Cracker Island
Tim makes a decision and regrets it; Donovan rescues Tim
[Well, beloveds, we’re back on Cracker Island — excuse me, back in Marion County, Tennessee — with Tim Teresias and Donnie Ross and the elusive Jethra Holloway. It’s time to see how Jethra’s Mad Art Project is progressing.
This story picks up immediately after Cherry Red. Jethra’s grown son Donovan has just pulled Tim out of Bad Oak River. Someone switched the detour signs, see, and Tim drove his pretty 1972 Triumph Spitfire right into the flood. Though, being Tim, he first treats us to a flashback filled with unasked-for and offensive opinions.
I really can’t apologize enough for Tim. Still, he wants so badly for his story to be told. I guess I’m stuck with him.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
Marla says, “You saved my life. The Regent Hotel. I’d accidentally attempted suicide. Remember?”
Oh.
“That night,” Marla says, “I said I wanted to have your abortion.”
— Chuck Palahniuk
Here’s an observation for my lady readers:
There’s one thing you can’t say, cannot say, can never, ever say.
It is the confound of feminism, the Achilles’ heel, the contradiction at the heart of the big lie —
I haven’t omitted to tell you how I felt about Donovan Holloway in the 1990s. I wished he hadn’t been born. He was a drag on Jethra’s life and, consequently, on mine. He yelled constantly. He tore up everything he touched. He beat his head of sweaty white-blond curls on walls. (And doors and the padded bars of his crib and once, terrifyingly, on the back seat of my gold-toned 1969 Chevy Impala. He banged all the way from Chattanooga to Crossville, then collapsed into a sound sleep on our picnic blanket at Fall Creek Falls and didn’t get to go wading.
Then he woke up and banged his head all the way home.
“The seat’s soft,” Jethra said.
“He’s soothing himself,” Jethra said. “He’s all right.”
That made one of us.
The next time Jethra asked if I wanted to spend Sunday with her, I cradled the phone between my cheek and shoulder, reached into the fridge, and pulled out a Cheerwine before I answered.
“Glad to,” I said, “unless, of course, you plan to bring your little mucous plug along.”
I took the opener and popped the top off, letting Jethra hear the hiss.
Silence came over the line. I knew I’d made her wince.
But Jethra said, “So sorry, didn’t realize this was Tim. Have Tina give me a call when you unlock her cell … ”
My turn to flinch.
She was learning.)
But back to that one thing —
you must never —
ever —
say.
“I should have had an abortion.”
Sure, there’s the poor-thing’s-a-vegetable exemption, but that just goes to prove the rule. You can pen maudlin short stories about women dead of self-mangled, I’m sorry, self-managed abortions. You can call your representative. You can write angry columns in — where are the poor dears writing angry columns lately, now Jane is gone?
Oh, yes, the entire internet.
But post an essay about how you regret your pregnancies and are of the opinion Little Lucy and Baby Biff should have never been born — and I guarantee all your subscribers will drop you like a big steaming —
Let’s not be crude.
You are not allowed to wish for the pluperfect of the one act you devote your entire political life to enshrining for the future. You may wish for the right to abort potential children but you may under no circumstances even contemplate the desirability of having aborted any one living child.
I leave you to ponder.
However, I have no feminist credentials to worry about, so I don’t mind repeating: Jethra should have aborted Donovan. That’s what I thought all through the late 1990s and I didn’t have a Damascus road moment until that night in 2024 when the big idiot dragged me out of Bad Oak River by the scruff of my neck, and even then I was of two minds. I wanted to find out where Jethra had gotten to so I could rescue her and tell her off good — maybe not in that order — but apart from that I didn’t hold my life worth a nickel. I hadn’t done for years.
I wished my mother had aborted me.
BED-WEATTER
I don’t know what shamed seven-year-old me more: the fact my mother wrapped me in my urine-soaked bedsheets, shoved my piss-drenched Underoos down over my ears for a cap, and posted me out in a folding chair by the road, or the knowledge that everyone driving by would see the cardboard sign spelling out BED-WEATTER.
I wet the bed every night and had as long as I could remember.
There were no pull-ups in 1979. I graduated from toddler diapers to underwear, towels in the bed, yelling, tears, prayer sessions (Jesus, heal my Timothy), and humiliation.
Now everyone who drove through the holler — sometimes five or six cars over the course of a long Saturday morning — would see I was a BED-WEATTER with a mother who couldn’t spell.
I couldn’t be angry with my mother, who — I realized a couple of years before — was just as much a child as I was. She would have been 21 when I was seven, I think. She never learned to read well, and though she did read me the Bible, she did so mostly from memory. When the book mobile came to town and we could get a ride out of the holler to visit it, she would add to my Dr. Seuss or Tasha Tudor something she wanted to hear, a Christian romance novel generally. Then I would read it to her, skipping the long words or filling them in with a guess. I wasn’t particularly advanced for a seven-year-old. I was just lightyears ahead of my mother.
Sometimes she was my best friend and we had tea parties on the fragrant red needles under the white pine trees with their tall, rosy trunks. Other times she wept in bed and called on Jesus until she was hoarse, and I got up our dinner as best I could, wheedling a couple of bites into her.
But though I could not rage, I despaired. Day after day I wished I could escape. Children did sometimes get taken away from their parents. But then, who would read to my mother? Who would talk her down from her crying spells? Only me. I solved the equation in her favor every day until BED-WEATTER.
I knew it would happen again and it did happen again and then, seeing a future of days by the highway holding my sign and unable to imagine I would ever grow old enough to stay dry at night, I told my teacher.
Once I resolved to do the thing, I thought it out first and then executed my plan without mercy. You might say I’m still the same boy ...
But I digress.
I’d heard about children who got taken away, knew more or less what threshold you had to cross to have your child taken away, and I added enough details to interest Child Protective Services. I shared all those details, real and made-up, with Miss Holmes, the first-grade teacher.
Then — as if I had a choice — I sat by the road with my sign to wait.
All that I’ve told you I remember more or less like that — a recitation of facts, interspersed with shards of images, not a story.
But I remember my mother in her faded, purple-plaid housedress and bare feet, clinging to the social services woman and begging. Momma usually had her hair up in a pineapple bun with plastic barrettes securing the wisps. Now one barrette was falling out.
“Please,” she said to the social services woman, who was broad-shouldered and wore a short-sleeved green polyester pants suit. “I won’t know what bills to pay. I’ll lose my land.” We had a bit of land, six scrubby acres, with a fallen-down shed for our dog Wendy and an ancient single-wide trailer for us. “Who will tell me when to pay my taxes? Who will read my tax bill to me?”
The sheriff’s deputy put me in the car. Someone handed me my shoes — red sneakers with dirty white laces — through the window.
“Please.” Momma was begging. I had to pull myself up to see her over the edge of the window. She had fallen to her knees in the grass. She always knelt when she prayed to Jesus, sometimes half-a-dozen times a day, but now she knelt to the social worker. “Don’t take him. Tim takes care of me. I can’t live without him. Please.”
Her voice soared in a panicked wail.
And it was the truth. I did take care of her.
I changed my mind. I started shrieking. “Let me out let me out let me out — ”
I scrabbled at the door. I learned the hard way you can’t unlock a patrol car’s back door from the inside.
Anyhow, it was too late. The woman gave my mother some paperwork (which I knew she couldn’t read), then climbed into the passenger’s side of the patrol car. We pulled out onto the road, crunching gravel. Sun angled through pine needles into the backseat where I now sat with my head lolling back, watching trees veer past from that weird angle, which of course is a normal angle when you’re seven, how you always see trees from cars.
My tears dried on my cheeks. I felt too sick to cry. With one cruel act I had broken my mother and me. I would recover and grow strong, I knew even then, but Momma would not.
I thought: I should have died before I was born.
Then I wondered if the foster family would have something sweet for desert.
I didn’t get strawberry shortcake that night. There were a few weeks of anxiety and bedwetting and different short-term families every night. Car ride after car ride with my charity clothes (no more Underoos) in a paper bag. But at last there was a Seventh-Day Adventist family, clean, serious, well-educated. They were strict but gentle people. Better, in my mind, they were decent and ordinary. After a few years they adopted me, and I lived peacefully through grade school, high school, college, an accounting degree.
I felt all right about life until I was in my mid-twenties. Then one morning I realized I’d sacrificed my mother’s life for a couple of beautifully tailored suits, a sports car, and a handful of nights a month spent in skeevy clubs or hotel rooms, sucking off guys I wouldn’t spend five minutes with by daylight. And half the time, paying for the privilege.
The sorrow fell over me, and it hasn’t lifted much since.
I’m softening this a bit. The true details of my childhood are too macabre to believe. At any rate, it ended the same, nice foster family, sufficiently interesting and lucrative career, pretty car, sorrow. In fact, nothing strange — the way Momma was strange — came along until Jethra began assaulting me (or beguiling me, I won’t lie) with her mad art project.
How could I not succumb? How could I not resist?
Rain pelted against the windows of the old-model Chevy Suburban. I struggled against the young giant who held me in a bear hug.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “You’re all right. You’re all right! You’re not drowned — you came out conscious and then you passed out. This is just shock. You’re all right.”
“Thanks,” I managed. “Can’t breathe — ”
He let go and sat back. I took a breath and surveyed my surroundings. No telling what was outside apart from a downpour on a pitch-black night. Inside the truck, which looked at least 30 years old by the dome light, a handful of talismans dangled from the rearview mirror: a crucifix, a hand-carved wooden rune, a naked good-luck troll with tuft of pink hair, a sci-fi con pass, and a half-postcard of homemade paper. On the paper someone had stamped a baby’s footprint in dull reddish ink.
I remembered that paper, that blood.
I looked from the footprint to the young man. Hard to tell in the truck, but I reckoned him to be past six-foot-five, heavily muscled and fat over it. For all that, he had a nimble readiness to his movements.
He wore his pale blond hair in dozens of small braids, now soaking wet, that hung past his shoulder blades. He was dressed in jeans, square-toed leather boots, and a black t-shirt adorned with more runes and a stylized dragon. From his shirt collar to his jawline, a tattoo of fangs grinned at me.
“Donovan?” I asked. “Donovan Holloway?”
“That’s me.” His face brightened. “Do you know me?” he asked. Clearly the possibility delighted him. This was a fellow who expected to like folks and be liked in return.
“My name is Tim Teresias.” I held out my hand. “I knew your mother back in the 90s. You were a little fellow then.”
He seized my hand. “Tim! I don’t remember you, but Momma told me all about you.” He pulled me in for another hug. “You helped Momma when she was raising me up. She said you were her best friend, you took care of us.”
I had not. I had resented Donovan’s existence and wasted Jethra’s time. Was this how she remembered my bare tolerance for her affection, my unrelenting cruelty?
He grinned, releasing me again. “How did you know it was me? I was a just tiny kid. Nothing like this.” He glanced at his body with a chuckle.
I could see it now beneath the rough, sunburned skin: the elfin face shape, wide-set eyes, sweet chin, dimples. Other than that and his muscular physique, Donovan looked nothing like Jethra nor like the wiry toddler I remembered.
I touched the bit of pasteboard that dangled from the rear-view mirror. “She used to give me her artwork.”
Tears sprang to his eyes. He blinked. “Yes, she made that for me when I was a baby. Two footprints.” He also touched it, turning it to show me. “I had one as a crib dangle and she had this one in her car, and then when I got my truck she swapped them, so I had the traveling one. So I could always follow the footprints back home, you see.”
He wiped his eyes with his forearm.
“Someone mentioned your mother to me today,” I said. “He seemed to think I could help him find her. But I didn’t know anything about it. I moved back to Tennessee to take care of my mother. She lives west of here, in Bethlehem. I hadn’t — forgive me — I hadn’t thought about Jethra for more than 20 years.”
Donovan pushed a couple of braids behind his ears. “That’s right. She’s vanished.” He reached across me to the glove box and pulled out an e-cigar. I watched him fiddle with it. He cranked the window to let a mist of grape-Koolaid-smelling haze curl out into the rain. “They said she ran out on her probation, but she wouldn’t do that. She was making political art, see. She wanted to get caught. To make a statement.”
That squared with what Donnie Ross told me.
“Then where do you think she is?” I asked. Stupid question. He didn’t know; if he did know, he’d be off finding her, not here rescuing me.
But he didn’t take offense. He just puffed at his e-cigar and wiped his eyes again. “I think the fairies got her.”
As bad as his mother. I gazed at him for a while, thinking about Jethra. “That is unmitigated bullshit.”
He sat straight up.
I suddenly pictured myself in contrast to this Hercules — 130 pounds to his probably 300, five-eight to his maybe six-eight, pale, balding and potbellied beside his ruddy, long-haired bulk.
I went on.
“Now today I just had a most unpleasant conversation with a gentleman called Donnie Ross, a kind of two-bit Boss Hawg he sounds like to me.”
“What’s a Boss Hawg?”
Oh, the youth of today.
“Hick-town mafioso, that’s what,” I answered. “Never mind that. If you’re cooking your books — I’m speaking metaphorically — you don’t call on an outside auditor to do a job requiring insider knowledge, not unless you’re need a stooge of some kind. Maybe just to make a play of saying you got your books looked at, you see.”
He smoked some more. “I like Mr. Ross.”
Spare me.
“I’m sure he’s very likable,” I said. “I liked him for the whole two hours of my time he wasted while he talked to me on the phone today. But I wouldn’t trust him.”
Donovan put away the e-cigar and stared at me. “I trust everyone. Sometimes they prove me wrong, but most of the time folks live up to your opinion of them. You just have to give em a chance.”
“Give them a chance with yourself, not Jethra.”
He frowned. “Seems to me you have a closed-hearted way of thinking.”
But his big hands stayed easy on his knees. He had runes tattooed on each finger, I noticed. I sat there amazed at how people change, how we persist. This was the same little boy, with the same big feelings, too powerful for his body — but he had grown large enough to contain them.
“You’re right,” I said at last. “I’m a coldhearted, narrow-minded man with a mean streak a mile wide. But you’d be surprised how handy that can be sometimes. Now before you so kindly pulled me out of Bad Oak River, I was on the way to see some friends who were going to give me some background to help me find Jethra. I’ll need to make my apologies to them and reschedule, of course. But I’ll keep you up-to-date with everything I learn.”
“Or I can drive you around, help you out.” He started the truck. “You need someone who understands fairies.”
Fairies. I bit my tongue. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“No you won’t.” He chuckled, then whooped. He pounded the steering wheel, laughing almost too hard to speak. “You don’t — you don’t have a car. Yours is in the river!”
It took him a while to recover. He had to wipe his eyes again.
My other cars were garaged in Chattanooga, but I let him have his laugh. I suppose he’d earned it. He turned on a late-model sound system and fiddled with the selector.
We all been lost, we all been called
Everyone rise to a brethren code
We got your back, we all been low
Let’s all rise —
Heavy metal and Mongolian throat singing?
It was … not bad.
“Buckle your seatbelt,” Donovan hollered over the music. Wheels throwing mud and gravel, the Suburban bucked up a hill to the main track. Donovan executed a K-turn to get going the right direction up the gravel lane, then turned again onto the two-lane highway not far from where I’d driven into Bad Oak River.