Pine Grove Gothic: (A Drugged Family)

By Curtis Martin

Pine Grove Gothic is more about the times than it is the story itself. The characters live, react to, and disintegrate in the world of rampant drug use in a rural area of Appalachia. Hidden from the general public due to poor media coverage, this novel attempts to break open the lives of people, families, and children affected by this scourge. This is not a happy, hopeful, or moral uplifting story. It is fierce and honest, tragic, and there is not positive outcome.

Pine Grove Gothic revolves around Raymond Duvall and his family and their lives in the Pine Grove Trailer Park. Raymond is an angry alcoholic. Lynn is addicted to heroin. Raven and Pup are their children who struggle with the addictions that drive their parents from day to day, hour by hour. The trailer park is a menagerie of characters from other drug addicts, to the morbidly obese, and those with chronic medical conditions. But this isn’t exceptional, it’s everyone’s reality. There is the murder of Mrs. Keirns. There is the need to get more heroin. There is the tremendous stress of profound poverty.

Pine Grove Gothic is about everyone’s struggle in the milieu of drugs and what it takes to get them. The traditional roles of husband, wife, and family are shattered by this ever- present struggle. Since childhood, a childhood filled with abuse, Lynn knows what she has to do to get her required fix. Raymond tries his best to fulfill her needs, but his love of alcohol since the age of twelve keeps him from providing for Lynn and his children. Raven, nine, is her brother’s protector, shielding him as best she can from their tough reality; from their father. Pup, seven, is delayed by the effects of drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. He is on potent medication to curb is aggression and ADHD. He finds his solace in his sister, the stray dog, Roy, and the woods and creek that run along the trailer park. The two siblings witness and are victims of their parents addiction; suffering from lack of food, to being in the trailer while Raymond makes methamphetamine, to finding Lynn overdosed on a variety of lethal drugs. In the end the Duval family dissolves under the overwhelming pressure.

Pine Grove Gothic is for the reader who wants action and a compelling story line and not in five hundred or a thousand pages. The murder of Mrs. Keirns is brutal. Sex is without love. The story is current but generational. The role of legal and illegal drug use affects us all. When Lynn is asked by a TV reporter what will stop her addition, Lynn relies, “Probably a casket.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Curtis Martin
• Release date: Jun 6, 2017

Book preview

I

CHAPTER ONE

88 degrees. On a hot, stuffy June day, which is typical for this rural area of the state, Raymond James Duvall, the Second, sits on a kitchen chair outside his single-wide mobile home. He’s watching the neighborhood kids, some of them, splash in the new blue Walmart pool Sheila Cantor installed for the summer season. The novelty of the pool has kids wading in the cold, recently filled water up to their nose. The young mothers are carrying their babies in their arms, and the bigger kids playing splashing and dunking. Most wear makeshift swimsuits of T-shirts, cut off shorts, and ill-fitting one pieces from the summer before. He and the vinyl-covered chair rest on the rickety wooden stoop, three steps above the cement pad where the short wheel based purple Geo sits. Some tenants have aluminum covers over their pads; those that can say they have carports.

Raymond is disabled because of his nerves. He has a nervous condition that makes it impossible to keep at a job for very long. At the moment, he is nervous for a cigarette and a beer, of which he has neither. Raymond is five foot nine, a hundred and sixty-five pounds. That’s what his driving license documented when he had one. His jet-black hair is parted in the middle, and his shaggy over his ears. He wears a pair of nylon white gym shorts with navy blue piping down the sides, and a pair of Walmart brand flip-flops.

Lynn’s voice is heard admonishing the kids from inside the trailer. Can’t you kids go find somethin’ ta do besides sit in here and watch cartoons! You ain’t spendin’ your whole summer vacation in this trailer. Now get!"

Raymond stands up and moves himself and the yellow covered chair out of the way, knowing what’s coming next. Pup (Raymond James Duvall, the Third) and Raven come blasting outside, throwing the glassless aluminum screen door open. Pup is in the lead. The hydraulic arm that is meant to control the opening and closing of the protective outside door, like the two panels of glass, have long since been broken. Raymond was responsible for the top pane being shattered. Slow down there, Pup. You’re going to end up falling again. I won’t take ya to the hospital agin’.

Raymond puts his chair back in place. Neither Pup nor Raven pays any attention to him. Damn kids, he scoffs to no one. They run towards the four-foot-high round pool in bare feet, cut off shorts and t-shirts from Goodwill. You just can’t get that kid to slow. That was his major problem in school. Raymond doesn’t see how Raven keeps up with him. Good thing she is older with longer legs. Raven has black hair like him. Nine. Pup is seven and favors his mother. It is going to be a long summer with the kids hanging around all day long, everyday. Raymond likes it better when they are in school, getting off the bus at four-thirty. They’d eat and be in bed by ten, hardly putting a strain on his days. Raymond yells through the broken door to Lynn, who he hopes, was still in earshot. Honey-Bunny, you seen the weed eater?

Chapter Two

There’s no response. Raymond doesn’t try again. He knows Lynn’s routine. He knows it would be futile. Even if she had heard him, she has more important things to attend too. Raymond scans his domain. The trailer lot has sparse grass. Tall sprigs that need attending too; some blades and weeds grow up around the broken bicycle that had been there since two days after Christmas, the wheels missing, turned upside down,and other abandoned toys. There’s a bag of cans he has intended to take to the recycling center since November. He sold the white knobby tires to help Lynn. But no weed eater.

Before stepping off his perch, he watches Pup climb the pool ladder and do a cannonball among the throng of swimmers without regard to them or the two ladies playing lifeguard on the side. They get drenched and Raymond laughs. Sheila and her neighbor, Rhonda, squeal. Sheila irked, Pup! Iffen you don’t stop it right now, I’m not lettin’ you and Raven swim in the pool. You hear me? Rhonda hands Shelia a towel and the two chubby friends wipe the brisk, chlorine water from their summer-exposed flesh. Sheila adds, You want me to go get your daddy? Raven copies her brother’s splash into the pool. Raymond goes down the uneven, splintery steps. Hearing what Shelia said, Raymond yells back, Yeah, and I’ll call the sheriff about all those extra pain pills you and your old man keep around, too. He laughs seeing the two fat girls struggle to get all of their skin dry. As Raven clears the water from her eyes after resurfacing, she hopes Ray doesn’t come over and spoil the fun for everyone.

Raymond carefully walks around the lot looking for the broken electric lawn tool. There have been many occasions where people have tossed dirty syringes in the grass, or shattered broken bottles on the asphalt street out front for sport and the shards finding their way into the feet of he and his family. The tan trailer with brown trim is typical of most of the aluminum homes in the park, seventy-two by fifteen. The biggest difference being, he doesn’t rent. He and Lynn bought the thousand square foot single wide right after they got together forever, when he still worked full time changing tires at Walmart. He got real close to be being Assistant Manager before all the trouble started.

The width of the trailer faces the street. The length of the trailer runs back towards the two-lane highway which heads to town five miles east. The next trailer over is a mere twenty feet away. Close enough to hear Bill and Jean fight or fuck. The dividing line between the two easily delineated. Bill keeps his grass cut. Raymond walks around two bald tires, and a deflated kickball. The bathroom window is extending above his head. Gauging from the time the kids ran out of the house and now, Raymond figured Lynn was inside the small vanity with the door locked, preparing her morning medicine. As if he was standing in the lavatory watching her, he was seeing her from the outside, brewing the mixture of tar heroin and water in the blackened spoon. The lighter and syringe. Lynn has burned anywhere from one hundred to two hundred dollars a day of the opiod over the last year. It was getting so bad there wasn’t much money for anything else, like food. The EBT card, a mortgage voucher, SSI for Pup, and his disability check barely keeps their head above water. Raymond often worries what would happen if something happened to Lynn. What if she overdosed and died and he was left with the kids all alone? He wouldn’t know what to do with a seven and nine-year-old. Raven would have to do a lot more around the house, that was for sure. Luckily, the state was making it real easy to get the antidote to counteract the toxin if Lynn took much, or there was a more potent dose floating through town. Pretty soon she would come out. She was calm, high, and not agitated and anxious like she was this morning when the effects of the drug wears off. Worse, when there isn’t any more to be had.

A panel of underpinning is missing. It’s where he had removed it late last fall when a family of gophers had gotten up into the insulation under the floor. Their scratching and clawing kept them awake at night. With Lynn’s urging he had crawled under the trailer, through the damp, muddy, cold dirt on his knees to get the furry rodents. The mother had put up quite a fight, but he finally subdued them. He took them all wadded up in a trash bag to the creek that runs along the length of the trailer park flowing towards town, where it connects with the Albert River. He had long forgotten the sound of their frantic cries as he held the bag under the cold water. The black plastic handle is sticking out from the missing panel. Pup must have been playing with it like he was whacking down the weeds, imitating the sound of the whirring plastic twine. As he was reaching down to pull the rest of the green implement out, a brown blur of a dog came running out from under the trailer causing him nearly to fall backwards. His jittery heart palpates. It worries him, often. He’s had a heart attack.

The tan and white mutt high tails it out to the street and was gone so fast Raymond wonders if it was a dog, maybe it was a coyote. There are plenty of those feral beasts around. You can hear them crying out across the hills in the dead of the night. Raymond picks up Pup’s toy and starts for Mrs. Keirns’ trailer at the end of the street.

Chapter Three

There are nearly fifty trailers in the Pine Grove Trailer Park. There is an entrance, and an exit. An asphalt lane runs from one end to the other. Mrs. Keirns lives near the entrance, near the park office. Raymond shuffled toward his benefactors aluminum home. The heat and humidity are oppressive. A sweat breaks out on Raymond’s skin as it does on anybody outside. That’s why most are inside, those not at work. There was generally more activity at the beginning and end of the month when the rent comes due and new people move in. Consequently, Raymond only knew a few of his fellow Pinegrovians.

Pine Grove catered to a transient clientele. The Duvall’s are one of the more established family’s in Pine Grove. But Mrs. Keirns is the last of the original residents, having moved in with her late husband, Gerald in 1978. Being the middle of the month, Raymond is surprised to see a poorly mufflered Ford pickup truck pull in up ahead of him. It was loaded with somebody’s world of a bed frame, washer and dryer, TV, and sundry items. The truck is dark blue, but it has a white passenger side door. There is a woman at the wheel. She seemed to be driving and looking for an address or a landmark with her head looking left and right and working a standard transmission. There is no one in the passenger seat, or anyone standing in the bed trying to hold the household furnishings down against the highway wind. From what he can see at the distance is she’s blonde and thin. He puts a hand up to his brow to shade against the sun to better see which empty trailer it was headed to. Pine Grove doesn’t have any pines to block the sun and provide shade, becausehey were cut down years ago when people complained about the thick sap getting on their cars and homes. The twenty-year-old F 150 pulls up to the park office.

Raymond’s thirsty for a beer, and has been for days. He loves to drink. The nerve pills he takes, the Ativan and Xanax bars help. But alcohol has its own special quality. And mixed with the psychotropic duo; now that’s a tranquil time, till somebody wants to start trouble. Life would be a great deal better and easier if he could use the EBT card for beer and whiskey. The government doesn’t understand what life is like for a man with nerves like his.

Pup and Raven are calmly playing with the other kids. Raven waves at him and asks him if he wants to get in. I can’t, honey. I gotta go see Mrs. Keirns, and keeps on walking by. Pup ducks underwater. The trailers are quiet, or there’s a small stir of activity. He smells pot at one. Hears a soap opera on TV in another. Someone is frying up lunch.

Bald headed, Curly, lives a rental. He weighs over six hundred pounds and can’t get through the door any longer. The local volunteer fire department will have to cut him out of the tin box like he was in a wrecked car when he has to go to the hospital next time. Curly’s wife is half his size. She waddles about, keeping a plate in Curly’s face all day long. He eats a dozen eggs in the morning; Hot Pockets till lunch. Curly’s fat kids run around the trailer park with something always in their hands to eat. Pepsi is their milk.

Lonny lives in another of the tightly grouped trailers. There’s a ramp up to the front door. He has emphysema, and doesn’t have the air necessary to go to the store even with his bottle of oxygen. He started smoking at ten when finding out tobacco helped take away the hunger he often had as a kid. His wife, Elaine, died of congestive heart failure last year. Lonny, the fifty-six-year-old, sits in there alone, waiting his turn to stop breathing while smoking cigarettes with a nasal cannula up his nostrils. On the stand next to his recliner is an inhaler, a breathing treatment when he needs one, which is often. When the breathing gets really bad, like there’s cotton stuffed in his ruined lungs, he dials 911, about twice a month. When Lonny’s wife died at four in the morning, he had come and got him, using what air he had to get himself across the trailer park on his motorized scooter. To this day, Raymond doesn’t understand why Lonny had done that before dialing 911. Once he had given the chronic lunger a cigarette. A couple of others he knows in the aluminum homes while he strolls by, but for the most part if someone lives in Pine Grove more than six months, they’re homesteaders.

Davis Lowery sits in the shade under his carport. The mid-twenties boy-man is talking on a cell phone, smoking a cigarette. Davis has his skinny legs crossed, and chats and giggles, puffing between chuckles. He wears t frayed jean shorts that dare sight of