Them Old Mountain Songs

He was a horndog, Jerry was, back when we was first married, and a pervert, too. That’s why I was more than a bit eased when he got locked up for breaking and entering. What with all the housework and the grocery shopping and the cooking—and then the boys—how could he expect me to be wanting it eight, nine—even upwards of ten times a day on the weekend? When I was pregnant with Mikey he started tomcatting around with that slut of a barmaid from down at Gary’s. I’m pretty sure he had a few more before that. And if that wasn’t enough already, when the cops caught him after the break-in, they found a bag full of women’s underwear—clean and dirty—under the seat of his truck, which he had taken from the place he broke into. Then when they came to search the house they ran across a lockbox hidden in the garage with a bunch of pervert stuff in it, I’m not even going to say what.

We had a rough time of it after he’d went away. I had to roll my sleeves up and get a job to pay the bills, and it was always a damn ruction trying to discipline the boys without a man in the house. When school let out they ran wild with no one home in the afternoons. I found a job waiting tables in a place over on Market Street. At least the sex stuff stopped. After each of the boys was born, he sulked about the place all the time, angry that he had to wait a few weeks before we could go at it again, as he used to put it. He’d always had a low boiling point, getting steamed up over something or other. He started drinking more and coming home late. I’d give him hell and he’d pretend to knuckle under, but next Saturday night he’d be down at Gary’s again, kicking up a ruckus till all hours of the morning. I could relax a bit, though, when he was locked up. They say every cloud has a silver lining and I suppose that was mine.

We only ever visited for the boys’ sake, anyhow. I didn’t want them to see him like that, and I didn’t want to see him at all, but he was their father and they loved him. After everything I think I still did, too, in a way, I guess. But love ain’t always enough, is it. He used to be a handsome devil, though, he was. Blue jeans and white t-shirt, pack of Luckies rolled up in the sleeve, like in some old movie, always up under the hood of some car or other with his friends, AC/DC or Kansas or Boston cranked up on the stereo. He had one of them metal lighters, too, the ones you have to fill up from a can of fluid and replace the sparker things when they get worn down. He’d flick it open between his fingers and light it up with a snap, like he was just the sharpest fellow in the world. The muscles in his forearm rippled just so whenever he did it. I liked that, and the way he’d stare into your eyes and flash that troublemaking smile of his whenever he lit you a cigarette, at least that’s what he always did to me, and well, you know.

Mama always said men was weak in the flesh, and simple too. Back when I was pregnant with Adam—he’s the baby—Susan Edwards told me her and her husband seen Jerry’s work van parked outside that dirty movie place down on Case Avenue when they was driving by. You couldn’t mistake it, that van. Big white thing with orange letters outlined in black on the side—Jerry’s Plumbing—a big toilet plunger formed around the bottom of the ‘J’ in Jerry’s, with the handle running underneath, and the phone number under the plunger. The ‘P’ in Plumbing was one of them big red pipe wrenches—that was Jerry’s own idea, he was always reminding you. But there was no mistaking that van, and they seen it there on a Thursday evening when he said he was working late over in Mogadore cause of some silver maple roots in a sewer line, or something. Susan called me and told me the next day. She said she heard some nasty stuff goes on in them places. Abominations, that’s what she said. I was fuming. Everybody knew about him and that whore down at Gary’s, but somehow this was worse. Sneaking off to some porno theater to do God knows what with God knows who, and it wasn’t long before Susan let everyone know. Whoring around was one thing, but this pervert stuff was shameful, like a sickness or something. And just leaving the van out front there for anyone to see, like a stone-cold idiot. Nobody never said a word to me, not about what Susan seen and not about that slut and not about any of his other whoring neither, but they talked. Of course they talked. They knew what he got up to, even the stuff I didn’t. And their breath stank of pity and pridefulness whenever they saw me and asked how I was. It was the pity that really got me worked up, and how they were so damn sure they were better than me. It made me so mad I could scream. I didn’t say nothing to him about it just then. I couldn’t. It made me sick to my stomach just thinking about it. Sometime later it burst out of me in a quarrel, and he denied everything, of course. By then I’d seen it with my own eyes, the van parked down there, on more than one occasion. He’d made a fool of me, he had, and I’d done nothing about it, so who’s the weak and simple one? I guess I should be pointing the finger at myself.

One time he said he was going to work, but he was dressed up nice, smelling of cologne. He only ever wore cologne when we was going out someplace nice. I asked him was he going to unclog a toilet all smart like that and he said he was meeting the manager of some rich condos down in the valley or something, but there wasn’t no need for all that just to meet some apartment manager. He always had answers whenever something like that happened, like he was expecting it, preparing it all in his head before. Anyhow, I guess he learned cause he didn’t get all dressed up like that again, but some months later I found a bottle of Stetson and some rubbers out in the garage, wrapped up tight in a plastic bag and stuffed in the back of one the drawers in his workbench. I was angry, but of course he said they weren’t his. One of the young guys he hired for big jobs must have left them there, and he’d give them all what for just as soon as he got the chance.

He could be lovely, though, when he wanted to. When we were dating, he was kind and gentle, always pleasant, even though he always had that mischievous smile. Later he’d lose his temper a bit if the food was cold or if I said something stupid sometimes, but he never laid a hand on me in anger, he didn’t. He was moody as all hell, though. I ain’t never seen nothing like it. He’d be real easygoing-like one minute, then you’d just see it come over him like a dark cloud. Like he was a totally different person. Like he was wanting to strangle you. A couple of girls warned me about him, though, right when we first started seeing each other. Told me he liked his women and whatnot, and that he’d had a few and I wasn’t the first, and he was bad news and all that. I told them to mind their own business, they didn’t know him like I did. They said just you wait and see, don’t blame us when he gets to running around, you made your bed. Like hell, you don’t know what you’re talking about, I said, but even then I think there was something in me that knew it wasn’t just jealousy that made them talk like that, that there was something to it, even if they was just trying to get my goat.

There was one time, I guess, before Mikey was born, I wasn’t even pregnant yet and we hadn’t been married all that long. He’d smack me a bit on the backside every once in a while when we were making love, but nothing too hard. I can’t say it did much for me but he liked it when I acted like it riled me up, so I’d just do that and he’d be happy. This one time, though, he was on top of me and I saw something clawing up from behind his eyes, that dark cloud coming down over him, and all of a sudden he just up and smacked me across the face, real hard. I started crying and tried to push him off, but he told me to shut the hell up, then held my arms down and finished fast. Right after it was like he came back to himself. He started apologizing and saying he didn’t know what came over him, that wasn’t like him at all.

I was still a married woman when one of the regulars down at the diner made a pass at me. Not one of the usual comments or pats or pinches on the backside, and I’m not even sure I’d call it a pass, since he just asked me if I’d like to accompany him to a dance at the VFW. He had a funny way of going about it, too, like he was what mama used to call a gentleman caller pitching woo. Jerry had already been away a year and a half almost by then. I was sick and tired of everyone’s pity. The poor, little two-timed wife and that nasty, panty-stealing pervert man of hers. He was a nice one, this fellow, divorced and lonely. Why not, I thought. Why was it that Jerry got to run around and have his fun with God knows how many women, while I had sat home and cooked and cleaned house and took care of the boys all those years? And what about now that he was locked up, and they had even wrote about that nasty stuff in the paper? You reap what you sow, they say, and why shouldn’t I have a nice time for once? Didn’t I deserve it? Maybe even give him a taste of his own medicine. Well, I decided to go ahead and give him my phone number, I’m not sure why, but then when he called, for some reason I got all aggravated and lit into him, said I was a married woman and I don’t know where he got the nerve what with the ring right there on my finger and all, didn’t he see that at the diner, and it wasn’t right of him to try such things with a married woman, where was his morals, and what kind of man was he, I ain’t going nowhere and certainly not to no VFW with a man would do something like that, even if I wasn’t married.

Jerry had a bad cough the last few months he was in, but he wouldn’t let the doctors anywhere near him. Said nothing kills a man faster than a doctor. Later they said that the cancer had already ate up his lungs by the time they paroled him, and spread to some other places too. I managed to carry on somehow, but that’s a funny way of saying cause I don’t know what I was supposed to be carrying. The weight of the world, is what they say. It ain’t wrong, I guess, cause after he passed I felt so light, like a bird up in the air, like I could just fly off to wherever. It reminds me there was an old song mama used to sing sometimes when daddy wasn’t around. After they moved up here from Virginia when they was first married and he found work at Ohio Brass, he couldn’t stand nothing that reminded him of Wise county. Not coal, not country music, not flatfooting, not nothing. Once when I asked her why, she just said that papaw was a mean man and Daddy didn’t like to remember. She wasn’t yet seventeen and my older brother was barely a year old when they left. Daddy said he didn’t want no children of his growing up to be hillbillies. When they settled down up here she’d tried singing some of them old songs a few times, but he’d always tell her to knock off that hillbilly shit, he wasn’t having none of it. I don’t remember what the song was called no more, nor who sung it, but somehow this whole thing just makes me think of them old mountain songs.

____
Eric T. Racher lives in Latvia.