I wouldn’t have minded the warehouse, but lacked a mule’s good knees. I had been looked at now by more doctors than existed in Lee County, and advised that at such time as I ever found myself in a job with good health insurance, I’d be a candidate for knee replacement. Meantime, I followed my mother’s footsteps and got hired as a stocker at Walmart Supercenter. Unlike Mom, I was probably the soberest cracker in the whole big box, and quickly worked my way up the career ladder to produce. I avoided the employee smoking room aka drug-exchange HQ, and found no real downside to the job. People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts. I counted down the fifteen-minute intervals and watched them flinch and shudder like wet dogs every time the machine came on with the fake thunder and spray to mist down the goods. I told myself I was laughing with them, not at them. But really, I was sad. It was the closest they probably got to real rain on a vegetable.
I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor, and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing “hustle,” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.
I made my peace with the place, but never went a day without feeling around for things that weren’t there, the way your tongue pushes into the holes where you’ve lost teeth. I don’t just mean cows, or apple trees, it runs deeper. Weather, for instance. Air, the way it smells from having live things breathing into it, grass and trees and I don’t know what, creatures of the soil. Sounds, I missed most of all. There was noise, but nothing behind it. I couldn’t get used to the blankness where there should have been bird gossip morning and evening, crickets at night, the buzz saw of cicadas in August. A rooster always sounding off somewhere, even dead in the middle of Jonesville. It’s like the movie background music. Notice it or don’t, but if the volume goes out, the movie has no heart. I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars. A sky as dark as sleep, not this hazy pinkish business, I’m saying blind man’s black. For a lot of us, that’s medicine. Required for the daily reboot.
I understand this is meant to be a small price to pay for the many things you do get to have in a city. Employment. Better entertainments, probably, if you’re not living in a recovery house with a curfew. City buses, library and grocery stores in walking distance, check, check, check. Here’s another one: house keys. I’d never lived any place where people locked the front door at all times, whether inside of it or gone from it. Usually, we never even knew where the door key was. Chartrain did not believe this. We tried to explain, after the sixth or tenth time Viking or Gizmo or I left for work and forgot to lock up. He just thought we were idiots. He called us hillbillies and yokels and all the names, unfit to live in the real world. We knew Chartrain loved us. We’d all had turns at carrying him and helping with bathroom business, the legs being not the only part of him messed up down there. The names we could have called him back are not approved, so we didn’t. But never did get what he thought would happen to an unlocked house like ours, so plainly short on things to steal. We weren’t allowed drugs, couldn’t afford electronics, and our only jewelry was hardwired onto Chartrain. Regardless, we learned that much about living in the so-called real world. How to lock up a house.
I’ve tried in this telling, time and again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there’s also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing’s going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. Then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful.