Six hours and one Xanax-induced catnap later, I’m on my way to baggage claim as a local reporter bemoans the serious lack of rain on the Gulf Coast from a blaring TV in the terminal. A teaser for the afternoon talk shows reminds me to call Frances to inform her that her Oprah dress is ready for pickup.
“You’re coming back soon, right?” Frances says, talking to at least three other people at the same time.
“As soon as I possibly can. And I’ll still be handling some of the things we talked about, so don’t freak out.”
“Thank God. Contrary to what you may believe, I do plan on respecting your time there.”
“Thanks,” I say without believing a word of it. I retrieve my bags and walk outside, horrified to see Billy Wade jumping out of the cement truck he got after he inherited his daddy’s concrete business. “Listen,” I say to Frances, setting down my bags, shielding my eyes from the Alabama sun. “I gotta go. My ride’s here.”
“Call me soon. Like yesterday.”
“Yup,” I say, marveling at how she could make a promise in one breath and take it away in the next.
Billy Wade spits a brown stream of tobacco juice through a bucktoothed grin. Billy has held me over his head since we were kids. I mean this literally, not figuratively. Although I am of average height and weight, Billy stands well over six feet, with arms like a lumberjack. He has claimed this height since he was fifteen. Billy grabs me around the tops of my legs, hoisting me high in the air above him, running in circles until I threaten to put his eyes out with my thumbs. This warning is meant to conceal the glee in knowing most people never get to know the exhilaration of being tossed high in the air after the age of two and a half.
“How’s Mr. California?” This being the first thing Billy always asks when he hasn’t seen me in a while.
“Ha ha.”
“Hey! I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!” A bleached blonde Patience hangs off the running board of Billy’s ride in blue jean cutoffs and a bikini top, late thirties be damned.
“Good God,” I say as she jumps off the running board and into my arms like I was a long-lost war vet. “Look at you.”
Patience laughs, flips her hair and jiggles her bosom. “Yeah, look at me,” she says.
* * *
Jackson, Alabama, the place we all wound up, is known as the turkey hunting capital of the universe. The town of four thousand is framed on two sides by cemeteries, the black community on the third, and on the fourth by Plymouth, the paper mill most in the town owed their livelihoods to. A behemoth with two smokestacks standing guard over the muddy Tombigbee River, Plymouth was a Yankee outfit from Idaho that initially had promised wealth and prosperity.
In the end, it failed to deliver more than a cut-rate shopping center and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. In small-town Alabama, the affluence of any town was always measured by the number of fast food chains the Chamber of Commerce landed, usually springing up on the outskirts of town so as to attract the four-lane traffic. Thomasville, half an hour away, had a Hardee’s, a McDonald’s, and a Sonic Burger, and they didn’t even have a paper mill. It was a sore subject to most in the community, and one of the most consistent bones of contention brought up at town meetings until councilman Tetley Crane forbade anyone to mention it again.
Presently, the worst drought in almost two hundred years had left the Deep South a shriveled dust bowl of end-of-the-world insanity. Dehydrated dogs died in the streets and nervous housewives shot their philandering husbands in double-wide trailers. Everywhere I look, the red dirt powder hangs in clumps from oak leaves like fake snow at Christmas.
I take my place tentatively in the back seat. Billy can’t drive, and he never could. He steers the cement truck like he owns the road. Billy blows his horn at an innocent pedestrian, plowing through a traffic light that turned red five seconds ago.
“My side of the road!” Billy croaks. Riding shotgun, Patience hollers out the window at an old man shaking his fist as he makes his way safely to the other side of the street. “The light was still green, bonehead!”
Billy grins at Patience, who plops her bare feet on the dashboard and twists her neck around the headrest. “How’s the schoolmarm?” she asks, always more concerned about the stats of one’s love life than anything else.
“She’s a professor, and we’re sort of busted up.”
She winks. “I’m just pullin’ your leg, sugar. And I’m sorry about the bust-up.”
“How’s Granny?” I ask. Patience had years ago relocated back to Jackson to care for her favorite relative. The matriarch, a lifelong All My Children fan, had absentmindedly begun mingling her own milieu with that of Pine Valley.
“Granny’s okay, I guess. She’s positively rabid about Erica’s wedding, so I was charged with the task of finding a gift for someone who’s currently doing time in the hoosegow for burying someone alive.”
“What about you, Billy?” I say. “How’s the better half?”
Patience stage whispers, “Oh, we don’t talk about that.”
A spray of Billy’s tobacco juice hits the window separating me from the scalding heat of an early June day in the cradle of the Gulf Coast. He pops a CD into the player on the dash. “There’s a porn burglar on the loose.”
“I’m sorry?” I say, the Black Eyed Peas muffling the first part of Billy’s bulletin.
“Somebody’s breakin’ into single guys’ houses with a crowbar and stealin’ their porn. He’s hit Griff Watson twice—some of his classic Ginger Lynn you know he’ll never replace. You ’member that girl Brianne you used to date in college? Her sister’s the detective on the case.” Billy swerves to avoid a speeding ambulance. “My side of the road!”
Just ahead, a farmer hauling hay in an ancient truck approaches in the opposing lane of Highway 43. There’s an old Southern superstition: if you ever meet a hay truck, you’re supposed to make a wish. But it’s very important you don’t look back. Because even if you see that hay truck in your rearview mirror, your wish won’t come true.
Billy pulls at a scab on his elbow, our colossal vehicle moving into the direct path of the truck.
Patience screams to me excitedly over the seat. “Hay truck, make a wish. Don’t look back!”
Bowing my head, I try to think of something good to wish for. I quickly decide on wishing the events of the past few days are a figment of my imagination.
Billy whistles, swerves back into our lane and turns up Fergie. “You didn’t look back, didja?”
“No,” I say. “I can’t believe they still do this down here.”
“What’d you wish for?” Patience says.
“I think I wished that we wouldn’t run into that hay truck.”
“Birdie Haines saw a hay truck in her rearview mirror and both her babies were born dead,” Patience says.
“I don’t believe that.”
“They were too born dead,” she retorts.
“I believe that,” I say. “I just don’t think the hay truck had anything to do with it.”
“Suit yourself,” Billy says. “See if we care, Mr. California Know-Everything.”
Patience chimes in. “Yeah, Mr. California Know-Everything.”
Patience covers the rearview mirror with her hand.
Like a good Southern boy, I bow my head and close my eyes again, giving the powers that be one more chance to make all this insanity right.