Michael Muhammad Knight - Impossible Man

Copyright 2009 by Michael Muhammad Knight.

All rights reserved under International and

Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN (10): 1-59376-226-7

ISBN (13): 978-1-59376-226-1

Cover design by Brett Yasko

Cover image by Michael Muhammad Knight

Interior design by Beth Kessler, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

Soft Skull

1140 Broadway, Suite 704

New York, NY 10001

www.softskull.com

www.counterpointpress.com

for mothers

My fathers father, Calvin Sherrard Unger, was born on Christmas Day, 1895, in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Calvins brother, John Wesley Unger, was a blind musician who wrote a well-known folk song, The Miners Doom, about an explosion in a nearby mine. The Ungers had a lot of history in Morgan County; there was an unincorporated town called Ungers Store (just an intersection of country roads, a post office and general store, population eighty), later shortened to Unger, where my great-great-great-great-uncle Washington Unger gave shelter to Stonewall Jacksons troops before they invaded Romney. Another Unger, also named John Wesley, served as a captain in the Confederate army.

Calvin married a local girl named Maude and left her pregnant to fight in the First World War. According to legend, Calvins mother-in-law had disapproved of her daughter marrying a low-class Unger, and after delivering the baby in her home promptly smashed its head against a chair. Maude died in the summer of 1920. Five months later, Calvin married sixteen-year-old Martha Irene Bishop.

When he wasnt working in the coal mines, Calvin preached the Gospel on street corners and in time became a Pentecostal minister. He gave immersion baptisms in the Cacapon River and sometimes received the Baptism of the Holy Ghost and Fire, which caused him to speak in tongues. Following the Lords orders against birth control, between 1921 and 1947 Martha would give birth to twenty children, twelve girls and eight boys. Calvins primary instrument of discipline in that crowded house was the Devil: If you dont eat your vegetables, the Devils gonna get you. Do your chores, or the Devils gonna get you. He even let them believe that the charcoal furnace in the basement led directly to Hell, and that he kept the Devils fire burning.

With so much work and so many kids, Calvin and Martha delegated their older children to watch over the younger ones; as one of the younger ones, Wesley Calvin Unger was mostly raised by his sisters, one of whom would claim that Calvin had molested her. Wesleys surrogate mothers all left him in turn; at least half of the Unger daughters were married by seventeen, but thats how they did things in that time and place.

The twentieth child was Calvin and Marthas eighth boy; but because one of the boys had lived only six months, they thought of this one as the seventh sonwhich Calvin saw as full of religious meaning. They named him David Pine Unger; David after the Bibles King David, who was also a seventh son, and Pine after the hospital in which they delivered him (he was the first Unger born in a hospital).

One morning as the Unger kids crossed the road to get on the school bus, a Harris Express Company tractor-trailer came speeding from behind the hill. Wesley was fourteen years old and right there in the road. He saw it coming full of violence but no personalitylike the violence of natureupon six-year-old David. And he saw up close as the eighteen wheels and however many tons absorbed the blonde child into itself. In less than a second there was no more of David Pine Unger, nothing that could have been recognizable as a boy or parts of a boy. Wesley watched men with shovels come to scrape his brother off the road. And he watched his mother lose her mind and attack the trucker with a butcher knife, screaming as the men dropped their shovels and rushed to hold her back.

Martha told her remaining children that the trucker was the Devil coming to get them. She died of grief in two years and Calvin married another woman with her own kids. Calvins new wife tried to convince him that the Devil had possessed Wesley, that after Wesley left a room, books would start jumping off the shelves and flying around her. When she became too much, Wesley would live in his car in the church parking lot. He looked to the army for a way out of Berkeley Springs, but at seventeen he needed parental permission; his stepmother happily signed the papers, and he was soon shipped to Korea. Something bad happened there. Nobody knew what, and Wesley wouldnt talk about it, but his sisters all had their own stories. One claimed that he had witnessed the North Koreans massacre a truckload of refugee children, giving him twenty simultaneous flashbacks of Davids death. Another said that his brain had been fried by chemical warfare. It might have been a jeep accident (and not in Korea, but off base in Niagara Falls) resulting in neurological problems; but for whatever reason, Wesley was honorably discharged and received benefits as a disabled veteran.

After coming home, he started to get weird. During the national headlines of Richard Speck raping and stabbing eight nurses to death, Wesley drove to the FBI headquarters in Washington, handed in his gun, and confessed. The FBI let him go but kept the gun. He did do some time, for what, nobody knew, but Mom thought it was drugs. He married two or three times. One of the women was Puerto Rican, for which the Ungers briefly disowned him, but she left Wesley after he slept with her mother. Another wife, remembered in Unger history only as Cookie, gave Wesley two kids, a boy and a girl. After Cookie left him, Wesley showed up on her front lawn with an army-surplus bazooka. None of Wesleys sisters know how the kids ended up; according to Wesley, they were killed by the Kennedys.

Living off his monthly $211 as a disabled veteran, Wesley never had to work and could drift as he liked. He wandered down to Titusville, Florida, and moved into a little bubble camper at the end of a trailer park. Driving his illegal yellow 1963 T-Bird one afternoon, he passed a tiny, dark-haired girl carrying two bags of groceries. He slammed on the brakes, then floored it back to her in reverse.

GET IN THE CAR! he barked at her. She was nineteen or twenty and he had a decade and a half on her. He was handsome and intense, his eyes burning through hers while he stretched his body across the passenger seat and kept his left hand on the wheel. She noticed that all of the stuffing had been torn out of his backseat. He opened the door for her, she got in, and thats how my parents met.

COMING TO FLORIDA from upstate New York, Mom had first lived with her aunt Trudy before moving into the trailer park. After the wedding, Wesley developed a theory that Trudy was working for the Mafia, so they packed up and moved to Hagerstown, Maryland; but there he uncovered a new plot against him. At a local antique store he found a painting of a foxhunt and became convinced that his brother Jim had stolen it from them years ago. Lacking the money to buy it back, Wesley started hanging out at the store, examining the painting with a magnifying glass or chatting up the store owner, trying to trick him into admitting that he knew Jim. Once he even sent Mom in there with a camera to take pictures while he waited outside around the corner, crouching behind parked cars and mailboxes like a cat burglar in a Saturday morning cartoon. He was trying to be James Bond about it, said Mom, but he just looked ridiculous.