Exactly How You Wanted It

In the cotton field, with a hoe in your hand, the hours sometimes tick off like seconds. You walk up a row, maybe a quarter-mile toward another cotton field or a soybean field, off too far to make out which it is, but you know it’s cotton because you’ve already walked this same row a thousand times and if not this one, another just a couple of steps to the left. You come back toward your tan truck after you’ve got to the break in the field, a dirt path separating the two cotton fields; and by the time you make it back to that tan truck, it’s lunch time or quitting time.

Other times, the seconds drag into days and the days into months. The field does not end, or rather, there is no end to the number of fields that need chopped. You raise your hoe to the sky—the sun would glint and shine in your eyes if the damn thing wasn’t so rusted—and you drop the hoe to the earth, a resonating thud of steel and root colliding. But the root only gives way to a thicker one you hadn’t seen just yet.

You strike down upon the earth again. You walk up and down, raising your hoe and dropping the wrath of God down upon those demon roots, and you finish the entire field. It’s still a quarter til noon and there’s another field to get in after lunch.

Lunch is a bologna sandwich and a beer you stole out of the refrigerator. Your momma doesn’t even know it’s been taken yet because she won’t wake up for another couple of hours still. But when she does wake up, she’ll be madder than hell that her beer is gone, not because you took it and drank it though, but because you took it and she couldn’t drink it.

Lunch lasts just long enough for you to unwrap your sandwich and down the beer. Then it’s time to move the truck to the field down by the Marshall’s place—out on Highway 61—or to the one down by Byrd’s Corner off of Salcedo; when you get there, you’re not sure which you hope it will be: an afternoon that flies past with one walk up and down a row or one that hangs on the end of your hoe like so many roots slashed and stuck over the last couple of years.

Some days you see people while you’re out in the field, off in the distance somewhere, another worker or two loading irrigation pipes into a trailer to take to another field, or maybe you see a hitchhiker walking the highway trying to get taken down the road a ways, to New Madrid maybe, or even further if the driver’s going down to Arkansas or Mississippi. Other days, most days, you’re on your own in the field, no one around for miles. On those days, when the breeze is blowing just enough to bend the leaves of the cotton plants, you can lose yourself in the quiet noises of the field. You walk by dozens of weeds, a whole field of weeds without seeing a single one. You stay through dusk to go back and finish the work that should have been done hours before, but you were so caught up in the rhythm of the wind and the slight give of the dirt underneath your boots that you hadn’t swung your hoe for hours. When you finish walking the last row for the second time that day, it’s time to go home, and now you know which you had wished for at lunch. You hoped the day would go on for an eternity so you’d never have to go home to that trailer with your momma. If you were lucky she wouldn’t have a new man at the house, someone she picked up to buy her booze and meth or any other drug they could get their hands on, someone who picked her up because she is as easy as losing a whole afternoon caught in the slow sounds of the earth.

But the days always end and run into that trailer sitting off the side of HH just outside of Sikeston, Missouri. No matter how many times you get beat on by a fist you don’t even recognize, or how many times your momma is so fucked up she can’t pay back those men for her drugs and they beat her and beat you and ransack the trailer and rob you out of a week’s pay, there’s always another field to be in as the sun’s rising. One day, after being up all night just making sure your momma doesn’t die on the floor of the bathroom— which isn’t even big enough for her to die in—you’re out in the field as the sun’s rising, your jeans soaked up to the knees from a few drops of dew from a few thousand cotton plants. You hear the man’s voice, so far off in the distance that the words are a jumble in the cool windless morning.

You have just struck through a root the size of your forearm when you hear it. Every hair on your body stands up and listens. You look for the headlights of a pick-up truck coming down the dirt road, the boss or maybe one of his men coming to tell you that this or that field is off limits today because they’re getting crop dusted or some other thing. But there is no truck, no headlights, no nothing except for the dirt and the rows of cotton. The sun’s rays just barely make it over the tops of the trees in the distance. You hear it again, but it doesn’t sound like someone yelling too far off to make out what it is they’re saying. It’s more like someone whispering soft enough, just soft enough so that you can’t hear, like it’s done on purpose. Goose bumps, not from the soaking wet pants, come up all over your legs and arms and a funny feeling settles into the base of your head. You pause and adjust the bill of your baseball cap. You make the decision, voice or no voice, there’s still a day’s work to be done. The sky stops as you walk up and down, slamming the ground with your tool, your weapon; it freezes, remaining too dark for twenty, thirty, forty-five minutes too long. But how can you say for certain in a place where time starts and stops as it pleases?

You come to the end of a row, on the side furthest from your pick-up truck, where you heard the voice before, and there’s a figure about a mile away, walking toward you on that dirt road that borders the field. It isn’t the boss because he would have just pulled up in that big F-350 of his. You stand there watching as the dark mass in the distance turns into the form of a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat and before you can blink more than twice, the man is only a few hundred feet in the distance. If you had turned away for just a second even, you would have said the man got there that quickly by getting into a full sprint; but you hadn’t taken your eyes off the stranger, and he hadn’t broken from his short, smooth gate.

When the man comes close enough to talk you up on the weather or high school football like those men down at Jay’s would have done had you left and gone for breakfast when you first saw him, the man doesn’t even move his lips to say hello. His long black coat blows in the wind that kicks up just as he passes by and it mesmerizes you like the dirt under your feet. You can’t take your eyes off of it. That’s when you hear the whisper again and this time you can make it out.

“What do you want?”

Four words hadn’t hit you so hard since Momma said, “Your daddy is dead.” That was six years ago now and the man’s words pluck the same chord as your momma’s had then. You notice the goose bumps are gone but that a cold chill has replaced them all over your body. You look from the spot where your tan truck’s parked, just visible over the tops of the cotton, to where the man should be walking still and there is no one, no trace that a man has passed by at all. You step from the field into the dirt road and there isn’t a single footprint in the dry, almost sand-like dirt.

You walk back into the field, the sun much higher in the sky than it had been just moments ago and you wonder how long you were standing there. You work through lunch trying to catch up on the work and you raise and lower your hoe a thousand times and when you come out of the last row, you walk over to your oversized, but perfectly sized, red water jug and pour the last of its contents, which isn’t much, over the top of your head. The luke-warm water washes streaks through your dirt-stained face and arms. It feels nice, like you have finally woken up after the day’s labor. You take your hoe and flip it into the back of that pick-up truck, the one that used to be your daddy’s and which you’re still paying on today. You get inside and are thankful that the A.C. still works as you crank it to full blast. You fold your arms on the steering wheel and rest your head for a moment.

There’s another truck at the trailer when you get home.

Calling it home drives you crazy and more than a few times you have tried to drop the word from your vocabulary all together, but it holds on in your head like a concussion; and like a concussion, it makes you physically ill. You sit there and stare out at the truck, through the dirty windshield, and try to figure out where you’ve seen it before. It’s nice, too nice to be sitting outside of this trailer, off this county road, outside of this town. Every accent is chrome coated and shined as though it has been meticulously cleaned after being parked. Hell, the truck should have lost its sparkle just coming down the dirt road from HH to the trailer.

You stay in the beat-up old pick-up that used to be your daddy’s and stare at that beautiful vehicle for a full hour, not because of how much you’d like to own such a truck, or because you’d rather not see what’s going on inside that trailer, but because you can’t shake the feeling of having seen it before and that scares you.

Usually, the men that stop in with your momma are vagrants and dope heads, men who just happen to have something your momma wants, and when they’ve gotten what they will out of her, they leave and you never have to see them again.

But a man that drives a truck like this, a truck that you can almost put your finger on where you’ve seen it before, a man like that might be a man who you could run into from time to time in an area like southeast Missouri where people from other small towns know each other. You’d have to look him dead in the eye when you did have dealings with that man and stand there, knowing what he had done to your momma.

Finally you get out of that little tan truck and throw a tarp over your hoes and grab the water cooler. You walk toward the door but when you’re ready to pull the handle you hear laughter from just on the other side of the quarter-inch thick metal. The woman, who must be your momma, but she hasn’t laughed like that in the last six years, continues to giggle as you stand there. But she doesn’t sound drunk or high and this makes it all the more odd. You step lightly back down the two plastic stairs and head around the back of the trailer. In the dark, you remove the checkered wood piece that hides the wheels and reach under an old car hood that’s been sitting under the trailer since before you were born and grab the half-full pint of Tennessee whiskey you knew would be sitting there. You’re momma doesn’t have money but there’s liquor hidden anywhere and everywhere and probably buried too. You sit down on that red water cooler and take burning sip after burning sip until it doesn’t quite burn anymore. When it stops burning, you get nice and comfortable there on the ground next to the trailer and take drink after drink until that bottle’s gone and it doesn’t seem so bad sleeping out in the dirt behind a trailer.

When your eyes open, they’re met with a burning not unlike the one your throat met with upon taking those first drinks of that whiskey the night before. But you force them open, fight against their fluttering.

The noon day’s sun would be beautiful if your head wasn’t beating and punishing you for the drink you consumed without thought for how you’d feel today. The clear blue sky, only broken by puffs of soft white clouds here and there, makes you think of the day you and your momma laid your daddy in the ground. It’s the middle of August just as it had been six years ago. You didn’t have a suit to your name and after the funeral expenses, there was hardly going to be enough money to pay the bills much less to go out and buy you one. But your momma told you to get in your daddy’s truck and she’d drive you to Penny’s and see if you all couldn’t find you something that she could afford. You and Momma got in his truck and it still smelled like cigarettes and dirt, the smell that no matter if he showered or not, still lingered on him. It’s the same smell that on certain days when you and the other workers have been out in the field all day and you come to meet up before going home, that same smell that stops you dead in your tracks when those workers get too close to you and you can smell your daddy standing right there beside you.

You get up and shake the dirt from your hair and watch it fall from your clothes as you straighten them and pull at them so that the buttons of your shirt and the zipper of your jeans are back in the front where they ought to be. The thoughts and pictures from the night before remain just out of grasp as you walk around to the front of the trailer until you see that big, oversized Chevy still shining against the dirt and gravel drive that it’s sitting on. They come rushing back through your alcohol stained mind and you’re faced with the same choice you had the night before, except this time there’s really no choice at all. You can’t go back behind the trailer and soak it all away again because there ain’t no whiskey left and eventually, one way or another, you’re going to have to go in there and face them, go inside the trailer and face him that is.

You step up those plastic stairs again, feeling your weight shift the plastic underneath you to the right with your first step and then back to the left with your second. You put your hand on the knob, hoping that when you turn it you won’t find your momma with a needle sticking out of her arm, passed out on the floor and this new man waiting to go upside your head just for the recreation of it. But when you do open the door, you can already tell a difference. The place is spotless, no cigarette or alcohol containers on the card table, no condom wrappers on the floor.

“Hey honey,” your Momma calls to you as you walk in the door. “Where have you been all night?”

“Umm…I was—“

“It’s alright sweety. I wasn’t too worried about you, only Bill wants to meet you is all.”

Your momma hasn’t asked you where you’ve been for a couple of years now and you know that something’s wrong.

You can hear the shower down the only hall in the trailer.

“Come on Momma. Let’s go before he gets outta there,” and you tug at her shirt like a little kid but she just stares at you like you’ve lost your mind.

“I ain’t going nowhere honey. What has got into you?”

“Have you been doing drugs?”

“No, I haven’t been doing no damn drugs—“

“What did that man do to you? Did he hurt—“

“That man has a name honey and no he didn’t hurt me. In fact, we had a right pleasant time last night.”

You can feel the vomit rising in your throat as the words come out of her mouth and it must show on your face too.

“What kind of woman do you think I am honey? We just—“

“What kind of a woman? What kind of woman do I think you are?” You feel the blood rising to your face and the tears come to your eyes before you can even notice. “I think you’re the same woman that’s been too damn drunk or high or both for the last six years to even ask me how my day went or…or where I’ve been if I don’t come home.”

Your momma sits back a second and looks back at you through teary eyes of her own. “I guess I deserve that. I deserve just about any ole thing you can throw my way and you know what? You’re right. You are right.”

You feel the hurt in her voice and it slices you, cuts you through to the marrow of your bones. “Look momma, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean those things but—“

“Well you shouldn’t be sorry honey. You’re right. I been so screwed up for the last few years I didn’t know what was real and what was them drugs talking to me. I know I’ve done some bad things, some down-right-stupid things, and some flat out wrong ones, but last night I went to the store to get me a couple of 40 oz. beers and there’s Bill, like he been waiting on me to show up. Knows me inside and out like he’s lived here with us over all this time.”

You feel that anger rush back up. Bill knows your momma?

Bill knows what’s been going on since your daddy died?

“Who in the hell is Bill and how do you know he don’t want nothing from you like them other men did?” You scream.

Right there behind you, you never even heard the shower shut off, there’s Bill standing there buttoning up the buttons on his shirt.

“Well son, I think I can answer them questions you got.”

Before you can turn around though, something about the voice causes you to stop, and then you smell it, him. Over the top of the shampoo and after shave, there it is just like you had smelled so many times in that trailer, cigarettes and dirt.

“Have you been saved, son?”

“Wha…What?”

“I said, ‘Have you been saved?‘”

You look at your momma and she’s smiling like an idiot and you realize that you have no help there. “Saved? You want to know if I’ve been saved?”

“Well…yeah,” he says and smiles just like your momma.

“You come into my home,” and you almost grimace at calling it home but go on, “You come in my home and do God knows what to my momma—“

“You watch yourself son. That’s your momma you’re talking about.”

“—and you want to know if I’ve been saved?”

He stares at you. You turn back to your momma and she’s staring too and you just want to run out the door, or have her answer for you, or for someone to tell you what in the hell is going on but no one’s talking and both your momma and Bill are looking at you and waiting on you, expecting you to say something, anything.

“Hell, fuck, shit no I haven’t been saved and what the fuck is it to you anyway whether or not I’ve been saved? You some kind of goddamned preacher or something?”

You brace yourself as the corners of his mouth turn up, not sure if you’re waiting on a hand across the face or a pat on the back as he stands there grinning at you, and you might as well be ready for it this time

“No sir. I’m no preacher and I ain’t a reverend, or a priest, or minister neither for that matter. You see son—“

“Don’t call me son, Bill.”

“Alright. Alright. I get it. I don’t mean no disrespect by it C.Q.”

You freeze and straighten up at the name. Your daddy called you C.Q and not a single person has called you that since the minister at the funeral asked you if you’d like to say a few words at the service. Your momma calls you Charles and the boss and the other workers always call you Chuck or Chucky.

Your eyes well back up at hearing C.Q. and you say, “Chuck” almost under your breath and you’re surprised when he hears you.

“Alright Chuck. Good. I like that. You see Chuck, there’s people all over this earth that need a change and plenty of them people are right here in this wonderful country we got us here. Only, they don’t realize they need a change. Day after day, they pick up a bottle or a needle and they try and push whatever happened to them somewhere deep down, sometimes so deep that they think it’s gone, but you know what Chuck?”

He looks at you like it’s a real question and he expects an answer. But instead of answering, you sit down at the cheap, folding card table that’s been your kitchen table since some time right after your daddy died and your momma was so high on PCP or crack or who knows that she tore into your all’s table with a butcher’s knife until there wasn’t nothing left of it but splinters when you got home from school.

Every time you sit down at the built in bench-seat and look at that card table, you can’t help but seeing Momma’s eyes when you walked in that day. They were so big you thought they might pop and for a full year after that day, you dreamed about those eyes. You sit there and look up at Bill and try to answer with something that might make you sound smart but you aren’t and you know it and now Bill knows it; all you can think to say is, “What?”

“It ain’t Chuck. It ain’t gone by a long shot.” He stares you dead in the eyes and you wonder about his angle, wonder where he came from, think about that accent that isn’t quite southeast Missouri but it ain’t quite the South either. As you keep staring into them brown eyes of his, the ones with the slight ring of yellow right around the blacks of the eye, you forget those worries and finally, you break from his gaze and look at your momma. She looks better than she has since your daddy died. For the first time since you walked in you notice that she’s got her hair done up and there’s some color in her cheeks that’s replaced that ghostly white they’ve been for the last several years. You smile at her and she smiles back, a real smile, nothing forced about it, and she looks happy, really and truly happy. Bill sits down next to you, between you and your momma and pats you on the shoulder with his right hand. He turns to face you, putting his back to your momma and stares you right in the eyes again and just barely audible, asks, “What do you want?”

The question cuts right through you as it echoes around in your head. You walk up and down the rows of that field out by Bird’s Corner; the morning dew’s long gone and the warm breeze sits at odds with that cold feeling you’ve got all the way up and down your arms and legs.

Bill’s been living with you all, your momma and you, for almost two weeks now. He’s been taking Momma to the movies up there in Cape, crawfish boils down at Danny’s Place in town, and talking about how you two would do some hunting when deer season came around, offering to take you fishing on the weekend. You smile as he says these things; you smile because your momma smiles and because she’s cleaner than you’ve seen her in six years. You smile because it suits your face or at least that’s what Momma used to tell you when you were little and what she took to saying again anytime you’d come home and she was so far gone she could barely open her eyes much less make them focus on you. You smile because you are scared not to. Something about that truck of his still bothers you. That ring of yellow in his eyes, where it had brought a peaceful feeling on you the first time you stared into them, now leaves you looking away any time he tries to look at you. Your momma not using drugs makes you happier than anything and that’s the one bright spot in all of this that makes all the worrying and fear worth it. You still can’t quite put your finger on what it is that you’re scared of but there’s something and you consider it as you get to the end of the last row of the last field for the year.

Just a few weeks ago it seemed like the rows would never stop coming but now the weeds are gone from all the cotton and soybean fields and other than some random work here and there on one of the different farms, there won’t be much work or money for that matter for the next several months.

Bill said he’d take care of you all, help out with bills and things until your momma gets back on her feet and is ready to go back to work, but you don’t really want to rely on Bill for anything at all. Plus, for the last few years, you’ve gone into town and got seasonal work at Aldi’s or Wal-Mart or both and those incomes have been enough to get through the winter.

As you finish the thought, you throw the hoe in the bed of the truck and rest your back against the warm metal, smelling the land, mostly the dirt stuck to your face, pushed deep into the fabric of your shirt and blue-jeans. You hear the sound of a truck coming down the dirt road and a second later see the dust its wheels are kicking up. You wipe your face and watch it turn from a Hotwheel to a real truck as it gets closer to you. You know the vehicle from its mismatched parts before you notice the man behind the wheel. He comes to a stop and rolls down the window on the gunmetal and rust colored door.

“Chucky,” he hollers over at you through his false teeth.

“Yeah? What you need Rick?”

“Chucky…He’s…Well, he’s dead.”

“Your daddy is dead,” The trip to Penny’s, the minister’s sermon at the funeral, all of these flash through your mind in a single second and you ask, not certain that you want the answer, “Who’s dead, Rick?”

“The boss. Me and John were out in one of the fields off Highway 61 and he was pointing out where we needed to put in the last of the irrigation pipe and all of a sudden he drops down to one knee and asks for some water. I runs down to the truck, bout 50 yards off, and when I get back to him, he’s laid out on the ground, grabbing at his chest.”

“Wait, John’s dead?”

“That’s what I’m telling you Chucky. I got him up in the truck and drove him over the hospital as quick as I could but it didn’t matter none; he was DOA.”

“Does his family know?”

“Well, I called Johnny, his older boy, right after I got to the hospital but his wife, Maggie, left him a couple of months back and Johnny didn’t even know where she was staying these days.”

“Is there anything I can do?” you ask, knowing there ain’t.

“Johnny got up the hospital and his chest is all puffed out like he owns the goddamn place and he tells me he’ll be taking over harvesting. Says we should all take a week off and meet back up on Thursday. I told him if he wanted everything done right and like John would do it, we ought to be back in the field tomorrow, but he won’t listen none. Says take the week off and walks off.”

“Too much work to take a week off, at least for you all that is.

My job’s done for the summer,” you say, grateful not to have to be a part of this.

“I tried to tell him that, but like I says, damn kid wouldn’t hear none of it.”

There’s a pause and before he says anything, you know the conversation is over.

“Anyway, I better take off. I’m trying to catch as many folks as I can before they go home, you know?”

“Yeah, I’ll see you Rick.”

He rolls up the window and drives past you to get to a place big enough to turn around and comes back past you again, kicking up a cloud of dirt all around you.

Three days later, on Saturday, there’s a knock at the door to the trailer. You’re back in your room and Bill hollers for you. Your momma’s off at the beauty salon and getting groceries and doing a couple more errands she said she needed to do, all with Bill’s money, and you come out of your room and there’s a man standing there by the door. His big belly’s only held in by a couple of stressed buttons and he’s got that pair of seven hundred dollar boots you’d seen up at Francine’s Western Store a few weeks back. He takes off his hat and holds it out in front of him.

“You Charles Quinn Rodgers?” He strokes a meaty paw through his receding white hair.

“Yes sir.” You look at Bill who’s sitting on the built in seat behind the card table and he looks like he’s trying to hold back from laughing.

“The Charles Quinn Rodgers that worked for John Montgomery Waters before he passed?”

“Yessir. I mean, if his middle name was Montgomery.”

“Well son, I don’t really know how to tell you this or if it’ll even stand up in court or what have you, but I was Mr. Waters’ attorney, and well, he came in a few weeks before he died and…Well, he signed every bit of his farm land over to a Mr. Charles Quinn Rodgers.”

You sit down next to Bill, not caring if he makes you nervous or not; you need to sit down. You stare at the man, not knowing what to say, running through thoughts, not knowing what to think. You drop your head down onto your knees and block out the light with your arms and you cry, deeper and harder than you have in six years. Bill puts his arm around you and holds you to him and no one says a word for a few minutes, or twenty seconds, or an hour and a half.

“Is there a number we can reach you at Mister?” Bill asks.

“James Arnold,” the lawyer says as he reaches in his coat pocket and fishes out a card. He hands it to Bill. “It’s there on the card with my number and the address of the office.

Just bring your boy down in the next day or two. There’s quite a bit of paperwork to be taken care of.”

“Will do. Thank you, James.”

Bill removes his arm from around your shoulders and you look up to see him shaking Mr. Arnold’s hand and escorting him outside. You wipe your eyes on your shirt and get up just as Bill comes back inside.

“Can you believe that?” Bill asks smiling from ear to ear. You don’t say anything back and Bill walks to the refrigerator and gets a beer, which doesn’t seem at all odd to you until much later when you realize there hasn’t been a drop of alcohol in the house since he moved in.

“Come on outside with me Chuck. I think you could use a little fresh air.”

You walk outside with him, not because he asked you to, but because you really do need some air. When you get out there, Bill turns around and faces you, holding out a set of keys. He looks at you and then the truck.

“It’s yours Chuck. A big time farmer like yourself should have a big time farmer truck. Don’t you think?”

You stare at the truck, knowing that you’re going to throw up. He hands the keys to you and you try not to take them, but he grabs your hand and presses the keys into your palm.

Right then, you bend over and throw up all over the only patch of real grass in the whole yard.

You wipe the tears from your eyes and the vomit from your mouth and Bill walks over and puts his arm around you again. He’s smiling when he says, “What’s wrong Chucky? Everything’s exactly how you always wanted it.”