Cold Flat Junction

by Martha Grimes

  Dwayne looked from the sky down to me. “A word? Yeah, but maybe Faulkner meant it the other way. That a word itself don’t amount to a hill of beans. Like the word ‘love’ can’t take the place of the feeling. The word’s a shape, a husk, an empty shell.”

  I was absolutely astounded he’d think such a thing. “But of course he believed in words. He was a writer, after all. How could he not?” I recalled Louise Landis talking. “Words are home.”

  Dwayne stopped in the act of setting his beer down to finger out another cigarette. “That’s pretty deep. Where’d you hear that?”

  “Oh, I just made it up,” I lied.

  Before he put the cigarette in his mouth, he said, “One of the deepest things I ever heard.”

  “Actually, I didn’t. Someone else said it.” Whatever provoked me to tell the truth? “That lady you met, up on the porch. Louise Landis.”

  “She must be interesting. She’s sure good-looking for a woman that age.”

  Quickly, I said, “Well, she’s too old for you. A lot too old.”

  “Yeah? Well, you’re too young for me, yet here we are.”

  I put my chin on my knees again, for I was blushing, and he, being a poacher, could probably see straight through the dark to my insides. “Don’t be stupid.”

  He was handing me a cigarette. “Hate smoking all alone.”

  My jaw dropped as I took it. I sat up and watched him light his and then pinch out the match. I wiggled my cigarette at him. “Well?”

  “You can just pretend. You could go through a whole carton just pretending.”

  I think that was a compliment, but, knowing Dwayne, I thought I’d better leave well enough alone and not ask.

  We were silent now, both looking up at the moon. “Hunter’s moon,” he said. “That’s because of the brightness.”

  “Poacher’s moon, you mean.”

  Dwayne laughed. “That’s pretty good. It looks silvery, looks the color of a gun barrel tonight.”

  We were silent again. I disliked the wet taste of the tobacco in my cigarette. “I’ve smoked before, you know. You can’t get to my age without doing it at least once.”

  “Oh, I can see that.”

  We grew silent again, and I thought about my story. Mr. Gumbrel believed it. All those reporters believed it. Even ReeJane believed it, for heaven’s sake. So I could stop worrying about that. I went over everything that had happened, thinking about what to put in and what to leave out for my newspaper write-up. I wondered where the beginning began. Was it down in the Pink Elephant, going through my Whitman’s candy box? Was it my first glimpse of Cold Flat Junction and that horizon of dark trees? Or was it even further back? Was it back before our playhouse burned down? Or when my dog got run down out on the highway? Was it back with the Waitresses?

  I said, “I wish the past weren’t dead and gone; I wish things weren’t over.”

  Dwayne smiled. “The past ain’t dead; it ain’t even past. Billy Faulkner.”

  I thought for a moment, and then I smiled too. “This is my story, and it’s not over till I say it’s over. Emma Graham.”

  We laughed.

  I watched Dwayne’s real smoke and my pretend twine upward toward the gunmetal poacher’s moon.