Free Shaking the Sugar Tree by Nick Wilgus Page A

lay down as well, propping his head on my leg, munching carrots and watching Robert Downey Jr. get the bad guys as I read about the history of the Zombie wars, thinking to myself that this was a real horror novel.
    When would I ever have such a good idea to work with?
    But your best idea is currently using your leg for a pillow, isn’t it?
    I glanced down at Noah.
    Would writing about him be such a crime?
    I thought of a million and one things I could say straight off the top of my head with utterly no prompting and no editorial sweat. I’d have an eight-hundred-page novel in no time. I’d call it something mysterious like What the Deaf Boy Heard. I’d talk about the travails of a gay man raising a deaf meth baby in the South.
    Only one small problem. To tell his story properly, I would have to confess to what I did. The stupidity of a gay man letting himself be talked into thinking he needed to have a girlfriend, and needed to have sex with her to prove he was a man. The stupidity of crystal meth. Getting a girl pregnant with a child that would have birth defects because the two of you were passing a crack pipe back and forth while “finding” yourselves.
    There was no way I’d come across pretty in such a tale. I could easily imagine my mom reading this book and being furious with me for shaming the whole family, washing our dirty laundry in public like redneck trailer trash on the Jerry Springer Show.
    And what if Noah could read well enough one day to read with his own eyes what his father did, what his mother did? How would it make him feel, to know that he might have been a normal boy, part of the “normal” world of the hearing, but for the fact that his parents had smoked crystal meth?
    I glanced down at him, at the tumble of blond hair falling on my leg, at the way he stared so intently at the television screen as if afraid to miss a single moment.
    Would he still love me if he knew the truth?
    How much longer could I hide it from him?

19) Dead to me now
     
    T HE NEXT day, after work, I drove to New Albany. Not to see my mom but to see two people who might have been my mother-in-law and father-in-law in another life, Mr. and Mrs. Warren. They lived downtown in a solid brick house with fancy columns holding up the front porch. Carefully tended flowerbeds were sprinkled abundantly with color. A small army of rhododendron plants graced the front porch, hanging at evenly spaced intervals. The smell of crepe jasmine drifted on the air.
    I knocked hesitantly on the door.
    Mr. Warren answered, and he seemed neither surprised nor happy to see me.
    With his clipped fingernails and hint of cologne, it’s safe to say that Mr. Warren was not the sort of man you’d bump into at Walmart, but I could easily picture him sitting in front of his massive flat-screen television watching porn with a shot glass full of Jim Beam in one hand and a great big hunk of Velveeta cheese in the other, or doing whatever else it was these big time small-town sharks did when they weren’t screwing people out of their life’s savings or shooting the shit at the country club and whining about the goddamn Christless communist-loving federal guvmint and patting themselves on the back on how well the darkies were doing in the post-Jim Crow era as they worked at McDonald’s for frikkin’ minimum wage. But we couldn’t all have enough money to burn wet mules, now, could we, and ain’t that just the plain gosh darn truth?
    “How are you, sir?” I asked politely.
    “I’m about as fine as a frog hair split four ways,” he replied.
    “Frogs don’t have hair,” I pointed out.
    “Exactly,” he said.
    I walked smack into that one.
    “May I come in?” I asked.
    “What do you want, Wiley?”
    “Just to talk,” I said.
    He considered this in silence, not moving his solid bulk out of the way.
    “Reckon there ain’t much we have to talk about,” he said at last.
    “I’m trying to find out where Kayla is,” I admitted. “Her son