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Weedeater
WEEDEATER
AN ILLUSTRATED NOVEL
ROBERT GIPE
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701
© 2018 by Robert Gipe
All rights reserved
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Printed in the United States of America
Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gipe, Robert, author.
Title: Weedeater : an illustrated novel / Robert Gipe.
Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058087| ISBN 9780821423097 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780821446256 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Coal mining--Kentucky--Fiction. | Dysfunctional families--Fiction. | Drug abuse--Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3607.I4688 W44 2018 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058087
Dedicated to the memory of my mother
Barbara Jane Hale Gipe
1939–2016
Contents
1
DREADFUL CRASH
GENE
First day of July I was thumbing the Caneville Road. I’d walked off another of Brother’s cleanup jobs, mine sludge up to my pant pockets, throat raw, hands itching and broke out. For eight dollars an hour I told him I couldn’t do it. Told him I’d walk back to Canard. He didn’t like it and called me an ugly name, but I told him I’d make it up to him, and at the time I thought I would.
I got my first ride from a blackheaded man in a Chevy pickup. He set me out at the Caneville bridge, and I stood there a good while, till a heavyset preacher picked me up, but he got a flat before we got to Pic-Pac and had to call his wife to bring the spare. I went in Pic-Pac and got me a Popsicle, come out, started walking. I walked a half mile when a man stopped had the crazy eye. I told him I’d wait, and he gunned his silver Buick across the double yellow line into a red Ford heading the other way. The Ford flipped up on its side against the rock wall, and the Buick sailed down the ditchline toward Canard a hundred yards and hung up on a road sign, front wheels spinning, no skid mark in sight.
Such as that common in oh-four, back when the pain pills poured down like February snow. Same year one died in a bathtub dry and blue as a pool chalk. Another they found dead in the sewer ditch in front of the Frawley Headstart. A lady’s heart give out, a needle in her arm, back of the Christian Church, and a teacher died at Kettle Creek School snorting a pill off her desk in front of a room full of kids. All that in Canard County in a single year.
When you’re first one at a wreck, you can’t believe how quiet it is. A woman had hair dyed orange come hollering out of the sideways Ford, but even still it felt too quiet. No police nor ambulance. Just you and what happened. A man with a winch on his truck come up, had a hat said “Blackbird VFD,” and he went to work getting that Ford set down. Then a lady in her hospital scrubs stopped, tried to see to that screaming woman. After that, people gathered from every side—come out of their houses to say they seen it, cars lined up down both sides of the road full of people wanting to help, a man running for magistrate handing out cards. Pretty soon so many people had congregated, felt like a yard sale. One woman stopped to ask if anybody was selling baby clothes, but when the ambulance pulled up and she seen it was a wreck, she started to cry. I told her not to feel bad, told her I thought the very same thing.
When she settled down, I walked back to the Buick. They was several people crowded around, and I could barely see the driver the way the Buick was rared back on that road sign. I stood up on my tiptoes, and seen the man stir. He stared out the windshield at the white summer sky.
Somebody said, “You gonna make it, buddy?”
The man in the Buick leaned over on his elbow towards us, mouth hanging open, face white as the sky. His eyes opened wider, till they was like two bowling balls coming down the alley. He shook his head back and forth and said, “Nope.”
Then
