I

Scrap Iron Sprayberry would only half-sleep in his whirlwind of senses, listening to the sounds of night coagulating beyond his window until he could no longer lie still, then raising and watching the cobwebbed clock, waiting for time to tell him “Go.”

He’d go from his backdoor and into the forest that now reached the steps of his porch.  He’d walk without seeing down the slope of the hollow and across the cold waters of Parachute Creek.  Then he’d slow, and breathe, and creep spider-like into the Masseys’ expansive backyard.

There he’d climb his magnolia.  The lower limbs of the tree, the size and color of dinosaur bones, provided a grotto of sorts, a playground for children in love.  A moist smell, as of fresh blossoms, enveloped him within.  He’d swing up and scurry apishly into position, nothing larger than a firefly disturbing his view of the Massey’s second-floor bedroom window.

Scrap Iron had long since discovered that Bronwyn Massey undressed within fifteen minutes of ten o’clock every weeknight.  Naked, she’d stand at the window and prepare the blinds so they’d allow the right kind of sunlight the following morning.  Sometimes she’d linger and even project her torso through the open window and into the night, into the same air that drifted beneath Scrap Iron’s uplifted nostrils.  He would lean back and imagine the smell of her body’s every corner.

And he’d long since memorized the image of her nakedness.  He’d carry it home with him, sleep with it, cuddle it in his brain like an infant: her almost blonde hair, the uneven collarbones, the small breasts with puffed peach nipples, the plump and creamy belly, her sad eyes . . . .

But Scrap Iron wasn’t anything like her husband: the six-and-a-half foot Ewitt Massey.  No, Scrap Iron didn’t give so much as a frog’s fart that she had only one arm.

 

II

But really, when Scrap Iron was spying on Bronwyn Massey, folks hadn’t yet started calling him Scrap Iron.  His Christian name was Marion, but folks didn’t much call him that either, because it sounded so much like a woman’s name, so they pronounced it “Maron” instead.  And in some cases they’d avoid the whole situation by just saying “that Sprayberry fellow from Shinbone with the scrap of girly bloomers he calls a Communist parachute.”

This last title had its roots in yet another discrepancy over names.  See, in those days, when Marion Sprayberry nightly crossed the hollow behind his hilltop shack, it wasn’t actually the cold waters of Parachute Creek that filled his workboots, but the cold waters of a nameless trickle instead, insignificant save for the two men who often fought for the right to name it.  To Marion Sprayberry, ex-pulpwooder and current cabinetmaker, that water knew no other name than Parachute.  To Ewitt Massey, catfish farmer and man to many women, it was Massey Creek.

“And that’s just damned good-old commonsense,” Ewitt said to a small cluster of acquaintances at the 1976 Terrapin Blueberry Festival.  It was here that the dispute made its first public showing.  “Because things get their names from the folks who own them.  Take Terrapin right here, for instance.  Back in the olden times the Indians called it ‘terrapin’ in their own tongue, and when the white folk came and ran them off, they figured out what the Indians had been calling it and translated it.  See how the name changed with the owners?”  He hesitated and waited for their nods. 

Marion kept his eyes shielded, staring at the sooty toes of his boots. 

“Now, I guess sometimes stuff is called after the ones who discovers it,” Ewitt went on.  “I mean, it only seems right, if you invent something or find a new country, that you get to name it. God Almighty established that rule in the Garden of Eve when Adam got to name the goats ‘goats’ and the pigs ‘pigs.’  And America was named after the first man to see it, an Italian feller with a telescope called Americo.  So, it stands to reason that since my great-granddaddy was the first man in that little Shinbone paradise—the first one to come in and terrace the hillsides and plant ‘em in corn and cotton and clear that hilltop and build the foundation for the house that still stands there today—well, it only stands to reason that the life-giving waters he was the first one to claim should inherit his name.  It’s Massey Creek because if’n it wouldn’t-a been for the Masseys that damned hollow would still be infested with rattlesnakes and wild Indians!”  Towards the end of his sermon his voice grew hot and the small crowd of men helped punctuate his sentences with their enthusiastic agreement.

“But it ain’t called Massey Creek,” Marion said amid their murmurs, his voice cold like the echo from a tropical cave.  “It ain’t called Massey Creek because it’s called Parachute Creek.  And I couldn’t give so much as a frog’s fart who found what when and who saw who where, ‘cause things aren’t named for people but for the things that happen there.  Events name places, not people.  Washington DC wasn’t discovered by George Washington, and he didn’t own the whole town neither, but he did kill a bunch of British soldiers who didn’t have no business being here, and so the city named itself after him, because George Washington did something worthy-a bein’ remembered by.

“You said so yourself,” Marion continued, looking directly at Ewitt now.  “You said America was named after’n Italian guy.  I agree, but not because America was the first man to see it, because he wasn’t.  The damned Indians saw it first.  But America did sail across a big damn ocean in a rickety old boat without an engine, and he was the first whiteman to see it, which was pretty fortunate for the world considerin’ that the Indians just didn’t quite know what to do with the place nohow.”

The group of delegates turned to hear the rebuttal.  The lost looks on their faces told that both cases had been equally convincing.     

But the look on Ewitt Massey’s face told of nothing more than curiosity.  “You know, listenin’ to you talk just now, I’d almost believe you,” he said.  He stared down at Marion, who was a good six inches shorter.  “But you still ain’t told us one thing.  Why in the hell would a man think to call it Parachute Creek in the first place?  I mean, what in the hell ever happened there that had a lick to do with a dead-burn parachute?”

 

Marion told them the story.  It had been the Spring of 1955.  Marion was only twelve years old, and while he waited in a half-empty classroom for the last day of school to end, his father sat on the back porch of the old Sprayberry house, the one that would eventually burn and be rebuilt.  An airplane buzzed overhead, and since they were not as common in those days as they are now, his father leaned forward to the edge of the porch and gazed skyward, awaiting the machine’s appearance.  The sound grew louder until even the floorboards trembled beneath his father’s feet and the dust shook from the porch’s eave.

And then the plane emerged from behind the treetops, low-flying and fast and flopping erratically about the sky.  Then it dove.  His father thought for sure it would crash, but just soon enough it pulled up, leaving behind the blossom of a red parachute like something it simply shat.

“Well I be goddamned,” his father said, gripping a knee.  “Momma!” he shouted, because that’s what he called his wife.  The plane had straightened and zipped away confidently and the parachute drifted down to the hollow and disappeared.  “Momma!” he shouted again.

“What?” she yelled back.  She was washing dishes.

“You best stay in the damned house,” he said.

“You better watch that cussin’ Pauline Sprayberry!” she returned.

“Just stay in the house,” he said.  He stared at the point where the chute had vanished.  He pulled the truck keys from his pocket and stood.  “I be goddamned,” he whispered.

He drove along the dirtroad until he felt it would be a straight shot to where the jumper had landed.  It was red, he was thinking.  That goddamned parachute was goddamned red!  He parked and stepped out and reached back in for the shotgun from the gunrack and turned back toward the forest and faded into the branches, the weapon pointing venomously before him.

He found the parachute but no man.  It was bundled and discarded with straps and buckles.  He ravaged through it, searching for something, anything.  He found a logo of sorts, likely a manufacturer’s mark, but couldn’t read it, couldn’t even begin to sound out the syllables because the letters were unidentifiable.  Though he couldn’t say for certain, they appeared Russian.

He ran uphill toward the dirtroad.  He tried to stifle it, but halfway back his voice erupted from his chest: “We been invaded!  Goddamn the Russians are here!”  No one heard.

 

“Bullshit!” was Ewitt Massey’s interpretation of the story.

“Yeah,” another seconded.  “Why hadn’t we heard a that before?”

“Cause,” Marion replied.  “My daddy made us all swear not to tell anyone ‘cause they’d call us crazy and haul us off in a loony-wagon.”

“That was the only smart thing your daddy ever said,” Ewitt muttered.

“What?” Marion demanded.

“Nothing,” replied Ewitt.  “So what gave you the courage to tell us now all the sudden?”

“Something I read in the newspaper.  They say they found a body without identification the other day in Atlanta.  Said they found documents in Russian.”

“So?”

“So.  It was a Russian spy.  He’s been living in our midsts this whole time, sending over who knows what to the Russians, and the only folks that knew were the gosh-durn Sprayberrys!  But folks won’t listen.  You cain’t tell em nothin.”

“D’you ever see the parachute?” a fellow chimed in.

“Well naturally, seein as my daddy was the one fount it.”

“Where’s it at then?” asked Ewitt.

“It burnt up in the house fire.  Ya’ll heard about that.”

“Bullshit,” Ewitt said.

“Look here,” announced Marion.  “This here is the only remaining shred of that Communist parachute.”  He pulled it from his backpocket, a shiny red rag with frayed edges.  “You can even see the soot stains from the fire.”

“That ain’t nothing but the titty-cup from your momma’s bra,” one fellow said.

“Yeah,” another added.  “And those black marks are snot stains where you been sniffin it all this time.”

“Ya’ll callin’ my daddy a liar?” Marion interrupted.

“Oh no, not at all,” replied Ewitt.  “We’re calling him a thoroughbred lunatic.”

“The hell you say?”

“And that goes for you too,” said Ewitt.  “The whole damn bunch of you Sprayberrys.  Bona fide nutshells.”

It wasn’t long after that and the two men were fighting, the rest of the group struggling to come between them and end it.  The wives and mothers and grandmothers and old crippled men and dirty-kneed children came from throughout the festival to watch, to grumble their disgust and outrage, to squeal with delight, to chuckle quietly, or just to gawk.  Ewitt punished Marion severely, beat him into the ground and towered over him, slinging men from his arms and growling.  And as he walked away, Marion crawled to his knees without the least bit of surrender in his eyes, ready for more, bloodied and savage and shaking. 

And that wouldn’t be the last time they’d fight.  Again at the 4^th of July fireworks display in Oxford and again that very same night in the hallway of the Calhoun County jailhouse, drunken and stumbling and even handcuffed, breaking loose from their escorts and kicking at each others’ shins and Marion headbutting Ewitt in the shoulders and chest because he couldn’t reach any higher, Ewitt finally leaning back and laughing and launching a kick into Marion’s groin.  And again, at the K-Mart, Ewitt tossing Marion into the air and into a shelf of picture frames.  And then there was that once at the Terrapin High football game, and that other time in Waldo, where folks make sorghum syrup with an old-fashioned mule-powered mill.  Marion ended up with his face in a pile of mule shit that morning.

Then there was the time in the hollow behind Marion’s house when Ewitt didn’t beat him, even though Marion begged for it.  But that one wasn’t about the name of the creek, nor the question of Sprayberry sanity.  No, that time it was a different matter altogether.

 

III

Marion hunted that hollow regardless of the season.  He hunted deer, squirrel, rabbits, turkey, even possums and groundhogs.  And though he enjoyed it, he didn’t consider it sport so much as sustenance.  Because Marion didn’t enjoy grocery stores, nor did he much care for town limits, after all the trouble he’d encountered with Ewitt, the police, and even the regular old townswomen who’d sometimes stare at him with the hatred of the devil in their eyes.

So instead he sulked around in the trees waiting for some small supper on which to unload his daddy’s doublebarrel shotgun (even though nothing was in season, and even though most of the property he traversed didn’t belong to him, belonging to Ewitt Massey instead).  It was late summer.  He’d been perched on a hillside terrace, his back leaned against the trunk of an oak, his elbows propped on the massive roots that curved around his sides like armrests, when he heard a tantalizing splash of water not too far distant.  He opened one eye to see, because he’d been sleeping.  He heard nothing and closed his eye.  Then the splash again, and a woman’s giggle. 

He walked slowly and quietly to a ridgeline that paralleled the creek and provided a clear view of most of the hollow.  He could vaguely see the human shape below, dressed in white, lying down midstream, occasionally splashing the current.  Marion dropped to his belly and slid like a sniper through the leaves, following depressions in the earth to conceal his approach.

At another vantage point his head emerged from the undergrowth.  He could see better from here.  Bronwyn Massey had sat up and now remained almost motionless, staring sadly into the water that curled around and beneath and through the white folds of her dress.  With her one arm she toyed at the water’s surface, magically drawing ripples in the current with the tip of a finger, poems that bespoke tears and loveletters to her compassionate voyeur.

Marion watched her finger with such focus that he almost failed to notice the wet translucence of her blouse.  Her clothing seemed of the boring housewife sort, shapeless and plain, but with the new glisten of water, and its suction to the skin, it became a second flesh, an exotic and silken layer of sculptured splendor.  The darkness of her nipples showed through and Marion ground his teeth, stealthily unbuckling his overalls and pulling them to his knees.

Bronwyn stood and turned and squatted and splashed water on to her face and hair and neck and breasts.  Marion lay back into the soft leaves, exposed now to the wet air.  Bronwyn walked about, watching the rocks as they shimmered and kicking pearls of water off the tips of her toes.  Marion gripped himself and shivered.  She turned back to his direction and scanned the surroundings.  He squeezed.  She turned again—he saw where the dress held to the crevice of her ass.  She stepped to the bank and a sparkling calf emerged.

A shadow now lay across Marion’s skin.  He rolled his eyes up and looked behind him the way a cat does when it stretches out on its back.  Ewitt Massey stood there so large and real that it took many seconds for Marion to register it.  Then he jumped and pulled himself speechlessly together.

“You’re a dumb son of a bitch,” Ewitt growled.  “Dumber than a mule and worth half the money.”

Marion grew angry.

“Next time we find ourselves in a situation like this,” Ewitt said.  “Or any situation for that matter, it’s gonna take the National Guard to keep me from killin you.”  He walked away, brushing Marion’s shoulder as he passed.  “Bronwyn!” he yelled.  “Get the hell back to the house and stop actin like a heathen!” 

Marion watched Ewitt walk.  He raised his doublebarrel up and aimed it.  He pulled back both hammers.  He closed his eyes and turned away his face and squeezed each trigger successively, screaming.  The sound from the barrels launched thunderously into the quiet forest and the world shook.

Ewitt stopped and turned back slowly, disbelief in his eyes.  Bronwyn scurried away uphill.  Marion waited.

“You piece of shit,” Ewitt said, coming toward him.  “I’m not going to kill you,” he assured.  “I’m not going to fight you.  I’m not going to cuss you.  I’m not even going to hate you.”  He stood less than a foot away now.  His breath was hot and smelled of tobacco.  “I’m just gonna let you live rememberin what you are, what you really are.  You cain’t even kill a man.  You cain’t even shoot a man in the back with a double-barrel shotgun standing no farther than thirty feet behind him.”  He smiled, calmly and gently removing the shotgun from Marion’s fingers.  Marion didn’t resist.  Then Ewitt took it up into the air and smashed it on a rock.  The stock splintered and the machinery of the trigger disjointed and Ewitt once again walked away, tossing the two barrels into the bushes like a harmless stick.  “Ain’t nothin but a dead-burn spectacle.”

Marion screamed at the man’s bullish back.  He begged to be beaten, to be murdered.  He prayed for death, death for both of them, for Bronwyn too.  He cursed and he spat and he tore and when Ewitt was too far to see or hear he cried, curled up like a fetus, weeping until he finally slept, sleeping until he finally awoke, and then walking, somewhere, nowhere, home.

 

But he’d see Bronwyn again, and not only in her bedroom window.  She knocked on his door a few weeks after he tried to kill Ewitt.  The sun hadn’t quite brightened the sky yet.  Marion came to the door in his long johns, and when he saw her he was too afraid to be embarrassed.  She smiled and nodded and then laughed, scanning him from head to foot, his matted, flaky hair, the bed-creases on his pink face, the finger of black wiry hair that curled over the edge of his pajama shirt, the skintight drawers that reached only a little past his knees and the bonewhite calves below, thinner than straws.  “How you doin, Marion?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, because she’d called him Marion—not Maron, not Sprayberry.

“I just thought I’d come by and apologize for the other day,” she said.

He looked at her strangely.

“It’s not real neighborly behavior to go gallivantin around half-naked and all.  A lot of trouble’s been caused by women showin too much to men.”

“Yes ma’am,” he choked.  “I suppose it has.”

“Anyway, I just wanted to say I don’t hold you guilty none.”

“Well I don’t hold you guilty a lick either,” he said.

“Mind if I sit here and smoke a few stogies?” she asked.  “Ewitt says it makes me look trashy and won’t have it, so I have to sneak off in the bushes and all.  I would surely enjoy a good comfortable rocking chair to smoke in.”

“Go right ahead,” he said.  “Let me just put on some clothes and I’ll join you.  Coffee or anything?”

“Got anything with some bite?” she asked.

“Bite?”

“Beer, wine, whiskey.”

“I’ll see what I can find.”

He entered the shack and rushed about the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets.  Nothing.  Finally, atop his refrigerator, he found a bottle of cooking wine.  He grabbed it and took it outside, still in his long johns.

“You think this’ll be good?” he asked.  “It’s older than dirt. I never even tasted it.”

“It’ll work,” she said.  She waved him toward her.  “Let’s drink it.”

They smoked her cigarettes and drank his wine.  He leaned against a post because he had only one chair, and they passed the bottle back and forth, drinking in gulps because the taste was too sour to relish.  She spoke: “Yeah, I got to get out early in the day to live my life.  Ewitt don’t wake up till around nine usually, when he goes and does whatever he does.  The early daylight hours are my times.  I do all kinds of crazy things.  Ewitt don’t have a clue, but I’m usually damned near drunk by the time I fix him breakfast.” 

“Gosh,” Marion said.

“Yep,” she went on.  “I don’t give a damn for him, he don’t give a damn for me.”

“Why not?”

“You know,” she replied.  “Everyone knows.  I don’t care for him ‘cause he spends every spare second poking somebody else’s wife.  And he don’t care for me ‘cause a this,” and she lifted the stub where her left arm used to be. 

“How—?” Marion tried to ask.  He coughed.  “How did that happen?”

“Ah,” she said.  “We ain’t close enough friends for all that.  I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

“Well, anyway, I don’t give so much as a frog’s fart how many arms you got: one, two, three, or four.  To me, you look right fine just the way you are.”

Her face reddened.  “I know,” she said.  “Everybody knows, Marion.  They know what you think of Ewitt, and they damn sure know what you think of me.  Hell, it’s all over your face ever time you see me.”  She took a drink and looked at him, pointing with the tip of the bottle.  “I know you want me, Marion, but it just ain’t gonna work.  I cain’t be yours.  Got no reason to.  I got plenty of reasons to not be with Ewitt Massey, but none of them are good enough reasons to be with you.  You know what I mean?”

“Maybe,” he said, scratching his unshaven jaw, wondering how everyone knew so much about his feelings when he didn’t really understand them so well himself.

She stood.  “Anyway, I didn’t aim to get nothing started here.  I just wanted to clear the air so you know that I don’t think a bit less of you ‘cause of what happened couple of weeks ago.  Really, I’m kinda flattered.”  She stepped from the porch.

“Let me say something,” Marion said.  “What if I showed you?  What if I showed you a reason to be mine?  What if I could do something to show you that they ain’t no one on this earth a lick like me?”

“I already know that.  It’s perty obvious ain’t no one as crazy as you.”

“I’ll show you,” he said.  “Give me some time and I’ll think of some way to show anyone who wants to see that they ain’t no man as worthy as me.”

“Well you got me right curious now, Marion,” she said. “But whatever.  Do what you want.  I ain’t makin no promises, but I’ll be watchin.”  Then she faded into the forest along the same faint path that nightly guided Marion toward her window.

 

It took him a week to come up with a plan, and then another week to begin its execution.  It started at work, at Wilborn’s Cabinet Company.  His job was to take the rough boards and run them through a planer to get the surface smooth and level.  He pushed the planks, and a black man named Johnny Ray retrieved them and handed them back so they could be pushed through again.  Sometimes there’d be a lull in the work and the two would talk.  They’d become pretty good friends over the years.  Johnny Ray believed the earth to be flat because the Bible spoke of it having four corners.  Marion didn’t buy this, but he supported Johnny Ray’s theory that space exploration and folks on the moon were nothing more than cinematic conspiracies initiated by Communist spies to help the spread of atheism.  Marion showed him his scrap of parachute and narrated his father’s experience.  Johnny Ray mentioned as a sidenote that for eight hundred dollars the man who owned the Piggly Wiggly in Terrapin would take a person up in his airplane and let him jump out the back.  Marion remembered this.

So a week after Bronwyn stepped off his back porch, Marion approached Johnny Ray during their lunch break and asked him about the fellow with the airplane.  Could you jump out anywhere you wanted?  Did it matter if you’d never jumped out of one before?  Johnny Ray didn’t know.  All he said was that he’d been waiting to hear about the crazy man being dead, because if folks had been meant to fly, then God would have given them feathers. 

Marion phoned the man himself, told him what he had in mind.  The man didn’t like it one bit.  “Well, then how much extra is it gonna cost me?” Marion asked.  That depended.  “Depends on what?”  It depended on how much Marion had to spend.  “Five hundred dollars.”  A thousand and they had a deal.  And if something went bad wrong and Marion ended up breaking every bone in his body, the pilot wouldn’t have anything to do with it.  And if Marion went and ran his mouth off to some lawyer, the pilot would deny it till the end of time.  And if by some chance the bones were to heal after all that, the pilot would make sure to visit Marion and to break them again.  And he’d deny having any part in that as well.  Did Marion understand? 

“Oh yes sir,” he answered.  “I don’t like lawyers no how.”

 

But then he needed to raise a thousand bucks.  He stopped buying anything.  He stopped going anywhere.  He stopped paying his bills.  He worked and came home and ate boiled kudzu and rotten potatoes and animal scraps quarried from the trees.  He snuck over to Ewitt Massey’s catfish farm at night and speared the fat blue beasts with a stick of rivercane tipped with a straightened, sharpened fork.   These he ate for breakfast. 

Actually, things weren’t all that different from normal. 

Except for work, of course. He worked twice as fast at first, then three times as fast, and then just all-out gasoline quick, Johnny Ray struggling to keep up.  He worked through lunch even, and Johnny shouted at him over the whine of the machine: “Why in the Lord’s name we workin so hard?  We get paid the same no matter.”  But Marion ignored this reasoning.  His muscles cried for hard fast labor, his heart hungered for speed and struggle, and in the meantime his mind kept pretty much quiet.

This energy became contagious though, at least as far as Johnny Ray was concerned.  The fifty-year-old black man gave up trying to figure it out and just started keeping up and then even enjoying it, whooping and shouting out praises for the Lord and amens and hallelujahs. But the other workers didn’t seem quite so enthusiastic.  The ones who followed Marion and Johnny in the production line had to put in overtime to catch up with the surplus lumber.  They started making comments when they’d walk past, or giving Marion resentful looks.  One evening Marion left for home and in the parking lot a group of them stood around his truck, waiting for him.  He tried to ignore them but they blocked his way. 

“Problem?” he asked.

“Why don’t you just cool out, Sprayberry?”

“I ain’t got no time to cool out.”

“There ain’t no reason to hurry.  Work fast, work slow, it comes out the same in the end.”

They let him go, but he didn’t slow.  In fact, if anything, he quickened, intensified—to watch him at work was to watch a machine, a tank engine, that could yell out and curse its own functioning, curses that had no anger or resentment but erupted nonetheless from the bones and muscles themselves: “Yip! . . . Yip! . . . Goddamn fuck me! . . . Yip!”  Sweat gathered in pools at his feet.  Purple veins popped out in places where purple veins weren’t supposed to be.  And the one time when the machine gave out, simply quit as if he’d overworked it, Marion kicked it from its platform and it smashed and scattered on the floor and he walked off toward the bathroom.  Seconds later, the workers who’d gathered around the machine in astonishment could hear the sounds of Marion retching and spewing through the very walls.  Management almost fired him but they knew that he’d already paid for the machine with increased production.

The second time the men gathered at his pickup they had two-by-fours and chains.  “I ain’t lookin for no trouble with you fellas,” Marion said.

“Well you found some anyways,” came the reply.

“Dammit,” he sighed.  “Cain’t ya’ll just let me be.”

They proceeded to smash his truck.  By the time they were finished, it had no headlights, taillights, windshield, or bumpers.  The hood had been completely caved in and the muffler ripped off and the paint tattered and scraped from the sides.  He didn’t observe the spectacle—just squatted and stared at the gravel and waited, almost embarrassed, as if it were a woman being tortured and raped and he were helpless to prevent it.  When they finished they left, one of them walking backward and announcing: “The next time, you’re the one going to be busted up!”

Marion approached his wounded vehicle and tried to open the door.  It wouldn’t budge.  He climbed through the window, which had also been busted, and backed out of the parking lot.  “At least they didn’t flatten my tires,” he said aloud to himself.

Soon after that he counted a thousand dollars in the cigar box under his bed.  He was relieved, because now he wouldn’t have to work so hard anymore, and those boys wouldn’t have to beat him up.  They eventually noticed that he slacked up, and they probably felt pretty good about themselves, thinking they’d scared him into submission.  Marion smiled and nodded at them politely when he passed them here or there at work, and afterward he’d look to heaven and thank God for His expediency in the matter.

 

It was midnight when he wrote out the note for Bronwyn:

Watch Heven and God will send you a sign.  Then youll know.  Look up at the sky at Noon Aprile 10.  Marion S.

The next day he waited outside the Massey house, concealed by foliage, lying flat on his stomach in his camouflage overalls and with his arms and chest and face smeared with mud.  He watched Ewitt drive off at around 1:00 pm and then scurried towards their frontdoor, bent at the waist and jerking his eyes from side to side like a nervous squirrel.  He slid the note under the door and rang the doorbell and ran back across the yard and all but dove into the briarpatch.  He snapped himself around, thorns tearing at his flesh, to watch as Bronwyn opened the door and stepped out, glancing around the yard.  She saw the note and lifted it, waved with her fingertips in no direction, to no person, and then smiled.  Before she closed the door, she put the note between her lips and reached down and unbuttoned her britches with only her right hand and then took the note and slid it delicately behind the elastic of her panties.  Marion groaned.

 

IV

When the side of the plane opened, the wind entered like a trenchline charge.  Marion yelled at the pilot: “Anything I need to know before I do this?”

The plane bumped through a pocket of turbulence and Marion fell onto his right hip and the pilot choked on the beer he’d been drinking, sprayed foam onto the windshield and hollered “Lawd God!” with a vulgar laugh and then turned to scream into the roaring suction behind him: “Hell man, just make sure you pull the dead-blasted cord!”

Marion looked over the floor’s edge into the trees beneath him.  His throat tightened.  He looked at his watch.  Noontime.  He stared through his goggles at a gray cloud poised on the horizon in anticipation.  The world tilted as the pilot dove the plane and suddenly Marion thought they would crash, and even though by this time he’d almost talked himself out of jumping, he jumped nonetheless, thinking that he’d be safer falling from the sky with a parachute than jetting toward the ground with a drunken pilot.

The second his body exited the windbreak of the plane, the air jerked him back and threw him down like a missile.  He fumbled for his cord and pulled, screaming with every muscle.  The parachute popped open and he regained control of his lungs.

From her bedroom window Bronwyn Massey leaned out into the day and watched as the erratic airplane steadied and zipped away and the white parachute floated cheerfully down from the white haze, a little black outline of a man dangling and swinging beneath it.

Marion saw the treetops drawing near.  He looked up—yes, his parachute was there.  It sure felt as if he were falling fast.  Before he knew it, branches were zipping by his face, and then one of the parachute cords caught on a limb and he could hear the chaotic crackling and he could smell the wet rotting forest and the chute tangled in the forest’s canopy and the sudden halt jarred Marion.  He could smell his own fear as the chute chords pulled him with the momentum of a wrecking ball toward the trunk of an oak that seemed so old, so mad and deadly, as he swung against it. 

He’d never tasted anything quite as potent as the potion of broken bone and enamel and blood and shredded tissue and treebark that he drank in suffocating gulps as his body peeled away cartoon-like from the side of the undisturbed oak.  He fell backward into a black, sticky rest.

 

V

His first visitor in the hospital was Johnny Ray from work.  The black man entered sad-faced with his hat off, holding it over his heart and stepping lightly the way a person would approach a casket.  He looked over the bandaged and crippled mess, wires and tubes and straps attached to various bodyparts.  “No sir,” he whispered.  “The Heavenly Father didn’t intend for fellers to be flyin.”

“Gawdamn Johnny,” Marion muttered through clenched jaws, gazing out from yellowed eyeballs set in purple and red baskets of flesh.  “They got more metal in my bones than a tractor.”

“Well, least you still livin,” replied Johnny.  Then he gave a little chuckle that rang of typical hospital humor:  “I guess we just gonna have to start callin you Scrap Iron.  Yeah buddy, Scrap Iron Sprayberry, praise the Lord.”

Scrap Iron wouldn’t remember this visit (and he’d always wonder what clever soul had invented his name), but he would remember his second one.  Bronwyn entered the room without knocking, and when she noticed that Scrap Iron watched, she immediately closed the door behind her and unbuttoned her blouse one-handedly and then pulled down her sweatpants.  Beneath, she wore a nurse’s uniform—not the white sterile outfit of fantasies, but the bluish-green scrubs of reality.  She took one strap of a surgeon’s mask and held it between her teeth and then pulled the other strap around the back of her head and tied it and then turned the mask around so it covered her face with all the eroticism of an Arab maiden’s burka.  She giggled.  Scrap Iron tried to lift his head but she rushed to his side and placed her hand on his forehead.  “Don’t,” she said.  “Just relax.”  He smiled doggishly.  “Yeah, I know,” she went on.  “How about the outfit?  I stole it from a closet.  I’m not wearing anything under it either.”

“Did you see me jump?” he choked out.

“I saw.”  She leaned her shoulder on the bed beside him for support and then gently worked her hand under the sheet and down between his legs.  “For once, I got to watch you.”

 

He lingered two weeks in the hospital and six months after that in a convalescent home.  The halls and recreation rooms bustled with little old women in nothing but loose gowns and slippers.  Occasionally a deflated breast would slip out at the ping-pong table, and sometimes they’d scratch the stubbled flesh of an inner thigh, legs open, their graying, hirsute crotches exposed.  Scrap Iron waited for these events.  Often he’d tire of waiting and just roll his wheelchair into the women’s bathroom to catch a patient showering, or he’d stroll in the courtyard and watch their windows, hoping to see someone undressing.  Time flowed more smoothly when there was nudity around, even if it did disgust him.  He even enjoyed the sporadic flash of a dispirited penis, just because it was old and belonged to someone else.

And it wasn’t but a few days after he returned home that he managed to limp his way with a walking stick down into the hollow and across the creek and up into the Masseys’ backyard.  He lingered beneath the magnolia for several hours, but Bronwyn never approached the window.  He glimpsed Ewitt once, but soon after, the lights went out.  It appeared that Ewitt slept alone.

After four nights and four trips through the hollow, Scrap Iron finally decided that Bronwyn had left.  “I don’t know how I feel about that,” he said aloud, to himself, to the forest perhaps.  “Disappointing, sure.  But not completely tragic.  No, not nearly as bad as a feller might think, at first.”

 

VI

It was just last year when the county commissioner finally decided to put street signs on every road, even those that were unpaved.  But this involved naming all the unnamed streets first.  Residents of each road were given questionnaires that included several possible titles and a space to write in other suggestions.  Most names originated in families that held substantial landplots, or some pioneering ancestor who built the first plantation there, or in some cases a church, or a school, or just a geographical oddity nearby.  In rare occasions, the names derived from significant events, or stories that found frequent narration.

   “You ever wonder where the names of these roads come from?” the new boy on the county work crew asked Gordo, his older colleague.  “You been around for a while.  Why they call this one ‘Parachute Creek Road’?”

Gordo hammered the top of the sign, driving the metal post into the clay earth.  “’Cause that right down there is Parachute Creek.”

“Oh,” the boy said.  He glanced around the hollow.  “But wait.  That don’t answer nothing.  Why is it called ‘Parachute Creek’?”

“Hell, boy,” replied the older man.  “I don’t know.  Why is that tree there called ‘pine’?  Why is the state called ‘Alabama’?  Why is Tuesday called ‘Tuesday’?  Blah blah blah.  You get as old as me, you’ll stop asking questions.”

The boy thought for a second.  “Maybe I will.  But you know what: those are really some pretty good questions, even if they ain’t no answers to ‘em.”