Twilight of the Drifter

by Shelly Frome

  “Backward glance?”

  “Come on, come on. What do you think the private academies are all about?”

  Slipping further into his musings, Cobb mentioned losing the war between the states that everyone he grew up with called “the war of northern aggression.” He spoke of the “glorious lost cause.” Then segued to a loser’s sensibility, wounds that never heal, the callous federal government forever imposing things. Not that he was a right-winger, far from it. But he understood it all nonetheless. In the same way he understood Rebel allegiance was haunted by a guilty past, a virulent strain of blundering impetuousness, racism and mindless acts.

  Breaking out of it, Cobb rose up and began brandishing the stem of his pipe again. “So, tell you what. You return first thing with some kinda sharply focused through-line. In the meantime, I will fish around and see what I come up with. Of course, chances are you won’t show up, won’t be able to supply a coherent arc. Or else, I’ll have nothing for you, came up empty. But then again, I just might have a little assignment for you if you’re interested.”

  “Such as?”

  Abruptly, Cobb dismissed him with a wave of his hand and booted up one of the monitors.

  . . .

  Josh couldn’t get over how he’d mouthed-off like that. He’d never stood up to an authority figure before. Just as he’d never before lost his temper or punched anyone out.

  Traipsing through the deserted campus under the darkening sky, disregarding the renewed dampness and sprinkles, he convinced himself he could spare some time to humor Cobb and something might very well come of it. He reassured himself yet again that Alice and LuAnn were safely ensconced in a buffer zone. With Darryl hurting and possibly facing charges and Dewey also safely ensconced out of harm’s way.

  By the time Josh slid back behind the wheel and pulled into the narrow lane next to The Bottletree, the activity further up at the City Grocery continued to reassure him that, for the time being at least, everything was okay: early diners nonchalantly tucking into a choice of pecan-crusted halibut, Coca-cola chicken, three-way pork, smoked crawfish salad and the like. All activity part of a normal routine. For his part, all he had to do was report back to Uncle Billy, gratefully down a couple of BLTs, chips and coffee provided by LuAnn while checking in one more time to see that Alice was safe and sound. And then wend his way back to Memphis.

  Granted this agenda was complicated by the fact he still had the rest of his drops down to Water Valley and west to Batesville and the rim of the Delta. Of course, were it not for his run-in with Darryl and, do-si-do with Sonny Drew and Strother, he would’ve easily been on schedule. But getting around Billy seemed doable and another item in the normal range of things.

  Once back inside LuAnn’s flat however, things got a little problematic. While LuAnn was putting the finishing touches on the BLTs in the kitchen and before Josh was able to make the call to Billy, Alice came away from her perch overlooking the dark street below and snatched his cell phone with her good right hand.

  “Don’t. Tell him you’ve got to stay over. Tell him anything.”

  “Beg your pardon?” Josh said, stifling a yawn.

  “Okay, hey, I know what you’re thinking. You’re a useless teddy bear. But until I rest up this shoulder and conk out with both eyes shut this time. I mean, till I get a good night’s sleep before I take over and end this freakin’ thing, I need your hulk around as a kinda door stop and sentry. You follow?”

  LuAnn peered-in from the kitchen. Caught in the triangle between the two of them, Alice carried on, sputtering like before, making her case. “LuAnn is out of it. Got me patched up and threw in a place to crash, that’s it. I got a lucky break, seeing that her roomie took off yesterday for the swamps of Florida. No more hitting the books for Miss roomie; an empty pad and no more nights up against the coffee machine for me.”

  Josh glanced over at LuAnn and beckoned for her to handle it. But LuAnn didn’t seem to fathom where Alice was going with this either.

  “Hey, guys, don’t give me that look. What do you think I’ve been doing here Thinking, thinking, thinking all the time. Survival techniques, man, I’ve got a million of them. Maybe if I still had my Swiss army knife I could--but never mind. Jeez, Joshua, you look like hell, you know it? Anyways, here’s how you play it. You tell Billy you’ve had it with that crap box truck. With all the dampness and here it’s splattering against the windows again, the wires got wet and there’s a hairline crack in the distributor cap so the crate keeps misfiring. You got stuck all day, even had some biddy lend you her hairdryer to dry it out, but now you’re up against it. Tomorrow, when you can get to a parts store or some cheesy garage that handles crates like this, you’ll get it running again. But as things stand, there is no way you’re gonna put this thing on the road. Oh, and your new buddy, whose heart bleeds for you, offered to put you up for the night. Cool, huh? You got it made.”

  As Josh continued to look to LuAnn to deal with this, Alice completely got the wrong idea.

  “Oh no, man, none of that. No chance for you to jump on her bones while I stick my head under the pillow. No more of that ever again, you hear?”

  Catching the hurt expression on LuAnn’s face, Alice went on another tangent. “Okay, okay, I didn’t mean it. But look at it this way. You both get your cut after I take care of business and make a swap. You’ll have to trust me on that ‘cause I haven’t worked out the details and can’t till I buy a little more time. Get it? You got it? A little nod would help right about now.”

  Humoring Alice, gently leading her over to the table and inducing her to sit down in front of a flowery place setting, LuAnn quietly went along. But only because she could see that Josh actually was in no shape to get back on the road tonight and might very well get in an accident. She didn’t like the idea of lying, but Alice cut her off with the news that Josh was one of the all-time great storytellers and, in the end, it was “no skin off anyone’s nose.” Any way you looked at it, Billy’s truck was safer parked where it was, Alice was better off not having to keep watch, and there was no way Josh could tell Billy the truth what he’d been up to all day. Especially coming to the rescue of a brat Billy couldn’t stand the sight of over in the boonies where he had no business being in the first place.

  As all this banter was going on, Josh could only chime in with, “I don’t know about this, ladies. I really don’t know.”

  While serving the sandwiches, chips and lemonade, LuAnn kept waiting for Josh to finally speak up.

  Heading toward the spare bedroom, snatching his cell phone out of Alice’s hand, Josh said, “All right, I’ll see what I can do. Maybe LuAnn is right. My sentry duties aside, I’m not going to do anybody any good if I don’t get a little down time. However, all-time great storyteller that I am, I’m not at all sure I can pull this off.”

  Josh eased into the other room, closed the door and hit the speed-dial. It was only a few minutes before seven on this endless Wednesday as, predictably, the handful of regulars could be heard grumbling around the bar as Ella answered. Trying to contend with Ella’s wry put-downs, Josh found himself incorporating Alice’s notion. In turn, and with a tell-me-another-one sigh, Ella agreed to pass the news to Billy who seemed to be engaged in some argument over the quality of homegrown brew. It took a few minutes for Ella to butt in and come back with the upshot.

  “Okay, sport. Billy’s pissed you didn’t notify the guys in Water Valley and Batesville, glad you at least got the truck parked under the street lights by the pad of whatever bimbo you’re shacking up with.”

  “I never said it was a she.”

  Ella yelled back to Billy it wasn’t a she and added, “Have mercy, don’t tell me, just don’t tell me.”

  “Okay, it’s a she,” Josh cut in over the noise, “who happens to be a shy young lady of high moral character.”

  Ella conveyed the news back to one and all to a smattering of applause. “Anyways,” she said, “here’s the deal. You can add the cost of the parts and
what-all to your pay, apologize to the Water Valley and Batesville guys and get your ass back here by early tomorrow afternoon. That’s Thursday of this week and this year, you copy?”

  “I get it, Ella. I got it.”

  “And one last thing. Billy wants to know what the hell that call to Travis was all about?”

  “What call?”

  “The one about you from our dear old friend. Honoring us once again with his dry-as-a-bone backwoods twang.”

  23.

  As LuAnn was doing her best to get Alice settled for the night, Josh stepped out onto the narrow balcony. The air was cool and damp as ever, the cloud cover obliterating any sign of a star.

  Absentmindedly, he reached into his jacket pocket for his blues harp. At first, he simply cupped his hand and made a few warbles, slides and drop-offs. Gradually, after a few false starts, he began to tease-out the melody line of Townes Van Zandt’s If I needed you. But he lost it at the chorus. On the next pass, he got the melody line down pat and repeated it once more to make sure.

  Lost again reaching for the draw notes for the chorus, he hadn’t noticed LuAnn slipping through the doorway, only the moment when she brushed by his shoulder. She asked him to go on playing, hoping she hadn’t disturbed him. When he assured her that he welcomed her company, she asked if this was one of his original compositions.

  “Alas no,” Josh said with a shrug.

  “It’s a nice melody.”

  “Sure is. But usually it’s the lyrics that get to me first.”

  “You mean like Dylan’s orphan song.”

  “Only these lyrics are a lot more comforting.”

  Murmuring over the hum of light traffic below, Josh tried to say it would be a whole lot better if the song came from him. If, from time to time, he could let it spill out of whatever was percolating inside.

  The breeze kicked up and made her shiver, but she stuck with him and gave him one of those pats on the shoulder and a gentle “It’s okay” which always seemed to mean something else.

  For want of a better explanation, Josh said, “A bluesman by the name of Dewey says I’m just going along for the ride.”

  “Meaning?”

  Shrugging, not wanting to go into it any further, Josh said, “Maybe we better go back inside. I don’t want to add the chill you’re getting to my list of regrets.”

  She took his hand and helped him over the sill as if he were the one who needed looking after, he and Alice both.

  Once settled on the small couch, he started yet again to recount the last straw with his ex. Keeping his voice down, he told her for any number of reasons. Partly because he simply wanted to keep limiting the conversation for LuAnn’s sake. And partly because he felt the need for some kind of understanding to tide him over.

  Recalling the exact details, he told her that, Megan had come over his apartment while he was watching a DVD about a wayward country singer whose life was in free fall. One of the lyrics from his old hit song was “falling feels like flying for a little while.” Weary, degraded and totally out of shape, the songster was looking for some way to crawl out of the hole he was in, relegated to playing bowling alleys and backwater dives.

  Megan however, seeing right through Josh the second she spotted him playing right along with the pickup band, grabbed the remote and shut the movie off. “Don’t tell me,” she said, “not another of those God-awful road stories. One more chance for poor little Josh to wallow in squandered opportunities.” Flinging the remote against the wall, Megan gave him a final ultimatum. “Guess what? You will no longer assume that easygoing front while harboring some idiot rambler dream. I mean it, Josh. Swear to me right here and now it’s all going in the dumpster, along with whatever could’ve been or should’ve been and never existed in the first place.”

  Though it made no sense, Josh couldn’t swear to any such thing.

  Josh stopped his story realizing there was no way to go on. No way he could tell her something was out there leading him on. And that it had come down to a task he had to do he couldn’t possibly fathom; one that both Alice and Dewey made abundantly clear was clear out of his league and none of his business.

  They sat still for a while in the semi-darkness until LuAnn said we can’t help who we are and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Things happen and we try to make the best of it. Then, as though citing examples from her own life would ease his mind, she suggested it was only fair that she took a turn.

  In that hesitant way of hers, she revealed that when her mother passed on, and when her absent father didn’t even show up for the funeral, she was handed down from relative to relative. To earn her keep she did odd jobs, a lot of babysitting, housekeeping and the like. She also had a penchant for nursing hurt and abandoned creatures: birds with broken wings, small critters that had been bitten or battered in some way. After they were healed, she would return them to their habitat. “You can’t keep them, you know,” LuAnn said. “Can’t tie them down.”

  Coming up from Yazoo City, working for Cody (another distant relative) and mainly at The Bottletree, she was gradually able to continue her education. The few boyfriends she’d had, attended Ole Miss full time and left. Because everything in her life had been so transient, she’d learned to do what she could, withdraw into books and, like she said, hope for the best. As a result, she’d avoided trouble or heartbreak. Of course, this latest incident with Darryl was a lot different. But hopefully if you stayed clear of trouble, trouble would stay clear of you.

  “Anyways,” LuAnn said, “that’s about it. Not much of a talker as I’m sure you know. But maybe, with a little luck everything’ll simmer down, and folks will let bygones be bygones.”

  Josh wanted to nod but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  Trying a little harder to convince him, she said, “Soon as Alice remembers what’s worrying her so, that is. Gets herself mended and makes it up to whoever it is she’s supposed to swap with.”

  “Right,” Josh said, deciding under the circumstances to help her gloss it all over.

  “Uh-huh.” Sounding not at all sure she’d gotten through, she ended with, “Glad you can see it that way.”

  She wandered over to a walk-in closet, got out a bedroll, pillow and blanket and fashioned a nook for Josh in a far corner.

  Then, as an afterthought, she asked if he wouldn’t mind sharing the words to the song he was playing. “I don’t know why exactly. Just thought it might be a nice way to . . .”

  “. . . put a cap on it?”

  “I guess. If you don’t mind.”

  Giving in for her sake, he said, “Okay. But all I know is the gist of it.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Feeling self-conscious, trying as he’d done earlier to be as offhand as possible, Josh said, “Well, here you go. The lyrics go something like this:

  ‘If I needed you, would you come to me, would you come to me and ease my pain?’

  “And then there’s the switch.”

  ‘If you needed me, I would come to you, I would swim the seas for to ease your pain.’”

  In the dead silence that followed, she held still for a time. The wistful faraway look returned as she touched his cheek and thanked him. Then she said goodnight and slipped off to her bedroom.

  Josh stretched out in the dubious hope his tired body, Townes Van Zandt’s lyrics and thoughts of LuAnn would lull him to sleep. No such luck. Soon, LuAnn’s reluctant air of resignation took him to the old hymn “In the sweet by and by”—the only realm where bygones were bygones and all strife was laid to rest. More sick and tired of his on-again off-again resolve than anything else, the hymn also led to Ada Mae’s guardian angels, grace and strokes of luck if he could only get cracking.

  He rose up and reached for some computer paper lying on top of a nearby bookshelf. He would show Cobb he knew the difference between random scribbling and the real deal. He grabbed a pen, bound and determined to get off the funk he was in, drag the nagging, convoluted bits and pieces into som
e kind of order and damn well see this thing through.

  24.

  Early the next morning, on a less chilly but still overcast Thursday, Josh shared some coffee and muffins with LuAnn. Perhaps just kidding themselves, perhaps not, they both hoped for an uneventful day, planned on Alice sleeping late and promised to keep in touch again by noon.

  Josh drove back to the antebellum Southern Studies building, parked close by right off fraternity row, entered the spacious foyer, mounted the steps and entered Hunter Cobb’s office. Ostensibly the lone inhabitant of the entire campus, Cobb was checking his watch while clearing a space in the center of his cluttered desk.

  Without a word, Josh unfolded his homework assignment and plunked it down. Cobb put aside his coffee mug, slipped on his reading glasses and perused Josh’s report:

  Alice was doubtless an eye witness. Fairly recently, this runaway, barely fourteen, in the company of a drunk named Bubba more than four times her age came across something dreadful. She was supposed to blow the whistle but became so distraught she bolted and fell or somehow injured her head and blanked it all out. Which, in turn, led to a getaway from the ER at Holly Springs up to Paducah. Taken with her plight, I provided her with a safe haven in Memphis which, unfortunately, backfired and sent her scurrying back down again to Benton County chased by a creep named Darryl. Pencil- in a laconic nameless figure also in pursuit at the very outset. Whatever Alice has locked in the back of her mind could also involve something Dewey Charles was mixed up in way back when. Something that got him shipped off to Parchman Farm out in Clarksdale. Something that, if it ever got out, could open a whole can of worms. Possibly turn on Bubba’s whereabouts, or Darryl’s allegiance to Lamar Dean’s campaign. Anyway, if I was forced to concoct a through-line based on what I know so far, this would be it.