Where the Slope Goes

We met at a gas station outside Sneedville, Tennessee, which is the kind of place that exists primarily to mark the distance between somewhere and somewhere else. The pumps had been shut off years ago but the store was open, selling jerky and bait and Coke in glass bottles from a cooler that hummed like a dying animal. Behind the building, a gravel lot sloped down toward a tree line and beyond that, the sound of water. It was early September and the air was thick enough to chew. The light came through the haze the way light comes through gauze — not bright, exactly, but everywhere, inescapable, without a direction you could point to.

McCarthy was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket near the edge of the lot when I arrived. He was looking at the tree line the way you look at a sentence you’ve already written and are deciding whether to cut. He had a Styrofoam cup of something — coffee, I assumed, though it could have been anything. He did not greet me. He did not look at me. I had the sense that my arrival was an event of roughly the same significance as the arrival of a particular cloud.

Abbott drove up ten minutes later in a rental. She got out and stood for a moment looking at the lot, the store, the trees, and then at McCarthy on his bucket, and something crossed her face — amusement or recognition, I couldn’t tell which. She was wearing sunglasses and she left them on. She bought a Coke from the store and came back out and leaned against the cinder-block wall and crossed her ankles and said, “So we’re writing about girls.”

“We’re writing about a place,” McCarthy said. “The girls are in it.”

“The girls are the story.”

“The place is the story. The girls are what happens in it.”

I sat down on the gravel, which was a mistake — the ground was hot and the rocks were sharp and I looked foolish, but I was already down and standing back up felt like it would look worse. I said I thought the tension between those two positions was exactly what we needed to figure out.

McCarthy took a drink from his Styrofoam cup. “There’s nothing to figure out. You write the land first. You write the karst and the creek and the hollers and the way the light sits in them like something that got trapped and gave up. Then you put people in that landscape and you watch what the landscape does to them. The landscape does not care about your characters. It was there before them and it will be there after and the story is what happens in the interval between those two facts.”

“That’s one way to write it,” Abbott said. “And it produces a certain kind of story. A story where the characters are weather. Weather that passes through a landscape and leaves marks. But the story I want to write is about what happens inside the weather. The interior. What those girls feel in their bodies when they walk down to that creek bottom. What it means to be fifteen and to have organized your entire sense of self around another girl, and to feel that organization start to dissolve.”

“Feeling is not the same as story.”

“Feeling is the only story. Everything else is scenery.”

I watched McCarthy’s jaw work on that, the muscles tightening and releasing. He did not respond immediately. The gas station hummed. A truck passed on the road and the sound of it rose and fell and was gone, and in the silence that followed, the creek was louder.

“I want the narrator to be one of the girls,” I said. “Bree. She’s in the group but she’s not the leader. She’s the one who watches. The witness.”

“The witness is always complicit,” Abbott said, and she said it fast, like she’d been waiting to say it. “That’s the whole thing. The girl who watches is not neutral. She’s choosing to watch. She’s choosing not to act. And the not-acting is an action. It’s the most important action in the story, because it’s the one she’ll carry for the rest of her life. Not what Jolene did — what she didn’t do while Jolene did it.”

“Jolene,” McCarthy said, trying the name.

“The queen. The one who builds kingdoms out of nothing. Five girls and a borrowed truck and the back roads of a dying town — she turns that into a structure, a hierarchy, something that matters. Something that gives these girls a shape when everything around them is shapeless.”

McCarthy set his cup down on the gravel. “The boy.”

“Garlan Prewitt,” I said.

“A Prewitt.” He said the name like it meant something to him, or like it meant something to the landscape, which might have been the same thing. “Living in a shack by the creek. Burns on his body. The town’s already decided about him.”

“That’s from Child of God,” I said. “Lester Ballard. The person the community has expelled. The one they’ve decided about before — ”

“Don’t explain my own work to me.”

I shut up. Abbott pushed her sunglasses up onto her head and looked at me with an expression that was sympathetic and also amused, the way you might look at a dog that tried to jump onto a counter and missed.

“The question,” she said, “is what Jolene wants from him. And it can’t be simple. It can’t be desire, though there’s desire in it. It can’t be pity, though there’s pity. It has to be something she can’t name, something that operates below language, in the body. She goes down to the creek and touches his scars and what she’s doing is — I don’t have the word for it.”

“Claiming,” McCarthy said.

Abbott turned her head and looked at him. For a moment neither of them spoke. The word sat between them like something set on a table.

“Yes,” she said. “Claiming. She’s claiming him. The way she’s claimed the other girls. But the other girls were willing — they wanted to be inside her structure. Garlan doesn’t want anything. He’s outside wanting. He lives in a plywood shack and carves birds from creek wood and talks to water. He’s not inside the system of wanting and being wanted that Jolene runs. And that’s what draws her. The thing she can’t claim is the thing she needs most.”

“The boy is not a metaphor,” McCarthy said. “That is the mistake you will make if I do not stop you from making it. The boy is not a symbol of what Jolene can’t have. The boy is a boy. He has scars and he has a stone shelf with water-damaged books and he has hung wooden birds from sycamore branches on fishing line and they turn in the wind like prayers offered to nothing. He is a human being living in the aftermath of violence that was done to him by the person who was supposed to keep him alive. If you turn him into a metaphor for a girl’s desire, you have done to him on the page what the town does to him in the story. You have decided what he is before you know what he is.”

The silence after that was long enough that I could count the sounds inside it. The cooler humming. The creek. A bird, somewhere in the tree line, making a sound like a question it had been asking for a long time without getting an answer.

“You’re right,” Abbott said. She said it flat, without pleasure or resentment, the way you acknowledge a hand you’ve lost. “But here’s what I’ll push back on. You say the boy is not a metaphor. Fine. He’s not a metaphor. He’s a person. But the girls are also people, and what happens between them — the loyalty, the hierarchy, the way Jolene can freeze someone out for two weeks and then readmit them — that’s not metaphor either. That’s the architecture of female adolescence. It’s real in the same way the creek is real. It has its own physics.”

“I did not say it wasn’t real.”

“You said the place was the story and the girls were what happens in it. That makes them events. Weather. I want them to be the geography. I want the reader to feel the hierarchy the way they feel the karst — as something under the surface that shapes everything above it, that opens up without warning.”

McCarthy stood up from his bucket. He was taller than I expected and he moved the way old men who’ve spent time outdoors move — slowly, with a precision that suggests the body is being managed rather than inhabited. He walked to the edge of the lot where the gravel gave way to dirt and the dirt gave way to the tree line, and he stood there looking down the slope toward the creek.

“The creek does not care about your hierarchy,” he said, without turning around. “The creek runs downhill because that is what water does. If a girl puts her hand on a burned boy’s chest, the creek does not notice. If a girl hits another girl in a parking lot, the creek does not stop. The land is not your accomplice. It is not your mirror. It does not reflect your themes back to you. It is there and it will be there and the people are temporary and the water is not and that is the whole of it.”

I said something then that surprised me, because I had not planned to say it and was not sure I believed it. I said: “But the narrator hears something in the creek. At the end. She drives through that country years later and she hears something in the water. Something she can’t quite name. And maybe it’s not that the creek is talking to her — maybe it’s that she’s become the kind of person who needs to hear something in the creek because the alternative is that it all happened for no reason, in a place that didn’t notice.”

Abbott looked at me. McCarthy did not turn around.

“That’s the story,” Abbott said quietly. “Right there. A girl who needs the landscape to mean something because if it doesn’t, then what she did — or what she didn’t do — is just a thing that happened. Not a tragedy. Not a crime. Just gravity.”

“Gravity is sufficient,” McCarthy said. He was still facing the trees.

“Gravity is not sufficient for a fifteen-year-old girl. Gravity is for men who’ve already decided that meaning is a luxury. For a girl who let her best friend get hit in the mouth and did nothing — who stood there with her arms crossed because that was what the queen required — gravity is not enough. She needs it to mean something. She needs the creek to have said something. Otherwise she’s just a coward.”

“She is a coward.”

“She is. But she doesn’t know it yet. She doesn’t know it for years. The story is the years between the cowardice and the knowing.”

McCarthy turned around. His face gave away nothing. “What happens to the boy.”

“They take him,” I said. “The county. Someone tells, and the sheriff goes down to the creek, and they find what they expected to find because they’d already decided what they would find. They see the knife and the animal bones and the filth. They don’t see the books or the birds.”

“They don’t see the birds,” McCarthy repeated.

“Because they’re not looking for birds. They’re looking for the thing they already named him.”

He walked back to his bucket and sat down. He picked up his Styrofoam cup and looked into it and set it back down. “That is the truest thing about a small place. It decides about you before you arrive. You are born into a name and the name has already been lived in by people who ruined it, and you walk around inside that ruined name and nobody sees you through it. They see the name. The boy is a Prewitt. He lives in a shack. His father is in prison. The story was finished before it started.”

“And Jolene?” Abbott said. “Jolene is a girl from a known family. When the county comes to investigate, they investigate him. Not her. Because she has a name that still works.”

“Names are not the subject.”

“Names are exactly the subject. Who gets named dangerous and who gets named victim and who gets to do the naming. That’s every crime story ever written. The crime isn’t the punch or the removal of the boy or the betrayal — the crime is the taxonomy. The sorting. The decision about what things are before you’ve looked at them long enough to see.”

I wanted to ask about the ending. About Bree, years later, driving through that country. About her fist closed around nothing. I wanted to ask whether the story should arrive at understanding or refuse it, whether Bree should know what happened to her or only know that something did. But I could feel the conversation pulling away from resolution, refusing to land, and I thought that was probably right. That the story should come from this place — from the unfinished argument between a writer who wants the land to be the meaning and a writer who wants the body to be the meaning and a narrator who stands between them on sharp gravel, trying to hear what the creek says, which is nothing, which is everything, which is the sound of water finding the lowest point because that is what water does.

Abbott finished her Coke and set the bottle on the windowsill of the gas station. “One more thing,” she said. “The narrator. Bree. She says she loved Jolene. She says it early. She says it’s the truest thing she’ll say. And the rest of the story is about whether love is even the right word for what she felt, or if she’s using the word love the way the creek uses the word water — because there isn’t another word available, and the thing itself is too big for the word, or maybe the word is too big for the thing.”

“Love is not a word the creek uses,” McCarthy said.

“No,” Abbott said. “It isn’t.”

She put her sunglasses back on. McCarthy looked at the tree line. I sat on the gravel with my hands empty and my notebook closed and I listened to the water, which said nothing, which kept on saying it.