If Roads Change Their Names...

By David M Patteson and Rebecca L Taylor

If Roads Change their names, if Courthouse becomes Huegenot, then Cary, then Route Five, then why can't Stu become Mohamed or Lisa become Athena? In this collection of stories, photo journals, and poems, David Patteson and Rebecca Taylor explore the intersection of travel and change, how venturing into unknown geographies, whether physical or sp

• Language: English
• Publisher: BEK N DAVE PUBLISHING
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781956092097

Book preview

If Roads Change Their Names...

If Roads Change Their Names...

David Patteson and Rebecca Taylor

Helton Creek Publishing

If Roads Change Their Names...

This is a work of fiction and nonfiction. All characters, descriptions, events, and accounts portrayed in the fictional stories, except for certain historical references, are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of non-historical story characters to persons living or dead is coincidental.

The true story Amos was performed for the RISK show at the Broadberry in Richmond, Virginia, 2016.

In the Merge and Escape originally appeared in Lingering in the Margins: A River Poets Anthology, 2019.

Breakers won 2nd place in the Poetry Society of Virginia contest on the theme: Honoring Fatherhood, 2022.

Copyright © 2023 by David Patteson and Rebecca Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Printing, 2023

Are we there yet?

Kids.

Acknowledgements

Dave would like to acknowledge his deep gratitude to Cathy Hill and Ward Howarth for their careful reviews. He would also like to personally thank the members of his writer’s critique group: Judith D. Howell, Joe Erhardt, Cathy Hill, Julie Hebner, Linda Lyons-Bailey, George Klein, and Archie Abaire. You guys covered his blind spots.

He would also like to thank the members of his poetry critique group: Joanna Lee, Marsha Owens, Judy Melchiorre, Michele Riedel, Trevor Tingle, Vernon Wildy Jr., Debbie Collins, Dorinda Wegner, Brian King, Govind Narayan, A. Logan Hill, and Nan Ottenritter.

And his lovely wife, whose literary insights challenge him to be a more empathic writer.

Becky would like to thank all the lovely people who helped her get to Haiti, you know who you are, and especially her biggest zephyr, Emily Moss.  The trip and all the wonderful art and friendship that has come of it are all because of you. She'd also like to thank Dave, Lillie, and Mom, her biggest fans and most loyal encouragement. Finally, to all of the people who have taken the time to read Becky's work, your surprising compliments boosted her confidence and provided the motivation for her writing to even exist. Thank you so much.

Contents

Poem: Our Maps

Collage: Voices

One The Hills (Excerpts from a Novel)

Two On the Road in Haiti; A Photo Journal

Three Short Stories

Four Short Stories; Nonfiction

Five Coming Back; A Novella

Paintings

Six Poetry

Poem: Our Maps

Our Maps

We ink our migrations around cloverleafs,

through bottlenecks, mixing bowls,

over indecisive squirrels, past speeding toothpick trees—

moving and turning so fast—no room to be wrong—

every stop and turn tattooed into muscle memory.

We race there and back

with salmon-faced indifference,

obeying the signs saying East

though the Sun says West.

It is when we venture off course

that we find ourselves lost at every turn—

Which is the best way to go?

Will left lead to Pacific overlooks?

Will right to that Brown-Eyed Girl?

Will Straight just go on and on

narrowing from two lanes to one,

to a vanishing trace,

that leaves no room for

turning back?

Collage: Voices

Mixed Media Collage

Rebecca Taylor

One

The Hills (Excerpts from a Novel)

Northern Laos, 1964

Troy squirts a gob of grease onto the blistering hot rotor shaft. His crew of Air America transport officers has landed their Choctaw on a dirt runway—built and abandoned by the Japanese in WWII—and dropped their load of rice, five crates of M14 rifles, an M60 machine gun, a thirty-caliber machine gun, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, a crate of fragmentation grenades, about twenty chickens, two pigs, and actual rice, for a platoon of grateful Hmong soldiers. Not one of these soldiers can speak a lick of English, and most have never seen a helicopter before.

He shoves a crate toward a boy who looks to be about 80 pounds with the will but not the muscle to lift and transfer it to their ox-drawn wagon. Troy reminds himself that he is arming them against the Chinese Pathet Lao, commie butchers who attack their villages, burn their crops and separate their families. The soft rice, food and medicine, are permitted under the ’62 Geneva Accords. The hard rice, guns and ammo, aren’t. These skinny farmers are our front line against the commies. If they fall, Nam falls, then Thailand., like Eisenhower said, dominoes, Troy reminds himself.

He wipes his brow and seats himself on the copter roof where he observes about a dozen Hmong villagers to his east, all wearing red ribbons, carrying what appears to be a body in a zigzag route, from bush to bush, up the side of a hill. A white-haired old man leads them, playing a reed connected to a series of bent bamboo pipes of different lengths. The sound reminds Troy of the lonesome, drawn-out fiddle notes he’d heard over and over as a child growing up on his parent’s farm in the Appalachian Mountains.

Hey, Xov? Troy yells down.

What?

Troy points at the procession. What’re they doin’?

Funeral, Xov says.

Why do they go from bush to bush like that?

"They hide from the dab spirits."

Dab?

"Evil. Dab evil. The dab keeping him from his ancestors. They helping him get to his ancestors."

The dead guy?

Yeah. Xov points at the leader who plays on the reed instrument. "The txiv neeb ...   healer."

What? Troy’s ears are still ringing from the recent scream of the copter’s Cyclone radial engine.

The healer ...   spirit guide—same thing, Xov yells and points. Him.

Hey, Evan, the pilot, yells up at Troy after taking a piss. How’s that rotor shaft?

Hot as hell, Troy replies. He notices a box turtle crawling toward the jungle—carrying his home on his back.

How hot? Evan sounds annoyed. I wanna beat that storm back.

Troy turns and sees a dark sky to the north. Red panties hot.

She’ll hafta burn. That storm’s no joke.

Yessir. Troy presses a last dollop of grease into the shaft and prays that it’ll do. He looks for but doesn’t see the turtle.  

Troy mouths hot and blows Hector, the copilot, a kiss as he descends past the cockpit, swings into the cargo door, and grabs a seat in the bulkhead next to Xov. He feels like a kid on his first train ride every time the copter lifts off. First, there’s the scream of the Choctaw’s radial engine awakening the four-bladed main and rear rotors, then the slow buildup to the chop-chop as the blades pick up speed, then the wobble of the ship as it leaves earth, and finally the upward torque as it takes off into the sky like some awesome magic carpet that Troy has a part in.

Okay, Grandpa, take us home. As crew chief, Troy had the honor of naming their copter. This one was an older ship that had seen a lot of action but was reliable, so he named it Grandpa. Troy knows the copter on an intimate level. He knows all too well the tendency for the rotor shaft to overheat, for oil strainers to clog, for tires to blow out, and for the magnesium body to corrode and even catch fire.

As if that wasn’t enough, all the Choctaw copters were equipped with functional instrument flight rule (IFR) controls which were anything but functional. These controls were designed for fixed-wing craft, not helicopters, and so didn’t account for the copter’s erratic movements, instability, and variable speed. Any minor correction based on the IFR reading would translate into extreme adjustments of the copter, each correction becoming self-compounding, like overcorrecting a fishtailing car. For this reason, seasoned copter pilots preferred the eyes of their crew and contour maps to get them through tight spots.

After ten minutes the storm cuts off their path and forces them to drop below the cloud deck where they can continue to navigate visually. Due to the noise and the unusual design of the Choctaw, with its raised cockpit and rotor shaft dividing the crew from the pilots, Troy and Xov can’t communicate directly with the pilots but must rely on the helicopter’s intercom.   

Troy takes his post at the cargo door and Xov looks down the hell-hole—a small opening on the floor—as the copter follows a stream running through a steep mountain gorge.

 Tree-line thirty meters west, Troy transmits to the pilots.

Field half klick northwest, Xov transmits, apparently spotting a safe-enough place to land and weather out the storm.

A wind shear pushes the copter into the tree line along the eastern mountain slope.

Bank left! Bank left! Troy shouts as the rotors shred the tree canopy, shooting branches and leaves into the swirling dark sky.

The pilot attempts to correct but it’s too late. A rotor catches the steep hillside and flips the copter into the mountainside, catapulting Troy out the cargo door.

***

Up Sam. Sam? Sam? Up Sam … Sam … Sam ...    Sam is the name the locals give to all Americans. He opens his eyes to an Asian face perched on a branch beside him. He looks down and sees about a dozen more, at the foot of the tree he landed in. A couple of them carry rifles, others machetes. A boy of about 10 carries a basket of papaya. He can see through only one swollen eye so can’t tell if the guns are Kalashnikovs or M14s. If M14s, he’d know they were friendlies. If Kalashnikovs, he’d be screwed. Several thorns from the locust branch that caught him won’t let go of the flesh beneath his armpit. The Asian tugs at his arm and Troy’s flesh rips free and he plunges to the ground.

He awakens to sleek black hair framing the face of an Asian girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen. He recalls his mission instructor’s warning weeks ago, back in Vientiane: The soldier’s worst fate is to die on foreign soil, far away from home and family. The words didn’t register at the time because Troy had no intention of dying in Laos. Now they feel like a judge’s verdict.

Troy also recalls, in gruesome detail, stories of the various tortures the communist Pathet Lao soldiers loved to inflict upon their prisoners: bamboo shoots crammed under fingernails, fire ants thrown onto bare skin, feces smeared into wounds, sexual tortures involving diseased prostitutes, daily beatings, starvation. Troy had rolled his eyes at such horror stories, figuring they were just meant to scare new recruits. Now, he’s not so sure. Still, he thinks he can tolerate any torture if it ends in him getting home to his family.

His wife, Theresa, would hold him and take care of him. He’d play catch in the backyard with his three boys, now three, five, and nine. Just being a normal American dad suddenly became his greatest and only ambition in life.

Home, Troy wheezes. I want to go home.

The girl places her palms together before her mouth and bows.

Home!

"Koj tuaj los," the girl replies. She pushes a wad of dark gray gum into his mouth and mimes chewing.

Troy obeys. He’s too scared not to. The gum has a sweet papaya flavor at first, then becomes bitter. Slowly the pain dulls, replaced by mellow weightlessness, then sleep.

He walks up a trail bordered by tall grass. A far-off reed plays somewhere ahead of him. He stops at a three-way fork in the trail. One winds up a crooked, dark mountain hollow; another descends into thick fog. He continues straight.

Giant green and yellow caterpillars, some the size of school buses, with rows of V-shaped legs, spiky black horns, and long green and white-striped antennae munch on the tall hay bordering the trail.

A tiger emerges from the hay, and Troy tries to load his M14 with cigarettes, but the cigarettes are wet and fall apart before he can squeeze them into the clip.

Goddamned rifle! Goddamned army! Fuck Uncle Sam! The tiger disintegrates into mist, but the mournful whining of the reed continues.

Troy awakens to a headache so intense that he vomits onto the hut’s dirt floor. The same girl who gave him the poppy gum throws dirt over his mess and wipes it off his chest and stomach with a wet rag. She bows again, palms clasped together as before, then applies a dark, honey-like substance to sores along his side. On top of his headache, Troy struggles to get air. He assumes he punctured a lung and suffered a concussion in the crash. Then he notices a string on his wrist and tugs at it, thinking he’s been tied up.

The girl pushes his hand away. Khi tes.

An old man clanging finger bells—Troy assumes he’s the village shaman—throws ox horns to the ground and burns joss money as he dances around a supine body on the hut floor. Several Hmong villagers sit in a semi-circle around the body and the dancing shaman.

Xov? Troy asks, gesturing toward the body.

Jao, she replies—yes.

Is he alive?

Niam, niam! A naked child, maybe three, interrupts and tugs at the girl.

Tsaug naum, the girl says and places another wad of dark gray gum in Troy’s mouth and mimes chewing. Troy obeys, welcoming its pain-numbing, opiate effects.

He is walking again, on a trail beside a rice field that becomes tall corn. He runs through it until he finds himself in a dark hut surrounded by old people. He recognizes his grandmother and hugs her. Then his grandfather and his parents appear and they’re in their kitchen on their farm in Tennessee, and his wife and he has four children, not three, that come into the hut, now a farmhouse, and they’re all bundled up because it’s snowing and the kitchen door is open. I need to fix that door, his dad says.

Phone? Troy calls into the night, not knowing where he is. When he realizes he moans, Help me! Please! His head feels like it’s about to explode.

Then the girl is back at his side with another bow and more poppy gum.

Tsuag zog, she says and puts it in Troy’s palm this time. Troy tosses the raw opium in his mouth and chews, eagerly anticipating its pleasurable, pain-numbing escape to dreamland.

He looks up at a vine descending from high in a tree and hears the familiar chop-chop as he grips the vine and lets it pull him up to the tree crown. There he finds Uncle Sam in the cockpit of a helicopter wearing his shiny red, white, and blue hat and suit.

Home! Troy cries.

He waits as Uncle Sam consults with the president of Laos—Troy can’t remember the Lao president’s name and hopes no one asks him to say it. The president gives Uncle Sam a stack of papers.

***

In the Lao hospital, and later in the German hospital, Troy relates his opium-induced dreams to anyone who’ll listen. The nurses and doctors listen, but none can offer any insight to the meaning of his experiences. Troy wishes Xov were around to explain to him what they went through. He learns later that Xov died of his injuries and was buried in that Hmong village.

After Troy returns home, he searches the Falls Church Library for any books or articles on Hmong culture. He finds one article in an anthropology journal. From it he learns that the instrument he saw the spirit guide playing back in Laos and heard while recuperating in their hut is called a queej reed. That the queej reed, with its poignant notes, is used to call a sick person’s soul back to his body. He learns that the Hmong believe that no healing can happen without the aid of the soul, which is why the spirit guide serves the dual roles of healer and priest.

The khi tes string, he reads, is meant to tie the spirit back into the body, to keep it from escaping.

That evening, while play-wrestling on the living room carpet with his two younger sons, Tommy and Ricky, Tommy grips the worn khi tes string on his dad’s wrist and yanks it off. Troy tries to snatch it back, but Tommy playfully keeps it from him.