Oregon Hill by Howard Owen

down here from Ohio.
    It is a testament to the Hill’s car culture that two of us have automotive references embedded in our names. R.P. is Richard Petty McGonnigal, because his father was a big NASCAR fan and thought it’d be funny to name the kid after the King. R.P. might have forgiven him for that addled idea, but I don’t think he’s forgiven his mother for actually going along with it.
    Goat, against all odds, is president of a small liberal arts college in Ohio that must not check résumés very carefully, and he’s managed to wangle a trip back home around the fact that his school has a dozen or so living alumni in the area who might die and leave something to their alma mater.
    He’s Goat because he worshipped GTOs long before he had one. In high school, he was way more interested in girls and cars than studies. I’m pretty sure R.P. and I both had better grades. But then he went into the Army, and then to Tech, and something happened—either the unalloyed joys of learning or a strong aversion to work. We have our suspicions.
    Anyhow, he stayed, and stayed, and stayed. His mother and father and half the Hill thought he was sandbagging. Eight years of college seemed excessive.
    He emerged with not one degree but three, and he was Dr. Francis Xavier Johnson, although his father complained that he couldn’t even write out a prescription for him. Goat always was a natural leader. He got Sammy Samms to enlist with him upon graduation, and almost got me and Andy to join, too. And here he is, gray and respectable. They’ll no doubt name a hall or a gym or something after him someday.
    Andy Peroni shows up, and we’re ready to go. The five of us can squeeze into the GTO. It was always a problem in high school, because six definitely did not fit. We tried. There were, on occasion, hurt feelings.
    “Sammy shoulda seen this,” R.P. says, and we all nod.
    John Wesley Samms, the one who has enabled us all to fit into one cruising land shark of a car. While Goat used the G.I. Bill to featherbed his future, Sammy, who always liked to party, came back to the Hill and was dead in five years of a cocaine overdose.
    “Well,” Goat says, “it’s a miracle there’s five of us left.”
    “How’s Peggy?” Andy asks.
    I tell him she’s the same, relating the basics of what’s going on with Les.
    “Well,” he says, “she’s a scrapper. She’ll be there for him.”
    I nod. He’s right. Even if sometimes you wish she was somewhere else, or at least straight and sober and in possession of a better asshole-detector, Peggy has had a habit of being there, if you really mattered.

    Growing up in Oregon Hill wasn’t easy for anyone. If your father was an African-American, current address unknown, the shit got exponentially deeper.
    Back then, the Hill was as white as a virgin’s wedding gown. It had been a working-class community, kind of a mill town hidden away inside a city, full of German and Irish and Italian ironworkers. By the time I came along, it was boxed in by Hollywood Cemetery on one side and Route 1 on the other, with the river behind us. When they built the Downtown Expressway, it became a little more isolated, which probably didn’t bother the rest of Richmond much.
    We fought. A few decent boxers made it out and then stumbled back, minus a portion of their teeth and brains. No challenge, no matter how trivial or baseless—no matter how big the challenger—could be ignored without serious loss of face. I’ve seen fathers pit their kids, some as young as five, against each other the way you’d pair off a couple of pit bulls, and you’d better not lose, because Dad had some money riding on you.
    One of my “uncles” did that to me when I was eight, and Peggy threw his ass out when she heard about it. What I wanted to know was, what the hell was he doing “in” in the first place?
    But that was Peggy, putting out the fires she started herself.
    In the picture Aunt Celia gave me, Peggy is a pretty