by Tom Franklin
It was a successful three-point turn, everyone noticed, but he stopped at the top of the driveway anyway. The regulars, Penelope’s off-duty law and order, who unofficially headquartered there, and the Phils, who called the Waffle House home, had long ago become accustomed to watching people back up and turn around in their parking lot very closely. That may be the only reason anyone was paying attention to Chawser, but his every action was being watched.
Backs up like a New Yorker, Phil said.
Like a man, Chris, Dave’s partner said.
Women don’t back up.
Ever?
Not if they can help it.
Backs up like a New Yorker, the Phils said again, wrestling the conversation back.
Another of the Phils’ theories concerned the correlation between car handling and place of origin. They’d noticed that New Yorkers (or at least drivers with New York plates on the front of their vehicles) liked to back into parking spaces, where everyone else pulled in and then backed out as they were leaving. And then one time a driver without any plates on the front of their car executed the maneuver. Phil wouldn’t abandon the theory, though.
Excuse me, he said to the patron, once they were seated. Do you mind if I ask where you’re from?
Where I’m from? the man asked back, flipping his menu card over and back as if there was some kind of connection. Ah, New Orleans, he said without any trace of a Cajun accent.
Originally? Phil pressed him.
Originally? No. Originally I’m from New York. Upstate, he added, reflexively.
Thank you, Phil said, beaming. I’d recommend the steak and eggs, he added, in an effort to make the connection.
QED.
For two theories at once!
Then Chawser did the unthinkable. He got out of his idling car and pulled up Agnes’s sign, stashed it into the backseat, got in and drove off.
The occupants of the Waffle House could not believe what they were seeing.
Hah! Rudy the cook called out.
Dave and an EMT friend happened to be outside chatting and witnessed the whole thing. Put that down! they yelled, and then sounded the alert. Theft at the WH they called into their car radios. Suspect headed south on 98 in green Stanza.
The place emptied. Everyone who owned any kind of vehicle was out the door and in the chase. The Phils had never seen such a posse.
Kind of an anti—Big Bob, Rudy said. A reverse jubilee. He’s never been entirely overjoyed to be working at the unofficial off-duty headquarters of Penelope’s law and order. The way he saw it, the Waffle House was his domain, from four in the afternoon until midnight Monday through Friday, but the LO’s, as he called them, had a most annoying habit of trying to assert their authority. They complained about the jukebox, for one. Said they couldn’t hear their radios while music was playing, and management conceded the point, actually replacing the jukebox with a police scanner. That’s when Scarpete showed up. He’d been driving north on 98, headed for the interstate, headed away from the eastern shore, trying to avoid reasons to stop, when the flood of vehicles exiting the Waffle House without yielding to traffic on the four-lane had almost side-swiped him.
He pulled up the driveway and slid to a stop dissecting a couple of parking spaces in the open lot, stomped inside and demanded, What the hell was that all about?
Welcome to the Waffle House! the Phils called to him in the otherwise deserted restaurant.
What are you frowning at? Rudy asked.
What the hell was that? Scarpete asked again, in a foul mood, and not wanting to let go of it.
Stampede. You staying? Rudy said, holding up a menu.
And then the Phils called, Welcome home! which prompted a double-take.
Scarpete relaxed, nodded his head, and moved toward a stool. But Rudy told him, Can’t sit there. Or there.
Scarpete continued down the length of the counter, looking up to Rudy to see if the empty seat was actually vacant. Rudy had turned back to his griddle and only glanced over his shoulder and shook his head as Scarpete moved from stool to stool. When he reached the end of the counter he asked the Phils, Do I need a reservation?
On a Tuesday night? they answered. Are you kidding? Here pull up a seat.
Coffee? Rudy asked.
Then the Phils proceeded to tell him about the sign and the Big Bob from Boise story.
You would have liked Big Bob, they said.
Oh? Scarpete answered, unsure about staying to hear the whole story. He’d been on his way out of town, away from Alabama for good, and didn’t want to be side-tracked again.
Tell him, Rudy, the Phils tried. Tell him he would have liked Big Bob.
Kudzu don’t tell no stories, Rudy answered. You gonna eat something?
Try the steak, Phil said.
Un-uh, Rudy said before Scarpete could respond. No more steak.
No more steak?
No more steak, Rudy repeated.
That’s another story, another Phil told Scarpete.
What brings you here? another asked.
What is it about this town that you have to have a reason to be here?
I was just being polite, Phil said.
It’s another of their theories. Everyone’s got a story, they’ll tell you.
Except Kudzu.
Kudzu?
Everyone except Kudzu.
Someone needs to listen.
Make them feel special.
Something else they picked up from Big Bob.
Something he learned at HP.
Don’t you wish you could have worked there?
And met Bob earlier?
You would have really liked Big Bob, they say to Scarpete again.
Coffee, he says at last, relaxing in his chair, for the moment.
It was a jubilee kind of day, Phil began.
HAWK & CLAY
by Juliana Gray
The fathers taught their sons to set the snares
in high, lonesome places: martin poles,
the tops of winter trees, easy to climb,
on fence posts overlooking empty fields.
When meat was hard to come by, they set their traps
and waited for hawks to land. The butchered flesh
was strong and dark with blood, and sometimes the men
discovered mice or little snakes inside.
The mothers taught their daughters to dig for clay
in creek beds, to cut it out in solid chunks
and carry it home wrapped in dampened cloth.
They cut away the red dirt, seeking bands
of white or palest pink, and they could not stop
from tasting it where they sat on the riverbanks.
The pregnant women sliced it like soft cheese,
and chewed it slowly, running it over their teeth
and tongues, staring at the sweet gum trees.
If they had ever tasted pâté served
with peeled wedges of cold, grainy pear,
the women might have said, “It’s like that.”
KING COTTON
by Juliana Gray
Forget snow. Of course it looks like snow,
the fields of winter white that raise their bolls
above the Mississippi mud. Forget
the whitened cloth of hoods and robes, spun
from fibers plucked by aching black hands.
Just leave the past alone for once. Instead,
say it’s like the ragged lines of coke
my students cut on CD cases and snort
through dollar bills. Say the seeds of bones
have taken root and flowered. Tornadoes hit
a gin in Quitman County late last year;
the spinning tractor trailers smashed the works,
and the season’s crop festooned the trees for miles.
Sodden, lank and dirty, shagging limbs
the winds had stripped of leaves, it looked like nothing
more than wasted money. Let it grow,
then blosso
m pale, swell and ripen white,
be harvested all day and into night
by spotlit pickers. It’s only cotton now.
PEACHES
by Juliana Gray
In 1967, my father brought
my mother to his home in Chilton County.
She asked, flirtatiously, “I thought they were
supposed to grow a lot of peaches here.
Where are they? All I see is pine and clay.”
He drove her through the county roads for hours,
past every orchard, until she cried “enough.”
Then he showed the plant where he had worked
his teenage summers, picking and sorting fruit
so hot that some collapsed to overripe
nectar in his hands.
He told me this
some thirty-five years later as we toured
a packing plant in Georgia. On catwalks, we strolled
above the migrant workers, who boldly stared
at us without pausing from their work.
We spooned peach ice cream in our frozen mouths.
As he talked, my father’s voice was edged
with envy for machinery, the sprays
and belts and sorting trays he hadn’t had
the chance to use when he had done this job.
I had forgotten peaches until a friend
shared an August basketful with me.
We tore them open with our teeth, sucked
the juice between our fingers, pulled the meat
from clinging blood-red stones and ate it raw.
It tasted good. That’s all. We ate the fruit,
and wiped our mouths, and did not think of more.
BIRDS OF PARADISE
by Bret Anthony Johnston
In the summer of 1974, my friend Jesse Ortega’s father was hooked up with a married woman named Fancy. I was sixteen that year, living with my mother in Southport, Texas, a little fishing town north of Corpus Christi on the Gulf Coast. Down there the heat is wet and exhausting, and the land feels as wide-open as the ocean. Some people in Southport ranch cattle or own farms, and a lucky few repair helicopters at the Army depot, but most men in that area haul shrimp for a living or work in the pits outside of town mining caliche to lay foundations and cover roads. Those are hard, solitary jobs. And when I met Fancy, there was, I think, a feeling of loneliness in all of us—my own father had disappeared by then, Jesse’s mother was long buried in Colorado—and viewed in this light, with men and women afraid of untethered lives, none of what happened that afternoon seems shocking or beyond forgiveness.
Jesse’s father was named Luis Ortega and he had operated a bucket crane in the pits, but when I knew him, he had been laid off and was uninterested in returning to work. He stood six feet tall and wore western shirts with a turquoise necklace. To make money, Luis brought animals in from Mexico: snakes, monkeys, and birds—toucans and parrots and macaws. He drove a rusted-out Ford Ranger with a camper, so on those weekends when he returned from Celestun or Reynosa, he stashed what he called his “exotics” in burlap sacks and crossed the border without trouble. The animals stayed in the house until he sold them, and when I visited, the birds squawked and got wings stuck through the bars of their little cages. The monkeys threw their shit at you.
Jesse was a year older than me and had been with girls older than him. Some nights after football games, he lifted Luis’s keys and we took girls swimming in the pool behind the Catalina Motel. If we couldn’t do that, we drove to the bay and gigged flounder and netted blue crabs. Luis would be drunk and watching Mexican wrestling by then or passed out or trying to recoup his losses at the dog track in Corpus, so if he entered our minds it was only to think that we need not worry about him.
The day I want to describe was a Saturday in August. Jesse called early that morning—so early I suspected he’d not slept the night before—and he invited me to the beach, which I thought sounded fine. He had some girls lined up was my guess, or he wanted to catch snakes in the hummocky dunes and sell them at the pet store where Luis sometimes got rid of his birds. I told Jesse where I would be working—that summer I cleared overgrown lots for an investor—and expected him to meet me soon after I arrived, but I waited an hour before Luis’s Ranger sped toward the property in front of its dust cloud. Jesse’s hair was long and he wore black jeans with what my mother called his Mexican wedding shirt. She considered Jesse trouble, but I enjoyed his company because life moved faster with him and it made me feel older, more in the thick of things.
“Who kept you up?” I asked. Jesse was rubbing his eyes. The air-conditioner blew cold.
“Birds,” he said. “We’ve got a house full. No one wants them right now.” Jesse eased the Ranger onto the road, then began steering with his forearm at the top of the wheel. Miles passed with only the noise of driving, the wind slicing around the truck and the dashboard rattling. The clock showed 9:15 and the sky was still washed in pinks and lavenders, like the soft colors inside shells.
“Luis is serious about a woman,” Jesse said eventually. A row of lantana bushes streamed by, and two pump jacks, motionless and miles apart, rolled over the horizon. “She sleeps over while her husband works shifts at the refinery. She calls herself Fancy, but I doubt it’s her real name.”
“It could be,” I said. “I went to grade school with a girl named Season.”
Jesse glanced in the rearview mirror, then adjusted it. We passed a fireworks stand, just a plywood box painted red, white, and blue with faded ribbons hanging from the roof. We were traveling west, heading toward Southport.
“Luis came in my room last night.” Jesse shifted in his seat. “I thought the big bastard would break my bed.”
He wanted me to say something—I felt that—but I fixed my eyes outside and waited. Some grackles were scavenging in a sorghum field. Finally he said, “I pretended to sleep. Then he started talking. Not even whispering, just jabbering in his regular voice.”
“What did he say?”
“He feels like he’s woken up in another man’s life. And he said love has no conscience. It was crazy talk. I thought maybe he was dying.”
We drove under a Fourth of July banner that was still stretched over Main Street, and entered Southport. I didn’t know what to say to Jesse. I saw the building where my mother and I rented an apartment above The Yellow Rose, the bar where she waitressed, and her curtains were still drawn. I assumed she’d stayed up late again, talking with her sister in San Francisco. “Maybe we’ll move out there,” she’d said into the phone two nights before, “and make a new start under the Redwoods. I’ll find a job and put Curtis in private school.” When my father left two years before, we’d moved from the hill country and settled in Southport to make a new start by the ocean. I’d always doubted we would stay there long, so it didn’t bother me to hear my mother talking.
Jesse turned off Main Street and onto Farm Road 53, which runs south. He said, “I told Luis he was full of shit.”
“Was he drunk?” I tried to picture Luis sitting in the dark, philosophizing. I’d not known him to talk much unless he was drinking, but he was not my father and I did not live with him.
“I didn’t think that, but it’s possible. He asked me to tell him a secret.” Jesse glanced at me. “So I said I was leaving today, running away. I told him you were going, too, and we were stealing his truck.”
“You said I was going?”
Jesse shrugged, looked out his window. The Catalina Motel came into view ahead of us, the Vacancy sign glowing faintly against the morning sky. We were nearing the string of resale shops where shrimpers hocked their belongings between good hauls.
“Luis didn’t believe me,” Jesse said. “He wants us to grab some things from Fancy’s house, before her husband’s shift ends this afternoon. It’s her big getaway.” Jesse didn’t look at me. We were driving away from the beach and toward the port and ship channel. The smell of exhaust seeped into the cab, and caliche pelted th
e floorboard under my feet. “If a red Chevy’s in the driveway, it belongs to her old man and we’ll turn around and let Mr. Hardass handle it.”
I didn’t respond because Jesse’s mind was already made up. The road turned to asphalt and we continued south, with little ahead of us except puddles of heat that opened then evaporated on the blacktop. There were cotton and corn fields, and the sun looked heavy, syrupy—it warmed my face and arm through the window, and my eyes started getting drowsy as we drove.
We passed a few cars, but mostly the road was quiet. Jesse gunned the engine and swerved at some seagulls on the shoulder, then he laughed when I grabbed the dashboard. Eventually a little house emerged on the horizon and it seemed nice from the distance, but when we were upon it, the windows were boarded over and I saw that no one had lived there in a long time.
*
The neighborhoods along the ship channel are poor and neglected, mostly small tract houses rented by servicemen or Vietnamese shrimpers or families who cannot afford anything better. The air-conditioner had quit on us, and I smelled the rotten-egg odor of the oil refineries across the bay, where Fancy’s husband worked. We drove slowly and looked for a street called Lucille. Jesse’s mood was sour, though I also believed the idea of breaking into Fancy’s thrilled him. I was not excited about it. What I hoped was that we would see the red Chevy at Fancy’s house and step away from whatever was poised to happen. But when we found it, her narrow seashell driveway was empty and Jesse steered in.
The front door was unlocked and when Jesse opened it, cold air rolled out of the house the way it rolls out of motel rooms—I could hear a window unit humming. The living room was clean, furnished with a couch and chair and television; it smelled lemony. A brass-framed mirror and a painting of some mallards hung on the walls, but there was nothing else, and the sparseness made it seem like a space where people slept but did not live. I felt giant in that little room, as though my slightest movement would shake the house. Jesse slipped into the hall saying, “Hello. Hello.” I thought to wait in the truck, but didn’t want to go outside alone.
Jesse began rummaging through the rooms, opening and closing drawers and closets, while I sat at Fancy’s kitchen table. A stack of bills addressed to Phillip Bundick lay across from me, as well as a scrapbook someone had been filling. The pictures were from the beach, mostly of a dark-haired woman wading with a little girl wearing blow-up arm floats. The woman looked too young to be the girl’s mother, maybe only a few years older than me or Jesse. She was pretty, with a heart-shaped face, and in one photo, her nipples, small and dark, showed beneath her white bathing suit. In another shot, a man held a dead rabbit over a campfire, and below the picture were the words “Bunny cooks a bunny,” written in a woman’s looping, optimistic script.
