Littlejohn (6 page)

“Don’t know that one,” he says, “but I’m goin’ down to Zion Springs.”

I don’t know Zion Springs from bedsprings, but anything beats standing, so I get in this car you have to open from the inside. We go about twelve miles, just far enough to be away from everything, when he puts on his turn signal, and I see the sign,
ZION SPRINGS
8, pointing to the left. I ask him to let me out there, and he gives me this snaggle-toothed grin as I get out, ’cause he knows there’s no way in hell anybody else is going to pick me up out here, especially now that it’s almost dark.

I stand there for two hours. I’ve thumbed a lot around Montclair, and there’s a theory I’ve got about it. You have to believe you’re going to get a ride in order for a car to stop. If you believe you’re not going to get a ride, that you don’t deserve a ride, that you’re not worthy to ride in that fine Buick coming toward you, the driver gets the message sure as hell. When you get to that point, you might as well start walking.

The trouble was, I was still more than a hundred miles from Port Campbell, which is like another six from East
Geddie, the best I could add up the little numbers between towns on the map. And the next town south of where I was standing was nine miles away.

So I’m standing there, walking awhile, thumbing awhile, and it’s like eleven o’clock. I get to this white-trash store that’s just closed, but there’s a Coke machine outside, and somebody has thrown an apple, with only one bite out of it, in the trash can. It’s just sitting there on top. I must be pretty hungry, because I take it out, try to pull the skin and meat away from the part that’s been bitten and eat it. That’s supper, and breakfast looks like it might be a long way down the road. I’m kicking myself for not having the construction worker just let me out at a McDonald’s we passed back in Danville. I can taste a Big Mac.

There’s not much left to do but climb the twenty-foot embankment on the side of the road and try to sleep. Even in June, it gets cold as a bitch outside late at night. I put the backpack down for a pillow, take out another shirt and put it over my shoulders, roll a joint and smoke it all. It probably takes me like ten seconds to fall asleep, I’m so wasted.

I dream we’re at the big Fourth of July celebration they have at Michie Park back home, the one we used to go to when I was a little kid. All the fireworks are going off up above us, and I’m sitting between Mom and Dad, who are sitting close enough together that I can feel and smell both of them. I’m kind of scared, and Dad looks down at me and smiles and says something, but I can’t hear him because of all the noise.

And, of course, the way things have been going lately, I wake up in the middle of
Bambi, Part II
. You know, the one where six raving rednecks freeze a deer with their truck’s
headlights alongside a deserted highway at three in the morning, then get out and calmly blast him to Swiss cheese. There aren’t any houses around, but these guys act a little nervous, anyhow, and I hope they don’t see me. Winding up as a road kill is not my life’s burning ambition. They drag the deer over to the truck and manage to lift and push him into the back. Before they roar off, I can see the dark spot on the side of the road, staining the white line, where the deer fell. Then they’re gone, and I’m wide awake, shaking like a bitch, partly from the cold. I wish I was back in Montclair, hassles and all, and I damn near decide to turn my ass around and start thumbing north, although I know by now that it would not be smart to stand alongside this road after dark, at least not without a sign that says
NOT A DEER
.

About two years later, the sun finally comes up. It’s beautiful from my spot up over the road, but I realize I must have picked the coldest place for miles, because I’m on top of an exposed hill where I can see east for just about ever. I stumble down the embankment, feeling froggy as hell and sore and tired and very, very hungry. In less than five minutes, before I wake up and realize I don’t deserve a ride, an old man, looks almost as old as Granddaddy, stops and takes me all the way to Durham, lets me out right in front of a Burger King. I order a couple of those croissant things, along with a large Pepsi. The croissants make me think of Mom, because on the last trip the three of us took to Paris, she must have spent fifteen minutes with me one morning at our hotel teaching me how to pronounce it, so I could order breakfast for all of us. What I want to know is, why do the French put all those letters in their words if they’re not going to say them?

It takes me until almost lunch to get to Granddaddy’s. One guy is going as far as Benson, another one takes me to Port Campbell, right to Highway 47, and then another one drops me off at a place called the Hit ’n’ Run, right in Geddie. From there, I walk to his house.

He looks older than I remember him, but maybe I just haven’t been paying much attention. I’m already thinking, damn, he needs help worse than I do. He’s obviously got me mixed up for somebody else at first, and when we go inside, I see he’s got notes on everything. There’s a note telling him to turn off the oven, except he’s spelled it “trun”—Mom said he’s had trouble spelling all his life—one telling him how to warm stuff in the microwave, instructions on the washer-dryer on how, step by step, to do the clothes. These seem to be in Grandma’s handwriting, and the paper is kind of yellowed.

But he has his own way of doing things, and as long as nothing gets in the way of his routine, he’s usually all right. Guess that makes me a welcome addition. He gets my name wrong like about half the time, usually calls me Lafe, which was one of his brothers’ name, the one that got killed in a hunting accident, I think. Sometimes, he’ll start off with Lafe, then go to Mom, before he finally gets to me, like “Lafe … I mean, Georgia … I mean, Justin!” After I’d been here two weeks, and he’d done that about a million times, I went to my room, got a sheet of notebook paper out, wrote
JUSTIN
on it in big red letters and taped it to my forehead. When I came back in the dining room, which is also where the TV is and where visitors sit in cold weather, he looked at me, kind of surprised, with his mouth open a little more than it normally is. Then he said, “Son, if you
ever live to be as old as me, you’ll be happy if you can just remember your own name.”

He’s probably right. I mean, like I can’t believe his father fought in the Civil War. Trey’s great-great-great-grandfather fought in it, and I had to borrow Mom’s copy of this “history” that my great-grandmother wrote before Trey would believe it.

Actually, my great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather both fought in the Civil War. My great-great-grandfather was called Captain McCain, but the history said he wasn’t a real captain in anybody’s army until the Civil War, when they let him lead the home guard, which I guess was like the geezers and kids and crips. He was supposed to have led these jokers up to the federal arsenal in Port Campbell and demanded that the Union troops surrender, even though he had just a few old guys with hunting guns with him. According to the history, the lieutenant asked him, “Is that all the men you have brought to take my arsenal?” And my great-great-grandfather was supposed to have said, “The woods is full of them. The Geddie boys is everywhere.” And they surrendered! Of course, my mom said the guys in the arsenal were probably Southerners anyhow and couldn’t wait to surrender and join the other side.

My great-grandfather, who was called Red John, had lost his leg in the real fighting. He came home and was in the home guard, too. They had this battle, right down in Old Geddie, where the black people live now, when Captain McCain and Red John and a bunch of other dumb shits tried to attack some Union army troops that were doing a little raping and pillaging on their way north. The history said a bunch of the home guard got killed, and the rest escaped over
into the Blue Sandhills, where they apparently hid until the Yankees finished burning down everything they could find, including the captain’s house. Smart move, guys.

Anyway, Granddaddy gets in touch with the Carlsons, and then I come clean with him, except about the dope, because I don’t think Granddaddy can handle that, and he might search my things. But I tell him I flunked English, which is not a flash to him, since the Carlsons already told him, and my girlfriend will never be allowed to speak to me again, and my mom is going to marry a guy who’ll send me to military school for the rest of my life, and she doesn’t care anything about me, anyhow.

He takes it all except the last part. He gets a little red in the face and starts reading me the riot act about how “ugly” I’m acting toward my mother, and about how hard it’s been for her, getting divorced and all, and about how most children—I guess he’s so old he still thinks of me as a child—would be happy to have a mother so smart and pretty.

I get mad, too, and go to my room to start packing things, actually just throwing them into the backpack. I’m doing such a piss-poor job of it that half the stuff won’t fit. I storm out the front door like I know where I’m going, a couple of shirts and some underwear still back on the bed. The screen door makes that singing sound it always makes when somebody slams it hard. Granddaddy calls after me, but I’ve got to get out of there. I can get a job somewhere, sleep at the Y, whatever.

I’m already on the paved road, headed back into East Geddie, when he pulls up alongside me in the pickup.

“Come on and get in the truck, son,” he says. I keep walking. He keeps moving the truck up in jerks and starts,
trying to talk to me. We must go down the road a couple of hundred yards like this. Two cars go by, and now we’re beside this mobile home, and some gap-toothed old hag is sitting on the little wooden steps in front, staring at us.

I finally get back in to keep him from getting rear-ended by some of the maniacs around here. We go to the little store in the middle of town, and we sit in the truck and talk.

“The folks that are keeping you said you could stay here if you want to,” he tells me. “I told them I could get you all straightened out about summer school. And they already talked to the man you stole the sunglasses from.”

I’m crying by now. He goes in the store and comes back out with a couple of Cokes, and we sit there in the shade and talk. He tells me how proud he’s always been of me, and I wonder how anybody could be proud of me right now. He tells me how much I remind him of his brother Lafe, who he says was the good-looking one, and the smart one, in the family. Some family, I’m thinking. He says that he’s never forgotten how I could read when I was five, and he tells me the story, for the first time since I’ve been old enough to understand it, about how he didn’t learn to read until he was like forty years old. He says he still has the story I wrote for him when I was nine, about the little boy who saves his father’s farm by planting magic seeds given to him by an elf that blossom into full-grown pizzas in just three days. Pretty heavy stuff.

He tells me this is as far as he can go, because he’s not supposed to drive his truck any farther than the store and the church down the road. He probably shouldn’t be driving that far, I’m thinking. He tells me that he has a friend who’s a teacher at the local high school, and he might be able to help
me get into summer school down here and maybe get that much back in Mom’s good graces before she comes home. He’s already called the guy, and summer school classes began like today, so I wouldn’t miss by starting tomorrow. If I want to, he says.

Well, there isn’t much choice, short of just chucking it and starting my lucrative career as a street person. I am not so sure this is going to work out, but at least maybe I’ll meet some good-looking fox to take my mind off Marcia, who I only think of every five minutes. Granddaddy says this guy will even give me a ride every morning, good news since that august institution of learning, Sandy Heath High School, is, as Granddaddy says, a right good ways from here.

Next morning, we go through the usual routine. Granddaddy asks me don’t I want to dress up a little more the first day, and I point out that my good suit wouldn’t fit in the backpack. He kind of chuckles at that. I think maybe he’s getting used to the fact that his only grandchild is a wiseass. He says maybe he can get Jenny, my second cousin who’s older than Mom, or Harold, her husband, to take me into town, to Belk’s or somewhere, to get some clothes. He says he’ll pay for them, which is fine by me.

I see this car come tearing down the road, some low, mean machine from the 1960s, it looks like, but in real good shape for something that old.

“That’d be Kenny,” Granddaddy says. He’s already told me a little about this guy. His name is John Kennedy Locklear, after the old president Mom and Dad think was so great. He seemed like a neat guy—JFK, I mean—but if I see one more television documentary on how the world might just as
well have crawled up its own asshole and died after his assassination, I might puke.

This guy, who goes by Kenny but is Mr. Locklear to me, teaches agriculture at the high school, and Granddaddy lets him farm several rows out back of what Granddaddy calls the carhouse, because the guy like lives in a mobile home and doesn’t have any land of his own. Granddaddy says Kenny’s family used to work for the McCains and lived in the shack down at the edge of the woods. He says Kenny gives him vegetables from what he grows, and that he has gotten more out of the land than any of the McCains ever did. He was in the Army for three years and went two years to N.C. State to study soil science, which doesn’t quite sound like nuclear physics, and he’s trying to get his degree one course at a time at the local college. He doesn’t teach agriculture in the summer, though. How the hell could you fail agriculture? He’s a driver’s ed teacher in summer school. Good. Maybe I can somehow manage to get a driver’s license. I’m sixteen in August, but it’ll be fall semester before I can take the classes in Montclair. I’m a little leery, though, of a guy who teaches ag but doesn’t own any land and who teaches driver’s ed but has a car that’s older than he is.

Granddaddy walks out with me, being careful to step across the rusty pipe sticking out of the ground that carries the sink water down to the grease trap by the chicken yard. He has to think about every step, it seems like. He speaks to Kenny, who doesn’t get out or cut the engine, and I walk around to the other side to get in. The car’s a beauty, must be about twenty-five years old, I guess, and I’m not too far off. He tells me it’s a 1965 Impala. It’s like white with
a red stripe, new red upholstery on the inside, neat as a pin.