Idiot Wind
(Chapter One of Breathing Out the Ghost)

Let me tell you about the time your grandfather took a sledgehammer to the car.

It was the summer I told everyone I was sixteen, the same summer my family went four months without sleep. Just as the school year was ending the hourly boys at Dow walked out on management. Your grandfather worked the acid tankers back then, and he was beholden to the union, so that left seven of us--me, Mom and Dad, Robbie, and the girls, Cassie, Devlin, and Sally--to get by on $300 a month strike pay. Because my parents had five children, there was no savings account. Right away we were unable to meet the mortgage, and toward the end grocery money was scarce. We did the best we could, of course. We learned to swallow powdered milk without making a face and not to note out loud that we were dining on macaroni and cheese for the umpteenth day in a row. We knew to appreciate our mother for the one delicacy she could afford to indulge us in, the bread she baked with flour and eggs donated by the church auxiliary. Years later I realized she encouraged us to gorge on her endless loaves so we’d be too bloated to complain. She wasn’t the only one who picked up tricks that summer. We kids learned not to ask for seconds or to speak too loud. We learned to stay outside long after dark and to keep the fan running in the bathroom so our odors didn’t annoy him. We had to do these things because we didn’t want to set your grandfather off. Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. In that environment there wasn’t a sound that didn’t ring loud as an explosion, not a move to be made that didn’t make the claustrophobia all the more stifling.

Nights were the worst. You thought that with silence would come sleep, only there wasn’t ever any silence. As you lay in bed you became aware of all sorts of noises that wouldn’t let you rest. The cedar beams popped and groaned, the drywall cracked as the foundation shifted. Outside, birch leaves slathered themselves creepy-crawly on the shingles. If you were lucky you might drift off for an hour or so, but then a pipe would clang, or an eighteen-wheeler somewhere would accelerate, and you’d be brought right back into a state of lucid, aching insomnia. What usually kept me bright-eyed and bushytailed was the sound of your grandfather pacing the house. He was doing his best to wear out his restlessness.

Your uncle was a little smarter than me in those days. He wore headphones so he didn’t have to hear the racket. All night his spindle dropped records onto the turntable beside our bunks. I know your grandfather heard that sound, too, because he often came into our bedroom to set the needle back in its grip. I’m not sure he was aware I was awake; he didn’t know what a good game of possum I could play. Some nights I would hear him slip the headphones from around Robbie’s ears, not gently at all, really, so I’d be wondering why Robbie never woke up. It never entered my mind he might be faking just like me. Then other nights, with my eyes closed, I’d feel your grandfather breathe all over me, hot and heavy. He didn’t just inhale and exhale, you know; he had this kind of anxious humph that burst all concentrated like kettle steam. There were times he would hoist himself up and under my covers, and he would try to rest by rolling his weight on top of me. This would go on for hours until I’d imagine my spine cracking. This particular night, though, he just stood bedside and whispered, “If you’re up, I need your help.”

In the kitchen he handed me a bottle of sleeping pills he’d bought off his shop steward. “Hide them,” he said. “And don’t tell me where.”  Then he turned around and started counting out loud.

I slid a few drawers out. I shuffled the cracker and cookie boxes, opened cabinets and rearranged soup cans, all to throw him off the scent. Then I stuck the bottle behind an old jar of pickled something or other that had sat untouched for years in the lazy susan. When I went back to bed he’d taken to sitting crooked on the davenport, peeking out a bay window that looked past a flowerbox and some shrubs to the front yard. I didn’t realize what a good job I’d done until, some time later, I heard him rifling the spice rack.

You see, son, the thing is, when you crave it most, sleep is like a ghost; the relief it brings evaporates from your memory, but the weight of wanting it remains. Sometimes as I drive now, thinking I can find you--having to convince myself that I can find you¾I imagine things crawling across the highway. Not dogs or raccoons or deer even, but shapeless things that can’t be caught between edges. What are they? Hard to say, exactly. They usually appear around the thirteenth or fourteenth hour when I have a hundred miles to go before I can rest. But that’s phony of me, I know. There’s nowhere I’m expected. It’s not about getting anywhere now; it’s just about getting on.

I like to think that’s the feeling he faced as he grabbed hold of that sledgehammer. He wasn’t attacking the burden of his great expectations, but something altogether more formidable: their loss. I can’t tell you what he thought his life should have been. I only saw the resentment he felt for what it had become. I do know what my intentions for my life were: you, plain and simple. And the joke is that now I, too, must live with what I don’t have. Back then I couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of indignation could shove a man to such extremes, but now, as you can guess, it’s as clear to me as the yellow lane lines in front of my face. You can’t start a fire without a spark, and my hiding those pills was the flint he needed to strike out against.

Lucky guy. I’m still waiting for my turn to go off.

Here’s how the rest of that night played out:

By the third crack of the sledgehammer your grandmother’s bare feet scuffed the shag as she slapped the walls feeling for the light switch. That sound made me wonder, just for a moment, if a frightened doe had wandered through an open door, searching for a lost fawn. Then came another concrete smack as the hall trembled into brightness and Robbie audibly stirred. I felt responsible, knowing as I did that I’d buried your grandfather’s treasure without leaving him any kind of map, without leaving him so much as an X to mark the spot. So I slipped down to the bottom bunk and stepped lightly on Robbie’s chest, rousing him. The turntable was playing the second song on side two of The White Album, which, two days earlier, we’d shoplifted together.

By the time we made it to the living room your grandmother was already at the bay window. The T shirt she slept in barely covered the fading blue butterfly tattooed to her thigh. She had to stand on her toes to see through the shrubbery, which needed pruning. It was one of the few bits of yard work we’d yet to complete as we tried to reassure your grandfather that, despite the past due notices piling up by the telephone, his world could still be tidied and orderly. I remember the smell of varnish on the trim as I joined her to peek through the window. I remember the evergreens and saplings outside shivering. A silhouette dancing in the driveway, reflections flashing off the mallet. The whole family joining us.

The girls clung to their mother. They slept in your grandfather’s old T shirts, too, and each time the hammer sounded they seemed to shrink, swallowed alive in his stained cotton. Robbie and I, we were older, so we just stiffened and gawked. Soon we could see lights from other houses flip on, and the neighborhood became a constellation held together only by the gravity of our disbelief. Your grandfather shattered the windshield so hard a wiper flipped over the car’s roof. After that, the girls covered their ears and hid their faces, but I was looking at that butterfly tattoo. You must understand: your grandparents were seventeen when they had me, so when I was younger I saw her more as a beautiful older sister than a mother. Once at church I spied the minister pointing at her, saying to a parishioner, “Five kids, out of that,” and I had to agree. Your grandfather had a butterfly tattoo as well, on his right biceps. They were matching jokes, a dare they’d carried out when they were too young to know better, before we happened. Only by that night I’d already recognized something sad about the dull color and the flattened dimensions of the wings. Those tattoos had become graffiti on an earlier undercoat of life that the grit of getting on failed to cover up.

He didn’t stop until he pounded the bumper clean off. For a time, he stared at it, and though darkness confined him to shadow, I imagined him looking at it remorsefully, as if it were a mutt he’d struck while speeding. He didn’t seem concerned or even aware that he woke the neighborhood; he just carried the hammer into the carport and joined us in the living room.

“Now they’re welcome to it,” he said on his way to bed.

We didn’t know what that meant until the next day when the repo men showed up. Robbie and I were in the yard, playing with an old chemistry set that, like everything in our lives that summer, somebody from church had given us out of pity. We watched as the men backed the tow truck into our drive, indifferent to the front tire that gouged our yard. When they finally caught sight of what they’d come to collect they scratched their heads and spit into the grass. Then they stared at us, waiting for an explanation. I stiffened my shoulders and did the only thing I knew to. I was my father’s son, after all.

“You’re welcome to it,” I told them.

After the car was hauled away, we went inside to make sure our sisters knew not to ask where it disappeared to. I don’t know if my dad relaxed at all that night, but I can assure you he didn’t go digging in the lazy susan. Years later--I was in college, I think--I found his bottle of sleeping pills right where I left it, right there behind that jar of pickled something or other.

It’s funny. Back then I would have given everything I owned--which, obviously, wasn’t much--for a little peace of mind. Now I’ve lost all I ever wanted, and I’m afraid to sleep. I’m afraid to even rest my eyes for fear of what I might miss.
It’s funny, too, how in the years since then I’ve come to admire what your grandfather did. At the time I hated him. More than frightened, I was embarrassed. That’s why I told everyone who didn’t know better that I was sixteen when I was really only fourteen. I was already shaving by then, though, and stashing the odd-job money I earned from neighbors thinking it would get me a life of my own. I didn’t know yet that being a man doesn’t mean you’re always able to exact control. I didn’t know that sometimes immolating yourself in anger is your only option. Now I can honestly say I love my father more than I’m capable of loving anyone else, including you. Why?
Because a man seeking his father seeks God, but a father reduced to searching for his son only chases after the man he thought he ought to be.

(Laughter).

Sorry. That’s as profound as the philosophy gets when you’ve only got you and the life you should be leading left to entertain.

Maybe that’s the real difference between your grandfather and me: he wasn’t the kind to talk out of turn. There was more eloquence in that one act of beautiful ferocity than you’ll ever hear in these rambling hours I’ve put to tape. I, meanwhile, am a blabbermouth. I can’t shut up, I can’t not talk, and I hate myself for it. Sometimes I have to say your name out loud, A. J., just to believe you ever really existed. It’s almost a year since you’ve been gone. The milestones are becoming millstones. A whole year, and what’s become of me?

I’ve become the Ahab of the interstates, mewling and puking, raging at the breath of a mist that recedes into nothing.
Raging about it, about you. If you were here, would you hide my pills for me? 

Sometimes I get so tired sleep jumps in front of my wheels, a suicide.

But you, you’re different. You’re a vapor, a whiff, a movement, and all I have are the leftover vibrations to chase. You can ponder perpetual motion, sings the radio, and believe you me, I do. Perpetual motion’s my spook.

The wind’s steeper now, and it’s not even tornado season. The wind rattles the truck, sucks hard at the windows. I have to strap the recorder to the dashboard with duct tape to keep both hands on the wheel. I have to. Wind is a sound without shape, another ghost, another claustrophobia. There are so many now, I run into them, headlong, all the time.

So many that sometimes I think that this truck is nothing but your grandfather’s old house straddling four stupid, spinning tires.

Excerpted from Breathing Out The Ghost by Kirk Curnutt. (River City Publishing 978-1-57966-070-3)