No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Nine-Mile at the Video Store

There is a short stretch of highway between 1-64 and More-head, where a new Wal-Mart has slowly gnawed the town to bits. Morehead storefronts hold nothing but tape on the window cracks. A harebrained remedy to the loss of business was realigning Main Street so that it slithered like a snake. A triangular-shaped wedge of concrete protruded from the corner of every other block. These giant slices of cement pizza ran six blocks, forcing cars to weave a zigzag pattern. People said the cops should use Main Street as a means of testing drunk drivers — anyone who could drive it was sober.

This beautification project transformed Morehead into an obstacle one must circumvent on the way to the mall. You can take the bypass through town, but the lack of traffic lights and turning lanes makes it slow as grandmaw. What we really need is a bypass for the bypass.

The video store at the mall has replaced the general store as the place to visit with neighbors. Aside from church, it is the only place where families see each other. People from two counties away come to Morehead for Wal-Mart, but only locals rent videos. Foreign movies are not available in Rowan County, unless you count Road Warrior. Documentary films are confined to hunting, fishing, and National Geographic. Action movies occupy the most shelf space, then thrillers, westerns, and comedies. Porn movies are kept in a back room, but the town is too small for anyone to risk being seen going in or coming out.

While walking the stores aisles I study people near my age, narrowing their features to seek the ghost of who they once were. Anyone on either side of forty receives my wave. The other day I nodded to a man whose posture I recalled. We called him Nine-Mile because he could run fast. He hit puberty in fifth grade and began sleeping in class until high school, where he became a star athlete. Nine-Mile played three sports, drove a Dodge Charger, and dated the prettiest girl from the other end of the county. I admired him tremendously but he ignored me.

These facts entered my mind like an exploding time capsule. His voice was casual, as if we’d seen each other last week instead of two decades ago.

“If it ain’t Chris Offutt,” he said. “I heard you was in. You doing all right?”

From a great distance, I heard my voice’ tell him I was picking up videos for the kids. He pointed out his seven children and smiled with pride. Their ages spanned twenty years. One of his young boys ran to him, clutching an empty movie box.

“Put that back, honey,” Nine-Mile said. “You’ve seen that before.”

“I have?”

“Yes siree, you have. That movie’s the best thing since eggs, but run and get you a new one.”

The boy hurried to the shelf. Nine-Mile turned to me and spoke.

“His memory’s about as long as his pecker.”

“I have the same problem.”

He laughed and I gestured to the videotape under his arm.

“What movie you getting?” I said.

“I’m bringing back Deliverance. You seen it?”

“Yeah. The music in it’s good.”

“I didn’t like it one bit.”

I stepped closer, eager to hear his opinions. I despise the movie’s stereotypical depiction of rural people. Nine-Mile’s disdain was a pleasant surprise.

“How come you not to like it?” I said.

“At the end when that old boy gets shot with a crossbow, the arrow sticks out of his chest. As close as he was, it’d go right through him.”

“I never thought about it,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. I’m a bow-hunter. When I see something in a movie that’s supposed to be real but ain’t, I’m done with it.”

“What about the way those country people were?”

“A pretty rough bunch, if you ask me. I’d not fool with them. They’re from so far back in the hills they went toward town to hunt.”

I laughed as he scanned the aisles for his kids.

“You still writing books?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good trade. It’s nice to see a Haldeman boy make something of hisself.”

“I just worked hard and got lucky is all.”

“Do you print them up yourself?”

“No, there’s a company in New York that takes care of that for me.”

“I see,” he said. “You subcontract it out.”

“Something like that.”

“How long’s it take to write a book, Chris? About a month?”

“Longer for me. What makes you think a month?”

“That’s when they change the paperbacks at Wal-Mart.”

The conversation stopped, but I knew he wanted to talk. We both stood awkwardly. I studied his large hands, once so adept with a football and basketball, now gnarled and battered like old tools. He was missing two fingers.

“What are you doing these days?” I said.

“I’m a logger and a tobacco farmer. Guess I’m what you’d call an endangered species. I’m getting out of farming. No money.”

“What’ll you go into next?”

“I don’t know. I ain’t thought that far ahead.”

A child began to cry and Nine-Mile smiled apologetically and hurried away. Like many generations before him, he was engaged in the only industry offered by the land where he was born. Stores give credit until the tobacco harvest and every fall the new clothes on schoolkids will tell you how the prices are running at the burley auction. Nine-Mile lived on land his family had always owned and made a living from.

He retrieved a five-year-old girl and held her against his chest. Nine-Mile’s face softened to the boy I remembered, and it occurred to me that I should have lived in an earlier time. I’d still have the same personality, the same ancient soul. Born in the eighteenth century, I’d lament having missed the wonders of the seventeenth. If I were living in the Renaissance, I’d probably feel nostalgic for the Middle Ages. Continuing this way would make me a Cro-Magnon in a cave envying his brethren who still lived in the trees.

I left the video store with several movies for the kids. The afternoon sun leaned into the hills across the parking lot, surrounded by chain stores that manacled the land. Across the vast sea of black tar stood Wal-Mart. People were excited when Wal-Mart first arrived until the low prices killed local stores. Now there is nowhere else to shop. It cares as little for its customers as the old company store in my hometown did. The only difference is that scrip is legal in the form of a charge card. If Wal-Mart doesn’t carry an item, you are compelled to do without. People accept this with typical mountain resignation, putting a melancholy forward spin on it with a new slogan: Everything’s at Wal-Mart. Technically that’s true, because if something isn’t there, it does not exist here.

Behind Wal-Mart like a ramparts to the hills is the first planned development in Rowan County. The neighborhood was such a success that the Church of God closed its doors in town and built a new one behind the mall. It is now known as the Wal-Mart Church of God.

One is tempted to say that Wal-Mart killed what was once a thriving town. One could just as well blame the interstate. The real culprit is the end of the rail industry. This was preceded by the decline of the riverboat era, the invention of the horseless buggy, the westward expansion, the discovery of the Cumberland Gap, the European invasion, the Puritan pioneers and subsequent waves of immigration, the voyages of Columbus, the Viking explorers, the landbridge walkers, the death of the dinosaurs, and the great breaking apart of the continents.

All of this ruined Morehead in twenty years.