by Michael Parker
Stovall, Texas, 1973
Because Earl’s clothes were line-dried, they smelled of sun, grass, earth. But the girls on the bus said he smelled like creek mud. The girls were even meaner in the winter when he wore parkas donated by the Kiwanis Club coats-for-kids drive, easily recognized by the fake fur collars, which reeked of the kerosene used to heat their house.
At home, his family treated him like a second cousin much removed. “Oh, look, Earl,” they’d say after he’d been sitting quietly in a room for a half hour. He was seventeen and did not mind being unseen, but he knew he was creek mud to them, too. And so he refused their offer of a snack of celery filled with peanut butter and dotted with raisins, because, seriously? Ants on a log?
Into the smoke from neighbors burning their trash in rusty barrels slipped Earl, on the lookout for someone to whom he might define himself. But he always ended up in the woods, listening to the transistor radio his father had given him, or reading aloud from the biography of Lead Belly he carried with him always.
His people were proud Louisianans who’d moved, for reasons unknown to Earl, across the border to Stovall, Texas. His father was vaguely around. His mother talked all the time to her sisters in Bossier City, installing a twenty-foot cord on the telephone so she could sit outside on the front stoop and smoke and ask her sisters about the fates of various men she might have married instead.
Prison, preacherman, gay, career military, Port Arthur were the answers Earl imagined coming across the line. “Shoo now, Earl,” said his mother when she caught him snooping.
Earl had two brothers, two years older: Cary and Larry, identical twins. They were sly and slow-eyed. When they were young, all three boys wore striped T-shirts and crew cuts. Therein ended the likeness. Now, his brothers rode their banana bikes cock-legged, hips jutting as they looped surly circles down the street, talking sideways to each other in a language both unique and precociously foul. They spent most of their time heckling Cedric Drawhorn, who had been beat in the head with a tommy gun during the Korean War and thereafter walked the streets shooing imaginary swarms of gnats from his head.
Earl liked to believe his family were not bad people. Nobody ever beat him with a garden hose. His brothers were technically juvenile delinquents—they put out the eye of a neighborhood boy with a slingshot and dropped bricks from overpasses onto only Winnebagos—but aspects of their choices could be intriguing. They wore cutoff blue jeans year-round. They sheared off the pants legs in a zigzagged pattern that impressed Earl, even as he struggled to understand it.
His father, when he worked, laid pipe or worked in the oil-fields. He claimed to be Acadian but his mother said he was out of Lawton, Oklahoma. She once told Earl that their last name was “assumed,” adding that this didn’t bother her because Boudreaux sounded better than Miller, which she’d spent her first seventeen years hating. Wherever his father was from, his brothers and cousins soon arrived in Stovall and a compound of trailers and vehicles sanded down to primer or missing bumpers or outright wrecked beyond repair sprung up in the piney woods on the outskirts of town. Earl’s father once took him on a walk through the woods to a pond, where he taught him the words to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Even when his father disappeared for weeks, Earl had his transistor radio, on which his father claimed to have listened to stations out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Matamoros, Mexico, when he was a boy in his bed at night. Was there anything in the world more romantic than listening to radio stations from other countries illicitly after lights-out?
Yes there sure was, and Earl came one day to hear it on some old forty-five of his father’s. Earl couldn’t even remember who was singing or about what. He just remembered lying on the floor watching the warped vinyl hiccup and here came an ample solo of what he would learn was pure pedal steel. Earl felt draped by a blanket and shocked by a cattle prod. The pedal steel both softened and sharpened. Say you were a river. Say there was no wind. Still river equaled words set to music written out flat on a page. Now add pedal steel. Wing it in on a westerly breeze. Hear the plaintive shiver of leaves through trees lining the bank.
Pedal steel could turn a song into what, Earl didn’t know, your heart struggling to stay in rhythm and burst out of you at the same time? Trying to define it made Earl feel foolish and that is how he knew it was true. He would die trying and that is how he knew it was true.
Earl walked the outskirts of town, past tire shops that sold only retreads, stores that claimed to repair sewing machines. The air smelled of bacon grease, gasoline, and pine resin.
Paths snaked off into the piney woods, beer cans and castaway underpants lining the trail instead of the breadcrumbs of phony fables.
On his walks he often ran into street lurkers: Moonwalk, Sleepy T., Burnt Cheese.
“Hey, ho, Earl, what’s the good word?”
“The blue light was my baby, the red light was my mind,” said Earl, a line he’d heard his father sing while shaving.
Often he would see these same men later in his backyard on nights his daddy was in town. They gathered there to listen to music by their shed, its wormy chestnut walls painted by the day’s last slant of yellow. They favored what Earl dubbed the negative adjectival: if a man did not have a light, he was one no-pack-of-matches-having sapsucker. Earl liked to listen to them argue over what was worse. He never heard them argue about what was better. On into the night they would argue, while the world turned black and white and branches in shadow clawed at the walls of the shed, though only Earl seemed to notice.
Was he put on earth to notice? He saw a Band-Aid stuck to the bottom of a swimming pool. Once he’d seen it, he couldn’t not. He saw it in the sky while floating on his back, watching grackles chase each other from the limbs of a live oak to the top of a telephone pole. Between the live oak and the telephone pole, a Band-Aid the size of a jumbo jet, wavy in the manner of items on the bottoms of pools. He saw a grocery cart come not to rest at the bottom of a roadside culvert and its eternal restlessness did not unnerve him. It was no blight, unlike the music played on the radio, 97 percent garbage food from a chain store. Nor did the lone shoe in the median bring on a bout of melancholy. Most would consign to this sight only loss;
Earl saw independence, freedom, escape.
On his walks he collected scraps of sun-dyed paper dancing leaflike across lawns. Grocery lists; receipts from the gas station; on a lucky day, love notes. All he had to do was bend to pluck the paper and sometimes scrape dried mud to read the words. Sometimes the paper was stiff from having been soaked by what Earl believed to be tears. Here came the sun to dry off and preserve the better part of it, send it on to Earl. Baby why you do me like you do me? Darling are you really only fifteen? Meet me at the fiddler’s convention outside Alexandria. As he read them he heard his aunts recounting the fates of his mother’s might-have-marrieds.
Other people’s messages: on index cards filed in a plastic box, he wrote them down, along with other phrases, some he’d found in books he checked out from the Stovall library and some he overheard on his walks. As for other people themselves, well: he welcomed their company, but he preferred to talk to himself.
“I am the light of this world,” he told himself, because he had heard it said in a song. “I am good at stripes. I can recognize the four basic face shapes, I can hum the minor-key melodies that accompany movie credits playing in my head.”
“Well, let me ask you this, Earl,” replied a voice celestial but garbled by a passing logging truck. “Can you be not good at No and not terribly good at Yes?”
“But of course you can if you want to please everybody by going along for the ride. Just pat your pockets for your forgotten wallet when the car rolls up to the gas pump.”
Excerpted from I Am the Light of This World, Algonquin Books, 2022