Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel by Gipe Robert

Author:Gipe, Robert [Gipe, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Ohio and Regional, Fiction
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2015-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

“I don’t know,” I said. I made the glider squeak. “You don’t want me working for Hubert, do you?”

“You know I don’t,” Mamaw said.

“Then why don’t you stop me?” I said.

“Why don’t you stop yourself?”

And then the night and the cold and the smoke came between us again, and I wished for alcohol, for my own pipe running down my own throat.

“Men,” Mamaw said, loud enough to make me jump. “Men are scared. Men are a bunch of rabbits—a bunch of rabbits who woke up one morning with sharp teeth and thought that made them lions. But it don’t. They can tear up the whole world with them sharp teeth, and they still won’t be nothing but rabbits.” Mamaw stood up and took hold of the porch rail to steady herself.

“Mamaw,” I said. I thought she was drunk.

“You going with me tomorrow to look at that strip job,” she said, and she wasn’t asking.

“Yeah, Mamaw,” I said, “I am.”

“All right then,” she said. “Don’t forget to go to bed.” And with that she knocked the fire out of her pipe and slid into the dark house.

By then I could make out the ridgeline of Blue Bear across the valley, and my mind grew still in the face of its broad silent dark. Then the mountain began to laugh. It wasn’t my mother’s scary high person laugh, and it wasn’t my father’s easy-rolling laugh. It was a laugh I’d never heard before. It was a laugh like something was actually funny, something that would be funny to everybody, and not mean. And even though I didn’t know who was laughing or what they were laughing about, my bottom grew warm against Mamaw’s glider. I rose and went into the house, and when Mamaw woke me in the morning I felt rested and we ate bacon and pancakes at the Huddle House and met the organizers and went and looked at the mine and what the rabbit’s teeth could do, and I was strong and free for a little while.

***

When we finished the strip job inspection, the last of the mist lay in the mud lot filled with pickups where you come off the job. The state man thought if he made us come early, wouldn’t be so many show up. But there was five of us—me and Mamaw, Otis who used to be a miner, and the organizer girls, April and Portia. The organizer girls had been partying the night before, and they made such a racket complaining, I stood away from them at the edge of the cliff drinking my pop. Something flashed in the parking lot. It was lit up green, green like a traffic light, but not really, more like I don’t know what—a funny green, like from a dream green, but it was something I knew and I couldn’t think from where.

“You people seen enough?” the state man said, his crew cut flat on top as the strip job and his voice dull as a city man’s pocketknife.

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