What Gets Into Us

Salvage

Salvage Homer Cobb, 1999 We set out about midnight, which is late, I know, but Aunt Isabel didn't think wehad much time to find him. To get to North Salter you head south from Fayton through the Alba River Basin on 117 toward Guston Corners to State Road 2oA. This is by far the loneliest beach road I know of. Long time ago the island was a place for pirates to hide their booty and now mamma sea turtles come to shore there to bury their eggs. Later, on a schedule, the turtles come out of the sea to greet their babies just as they hatch, eager to showthem alltheir loveand how tolive in the ocean. People time their vacations to see this happen, but I have never been there for it. The papers she'd downloadedwere on her lap. Shekept turning on the lamp in my truck to read the names of the cottages to me. "Dune's End ring a bell? Ocean Destiny Townhomes? Turtlewatch ?" She announced which beach rentals she'd try first. It was early May, not the high season, and he would havehad his choice of properties. She'd isolated the oceanfront condos because her son, Bit,had always liked to stare at the waves when he was aboy. 134 SALVAGE 135 He was fifty that March, but she assumed he still had the same tastes. As we were getting toward Blalock where they grow blueberries she started telling me about him: that he was a footling breech, for example. She was only eighteen when she had him and this was before the time of drop-of-the-hat cesareans. There was probablya way to get him out quicker, but what did she know, she was a child in labor. She hadn't wanted to marry his father, my uncle Tulip, really. She had always done the best she could: did I know how hard it was being a mamma when you see your own child is inclined to bring suffering to himself and those who love him? And I said yes, ma'am, it must be hard. I had said this before. She was difficult for me to contradict. I was her favorite nephew. She was sixty-eightyears old, and used to getting her way. And not just from her husband: people whisper in Fayton, about her going to Sorrowsville and Pine Sands in her thirties, and forties, and even fifties, and being seen coming out of motels, or standing round truck stop restaurants with her raven hair up, sunglasses on, her sweaters lowcut. She is old now,but she can still throwherself at strangers. At the one stoplight in Moscowthere is aworn-down gas station and next to it a café I know where old men sit around from six until two on weekdays, and eat plate lunches with sides of collards —still, in the year 1999. When we passed it—at 12:40 a.m., so of course it was closed—Aunt Isabel said, "Let's stop for coffee, we havea long night ahead of us." I said okay though I knew there wasn't much on that road. Back in January when he still seemed well, her son, my cousin Bit, and I visited in a gourmet pizza restaurant in Dimeboro, near Oleander where the university is. It was in a part ofthat town they 136 SALVAGE have really NewYorked up, which didn't bother him. He hadn't come back to Carolina because he cared about it, out of homesickness for the old places. Nostalgiais my profession: I go out before they tear down a house for a Popeye's or a Savamart and take away the old doors and the shutters and the stained glass and the newel posts. I strip and sand them until they are beautiful again, and sell them. I call this Homeboy's Salvage. Everybody calls me Homeboy . Aunt Isabel is the reason. He wanted to reminisce, which could have been a sign. He told me about the time in the last of the sixties when he lived as a squatter in a condemned house on a canal in Holland. He got the Amsterdam government to agree he was an artist, payhim money he mostly spent on hashish and heroin. His friends did videos of naked people standing in the North Sea yelling in Dutch about everything that waswrongwith their lives, he...