M.C. Higgins, the Great Read online

  “They didn’t!” the dude said.

  “Yessir,” M.C. said. “We were just playing down around the house when there was a bursting noise. Some rock and coal hit the back of the house real hard. It fell all around my sister on her tricycle. Knock holes in her spokes, too. It fell all around her and she never was touched.”

  “That surely was a blessing,” the dude said.

  “Yessir,” M.C. said, and continued: “Daddy was running around and yelling up there. And then he came down with a fist full of dollar bills for damage, right in his hand.”

  “They paid off real quick, did they?” Lewis said.

  M.C. grinned and nodded. “Then a bunch of the machine men came on down. They fix the back of the house right off. They say they want no trouble. But they never did fix my sister’s tricycle.”

  M.C. walked off the road and down the mountainside. Carefully he skirted the huge and silent spoil heap in his path. He knew it was a rotten, terrible thing. But it didn’t turn him cold; it didn’t paralyze him with fear the way it once had in his nightmares. It had no plunge and roar of menace.

  Just big, M.C. thought. And dangerous. But we’ll get out of its way.

  The dude stopped to look at the heap. M.C. was some feet below him at the base of it. He sighed again, watching the dude waste his time walking around the heap.

  “Near good-sized, isn’t it?” Lewis said, making a joke.

  M.C. smiled at him but said nothing.

  To balance himself on the mountainside Lewis cautiously held on to trees jutting out of the spoil. M.C. climbed back up over to him to wait. For the first time, he noticed that James Lewis had a leather case—full of his lunch, probably—strapped to his back. He also had a canteen, empty, with the top dangling down on a short, metal chain.

  Wish he’d come on, M.C. thought. M.C. had his arms around a tree trunk sticking out of the spoil. He swung on it, lifting his feet off the ground, just to see if it would hold him. There was a thin, cracking sound somewhere deep within the heap.

  “Son!” the dude yelled, his eyes wide with terror.

  Instantly M.C. let go of the tree. He backed away from it.

  “That’s nothing to play with,” the dude said, more calmly.

  M.C. felt cold fear spread inside him. “I have to get on home,” he managed to say. Fleetingly, he thought of the kids at the lake. He glanced over there, where all seemed calm.

  “I was just seeing how this thing works,” Lewis said. He was at the top of the spoil and motioned for M.C. to come up. Reluctantly, M.C. climbed back.

  “See, right there,” the dude said, when M.C. was at his side.

  M.C. looked and saw. The heap was plastered to the mountainside. There was a crack all along its base where it met the mountain. There were two inches of black, oily slime left on the mountain behind the crack. Still M.C. did not comprehend. He gave Lewis a nod and turned to leave.

  “It’s moving, all right,” Lewis said. “It’s growing, too, and sliding about a quarter-inch at a time. I suppose your daddy is prepared.”

  M.C. stood stock still. Rooted to the mountain, his back to the dude, he swiveled his head around as far as it would go. “What?” he said, in the faintest voice.

  “Why, it’s absorbing rain like a sponge,” the dude went on, “and then seepage reaches the mountainside and acts like an oil. This whole thing is just sliding along on the oil, getting a free ride.”

  “You mean, it’s moving?” M.C. said.

  “Been moving,” the dude said. “Lucky it takes off the pressure by moving a little. But give it the right angle of steepness and that pressure is going to build up until it crashes down.”

  Waves of fear swept over M.C., as if they had been holding back, waiting for the time they could let loose all at once. It was his nightmare come to life. Having somebody like the dude say what he had often dreamed made him sick with dread.

  M.C. started down the mountainside again. His legs felt rubbery. He sat down hard, twice, when they buckled under him.

  It won’t give any sound of warning.

  M.C. could hear the dude coming on from behind, grunting and stumbling. He could see his pole gleaming down in the yard. He felt drained, weakened. The heavy stillness of the whole outcropping drenched in sunlight was like a scream. The house, shut tight against impact. The trees, wilted and dusty, waiting to be swallowed whole.

  Next to the well pump they no longer used was a sunflower. His mother loved the flower, the single one that ever would grow and come back each year. Loved the way it turned its dark roundness always to the sun.

  Spoil will just fill up the backyard.

  M.C. struggled over car bodies and dragged himself up his pole. His arms flexed too tight. He could feel them hurting as they trembled and jumped. Finally he pulled himself up on the bicycle seat. In a moment he swept the pole out in its long, delicate arc.

  Bend my pole so it won’t ever straighten out again.

  The hills rushed to meet him. A sudden gust of wind made the trees moan before it died. The pole swayed and bowed in an arc of light.

  It’ll hit the house. But we’ll be long gone—will we?

  His stomach turned over as the sky rolled down.

  We don’t want to go, we have to.

  With the thought, his strength returned as mysteriously as it had left him. His arms didn’t shake as he held them straight out from his sides. He pedaled with all his might as James Lewis made his way with agonizing slowness down to the outcropping.

  M.C. tested his strength with a pole trick. He let his feet dangle off the pedals. Gingerly he grabbed hold of the bicycle seat, one hand in front and one in back. He lifted his body up with the strength of his arms and extended his legs out on either side of the pole. It was a difficult and awkward position. He would have liked to pull his legs back in a shaky handstand.

  Fall, and snap my neck in two.

  He held the position for about five seconds. Then he sat again.

  The dude came into the yard behind M.C.

  “You’re some kind of acrobat,” he yelled up at M.C. “And that sure is some kind of pole.” He made his way over the junk cars, to crumple finally at the foot of the steel pole.

  James Lewis sat, breathing hard for a time, as if he would never get enough air. Again he shouted up to M.C.: “I’ve seen poles like it before, on a beach down in Florida. But I never have seen a one that could move by pedaling it.” His breath broke again and he had to rest.

  M.C. slid down the pole. “Sound rises with the heat,” M.C. told him. “Don’t need to shout.”

  Pulse beats jumped in Lewis’s neck. His mouth was set in a grim line. Worn out, he looked older than he had seemed up on the mountain top.

  “Where’d you ever find a pole like that?” Lewis asked, finally, mopping his brow with the wet handkerchief.

  “Never even found it,” M.C. said. “My daddy gave it me for swimming the river.”

  “The Ohio River?” Lewis asked.

  “Yessir,” M.C. said.

  “You’re a swimmer then,” Lewis said.

  “I’m a hunter, too,” M.C. told him.

  “A hunter and a swimmer and a pole-setter. What else can you do?” Lewis asked.

  “I can do about anything,” M.C. said simply. “But what I need,” he added, “is someone to carry the other end of my pole.”

  “Where you planning to take it?” Lewis said. He folded the handkerchief and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.

  “Well,” M.C. said. He glanced significantly at the tape recorder on the dude’s shoulder. “Like to take it with me in case we have to move.” He waited for Lewis to tell him they would travel once Lewis had taken his mother’s voice.

  Lewis looked up the mountain toward the spoil heap. Grimly, he smiled and nodded. “You won’t be able to take that pole, son, it’d be too heavy. And anyway, you might have to move real quick.”

  “I can’t leave it.” M.C. spoke eagerly, now that he knew that the dude intended
them to leave.

  Lewis frowned, staring up Sarah’s final slope. “To leave a place,” he said gently, “you’d best leave everything behind; all your possessions, including memory. Traveling’s not as easy as it’s made out to be. See, look at my poor old boots.” He laughed and held up his trouser leg so M.C. could take a good look at the ruin caused by travel. “But for me, it’s worth it all to discover voices like the kind your mother is said to have. Would you call her out here, son, so I can speak to her?”

  “Did you think she was home?” M.C. said. He blew out his breath, ashamed he hadn’t thought to tell the dude before. “She works and won’t be home until darkness.”

  The dude’s face fell.

  “All that walk for nothing,” M.C. thought to say.

  “Oh, now, it’s not your fault,” Lewis said. “I just took it for granted she’d be here and that was my mistake.”

  “She’ll be here by darkness, you can stay and wait if you want.”

  “Think I’ll go on around and see some others. Some Pitcairn people who group sing?”

  “Sure,” M.C. said, “in the west plateau.”

  “I do like to make first contact,” Lewis said. “And then I can just come back here around evening time.”

  “Sure,” M.C. said again, “Mama’ll be here by dark.”

  “Can she really sing the way folks like to say?”

  “She can sing,” M.C. said, “like nobody else.” He looked longingly at the tape recorder. Lewis followed his gaze.

  “You want to see it?” he said.

  “Sure,” M.C. said.

  “Well, here then.” Lewis took it off his shoulder. “Just take it out of the case and lay it on your lap. I’ve got some banjo playing that I like to listen to and some group singing on it right now, I think. And you know where I got it?”

  M.C. put the case on the ground and the recorder on his lap. He touched the machine lightly here and there but he said nothing.

  “I got it in Cleveland. Cleveland, of all places,” the dude said. “Some brier hop . . . some hill people just moved there. There are thousands of them have moved up from Kentucky. And you know what?”

  “What?” M.C. said, the word barely out of his mouth when the dude went on anyway and without a pause.

  “They don’t only bring their instruments—the banjos and guitars. They bring all of their hounds, their kettles and boards from their barns. Boards!” The dude’s eyes lit up suddenly through a film of fatigue.

  “And every weekend, thousands of them just pile into these cars without windshield wipers or without hardly enough gas—

  “—Oh, I don’t mean to say some of them don’t have new second-hand cars. But the majority, thousands of them, they get on the interstate in anything metal racked-up from Detroit—

  “Am I boring you, son?” Lewis said to M.C.

  “No.” M.C. had time to shape the word before the dude plunged ahead.

  “And they head for home over the border, right across there.” Lewis gestured beyond the Ohio River where distant mountains loomed. “They kind of flow out on Interstate 60. We lose a few there in about sixteen spectacular highway deaths between Friday, 4:30 P.M., and seven minutes after midnight on Saturday. A portion of them never make it back to that dreamland they loved so much but had to leave—the one they can’t wait to get back to when the plant or mill or factory closes on Friday—because they get caught up in the turn-offs every time,” the dude said. He shrugged. “I don’t know where they end up. But maybe they roam the interstates forever, growing their gardens on the shoulders of the road.”

  He laughed uproariously at the picture. M.C. stared at him, awe-struck for a moment. He had one finger on a gray key of the recorder as his mind attempted to grasp the will of thousands to leave home and go back again and again. But he managed to press the key. Soon, music came, and singing. It sounded distant and muffled, not at all like he had thought.

  After a time M.C. said, “I’ve seen smaller ones. Maybe a little heavier. The stores in Harenton have them.”

  Smiling, James Lewis watched him. Leaning forward, the dude clutched his soiled pant legs at the knees. His face was puffy now with tiredness. He swallowed often.

  “You’ll never get the way my mama sounds with this,” M.C. told him.

  “Just an idea of the voice is what I want,” Lewis was quick to say. “I’ll get that much, if she’ll let me. When I have that, I’ll have something to work with.”

  M.C. smiled from ear to ear.

  Going to sell Mama to a record company, he thought.

  He could see her in a long gown covered with sunflowers, and in a coat of white fur. He felt so good all of a sudden, he wanted to shout loud and long. And he joined in with the music by clapping his hands.

  The dude wasn’t smiling. He stared at M.C., his eyes unreadable. They flicked away from M.C. as his hand came up, shaking, to his throat. A frown spread over his face as he tried to swallow. Pain.

  “Water,” Lewis said, hoarsely. “Could I please have some water right away?”

  M.C. jumped up. He set the tape recorder on the ground and climbed up on the car junk. Before he jumped down, he caught a glimpse of the river and then the cirque with the lake. The kids were all right. Squinting, he could see they were lying on the shore, drying darker and darker in the sun.

  M.C. went inside the house. A moment later he was back with a pitcher of cold water out of the icebox. Lewis took up his canteen and M.C. filled it.

  “Here,” he said to the dude. “Now just a little. I had that pitcher right next to what little piece of ice is left. It’s awful cold.”

  “All right,” Lewis said, his voice a hoarse whisper. He turned up the canteen, pressing it on his parched lips. He took a small swig and then another.

  “Lordy,” he whispered. And then he drank. When he had finally finished, M.C. filled the canteen again and screwed the top on tight.

  Lewis quickly opened the second leather case he carried and took out four sandwiches wrapped in cellophane. He lined them up on the ground. “I’ve got two egg-salad and two ham and cheese,” he said quietly to M.C. “You are welcome to have either kind with me.”

  M.C. couldn’t think when he’d had an egg-salad sandwich. He knew he wasn’t to take food or anything else from strangers.

  He’s a friend, M.C. thought. “I’ll have an egg-salad,” he said. “You better have the other egg-salad or it will spoil. Save the two ham and cheese. I don’t have food to give you.”

  “I’ll just do that,” Lewis said.

  M.C. had to hurry and eat the delicious egg-salad; then scoot back up the pole in order to watch the children. He told the dude this.

  “You can’t call it watching them, not from way here, can you?” Lewis asked.

  “Watch them everyday,” M.C. said.

  “I mean, what if something was to happen to them?” Lewis said.

  M.C. shook his head. He gobbled the food and drank water directly from the pitcher.

  Shortly after, he returned the pitcher to the house. When he came back, he said, “I have to go up. You going to stay?”

  “No,” Lewis said. “Think I’ll go on, see what I can find. But I’ll be back this evening.”

  “Mama’ll be here.”

  “You tell her I’m coming, will you, son?”

  “I sure will tell her,” M.C. said.

  “You think she’ll be too tired to sing?” Lewis asked.

  “She sings every night,” M.C. said.

  Lewis smiled. “Then she knows she’s good.”

  “No sense pretending she’s not,” M.C. said.

  “Well then,” Lewis said, “I’ll see you later on.”

  M.C. shimmied up his pole, saying so long to James K. Lewis. At the top, he settled on the bicycle seat, staring out on the expanse of hills. Below him, Lewis still sat, munching on his sandwich. Across from Sarah’s, something glinting caught M.C.’s eye. It sparkled in the sun and it was moving, half-hidden by foliage. He
watched it, curious for a moment because he couldn’t identify what was glinting and moving. Suddenly, it was gone.

  “I thank you for the water,” James Lewis called up to him. Squinting into the sun, he looked up at the dark form of M.C., forty feet above him. “Hope you don’t mind if I just rest here a little while longer, get up all my energy.”

  “Sure,” M.C. said mildly. “And thank you for the sandwich. Better be careful, though,” M.C. told him. “Saw something I can’t figure moving out there. . . .” He had only wanted to sound important, like the dude. But then he paused, remembering the morning and the nice kind of surprise he had discovered on the path to home. He had to smile.

  “What kind of something?” Lewis called.

  “There’s some girl out there,” M.C. said. “Saw her early, just walking along. Some new kind of a girl. And just now I saw something shining. But I don’t see it now. Don’t know if it’s the girl for sure. You have any protection against girls?” He laughed.

  The dude smiled up at M.C. “Is she a pretty little thing with a back pack?”

  “Sure, a green pack,” M.C. said. “You know her?”

  “Why, yes,” the dude said. “She’s my ride.”

  “What?”

  “My ride. My ride. She brought me into Harenton. She’s got a little car. Picked me up on the road.”

  “Oh,” M.C. said. He was both disappointed to hear that the dude had no automobile and that the girl was old enough to drive one.

  “Nice kind of little girl,” the dude said, “just moving around. Kind of moody, though, trying to figure things out, I guess. Now was she bothering you, son?”

  M.C. could hear the amusement in Lewis’s voice.

  “If I see her, I’ll tell her she’s bothering you,” Lewis said.

  “Shoot,” M.C. said, and snickered.

  Lewis laughed. Later he gathered up his canteen, the tape recorder and the leather sandwich case. M.C. heard him scramble and strain his way up the slope of Sarah’s Mountain. Why the dude felt he had to climb up in order to get down was beyond M.C.’s understanding.

  Guess up is easier than down for him, M.C. thought.

  He never did see the dude climb out over the gully at the foot of Sarah’s.