No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Harley in a Car

Appalachia suffers from “brain-drain,” in which the bright and ambitious people depart and seldom return. Those left behind tend to perpetuate the social problems that forced folks out in the first place. People who leave crave the opportunity to assimilate by erasing their accent, speaking vaguely about hometowns, and embrace the trappings of a new life. Many tend to hide who they are and where they are from. I had been through this myself.

For the first time in two decades, I could stand in a room full of people as a member of the majority. My favorite class was Intro to Creative Writing because of the sense of freedom young people brought to their work. The top two students, Eugene and Sandra, were in the class. Eugene arrived early to return the books I’d lent him — Flannery O’Connor and Breece D’J Pancake — writers from rural worlds.

“I never read nothing like those,” Eugene said. “In high school, we read Romeo and Juliet, the biggest bunch of bullshit you ever did see.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “Two teenagers in love and their folks mad at them. Families feuding with each other. People saying one thing and meaning another. Getting killed for no reason. Nothing like where I grew up. What about you?”

“Well,” he said as a grin slid along his smooth jaw. “I know what you’re doing. But we never had swordfights up my hollow. And we don’t talk funny, either.”

“Let me tell you something, Eugene. You might not think you talk funny, but the minute you step foot out of these hills, everyone else will think so. Next time you read Shakespeare, just substitute guns for swords. The best thing, though, is to read what you want to.”

“Got one for me?”

“Still want short stories?”

“Yup.”

I gave him books by Mary Hood and Larry Brown.

“Georgia and Mississippi,” I said. “Talk about talking funny.”

He slipped the books in his bag. Students flowed around me, the twang of their accent bouncing off the concrete walls. The days assignment involved reading a poem that used the word waning. Sandra said she didn’t know the word.

“You’re an English major,” I said. “This is a writing class. When you don’t know a word, you should look it up.”

“I can’t look up every word I don’t know,” she said.

“Sure you can, Sandra. In fact, you’re supposed to. That’s how you learn new words. I know one guy who makes a mark by a word he looks up so he can know if he’s searched for it before.”

“Well, I went to school in the hills,” she said. “There’s a lot of words I don’t know.”

“I understand.”

“Since you’re from the hills, you should give me a break.”

“No way,” I said. “That’s even more reason not to give you or anyone else a break. You can’t think that way. That’s buying into the whole victim status we’ve been given. The federal government thinks that way and they throw money at the problem. This college tells new faculty that the students are a ‘special population.’ Do you know what that means? It means they don’t expect anything from you. Once you think you deserve special treatment simply because of who you are, you’re in a lot of trouble. You are then participating in your own subjugation. As long as we act like dumb hillbillies, people will always see us that way. The stereotype comes from within the culture, not from outside! We must defy the expectations, not feed them! We cannot voluntarily participate in our own social oppression!

Out of breath, I stopped and looked at the faces of the students. Some were visibly upset. Others showed the familiar glazed expression of having turned inward for protection. I realized that my yelling was in itself a form of oppression.

“Class dismissed,” I said. “Go look up the word subjugation. I’m sorry I yelled.”

The class left silently, no one remaining behind. I walked out of the building, thinking that I was the same as a father being cruel to show cruelty was wrong, or a boss belittling workers to increase morale, or a preacher judging his flock. I had just behaved in a way that I had always despised.

Sandra was waiting on the sidewalk outside the English building, an expression on her face of shame and dismay. She wanted to talk in private and we walked half a block to my office.

“I lied,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“About why I didn’t look up that word. I don’t have a dictionary, Chris. I’m sorry, but I don’t have one. I never saw one except in school. I don’t even know where to get one.”

“You can get one in a bookstore.”

“I’ve never even been in a bookstore, Chris, not a real one. They don’t have one where I’m from. The college bookstore is just textbooks and T-shirts. I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

“How old are you?”

“Going on twenty.”

“Well, you’re on the same track as me, Sandra. I went to my first bookstore when I was nineteen. I had to leave to find one, too.”

“Morehead’s where I left for.”

“It was the first step for me. Maybe you can go a little farther.”

“I’ve thought about it,” she said, “but I don’t have any idea where.”

She stood to leave. I grabbed the dictionary from my desk, a hardback College Edition, and offered it to her.

“Please,” I said. “I want you to have it.”

She took the heavy book. Her lips pressed together and her eyes got wet.

“Thank you,” she said. “No one ever did anything like this for me.”

“You deserve it, Sandra.”

She nodded and turned away, then spun back and gave me a quick hug, the dictionary between our bodies. She hurried from the office. I sat for a long time, realizing how ignorant I was of my students’ needs. The first lesson was mine, not theirs.

I gathered my classwork in a daze, and headed for the old Malibu at Mrs. Jayne’s house.

A car stopped in the street beside me. People here don’t use their horns, and think nothing of halting traffic to talk with someone. Harley grinned at me, his scarred face missing a few teeth, his hair already gray as an old fence post. I hadn’t seen him since the first day of school, when he invited me to get high with him in the woods.

Harley sat behind the wheel of a rusty car. He appeared happy and proud, and I opened the door and got in. I couldn’t recall ever seeing Harley in the driver’s seat. It was utterly incongruous, like finding a chain saw in an Easter basket. The car ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts. On the transmission hump was a large table ashtray, also full to overflowing.

“Want a cigarette?” he said.

I told him I quit and asked about the car. He explained that he gave up drinking after twenty years, and the car belonged to his girlfriend. She’s the first girlfriend he’s ever had, a Caudill. This last name was as common in the hills as tree leaves, and Harley took pains to identify her. Such distinctions are crucial in Rowan County, where people will judge you forever by who you dated ten years back. They shoot friends and neighbors over these issues.

“She ain’t one of them hollow Caudills from up sixty,” he said. “And she ain’t out of that black-headed bunch on the creek. She might be kin to that uppity bunch, you know the ones, but she don’t claim it.”

Harley told me her mother’s last name, which I vaguely recognized. Essentially, he was letting me know that his girlfriend was a solid middle-of-the-road Caudill, neither inbred nor rich, either of which is highly suspect. Her only indiscretion was having married a man from Martin County who left her after she bore his triplets, one of whom died shortly after birth. People used her as an example of the sort of cosmic penalty that is inflicted for marrying out of the county. There are no coincidences here. Everything is governed by cause and effect.

Harley was still talking. His girlfriend did everything for him.

“I don’t even have to light a cigarette, Chris. She lights it and puts it in my mouth for me. She’s got something to eat any time of the day or night. She won’t let me take a bath. She just warshes me off cleaner than I’ve ever been. Dries me, too.”

“You look clean,” I said.

“Son, when we’re out she don’t look at nobody else. She clings to me like a monkey. She’s fat and ugly but I don’t care.

Harley had recently moved ten miles away from Haldeman across the county line. It was foreign territory to him, like Montana or New York for me. He felt the same as I did about the changes in the county. Our hometown was nothing but dirt and houses.

“Ain’t it awful how they done Morehead,” he said. “I’d not live here for ten dollars a day. They’ve got Main Street bent like a bobby pin. And son, Haldeman’s gone, just gone. It’s like our backyard got took away.”

Our agreement on loss made perfect sense to Harley. It meant nothing that I had traveled half a million miles to his ten, that we both quit drinking, that we hadn’t seen each other in many years. All that mattered was having grown up together. No one can ever know a Haldeman boy like another Haldeman boy. I admired his car for a while.

“Shoot,” he said, “I just got my license two months ago. Had to borrow a car to take it in, and got it on my first try. First try, son! You got anywhere you need to go? I’ll drive you wherever. It don’t matter how far or how long it takes. I got gas and everything. You just tell me where to point this rig. I’ll take care of the rest.”

I realized that Harley wanted to return years of favors to people who drove him around the county. His glee was palpable. The old Pinto looked like it would barely get out of a driveway, but in eastern Kentucky, a car’s appearance could be extremely deceiving, evidenced by my Malibu. I didn’t have the heart to show my car to him. It would feel too much like bragging, and I wanted Harley to enjoy his own satisfaction.

I declined his offer to go somewhere.

“That’s all right,” Harley said. “We’ll set and smoke. Only I forgot you quit. Well, I’ll smoke double then.”

He lit two cigarettes and smoked them simultaneously while recalling various car wrecks, two of which I was in as a teenager. There was a time when several of us boys got drunk and deliberately wrecked cars for the fun of it. I remembered getting stoned on pot with him shortly before I left Kentucky the first time. Harley was astonished at my decision, and said, “There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather live than Haldeman.”

He told me of driving to visit his brother in Huntington, West Virginia, three hours away. Everyone warned him against such an undertaking — his family, his friends, the various counselors who’d attempted to look after him, even the police. No one believed in Harley. I realized that Sandra had lied in class because no one had taught her to believe in herself. I thought of Eugene’s periodic despair over deserting his county for college. My own efforts at self-belief wavered constantly.

I asked Harley if he’d been scared of the trip to Huntington.

“Shit fire and save matches,” he said. “I’ve got a car and a map and a set of eyeballs. Drove right there. Stopped once for gas. Never made a wrong turn but the one time and I was right by my brother’s house when I done it.”

He finished a cigarette, and contemplated the second one still burning in his other hand.

“You seem like you’re doing good,” I said.

“I’m happy as a whore in a pecker patch.”

He hit me in the arm and laughed. Abruptly he looked down, as if talking to his lap.

“Son, I had no idea what a man could do if he wasn’t in the habit of drinking.”

“What made you quit?” I said.

“Thought I was going to die of it. What happened was I had me a hangover that went for a week. Never got no better. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Every water I took came right back. They was puke bags laying thick around my bed. So I just decided I was done with it. I didn’t want to die. Not before I got my license, anyhow. You sure you don’t want me to drive you somewhere.”

“Okay,” I said, “drive me around the block.”

He very carefully put his foot on the brake, turned the key, and slid the automatic shifter to reverse. He looked both ways twice. He checked his mirrors, placed his right arm on the back of my seat, peered over his shoulder, and eased into the street. A cop drove by, one of the few in town, and Harley waved.

“He don’t know what to think,” Harley said. “I’ve knowed him a long time.”

He executed a perfect reverse turn, shifted gears, and began moving forward at five miles per hour. I was reminded of teaching Rita to drive on these very roads a decade back. She still drove like Harley did now — shoulders high, neck pronged forward, hands tense on the wheel, staring straight ahead. My sons told me that on long trips, they remind her to breathe. I understood why Harley’s girlfriend lit cigarettes for him in the car.

We circled the block at a funereal pace. Harley held the wheel with his hands clenched tight. We saw one car the entire drive and Harley became extremely tense, veins rising like cords on his forearms. He didn’t relax until the car went by in the opposite direction. He triple-checked the mirror to guarantee clearance.

He parked and I reminded myself to breathe. Harley was grinning in a new way that was also an old way, draining years from his face, erasing the marks of alcohol, cigarettes, bad food, incarceration. He was not a forty-five-year-old alcoholic on the mend, and I wasn’t his neighbor who left for work and came back home. We were two Haldeman boys on the loose. Anything might happen. If we spent the night in the pokey, we’d laugh in the morning. If we wrecked the car, we’d cover it up with bushes and walk home through the woods. I was proud of Harley, and happy for him, but if you’re a man in eastern Kentucky, you can’t go around saying you love other men. We communicated through our cars, our fists, and the ancient go-between of women.

I hit him in the shoulder.

“You’re a good driver,” I said. “I bet you could go anywhere you wanted to. Farther than West Virginia even.”

“You reckon?”

“I know it.”

I opened the door and placed a boot on the cement.

“Chris,” he said.

I turned my head three-quarters. His grin had faded and the years returned, but he was still Harley. He looked hard at me. I didn’t know what was coming. It might be anything — an offer to smoke a joint or drink some whiskey, a request for a loan, a punch in the face.

“Haldeman was nice, wasn’t it,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I got to where I had to leave there.”

“I know, Harley. Me, too.”

“Sometimes I miss it.”

I left the car and hurried away and hid behind a tree. I leaned around it like I had a hundred times with Harley as a boy in the woods. He lifted his chin in a wave. His hands were on the wheel, a cigarette in his mouth. He shifted the car into gear. He slowly backed the car into the street, stopping every five feet to check both ways.

I understood why people were afraid of him heading to Huntington on his own. I also understood how the liberty of departure gave him confidence. In Morehead, Harley drove the way everyone expected him to drive, but I suspected he had driven differently on his way to West Virginia. Like me, he had to leave to defy expectations. If Sandra left the hills, I felt sure she’d look up words she didn’t know.