Cotton Jackson came upon looters on Main Street in Persimmon Ridge early that Saturday morning and didn’t have any idea what he ought to do about it. Gratefully, they saved him the trouble of doing anything at all by taking one look at him, leaping into their pickup truck and hauling butt out of town, left a box of tools they’d been stealing sitting on the sidewalk in front of Peetree’s Hardware Store.
It was bound to happen sooner or later.
They’d be back tonight or tomorrow or whenever. Once they bragged to their friends about it, wouldn’t be long before all the businesses in town, in all of the towns in Nowhere County, would be stripped bare of whatever was on the walls there — because that’s all that was left. Everything else was … gone. Absurdly, ridiculously, impossibly gone. Vacant buildings, homes, the courthouse. Like they’d all been emptied out of everything so they could be repainted and the painters didn’t want to chance a drip on the owner’s belongings. Except the furniture wasn’t sitting outside, waiting to be moved back in. It was … gone.
When Lester Peetree had closed his little hardware store in Twig years ago and opened a bigger one in the Ridge, his son Willie had lined the walls of it with tools so customers could wander among them and pick out just the hammer or screwdriver or drill bit they needed. The tools were still there — or had been until looters came to steal them — but nothing else was left in the store.
Nothing was left in the parking lot out back, either. No cargo van with Peetree’s Hardware Store stenciled on the side. Cotton hadn’t seen a single vehicle of any kind — car, pickup truck, motorcycle, jeep, four-wheeler, tractor … golf cart or Sherman tank — anywhere in the county. The parking lots, driveways, garages and carports were as empty as the buildings.
And some of the buildings weren’t just empty. Some of them had become dilapidated husks overnight, with sagging roofs, peeling paint, rotted boards. Every day there were more and more of those. Stores and homes all over the county. Cotton didn’t know which frightened him the most, made him more nauseous — empty houses where the folks living there might have stepped out on the porch to watch the sunset or catch fireflies with the kids, or falling-down shells, shacks that looked a hundred years old.
A hundred years ago would be 1895. Did that mean something? Cotton had no idea. He wondered, though …
Like he wondered about everything else in his life, had been wondering ever since the world as he knew it was shattered, the day everything he believed about reality and the whole nature of the universe crumbled at his feet. The day the world went mad.
Normal, garden-variety day. He’d stayed overnight in Lexington, slept on the lumpy cot in the employees’ breakroom at Polanski’s Sewing Machine factory, where he was the production foreman, because he had stayed late to repair a broken piece of machinery and would have to be at work early the next morning.
Oh, how he wished he hadn’t stayed, wished he’d gone home.
Right, stack that wish up on top of the pile of them that was topping out now at about the same height as the World Trade Center in New York.
Wished he’d gone home.
Wished he’d been there when whatever happened happened.
Wished he could have stopped it, or fixed it or … or been there with Thelma at the end.
Wished he could peck his sweet wife on the cheek just one more time and pinch her butt and have her jump like she wasn’t expecting it.
Wished he could figure out what catastrophic event had occurred in Nower County, Kentucky on June 3, 1995.
Wished he could find all the people who were missing.
Wished he could convince somebody — anybody! — that it mattered.
At age sixty-four, Cotton Jackson was a man comfortable in his own skin. He knew who he was, what he was about, and spent his days being grateful for all the good in his life. An eternal optimist. Thelma’d said he reminded her of that grinning sun on the box of kiddie cereal he always bought. He maintained that he was a simple life form — an amoeba in a world of multicelled fungi or bacteria or viruses or whatever was the next rung up on the evolutionary ladder.
Born in Nower County, married his high school sweetheart. Yeah, she was six feet two inches tall and he was five feet eleven inches and there were men that would have bothered but Cotton Jackson wasn’t one of them.
They’d had Billy and somehow — he looked back on it now and wondered how in the world they’d managed to pull it off — both made it out of college with teaching degrees. In the fifties! And black! Yeah, it was a miracle, a minor one, but life had all kinds of simple miracles if you’d just look around and notice them.
They’d gotten teaching jobs in their hometown, a tiny school district in Eastern Kentucky, one of only a handful of black people for a hundred miles in every direction. Of course, they only got the jobs because they were “local” and because the district didn’t have a single white applicant. Nower County, Kentucky wasn’t exactly a tour bus destination.
He taught math. She taught history. Life was good. Then Billy went off to Vietnam. Only eighteen years old! After two white soldiers in dress uniforms showed up on their porch one cold morning in January, there followed a decade of Cotton’s life that was so dark he had trouble seeing into it in his memories.
But he had Thelma and together they made it through.
When the high school closed, Cotton couldn’t find another teaching job so he took a job at a sewing machine factory and worked his way up to foreman. He liked the job. It was challenging, made him feel like he was earning his way in the world when the majority of the people in Nower County had rolled over on their backs, stuck their feet up in the air and surrendered. Took the government checks, did everything they could think of to beat the system and sank down into a place Cotton couldn’t locate in his mind.
Thelma didn’t get another teaching job, but they were fine on one paycheck. She indulged her hobby and her passion, genealogy and historical research, got so excited when she found the records on somebody’s great-great-great grandfather you’d think she’d won the lottery. Met with her Bible study once a week, her sewing circle once a week, could quote Scripture like she’d been to seminary and made a mountain of quilts to donate to orphanages.
Cotton was a year away from retirement, fully vested in his pension and Social Security, and they’d do fine. He hadn’t yet decided if he wanted to quit working, though. He enjoyed what he did and he was good at it — still, to kick back and go fishing every day had a certain appeal. In fact, he and Thelma had planned to spend Sunday afternoon looking at some brochures for “retirement homes” in Florida, just blue-sky dreaming.
But by Sunday afternoon, Thelma was gone. And the world — in all its particulars — reality that was the foundation of Cotton’s existence had vanished in a puff of smoke.
Cotton pulled his car over to the curb and looked at the cardboard box the looters had left behind. And somehow, it seemed to symbolize the insanity of it all. A box full of wrenches and screwdrivers, hammers and bolt-cutters sitting all by itself on an empty sidewalk, in front of an empty store, in an empty county …
What should he do with the box? Go put it back in the store so the looters could come back later and get what they’d left behind? What was the point in that? Useless effort; why bother?
Yet he found he couldn’t just drive away down the empty street past the empty stores and the dilapidated heaps, and leave the box sitting there. So, he got out, picked up the box and carried it back into the store. Lester’d outlined the tools on the store’s walls in black Magic Marker, so it was easy for Cotton to see where the tools had been hanging. He put them back, one after the other until the box was empty, was tempted to sweep up the mess from the back door window the looters broke to get in. He didn’t do that, though, just left the front door of the store standing wide open so the looters wouldn’t have to go in through the back. Wouldn’t want somebody to cut a finger on the broken glass.
Then he got into his car and drove south out of Persimmon Ridge with no particular destination in mind, just headed out toward the Middle of Nowhere.