by Cameron Judd
ELI ARRIVED EARLY AT HIS office the next morning, though there was no call for it. All that lay immediately ahead, as far as he knew, was another day of roaming around with Lundy, and if they were lucky, actually getting some anticipated story assignments onto paper at last.
He was cheerful both for the prospect of another pleasant day and for the good news regarding his book proposal. As intended, he’d called Allison and they’d had one of the most pleasant conversations they’d experienced since their rather dramatic breakup. That had added to Eli’s positive frame of mind, not that he foresaw any future for him and his former love. Breaking up had been painful, but also right. He didn’t doubt it, and was sure Allison did not, either.
As he pulled into the lot of his office building, he saw an eighteen-wheeler in the lot. He wondered if there were any rules forbidding the overnight parking of commercial trucks on this property. Whatever the case, it was not his problem. Jimbo Bailey’s perhaps, maybe, but not his.
Eli entered the building, pondering as always the astonishing randomness of the building’s design. How much money had Mr. Carl wasted, having this architectural effort handled by a mere boy? Oh, the deluding effects of family affection. It was illustrated concretely in this mess of a structure. A theme for a future novel by Eli Scudder, maybe.
A mid-thirtyish man in jeans and a faded work shirt was in the hallway, feeding change into a vending machine near Eli’s office door. He glanced up as Eli neared and the two of them gave muttered hellos. Eli unlocked his office and entered while the man continued fumbling about with the knobs of the vending machine, quietly cursing beneath his breath in particularly vile language. Eli had never used that machine, but knew it didn’t work well because he’d seen others have similar struggles with it and, from the other side of the wall, heard the frequent rattle of the machine being shaken and punched by annoyed would-be users.
The cursing suddenly got louder and the man pounded the machine, a flat-handed, slapping blow from the sound of it. A kick followed, and then the familiar rattle of the machine being shaken, thumping the wall of Eli’s office hard enough to dislodge the framed University of Tennessee diploma that hung there. Another slap and kick, then more rattling and wall-bumping.
Sorry about your frustration, buddy, but enough’s enough.
“Problem with the machine?” Eli asked grumpily after he’d stormed back out into the hall.
“Yeah, this damn machine … it bugs the crap out of me when something takes my money and then won’t give you what you paid for.” The man paused and made a visible effort to calm himself. “Listen, friend. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper over something little like that. I’ve had a temper problem all my life, like my old man before me. I need to calm down. That’s what my wife told me the whole four years she was able to put up with me. Calm down, J.D., calm down. That’s what she’d tell me. I never did do it, so she gave me the boot.”
Eli took a deep breath and made himself calm down too. He put out his hand. “Name’s Eli. Pleased to meet you, J.D..”
“Howdy do.”
“That your truck out there?”
“Yeah. Is it a problem that I parked there?”
“I don’t know, since it’s not my building. I just have an office here. I don’t know if the owners allow overnights. It’s never come up.”
“Wasn’t an overnight. I just pulled in over there maybe half an hour ago.”
Eli chuckled. “So you stopped here just to come in and have the pleasure of fighting with this machine?”
The young trucker laughed and palm-slapped the vending machine, lightly this time. “No, no. That was just a side benefit of stopping by. I had another reason to stop.” Eli nodded, assuming this to be a veiled reference to a call of nature. “Hey, what kind of office you got here, Eli? You an insurance man or something?”
“No. There is an insurance office down the hall, if you’re looking for one, but me, I work for the local newspaper. I’m handling a special project having to do with this city and county having its bicentennial next year. The paper is putting out a magazine with a lot of history stories and so on.”
“History,” the trucker said. “I can relate to history. I’ve got some history right here where we’re standing. That was the other reason I stopped here, in fact.”
“What do you mean?”
“Step outside with me, if you got a minute to spare. I’ll show you why I stopped. Something I seen out there that brought back a memory of some of that history I was just talking about.”
Eli had no real reason to spend more time with this stranger, now that he had seemingly given up prize-fighting the vending machine, but there was something mildly intriguing in all this. “Sure. Lead the way, J.D.”
Outside again in the parking lot, J.D. pointed across the two-lane highway, and Eli noticed something he hadn’t before: a barn, and on the side of it a very faded advertising message regarding a long-defunct Tylerville jewelery store owned by a man with the rare name of Spancake.
“I can tell from the shape those trees are in that you folks had the same kind of storm last night that I drove through coming this way. I swear, I thought it’d blow my trailer right over. I had to pull off at a rest stop and let the worst of it pass, just for safety.”
“Is that why you brought me out here?” Eli asked.
“No, no. Hell no. I wanted to show you that sign on the barn. That’s why I stopped here: seeing that sign.”
“Huh,” Eli said. “Funny how you can see something day after day and still not really see it. I never noticed words painted on that old barn. To tell the truth, I hardly even noticed the barn.”
“No surprise you wouldn’t have noticed the words. They’re pretty faint now … pretty much faded away from the first time I saw them,” J.D. said. “Of course, that was a long time back. Twenty or more years. It was seeing that on the barn wall while I was driving that made me realize exactly where I was.”
“You came through here as a kid, then.”
“Yep. Trip with my family. I was eleven; my sister was just ten. Good lord … it seems so far back now. Anyway, things kind of went sour that trip. Not an uncommon thing in my family, things going sour, but that time was the worst. My parents split up over something my Dad did. Well, over that ‘something’ and a lot of other ‘somethings’ before it. After the fight, Dad drove off come morning, from the motel lot … pulled out right over there, then headed out that highway, and Mama took me and Emmie, that being my sister, over to a restaurant that sat over that way … Winnie’s, I think it was called … and we ate pancakes and waited until some relatives picked us up. Good old Mama. She put up with a lot of Daddy’s crap through her life, God rest her soul. She’s buried right here in this county, even though this wasn’t really her home. She’d got a job on the housekeeping crew at Bowington College, after the family broke up, and she worked too hard at it. She died of a heart attack before she even turned fifty.” The trucker reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of generic low-tar cigarettes. “She worked and worried too much and smoked too many of these damn things … and she always smoked the full-power kind, she and Daddy both. Me, I want to live longer, so I stick with the light ones.” He lit up, exhaled bluish smoke, and looked wistful. “Being here, I can still see her in my mind, looking just like she did the morning Daddy left us abandoned at this motel. That’s not the best day to remember her from, though. She’d had quite a bit of beer the night before, and it showed.” He scratched gravel with the toe of his boot. “Part of the reason I came through here today was that I want to go visit Mama’s grave while I’m in the area. I wasn’t able to come to her burying service. I got a letter from my sister giving me holy hell for not being there for the burying. It made me mad because there was really nothing I could do about it, in the circumstances I was in. I was in the county jail over in Claiborne County. I drink quite a bit of beer myself every now and then, you see, and I’m not a friendly drunk. I’m a fighting one.
”
“Where’s your sister now?”
A shrug. “No idea. I lost track of her. I have no notion where she is or if she’s married or has kids, or anything like that. She’d be thirty-three years old now. I’ve not tried hard enough to connect back up with her. Some of it’s embarrassment because my marriage went south. Emmie told me from the outset that my marriage was a mistake. Turned out she was right.”
“Sorry things have taken bad turns for you,” Eli said, then cast about for a way to lighten the conversation, which he intended to end soon. “So there used to be a motel here, huh?”
“Yeah … still is here, in a way. This nutty building – not trying to insult your office place, pal, but it’s freaky, you gotta admit – this building looks to have been put up to enclose the motel and the restaurant both. Crazy piece of construction, this is.”
“Yeah. There’s a story behind it I could tell you, but it isn’t worth your time, trust me. But I didn’t know it once was a motel.” Eli scanned the place like he was seeing it the first time. “All I’d been told was that there were some smaller buildings here that were pulled together into one big one. What kind of buildings, nobody said.”
“Well, let me tell you a little more. Not only was this a motel, but if my memory is right and my bearings are good, the area where your office is is right about where my family’s room was that night. Very close to it, anyway. Of course, it’s been changed a lot, and what used to open to the outside now opens into a big hallway, so I can’t say for sure. But it could be the same room.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I ain’t. I feel right sure of it … and holy shit!”
J.D. suddenly was no longer looking at Eli, but past him. Something farther down the parking lot had grabbed his attention.
“Damn!” Dale said. “My eyes are popping right out of my skull!”
“What’s wrong?”
Dale shook his head. “Not a thing, buddy, not one thing wrong about what I’m looking at. Well, except maybe the kind of thoughts it’s rousing in my dirty little mind right now.”
Eli turned his head, and saw at once what held Dale’s attention.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a more beautiful young woman. The sandy-haired stunner was climbing out of a van marked with the logo of WVKT, a television station in the Tri-Cities area some miles up the road. With her were a couple of men carrying boxes, as if about to move items into an office.
“Man, man, oh man! Hoochie mama!” J.D. said. “That there, my friend, is as fine a piece of the best thing a man can get as I’ve ever laid eyes on! And I’d like to lay a lot more than my eyes on her!”
Eli was far from prudish, but his reaction to J.D.’s crudeness was reflexive and negative. Eli had lived no sheltered life, grew up only peripherally involved in a church, and had never seen himself as inhibited by puritanical strictures. Certainly, at the very least he’d done his share of looking at attractive females in a less-than-righteous frame of mind. J.D., though, disgusted him with his blatantly prurient way of gazing at, and talking about, the unknown beauty down the parking lot, toward whom Eli felt a protective instinct he couldn’t fully account for.
“She’s a very pretty lady,” Eli said mildly, refusing to pander to J.D.’s crudity.
“Pretty?” J.D. said in a nearly contemptuous tone. “Hell! That’s a way long ways beyond ‘pretty,’ pal. ‘Pretty’ is sweet little ten-year-old Susie in her new Sunday School dress. That down there ain’t ‘pretty’; that down there is nothing in this world but sex on two legs.”
“You know, J.D., I don’t really know you, but I got to say, I don’t like your kind of talk.”
J.D. gaped. “Just what the hell are you, buddy? Some kind of preacher or saint or something?” He paused. “Or maybe you travel on the other side of the road. Is that it, Eli? You sweet? You a funny boy with no use for the girls?”
Eli kept his temper and his cool. “I’m just somebody who was taught by his father to have a little bit of decency about him when it comes to the ladies.”
“Yeah? Well, my old man raised me a whooooole lot different than that, friend. If appreciating fine female flesh is indecent, then indecent was fine with him, and it’s sure fine with his little boy! Family tradition, dude, like Hank sings about. Family tradition.” J.D. stared nastily at the young lady as she entered the office building with her two male companions, and murmured “Um, um, ummm! Tasty stuff! Tasty!”
“You have yourself a good day, J.D.,” Eli said, turning away because he’d had enough. “Back to the salt mines for me. Somebody’s supposed to be here to meet me anytime now.”
“You have a good day, Saint Eli,” said J.D. in a sarcastic tone. “Pleased to have met you. Though I got to say I’d a lot rather have rather met that fine piece down yonder. Man, what I’d do to that! Want me to tell you what I’d do to her? ’Cause I will! I’ll tell you every sweet little juicy detail.”
“No thanks and so long, J.D.” Eli headed for the entrance. J.D. called after him, “Hey, Eli!”
Eli turned, annoyed and ready to be finished with this boor. “What?”
“Meant to ask you … you ever found anything in that office of yours?”
“Found anything? What do you mean?”
“I mean, you ever found anything that looks like it might have been left behind by … by somebody back in the days this place was still … aw hell. Nothing. Forget it. I got to get back on the road. That truck ain’t going to drive itself. But just in case you find ever find something … here, take this.”
J.D. pulled out a wallet attached to his belt loop with a chrome chain, and from it produced a card that he thrust toward Eli. “You find anything in there you think you might want to tell me about, you call me at that number. Y’hear?”
Eli looked at the card. “All right, Mr. ‘James Dale Moody, independent trucker, Maynardville, TN.’ I’ll do that. But tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.” He tucked the card into a pocket to throw away later.
“Just forget it. So long, Eli.”
“So long, J.D.”
They parted and Eli returned to his office, wondering when Jake Lundy would show up. He wondered as well who was the lovely newcomer to his building, and why she was there.
Chapter Nine
“YEAH, I’M RIGHT WITH YOU ON THAT,” Jake Lundy said as he pulled out of the parking lot ten minutes later, Eli on the passenger side. Eli had just recounted his conversation with the loutish trucker. “I got no use for a man who can’t control his own filthy mouth. I’d have been as pissed off as you were if I’d been there to hear that jackass. What’d he stop here for, anyway?”
“As best I can put it together from what he said, he came through Tylerville partly to visit his mother’s grave, and he happened to see the old Spancake sign on that barn across the way there and remembered the sign from when he was a kid. It seems his family stayed at a motel that was here back in the 1960s. He saw the Spancake sign and decided to see what had changed since he was a boy, I guess.”
“The old Winona Court Motor Lodge. I remember it well. Your office is in one of the old motel rooms, you know that?”
“I do now. It’s apparently the same room that trucker’s family stayed in, or he thinks it is.”
“I be durned!”
“Yeah, he gave me a card asked me to call him if I ever found anything in my office that looked like somebody might have lost it a long time ago, or something along that line. He didn’t say exactly what he was thinking of. It was a strange conversation, all around.”
“Who you reckon the pretty lady you saw is?” Lundy asked.
“She arrived in a TV station news van.”
“TV news van … wait a minute … wait a minute! I might know that gal.”
“Tell me, then.”
“I heard talk over at the Cup and Saucer that one of the network affiliate stations over in the Tri-Cities, WVKT, I think, is putting a bureau office here in Tylerville. Because of the bi
centennial, and Homecoming ’86. You know about Homecoming ’86, I reckon.”
“I know it’s a statewide heritage celebration, and that all the towns and communities are supposed to take on projects that fit the heritage theme and carry them out during the year. For Tylerville that works out easy, because what we do for the bicentennial celebration can count for Homecoming ’86 at the same time. Two birds with one stone.”
“Exactly right. And the TV folk know a bicentennial is a pretty big deal, a lot of good material for television. So it makes sense for them to put in a news bureau here to keep on top of all the goings-on.”
“So she’s probably a TV reporter,” Eli said. “She’s pretty enough for TV, no doubt about it. That trucker was really vulgar in how he talked about her, but he was sure right that she’s an easy sight to look at.”
“I’m betting she’s Ben Buckingham’s daughter. A Tylerville girl. Ben’s daughter works in TV. She started an intern, I believe. I swear the gal is pretty enough to be in movies. Sandy hair, nearly blonde … big eyes, beautiful face, fine figure … the full package.”
“What’s her name?”
“Melissa.” Lundy paused, rethinking. “Uh, no, not that. Melinda. Melinda Buckingham. Did she look to be right about your age? Twenties?”
“She did.”
“Gotta be her. I know the family. I go to church with the Buckinghams, and Ben even does some fill-in preaching for some of the rural churches, when they need it. I’ve heard him a time or two … real old-style hellfire and brimstone. Too much so for me, even though that’s what I grew up with.”
“What’s he do for a living?”
“He works in video, the big rising trend in these crazy modern times. Buckingham Video Services. Ben tapes weddings, graduations, special presentations, family reunions, anything people want recorded. He can transfer old home movies from film onto video cassettes for folks. Things like that. Him and Dot, that being his wife, operate out of a little house out on Bowington Boulevard, a place they converted into commercial space. They live in a house not very far from their shop. The family is Ben, Dot, their younger daughter Megan, and Melinda, back home for the moment now that she’s graduated college.”
