301 Hillsborough Road Unit C

Dixon

“Legends”

Alex Dixon

301 Hillsborough Road Unit C

Carrboro, NC

Legends

It was humid and sticky. Not the kind of humid that brings a couple drops of water to the back of your neck, but the kind that’s so heavy it makes you want to peel your skin off. She was still lying on the rock; her long hair soaked a dark brown from the cold stream of water running over her. The water had gathered in a pool just above the small of her back, which was like a pale mirror refracting the bright rays of the sun. She made the bright nature around her dull and unnoticeable; the blue jay chirping on the branch of the dogwood a few feet above her head annoyed me as much as my alarm clock at 5 a.m. Clyde said I couldn’t do it. He said only a few guys had ever had sex on Sliding Rock. To most people, it was an unattainable feat; a legend we always talked about when we were sitting around on the weekends. But I had accomplished it, and not just with any girl, with NorahSolomon, the prettiest girl in Henderson County.

I rushed home as fast as I could, sloshing mud on my jeans as I passed by Turtle Creek. It had been a rainy summer and the creek’s murky water stewed with the mud and rocks on the banks. It was late afternoon when I got back to the house. Clyde was out in the front yard carrying off the wood that me and him chopped down last week.

“You’re late,” he said as I struggled to catch my breath from the heat. “And you got mud all over your jeans.”

“I know; I been over at sliding rock,” I told him, trying to sound tough, but I could hear my voice slightly quiver like it always did when I could tell Clyde was mad.

“Well, help me get this wood out. Dad said to have it moved by dinner.”

Clyde grabbed the thickest piece of wood in the pile and started walking toward his truck. He wore white tee shirts daily; all of them stained a yellowish-brown from dirt and sweat. His jeans were too small and had holes and tears from years of wear. The only clothing he routinely bought were pairs of brown leather Hushpuppies he rarely bothered tying. He often told me that he didn’t understand the purpose of feet.

“God should’ve just put boots at the end of our legs,” he always said.

Clyde was always working. Doing anything that Dad asked him to and more from feeding the cows to shooting the deer that got into the garden. Dad couldn’t do those things anymore after his accident.

His tractor flipped as he was trying to get patch of grass on the side of the hill towards the back of our house. I don’t know why he always worried about cutting it; no one ever came around to the house and it was almost a 90 -degree angle. He had three ribs broken, his leg busted open to the bone from the ankle to the calf and a four-inch gash across his forehead. The doctor told him he was lucky to live, but now he can barely walk right and is almost always in his wheelchair. Now that he can’t do much outside, he sits in front of the television with a never-empty glass of Jim Beam, a pack of cigarettes, and a bottle of painkillers he was supposed to stop taking six years ago, but mom wouldn’t say anything to him about that. She would always tell him he’s a great husband and dad even if he was placed on the earth to chain smoke and stare into space.

Me and Clyde finished loading up the wood after about an hour. I wanted to tell him about Norah, but I knew he probably wouldn’t believe me and he still seemed mad. It was hard being the younger brother of one the only guys in the county to complete all of the Watson tasks. They had come about 100 years or so ago from a guy named Sam Watson. But they weren’t tasks for him; they was just part of his life. He’s still considered the toughest man to ever live in Henderson County among those of us who believe in him. Most of our parents tell us he’s just a legend. But I know he’s real ‘cause Clyde did all of the tasks and he’s one of the toughest men I know. The only way you can be is if you do them and I’d just done the first one.

I saw Norah the next day at school. She didn’t see me or at least she acted like she didn’t. But I didn’t care. I was just trying to get a bottle of Forest Calhoun’s moonshine. His dad had been a moonshiner for his whole life and his dad before that. Everyone said they made the strongest stuff in western North Carolina and drinking a half a Mason jar of it was something Clyde and Sam Watson did.

I met Forest out back after school about four o’ clock. Most of the kids had cleared out; the only ones left were the kids who rode the bus and we knew they wouldn’t say anything about some moonshine. They’d seen worse than that. Forest was tall and skinny and he lurched forward as he pulled the jar out of his bookbag. He unscrewed the lid and handed it to me for a sniff. I couldn’t tell the difference in smell between this and the rubbing alcohol my mom kept under my sink.

“Be careful with that; that’s the best white lighting you can get outside of Franklin County,” Forest said, zipping up his bookbag.

“I will,” I said, my hands shaking as I thought it might be best to drop the jar and act like it was an accident.

I could feel the alcohol burn before it even reached my lips. Norah was over at the house with some of her friends from school. The only reason they came was probably because I told them there would be alcohol. I’d already passed out half of the jar to them and was getting ready to start drinking my half. It was a cool night for the middle of June; a few clouds dotted the black sky and the moon was a small sliver providing little light for us on the back porch. I put the jar up to my lips for the third time and finally let the alcohol wash over my tongue. I could feel it in my nose first; it felt like a lit match in the back of my throat. It burned its way down into my stomach and my whole body tingled. I waited a few seconds before repeating the process and looking up at the 3 small slivers of the moon.

Clyde was standing over my bed as I woke up. I could faintly smell the stench of vomit and my whole body ached.

“What the hell were you thinking,” he said. Each word was like a nail being driven into my head.

Nothing I could’ve said would have helped, so I just groaned.

“Get up. Get a shower and come help me outside.”

Clyde’s voice was so calm it was unsettling. I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or mad. I wanted to find out if I had actually finished half the jar, but I was scared to ask him.

“Look, Ken, I know what you’re trying to do,” he said to me as we walked out to the barn.

The barn was more than 80 years old and most of the red paint was dulled to a dark brown. I picked at some of the flecks around the entrance.

“Well, did I drink the shine?” I said, surprised at the boldness of my words.

“Yea, and it damned near killed you,” Clyde said handing me a paintbrush. “Now let’s get to work.”

We painted throughout most of the day. Clyde didn’t like to take breaks but I had to around noon because of the heat. I sat down on a patch of grass and gulped water out of the faucet for the dogs as I looked out over the pasture.

Dad had got our land from my great grandfather. Our family had been living on it for the last 100 years and the only thing that had changed was the house. We owned nearly 300 acres and grandpa said if you sat down at the top of the hill beside the barn, you could see 297 of them. I was staring out over the driveway, which ran two miles from our house to the road, when I saw Norah’s car driving up. She drove a 1997 Jeep Cherokee, repainted a dark green because she said the light green was too girly. We had known each other about five years and for four of those years, I was stuck being her friend. In the past year she’d taken an interest to me, but she didn’t want to make it anything more than physical. I tried to play it cool and act like I didn’t either, but that was a lie.

She parked her car at the edge of the pasture and began walking towards the barn. She was almost six feet tall and her hips swayed as she walked. Her hair reached all the way down her back, but today she had it tied up in a bun at the top of her head. She was wearing my red-striped button-up shirt that I had given to her, not really because I wanted to, but because she stole it. Clyde glanced at her for less than a second and then resumed painting.

“I just came by to make sure you were all right,” she said, smirking slightly.

I ran my hand through my hair, trying to push it down while simultaneously smelling my chest to make sure I didn’t smell like vomit.

“Yea I’m fe-

“Ken, let’s get back to work,” Clyde said, interrupting a one minute conversation I was already sure would lead to sex.

I told her thanks for checking on me and that I would see her at school on Monday.

Mom prepared her signature pork loin that night. Apparently marinating it in only balsamic vinegar made it her signature dish, but it was still good. I thought about the last task I had to do in between the silence at the table and the acidic bites of the pork and some insect-bitten tomatoes from the garden.

Everyone was asleep by 12:30, but I waited until 3:30 to leave. My room was right outside of my parents’ and as I crept out, I could hear dad’s snoring echoing through the moonlight hallway.

He always left the gun safe open, so I wasn’t sure why we really even had it. I didn’t know much about guns so I just reached in and felt around the cold metal until I found a small pistol. Dad had taught me how to load and shoot it a few years ago so I made sure the safety was on and tucked it into my waistband.

It was a cloudy night and I could barely see by just the light of the moon and the few stars that peeked through the sheet of clouds. I thought about Clyde asking me to cut the grass for the past week as I felt the damp blades brush against my calves. I needed to be at Mullinax Cove by the time the sun started to rise and it was an hour hike up the mountain and down the other side where the cove was. I walked down to the barn and grabbed the lantern and a flashlight to keep in my pocket.

I hadn’t been to Mullinax Cove in nearly five years, not since Clyde killed a bear there and I came to help him move it. My hands shivered as I came up on the deer stand in the cove, crunching twigs under my boots. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the sky had gone from black to a light orange.

I clambered up the deer stand steps and sat and waited. I wasn’t sure how Dad and Clyde could sit up here for hours. I had never been hunting; I’d never even shot anything except a pumpkin.

I pulled out the pistol and examined it, not sure if this could even puncture a bear’s skin, let alone kill it. Although I wasn’t sure how thick a bear’s skin was.

Around 7 a.m., I began to doze off until a squirrel ran across some leaves below the stand.

I woke up hours later. It must’ve been around noon because the sun was directly over my head. There were still no bears out. I thought about when Clyde killed the bear back when he was in high school. I hadn’t seem him smile like that since then and it was one of the only times I’d seen him smile since dad’s accident.

Maybe if a bear finally showed up and I killed it that would make me smile. Maybe it would make Clyde happy and proud of me, too. Maybe it would make Norah see me as a legend in Henderson County. I picked up the pistol, cocked it, and rested it on the wooden plank in front of me, waiting on a bear like I’ve never waited on anything in my life.

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