Back There

by Clare Welsh

Eduardo Gutierrez

“Back there…is the ruinous forever.” -- C.D. Wright

The tiger lilies died too soon. Dried to stiff stalks weeded out and thrown in the compost heap. With so much else: eggshells, gristled meat, carrot stems. What couldn’t be digested. What refused to be forgotten. What needed, finally, to rot.

The stubs piled behind the house. It wasn’t easy going. Back there. In this world, one’s father said, you need a thick skin. One’s skin was thin. It let in the rain. It let in everything. The lighting lacing each bulbous cloud in the Allegheny mountains. The open, extracted land, the creek seeping sulfide. And words. What was cat-called, preached, argued, and whispered. The talk of the town sparked like an electric current. There was, of course, back talk, a warm counter-current. A cantankerous heat in the mouth. One could talk one’s way into self-respect, and from there, into self-tenderness — which grew despite the repeated proclamation that tenderness could never grow in a place like this. One tendered anyway. In the shadow of the mountains, one stretched toward the light.

The tallest mountain leaned to the West. It swallowed the sun. You had to see it to believe it. The way, back there, a dark shape eclipsed the memory of each day. If one didn’t forget everything that happened, one would lose friends. Family. The pet, an illegal wolfdog biting palms, leaving crescent scars — back there, in thevalley between ferocity and domesticity, there existed a shifting definition of legality. The carpenter drove his truck without insurance. The stylist bleached without a business license. The bartender served teenagers. Who left with old men while everyone looked away. While everyone forgot what they had seen. So they could go on. Not losing.

But one always lost eventually. The land was appraised and was found lacking. The skin aged like milk. The bank seized the house. The car. The hope like daytime television babbling in the corner.

One never lost, until one lost everything.

—

There were methods of surviving the loss of everything. The most accessible were alcohol and opiates. Law enforcement focused on opiates, a drug supply contaminated by fentanyl, a tranquilizer spiking overdose rates. Church groups focused on alcohol.

No one focused on the loss of everything.

The county hired a narcotics detective to solve the fentanyl problem. He sat in the problem like a man in a whale. The problem dripped on his uniform, which reeked of digestion. He got used to it. He was not a revolutionary.

The narcotics detective did not solve the problem. He enforced the law, which was something different. He met his quota by finding weed crumbs in cars with expired inspection stickers. By knocking on the doors of those on probation, those with disability claims, those falling in the red net of a statistic likely to misuse pain killers. He was always finding something, the narcotics detective, findingsomething where there should be nothing. Always twisting the word should to a Möbius strip of infinite potential. I get it, he liked saying, but you can’t go breaking the law. He puppeted his badge. Burned out. Like everyone.

The Taco Bell was a drug front. The donut store was a drug front. The asbestos-padded apartment above the theater, the duplex by the fire hall, the three million dollar house on the hill was a drug front. One learned one’s place. One learned to make a front of one’s face, to erect a discrete sign over each emotion — except rage, which maintained the front.

—

A common problem: I can’t relax around people, can’t tell who’s real and who’s gonna go behind my back, really shank me in the ass.

A common solution: It’s us versus them.

No one knew them. No one knew us either, but one pretended, sometimes, in the voice of Ronald Reagan. Of Billy Graham. Of Donald Trump’s name spray painted on the side of a pick-up truck.

Sixty miles east, a Civil War battlefield rippled in the wind. The mass grave required a new remembrance, but the state made good money on old tourism. Sold confederate flags in the museum gift shop. One was brought up to forget this. To never speak of politics, or God. To go on never speaking, always forgetting. But the memory persisted. Gunshots echoed from the neighboring farm.

One got the feeling that another war was coming. Wouldn’t it be nice, one thought, in the orange recliner, in the double wide trailer with the curtains drawn, to write a column for the paper without getting death threats.

—

Back there, death was threatened, chased, endured. In everyone a piece of death sparked like a match at the beginning of a long path of gunpowder. Once lit, the path burned into years of passive suicide. One went 90 in a 65. Got fined for speeding. God knows where. Where, a place that had to be gotten. Had to be got. A gutted throat. The head of a deer wet in the snow. The head of a deer stiff over the pool table. Always the heads. The trophies of so many Perseuses chasing their decapitation myth. The myth was unheroic. Disheroic. It had no beginning, no end. Was a wide middling.

The myth kept its own calendar. One fiddled away time with long trespasses on company railroads that expired to tunnels of faded graffiti.

Who carried the blue spray-paint.

Who shook the can, a metallic rattle.

Who wrote their memento mori on the water-slicked wall: Fuck the police — Jesus loves you — No he’s just using you for your body —

Love was real even when it was codependence. When it sunk into the amber of the afternoon. When it refused to change. When a woman’s dream grew too big for her grandmother’s bone china. The bowl on its snowflake of doily. The doily with its predetermined floral stitch. The man with his carcass of stag on the lawn. The man and the woman at the Elks’ Club, the cigarette unspooling between them. He wanted her to remember his story. She kept remembering hers.

The heterosexuals suffered. Meanwhile, everyone gay smoked on top of the parking garage. Everyone gay suffered, but apart. The narcotics detective wanted to make being gay more illegal, but didn’t know how, so again settled for alchemizing something out of nothing: A busted taillight. A parking ticket. An instance, again and again, when he should have protected someone but didn’t.

The fentanyl problem festered. One couldn’t access pure heroin, so started injecting embalming fluid. One fooled a drug test for six months this way. Which was about when, as in pregnancy, it started showing. Catching up. One wandered the woods. The pines with beer cans crunched around trunks. With holes in the beer cans. Back there, people made pipes from anything. Made smoke from shame, what burned like methane.

The community doled shame in alignment with evangelical philosophy. Even the atheists rebranded evangelical shame to suit their secularism. An example: A father with a drug problem was expected; like God, he was simply absent. A mother with a drug problem was exiled. She had failed to deliver her archetypal promise of contradiction, to be a slut in a nesting doll of virtue.

The old shame did not allow nuance, what some people call humanity. Children ran away from parents. Parents ran away from children.

Who, back there, was orphaned. Who resented biting off their domesticity to survive. Who left their domesticity, a manicured hand in a bear trap, while they limbered away, got out.

Who was bitter about it. Who tired of decapitating animals, who didn’t trust, back there, the double-edged attention of men, of women appeasing men. Who witnessed the narcotics detective walking like a duck with a gun, an absurd, crazy-inducing threat. Who was complicit in every passive suicide, whose body swam the poisoned river, whose cells churned radioactive, that is, reactive. Whose shame was passed like a buck, another dead animal, to whoever was least able to carry it. Who dreaded the lady with blonde extensions, her cyclical shit talk, who talked shit back, cyclically, to the same lady picking one scab until it bled down her elbow. Whose memory barely scratched the surface of the dirty window of back there, the bifurcated mangling of the soul.

Who knew they could never separate themselves from their upbringing, but tried anyway, years later asserting their singular pronoun: I hated it back there. On that mountain, its root extended deep into the earth, so it could never be moved, only worn down, shrinking inch by inch in the weather — and I, like an exposed pine, was the conduit of each lighting strike until everything green in me died, and hawks nested in my dry branches, and lovers carved their desires into twisted shapes in my side. My father was right: you needed a thick skin. The ability to carry others the way you carry your own limbs, an unnoticed weight. It was an enmeshed oneness, and fancied itself a godbody, but I knew what it was, deep down, under its warm, cultish authority, its weaponized us, its diminutive them. In the end, it was a ripped-up word I tied to the claw of a hawk; with it, I flew far from the mountain, my thick skin and its stories whistling in the wind. It was the object of my resentment, which was the name I gave my frustrated love. It was home.

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Clare Welsh is a writer and photographer. Her recent writing can be found in the Los Angeles Review and the Southeast Review. Her photographs can be found in The New Delta Review, Offbeat Magazine, The New York Times, and in private collections. A graduate of the University of New Orleans MFA program, she lives in Pittsburgh, where she is a COAL fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and an advocate for harm reduction services in the Western Pennsylvania region.