Billy Wade is driving on an untamed country highway during that unpredictable time of day when the last blip of sunset is giving itself over to darkness. Patience sips a beer and navigates next to him. In the back seat, Joe slides his big right foot up next to the side of my left one while I’m wrestling with reception on my cell.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back…Frances, listen…I know it seems there’s no way you can make it without me, but—”
Billy Wade snorts from behind the wheel of the cement truck. “Oh, brother.”
“Selfish!” Patience hollers.
I hush both of them with a cold stink eye, and Patience points at a road sign. “Mile seventeen marker!”
“Shh!” I hiss to no avail as Joe puts his hand over mine. In the rearview mirror, I can see Patience pretend she didn’t see it as I gently push his hand away.
Billy Wade swerves down a distant kin of drivable road. “THIS IS IT!”
“I gotta go, Frances. Visitors’ hours are almost over.” I toss the cell on the seat next to me. “So,” I say to my fellow trekkers, “do I get to know where we’re going?”
Patience bounces like a toddler. “It’s a surprise!” she says, turning around and flinging a Cheshire grin at me, then at Joe, then at me again, her happiness in being in on the secret more than she can bear. I stare back, chewing my lip, something she always said I did whenever she was pissing me off. She takes another pull off her beer and flings the bottle out the window at a yield sign on the side of the road. The glass shatters, and she and Billy Wade whoop.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I say.
“Ha ha! Two points!” she says with a wink at Joe before focusing again on me. “Okay, remember Jimbo Pritchett?”
Billy Wade waves Patience down with a wild arm. “Shush!”
“The Piggly Wiggly Easter Bunny?” I say, pushing Billy Wade’s arm back into his own territory.
“Yessiree.”
I turn to Billy Wade, hoping he’s giving me more.
“Let’s just say,” Patience says, choosing her words gingerly, “the biggest stars are not always found in Hollyweird.”
“Oh, shit,” Billy Wade says, pulling the car to the side of the road with a skid as a hay truck passes in the other lane.
“Hay truck, bow your head, make a wish!” Patience hollers.
“Bow your head!” Joe hollers at me through a half-serious grin, tucking his head behind the seat.
“What are you wishing for?” I ask Joe, bowing my head.
Joe lowers his voice. “That when we get home, you’ll try that thing you wouldn’t try the other night.”
“I heard that,” Patience says.
Genuinely embarrassed, I lower my head even more, giggling like a hyena.
Once we’ve avoided the wrath of the hay truck’s curse, Billy Wade pulls back into the highway before he quickly makes a left turn, maneuvering the vehicle through a rocky stream and up a narrow, washed-out hill. “Hold on to whatcha got.”
* * *
Our motley crew joins a group of twenty-five others outside a crumbling turquoise house trailer. Ancient aluminum lawn chairs have been assembled in the muddy yard, a sort of audience directed at the tiny front porch. Billy Wade pushes me down into an aisle seat next to Joe. Patience motions Billy Wade to sit next to her in one of the shortie beach chairs down front.
A nervous, buttoned-down business type across the aisle from me avoids eye contact with anyone, while one of a pair of would-be female sumo wrestlers seated next to Joe whispers, “First time here?”
The crowd begins to quiet in anticipation as someone turns down the camp lantern hanging from a nearby cypress tree. An announcement, an English woman’s voice through a cheap sound system, opens the dubious proceedings. “Ladies and gentlemen, the management would like to remind you that the use of cameras, recording devices, and cell phones are strictly prohibited in the amphitheater. And now it is our great pleasure to once again ask you to put your hands together and give a warm Gulf Coast welcome to the incomparable—the irrepressible—Miss—JEANNIE LEE WAGNER!”
A mechanic’s shop light positioned over the porch flicks on as someone resembling a chunky dime store version of Elizabeth Taylor exits the front door of the trailer. Jimbo Pritchett, aka Jeannie Lee, twists and gyrates to the first few bars of a country tune I’ve never heard like he’s playing the main room at the Sands. Pulling seductively at the hem of his mini, he adjusts the back of his wig with a tug, tracing the side of his face with a white-gloved hand as he begins to lip-sync over the fans’ wild applause.
Billy Wade and Patience turn around to check my reaction. Still attempting to find my footing in this Deliverance-tinged wonderland, I whisper, “Jimbo Pritchett is a drag queen?”
Billy Wade snorts. “First Friday of the month here. And every other Saturday at the Foxx Club in Mobile.”
I look up to find Jimbo’s eyes locked on mine, and he’s prancing my way. I pray that if I look straight ahead with enough steel cold horror in my eyes, he’ll look somewhere else. Or choke on a chicken bone. Anything.
And just like that, I have a two-hundred-pound drag queen sitting on my lap. Jimbo pulls a giant feathered boa around my neck and breaks his tune to address the audience. Trying to go inside myself to see if I can will my own death, I think I hear him say, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a celebrity in the audience tonight.”
Uh-oh, here it comes.
“Miss Frances Newman’s boy toy, Phillip Stalworth. All the way from Hoooollywood!”
Everyone whoops and hollers, even Business Type. The sumo wrestlers next to us hold up their beer cans, crashing them into other beer cans around them.
Holding up my own beer, I take a healthy slug before toasting Joe and everyone else around me. Jimbo pats me gently on the back, and I belch like a sweetly rocked baby.
* * *
The gentle heat from Jimbo’s primitive fridge is finally beginning to dry the night mist saturating my sweatshirt from an hour-and-a-half show and two curtain calls. Nursing a plastic cup of wine I retrieved from a box on the trailer steps, I’m doing my best to avoid one more question about my famous pedigree while Billy Wade, Patience, and Joe cut a tiny space of rug in Jimbo’s living room. I make my way discreetly past a wall of country music collector plates to a card table bearing Hydrox, chips, and California dip.
“Stay on the plywood, the rest is rotten.” Jimbo, still in drag, points to the planks of plywood on the floor in a husky voice. “Don’t wanna lose any Hollywood royalty.”
“Oh. Right,” I say, eyeballing the decking beneath our feet with suspicion.
Jimbo offers up a plate of dubious delights from the back of the table. “Have one—it’s the good Cheez Whiz.” Jimbo takes off his wig and glances at Joe, who’s dancing like a high school principal, his stiff arms resting on top of his head. “Joe Tischman’s still hot as hell. You think he’d go out with me?”
I take a healthy slug of my beer, noticing Joe has one shoe on and one shoe off. “Prob’ly.”