We Come to Our Senses (3 page)

THE
message Darla's boss left yesterday was no longer creepy genteel. It was not Wednesday's,
Just checkin' in on Darla to make sure she's feelin' okay
. Nor was it Thursday's,
Hey there, just sort of wantin' to know, well, where Darla might be. Give a call
. No. It was:
Darla, this is Jane Fisher. Call me the instant you get this
.

I
rescued my first turtle a couple of months ago, right after I lost the rug store job. This was on a Saturday, and I remember the radio saying the temperature had hit ninety-four degrees by ten-fifteen a.m.—a record. I was coming back from dropping Darla off at Lu's, where they were going to have a Girl's Day Out in the country and drink Keystone Lite in Lu's aboveground pool. The open car windows baptized me in hot air as I gunned it over the straights of County Road 313. The old Mazda shuddered with every brake at the curves. I flew past mobile homes and wood-rot barns and dead cars in yards, and millions of tiny green cotton shanks in rows in the endless fields. Lu is a Gold Star, a wild-ass former professor whose Army reservist husband got KIA while deployed, not shot or bombed, but blown full of metal split rim and rubber after he forgot to cage a transport truck tire, then overinflated it. She retired on the Servicemembers' Group Life payout, and moved into a shotgun house in the sticks so she could rag economic segregation from beyond the academy. And make bonfires and drink beer.

Squares is what you call as-yet-fruitless cotton plants, Lu taught me. She likes Darla and me because we came to Mississippi from the city. Or, rather, Lu likes that Darla slung back home having put boots on the ground of the Great Cultural Beyond. (“You got more cred,” Lu says, “than any dipshit Cultural Beyonder who judges the South from afar.”) Lu gets drunk and weepy and calls her late husband Rubberneck, and tries to laugh, and wipes her eyes while she lights organic cigarettes. She claims to be pissed that he didn't leave her a decent combat story, a real whopper to throw around so folks could at least be impressed.

Anyway: It was a box turtle. I pulled over, and walked back to get it off the road. When I got close I realized its back end had been crimped by a tire. It hissed when I picked it up, and a chip of carapace plinked onto the asphalt. Its front legs clawed the air and its back legs flung on limp muscle. I paced around saying Jesus Christ a bunch of times while gingerly suspending the animal; there was tall dead grass on the edges of the fields and rusted wire fence, no water. A couple of old black men drove by in a green, early-seventies F-100, towing shoddy yard equipment on a deck trailer. They looked at me like I was wild. I was desperate to find some moisture in which to place the thing. “Please stop trying to kick your back legs,” I begged. The shell was revealing itself to be a series of fractures. I figured the turtle would die but there was no way I could kill it. Finding no water, I carried it to a shady spot beneath a cluster of shortleaf pines. Huge black ants scurried atop the fallen needles beneath the trees.

“Sorry, man,” I said, putting the turtle on the ground before walking away. “I promise I'm trying.”

That night, while I was cleaning Darla's puke splats off the bottom of the boys' rim of the toilet, she got dropped off, drunk. She traipsed in and stood over me, and giggled at my yellow latex gloves.

“You never see these splats because of the way you piss,” I said. “But they're here nonetheless.” I then told her to hand me the Ajax.

TODAY
, we were hauling ass on 278 East, west of Batesville, when I saw it. It was the biggest turtle I'd ever come across; a virtual extinction-in-waiting. Darla yelled when I whipped off the highway and into the manicured, pea-pebble drive of a restored plantation house. She couldn't believe I was stopping, as if things weren't bad enough.

We were supposed to be at the Sunflower Festival in Clarksdale, eating mounds of spicy crawdads with corn and sausage, sitting on the lawn near the main stage, listening to sacred steel music and drinking American beer. But halfway there we got in a fight so deep that both of us decided it best to turn the car around, drive right back out of the Delta, and drive beyond the hills, maybe all the way to Shiloh, where we'd walk in the knee-high grass of the battlefields and try to finally figure our shit out. Specifically, Darla confessed that she lost her job because she's been driving down to Jackson to loiter at the gates of the abortion clinic profiled in the news. She said she doesn't know why, or even what she thinks about it. Only that she's overwhelmed by the physical inability to pick a side.

One of the evangelicals she met is trying to forgive her her past sins. Darla has no idea how to respond to this, either.

Though the ass end of the Mazda wasn't really in the road, cars swerved and honked at us anyway. I got out and ran toward the massive turtle, which was parked at the centerline. Darla stayed in the car, in front of the antebellum plantation house, yelling obscenities.

The turtle was as big as a hubcap. When I picked it up it twisted its neck around to bite me, so I dropped it and darted back to the shoulder. Looking around, I noticed a small pool of gulley-wash at the edge of the cotton field behind me—a perfect refuge, if I could get it there without losing a finger.

I ran back to the car, told Darla to get the knife out of the glove box.

“I'm not saving or killing anything,” she said.

“Come on, Dar.”

“Why?”

“We can't just let the thing
die
.”

The historic house we idled in front of was gorgeous: white column and portico and pediment, fanlight glass arching above the large doorway, and tall red cedars lining the long pebble drive. It sat comfortably back from the highway, its property defined by a thick, manicured hedge and tall iron gates. Acres of young, match-head cotton buds stretched out in rows over the adjacent fields. One lapse in drunken judgment less, one slip of latex more, and we both knew Darla would've lived in a place like this, without me.

She grabbed the knife. It was ninety-seven degrees. A passing semi concussed us in hot air.

“What do I do?” she asked, pinching the blade open. “Growing up, we never stopped for turtles.”

“If it bites me, cut its head off.”

“I won't,” she said.

“You'll have to, or it'll never let go. I saw this on Animal Planet.”

I jogged. She walked. Cars roared by, their draft air like slaps. Between them rose the scream of insects in the dry grass that fringed the fields. The snapper was still on the highway, intact but unmoving. I imagined the pavement was frying it inside its shell.

Darla caught up, and stared at the creature. “You sure?” she asked. “Behead it?”

“Hell, yes.” I darted out and picked the turtle up just behind its middle, then held on tight as it hissed and snapped, and flailed its clawed feet. Darla marched beside me, holding the blade out as if she were going to thrust it into the turtle's neck whether she had to or not.

“Now, don't you feel good?” I asked when we made it back to the shoulder. I lifted the animal up, as if presenting a newborn. “Who knew that within a year we'd go from mass-transit nobodies to rural highway gods?”

Darla didn't even look, but just dropped the knife onto the ground. “I don't even get to know if I wanted one,” she said, staring into the furrows, crying. “A kid, or even a stupid abortion. I don't even
get to know
, you know?”

“Darla, why are you— Why?” I was holding a snapping turtle on a highway outside of Batesville, Mississippi, in the swelter, trying to make the best of things. But Darla wouldn't let me.
She
. Because with Darla the fields are always a plague, the air a scorch over wasteland. All there ever is,
is the over-and-again regurgitation of Darla, Darla, Darla; is how she's feeling at that instant, and how I'd better take good note; is the lust to remind her that she's a terrorist, to remind her that fucking her is like fucking a suicide vest; that fucking her is forever fucking some faceless furlough named fucking
Brent
, who was a hometown friend of her college roommate; who showed up in Wrightsville Beach after being out-processed from Bragg; who crashed their spring break condo with his combat stories and crippled manhood; who rolled Kite cigarettes and who was built like David and who was a stopwatch lay . . . and who planted in her the seed of a hard, unending cough; a cough which would manifest a few months later, long after he was gone, and long before I fell in love with her; a cough whose legacy is legions of vomit, alongside joint erosion and myalgia and associative vertigo, and red splotches on toilet porcelain and liver seizures and more vomit . . . and who came inside her, came inside. Got to come inside.

I turned from her and put the turtle down in the grass. Stared out into the expanse of cotton and listened to the bugs. Darla's belief that she would never again do better than me was bullshit. I hated that she would soon figure this out and leave.

“Anyway,” she said, sniffled. “It's not just the light pollution, it's the moon.”

“Dar, I'm sorry. I—”

“Those hatchlings in North Carolina? The moon's supposed to be their beacon to water, but the light pollution distracts. You take halogen flashlights and lead them right.”

I watched the snapper claw through the dry grass, then dive beneath the brown water in the gully. I knelt down and picked up a twig, and poked at the pebbles and bits of safety glass on the shoulder. A minute later, Darla wiped her nose with the heel of her hand, then mouthed the words, Let's go.

So Bored in Nashville

BARS AND BOOZE
and lacquer and glass and smoke and teevee and tourists and shots, and pit-stop at Randall's to chop up a Xanax, to snort then smoke then back to the bars. In this city, through the bars, we wind up packed in a room full of ads. Living ads, that is, sexy and skimpy young women ads. New England or Oklahoma transplants, wannabe country stars clad in fishnets and bra tops, hot pants and logos, and who proffer shots of some dye-injected Extreme Liquor product. A temp job, they swear, they serve you straight out of their mouths, out of their navels, wherever, no problem. For ten bucks a pop they make ten bucks an hour, while your lips suckle shots off of their amazing young stomachs. And they're dying to sing, will do anything to demo. (All of this action in a Vandy sports bar, not an airport strip club, let alone a music industry hang.) And tomorrow I leave, for Forts Jackson then Benning. Signed the contract when the Army offered me 11B, Option 4: Airborne Infantry. I am twenty-six and terrified. Yet I felt compelled to follow through after the recruiters told
me how difficult it was to secure this assignment. How rare it is these days to earn Option 4, Airborne, war on and all.

Hoo-ah! they barked. You tha man, man!

Randall and I depart that bar, we drive on. He says zero about my deployment. We pay cover, we squeeze into an East Nashville venue, find another Brooklynesque band, another huddle of white hipsters in white V-neck t-shirts whose everything is constructed by camouflaging their incomes, by folding tattooed arms across their chests, and/or nodding and/or spying at their phones. Superb denim, everywhere. We drive off. Drop twenty bucks to park on bustling and hyper-sold Second Avenue: Hard Rock Café, Coyote Ugly, chain, chain, etc., etc. At a pseudo-upscale music hall, stuffed with pseudo-upscale music industry fakes, reclaimed wood and iron, taxidermy mounts, Randall yanks me into a hallway and flask-feeds me bourbon. Tells me he can't get away from unknowns who want to write songs with him—Hey, man, let's write; Hey, Randall, let's write—everywhere he goes, because they know that their chances of landing their first album cut are stronger with his name on as cowriter. (A couple years back, Randall wrote a chestnut called “Urban Cowgirl,” a one-off departure from his nonpaying folk songs. After the song was cut by a cosmetic cowboy, it topped the Top 40, and made Randall a universe of cash. Now nobody artsy and literate and frustrated will hang out with him. He is and forever will be the “Urban Cowgirl” sellout.) Randall hates this process, this creative suck-off, yet he does the same thing to more established songwriters: calls them to cowrite, wedges into their conversations at industry gatherings, at industry bars, pumping gossip like heartbeats, desperate to book a session,
to redefine himself. I do not call him out on this. We are all chasing better narratives. Besides, truth is, I only want to be called out by
him
. I am desperate for his protest, or his permission to deploy. Because Randall and I have been each other's go-to forever, over a thousand nights of dive bar and misquoted verse and booze-drenched guitar pull . . . and through his mother's distal dystrophy, and the guilt he had over avoiding her, her withered, alien forearms and brittle legs . . . and through the time we dragged his PA onto his back porch the instant the sun tickled the frozen January horizon, cranked J. J. Cale while slugging a bottle of Pappy, then woke up as two of Nashville's Finest draped us in Mylar emergency blankets, and . . . yet he does not seem to care about my military aptitude score, or the fallout with my job, or about what happened with
her
, how she never even called me back to tell me goodbye, or about my need to prove to her and my dad and my boss and everyone that I am worth something. That I am a Man from the South. Every time I try to prod Randall about this he says nothing. I'd been waiting on Option 4, Airborne, and I didn't think the recruiters would call back, and in fact had come to think of my whole visit to the recruiting office as a big, reactive joke to her having left me. A counterpunch to her giving up on us. But three months later they did call back. They said, Okay, you've got it, Airborne, grunt, and then barked and all, Hoo-ah, on the phone, it was so fakey this bark. It was another gray morning, a hungover Tuesday all email all phone all filing and process. Fakey bark fakey office fakey music fakey everything, and so I called her and got sent to voice mail, and I left a message telling her I what I was about to do, all but daring her to call me and talk me
out of it. And the morning burned off and I heard nothing from her: no phone or text no email no nothing. So I drove to the recruiter's office on my lunch break, and signed the six-year contract; I took his high five and then went and got drunk. And tomorrow I'm off, Forts Jackson then Benning, 11B, Option 4, No bitches allowed in Airborne, Hoo-ah! they said. So fakey, I know, but what else is there to do but follow history? Men go to war to be men worth a damn. Their statues and movies are everywhere, forever.