Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
Greenest state in the land of the free.
Raised in the woods so’s he knowed every tree.
Kil’t him a b’ar when he was only three.
Davy, Daavy Crockett.
King of the weeld frontier.
I write “wild” that way because that was how he pronouced it, like some kind of flamboyant elf.
In the background on the recording, toward the end of the song, you can hear a baby crying a little fitfully, fussing. That was me, only a few weeks old, trying as would become usual to assert myself, to little avail.
This recording was of course a precious possession, always, but it became all the more so after Hal’s early death, when he was a young man only recently married. It disappeared after the accident, and my mother bitterly accused Hal’s widow of having taken it for herself. I took this for the truth. And then, many years later, after my mother’s death, I found it beneath a stack of papers and documents in a dresser drawer in her bedroom.
Well, no, said one of my cousins. It was never lost, not that I know of.
She never told you that Sophie had taken it?
No, my cousin said. She never said that to me.
I could have sworn she’d told me the recording was missing, stolen, possibly destroyed out of spite. But even the memory of her telling me that comes from so long ago, now, that I can no longer be sure.
OUT AT THE Alamo Plaza’s pool next day there were a few people, a woman with two toddlers down in the shallow end, a few grown-ups in loungers along the apron. The big fat man who’d been jumping and doing cannonballs the night before was again on the diving board, leisurely bouncing and looking around, as if this were simply his place. He bounced easily, the board bending beneath his great weight and riding him slow as an elevator back up again. His toes hung over the end, his arms hung at his sides, and he nodded to us as we walked up.
Across the highway the beach was empty. The Sound lay flat and brown in the sun’s glare.
Morning, he called out to our mother. She smiled and nodded back. Morning, sir, our father said in his clear baritone sales voice. From my spot at the three-foot mark, I called good morning to the man, too, and he called back with a little salute and a wave, Morning, young man.
Standing there bouncing.
A long, big-boned woman lying flat out on a lounger with a broad hat over her face called to him. The voice came from her, but you couldn’t see her face. The hat didn’t move. Harry, she said to the man. Don’t go splashing all over creation.
The man looked at her, still bouncing, then looked at me and smiled and winked. He walked back to the base end of the board and turned around.
Harry, the woman said.
The big man rose on his toes. It looked comical, the action of a much lighter, fitter man. He spread his arms like a ballerina, ran tiptoeing down to the end of the board, came down heavily, and the board slowly flung him up. He came down in a cannonball, leaning in the woman’s direction, and sent up a high sheet of water that drenched her pretty good. She sat up and adjusted the wet floppy hat on her head. Harry swam to the pool’s edge and grinned at Hal and me. I looked at our mother. She stared at the man and woman, her mouth cocked into a curious smile. She saw me looking and picked up a magazine and started reading it. Our father sat in a deck chair in his swim trunks, his elbows on his knees like a man watching a baseball game. A can of Jax beer rested on the concrete apron between his white feet.
I heard a loud thawongabumpbump and a broad shapeless shadow darted onto the dimpled surface of the pool. There again was Harry suspended in all his bulk high in the air, a diving mule pushed off the circus platform. At the last second he tucked his head and rolled over onto his shoulders, sending an arc of water toward a mother and her two toddlers in the shallow end. They screwed up their faces and recoiled. When the water settled they all three turned, dripping, to stare at Harry, the mother annoyed, the children bewildered.
That’s enough, Harry, the woman said. She’d snatched her hat off and I saw she was wearing a man’s heavy black sunglasses, like our father’s, and her wide mouth was painted bright red. Her hair was frizzled and graying.
All right, sorry, Harry said.
But as soon as the woman had pulled the hat brim down over her eyes, Harry was up and tiptoeing back to the diving board. He made shushing gestures to all of us, a finger to his lips. At the shallow end, the mother hustled her two toddlers from the pool, grabbed up their things, and headed for their room.
Harry was poised at the base of the board. He spread his arms, rose on his toes, and pranced down its length. He swung his arms above his head, scrunched his big body down like a compressed spring. The board bent almost to the surface of the water, seemed to hesistate there, then cracked and split down its length and tossed Harry awkwardly into the air.
He hit the water with a loud, flat smack. The split board bounced a couple of times and lay still. Harry floated motionless as the rocking water lapped the edges of the pool. A little scarlet cloud bloomed around him. Then he jerked into a flurry of motion. His head rose up and he bellowed, then sank down again.
The big woman shouted and stood up from her chair, her hat tumbling into the grass. Two men standing poolside leapt into the water. They managed to subdue Harry and pull him to the pool’s edge. The woman stood rigid, watching them, her mouth hanging open. Then she closed it with a clap and her face took on what looked like a long-practiced expression of disgust. Other people came and helped drag Harry out onto the concrete apron. He made a groaning, desperate sound. Blood leaked from a wound on his foot. One of the men who’d helped rescue Harry from the pool pulled a car around, and he and the other man helped Harry into it. The woman got into the back seat beside Harry and they drove away, to the hospital I suppose.
I walked over to the diving board, leaned down low, and looked at the split board, its two pieces splayed, blond splinters sticking out like bleached porcupine quills. Hanging there jammed tight in the split, a small blunt wedge drained of color, was what appeared to be Harry’s little toe.
It was fantastic. It made the whole trip.
OUR MOTHER WAS HORRIFIED, of course. One year, a drowning. The next, a dismembered toe. Not so disturbing as a death, but awful in its own way. I think it settled deeply into her subconscious, an augury somehow of vague misfortune looming.
For our father, who was her opposite in terms of being able to live in the moment instead of living each present moment with a terrible awareness of the past and a foreboding sense of the future, the accident had a different effect. He would remember it with a kind of morbid humor, closing his eyes and pursing his lips and shaking with silent, wincing laughter. Ooo, shit, that had to hurt, he’d say. I still remember the time, riding with him in the car when I was a boy, and I had my arm out the passenger-side window. He glanced over and told me to take my arm into the car, that he’d heard about a man riding along with his arm out the window who was sideswiped by another car that took his arm right off at the shoulder. Ever since, I’ve never been able to leave my arm out a car window if there are other cars present within anything close to striking distance. I live with a combination of my mother’s morbid fear of danger, and my father’s irreverent appreciation of it.