Hair unwashed. Eyes unlined. I never wear makeup when I fly…or gain any kind of altitude.

We stopped at a rest area so He could get a look at the mountains. Up close and personal. Ish. With a D200 and a pocket Sony. (I always like the pocket Sony pics best.)

We had been to Asheville before. A few years ago we even thought about buying a place there. Just for the winter. For the snow we never see – not really – no matter how cold it gets in England.

The first photo was taken on the NC/TN border. The second, in WV (by my brother). It’s my old back yard. Literally.

What you see belongs to the old man. Who still lives there, on miles and miles of mountains. He says he’ll move soon. Trade in the vastness that’s The Homeplace for something a little more manageable.

I don’t believe him.

So, I’m trying this thing where I share the love – and the traffic. It’s my new Sunday ritual. Right after worship, food and papers.

Jason Kottke’s been blogging about an interesting little competition over at Netflix. How sounds one million dollars to ya? (Yeah, I meant to write it that way.)

Bonnie Wren is busy procrastinating (a kindred soul she is) and providing Halloween fun for all. She also has some fine tips on how to avoid pumpkin bum – ’cause it happens to the best of us.

Miss Brittany Noelle, aka Glamabella, loves November for the shopping, the big elaborate meals and the red cups at Starbucks.

Photo courtesy of Glamabella.

Pt 3: I hoped Maroula wouldn’t turn out the same way, but worried that she would.

The paramedics arrived, and began checking her vitals and asking about allergies… “Chocolate and nuts. I know. Isn’t it terrible!”

Through the window I watched two officers put a bearded man into the backseat of a cruiser.

Bobby Loop did follow his wife. He sat crouched in a bush at the edge of the parking lot, just beyond the lights of the Quickie Mart. Waiting. The boys in blue picked him up beating hard through an empty field behind the convenience store. He still had his gun, and that look of cowardice most men like him wear when confronted by anyone who’s not a woman.

One of the officers told Maroula “It’s all ok, you don’t have to worry anymore” and looked at Jean like she was crazy when she pushed him out of the way and grabbed the girl by her shoulders.

“No! It ain’t OK. When he comes back and tells you he’s sorry and he loves you, and he will…they always do… don’t listen. Don’t listen cause when you do, he’ll kill you. He’ll kill you and he’ll put you in that pond just like he said he would. He’ll do it and you and me both know he’ll do it…You go back to your family. You hear me?”

Maroula nodded that she did. She promised she’d go home to her mother and the officer promised he’d do what he could to help her.

It was after 2am when I left the Quickie Mart. When I said goodbye to Jean and checked the back seat of my car for hidden hillbillies. A mile down the road I drove past the pond and it’s blackness.

I couldn’t help but think of what almost was. What could have been.

And what still, might be.

This is a true story. Only the names have been changed. Maroula was taken to a battered women’s shelter. Bobby Loop was taken to the local. I’ll get an email when he gets out.

Don’t be a victim. If you, or anyone you know, suffer from this type of pervasive abuse, call The National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) .

Pt 2: It takes a half a man to beat a woman…and I believed that half-a-man was outside waiting for her just beyond the fog…

The cops got there when they got there. I moaned about it later but I know the wait wasn’t as long as it felt – Time has a way of dragging on when you’re caught up in the middle of something.

Jean unlocked the door. Waved her hand out into the parking lot. “She says he’s out there. Say’s he has a gun.”

The officer glanced over her shoulder at Maroula, with a look that suggested he didn’t really believe in things that went bump in the night. When he asked “Is she drunk?” I wanted to throw a box of Virginia Slims at his head.

I didn’t. And after a good stare he told Jean to “Go back in and wait” and “Another car’s on it’s way.”

As Maroula begged the older woman to keep the door locked, I flashed back to offender profiling, victimology studies (see no.23) and EU prison law.

I remembered another woman, just a year earlier, who jumped from a third story window and broke most of the bones in her lower body after being tied to a boiling radiator for two weeks…A Legal Aid defence team who drug her through court and tried to paint her a drunkard and a whore…And the guy who did it, who claimed he was just-your-average-Joe engaging in some innocent, and entirely consensual, S&M. (He ended up getting a laughable two years in prison where he’s now moaning about the food and his human rights.)

I hoped Maroula wouldn’t turn out the same way, but worried that she would.

Continued…

Pt.1: I never said a word when Jean locked the three of us in under the neon lights of the Quickie Mart …

Jean asked the girl to repeat her name and then swapped the broom for something a little more substantial in dealing with a man who beat his wife – mace, machete, gun – and called for help.

“Quickie Mart on Route ‘X’,” The place had been robbed that many times, it had a direct line to the Sheriff’s Department. “There’s a woman in here’s been hurt pretty bad. Don’t know. But I’ve locked us up. Bring an ambulance.”

It wasn’t Maroula who scared me. Or even Jean and her little arsenal. It was ‘the outside’ that made my back hurt and my stomach turn.

The weather fell fast. In the time it took me to get out of the car and get stuck in the store the fog grew so ugly I couldn’t even make out the Dodge sitting at pump 6.

It was like that Stephen King story – And I swear I’m not going for effect here – where everyone gets trapped inside the grocers…where something hides in the fog to tear off limbs or faces, or to do whatever it is that fog creatures do.

Well, it was like that. Only our fog creature wasn’t completely unknown, at least not to one of us.

“My husband. He likes to do this. To hatefully beat me.” Maroula was crying again. Splitting her infinitives and telling us about the man she married. “He said he will kill me and put me in the pond. No one will know and I will be dead. In the water.” She talked until her swollen lip and the pressure of a broken rib made her stop.

Her husband, our fog thing, was a hick named Bobby Loop who wore brass belt buckles and had a penchant for liquor and guns. He met her on the internet. Flew to Greece to bring her home. Bypassed any immigration procedures which would have documented her presence in the country. Forbade her any friends, family or means of contact with the outside world.

“He says he can do what he wants with me. No one knows I’m here.” I believed every word Maroula said about the half-a-man. (Because it takes a half a man to beat a woman – believe that.) And I believed he was outside waiting for her just beyond the fog…just beyond the seeing.

Continued…

Her name was Moula. Or maybe Maroula. I couldn’t be sure. You don’t really pay attention to banalities when the next words are:

“He is coming to kill me. He is coming to kill me now.”

It was Friday night. I was in a service station on a backwood road somewhere west of I77 when the girl fell through the door. A distinct beat-all-to-hell look on her face.

Jean – I’d later learn the cashier’s name was Jean – picked up a broom and moved toward the almost dressed mess – keen on sweeping her out with the rest of the night’s rubbish. “Crack heads,” she said, “come in here all the time…off their skulls.”

The girl grabbed her hand. Hysterical. “No. He will kill me. Pleeeeaaase. He is coming.” She started crying in a different language. One I knew just enough from my Nicky Days to make out this:

“I have no family. He brought me here to beat me. He said he will kill me and no one will know.”

Jean stared at the girl. She didn’t know the language but she knew the look. The desperation. The sincerity.

The older woman spotted me gawking in the Twinkie isle, Red Bull and Little Debbie in hand. “You leave now or you don’t leave anytime soon.”

I heard, but didn’t listen. I was too busy wondering at the girl’s face. At her skinned feet and knees and the missing patch of hair that snagged on longer strands on its way down her back.

I never said a word when Jean locked the three of us in under the neon lights of the Quickie Mart but I did think ‘Great. I haven’t been in the country a week and I’m already gonna be on an episode of Cops.’

Continued…

Pt 1: I was five when I knew him. When I helped him hunt snakes in the mountains of West Virginia for Preacher Slaughter and the serpent handlers.

The snake handlers were a Pentecostal-Holiness offshoot, whispered about in dark corners of other Appalachian churches. A few hundred in number, a majority practiced their brand of ecstatic religion in one or three holler churches in southern West Virginia.

Most of the congregation of biblical literalists had never left the state, but Preacher Slaughter once went all the way to Alberta to see a Frenchman handle a cottonmouth.

By the time I came along, Whitley was seventy years past his own bout with serpents and salvation. Past his youth in Grasshopper Valley where he exercised the only real religious intentions he ever had – and got a wrist full of venom for the trouble.

His mother remained with the church, with the anointed, and reminded him that “God never said you wont get bit.” Whitley listened and then lit out for hell and high water as soon as his arm healed. But the sign followers followed him to Kentucky and then, somehow, on to the mountain state where he settled down with a wife and kids and forgot about all them, until they set up camp right down the river.

That’s when he knew that just like the Devil, if God wants to find a man, a whole heap of mountains can’t keep him hid.

Continued…

“They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them…” – Mark 16:18

Whitley was old and from Kentucky. His face, tanned and leathered, lost the elasticity needed to form expression sometime back in the sixties.

A pair of eyes some once called fine lay beneath a fringe of white. He never smiled or frowned or made much use of his head at all except to drink with or smoke with or just say nothing with.

He wore lonesome and proud like heavy flanneled overalls, even in the summer.

I was five when I knew him. When I helped him hunt snakes in the mountains of West Virginia for Preacher Slaughter and the serpent handlers.

Continued:

“The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

- William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech

Yesterday I hung out at the DMV- and yearned for French Bureaucracy.

I wanted to renew my nine-years-gone license. Only they wouldn’t renew it – mainly on the premise that busing around Europe isn’t quite the same as driving around America – and made me sit the whole shebang.

I lined up with a crew of pimply faced fifteen year olds and answered stupid questions about wonky suspension and bumpy roads. Then John Coffey from The Green Mile stepped up to administer the driving portion. John Coffey from The Green Mile barely fit into my car – but he fit. And off we went.

I did ok avoiding the squirrels on the 50 foot wide street with no markings because, lets face it, a ten year old could drive through a residential district like that. Still, with Coffey at your side, every thing’s intimidating. Five minutes in, we jump to a busier road and a 90 year old woman in a too-suped-up sedan decided to pull into my lane (Please note she was moving toward me, not with me).

I grew up dodging deer and opossums but not so much the old women in Mercedes. I panicked and pulled the only evasive maneuver I knew, which could have killed us just as easily as the grandma…and then said “Crap, I don’t know if I was suppose to do that.” John Coffey didn’t say a word.

Later, in front of the camera, I did get a rumbling “You can smile. If you want”. I tried. But it came out as a squint.

So here I am, for now. Back on the road. In the land of the SUV and the big ton truck…do my little Dodge and I even stand a chance?