Fiction by Emily Blair

Emily Blair is a queer Appalachian poet and scholar. Originally from Fort Chiswell, Virginia, she now resides in Asheville, North Carolina, with her family. She has published poems in various places, a while ago; most recently, two of her poems are featured in Understory: An Anthology from the American South (Vol. II). This is her first piece of published fiction. 

Ingles Wreaths

“Clancy, there’s a way out of here. It’s just you raising up your hands—”

“How about you just eating the shit out of my ass!”

Tom heard somebody turn a laugh into a cough just behind him. “You think that’s funny?”

“Yessir.”

The tombstone in front of them read Loving Husband, Brother, Friend, and Tom wondered if that was the order, and if he hadn’t also been a father, or maybe, the wife had been the one who picked out the tombstone, or the kids, and the kids had never known their grandparents, and he’d been a shitty dad maybe, so why say Son or Father, but if Clancy got a lucky shot off his own tombstone would just say Cop, Son, Friend, probably in that order, because his momma would be the one to order it and it didn’t matter who she was talking to, she always brought up that he was a cop, a sheriff, but he wasn’t of course, that was Sheriff Beauchamp, all five seven of him minus the hat.

“Tom, I need you back here for a minute,” that kid said, what was his name? Something a teck too Biblical, Josiah or Jedidiah, one of those. The little EMT boy, barely looked like he needed to shave, much less could fix you up. Or, not fix you up, but keep you alive until somebody else could fix you up. They seemed to be arriving at the same calls at the same times, but this one didn’t count, because everybody was there, or trying to get there, the lights hitting the back of Tom’s eyes like a punch in the throat. He had to make his eyes go fuzzy just to find that kid waving a black-gloved hand at him from where the car had rolled into the ditch at the bottom of the hill. 

Tom stepped over the little stones left in the ground, whipped his hips around the tall monuments, dodging the bouquets and little plush bears weeping rainwater into the earth. A crying bear, that would be a good thing to make. Fill them up once a year and let them drip tears onto your family member’s grave. A weeping statue, now in fuchsia. That kid was standing near the trunk of the car, which stuck half out of the ditch on the wrong side of the road. The car was dark green, at least twenty years old, with faded bumper stickers making cream and yellow and white rectangles across the back. All four wheels were spares, making it ride too low, like the Hot Wheels he had as a kid. He had never played with the cop cars, never wanted to be a cop even. It was something to do. “Yeah?”

The kid jerked his head toward the front of car. “Girl’s dead.”

“How dead?” From behind the car, Tom couldn’t see anything but the busted windows.

“Been dead. No reason to do CPR.”

“Been dead how long?”

“That’s not my job. But we need to get everybody here, now.”

“Well what do you think this is?” Tom asked, and the end of his question disappeared in a roar of helicopter thunder that had just veered around the mountain. Across the field, near the house, cows startled and ran for the forests veiling the ridges. A spotlight drilled onto them, the graveyard, Clancy taking his last stand, and this dead girl in the fucking car.

“Just letting you know. Can’t move her until y’all do your job,” the kid said as he snapped his gloves off. “We’ll move the ambulance down to the church.”

Tom looked behind his shoulder. Somebody had already unclipped the Methodist church’s parking lot chain. “Alright. We’ll let you know when it’s your bag.”

What’s the helicopter for besides giving me a fucking headache, the walkie talkie on Tom’s belt, and all up and down the hill, screamed in unison.

So Beauchamp had arrived.

In case he runs, sir, someone answered, with all the ineptitude of a mouse walking directly into the mouth of a still cat.

If he runs I’ll shoot him in the fucking ass myself.

Tom closed his eyes and wished, beyond all hope, that he would start to levitate a handful of inches above the ground, unable to see or hear, just step out of this frame and into the next one.

That’s probably how the girl in the car, and Clancy too, felt when they got high.

Being high and getting high looked awful to Tom, but he never saw the first few months, which must be incredible, or else why would you get bloody and picked at, skinny and rotted at the mouth, hair falling out and scabs all over and homeless and ugly, if it didn’t feel good the first time? But there were always babies in nasty diapers drooling in the next room, already learned to shut up because nobody was coming, weirdly silent little kids with silver caps on all their teeth sucking on the edges of their t-shirt collars, teenagers smoking beside green above ground swimming pools, all of them looking at Tom like, Yeah I know, this really sucks for you for five minutes, imagine being born into it. Down the road was a trailer he’d gone into a few times last year, and now an empty dumpster sat outside it with trash scattered around, wet in the overgrown grass, a bear or two had already had at it, but that wasn’t as bad as it had looked inside. That guy went to prison pretty easy, the woman and kids he didn’t know about, but the trailer was empty now and probably should be condemned.

He stood that way for a few seconds at the bottom of the hill. It wouldn’t be a bad place to be dead. He didn’t know if it was a good place to die (certainly the girl hadn’t died here, and Clancy was doing his best to force the issue), but it was a good place to be dead, with the view across the narrow valley to the large white house tucked back by the forest, and the trees and the horses and the cows, and the way the mists of the morning would swell down the valley and then suddenly burn off to something unbelievable. In the fall, everybody loves the fall, the mountains were early to turn yellow and then orange and then the red of disbelief, and Tom thought, Why be buried anywhere else? Maybe Clancy was angling for his spirit to be left here and not wherever he knew he was like to die otherwise, some shithole house, some shithole jail cell, maybe it’s a way to get your ghost a good spot in the afterlife.

Tom, get up here. Somebody else on the radio this time.

Near the crest of the hill, a few of the guys stood around holding the front of their bulletproof vests down to give themselves more room to breathe. Poor Sam Moby was up there, looking like a kid playing dress up in his daddy’s uniform. They started looking younger and younger, but that just meant he was getting too old to feel excited about this call, or any call. Of course, he’d worried a little bit when he wasn’t excited at all when Clancy hit ninety on I-40. What was another chase? What was another knuckle-white grip on the steering wheel?

“Yeah?” He looked around, trying to see who’d called him up.

“He wants to talk to you,” Beauchamp yelled, although the helicopter was circling high enough above them now that it was less necessary. “Clancy. Here.” He shoved a bullhorn into Tom’s hands. “We’ll cover you, but he doesn’t seem to be armed. Or if he is, he’s a horrible shot probably.”

“Probably,” Tom nodded.

“High as a fucking kite,” Beauchamp said before he spit over some lady’s grave.

Katherine Cornelius Barnett. Wife, Mother, Friend. “See if we can get him out of here with a KFC sandwich or something.”

“Yeah, that’s a great idea.” Somebody had put a vest in his hands, which he hadn’t bothered to grab out of his car when he was running after Clancy at the start. Clancy had scrambled on all fours up the hill, bleeding out of his face from the wreck. Tom couldn’t remember if he had yelled anything out. They teach you to yell Stop and Put your hands up and Stop resisting and Get back here and Fuck you son of a bitch but only if you’re out of range of the dashboard cameras. But his voice didn’t feel like he’d yelled recently. “Hey Lewis, what’s up with the traffic,” Tom asked, just to pass the time as he adjusted the vest. Lewis shifted his weight downhill to take a long look back toward the interstate.

“Not much.”

“Can two of y’all go direct folks, please? Do we need both lanes down actually or are we just lazy about it?”

“We need the road closed,” Beauchamp barked. “Safety issue.”

“But probably, he’s unarmed,” Tom nodded, before stalking off between the headstones toward Clancy.

He could just make out a dirty white sneaker sticking out from behind an obelisk. His grandfather would have called that uppity, which Tom knew his teachers at the college would have called gauche. One of those teachers had made them pretend to be dead for an entire class, the theatre class he took because music appreciation was full, and Tom had laid with his head on the hardwood stage and one foot dangling off the front, and at first that had seemed a real artistic choice, something funny, until his whole calf got hot and tingly and then went completely numb, and he wondered how long it would take for the leg to actually die, for him to stand up and leave the leg hanging off there. He’d laid there and thought about what he wanted his funeral to be like. At twenty it would have been packed, because he would have been a dead kid, and not a dead person. A kid and a person are two different things. But then class had been over and they all giggled and pushed themselves up and groaned, rolled their eyes, made fun of the teacher together, left, didn’t talk about dying.

Clancy was crying behind the gauche obelisk, those gasping cries that come and go when you know you’ve well and truly fucked up. The bullhorn would make it feel aggressive, demanding, so Tom let it dangle from his right hand and took three steps closer, cleared his throat, glad he probably hadn’t yelled earlier.

“Hey Clancy, it’s Tom again,” he said, feeling a little like his stepdad outside the bathroom door when Tom had locked himself in there after getting cut from the JV basketball team. No coordination. It had stung but damn if it hadn’t been accurate. Mostly he had wanted somewhere to be all winter, the bright hot gym with all his friends, instead of home by himself after school every day. His stepdad had talked to him through the door for half an hour, but Tom couldn’t remember a single word the man had actually said while he had sat on the edge of the tub and stared at the sink and wanted to disappear.

Clancy wailed in response, like a child.

“Clancy, buddy, can you just tell me what’s going on?”

They’d known each other the whole time Tom had been a cop. One of Tom’s first arrests was Clancy for selling near school grounds in Clyde. But what ain’t near the school grounds down here? Clancy had yelled while Tom tried to palm his head into the back of the cruiser. He had a point. Clancy was like that, always had a good point, but he was usually so nasty looking that nobody listened much. Tom liked to. Clancy reminded him of a great-uncle he hadn’t much known, who mostly hung out outside during their Christmas Eve family party, smoking with the other men. That uncle had been a veteran and come home different, they all had. What was it called? A changeling. A whole generation of changelings. Tom wondered if drugs were like that too, if they took you and brought you back different. What had Clancy been like before?

“Lord I just want to go home,” Clancy yelled with surprising force.

“Home like, your momma’s house, Clancy?” Tom yelled back.

“No, home! I want to go home!”

Well, that settled that. “Buddy, who’s the girl you’ve got in the car?” Might as well try to get something out of this.

“Who?”

“The girl, Clance. Who’s that girl?”

“She’s dead! She died!”

“She died?” Tom put his hands in his front pockets and pushed the toe of his boot into the damp ground. A real wet spring. In both directions, cars sat waiting for them to get this thing over with. He could see the interstate was backed up too, because the exit was backed up. It would be school letting out time now, when the traffic got bad even here around nothing at all.

“She died. I didn’t have nothing to do with it!” Clancy cried, and that sent him into another fit of sobs.

“Well, what’d she die of?” One of the prosecutors had once told him to ask enough questions to look stupid. He felt stupid. She was a druggie in the car with a drug dealer. The options were scarce.

“I don’t know. I looked over driving and she was just gone. That’s why I tried to pull over, but I was going too fast—"

“Yeah, did y’all happen to do anything in the car?”

“Oh, fuck you,” he yelled, which meant, Yes, we did heroin going down I-40 and the girl had too much.

“Hey buddy, we can just walk out right now. Take you somewhere for a bite to eat, call your momma, whatever you want to do, we can do that right now.” A long scrape made Tom whip his head back around, where he caught the tail end of a van sideswiping a cruiser in the Methodist church parking lot. “Shit,” he muttered. The news was here. Then, half-shouting again, “How are you feeling?”

“Pretty fucking bad!” Even though he hadn’t been moving in over half an hour, he was out of breath.

“Yeah? What’s going on?”

“I got in a goddamn car wreck, and then you chased me up here!”

Tom sucked on his left eye tooth hard before taking three more steps toward the obelisk.

“Why’d you run?” he asked more quietly.

“Cause the girl’s dead. And I gave it to her.” Tom could hear his shallow breath now, just feet away, and realized he must be wounded somehow, something crushed in his torso, maybe even a broken leg, keeping him down on the ground. T “I don’t want to get locked up like that.

You know it’s always a little of this, little of that. But this ain’t going away. She’s eighteen.”

“She EIGHT-teen?”

“Yeah.” He took a beat. “Probably.”

Tom closed his eyes again and willed his body off the ground, up into the clear blue sky that surely had just gotten a little lighter. “Probably.”

What he hadn’t told that theatre teacher at the college, and what he hadn’t written about later in that little paper she’d had them do about performance or whatever, was that there are some people who don’t need to practice being dead to know what it would be like. That in some places, some places just off campus even, some places that her students had come from, death is the way of being and living was the practice, what you acted like in front of everybody else, but your whole life had that numb leg hanging off the side waiting to pull you down.

“Tom, you gotta help me, man. I’m not doing good.” The end of his sentences gasped now.

“Do you want to go down to the medics?” Tom found a cow to look at over the valley, a big brown cow, in the process of kicking her too-grown calf away from her teat.

“No. I’m gonna roll out and reach for this weapon that you’re about to see in my waistband. And I’m gonna try to shoot you. And you’re gonna act in self-defense.”

“I swear to God, if you make me do that much—”

And he did. And Tom pulled. Anybody will look a little lumpy moving fast like that.

Maybe that space of air is a gun, maybe that bit of fat squeezed over your waistband, maybe just the way your finger twitches, all of it says gun.

Tom yelled this time.

After, with the lights still sparkling and the traffic backed up and the helicopter circling and everybody running toward him and screaming, Tom realized this would be his biggest day on the force, that it was all downhill from here, and the trumpets blared.