Sinkholes

We didn’t talk about how I lived in a trailer. You knew it, but we never said so.

That old aluminum Diet Coke can—cinder blocks instead of wheels, waist-high dogs knocking you flat every time you came over—loomed in plain sight up on the hill, above the pond that my daddy drove the mower into when we were little. Whole rusty thing under in five minutes with a retching gurgle, 3,000 bucks down with the bullheads and fertilizer runoff. My papaw really let him have it that day.

We peered down into the muck at the John Deere and pretended it was a sunken ship. Make-believe, just like how when you asked if I needed to be getting home, you pointed at Papaw’s farmhouse rather than the trailer.

Not that I would have invited you in anyway. Not when you lived in that two-story with green shutters and the ceramic garden toad. You said your mom picked it up at Big Lots on account of everyone having some silly thing in their yards here.

So you couldn’t come inside because if you had, you would have widened your mouth into a Spaghetti-o and covered it real quick to hide that you'd been doing it. You would have seen the sofa bed in the TV room where Daddy sometimes slept and forgot to put away the sheets. The ragged hole in the dog food bag where a mouse kept getting in. Mikaelah’s Lisa Frank smilies and cheetahs stuck everywhere in our bedroom and my Mia Hamm poster taped onto the bedsprings below the top bunk.

So we stayed outside when you visited. Cold or rainy days were the worst. Then, I was just left bickering with Mikaelah over the remote while Mom and Daddy fought about what he’d done with their money. He’d give a little for groceries and our school things, but the rest dribbled away through his fingers.

When their yelling got real bad, Papaw would bring us over to his house for cream sodas, but all he did was jigsaw puzzles or squawk at the news.

"They're coming for us," he'd say to his TV set, only a little bigger than ours. No bunny ears though. "This'll be the end if these sonsabitches get elected."

"Who’s that, Papaw?" I asked once.
"The world, honey! The rest of the world is coming to blow this country to bits." Your daddy must’ve been the only Democrat in the county. I figured he must be one

because he's a brown man. But then, we don't have many of those in Sevier County either.
My parents didn’t like y’all because your daddy used to be mine’s boss at the clinic. They

said he was only too happy to cruise through town in that Japanese car, whistling on his way to work and rolling the lint off his white coat.

Why'd he have to be like that, all show-offy? Why couldn't he have just minded his own business and stayed quiet? That's probably where your family’s troubles were. Not keeping quiet.

*****

My mom and daddy were some of those parents that just didn’t make sense. Not like your folks, who both didn’t say much, but when they did, it was with the same honeyed accent. You told me they could hardly understand mine sometimes.

I never asked how Mom and Daddy met—that’s the kind of sappy thing Mikaelah would like to hear about—but he’s from Lexington, and she’s never left Seymour, Tennessee in her life, so it had to’ve been some weird circumstances.

Like if Mom were his waitress at the diner while he passed through town. I could see her swirling her order pen at him in a “keep it moving” gesture until she decided she might like for him to stay.

She’s not a pretty woman. When she gets to talking, even if she’s not mad, she stoops over you, gray-brown hair falling from its knot. My daddy would shrink into his sweater as this woman elbowed him into noticing her.

I was what they call here a counting-back baby, where people list the months on their fingers and where you can't tell if the bride is far along or just plain fat. They moved into my papaw’s trailer while they looked for a house and never left.

I was barely out before Mikaelah came following. You wouldn’t guess it now because she was a bitch to us most of the time, but she was the best thing when she was born. Always giggling and smelling sweet of something from the Johnson & Johnson company.

It almost makes you forget about the times she dented our car or those ratty jean shorts she wore. What the heck was the matter with her? Did she want “trash” written on us for the rest of our lives? But we’d all fight over holding and playing with her as a baby. I even did dress-up and dollies to be nice.

It didn’t take long before stuff went wrong between my parents though. Daddy spent a lot of time out, leaving Mom nothing to do but stomp around the kitchen, burning this and that on the stove and thinking up things to say when he showed up.

She sure did love calling herself a doctor’s wife, though. All she must’ve figured about them was that they dressed fancy and did not work.

One time, things were real lean, and Daddy arranged for her to work a few hours a week in the gift shop. That didn't take. Mom had all sorts to say about what would the other wives think and she really needed to get on organizing a fundraiser so she'd fit in. Right. A woman in a trailer planning a function for little African orphans or something. Can you imagine that?

*****

We found our fort when we were 10 or so. Or were we younger? I know it was springtime because the white buds on the trees scattered all over the fort like unruly snowflakes.

Looking back, it was pretty nuts how much you and me ran around to each other’s places. The woods from Papaw’s property to your cul-de-sac had to’ve been a couple miles. But we’d ride the bus home with each other then walk back through the thicket after. I get now that most

kids’ parents drove them around for playdates, but we walked, usually without asking permission first.

We discovered the fort on a day when my parents were practically shaking the trailer off its cinder blocks with their arguing. I didn’t even want to see it on that hill.

And I didn’t tell you this, but I thought things would get even worse if they saw us together out the window. Mom never used your name, acted like she couldn’t pronounce it: “Kristie, you’re not going over to your little friend’s, are you? I want you in the yard where I can see you.”

When I asked my mom what she had against you, she only said it wasn’t right for a girl to have only one friend. She said it like how when she said it wasn’t right for a girl to sit all day in a wet bathing suit.

So we wandered around. You liked to talk to the birds and trees. A sycamore told us that I’m very nice, and a woodpecker tapped its beat to are-you-OK-Kristie?

Then we saw it. Someone—a dad and kid, I thought—had built a platform and a bit of railing into the hill. Maybe it was gonna be a whole treehouse before they’d gone and left it.

You’d be the princess, me a pirate jabbing a stick-sword at enemies trying to get us. When it was your turn, we’d play house. I’d clean the home like you instructed by shoving leaves off while you rocked a fake baby.

I miss that about being a kid, entertaining yourself with nothing but the world you came up with. Now, watching the clock at work or wasting a day at the auto shop makes you feel so cemented in the place you actually are.

The fort was too far away to play there very much. That first day, it took hours of walking before we recognized familiar land.

When I finally got back after dark, I found out that my daddy had been fired by your daddy that day.

*****

When we all got back from summer vacation to start middle school, you were wearing the scarf. I hadn’t seen you all summer, me at JV basketball conditioning and you with your 4-H friends. That was the summer you got real into horses, and I begged Papaw to buy one. So I almost didn’t recognize you with that sheet of red covering the black hair that usually waterfalled down your back.

We all stared. I heard at lunch that you’d already been to the principal when a hall monitor tried to tell you to take it off, but a call to your dad won out, I guess.

On the bus, I nabbed our usual booth and crossed my fingers tight that no one from 4-H rode our bus route and would claim you. When you shuffled in and met my eye, I lowered mine and turned to the window, pretending to watch the traffic guard. Why did I do that?

You planted down in the row ahead of me, the slap of the cracked pleather enough encouragement for me to look up. Close enough.

“Hi,” you said. “Good summer?”

“Yeah. I had basketball a lot. They think I’ll be good.” But that seemed braggy, so I said, “But I’m not so good at rebounds.”

“Oh, you’ll be great. You’re tall!”
That’s all you knew about basketball players, but I liked you for it.
I asked about 4-H and lied that we could be getting a horse soon.
You said, “I should come by today and show you how to take care of it!”
Yes! Even if we have to practice riding on fence posts and muck imaginary hay from a

barn I’ll never have, please come over again.
Before I could answer, the words “turban head” were fake whispered nearby. Ricky

Whitcroft. Maybe he thought it was okay because we weren’t sitting together; I usually stood up for you.

The teasing got louder, angling for a reaction, mixed with your name. You turned back around to face the front.

It could just as easy be me, I thought. You wouldn’t want both of us being made fun of, I told myself.

And your daddy was the one who realized mine was self-prescribing. After that, he started treating criminals at the state penitentiary. So damn me if a tiny part of me didn’t think you deserved this.

When the kids became unbearable, when Ricky slid up to the seat in front of you, your brother came up from the back of the bus. Which was a big deal because Rahim usually ignored us for cigarettes and sloppy kisses.

At 14 and with the arm muscles of a varsity baseball player, he took over our space with a booming, “Do you jackwads have nothing better to do than mess with a little girl?”

The jeers hushed, and Ricky mouthed something behind Rahim’s back that made everyone laugh.

I shot Rahim a grateful look as he returned to the back row. He glowered back at me as I forced him to defend his sister and leave behind his teenager fun.

*****

By the time Mikaelah began high school with us, she was pretty much in love with Ricky Whitcroft.

They’d skulk off into Papaw’s fields—the same fields you and I spent all those hours in—and Mom would whip a nearly grown girl raw with a TJ Maxx alligator belt.

“Those Whitcrofts are worth jack shit,” she’d shriek over the flails. “And you’re shit for lying with him.”

Mikaelah would button her shirt back up and head to Ricky’s house without saying anything. She’d come back the next morning, often swaying from her fill of Tennessee Honey.

Her motions reminded me of Daddy’s when he’d been strung out, and only then did I think to worry.

Sometimes, I went to their parties to watch her back. Soft under a couple beers, Ricky and his friends were okay. In their spots—Ricky’s basement, the lot behind the Waffle House, we talked crap about Seymour and everyone who was dumb enough to live there by choice.

But I’m still sorry about the field trip. The guys and I were goofing off, spitting over the rail and not learning a thing about the Tennessee Valley Authority. I was trying to prove that a girl could spit as far as them.

But you were all alone, taking in the mountains that hovered over us like a worried mother. You were the only one not paired up, which knifed me, so I went over.

Your face just lit up when I said, “Hey, Samira.” It’d been almost a year since we’d even spoken, longer since you’d appeared in the black-eyed susan field.

“Hard to believe all this,” you said, nodding at the cascade that lights up the state, a stocky wall of water compared to the ones trickling in the Smokies.

“Yeah...” I added lamely and flushed.

You glanced over my shoulder at the guys, who were acting like they were gonna throw Nate McGarry, the smallest of them, over the railing. Your eyebrows furrowed. “You like hanging out with them?”

I shrugged.
You shook your head, and the waterfall mist dewed on your cheek. “They’re so—”
Just then, someone ran behind and ripped the scarf off you. Your hair, longer than before,

unfurled prettily out of its binding, and the flower-pink fabric flew out over the ledge. It ribboned through the air before landing in the thundering rapids and becoming lost in all that energy and power.

You were so scared of God or whoever being angry that a teacher bought a t-shirt from the gift shop for you to wrap, pitiful, over your head. I still wonder after all this time if you thought I only came over to distract you for that God-awful trick.

*****

The worst day of my life started after basketball. I got home and saw Mikaelah’s back through the living room window, the see-through material of her blouse bunched up against the glass and her dirty blond hair in a rat’s nest around her head. Weird. Through the fluttering gingham curtains, I strained for a better look.

I broke off running, fast as I could.

When I threw the door open, screen snapping hard like a rubber band, my daddy still had her held against the window.

“Get out!” he bellowed. His balding head was dripping with sweat.

Mikaelah had her eyes closed, legs kicking at a halfhearted struggle.

Mom was in the kitchen, inching backward, and I swear to God she was fingering a cleaver, the one we sometimes used for knocking the heads off chickens.

“Daddy, what’s going on?” I asked.

When I was a kid, I could distract him sometimes, do cartwheels or sing a nursery rhyme into a wooden spoon. “Daddy, why aren’t you at work?” It was all I could come up with at 16. “Don’t you have someplace to be?”

“He hasn’t been to work in days!” my mother keened, like I hadn’t gotten an easy math problem on homework. “They fired him Monday. That’s all the time it took for him to start using again. Except he don’t have a prescription pad now.”

“Shut up!” he and I shouted.

But he’d slacked his grip on my sister, so I went for him. Conditioning and cow chores had made me strong, so he fell flat into my room. I grabbed the knob and held.

He twisted, but I held out with both hands while he kept up his goddammits. Mom found a key from a drawer—those doors locked from the outside, I guess to protect all the valuables.

I sank down to the carpet-covered plywood, my knuckles white and armpits damp. “Look at us!” I screamed at my parents. “Look at what you’re doing to us!”
My daddy stopped hollering. His breathing was shaky on the other side of the door. I

imagined his back against mine through the wood.
“Why do you even care who we hang out with? Look at where we live! We are fucking

trash, and everyone in this trash town knows it.”
Mom called the cops, but when they showed up and unlocked the door, we only found an

open window above the bunk bed. The officers said to call back when we hear from him, then they left us, too.

******

Mikaelah and I waited by the front gate for Ricky to pick us up. When Daddy came to after sleeping it off in a field or wherever, best not to be home.

“You hurt his feelings,” she said, kicking at the barbed wire between the fence posts, “and that’s why he left.”

“Hurt his—” I started. “That’s crazy. He was crazy. If I did, I don’t care.”
“He wasn’t gonna hurt me.”
“Then you’re crazy, too.”
She stepped up onto the wire like a tightrope, holding onto the splintery post. “He’s got to

hate living off Papaw, on his land. That trailer’s all he’s got that’s his. And it ain’t even.”
I scoffed and turned around, back scratching my section of fence. As I’d gotten older, the

field wasn’t as big, yawning up to the woods toward your house. I’d never been on a plane but had seen pictures, and this would just be one itty-bitty yellow square of patchwork, gone on the way to someplace else.

Ricky pulled up, his Suburban bursting with kids, including you and Rahim. But I was too tired to puzzle that out. Later, I found out Ricky’d invited you, and Rahim had insisted on coming, too.

Ricky drove so far out that the roads bended up with the mountains. I could tell where we were going because he’d brought us there before: a sinkhole pond that glowed a ghostly blue, as if it had chlorine in it. The water looked shallow, maybe only a few feet, but cratered deep into the earth. His group liked to get high by the water and chuck bottles in.

When we parked, dusk had fanned out, and late-summer night prickled up the hairs on my stiff neck. I was over it already and tore up dead leaves by the water.

Someone lit a joint, and your eyes caught on the glowing end of it.
“What is this place?” you asked, nostrils flaring.
After the field trip—the whole class missed the homecoming game because you told the

principal—your parents let you decide if you wanted to keep on with the scarf or not, and you said no. Of course, after all that. But you always kept your hair tied back in a bun, and I’d sometimes catch you touching the invisible fabric at your throat or temple, like adjusting a phantom limb.

“Just a pond we go to,” someone answered, too casual. That’s what made me figure it out, that something bad was gonna happen. They didn’t want you to know it was a sinkhole.

Ricky was scanning the clearing, and his gaze settled on Rahim, talking to a girl by the cooler. Ricky saw me looking and smiled.

I shut my eyes, thinking. How could I get out of this?
Nate led you over to the water, lying about the fish you could see inside.
As soon as your shoes got close to the edge, Ricky put two hands on your back and

shoved. Forgive me; I actually remember rolling my eyes during the splash.
“She can’t swim!” Rahim yelled.
And he dived in. It was neat, not even much ripple.
Ricky flinched “Hey, we didn’t know that!” Eyes full, he asked the rest of us, “No one

knew that, right?”
Had I known that?

You still hadn’t come up. I loped to the craggy hole. The veins in my forearms hurt from the adrenaline. I couldn’t see anything down there. You could have been two feet under or 20.

At last, you broke the surface with a choking gasp.
I reached down. “Kick over to me!”
You managed it, and I heaved your shivering body out. Some of the guys helped. For a

second, I could be your hero, fixing us by saving you.
You caught your breath on all fours, soil turning to mud around you, and asked, “Where’s

Rahim?”
We all counted in our heads. When I think back now, typically when I’m fishing with

Papaw in the winter or get out of a cold shower, the thought makes me dig my fingernails hard into my arms: None of us thought to jump in after him like he had for you.

Ten minutes before someone thought to call 911, another hour before they could get up there and find us in the woods.

You let me hold you as you howled, the cries quaking through both our bodies, but I doubt you remember that. You kept saying his name. I didn’t say anything, only gripped you until the emergency people took you away to tell your parents.

The divers wouldn’t be able to recover his body until the next day, but I heard they figured out why he sank so fast. It was his shoes, they said. The weighty Adidas Superstars that he’d loved so much pulled his ankles to the bottom like stones and tangled up in the growth.

******

Like it was any other night, Ricky dropped Mikaelah and me off at the mailbox because we didn’t like him to see the trailer. We treaded the dust path in silence, well after midnight. But a strange glow up the hill made us squint.

The trailer was on fire. Our mother stood on the grass crying.
I opened my mouth and had to cough.
The entire thing was already engulfed in one giant flame that prowled close to the field.

A big enough fire that it had its own sound, like a flag flapping in the wind.
Lighter fluid stank in my nose. I knew exactly where he’d gotten it, from the woodshed

behind the house where Papaw kept the grill stuff.
“How’s that now?” Daddy called when he saw us. “We don’t live in trash now!”
He circled the mobile home, surveying his work and giving another squirt of fluid to the

bathroom.
My mud-powdered high-tops were rooted to the earth of the field. No point in trying to

stop him. My face got hot, like at a campfire, while we took it in.
What would be left? A hunk of strangled black metal? A patch of dead grass to grow

back next year?
“It’s OK,” I mouthed to Mikaelah. “We’ll go someplace.”
After a week at Papaw’s, she started crashing at Ricky’s, then moved on when the family

kicked her out. She doesn’t visit much now but calls me from New York. I wonder if she’s near you at all.

Your family took the body to be buried somewhere north and never came back. I found myself talking to you so much like this that I sent letters to your house, hoping they’d be forwarded. But even if they made it, you probably wouldn’t care to hear from me.

People still talk about what happened as the town’s biggest tragedy. Parents warn children to stay away from the sinkholes because someone once drowned there.

I see those guys in town sometimes still, waiting in line at the post office or parked beside each other at Wal-Mart. Nate McGarry said he still feels bad about Rahim, they all do. Other people feel bad for us, the poor kids who saw him die in a bottomless grave of limestone and silt.

No, I didn’t make it out of Seymour. I think I always knew I wouldn’t, even as I watched my home here blister and smolder away into air.