Hazard Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Margaret Combs

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Rain Saukas, with Jesse Aronson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1531-8

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1532-5

  Printed in the United States of America

  for my family

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I: Family

  Chapter 1. All Fall Down

  Chapter 2. Great Expectations

  Chapter 3. Back Seat

  Chapter 4. Home to Hazard

  Chapter 5. Jesus Is Calling

  Chapter 6. Monkey Bird

  Chapter 7. Among the Dead

  Chapter 8. Put ’em Up, Boys

  Chapter 9. Aileron

  Chapter 10. Split Levels

  Chapter 11. Mercy

  Chapter 12. Laundromat

  Chapter 13. All God’s Children

  Chapter 14. Pieces

  Chapter 15. Guns in the Family

  Part II: Flight

  Chapter 16. Wings

  Chapter 17. Cracker Jacks

  Chapter 18. Tears

  Chapter 19. Trapeze

  Chapter 20. Chant from Another World

  Chapter 21. Dive

  Chapter 22. Falling

  Part III: Fortuity

  Chapter 23. Coppertone

  Chapter 24. Sebastian

  Chapter 25. Apparition

  Chapter 26. Implosion

  Chapter 27. Dave’s Diner

  Chapter 28. Losing It

  Chapter 29. Lift Off

  Chapter 30. Batman

  Chapter 31. Valentine

  Chapter 32. Little Wing

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  I imagined myself the child of a perfect family when my brother arrived. It was April 15, 1956, a time on the calendar that spoke of Easter and spring. But in the dry stretches of Wichita, Kansas, the date meant little more than a dearth of color in our backyard. We lived near the airport, where nothing blossomed, much less the dogwood and crocus I’d come to love years later in New England. Still, I didn’t mind; dirt was fine with me. Already a tomboy at three, I thrilled to the wonders of a grassless backyard: potato slugs nuzzling in the dust, the miracle of dark mud spreading beneath the spigot, and the pitch of my swing set, its iron-red posts steepled to the sky. In my flitting and leaping about the yard, always in concert with my big sister, Barbara Ann, I loved my world; it was timeless and it was mine.

  My grandmother’s call that one morning in April pulled me from the swing set and into the kitchen. I sensed something vastly changeable had come into my life, nestled inside the bundle of blue folds in the doorway. My mother, twenty-six years old and a heartbreaking beauty, stood holding and parting the blankets. It was a boy, a real boy, completing our family in a way I never could as a girl, a second daughter. He was a fuzzy-haired, rosy baby, whose dimply smile and sweet wail brought joy into our little home in the middle of nowhere. I sensed a specialness, a surge of pleasure, like a sweet had just been placed on my tongue, unexpectedly—the way joy can arrive randomly, without warning or reason.

  The lightheartedness extended at least a while longer as my family packed up and moved out of flat, barren Wichita, and trundled west across the prairie to much greener and craggier Colorado. My father, rapidly moving up in the world as an aeronautical engineer, had captured a promising job with Martin Marietta, uplifting us to Denver and the Rocky Mountains. This is where the deeper root of my memory begins.

  To anyone parting the curtains the afternoon of our arrival on Jewell Avenue, we appeared blessed. A lean and agile father, tall and dark-haired, unfolding from the driver’s side, hefting boxes and suitcases from the car; a petite and fine-figured mother with a glamorous, garnet smile; two bright and lively girls, one brunette and the other blonde, each a different ribbon of the family; and finally, the baby boy, a happy and robust kicker, who would carry on the family name. I couldn’t have known what was coming. None of us knew.

  As I bounded out of the car, giggling with my sister, and flailed onto the grass, and as my mother, her arms bundled with my chubby brother, clucked at my father to hasten with the high chair, fate was already with us. Soon, it would turn our translucent skins inside out, so that our most delicate parts glared out to the world, showing what we were made of: bravery, cowardice, substance, rubbery-ness—our characters forever blanched and outlined in deepest black. Soon, our hearts would flay open, and we would, in many ways, remain veined and naked for the rest of our lives.

  Part I

  Family

  Chapter 1

  All Fall Down

  One afternoon, deep into the month of September 1957, I burst from a bush and skittered along the back fence, making my way back to my porch and family. Shadows smeared across the grass and light riffled up walls in magical ways. I was five years old, and I relished being alive. My neighborhood was a tiny one on the outskirts of Denver—little more than a huddle of duplexes in an open field—but to me it was a glorious frontier, marked by grassy unfenced yards and a single thatch of spindly bushes thick enough to hide me from evil bandits, or even the Devil if it came down to it. I did not fear Satan; Jesus was on my side, and besides, I could outrun any beast or brute in the neighborhood.

  Yanking open our screen door, I landed inside my living room, the door whapping behind me. Ahead of me lay the promise of something special: the taste of my mother’s puffy biscuits and hot, crispy chicken, and, especially, my father’s homecoming. Within minutes, I’d hear the gravelly crunch of his tires on the driveway.

  If I had known my life was about to change—that it was already crumbling and in another moment would ash apart—I wonder what I might have done. Rewound my steps out the door to the farthermost corner of my neighborhood and hunkered in the bushes until darkness yawned and swallowed me?

  I stood on the threshold and breathed. All was tidy and well. Ladies’ Home Journals and Aviation Weeks sat neatly stacked on the coffee table; the floor was damp-mopped and the throw rug vacuumed as always at this time of day; and the fold-top desk, where Mama answered letters in clean, pretty handwriting, was cleared of clutter and folded away. Still, a ping of worry sparkled up my spine. The house was thick with quiet and the supper table empty of plates and silverware. I lifted my nose but couldn’t smell anything close to the tang of hot oil, or hear the sounds of chicken parts flipping through flour and meeting the bright hissing heat of a skillet.

  “Where’s Mama?” I asked, breathily.

  My older sister, Barbara Ann, sat a few feet away on our green, knobbly couch, her school dress and shoes still on, a book open in her lap. At seven years old, she was my safety. Her dark hair touched her shoulders like Mama’s, and she knew things, like how to tie shoes and how to last nap-less through an afternoon.

  “Shush!” she hissed, wr
inkling up her face. She looked like an old biscuit, and I started to giggle. But she didn’t smile or look at me. She darted her eyes down the hallway. “Mama’s resting.”

  I stared at her, folding my brow in a way that would, over time, dig trenches into my forehead. She had never shushed me this way, and Mama, for her part, had never napped in the afternoon.

  Blowing out my lips, I flounced over to the playpen where my little brother, Roddy, sat like a baby blob. Scooping up a squishy ball, I beeped it on his nose and a warble of giggly noises came from his throat. He was a smiley, lazy boy, so big I could hardly pick him up anymore. At his last checkup I’d held him on my lap, my legs falling asleep from his weight as Mama looked down at her pocketbook and Dr. Gibbs tapped on her pillbox hat. Thump thump thump. If you don’t stop babying your boy, he’ll never bother to stand up and walk.

  But it was hard not to gather up Roddy like a fat puppy and carry him around. He was a roly-poly and I wanted to lift him up now, even though it was against our new family rules. I was supposed to leave him alone so he’d stand up by himself and get on with it. In a few minutes, Daddy would come in and lift Roddy out of the playpen, prop him up against the couch, squat down on the far side of the rug with arms outstretched, coat bunched around his shoulders, and call out, grinning, “Come on, Buddy, come on.”

  Every night before we sat to supper, Barbara Ann and I planted ourselves like stepping stones across the “rug pond,” slapping our thighs and cheering for Roddy as he plunged from the couch to me, from me to Barbara Ann, from Barbara Ann to Daddy’s arms. Mama would leave her cooking and pause in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands on her apron and giving us a smile.

  Suddenly, the screen door screaked on its hinge.

  “Daddy!” I sputtered, springing up.

  I adored my father. I was his girl, though he never said as much or offered me kisses or hugs. I didn’t expect these things; we came from a long line of Appalachian mountain people who didn’t waste effort on emotion. Instead, my father reached me in other ways: teasing me after supper, taking my hands and stomping around the room with each of my sneakered feet riding on top of his big, wing-tipped shoes. “S’margie, Pargie, puddin’ and pie,” he’d chant above my giggles, “kissed the boys and made them cry.” Or he’d settle at the kitchen table with me and my litter of dinosaur bones, well past lamplight, as if there were nothing else to do. He’d trim and hand me plastic parts, showing me how to bead the glue and press delicately on two knobs of vertebrae until the glue took hold.

  Now, my father stepped through the door, his dark hair and black suit filling up the doorframe. He didn’t look at me, not even a glance, touching off another pop of alarm in my chest. In the next instant, my mother appeared from nowhere, moving past me like a footless shadow. Her arms reached out, and she clutched Daddy’s lapels, pressing her face close to his ear. I saw her tremble. Her voice quivered as she whispered, her words spilling in a rush. Suddenly, she collapsed, her legs crumpling and her body melting to the floor as if she’d lost her bones. I stood in the middle of the room, mute and speechless. I had never seen my mother this way. There she was in a blue heap, sprinkled with white daisies and rickrack, bunched in a mess.

  Without a sound, I retreated, tucking my body back into a kitchen chair. As long as I had been alive, my mother had been the keeper of “lady-ness” and manners in my family. Seeing her fall, her limbs bouncing off the floor, I knew I was seeing what I wasn’t meant to see, ever—a kind of cracking inside her. My chest felt cottony. Barbara Ann slid off the couch a few feet from me and stood still, her mouth hidden beneath her hands.

  There were so many things I didn’t know. My mother had felt little flints of worry before that moment in our living room: her baby boy’s first words had vanished, the brown pools of his eyes rarely settled on hers, and he had never crawled on all fours. Dr. Gibbs had said, “Boys are different; he’ll catch up soon enough.” Still, something had haunted her—the way Roddy had started fiddling with his hands, twining his fingers; the way he rocked in his crib, banging his head against the bars, not seeming to mind the pain, not crying as she hurried to him. An ember of anxiety in her chest had driven her to call a special doctor, and that morning while my sister and I were in school, she had taken Roddy to a faraway clinic. Much later in life I would learn my mother had hardly been able to drive home.

  Neither she nor any of us would know for years what to call my brother’s affliction, but she had heard enough that day to know her baby boy was damaged and would never lead a normal life.

  Across the room, my father lowered his briefcase to the floor. Stooping, he shoveled his hands beneath the pile of my mother. When he lifted, her limp weight fell against his chest. He was an achingly young man, lean and long-limbed, with a straight nose and thick shock of black hair he’d inherited from his father—features that had made him the catch of his hometown of Hazard, Kentucky. Unlike his Pappy before him, my father had turned away from dirt farming and plumbing repairs in the back woods of Appalachia, and headed instead toward aeronautics and the dream of flight. He’d wanted to find out what makes a four-hundred-ton, winged machine lift and float on a gust of air as if it were a silver feather. And he’d taken with him the girl who’d won his heart, my mother, who sang like a meadowlark and was so clever she’d gone to college at sixteen.

  But right then, in my living room, I knew my mother wasn’t a songbird or a beauty queen. She was someone whose legs were dangling, and whose high heel was falling to the floor. And my father was someone who had forgotten I was there. He moved down the hallway, his black-coated shoulders slung backward, swaying heavily, side to side.

  I slid from my chair and padded to my sister’s side. My insides felt slippery and cold.

  “What’s wrong with Mama?” Barbara Ann whispered, hardly loud enough to hear. She didn’t ask the real question, and neither did I, the one that would stay buried for years, inside a time and a household that didn’t speak of such things: What’s wrong with our family?

  My father didn’t answer. He sidestepped down the narrow hallway, carefully, at an angle, so my mother wouldn’t bump her head. Then, at the far end, he turned, maneuvering her, feet-first, around the corner and into the bedroom, the soft cloud of her hair vanishing last.

  Chapter 2

  Great Expectations

  For a time, I thought I might have dreamed my mother’s fall. Barbara Ann didn’t speak of it, nor did either of my parents. If there was a name for what I had seen, I sensed it was better left alone, like the darkening mound I once came upon in my grandfather’s chicken coop, deep inside an empty nest, a matted thing I hadn’t touched.

  Instead, I turned to my family’s rhythms. My father’s stories, for one, spun a fabric that held my five-year-old world together. Woven in with baths and bedtimes, his tales took me to another world. Not long after my mother’s fall, he spun a story that swept me far away from our duplex on Jewell Avenue.

  “A long time ago in the Great Smoky Mountains, two little girls went messin’ around,” he began, propping himself in my bedroom doorway, the long reeds of his arms folded across his chest.

  “By themselves?” my voice twanged in the air.

  I was a child who couldn’t imagine being alone. Nestled in the dark, the soft pelt of my bed covers pulled to my chin, I listened, wide-eyed and riveted on his backlit head and shoulders. Shadows ruffled about the room and bright stars of hall light scattered across the foot of my bed.

  “Yessiree,” he went on, shaking a finger in the air. “No sooner had they jumped the crick but a twig crackled behind them, and there came big old grizzly bear.”

  I gasped, cupping my mouth.

  “Oh, for pity’s sake,” groaned Barbara Ann. I felt her eyes rolling at me through the darkness. Inches away in her own twin bed, she sat tucked up against the opposite wall. I couldn’t see her face, only the mounds of her knees, still as moles beneath the dark covers. “Calm down,” she admonished with the full authority o
f a seven-year-old.

  But I couldn’t. I was desperate for Daddy’s rollicking stories. They caught me up and flung me about so thoroughly that I let go of where I was, never guessing how improbable it was for him, a man of physics, to be there in our doorway, crafting scenes and garnished plots. It seemed an utterly natural and easy thing for him, this art of storytelling, as if he were born to it.

  My life felt restored. My father’s stories ferried me to sleep, and come morning, my mother’s household devotions carried me through the day: the ironing of clothes, the stacking of towels, the doing of dishes. After her brief collapse, she had rallied again, and each evening we gathered around a table spread with hot Southern dishes: pork chops and white peppery gravy, smoky shucky beans, and a bowl of steaming biscuits whipped up by hand, drizzled with sweetly sour sorghum. Often, she pulled from the oven her blessedly tart rhubarb pie, with its elegant fluted edges and velvety crust, my father’s favorite. Though she’d followed my father from Kentucky to the wild prairies of the West, my mother never took to rolling tortillas or rustling up chili; we ate as if we were in the Appalachians, tethered to our roots.

  These rituals steadied me so thoroughly that whole months passed without me thinking of my mother’s collapse. Not until one solitary Saturday in January did my memory stir again. That morning, the first big snow of the Colorado winter began, and by noon, icy snow pecked on our kitchen window like tiny beaks.

  I looked up from where I was: at the kitchen table, its Formica surface littered with plastic bones. In one hand, I held the skull of a pterosaur, and in the other, a dainty spine. Lost in the debris of dinosaurs, I’d ignored my mother’s voice a few moments before and only now missed the soft wuffing of her iron and the clicking of drawers. The room yawned with quiet. Neither my father nor sister was home.

  Softly, I laid down the skeleton and slid off my chair, peering down the hallway. My head, woozy from glue, made me totter and grip the table.