PART 1, CHAPTER 1
“I have to stop again, hon,” Sam’s grandmother says, tapping her on the shoulder. Sam Hughes is driving, with her uncle, Emmett Smith, half asleep beside her.
“Where are we?” grunts Emmett.
“Still on I-64. Mamaw has to go to the restroom.”
“I forgot to take my pill when we stopped last,” Mamaw says.
“Do you want me to drive now?” Emmett asks, whipping out a cigarette. He smokes Kents, and he has smoked seven in the two hours they have been on the road today.
“If Emmett drives, I could set up front,” says Mamaw, leaning forward between the front seats. “I’m crammed in the back here like a sack of sausage.”
“Are you sure you feel like driving, Emmett?”
“It don’t make no difference.”
“I was just getting into it,” says Sam, irritated.
It is her new car. Emmett drove through the heavy traffic around Lexington, because Sam wasn’t experienced at city driving, but the interstate is easy. She could glide like this all the way across America.
At the next exit, Exxon, Chevron, and Sunoco loom up, big faces on stilts. There’s a Country Kitchen, a McDonald’s, and a Stuckey’s. Sam has heard that Stuckey’s is terrible and the Country Kitchen is good. She notices a hillside with some white box shapes—either beehives or a small family cemetery—under some trees. She shoots onto the exit ramp a little too fast, and the tires squeal. Mamaw gasps and clutches the back of Sam’s seat, but Emmett just fiddles with the buttons on the old Army jacket in his lap. Emmett dragged it out of his closet before they left. He said it might be cold in Washington. It is summer, and Sam doesn’t believe him.
Sam pulls in at the Sunoco and springs out of the car to let Mamaw out. Mamaw has barrel hips and rolls of fat around her waist. She is so fat she has to sleep in a special brassiere. She shakes out her legs and stretches her arms. She is wearing peach-colored knit pants and a flowered blouse, with white socks and blue tennis shoes. Sam does not know Mamaw Hughes as well as she does her other grandmother, Emmett’s mother, whom she calls Grandma, but Mamaw acts like she knows everything about Sam. It’s spooky. Mamaw is always saying, “Why, that’s just like you, Sam,” or “That’s your daddy in you, for the world.” She makes Sam feel as though she has been spied on for years. Bringing Mamaw along was Emmett’s idea. He is staring off at a bird flying over the Sunoco sign.
“Regular?” a blond boy in a Sunoco shirt asks.
“Yeah. Fill ’er up.” Sam likes saying “Fill ’er up.” Buying gas is one of the pleasures of owning a car at last. “Come on, Mamaw,” she says, touching her grandmother’s arm. “Take care of the car, would you, Emmett?”
He nods, still looking in the direction of the bird.
The restroom is locked, and Sam has to go back and ask the boy for the key. The key is on a ring with a clumsy plastic Sunoco sign. The restroom is pink and filthy, with sticky floors. In her stall, Sam reads several phone numbers written in lipstick. A message says, “The mass of the ass plus the angle of the dangle equals the scream of the cream.” She wishes she had known that one when she took algebra. She would have written it on an assignment.
Mamaw lets loose a stream as loud as a cow’s. This trip is crazy. It reminds Sam of that Chevy Chase movie about a family on vacation, with an old woman tagging along. She died on the trip and they had to roll her inside a blanket on the roof of the station wagon because the children refused to sit beside a dead body. This trip is just as weird. A month ago, Emmett wouldn’t have gone to Washington for a million dollars, but after everything that happened this summer, he changed his mind and now is hell-bent on going and dragging Mamaw along with them.
“I was about to pop,” Mamaw says.
That was a lie about her pill. Mamaw just didn’t want Emmett to know she had to pee.
When they return the key, Mamaw buys some potato chips at a vending machine. “Irene didn’t feed us enough for breakfast this morning,” she says. “Do you want anything?”
“No. I’m not hungry.”
“You’re too skinny, Sam. You look holler-eyed.”
Irene is Sam’s mother, Emmett’s sister. They spent the night in Lexington with her in her new house—a brick ranch house with a patio and wall-to-wall carpeting. Irene has a new baby at the age of thirty-seven. The baby is cute, but Irene’s new husband has no personality. His name is Larry Joiner, but Sam calls him Lorenzo Jones. In social studies class, Sam’s teacher used to play tapes of old radio shows. Lorenzo Jones was an old soap opera. Sam’s mother’s life is a soap opera. The trip would be so different if her mother could have come. But Sam has her mother’s credit card, and it is burning a hole in her pocket. She hasn’t used it yet. It is for emergencies.
Emmett is in the driver’s seat, with the engine running. He is drinking a can of Pepsi. “Are y’all ready?” he asks, flicking cigarette ash on the asphalt. He has moved the car, but it’s still close to the gas pumps. A scene of a sky-high explosion, like an ammunitions dump blowing up, rushes through Sam’s mind.
“Give me a swig of that,” says Sam. “Did you pay?” She takes a drink of Emmett’s Pepsi and hands it back.
“Yeah. It was six dollars and thirty cents. I wrote down the mileage. We averaged thirty-one to the gallon.”
“That’s good!”
The gas gauge is broken, and Sam has to estimate when to get gas. To be safe, she gets gas every two hundred miles. The VW is a seventy-three, with a rebuilt engine. Tom Hudson sold it to her less than two weeks ago. His fingerprints are still on it, no doubt—on the engine and the hubcaps and the gas cap. His presence is everywhere in the car.
“I love this car,” Sam says, giving the VW an affectionate slap. “She’s a good little bird.” She suddenly feels strange saying that. Emmett is always watching birds and writing them down on his life list. There is a certain kind of exotic bird he has been looking for. He claimed such birds sometimes stopped off in Kentucky on their way to Florida, and he keeps looking for one, but he has never seen one in Kentucky. When Sam suggested that they could see one in the Washington zoo, he said it wouldn’t be the same as seeing it in the wild.
Sam climbs in the back, and Mamaw starts to get in, but then Mamaw says, “I better check on my flowers. I should have watered them this morning.”
She walks behind the car and peers through the back window.
“They don’t look droopy,” Sam says, glancing at the pot of geraniums wedged behind the seat.
“I reckon they’re O.K.,” says Mamaw doubtfully. “I’m just afraid the blooms will fall off before we get there.” She gets in the front seat. “I’m still so embarrassed, spilling dirt on Irene’s nice floor. I guess she thought I was just a country hick, dragging in dirt.”
Emmett stubs out his cigarette and takes off, sailing into fourth gear by the time they hit the highway.
“Reckon we’ll ever get there?” Mamaw asks. “We’ll probably get lost.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Hughes. We’ve got a map.”
“You can’t get lost in the United States,” Sam says. “I wish I could, though. I wish I’d wake up and not know where I was.”
“Lands, child, where do you get your ideas?” Mamaw says.
Emmett drives in silence, intent on his job, like a bus driver. Emmett is a large man of thirty-five with pimples on his face. He has been very quiet since they left Hopewell yesterday, probably because Mamaw is getting on his nerves. He has bad nerves.
“This transmission’s getting worse,” he says after a while. He glances back at Sam. “It just popped out of fourth gear again.”
“Tom said he worked on that transmission. It’s supposed to be O.K.”
“Well, it’s popping out. Just thought I’d tell you.”
“Well, I’m not sorry I bought the car, so don’t throw it in my face!”
She leans her head against the pillow they borrowed from her mother and watches the cars fire past. On the shoulder are blown-out truck tires, scraps of rubber flung out like abandoned toys. The scenery is funny little hills shaped like scoops of ice cream. Where she lives is flat. She has never been this far away from home before. She is nearly eighteen years old and out to see the world. She would like to move somewhere far away—Miami or San Francisco maybe. She wants to live anywhere but Hopewell. On the road, everything seems more real than it has ever been. It’s as though nothing has really registered on her until just recently—since the night last week when she ran off to the swamp. The feeling reminds her of her aerobics instructor, Ms. Hotpants—she had some hard-to-pronounce foreign name—when they did the pelvic tilt in gym last year. A row of girls with their asses reaching for heaven. “Squeeze your butt-ox. Squeeze tight, girls,” she would say, and they would grit their teeth and flex their butts, and hold for a count of five, and then she would say, “Now squeeze one layer deeper.” That is what the new feeling is like: you know something as well as you can and then you squeeze one layer deeper and something more is there.
Emmett’s cigarette smoke floats back and strangles her. She is glad when a while later he lets her have the wheel again. She’s proud of the car. It is off-white, with bright orange patches where Tom fixed the spots of rust. The rebuilt engine sounds good.
“This car will look better when I get a paint job,” she says.
“What color do you aim to paint it, hon?” Mamaw asks.
“Black.” Sam has been thinking that when winter comes she will get a black motorcycle jacket and dye her old tan cowhide boots black. They lace up, and they will look sinister if she dyes them black. A truck that she passed two minutes ago passes her now, with a wheeze and a honk. She slams the horn at him. Trucker-fucker, she mutters to herself.
“Why, look at that, would you!” cries Emmett, pointing to a station wagon pulling a small flat-bed trailer loaded with a dish antenna. “The license plate says Arizona. They’ve hauled that all the way from Arizona. Imagine having one of those. You could watch everything on earth with that.”
“It probably belongs to Big Brother,” says Sam.
“Yeah. He’s probably got one of those, and his own satellite too,” Emmett says thoughtfully.
“Whose brother are y’all talking about?” Mamaw wants to know.
“Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four. It’s a book I had to read in English.”
“There goes that transmission again,” Emmett says.
“Oh, shit,” groans Sam, not loud enough for her grandmother to hear. Cussing shocks Mamaw.
Actually, Sam never really cussed much before this summer. But now she feels like letting loose. She has so much evil and bad stuff in her now. It feels good to say shit, even if it’s only under her breath.
PART 2, CHAPTER 1
It was the summer of the Michael Jackson Victory tour and the Bruce Springsteen Born in the U.S.A. tour, neither of which Sam got to go to. At her graduation, the commencement speaker, a Methodist minister, had preached about keeping the country strong, stressing sacrifice. He made Sam nervous. She started thinking about war, and it stayed on her mind all summer.
Emmett came back from Vietnam, but Sam’s father did not. After his discharge, Emmett stayed with his parents two weeks, then left. He couldn’t adjust. Several months later, he returned, and Sam’s mother let him live with them, in the house she had bought with her husband’s life insurance policy. Emmett stayed, helping out around the house. People said Irene babied him. She treated him like someone disabled, and she never expected him to get a job. She always said the war “messed him up.” She had worked as a receptionist for a dentist, and she received compensation payments from the government. In retrospect, Sam realized how strange those early years were. When Emmett moved in, he brought some friends with him—hippies. Hopewell didn’t have any hippies, or war protesters, and when Emmett showed up with three scruffy guys in ponytails and beads, they created a sensation. The friends came from places out west—Albuquerque, Eugene, Santa Cruz. Boys in Hopewell didn’t even wear long hair until the seventies, when it finally became fashionable. Sam had a strong memory of Emmett in his Army jacket and black boots, with a purple headband running through his wild hair. She remembered his friends piling out of a psychedelic van, but she remembered little else about them. People in town still talked about the time Emmett and the hippies flew a Vietcong flag from the courthouse tower. One bleak day in early winter, they entered the courthouse through separate doors and converged at the base of the clock tower. The county circuit court clerk saw them head up the stairs and said later she knew something was about to happen. They fastened the flag to the side of the tower with masking tape, covering part of the clock face. Merchants around the square got nervous and had them arrested for disturbing the peace. The funny part, Emmett always said, was that nobody had even recognized that it was a Vietcong flag. He had had it made by a tailor in Pleiku, the way one might order a wedding suit. Soon after the flag incident, when burglars broke into a building supply company on Main Street, using a concrete block to smash a window, people were suspicious of Emmett’s crowd, but no one ever proved anything.
The friends went away eventually, and Emmett calmed down. For a couple of years, he attended Murray State, but then he dropped out. He did odd jobs—mowing yards, repairing small appliances—and got by. Now and then a rumor would surface. At one time, neighbors had the idea that Patty Hearst was hiding out with Emmett and Irene. For a week, Sam had been too embarrassed to go to school, but later she was proud of Emmett. He was like a brother. She and Emmett were still pals, and he didn’t try to boss her around. They liked the same music—mostly golden oldies. Emmett’s favorite current groups were the Cars and the Talking Heads.
Irene’s new husband got a good job in Lexington, but Sam refused to move there with them. Somebody had to watch out for Emmett, Sam insisted, and she didn’t want to change schools her senior year. The house was paid for, and Sam still got government benefits. After her mother went away last year, Sam and Emmett got into the habit of watching M*A*S*H every evening. Usually, they grilled something and then watched the news, two reruns of M*A*S*H, and a movie on Home Box Office or Cinemax. Sam’s boyfriend, Lonnie Malone, used to join them before he started working late at Kroger’s. Sam’s favorite M*A*S*H was the one in which Hot Lips Houlihan kicked a door down when she learned that her husband, Donald Penobscott, had requested a transfer to San Francisco without telling her. Emmett preferred the early episodes, with Colonel Henry Blake and Frank Burns. Burns reminded him, he said, of his C.O. in Vietnam, a real idiot. That was about all Emmett would say about Vietnam these days. Emmett had a hearty, good-natured laugh like Hawkeye’s. Hawkeye’s laughter was so infectious that sometimes when Hawkeye and Trapper John let loose, Sam and Emmett couldn’t stop laughing, just laughing for pure joy.
Years ago, when Colonel Blake was killed, Sam was so shocked she went around stunned for days. She was only a child then, and his death on the program was more real to her than the death of her own father. Even on the repeats, it was unsettling. Each time she saw that episode, it grew clearer that her father had been killed in a war. She had always taken his death for granted, but the reality of it took hold gradually. Now, when the episode was repeated, and she saw Radar report to the surgeons in the O.R. that Colonel Blake’s plane had gone down over the Sea of Japan, she felt it was poignant because Radar had looked up to the Colonel like a father. The Colonel’s last words to Radar had been, “You’d better behave or I’m going to come back and kick your butt.”
The summer had been wet. Early in June, a tornado touched down on the main highway south of Hopewell and knocked a few trailers together, but no one was hurt. One night a week later, another tornado watch was in effect. Emmett had been nervous all evening as he listened to the weather channel on the radio. It was ten twenty-four by the kitchen clock that sticky night before the storm. The air conditioning was grinding and thumping, and the TV was on, but above the noise Sam heard Lonnie’s van turn into the driveway. The van had a faulty post-ignition shut-off jet, which meant that the engine bucked along for a few moments after Lonnie turned it off, like a stubborn child making an annoying sound.
“Did you get off from work early?” Sam yelled under the porch light. A moth flew in and whizzed around the bulb on the hallway ceiling.
Lonnie Malone was a bag boy at Kroger’s. He had a six-pack of Falls City with him and an open can in one hand. He was five-eleven and muscular, and he had brown hair with a kink in it. Sam thought he had a sexy build. On his chest he had a beautiful birthmark, a splotch the shape of an Izod alligator. Lonnie had been a guard for the Hopewell Indians. When he reached the porch, Sam pushed his hair back over his ear and smacked him on the lips. He smelled like beer. Beer smelled something like a runover skunk.
“I saw a cop on I-24, and I was going sixty,” he said with a grin.
“You’re lucky he didn’t catch you with this beer,” Sam said. The screen door slammed behind them, and like an echo, thunder scattered across the sky. “Where’d you get it anyway?”
“Down at the Bottom. I got a guy to go in for me. Crazy old coot. He was just setting out on the county line, straddling it in his pickup. He was swigging from a bottle of Jim Beam in a sack and just daring somebody to look at him wrong.”
“Is it storming down that way yet?”
“No. There’s a tornado watch, but I don’t think it’ll hit here.” Emmett appeared in the kitchen doorway, filling it up so completely that he shut out the light from the kitchen. “Hey, I’m making muffelatas, y’all,” he said. “Do you want one, Lonnie?”
“Yeah, I’m starving. All I had for supper was a hamburger.” Lonnie jerked one of the cans from its plastic noose and handed it to Emmett. “Have a beer, Emmett, good buddy.”
Emmett opened the can and took a drink. Then with his oven mitt he swatted at the moth and missed.
Lonnie had done a double take when he saw Emmett in his wraparound skirt. He was wearing a long, thin Indian-print skirt with elephants and peacocks on it. Now Lonnie burst out laughing.
“Where’d you get that skirt, Emmett?” he asked.
“It’s a joke because Klinger wears dresses on M*A*S*H,” Sam said.
Emmett struck an exaggerated fashion-model pose against the kitchen door facing, with his cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “I got it at the mall in Paducah,” he said.
“Are you bucking for a Section 8, like Klinger?” Lonnie asked.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” Emmett said with a grin.
Sam suspected Emmett was using the skirt to draw attention away from the pimples on his face. They had been getting worse. She was dying to squeeze them, but he wouldn’t let her.
Emmett shoved the muffelatas in the oven and then turned around and pranced like Boy George, modeling his skirt. Emmett had a gleeful expression that said he had gotten away with murder.
“Far out!” Lonnie said, grinning at Emmett. Lonnie emulated Emmett, and they often shot baskets together at the high school. Lonnie even had an Army jacket that he had found at the surplus store, but Sam knew he would never wear a skirt just because Emmett wore one. He wouldn’t go that far. Lonnie didn’t even like Boy George.
“How come you’re here at this hour of the night?” Sam said, sitting down on the lumpy couch in the living room. The couch tilted at an angle.
“I quit,” said Lonnie. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking across the room to a rock group riding on a roller coaster on the television screen. He took such a huge slug of beer that his cheeks bulged out.
“What happened this time, Lonnie?” Emmett asked sympathetically.
“It wasn’t for me. I want to have my own business someday, and I wasn’t getting anywhere there.” Lonnie paused and lit a cigarette. “I’d like to do something outdoors, where I’m my own boss. I’ve got to be independent.”
“Good for you,” Emmett said.
Lonnie laughed and took a shot of beer. “At least now I can catch up on my video games with the guys, if I can scrape up enough quarters.”
“You can play with Emmett’s Atari,” said Sam.
“Emmett ain’t got Donkey Kong. Or Hard Hat Mack.”
“Hey, Lonnie, I scored over fifty thousand today on Pac-Man,” said Emmett.
“Gah!” Lonnie blew smoke out slowly. “I’ll never catch you, Emmett. You’re too good.”
“I’ve figured out the secret of Pac-Man. The trick is you ignore all them little vitamin pills. They’re just there to distract you and make you think you can get something for nothing. But if you keep your mind on your business, you can just keep going forever.” Emmett drank some beer and added, “That’s the Zen of Pac-Man.”
“I’ll have to try that,” Lonnie said.
“It’s too bad you quit your job, Lonnie. I need to borrow some money to pay back a debt I owe the government.”
“How much do you owe?”
“Over five hundred dollars.” Emmett lifted his skirt and fanned his legs. “They hit me over the head with it. I’d forgot all about it.”
“It was that semester he dropped out of Murray,” Sam explained. Emmett had dropped his courses but kept collecting monthly checks from the V.A. all semester.
“They won’t take me to court, though,” Emmett said. “It’s not enough money for them to fool with. And I don’t have no salary to garnishee.” He laughed.
“You can take my education benefits and pay for those classes,” Sam said. “I don’t want to go to college that bad.”
“That reminds me, Sam. Your mama called this evening when you were out running. She wants to know if you’re going to U.K. this fall.”
“I don’t want to go to the same school as my mother. That would be too weird for words. Did she want me to call back?”
“No. She just said to tell you she still wanted you to come up there.”
“Don’t go,” Lonnie said, reaching for her hand. “I need you here to help me get started.”
“I’m not going to Lexington. The track team’s better at Murray than U.K. anyway. It’s more personal.” Sam had been accepted at both the University of Kentucky and Murray State University, and Murray was nearby. She hoped to commute.
Emmett gave Sam a can of beer. “Go ahead and drink it. I won’t tell on you. It’ll give you carbohydrates so you can run tomorrow.”
Sam sipped the beer. It didn’t taste as bad as it smelled. She and Lonnie were sitting close to each other on the couch. Sam’s bare legs brushed against Lonnie’s jeans and made her feel a stir of desire. The couch was fuzzy and scratched her legs. Emmett had bought the couch at a yard sale. Emmett did most of his shopping at yard sales. All their stuff was junk. She felt empty and disappointed. Lonnie didn’t have a job, and he wasn’t going to college. Sam had worked at the Burger Boy after school for two years, but in March she had quit so she could have more time to study. She had been promised her old job back in the fall.
Emmett took the muffelatas from the oven and transferred them to melamine plates that Sam’s mother had left behind. She had taken her good dishes. He brought the muffelatas in to Sam and Lonnie.
“Thanks, Emmett,” said Lonnie. “This is what I call service.” He stubbed out his cigarette in Emmett’s Kentucky Lake ashtray.
“Don’t mean nothing,” said Emmett.
Sam didn’t really like the taste of beer, but the muffelata was delicious. Emmett knew how to make muffelatas just right, with lots of olives and onions. Irene never made muffelatas.
“I don’t think that storm’s coming,” Emmett said when he brought in his own plate.
“What’s on HBO tonight?” asked Lonnie. “This MTV crap is too weird.”
Billy Joel was singing “Uptown Girl.” He was in a garage mechanic’s coveralls, lusting after Christie Brinkley. Sam said, “HBO is pukey tonight—Humanoids from the Deep. But there’s an R-rated movie on Cinemax at midnight.”
“Oh, good!” Lonnie’s parents wouldn’t get cable because of all the Rrated movies. Two weeks ago, someone had blown up the cable man’s mailbox with a cherry bomb.
Emmett punched the buttons on the selector box. Surfers rode by, then policemen. He settled on Johnny Carson and sat down with his plate, scooting the cat to one side. His skirt fell on the cat, but Moon Pie didn’t budge. He was black with white armpits and a big saucer face. Emmett was so crazy about the cat he even slept with him. Moon Pie always woke him up at 4 A.M., and Emmett would get up and feed him, but lately Emmett had been keeping a packet of Tender Vittles under his pillow and a bowl beside the bed so he could feed Moon Pie practically in his sleep.
“How do you know Humanoids from the Deep is no good?” said Lonnie.
“Hemorrhoids from the Deep,” said Sam. “I’ve seen it and it stinks. Oh, look at Johnny’s suit!” she cried, pointing. Johnny Carson’s suit made rainbows under the TV lights—soft, glistening colors like those in a puddle of oil. The colors reminded Sam of the Jupiterscope her mother had sent her for her birthday last year. She had bought it in a museum in Cincinnati. The Jupiterscope was a circle of plastic, like a large soft contact lens, that turned scenery into shimmering colors when you looked through it. It was a silly present.
Lonnie laughed. “Hey, can you imagine Johnny Carson wearing a skirt?” he said. “I dare you to wear that skirt out in public, Emmett.”
“It’s healthier for a man to wear a skirt,” Emmett said solemnly. “He’s not all cramped up and stuff.”
Sam said to Lonnie, “It makes me so mad about that rash on his face. He won’t see about it.”
“What’s wrong with your face, Emmett? I wasn’t going to mention it.”
“It’s just adolescence. Haven’t you noticed how my voice is changing?” Emmett spoke deliberately in an unnaturally squeaky voice.
“Be serious,” said Sam. “You’ve got Agent Orange. Those pimples are exactly how they described them on the news.” Agent Orange terrified her. It had been in the news so much lately.
“I wasn’t exposed to Agent Orange,” Emmett said.
“You might have been around it and not known it.”
“Maybe you could get some money out of the government, Emmett,” Lonnie said. “Then you could pay them back what you owe.”
“What would be the point of that? A lot of rigamarole and we’d end up where we started. So let ’em keep the money to begin with.” Emmett touched his face. “This ain’t nothing,” he said. He shrugged, then cocked his head. Thunder. “Socrates wore a toga,” he said, petting Moon Pie. “All them Greeks and Romans wore dresses.”
Sam laughed. “Are you going to wear it to McDonald’s in the morning, Emmett?” Emmett always had breakfast at McDonald’s with his friends.
“I don’t want anybody to get any wrong ideas.”
Sam and Lonnie laughed. “What would they think, Emmett?” said Lonnie.
They knew what people thought. There were a lot of stories floating around about Emmett. Emmett was the leading dope dealer in town. Emmett slept with his niece. Emmett lived off his sister. Emmett seduced high school girls. He had killed babies in Vietnam. But he was popular, and Emmett didn’t care what some people said.
Ed McMahon blasted out one of his phony belly laughs, and then a loud thunderclap made the light flicker. Emmett suddenly bent over and clutched his chest.
“What’s wrong, Emmett?” Lonnie asked.
Emmett was grimacing with pain.
“You’ve got heartburns again,” Sam said. “It’s those tacos you ate at supper.” Sam explained to Lonnie, “He’s been getting gas. I told him not to eat tacos with hot-stuff. It always makes him belch.”
“I guess so,” Emmett said, straightening up and shaking his shoulders. Thunder crashed again, and Emmett cringed. Sam was scared. She had never had heartburns herself, and she didn’t know if heart attacks were related.
“Are you all right, Emmett?” asked Lonnie. “Don’t you go kicking the bucket without making out your will first.”
“It’s all right,” Emmett said. “It went away.”
Emmett looked stately in his skirt—tall and broad, like a middle-aged woman who had had several children. Sam and Lonnie sat on the couch with their hands on each other’s thighs while Emmett cautiously sat down in the vinyl chair, fluffing up his skirt to let air flood his legs.
“We’ll be right back,” said Johnny.
The storm broke soon after that and they raced around, unplugging appliances. During the storm, Emmett huddled on the stairs with Moon Pie. The rain was so hard the water rushed across the yard from the downspouts. The basement was probably flooding again.
In the hallway, in the dark, Lonnie grabbed Sam and held her close to him. “Are you disappointed in me?” he asked, after they kissed.
“I thought you liked Kroger’s. You liked that job better than you liked working at Shumley’s.” Shumley’s was the large farm-equipment plant where Lonnie had been a trainee after school during the winter. Lonnie had to buy expensive safety shoes for the job, but then he had been laid off. Now he had no use for the safety shoes, which had hard, bulbous toes.
“Kroger’s was a dead end,” Lonnie said. “It was boring, and I goofed off. I’d put all the cans in one sack just for meanness.”
“I’m not disappointed in you. But I’m disappointed.”
“Maybe I could apply at Ingersoll-Rand.”
“They’re not hiring.”
“Mama and Daddy will have a fit, though.” They had wanted Lonnie to go to vocational school to learn a trade, but Lonnie didn’t know what he wanted to do, now that he couldn’t play basketball. He was famous for sinking ten out of twelve jump shots in a winning game against Hopewell’s biggest rivals, the Bingley Bulldogs. People in Hopewell still talked fondly about how Lonnie had done that.
The lightning and the thunder coincided then. The storm was right there, over the house. Sam stood in the hall, clutching Lonnie. In the flash of lightning, she saw Emmett on the stairway, smoking a cigarette. They stayed there in the dark for a long time, and then abruptly the wash of rain let up and the lightning was just a flicker.
After the storm died down, Lonnie kissed Sam and said, “I know what I’m going to do now.”
“What?”
“Get drunk.”
In the dark, he took a beer from the refrigerator and opened it. “Hey, Emmett,” Lonnie said. “The storm’s let up. Let’s go somewhere.”
“It’s almost time for the eleven-thirty M*A*S*H,” Emmett said. He was smoking another cigarette. He and Moon Pie were on the couch now.
“Couldn’t you skip one?” said Lonnie.
“But this is my special outfit for watching M*A*S*H in,” Emmett said, flipping the hem of his skirt. “I miss M*A*S*H. I’ve been homesick for it since the series ended. AfterMash just ain’t the same.”
“They couldn’t fight the Korean War forever, Emmett,” said Lonnie.
Emmett grabbed his cigarettes from the end table and stuck them in his skirt pocket. “Let’s go, then. Where to? The Bottom?”
“I’ve already been there once tonight,” said Lonnie. “We could drive around and see if the storm wrecked anything.”
“I know where let’s go,” Emmett said, taking the last beer from the refrigerator. “Let’s go to Cawood’s Pond.”
“Are you serious, Emmett?” cried Lonnie. “I thought that place spooked you.”
Cawood’s Pond was Sam and Lonnie’s favorite place to go parking. It wasn’t really a pond but a snake-infested swamp with sinkholes. Sam had even heard there were alligators there. Emmett used to go there when he was a boy, but he stopped going. Sam was surprised that he suggested it.
“I ain’t scared,” said Emmett. “Let’s go. I might even have some sweet stuff around here somewhere.” He took a cocoa-mix can from a kitchen cabinet. “Ah-ha!” he said, looking inside.
Emmett found a sweatshirt and sniffed the armpits before pulling it over his head. He touched his face. He had one pimple about to pop.
“Let’s go to the pond!” he cried. “Don’t let Moon Pie out,” he said as they left the house. “At night is when cats get run over. Headlights confuse them.” Emmett was still wearing the skirt. He was so large he looked ridiculous in it. Sam had to laugh.
The street lights were shining in new puddles. Sam soaked both running shoes. She felt drunk on that beer. She lay down on the mattress in the back of Lonnie’s van, and Lonnie and Emmett sat up front. She bounced along on the mattress, feeling like a soldier in an armored personnel carrier because she couldn’t see where they were going. Emmett had once told her how claustrophobic those vehicles were, with a dozen guys packed together on benches, their rifles poking each other, and one guy in a tiny cubbyhole driving, with only a periscope to see his way. It was like being in a submarine, Emmett had said.
“There’s a bulldozer over yonder,” Emmett said when they reached the gravel road that led to the pond. “They’re draining the swamp and rerouting the creek. The biologists are going crazy. They say it’ll starve out the snakes, and birds won’t land.”
“I can do without the snakes,” said Sam.
Cawood’s Pond was named for a notorious outlaw, Andrew Cawood, who had once hidden out here and was believed to have fallen into a sinkhole. The university biologists had cleared a place for cars to park and built a boardwalk that looped out over the swamp. Sam and Lonnie had spent the night out here in the van a couple of times.
“The insects are having a conversation,” said Emmett. “They’re talking about me. I know ’cause my ears are burning.”
“They’re saying, ‘Who’s that weirdo in the skirt?’” Lonnie teased.
When Lonnie turned the lights off, and they sat there in the silence, they saw how the swampy woods made a black rim around the graveled clearing.
Emmett and Lonnie climbed over the seat of the van and sat down in back with Sam. Emmett pulled his sweet stuff from his cigarette pack. He lit a joint and passed it to Lonnie. The night was pleasant after the rain, and now and then a little breeze stirred and they could hear drops of water shaking from the leaves of the trees.
“Where are all the birds, Emmett?” Sam asked.
“They sleep at night. Except owls.”
“Where do birds sleep, Emmett?” asked Lonnie, with a giggle.
“In bird beds.”
“Hey, tell about that bird you’re always looking for,” Sam said. “Maybe there’s one here right now.”
“You couldn’t see it at night.”
“If it’s white, wouldn’t it look like a ghost?”
“What kind of bird is it?” Lonnie asked.
Emmett hesitated before answering. “An egret.”
“What are egrets like?” Sam asked. “Are you sure they’re around here?”
Emmett drank some beer. “I believe egrets are the state bird of Florida.” He took the joint Lonnie passed him and puffed it.
Sam said to Lonnie, “This was a bird he used to see in Vietnam.”
“Really?”
Emmett exhaled slowly. “Yeah. You’d see it in the rice paddies, dipping its head down in the water, feeling around for things to eat. It’s a wader.”
“They might be here, then,” Lonnie said. “In a swamp like this.”
“Why do you want to see that bird so bad?” Sam asked cautiously.
“It was so pretty. It was the prettiest bird I ever saw, all white and longlegged.” Emmett worked at the tab on the beer can. “They’re like cowbirds, but cowbirds aren’t pretty. Sometimes you’d see these water buffalo and every one of them would have one of these birds sitting beside it, like a little pet.”
“Why did they do that?” Lonnie asked.
“The bird would eat things the buffalo turned up, and it would pick ticks off the buffalo’s head. Sometimes you’d see the bird setting on the buffalo’s back. He didn’t care.”
“Won’t it bring back bad memories if you see a bird like that again?” Sam asked.
“No. That was a good memory. The only fucking one. That beautiful bird just going about its business with all that crazy stuff going on around it. Whole flocks of them would fly over. They fold their long necks up when they fly.” Emmett rolled the beer can in his palms, and the aluminum crinkled. He said, “Once a grenade hit close to some trees and there were these birds taking off like quail, ever’ which way. We thought it was snowing up instead of down.”
“Did you see a lot of action like that over there?” Lonnie asked.
“Some. I nearly got my ass killed once or twice.”
“How?”
“Oh, you don’t want to know.”
Sam passed Lonnie the joint. She exhaled and coughed. She could almost see that bird. She felt peaceful, but her head was spinning with thoughts about Emmett. He hadn’t said this much about Vietnam in years. Watching M*A*S*H so much must be bringing it out, she thought. Emmett used to have a girlfriend, Anita Stevens, but he had broken up with her at Christmas. He never said why. He took her out for Shrimp Night at the Holiday Inn and gave her a fancy cheese basket from the Party Mart in Paducah. Anita playfully called it her Easter basket and asked Emmett where the sweet stuff was. The basket had so much cheese and salami in it she probably still had some in her refrigerator.
“Hey, Emmett,” Sam blurted out. “I wish we had Anita with us. Why don’t you call her up?”
“Sure. Hand me the phone.”
“I’m serious. Why don’t you call her up tomorrow?”
“Anita doesn’t want a bird-watcher in a skirt,” Emmett said flatly.
“Well, don’t wear a skirt then,” Sam said.
Emmett mumbled something. He sat propped against the spare tire in the back of the van. The glow from his cigarette reminded Sam of Mars, the way it popped out in the summer sky, burning bright orange, seeming to move toward the earth.
Lonnie turned on the radio, and Bruce Springsteen yelled out, “I’m a cool rocking Daddy in the U.S.A.!” It was from his new album. For a while, they sang along with the songs on the university FM station, Rock-95. Sam watched the moon inch from behind the broken clouds. The night was clearing, and the radio was playing “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More with No Big Fat Woman,” a song Emmett loved. Anita wasn’t a big fat woman. She was pretty, and Sam was sure Anita still cared about Emmett. Sam felt Lonnie pulling at her, wanting to smooch with her, but her mind was whirling around in the darkness and she couldn’t catch it.
Emmett and Lonnie went outside, and Sam lost track of time. Maybe she dozed off. She felt afraid. With the moon out, this was a perfect setting for a horror movie. Gradually, she became aware of a familiar yet strange sound on the radio. It was a song by the Beatles, but it was not a song she knew. Sam thought she knew every one of their songs, because her mother owned all their records. She had left them with Sam when she moved to Lexington. “You better leave my kitten all alone,” they were singing. How could the Beatles have a new record, she wondered groggily.
“We’ve got to be quiet,” Emmett muttered when he and Lonnie returned to the van. “Lonnie, keep your cigarette inside your hand. Don’t show it.”
“Take it easy, Emmett. It’s all right.” Lonnie climbed in the driver’s seat and turned the key.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Lonnie!” said Emmett in a loud, hot whisper. “Be quiet! And don’t turn your lights on. Cut that engine! Let’s coast down to Highway 1.”
“No sweat, Emmett. Just hold tight.”
“What did you see, Emmett?” asked Sam, reaching to touch his shoulder.
“Don’t do that!” Emmett cried, jerking away from her.
“He just got spooked,” Lonnie said, backing out of the clearing. “It wasn’t anything.”
“Oh, shit,” Sam said. “Are you O.K., Emmett?”
Emmett mumbled. “Hurry,” he said. “I can’t stand this.”
“We’re going home, Emmett,” said Lonnie as they bumped across the gravel in the moonlight. “Keep your skirt on.”