Lee Knox was a widower with grown kids who lived in a clapboard house on the other side of the hill on Cheatham Springs Road. That’s what Ruby Gavin had told Webb. When he admitted he didn’t know what clapboard was, she told him it was the thin slats of wood that made up the siding. Any clapboard house these days was probably thirty or forty years old, because vinyl siding been around for years and didn’t ever need painting. She said you could tell a lot about a person by how their clapboard looked.
As Webb walked up the long oak-lined driveway to Lee’s house, a mockingbird—the size of a robin, gray with flashes of white in its tail—hopped along in front of him. The mockingbird finally got tired of Webb and flew away, and Webb reached a wide clearing from which he could see Knox’s white clapboard house. It was on a hillside, overlooking the valley to the south. Beside the house was a double garage with its doors up, revealing a large motorcycle with gleaming chrome and an older, bright red Camaro. The two-story house was large, with two rocking chairs on a wide front porch and an American flag waving in the breeze. The clapboard was freshly painted, matching the clapboard on the exterior of the garage. If Ruby was right about clapboard houses revealing things about their owners, Lee Knox was a person who took good care of things and cared about details.
The flower beds in front of the house confirmed Webb’s impression. He stepped onto the porch and was about to knock when the door opened, and the large man in the doorway studied Webb through round, frameless glasses. He had a few wrinkles, and the beginning of jowls under his close-cropped beard. The man’s hair was shaved so short that the coal-black skin of his head contrasted sharply with the gray stubble.
He was wearing sweatpants and an orange jersey that said UT. University of Tennessee. Now there was some major branding. Webb saw those letters everywhere in Nashville, on everything from bumper stickers to coffee cups.
The man in front of Webb held a magazine, as if Webb had interrupted his reading.
“Hello,” Webb said. “My name is Jim Webb.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because Ruby Gavin—”
“I know Ruby Gavin sent you here. She called, asked me if I would mind somebody coming by to ask me a few questions about the army and Vietnam. What I want to know is what questions you have. More to the point, I want to know why you put garbage down at my mailbox as you walked up.”
“Garbage?” Webb asked.
“Garbage. I’ve got a surveillance camera on my driveway. It showed you clear as day putting something down and walking away. Makes me wonder, too, why you’d park your car somewhere on the road and walk in like some long-haired punk trying to sneak up on me.”
Long-haired punk? Webb wanted to punch the guy. Normally, he could handle insults, but for the last while, he’d been getting angry at little things that usually didn’t bother him. “I don’t have a car,” Webb said, forcing a flatness into his voice as he swallowed the anger. “And what I put down by the mailbox is the same thing I’m going to pick up on my way back. A tin of cookies that Ruby baked for me. I set it down because I thought it might look strange knocking on your door with cookies, and I didn’t want to have to explain them.”
The answer softened Lee’s face a bit. “An old gal like Ruby bakes you cookies, that tells me something else, doesn’t it?”
So does freshly painted clapboard, Webb thought, and a perfect flower garden even though the flowers and bushes won’t be in bloom until spring. It tells a person something. So when could you believe what it told you and when couldn’t you?
Lee pointed at a rocking chair. “We might as well sit. You want tea?”
Webb had been in the south long enough to know that Lee meant iced tea. Down here, if you wanted it hot, you had to ask for hot tea. In Canada, when you ordered tea, unless you said iced tea, it came hot and steeped. More than once, he’d wished Tim Hortons would set up in Nashville.
“Yes, please,” Webb said. “Unsweetened.”
That was the other thing. You had to make sure you said unsweetened, or it would be so thick with sugar it was hard to drink. Webb had already filled up on cider, but tea wouldn’t hurt. He’d just have to make sure he used the bathroom before getting on a bus back to Nashville.
“Then set yourself down,” Lee said. “I’ll be back.”
Lee took a half step and paused, looking at Webb’s shirt, and said, “Saskatchewan Roughriders. College team?”
“CFL,” Webb said. In Nashville, if he wasn’t wearing his usual black T-shirt, Webb liked to wear different CFL shirts. He liked being reminded of Canada when he looked in the mirror. Today it was green and white—Go Riders. The T-shirt had been a real find, only five dollars from a surly ten-year-old at a garage sale in Toronto.
“CFL?”
“Canadian Football League.”
“They play on skates?” Lee asked, chuckling.
Webb sat in one of the rocking chairs and leaned back, thinking about what Lee had called him. Longhaired punk. Yes, he was mad at Lee for judging him because he had long hair, but if Webb was being honest with himself, it had not occurred to him that Lee Knox might be black. Maybe there was a good song in this somewhere, about making snap judgments. If Webb felt like writing a song. He was in Nashville for that reason, but the well had been dry for weeks. He didn’t seem to have the energy for it anymore, not since getting ripped off.
Lee came onto the porch with two tall glasses of tea, ice cubes clinking as he walked.
“Warm for December,” Lee said. “This is the first time since Christmas I’ve been able to enjoy sitting on the porch.”
Webb was used to snowy Christmases, so any day in December in Nashville seemed warm.
“How did you get here?” Lee asked. Get sounded like git. The entire sentence sounded like howdjew git heah.
“I’m from the Toronto area,” Webb explained. “I flew down to Nashville. I would have skated, but the ice ran out south of Buffalo.”
Lee raised an eyebrow.
Gotcha, Webb thought.
“What I meant,” Lee said, “was how did you get here today? Ruby told me you were living in Nashville. It’s a long ways to walk.”
“Bus,” Webb said.
“That wouldn’t have been easy.”
“With connections, about four hours,” Webb said.
“Four hours’ travel to come and ask some questions,” Lee said. “Must be important.”
More important than he was going to reveal to Lee. So Webb’s answer was to reach into his back pocket and pull out the pieces of military ID. One face. Two different names.