We drove out to the landlord’s funeral. He rented out the little building across from the trailer park, Deerhead Apartments. Her and her two brothers lived in one of them, me and my daddy in another, and him on the corner of the first floor, and I did electric work and plumbing and other stuff sometimes to help with rent. Daddy liked to joke and call me his handygirl.
Her brothers were old enough to know she was high and not brave enough to ask us about it. They acted kind of scared. I didn’t have a way to tell them it was just weed, no worries. Just made everything soft, easy. She liked to say it made her sweet. That was hardest I think. In the car how she kept touching my arm.
The oldest brother kept playing the same song over and over on his iPod through the tape adapter. It just sounded like noise to me.
The dress she had on wasn’t good for a funeral but she said it’s what she had. I didn’t remember her having any leopard print dress. Long sleeves even though it was summer. I kept looking at her sweating through it but I didn’t mention it. I turned up the AC and it started to make that buzzing sound like it does. She turned it back down. Ain’t you hot I asked but she said no.
I was showing up to a funeral in a black t-shirt and jeans, but I had my nice shoes on.
Her youngest brother asked where we were going, and she said hush up.
The landlord killed himself that summer. Ran a tube from the exhaust into his car. He had a woman they said found him. Nobody talked about who the woman was but everybody knew.
Once, before I met her, I saw her dressed for a party and thought my God: I want to lower my head to her and only come up for air when my lungs burn. She was walking through the trailer park into the headlights of some boy’s truck. When you think a thing like that, something you know you ain’t supposed to think, I mean ever, you put it in a bottle in your chest and let it rattle. I met her when I came to fix their toilet and it was the only time she ever let me in her place. That whole time I had to pretend like I wasn’t thinking of her walking by me, her ass in those jeans, her going-out top. Then she started knocking on my door asking if I had any weed to sell her.
She leaned her head against the window, pushed her fuzzy blonde hair away. She laughed. I didn’t ever know much about her. Somebody told me her daddy was a snake-handling preacher, but you could say that about anybody’s daddy and it might be true.
Think anyone from Deerhead is coming? I asked her. My daddy said I was stupid to drive up there but gave me weed for the road anyway. I felt like we had to go because the landlord was sort of my boss, but really we went because she was fucking him.
She said, I don’t know, man. Smushed an ant against her thigh. I got them crawling all up in the car from parking near the dumpster. It made a thin brown smudge across her skin.
The Bible says we are salt of the earth. Wouldn’t that mean we’re each so small.
It was the worst cold he ever had and it was going to kill him. The landlord was telling himself this. The snot tugged the inside of his face and made his ears ring. He made rounds for late rent that day with the bottle of Robitussin riding in his front pocket.
Two days ago the building owner called him. He would sell the property in a few months to some developer. He wouldn’t need the landlord anymore, his services, as the owner put it, a company under his father’s name. Said he was sorry about it, that he’d recommend him to other owners of other buildings. That wouldn’t be necessary, but he hadn’t told the owner this. He’d said thank you. Said it had been a pleasure keeping watch over his horrible old building, which most for most of the years he’d worked in it had only a few tenants at a time.
The handygirl clocked the Robitussin when she handed over her daddy’s check at the door. She said this here’s half and she could have the rest by Sunday. Her daddy’s apartment smelled, when he could smell it, like dust and stale food and cheap weed. Sometimes he could smell the dumpster through the open window at the end of the hall. He saw her eyes go to the bottle in his pocket. Did he have any work, she wanted to know, anything needed doing?
He had not told any of his tenants that they would have to move. Maybe he never would. Very soon it would not be his problem. He thought if he should get the handygirl to come rig the car for him. Everybody so afraid of her, and her so afraid of everybody, she’d never say a word about it. And she wouldn’t mess it up. She was thorough.
When he didn’t answer she asked, Sunday okay to get the rest to you by? She was near his height and broader shouldered. He’d always been a skinny fuck. Where all dykes big like this, he wondered. He’d only really met the one.
Don’t much matter, he said. By Sunday, none of this bullshit would matter at all.
You sick? Her eyes went again to the white cap sticking from his pocket.
He felt the urge to tuck the bottle away, something in the way she looked at it. He backed away from the door, sniffling. Yeah, he said. Feel like shit, to be honest.
My grandmama used to give us garlic.
Hmm.
Well, she said. Feel better. She closed the door on him.
There had been just one time in his life where he talked to God and thought God might answer him. He said Lord I need your attention. He heard something just by his ear, leaned to catch the sound. He sat still for the longest time waiting, but he never heard it again.
When he asked the owner what the developer wanted the land for, he told him they were putting a car wash on it.
Somebody told him once the name Daniel, his name, meant God is my judge. He guessed that was about right.
The landlord’s people come from outside Murphy. His people’s little church was like all the little churches where our bodies will go.
We kicked her brothers out and hot-boxed the car at the back of the parking lot, where across from the steepled building we could see the cemetery by whatever river that was, muddy from rain. Her youngest brother asked from outside the car if this was a funeral. She said hush and he did.
Her arm hung over the console, leopard sleeve pushed up over her elbow. I reached down and touched her skin there, right by her wrist. You okay?
She shrugged.
I never asked what it was like, finding the landlord’s body in the car when she walked over that night, same like she always does. I never seen a body, not even my mama’s. I was too little when she died to remember. I tried to ask her then, what it was like to see him dead, but she opened the door and stamped the end of the blunt into the asphalt.
We all had dead people in our lives. We all had mamas, or somebody anyway, who told us that we would be with them again one day. I thought maybe that’s what funerals are for. So we can all be together believing the dead were all together, somewhere nice.
When he was young he worked at a gas station up the road. A girl used to come in there always looking for the owner’s kid. She’d lean on the counter and talk to the kid for hours. Whenever he worked instead and she came in, she got this look on her face. Sometimes she spun straight around out the door. He used to hate himself for it, not her. The girl in 3C looked just like that girl. And 3C didn’t need much coaxing.
She came over nearly every night. She lived on her own upstairs with her brothers. She always had her rent money on time and he never knew how. Seemed all she did was go out at night in somebody’s truck, or get high with the handygirl. He never saw her come home but she was always there when he came by. She was steady like that. He liked a girl to be steady.
In the building he managed but didn’t own, it was him in the corner unit, her and her brothers above him, the old ass lady across from him, who he never saw, a fat couple up from her, and then on the third floor the handygirl and her daddy, and then a single guy who worked third at UPS across town. Deerhead was named for the split in the creek behind the property. The fast-flowing mountain stream that cut out the west side of the trailer park didn’t have a name, but the east side, where his building was, butted up to Deerhead Creek. It fed down through the North Carolina foothills to some other big river, and that big river went to the sea.
At night Deerhead lit up one window at a time, canned yellow light the color of whiskey piss. This was when she came to him. They’d smoke a cigarette out his back window and he’d half-listen to her talk if she was talking, or they smoke in silence and get to it.
He had three rolls of duct tape and a coil of half-inch plastic coupling. Once the sun dipped under the black tree line, he held a flashlight in his teeth and hooked the tubing to the exhaust and ran it back into the interior of the ‘91 Corolla. Then wearing the tape rolls like bracelets he sealed the windows and doors outside first, and then from the inside. All the while snot pumping behind his face like a thing alive. Whenever he bent down the pressure made him feel crazy, like he might split apart before he got done. He did all of this out in the open not for hope somebody would stop him but to see if he’d be stopped or noticed at all.
In the beginning he had her hit him while they fucked. Good and hard across the face. He never stopped liking it but for whatever reason she stopped doing it after awhile. He couldn’t hardly care about anything and that was part of this whole deal. Why he felt it had to be now.
He felt too that it had to be her who found him.
The oldest brother looked at me while we filled in a back row in the small church. Ain’t nobody here, he said. I told him we’re early yet, but we weren’t, and so then I told myself that small funerals were okay. I knew mine would be. All of us lived with the handful of people we knew and they were the only people who cared about us, and that was fine.
A chubby lady was playing piano and singing “Shall We Gather at the River” and she sang too. Because we were pretty high then I had this feeling like the church ceiling was dropping, and by the end of the service I could have touched it. When I looked up the feeling went away. She kept singing, the beautiful, the beautiful river.
Her brothers tried to decide who all of them where, the people who’d come. They decided the tall skinny woman was his mama. She caught me looking at her and I decided not to hide it. She smiled and I about split open.
She leaned against me. The dress had ridden up her leg. Isn’t it nice, she said, how everybody has a mama? I said yeah I guessed it was.
I had a second where I thought, why are we here? But then that went away too. Shall we gather at the river that flows by the throne of God?
The lady we thought was his mama never got up to speak. The pastor clearly didn’t know the landlord very well at all. He told us about how he was in a better place and called on anyone unsaved to turn to Jesus. They closed the casket and brought it down through the middle of the church. I could feel from her a relief as she watched them go out the doors that she didn’t have to look at him again, but maybe I had just wanted it for her, and it was only because we got there late, too late to go up and look. The singer finished “How Great Thou Art” and then she stood and tapped her music together on the piano and left us there.
When I was little and Mama died, my daddy tried explaining to me what dying was. The whole time I waited to tell him I already knew. Maybe Mama had told me, but I couldn’t remember. It was like I was born knowing. There was something scary about that. I said, I know Daddy, and saw in his face that he believed me, and that was the thing that made him cry.
She rolled another joint right there on the church steps, and the four of us sat and watched them bury the landlord off in the cemetery by the river. Her brother was humming, Then sings my soul, my savior God to thee. I don’t know why, but I started telling this story. I was sure I’d told her before, but she didn’t stop me.
I told about how back when my daddy and I moved to Deerhead, after Mama passed, we found this hawk nesting behind the dumpster. We could sit at our window and watch the mama hawk and the daddy sit on the two eggs the size of my fist. They hunted snakes and squirrels and even a skinny green lizard one time. Daddy and I sat there behind the glass and watched them. In secret I named the mama hawk Laurie and the daddy Johnny after Johnny Cash. I didn’t tell Daddy because he’d tell me that was stupid. When the babies hatched, first the left egg and then the right, they had weird chicken drumstick legs, black bumpy skin under thin white down, big bugged-out yellow eyes. I named the first one Carter and the second one Mary, and then it turned out they were both boys, or Daddy said they were, but I didn’t change the names. Mary was small and Carter picked on him and sometimes Laurie didn’t feed him. Daddy said, and I didn’t know how he knew this, lot of times the younger chick died because the mama ignored it. It turned out okay when one day Laurie and Johnny caught a snake and let both babies eat it. Carter and Mary got big and in May they started growing grown up feathers. Then one day we finished lunch and the chicks were gone. Laurie came back to the nest once but after that her and Johnny left for good. Daddy didn’t let me look for the chicks, but one day when he went to work, when he still did that, I went over by the dumpster and Mary was back behind it. I could tell it was him because he was always the smallest, and his neck was snapped weird and I screamed and no one came to find me to see what was wrong. Daddy said they might nest there again, but they never did.
Her older brother blinked at me. He said, That’s the saddest fucking thing I ever heard.
She put her hand on mine. It’s an okay kind of sad, she said.
He didn’t do much to prepare himself for it, but he did change his shirt. An old yellow one he’d had since high school. If he had a favorite thing, it was this shirt.
Lying across the bench seat he listened to the car running. It hurt his face to lie this way, but from what he knew it would take anywhere from ten minutes if he’d rigged things up well and up to two hours or more if he hadn’t. He figured he could stand it that long. There was so much snot in his nose he could not move it sniffing. It just sat there and he breathed through his mouth.
When 3C knocked on the window it scared the shit out of him. He slid half off the seat onto the floor. His arms flew out as he went sideways. He went to lift himself up and heard her pulling on the door. No, he said, and then shouted No! She stopped, stepped back and looked at the car and the pipe and him and tugged again on the door.
Honey, stop, he told her. He swung back up on the seat and she was ripping at the duct tape. Honey, honey, honey, wait, he said, and he thumped the window so hard with his fist she jumped back. He pulled the door toward him and pressed against the tape. He looked at her. He showed her with his hands that she should press the seal back. He put out both his hands like this would calm her. He saw then she was calm. She had a hand at her throat and her fingernails were bright red. He imagined she smelled like nail polish.
It’s okay, he said.
She shook her head, as if to say, whatever. He felt her weight shift against the car as she pressed on the door. Like this? she asked, and he said, Good, honey, good, yeah.
Why don’t you, he tried, started again. Will you come back?
What?
Can you come back later?
She gave him a look like, this is stupid, and she took a few steps back. She sat on his stoop, and he could see the crest of her forehead through the window from where he lay. He sat up to look at her. She folded her arms around her legs. They looked at each other for a long time.
They’re selling the building, he called to her through the window.
What?
I love you!
What? He shook his head. Whatever. How long? she said, shouting so he’d hear.
I don’t know.
Okay.
I’m sick, he wanted to tell her. Like that would explain everything. But it wasn’t like he had cancer, and even if he did, she wouldn’t care.
He looked at her for as long as he thought was appropriate, and then stretched back out as best he could.
On the way back she let her brothers smoke too. It got dangerous for the last ten minutes, enough where I definitely shouldn’t’ve been driving. When I swung into our skinny parking lot I saw her look at the spot where his car had been.
Okay, she said, thanks. No one moved to get out of the car.
Her youngest brother said, I’m so high. The older one said shut up. We were all quiet for a moment, and then she laughed. It was a cruel laugh, one she’d been holding in.
You’re fucking weird, said the older brother. He got out and the other one followed. I turned toward her as she settled down, got quiet. I thought for two slow, colorful seconds that I might kiss her.
Thanks, she said.
Yeah, I said. Sure, of course, cool, yeah.
She left then. It was the last time I saw her. She stopped coming round, and I never saw her in the hall even. Apart from when I saw her youngest brother in town later, all traces of her were gone. I didn’t even talk to her brother because I don’t know his name, don’t know I ever did.
The woman I live with now knows she must exist, or someone like her. I’ve never said nothing about her, but I think she knows. She knows the hawk story. How that landlord killed himself at Deerhead. She thinks I should tell Daddy how I named the birds, but then what else would I talk to him about when I got done saying all that, after all this time. She’s a good woman, and that’s how I know.
After she got out of the car I stayed in there alone for a long time. Inside it smelled like the weed of course and her shampoo, girl-sweet, some kind of small white flower, and I wanted to stay with her just a little longer.
