by Cameron Judd
“How long you been out, Rawls?”
“Since around the first of the year. Mighty glad to get out of that hole, I can tell you. I’m staying out of trouble from here on out. No plans to go back inside.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah … I learned my lesson. That lesson is: be careful as hell anytime you do whatcha do. You’re only in trouble if you get caught.”
Curtis nodded, finding nothing to say.
“Hey, Curtis, I seen you a time or two when I was driving around since I got home, but you didn’t see me. Honked at you once but you didn’t hear. Either that or you think you’re too high-and-mighty to wave at a Parvin.”
“I’d have waved at you if I’d heard you honking.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know you would have. I’m just redneckin’ you, that’s all. You’ve always been a friendly man, Curtis.”
“Got to be friendly in my line of work.”
Rawls barely squelched a mocking chuckle. “‘Line of work’? Your ‘line of work’ still selling pencils at the front door of Discount World?”
“Yeah.”
“Business good in the pencil industry these days?”
Curtis sensed he was being ridiculed and it made him want to stomp off in a huff. But that would be rude, something he wasn’t.
“It’s good enough. Folks always need pencils.”
“Lucky for you, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Why are you out here in this parking lot, this time of the evening? There’s nobody looking to buy crazy-man pencils here, I don’t think.”
“A man’s got to be somewhere.” A burst of annoyance at Rawls’s snideness and disrespect gave Curtis a moment of courage, so he asked a question of his own. “Why are you here, Rawls? You out here selling drugs?”
“Out here for personal reasons, Curtis. Personal reasons.” Parvin looked over at the power company building as he said it.
Curtis had no idea what Parvin meant, and asked nothing more. It never paid to annoy a Parvin, no matter how much the Parvin annoyed you first.
Parvin pointed at a powder-blue Bronco parked nearby. “That Bronco there, you know who drives that?”
“Don’t know.” In fact Curtis did know, because he’d been at the corner of the parking lot when Melinda Buckingham had driven in for the meeting in the power company building across the street. It would take a brasher man than he, though, to mention that particular name to Rawls Parvin.
“Well, I’ll tell you who drives it,” Parvin said. “The prettiest girl in Tennessee drives that Bronco. Melinda Buckingham. Works in TV now. I kept some company with that sweet thing a few years ago, but that got ruined by lies that were spread about me, and because her old man’s a nut-case who thinks his little girly is too good for a man to so much as look at. Damned old religious fanatic! And as big a hypocrite as any of them. And they’re all hypocrites, Curtis. Every damn one of them. You know what a hypocrite is?”
“Yeah.” It was a lie. The image in Curtis’s mind was of a big, lumbering beast he’d seen wallowing in mud at the Knoxville Zoo years ago. He figured that probably wasn’t what Rawls was talking about, so he moved the conversation on.
“I know who Melinda Buckingham is, and I know who her daddy is,” Curtis said. “She grew up in this town. I’ve seen her on the TV in my house … Coleman Caldwell’s house, I’m talking about.”
“Coleman Caldwell? Damn! You still living in that old lunatic’s weed thicket? Two loons under one roof! Ha! I guess not much has changed around here since they sent me up the river … which shouldn’t have ever happened, you know. I never sold drugs in my life!”
“Yeah.” Curtis knew better. Rawls Parvin had been one of the best-known drug dealers in Kincheloe County in his teen years.
Curtis also knew, as did most everyone in Tylerville, about Rawls’ brief and ill-fated courtship of Melinda Buckingham, a young woman so far out of his league, and from a background so incompatible with Rawls’s own, that even Curtis had known it couldn’t work.
Melinda in high school had been the toast of the community, winning local pageants, talent shows, cheerleading contests, citizenship awards, newspaper essay contests, student government elections, church youth group and denominational honors, oratory competitions, and eventually, scholarship offers from nearly every civic organization in Tylerville and from colleges and universities across the Southeast and beyond. She was a star in her small-town world.
Melinda’s hard-working and religiously devout parents were intensely proud of her, and took every effort to make sure no one forgot whose daughter she was, until …
Until Rawlston “Rawls” Parvin came along. Rawls came from poor stock, a rough family of low reputation and bad associations. Over nearly a century, several male Parvins, and a few females, had spent time behind bars for offenses both petty and large. During the first half of the 20th century, Parvin moonshine was the most noted product to come out of mountainous southern Kincheloe County. Starting in the 1960s the Parvins slowly updated their focus more to marijuana production, changing with the times while still maintaining the family’s transgressive tradition.
Rawls, as Rawlston was generally called, had in his teen years been seen as the Parvins’ great rising hope to give some long-missing luster to the family name. He was a healthy and strong youth, intelligent beyond his family’s norm and even handsome … though his looks were marred somewhat by what was known as “the Parvin eye” or “the Parvin glare”. This common local descriptive term referenced a distinctive look possessed by most Parvin men around and in their eyes, a kind of wild, piercing glare that made them look perpetually furious and menacing.
Parvin glare aside, Rawls could actually be charming, in his way, when required. Most importantly, he was athletic, with the ability to turn a football into a guided missile that went exactly where his eagle eye and steel-spring arm sent it. That he was prime quarterback material was evident by the junior high level. As the boy grew and became better and better on the gridiron, local football worshipers could talk of no other name than Rawls Parvin, their minds full of championship dreams on down the road when Rawls was just a few years older, followed by a university football career (as a Tennessee Vol, it was hoped) and then a successful pro career to put the cap on it all. Patience, patience, they counseled themselves. Rawls will be out there on that field in a few years, and it’ll all be ours, then. Skill in football, as always, covered a multitude of sins. It was also, probably, one of the few things about him that would make him worthy of notice by such a worshiped local angel-princess as Melinda Buckingham.
Even so, Rawls remained a Parvin, a name that hung on him like a badge of dishonor. Two Parvins had been lynched as thieves at the turn of the century, another had been shot to death by his in-laws because of how he treated his wife, and several had been run out of the county for everything from simple obnoxiousness to livestock theft and barn-burning. In more recent years, one Parvin, Lukey, had further darkened the family name by enrolling in a vocational program and learning to be a camera operator, after which he went to Los Angeles to involve himself as a cameraman for the movie industry. He’d actually succeeded in getting work, giving his family some bragging rights until it was learned that the kind of movies Lukey was helping make were far, far removed from the variety shown in mainstream theaters, and were typically created in seedy motel rooms in ways that violated every kind of law, legal and moral.
Even after the true nature of what Lukey was doing was known, some of the rougher Parvin men, Lukey’s father included, were “proud of the old boy for making a name for himself out amongst your Hollywood perfeshunals.” When the unflattering truth about Lukey’s disgraceful career began to be known, the Kincheloe County public marked up one more demerit for the Parvin name. After a narrow escape on a pornography-related charge in California, Lukey Parvin fled his grim new life and temporarily came back home, finding work in the local Farmer’s Co-op store and learning to ignore the whispers
and behind-the-back finger-pointing his background aroused among the locals. Being a Parvin by birth, he was used to being looked down upon, anyway, so being reviled as a moral pestilence wasn’t much different from past experience. He eventually grew sufficiently tired of it, though, that he returned to LA and a world where people lacked Bible Belt judgmentalism, and a man could do what he had to do for his living, as long as he could find shadows dark enough to hide in.
Even Lukey’s activities in the underground smut industry, however, didn’t overshadow the darkest blot on the Parvin name. That remained the 1951 crime of one Dalton Parvin, who got into a beer joint shooting fracas with a Tate, Tate being the only local family name held in lower regard than Parvin. Had Dalton’s shot hit its intended target, it would have been just one more fast-forgotten white trash barroom shooting. But Dalton Parvin’s shot inside the Wildcat Bar had gone wide of its intended Tate target, passed through a window, and lodged fatally in the brain of the then-sheriff of Kincheloe County. The sheriff was a Sadler, albeit one of the “lower branch Sadlers,” as the country-cousin outliers of the family were called. Someone had seen the lawman driving past just as it was growing evident the fight between Parvin and Tate was going to turn serious. The sheriff was summoned to stop with a frantic waving of arms. Sheriff Buck Sadler had been striding across the beer joint parking lot to resolve the problem inside when, in the later words of the Free Will Baptist preacher who led his funeral, “the good Lord called our brother home” by the seemingly very irreligious means of a drunk’s wrongly aimed bullet through a honky-tonk window.
That a Parvin had killed even a lower-branch Sadler, if only unintentionally, was so atrocious to local sensibilities that Dalton Parvin earned the dubious distinction of being the last white East Tennessean to suffer a long-outdated punishment, vigilante-style. He was stripped to his tighty-whities, globbed over with roofing tar and chicken feathers, and ridden howling and pleading on a rail down a public lane, specifically a portion of Mountcastle Road that ran through eastern Kincheloe County’s Perkins Creek community. As shamed as he must have felt, he actually had benefited from one crucial modernization of the antique form of punishment: the roofing tar in which he was smeared came from a metal drum, room temperature, unlike the hot tar that had been used upon tarred-and-feathered miscreants of centuries past.
A photograph later surfaced purporting to show the infamous “Perkins Creek rail ride of Dalton Parvin.” Two or three regionally published books of “history” published the photograph, which subsequently proven to be a mere reenactment of the event staged by local pranksters related to the Tate whom Parvin’s bullet had missed. The photographer was one Roy Tate, a local photo hobbyist and talented auto mechanic.
Dalton Parvin never returned to his home county alive, dying in a prison medical ward in winter of 1962 after contracting pneumonia in a drafty and barely heated cell. His body was sent back home to Kincheloe County and buried in a family plot. It was whispered around the community that local lowlife Millard Tate, half-brother to the man Dalton Parvin had shot at and missed, made a journey to the Parvin family plot solely to urinate on Dalton Parvin’s fresh grave while his son, Roy, photographed him doing so … a moment of crude redneck strutting. Rumor had it that a large framed print of the grave-wetting photograph had been among items destroyed, along with Millard himself, when Millard’s house burned to the ground some years afterward.
Despite an official fire marshal’s ruling that the Millard Tate fire originated in a fuse box, many people believed that the fire was caused by arson, because the Parvins didn’t like the Tates, and nobody was handier at arson than a Parvin. The fact that not one shred of evidence connecting the Parvins to that fire existed mattered not at all. Rules of evidence were lax in the trailer court of public opinion.
From this rough family legacy came the young man now standing in the parking lot with Curtis Stokes.
“YOU HAD ANY SUPPER this evening, Curtis?” Rawls Parvin asked.
“Not really. Just some vieenies.”
“I’ll bet you’re hungry, then.”
Curtis thought maybe he could see a hamburger in his immediate future, and his regard for Rawls increased dramatically in a single moment. “Yeah, I’m hungry.”
“Look up there, Curtis. That window. See that? That’s Custer Crosswaite up there, see him?”
Curtis did. Visible in the window was a head-and-shoulders view of the well-known buck dancer, whom Curtis didn’t much like because he sometimes performed a step he called “Curtis and the Shadow” in which he imitated the spastic way Curtis spasmed when he passed through the shadow of a light pole. If the joke had been at someone else’s expense, Curtis might have found some humor in it. As it was, it hurt his feelings.
Custer was not looking out the window, but downward, as if busy with his hands. He lifted a white foam cup to his mouth and sipped.
Rawls patted Curtis’s shoulder. “See that? Custer got himself some coffee. They got refreshments in there, Curtis. And since that’s a meeting open to the public, you could go in there and get yourself a couple of handfuls of cookies, or a piece of cake, or whatever, all for free.”
“Yeah … I admit, Rawls, I’d already thought about that.”
“Well, go on. The key is: move fast, get what you want, and don’t look at anybody. Just get your snacks in hand and hustle out of there. They’ll have forgot all about you half a minute later.”
It sounded good to Curtis … except for one problem. To get from where he was to the door of the power company building would require him to pass through …
“Don’t you worry, Curtis,” said Rawls. “I see you looking at them pole shadows ’tween here and there. I’ll get you through them without so much as a twitch.”
“How?”
“I’ll walk beside you and you can walk to my side inside my shadow, and my shadow will keep the pole shadow off of you if you stay in close enough to me. See?” He walked up to the closest pole shadow and positioned himself in it, left side toward the street lamp whose light caused the shadow, and sure enough, his own shadow stretched out long to his right, covering and obliterating the pole shadow for several yards.
“See, Curtis? You just come over here and step into my shadow, and stay in it, and that pole shadow won’t ever touch you.”
Nervously, Curtis Stokes gave it a try, and sure enough, was able to cover himself fully in the shadow of Rawls’ body. Protected thus from the shadow of the pole itself, he felt none of the jerking and tugging feeling so familiar to him.
“See there? It works! Now, Curtis, let’s you and me move together, toward the street, and you stay in my shadow and we’ll be good all the way across.”
Moving gingerly, Curtis edged along with Rawls, holding his breath and watching his positioning closely as they approached the second pole shadow. Together they passed through it without any ill effect, and Curtis laughed at the joy of the experience.
“You done it, Rawls! You protected me from it!” Curtis declared. Rawls, who never prayed but was praying now that no one he knew could see him, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with the craziest man in town, nodded and said, “The truth is, Curtis, you could have made this walk without me and it would have been no different. The only reason you feel seized by those shadows is that you believe it’s going to happen. It ain’t the shadows that are shaking you, it’s your own mind. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I … uh … yeah, Rawls. I understand.”
“Look, we got just one more shadow to get through before we’re at the door. Want to try that one alone?”
Curtis went weak in the knees at the mere thought of it. The braver and most rational part of him actually told him that, yes, he should try it alone, just like Rawls was saying. The other and dominant part of him, though, the part that had endured more jolts and shadow-shakes than Old Man Darwin had dollars, that part resoundingly told him no, and won.
“All right, then, we’ll go through the last one toget
her,” Rawls said. “Come on.”
“You’re being a good friend to me, Rawls. I appreciate you for helping me here tonight.”
“See? I’ve always told you I was your friend! I was telling you the truth.”
“Yeah, you was. Thank you, Rawls.”
They passed through the final pole shadow and Curtis hurried up onto the concrete steps leading to the side door, Rawls following more slowly because of his limp.
CURTIS WAS JUST OPENING the door to go in when Rawls said, “Hey Curtis, tell me one thing, would you?”
“What?”
“When I parked my truck over at the parking lot earlier this evening, I saw Melinda Buckingham parking her Bronco. But somebody else parked right about the same time. Some wimpy guy driving that old Rambler back there. They went in holding hands. I want to know who that dude is.”
“I can’t remember his name, Rawls. Honest I can’t.” It was a lie. Curtis was good with names and knew it was Eli Scudder whom Rawls had seen. “I met him one time, if he’s who I think he is … he was with Jake Lundy, from the paper. This guy works at the paper, too. Jake bought supper down at Harley’s for him and for me both that day.”
“Works at the paper, huh?” Rawls nodded. “That’s all I have to know. I got a friend in the mailroom at the Clarion. I can find out this pant-load’s name easy enough. And you can be sure, Curtis, I’ll find his name. And then I’ll find him, and he’ll wish I hadn’t.”
Rawls turned and limped back to the parking lot and his parked pickup. Curtis, still thinking about the refreshment table inside, entered the building and headed for the board room. The double doors leading into the meeting were both propped wide open. As he looked at the committee members seated around the big table, the fellow from the newspaper, Jake Lundy’s friend, looked back at him and instantly Curtis felt a jolt almost as severe as if he’d passed through a shadow.
