Logan had an old, mint-green Grand Marquis. The backseat was big enough to hold my bike, but we put it in the trunk. An Army duffle bag rode shotgun with the seat belt holding it in place. He tossed it in the back and helped me into the car. I wondered about the bag but didn’t say anything. The air conditioner was broken—he apologized for this three times—so we put the windows down. Something was wrong with the automatic window on my side. He had to get back out and yank on it a few times to make it come down even halfway. He told me his father had given him the car when he joined the Army, and he tried to take care of it as best he could, but it was old and there was always something that needed to be repaired. While he was over in Iraq, his ex-fiancée drove it. She hadn’t thought to change the oil once in an entire year, and this had added to its sorry decline. Even I would of known to do that.
Logan turned left on Lewis and we drove through Metter, crossing over the interstate and going a ways out into the country toward Cobbtown. The cotton fields along the road were dark green and powdered with orange dust. The bolls themselves had only barely begun to burst into white. I leaned back in the seat and watched the neat red rows of clay flicker past between the lines of cotton plants. I gave up my head to happy, empty looking. The sun-baked air blew my hair out straight behind my head. We topped a small rise, and on the other side, the hard sunlight of the cotton fields ended and the swaying, speckled shade of the pine tree farms began. Tall, straight trees rose up on either side, darkening the asphalt and filling the car with the sticky, medicine smell of rising sap. We passed the rusty ruins of the old turpentine factory. A donkey and a cow chewed grass in the building’s blue shadow. I threw them a wave, but neither one bothered to look. The clover in their pasture must have been juicy and sweet. All their wishes had been granted. They had no need of me and my cheerful teenage waves.
“Where are we going?” Logan had to shout because the wind roared in through the windows. Even with the air fluttering my hair here and there and keeping it up off my neck, the car was still hot. Sweat puddled up under my legs, so they stuck to the vinyl seat, and a dribble dripped down the middle of my back.
“I don’t care,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. And then, after a couple of seconds, “I’m not going back.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. At first I thought he meant Metter and I wondered briefly if he meant to kidnap me. The idea didn’t bother me much. It sent another zing of electricity through my frazzled nerve endings. No Metter High for me next week.
“I wish I didn’t have to go back to Hunter. I can’t stand it there. I hate it worse than anything I’ve ever hated. And the idea of going back to Iraq—it just—” He banged his fist on the outside of the door. It made a hollow thump. “I don’t think I can do it.”
“What would you do instead?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sick to death of the Army. I did my bit. Nobody can say I’m not patriotic. There’s plenty of other assholes who could go instead of me.”
We were quiet then, thinking about this. We drove past Dean Martin Taxidermy with its huge JESUS SAVES sign and pasture out in front. A couple of fat black sheep leaned together back to back, so still in the shade of a cypress tree they looked like great big rocks. I wanted a cigarette. We passed the little gas station at the edge of Cobbtown and I wondered if I should ask him to stop and buy me a pack. Logan beat me to the thought.
“Do you drink wine?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I think some cold wine would be good.”
There were no cars coming, so he made a U-turn in the road and drove back to the gas station. It was a little cinder-block box with peeling white paint and a window made of glass bricks. On one side of the gas station, a row of pecan trees kept the service island shady, and over past the trees, two tireless rust heaps were parked forever in a patch of jimsonweed and buttercups.
“Mind going in the store for me? I’ll give you the money. I don’t really like crowded little places like this.”
The store looked empty.
“Logan, the problem is they know me here. I ain’t twenty-one.” I asked him to buy me a pack of cigarettes, rummaging in my purse for bills. He waved them away. I watched the muscles in his back flex and relax as he walked into the store. They looked hard and well kept. Just then, I wanted more than anything to touch them.
A few minutes later, Mr. Jenkins, the owner of the hardware store in town, pulled up next to Logan’s car. I tried to slink down in the seat, but he saw me.
“How you doing, Lynn?” he said. Mr. Jenkins was just this side of fat and his T-shirt was a little too small, so you could see a bare strip of white belly above his belt.
“Alright, Mr. Jenkins,” I said.
“Last Friday before school starts, huh?” He smiled that superior little smile adults always use when they’re talking to teenagers about school. Like, hah, I don’t have to do that shit anymore, but you sure do. “Who you out motoring with?”
I treated him to one of my sweet girlish smiles, dialed down a notch or three. My little-girl-on-the-way-to-Sunday-school smile. “My cousin Logan,” I said. “He’s stationed down in Savannah and he came to visit us for the afternoon.”
He looked me over for a moment, squinting. “My little brother Jeffrey is stationed down there. You remember Jeffrey, don’t you? I wonder if your cousin knows him. What’d you say his name is again?”
“He might,” I said.
Before I could say Logan’s name again, the bell on the door clanged. I sucked in a breath between my teeth. He came out of the store toting two white plastic bags. Bottles bulged against the sides and Mr. Jenkins looked at them.
“Your cousin here tells me you’re stationed down at Hunter.”
“Yes, sir,” Logan said, his back going all stiff and soldierly. I couldn’t help but smile at this transformation.
“Maybe you know my brother, Sergeant Jenkins?”
“I don’t, sir. But Hunter is a big base.”
“That’s true,” Mr. Jenkins said. “What was your name again, son?”
“Charlie Davidson, sir.”
Mr. Jenkins squinted hard at me then, and it wasn’t nervousness that made me think he was suspicious this time. “Your cousin told me your name was Logan.”
That little shit, I thought. Why’d he ask Logan what his name was if he remembered?
Logan smiled. It looked like a perfectly natural smile. I was impressed. “That’s what my family calls me, sir. It’s my middle name.”
“Well,” Mr. Jenkins said, “I would tell you to tell my brother I said hey, but since you don’t know him—”
“If I ever meet him, I’ll tell him, sir.”
“You all have a nice day.” He looked down at the bag of wine bottles again and then over at me, raising an eyebrow. “Be careful now.”
Logan started the engine and pulled out with a spray of gravel. His eyes were dark. “If he says anything to his brother, I’m fucked. He’ll know in a second who I am and that I was off base without permission.”
“You know his brother?” This seemed an impossible coincidence, and an awful one.
“My sergeant. The one who made me late meeting you. He thinks he’s some kind of hardass but he’s really just a pissy little REMF.”
“REMF?”
“Rear Echelon Mother Fucker. Means those guys that stay behind the wire where it’s safe. Or in his case, at home.”
“Is this going to get you in more trouble?” I said.
“I’m in trouble no matter what,” he said. “Now it might just come a little quicker.”
“I don’t think he’ll say anything. He’s probably already forgotten about it.”
“Probably not, but still—”
“Don’t worry about it now.” I touched him on the arm with one finger.
“Nah,” he said, pointing to the sky, “you’re right. On a day like this? I’ll worry about it tonight.”
When we got back on the highway, he gunned the engine and we flew across the countryside like a big green buzzard.