Chapter 1: The Dead Land

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
"The Waste Land," T.S Eliot

He sat staring into the coffee watching small vines of oil with pale gray leaves of steam swirl into being within the stained porcelain wall of the cup before blowing off the surface in delicate threads that disappeared in the air. He drank the last to the dregs and pushed the cup to the edge of the table. A grainy layer of black sediment pooled at the bottom and grew larger with each refill.

For the last three cups he had been listening to the slap of the girl’s sandals on the bottoms of her feet. Her toes were short and pudgy, and the nails were cut to the quick but still held dirt at the edges, and her feet were the same tanned and dusty color as the rest of her skin. The sandals were scuffed and worn and bore the oil imprint of every footfall so that he knew exactly where each toe would rest when the sandal slapped back. He looked up and studied her as she poked at her half-eaten eggs. Her hair was let loose to fall where it would, and some strands stuck together in clumps that knotted and tangled into darker shades of brown and near black around her temples and against her neck. Her faded clothes were pilled, and at spots worn thin and frayed from those who had worn them before giving her the appearance of a hand me down doll not so gently used.

Her father sat across from her with his arms half encircling his plate, elbows on the table, fork fisted in his hand as he hovered over his food and lifted great mingled mouthfuls of eggs and hash browns toward his face. He was dressed in work clothes. Indigo jeans streaked with orange clay, and a shirt with ironed-on patches naming him and his employer.

Her mother smiled at the waitress uneasily as she approached. The type of smile that aims to please. The ingratiating grin that fills the faces of those who feel the lesser of others. She smiled as she pushed plates around the table and tidied up the little spills for which she apologized, never making eye contact as she assured the waitress they were fine. She was cleaner than her daughter, but her clothes were cheaper since they were purchased for one person only with no hope for a second life, or even much of this one outside the home. When the waitress turned to leave her smile shrank back to a self-conscious frown and her eyes silently studied the plates of her husband and daughter.

The waitress nodded at the coffee cup he had pushed to the corner of the table.

"You all right, sweetie? You just need more coffee?"

He nodded and the waitress touched his shoulder as she headed back behind the counter. The scent of cooking lard wafted around the room in warm waves that washed over him and leached into his clothes making them feel thick.

The waitress's fingers gripped the partition between his booth and the kitchen galley as she leaned halfway over the table. There was a gold ring on each of her fingers, and her skin was pale and smelled acrid with sweat. She sloshed a refill into his cup that spilled over and collected in the saucer. He thanked her as she slipped back over the wall, tossing the coffee pot on the warming plate and returning to an argument with the cook about another waitress who had not shown for work.

He scraped his cup over the rim of the saucer before taking a sip and holding it on his tongue. He tapped a cigarette on his lighter and slouched back in his seat.

The girl was smiling at him. Her eyes were deep blue and cavernous, and he could tell that she was practicing smiling at men already aware that boys were smiling at her. Her sandals slapped a few more times before she let one fall and left the other dangling from one toe. Her legs were bare to the knees beneath a denim skirt and her left knee had a fine cut scabbed in a broken line which had begun to heal and flake away. Next to her sat a shabby purse of matching denim. It was hard to imagine what need she would have for a purse, and the unnecessary accessory made her seem even more the pathetic doll. She wasn't old enough for keys and wallets, and for some reason it made him feel sad thinking of the purse filled with half-empty compacts scrounged from her mother's bathroom and tubes of cheap glitter lip gloss from the drug store. Maybe a school picture. A diary.

Her mother moved closer to her on the orange bench seat, eyeing him, and then looked to her husband.

He lit his cigarette and leaned over his coffee. He could hear her speaking quietly followed by a quick reproach from the girl before her father shifted in his seat. He knew that he had turned to look at him. He took a measured drag from his cigarette and looked up toward their table. Her father had turned to look at him, his arm locked over the back of the booth. He took a sip of his coffee and smirked before flicking an ash and locking eyes with the man who was examining him. The girl, embarrassed, had not looked up again but her mother's defeated frown had turned to a scowl and she followed her husband's approach with disapproving eyes as he rose from his seat and headed toward him.

The man stood at the edge of his table hunched slightly at the waist to crowd him, attempting to make the full weight of his presence known.

"Have you got a problem?" The man's voice was strained and low.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about you staring at my daughter."

He looked past the man toward the table. The girl was about to cry.

"There you go again."

The man shoved him against the back of his seat and the coffee lurched almost spilling. The cook moved quickly from the grill and the bulk of his body was wired and tense. His eyes narrowed.

"There ain't no reason for ya'll to be fightin in here."

"Shit, there ain't no reason. This Sombitch been starin at my daughter. That ain't no reason?"

The cook eyed him slightly to see if there was any truth in the statement.

"I don't know nothin about that, but I do know you ain't gonna be fightin in here."

The waitress hovered over the cook's shoulder and everyone was still. The father's dull green eyes were glassy, and his arms shook under his excitement. He exhaled deliberately and dropped his shoulders.

"Shit," he said. "You just stay the fuck away from my daughter."

He turned and walked back to his table pressing one hand fisted into the other.

The girl was crying mutely and pulling at the edges of her skirt with quick, violent tugs. The cook had not moved and now rested his body on his huge forearms taking turns looking at them both as if it were a form of containment, and the waitress shook her head disdainfully while pretending to clean a plate in the sink.

His cigarette had burned down, and ash had dropped on the table. He reached to put it out in the ashtray and realized that his hand was shaking, and his fingers had lost their strength.

He rose and went to the bathroom.

He latched the door behind him and looked at himself in the mirror. The smirk was still on his face, but his lips quivered at the edges and he frowned at his image with disgust. He turned on the water and splashed some on his face. His hands still shook. Water dripped from his nose as he leaned over the swell in the rust-colored basin. He ran his hands over his eyes and wiped them on his pants, turned off the faucet and yanked open the door.

The waitress was at the further end of the diner cleaning the now empty table and glanced over at him annoyed. Through the large glass windows, he could see them getting into a van in the parking lot. His pulse quickened and a tremor shook through his body. A cold wave tickled the top of his skull and drained down his spine. He took a handful of bills from his pocket and tossed them on the table and shoved open the front door. The waitress shouted after him.

When he reached the van, the man got out.

"What the fuck is your problem?"

He hit the father in his jaw and an explosion of pain erupted in his fist and shot down his arm. He could feel every muscle in his body come alive and burn, and he continued hitting him with a rage that made his eyes burn and well with tears. The man slumped back against the van. A look both shocked and vacant on his face. From the van he could hear the mother yelling and he turned to see her tangled in the driver's seat trying to climb out the open the door. He kicked the door shut on her and pounded the man's head into the van before shoving him to the ground.

"I'm not doing anything to your family!"

He grabbed him by the hair and kicked him in the stomach. He pulled his head back and looked into his eyes. His nose was bleeding and a dumb confusion had crept over his face as he struggled to breathe.

"I'm not what you need to worry about. That daughter of yours is going to grow up to be trash just like you, and that has nothing to do with me."

He kicked him in the stomach again and shoved him back against the van searching him for some reason that would explain his own actions.

"Your fucking daughter is what you need to worry about. Do you understand me?"

His eyes were fire as he looked into the van at the woman who was now paralyzed with her fingers gripped around the steering wheel. He walked alongside the van to the window where the girl sat, and he spat on the window between her eyes.

He went to his truck in a daze and as he pulled away, he saw the waitress running toward the van and the cook standing large and motionless in the doorframe watching him.

He pulled the truck off at the first road and sat. His hand already begun to swell. Little patches of purple and pink lines moved over his skin and when he tried to work his fingers, he couldn't make a fist. His body was beginning to ache, and the adrenaline was pooling in his stomach leaving a warm nausea. He leaned out the window and spat onto the ground watching it bubble in the loose gravel chalk before leaning his head back against the headrest. His ears rang, and when he tried to close his eyes they jerked beneath his eyelids until they opened again. He fought back the nausea in his stomach and put the truck in drive using the palm of his hand and headed toward the expressway.

By the time he reached town the air coming off the river was clean and brought only the smell of grass and trees. The sun was dropping behind the hills, and the day's heat gave way to a cool evening breeze that blew through the open windows of the truck and dried his skin. The streets were beginning to empty and only a few people could be seen walking the length of sidewalks beneath store porticos bearing names hidden in the dark so that only outlines and shapes were visible, and as the streetlights clicked on one after another down Broad Street all that passed beneath them seemed yellow and strange.

He pulled into the parking lot of the liquor store. He checked his face in the rearview mirror and went inside. The man behind the counter was playing on his phone and looked up out of habit without seeing him. He walked down the aisle walled with wooden shelves supported by exposed metal frames. For the most part the inventory was cheap whiskey and malt liquors. At the end of the aisle a few college students were poking around in a refrigerator arguing over what to buy. They grinned at him with faces filled of youthful anticipation and then continued their debate over which wine coolers they had been asked to get.

The man at the counter paused his game and avoided conversation by refusing to make eye contact so that he could go back to his chair.

Outside, the sky was dark and only a small line of deep blue outlined the tress on the rim of the town. The high-water table between the rivers made burials difficult when the town was founded so the cemetery of Myrtle Hill was cut into the sides of a hill in long concentric circles. The spiral of stones overlooking the town were nearly invisible from the streets below and practically forgotten by the inhabitants. In times past, it held greater prominence. President Wilson met his wife in the small town of Rome, Georgia, and when she died a state funeral was held on the slopes attended by dignitaries who are now remembered only by the bronze plaque above her grave. An unknown soldier, now known, was removed from Arlington and interred between iron machineguns and flags with a name but less ceremony. Where once uniformed soldiers paced above his head, now few come at all. At the summit of the hill, a statue of a confederate, and all around in great rings lay the bodies of Romans.

He pulled his truck past the black iron gates and navigated the narrow looping roads. In the darkness below large houses climbed up a hill behind the row buildings and shop fronts toward the clock tower that loomed mute and watchful, lost among the spires of churches waiting for the dawn and the chance to toll.

He reached next to him and opened the bottle before taking a long pull that dribbled from the corners of his mouth. He traced the liquid through his body. He rested his eyes in his lap and turned his hand trying to examine. Only its shape could be seen. Large and puffy, cupped in the other.

Her ghost walked these streets and sitting alone he could feel her next to him. He would sit on the steps of the buildings and remember her walking the concrete paths beneath the overhanging trees that smelled of summer and cedar. Her wheat-colored hair bright in the sun and her eyes smiling. He would go for weeks feeling uneasy and restless without knowing why before breaking down in tears and knowing exactly. It was a story that made him real and proved that he had existed before he was splintered and fell away into so many retellings that he barely existed at all.

Many nights were spent in this spot searching the streets below for evidence of her passing. A shimmer in a doorway. The memory of a day spent walking along the storefronts looking at antiques. The proof of a life to be mirrored back in the waters of the Coosa River flowing at the base of the hill. The touch of her hand on his that could now only be felt in the places she no longer walked.

The stones that surrounded him marked shared lives and offered testimony that love had existed, but a marker naming one who is forgotten names nothing. It was for this reason that he found it hard to speak to God.

In the distant street a car drifted by silently. The yellow sidelights in the front and red in the back distinguishing bow from stern like a boat in the night waters. The warmth of the alcohol flowed out into his arms and legs and the lights gently blurred in the corners of his eyes. He climbed from the truck and realized the weakness in his legs as a he made a few uneasy steps to the edge of the drive and chucked the empty bottle out over the hillside. He closed his eyes and teetered slightly as he pissed on the grass at his feet.

"Just let her know that I love her."

He felt stupid, small, and his voice seemed disconnected from what he felt as if only mimicking the real words he was saying.