“Right.” I blinked. “I think I might have told you the wrong place to turn off the road.”
“Damn it, Fever.”
“Wait.” I squinted. “I think that’s it right there.”
I pointed to a fallen pine, long dead and mostly decayed, not twenty feet ahead, barely thirty feet from the road.
“We have to go over a tree?” he asked.
“We have to go around a tree.” I motioned to one side of the tree. “See? Over there to the left of it?”
“Ah.” He saw the place I meant.
There was a narrow opening between the rotted top of the fallen pine and a hard row of maple trees. It didn’t seem big enough to allow my truck through, but I’d been on this road several times over the years. Fit’s Mill, among other wonders, was a secret Eden for the Plumleaf Azalea or Azalea Prunifolia, an endangered variety of the sweet-scented, deciduous shrub, and among the most beautiful. I had once bought one to plant beside June Cotage’s grave site because she loved them so much.
“We’re not going to fit through there,” Andrews insisted.
But he urged the truck forward.
“We’ll make it,” I assured him.
We did not.
Something in or under the rotted pine tree punctured my left front tire. It exploded like a shotgun blast, and the steering wheel shivered as Andrews lost control. We ended in a soggy pine-scented mush, the engine still sputtering.
“I hope you don’t have a spare,” he said calmly, “for two reasons. (a) It would serve you right. (b) I don’t feel like changing a tire.”
I grabbed the handle and shoved my weight against the door. “I would deserve it,” I agreed, “but alas for you: I do have a tire. And a jack.”
It took a bit of doing to set the jack, with much attendant grunting and cursing. At first it kept sinking into the muddy ground. I had to find a dry log to set it on. Andrews had decided at first that he would not, in fact, lift a finger to help me.
“I think part of the problem might have been that you were thinking of the wrong poem,” Andrews finally observed as he stood watching me work. “You should have come up with e. e. cummings. You should have said, ‘in Just-spring when the world is mud-luscious.’”
I looked up at him, sweating. “You can be ‘the little lame balloonman,’ isn’t that what’s next in the poem? I’m currently thinking of you as a little lame balloon man. Among other things.”
“I’m not helping.” He folded his arms. “You got us into this.”
“Fine.” I stood up unsteadily. “I’ve been in the hospital for three months, for God’s sake.”
“Which is why you shouldn’t be out and about at all,” he answered me, raising his voice. “Lucinda said you should stay home, and now you can see why. You nearly fell asleep in the truck, and then you told me to turn at the wrong place. Now you’re paying the piper.”
“I’m paying the piper?”
“I’m attempting,” he assured me in his best upper-class accent, “to wear you out so that you’ll fall back asleep.”
“You are?” I asked, every muscle in my body screaming out for sleep. “Why?”
“So that I can change the damn tire, and take you home.”
“How’s that working out?” I mumbled, going back to work.
“Suit yourself.” I could almost hear him shrug.
Before I could make any sort of response, a car pulled up behind us on the paved road. I turned to see a perfectly restored black and chrome 1962 Lincoln Continental, all sleek rectangles and Kennedy-elegant.
The driver’s side window lowered slightly. The way the sunlight slanted onto the car and the road, it was impossible for me to see the driver, but his voice was thick with an odd accent.
“You boys need help? Making quite a racket. Heard you half a mile up the road.”
“Thanks for stopping,” I called, turning my head his direction.
“We don’t need any help, though,” Andrews rushed to answer. “Everything’s under control here. He actually likes doing this kind of thing. Not to mention that this was all his fault. So you are witness to his just deserts.”
“I see,” the voice drawled. “You all headed over to Fit’s Mill, I wager.”
I leaned against the trunk, breathing hard. “How would you know that?”
“You started down the shortcut. It’s the only place that trail goes. They got some unusual azaleas over there in Fit’s Mill, I hear. Pretty.”
“They do.” I squinted, trying to see inside the car.
“Some like to put the Plumleafs close to a grave site,” he said cheerfully, “because they smell so much like honeysuckle. Makes you feel better when you’re standing over a loved one.”
“What?” I asked.
“Well, if you’re certain you all are fine,” he said, and the driver’s side window began to close. “Ça va?”
“That’s some kind of New Orleans accent you’ve got there,” I suddenly realized.
But the window closed and the car took off. Seconds later, I couldn’t even hear the sound of the engine.
“That was unusual,” Andrews allowed.
“That was a New Orleans accent,” I muttered.
“It’s an unusual accent, all right,” Andrews said, “but I was referring to the fact that you don’t see that many African-Americans up in these parts.”
“He was black?”
“What?” Andrews took a step closer to me. “You didn’t see that he was—”
Before he could finish, he slipped in the mud and ended on his backside.
“God. Damn. It,” he said slowly, in carefully separated syllables.
I couldn’t help grinning. “Kind of lost your balance a little bit there.”
“I landed really hard.”
“I’ve seen you land harder on a wooden bar stool than you just did in that nice soft mud.” I didn’t bother to help him up. “But as long as you’re down here, why don’t you help me with this tire.”
He grumbled, but inside of ten minutes we were back in the truck, our shoes and pants and hands caked with mud. We’d made it beyond the fallen tree and were bouncing down the old logging road that was the shortcut from Highway 76 to Fit’s Mill.
The trail was, in general, two deep ruts in a sea of weeds and grass. On either side of the path there were thick holly and red cedar and tulip poplar and loblolly pines. Yellow jessamine and scarlet trumpet honeysuckle perfumed the air and decorated all that new March green.
“You really don’t see that many black guys up here, do you?” Andrews said, eyes glued to the trail for any sign of further trouble. “Why is that?”
“Migration patterns.”
“I beg your pardon.” Andrews laughed.
“Settlement of these mountains happened pretty early in American history,” I explained, “with predominantly Scots-Irish stock. The English settlers stuck to the lowlands. Everybody else chose something farther up the Eastern seaboard.”
“Your own great, great however-many-greats back grandfather was from Scotland.”
“Exactly,” I said. “I’m impressed that you remember.”
“He killed a man and had to flee his country, change his name, and hide out in the hills,” Andrews responded with glee. “I delight in knowing that’s your heritage.”
“On my father’s side,” I agreed.
“And not many black folk migrated the same way,” he assumed.
“There were African-American patterns, of course, but they had to wait until the early twentieth century, in general. And when that occurred, roughly between 1910 and 1930—the so-called Great Migration—it was a movement of some four million African-Americans away from all the Southern states to the North and Midwest.”
We hit a dip in the trail and Andrews gripped the wheel.
“Well, sure,” he said. “You’d want to get as far away from that racist crap as you possibly could.”
I nodded. “That was the idea, at least. Of course, in real
ity, there was no escaping—is no escaping it. I mean, part of the idea was that there would be industrial jobs in places like Chicago and Detroit and Milwaukee, and everyone could make money. But the money was minimal, and everyone would agree that poor is poor no matter what your geography is. The Scots-Irish immigrants in these mountains discovered that there was no money here; the African-American workers in Chicago fell afoul of the same foible.”
“Nice alliteration, in the continuing vein of Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
“But as far as that man in the Continental goes? The one we just met?” I went on. “He wasn’t from around here, so your point is moot. He was from New Orleans.”
“So you’re trying to tell him,” Andrews said.
My next comment, whatever it might have been, was obliterated. The back window of my pickup truck exploded. Glass spewed in every direction, clipping my left ear and the side of my face, bouncing off the windshield and ricocheting back at me. Andrews slammed on the brakes and we skidded nearly sideways, and hit a tree.
“What the hell?” he shouted.
“Shotgun!”
I grabbed his collar and forced his head below the window level. Glass was still clinking out of its frame. Head low, I searched the woods and the trail behind us, eyes darting here and there wildly. I thought I might catch movement or reflection. The shooter would have been close.
“What do you mean?” Andrews whispered. He did not struggle to get up.
“I mean,” I answered, sotto voce as well, “that someone shot at us with a shotgun. And they were close.”
“How do you know?”
“I only heard the window breaking, not the blast from the gun.”
I glanced upward at the roof of the cab. There was a hole the size of a small dinner plate not two inches from where my head would have been.
The engine was sputtering. Andrews still had his feet jammed down, one on the brake, the other on the clutch. I looked out at the front of the truck. Despite slamming into a tree, it was barely dented.
“You should turn off the engine,” I said.
“Oh.” His hand flew up and he turned the key.
The engine coughed and then everything was suddenly silent: no birds, no wind, and no movement.
“He was kneeling or lying on the ground,” I announced.
“What?”
I pointed to the roof. “The shot went through the back window and up, out through the top.”
“Jesus.” Andrews sat up, staring at the hole.
“It was the guy in the car,” I said. “The guy in the Lincoln Continental.”
“Why the hell would he … what are you talking about?”
I opened my door and climbed out of the truck, heading back behind us on the trail.
“What are you talking about?” Andrews repeated, leaping out his side and following me. “Where are you going? There’s a man with a gun out here!”
“There’s a coward with a gun out there!” I shouted, hoping the man would hear me. “He waited until we passed and then tried to shoot us in the back!”
I was hoping to draw the man out, make him show himself. If this was the same man who’d shot me in my sleep, I felt he’d be somewhat intimidated by confrontation.
“But,” Andrews stammered, “the man in the Lincoln Continental?”
“Too coincidental, don’t you think?” I asked him, eyes still trying to look everywhere at once. “A stranger stops, and a few minutes later someone tries to kill us. Kill me.”
Andrews stood next to me, slightly crouched, waiting to dive for the ground at the first sign of trouble. “You really are paranoid. I mean I understand why you would be, but I think that an elderly well-dressed man in a town car is your least likely suspect in an event like this around here. Isn’t it some kind of hunting season or other?”
I had to think for a moment. “Most of the seasons close in February, at the latest. But I think turkey season starts in March and goes until May.”
“There you are.”
“And, of course,” I went on, “it’s always feral hog season. There’s no closed season for that.”
“Feral hog?”
“Wild boar,” I answered.
“In Georgia?” He didn’t believe me. “Wild boar like Beowulf killed?”
“Yes,” I answered absently, still scouring the brush for any sign of our assailant.
“How in God’s name would there be wild boar—?”
“Oglethorpe,” I snapped.
He stood silent for a moment. Then: “What?”
“Oglethorpe, along with a little more than a hundred other people from England, came to Georgia in 1733. Most of them were tradesmen and farmers who were used to the old usufruct rights: letting their cattle and hogs run loose.”
“Like in England.”
“Like in England,” I assured him. “And a favorite food of the day was salt pork, usually fried with cornbread, sweet potatoes, and molasses. But hogs got away, as hogs will do. And then they multiplied.”
“As they will likewise do,” he added.
“Now they’re everywhere in these woods, bristled and tusky and great for a barbecue.”
“So why couldn’t your shattered window be the result of some drunken yahoo out looking for—?”
“Because my truck doesn’t look anything like a hog,” I interrupted, “no matter how drunk you are. And look.”
I pointed to a place in the ground where the grass had been flattened and the earth was indented. There was a red shotgun shell casing.
“Okay.” Andrews looked around, searching the darker part of the woods. “So—somebody took a shot at us.”
I nodded.
“Then why did he leave?” Andrews continued. “If he wanted to kill you, why didn’t he just reload and come over to the truck?”
“Good question.”
“And, PS: where in those woods could you drive a Lincoln Continental?” he wondered. “That old guy didn’t follow us on foot, not chasing your truck.”
“You really got a good look at him in that car?” I asked. “You said ‘an elderly well-dressed man.’”
“Yes.”
“Could you identify him if you saw him again?”
“Oh.” He realized what I was asking. “Well—yes. I think I might at that.”
I stood for a moment, trying to hear, see, smell anything that might indicate where our attacker could be. Alas: nothing.
“All right,” I sighed. “Let’s go brush out the glass and get on over to Fit’s Mill.”
“You still want to go there now? After this?”
“Well I certainly don’t want to stand here in the woods while someone with a shotgun has a chance to get another bead on me.”
Immediately Andrews headed back toward the truck. He was nervous, but wouldn’t want to admit it.
“How is it that we escaped being sliced to ribbons by flying glass?” he asked casually.
“Safety glass,” I answered as if he were an idiot. “You have it in your car, every car in America has it.”
“I don’t have a car anymore,” he said absently, not really thinking. “I ride my bike. I’m environmentally responsible.”
“Ah, well, thank God for that, the planet is saved,” I responded, striding behind him. “Now all I have to worry about is a stranger from New Orleans trying to kill me.”
“The guy in the car didn’t try to kill you,” Andrews shot back, irritated. “And I heard that 911 tape Skidmore has. The man on the tape didn’t have the same accent as the man in the car. Not even close.”
I stopped walking. I felt dizzy. I tried to breathe.
“No,” I finally managed to say. “The man in the car had the same accent, the same voice, in fact, as a hospital orderly who gave me some strange tea a few nights ago.”
15.
For the rest of the drive to Fit’s Mill, twenty minutes or so, I did my best to determine if the orderly who had given me tea in the hospital had been real or another dre
am hallucination. I didn’t want to talk about it, and, as luck would have it, Andrews was willing to travel in silence.
The shortcut, overgrown as it was, spilled out onto a back dirt road near someone’s tiny farm. The farmhouse on that land was a wreck. Paint was peeling off in wide strips, like river birch bark. Part of the roof had caved in and was covered with a cheap blue tarp. The front porch had become nothing more than a pile of rotted lumber blocking access to the house through the door. Chickens and weeds ran rampant in the yard. Three old rusted cars sat in various states of impossible decay not ten feet from the house. A litter of indigo crocus, royal blue scilla, and yellow daffodils bore witness to better days, or at least days when more care had been lavished on the place. An ancient woman was moving at a glacial pace between the back of the house and a nearby lawn chair. She stared at us and I waved. She did not wave back.
The dirt road was not as muddy as the woods had been, but the sky had become seriously overcast, and it threatened to rain and create more mud. It wasn’t long before we were on the only real street in town.
The town of Fit’s Mill had always been odd and small. Few young people stayed. Most older people were too poor to leave. Why my mother had chosen to hide out there during the last years of her life was a mystery that I had given up solving. She knew no one there. No one liked her, as far as I could determine. Her reputation had preceded her, and most of the old-timers only felt sorry for me when they discovered that I was her son. A man named Ramsey who worked in the town’s only gas station had showed me her grave—for five dollars. He claimed to have slept with her. I had heard that he’d died, recently, of alcohol poisoning: too much of the homemade stuff.
“Jesus, what a depressing little place,” Andrews said, taking in the heart of Fit’s Mill.
The street was white top that hadn’t seen repair in decades. It was as cratered as the moon. Emerging pokeweed and kudzu were everywhere. The only identifiable buildings were the post office, the gas station, and a diner that was actually a front for illegal liquor sales.
The post office was a corrugated tin facility that had been unused since 1951. An increase in the number of rural delivery routes had lead to a decrease in the number of small post offices. The gas station had two pumps, but only one worked. The diner never looked open, and there were never any lights on, but there were always a few people inside, and smoke invariably rose from the outdoor grill in back.
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