It’s late, even for young guys like me and Ray and DC. So late, it’s early. The rest of the bars done closed down and we the only ones left just outside the city limits at the Hollywood where life don’t start till after midnight. People been stopped playing pool and gone. Ol’ Skunk — tired ol’ black man, walks slow, got a big white streak in the hair on top of his head — Skunk’s getting tired, shuffling back to where we’re shooting nine-ball and cut-throat. White folks other than me call him Edsel. They slap him on the back, shake his hand, talk like they’re black for about thirty seconds. Hey, Edsel. Man. What up? they say, think they cool. I call him Skunk just like Ray and DC do. We all call him Skunk. I can tell he’s tired of asking us if we need more beers. He’s too busy slow-mopping behind the bar, stacking chairs one by one on the table, making a little bit of noise so we get the message, but not so much noise that Ray gets mad. Skunk wants us to leave, but he’s too scared to say nothing.

We done hustled three drunk dudes for most they paychecks. Don’t nobody look us in the eye or give us lip when we take the money. The men leave us alone and the few chicks all sit on the far side of the bar, far away from us as they can get. But they’re looking, the chicks are. I catch the chicks looking at me sideways-like, acting like they’re not looking. Me and Ray and DC, we’re just what they want. We just what they need, baby. Hard ride. Hard six-pack ride with our big shoulders. Some nights I walk over and pick one out. Like that last white girl I had with the sweet face like she loves me. She wants me bad like I’m G-Eazy/Yelawolf. Tonight ain’t that kinda night, though. Tonight’s a business night. A player’s gonna play when he wants to play.

Ol’ Skunk finally rattles over our way, dragging a nasty sour mop and bucket on wheels. Sun comin’ up, he says. Watch out for the sheriff deputy down by the bridge, he says, like talkin’ is gonna get us to leave. They catch you they put you under the jail till you cough up the big bucks. Which is bullshit. We walked here. Didn’t nobody drive. Walked to the Hollywood through the woods from where Ray’s girlfriend Yolanda stays. Cold weather like this, you see them green and orange outside lights of the Hollywood from Yolanda’s front porch. Just walk down a steep hill and don’t get caught up in no raggedy saw brier vines in the dark, cross over a footbridge, then walk back up a hill and you’ll be right at the Hollywood’s back door. Nobody see you coming. Nobody see you going. We way too smart for that fat cracker sheriff deputy.

Ol’ Skunk’s still talking. Y’all go on over to Poochie’s. He open all the time for whoever show up whenever. Poochie a good man.

Poochie serves whoever shows up all right, but Poochie’s just a bootleg man. Last time we were sitting in Poochie’s front room, some man nobody ever seen before come up to DC and knocked DC out cold with a chair. Man never seen DC before.

Ol’ Skunk’s getting braver now, looking us in the eye, smiling. I seen you boys back here scammin’, he says, like he’s up on us. Then he stands there like he’s ’bout to stick his hand out like maybe he wants a piece of the action just because he thinks he knows something. That Raeburn boy you took for a hunderd, his cousin work down at the jail, Skunk says.

I don’t know where this motha thinks he’s going with this line, but before he can put together his own low deal, Ray’s up off his stool and got this motha choked up against the wall, Ray holding his chalky pool stick with both hands across Ol’ Skunk’s throat so Skunk can’t breathe/talk/nothing. Ol’ Skunk’s right eye pretty much popping out of his head.

Most of the time Ray’s easygoing, but when the money-man comes after Ray, Ray gets nervous. I need to say something to soothe Ray down. “Hey.” I start talking and think fast since I need a plan to get us out of this fast. “Hey man,” I say, “we’re a team. Me and you and DC makes three. Ain’t that right?”

But what I’m thinking is this: money from Skunk’s cash box ain’t enough to help. Ray baby needs more than the skanky jingle in Ol’ Skunk’s cash box. Ray’s in deep to the money-man this time. Way deep. Not even Ray’s fault, but that don’t matter.

Skunk is light-skinned enough that his face turns red. Other eye looks like it’s about to pop too. I can tell Skunk wants to ask something, but that’s hard to do with your throat mashed against a wall so hard your jaw’s hanging loose.

Ray speaks up, talking low and regular, like he’s at the Dairy Queen down on Court Street, trying to decide what flavor Blizzard he wants. “I’m gonna let you down nice and easy like, and you gonna tell me what I want to know.”

And I’m thinking: What the shit? Ray’s not even asked Skunk nothing I can hear, so how is Skunk gonna tell Ray what Ray wants to know? What’s that shit mean? Ray keeps Skunk held up pretty much slammed against the wall, letting him down slow, letting that chalky stick fall, bouncing off the floor. Skunk’s not fighting back, either. He’s just held up by Ray’s big arms, blue skull and flower on top of muscle, the name of Ray’s dead Texas friend in black on the other arm on Ray’s light skin. Almost as light as my skin. Ink looking good on Ray.

Ol’ Skunk tries to talk. Just air comes out. Then he says, like a whisper, I got no part in that deal.

Skunk’s right hand moving and Ray is holding Skunk’s collar with his right and reaching for what Skunk’s reaching for with his left. Metal flashes back up on Skunk’s throat.

Ray talks easy: “You gonna tell me what I wanna know?”

Skunk’s talk is still full of air: I got no part of that deal, man.

Ray takes the knife edge and nicks Skunk’s throat like shaving. “You gonna tell me what I wanna know.” But Ray is telling this time, not asking.

DC looks at me like he’s thinking: What the shit? Ol’ Skunk give us Orange Crush when we kids. Skunk opened up the Hollywood during Handy Fest Week and paid that famous Muscle Shoals trumpet man to teach kids like us how to blow without spitting. DC says out loud, “Hey man, Skunk got no money. Just chump change over in the cash box.”

But Ray pays DC no mind and cuts Skunk’s cheek — not deep, just enough to make it bleed.

Skunk never pisses his pants or nothing. Looking sad, he says, Boy, what you lookin’ at is being dead, ain’t it?

Ray takes the point of Skunk’s own knife and makes like to stick Skunk’s ribs. “You see this on my arm?” he says right in Skunk’s face, breathing the man’s nasty breath. “I’m already dead, man.”

The way Ray says it, Skunk’s gotta know Ray means it. Ray lets him go, and me and Ray and DC leaving slow. Because we want to leave. Not because we struck out. Ray and me and DC make three, picking up our shit real slow while Skunk doubles over and rubs his face.

We’re almost out the door when Skunk gets his voice back enough to yell out at us: You wanna die, just go past that sheriff deputy and take the trail that starts at the willow!

Ray doesn’t even act like he hears. We out the door, and me and DC go back down the hill. We’re headed back to Ray’s girl’s place, back to chill and catch a buzz, hanging, maybe Ray and Yo knock it in the next room and me and DC turn up the tunes loud ’fore my own stick gets hard just listening. Whatever it takes to chill Ray down.

“Hold up,” Ray says.

“What?” DC says. “What you wanna go hustle Ol’ Skunk for?”

“I’m goin’ back to Yolanda’s house,” I say, heading to that big bottle of cognac mostly full we left sitting on YoGirl’s table.

But Ray don’t move. “You wi’ me or not?” He’s serious. Not the same Ray played tight end last year Friday nights hoping somebody see his excellent shit and give him a ticket out.

DC done had enough. “Look, man, whatever shit you in, count me out.” He starts on up the hill toward the cognac.

“Don’t work that way,” Ray call to him. “If I go down, all go down.”

DC starts back down the hill. Me and DC are all ears.

“Won’t waste me first,” Ray says.

And then we see the scam. Ray don’t pay up, his friends and fam be the first to get whacked. And he ain’t got no family ’cept his mama that nobody know of. That’s the money-man’s way to let folks know the money-man means business. Dead dude can’t pay like a scared dude can. A scared dude is what you call motivated.

So me and DC follow Ray through the edge the woods by the road, Ray walking like a ghost he’s so quiet, me and DC stepping on sticks and dry-ass leaves and all kinda shit making racket. When we see the sheriff deputy car hid behind brush down low on the side road, Ray motions us to get down and we squat there till the gray daylight is enough for the sheriff deputy to think night is over and he takes his dumb-ass self back to his office. Sheriff deputy thinks he knows what’s going on. Sheriff deputy don’t know squat.

Ray starts up the willow path just like Skunk says not to do unless we wanna die, and we’re right behind. Light’s coming fast now. Before we know it, we’re standing on the edge of this big-ass rock, looking way down on Buzzard Creek below. Real name is Cypress Creek, runs right into the Tennessee River, but we all call it Buzzard Creek since the old garbage dump and the new garbage dump both right on the creek so that on and off you can see fifty or more buzzards in the trees here, right here at this rock where the trail ends. Me and DC looking at each other, studying what’s next. Ray sits down in the beat-down dead yellow grass under a big pine. I sit down myself and lean up ’gainst the pine. When my eyes shut, my head spins, so I open them quick-like again.

“What we looking for?” I ask. I’m thinking: kilos, cash money. Maybe ice, Oxy.

Ray’s not saying nothing for a minute. Then: “Maybe we lookin’ for the shit got ripped off me. Or maybe we lookin’ for cash-money.”

DC’s making water off the rock edge, seeing how far he can shoot his stream in the creek way down below. He’s looking around, looking across the creek, looking up in the air, as he makes water. “What’s that?” he asks.

“What’s what?” I ask.

“That,” he says, and points up in the pine tree.

So that’s how me and Ray and DC come to be hunkered down behind some needle-ass-stabbing green bush on the coldest day of the year, feet numb, snot running out my nose, hungover, waiting to kill somebody I ain’t never seen before when they come back to get their black L.L.Bean backpack stacked full of hundred-dollar bills. Ray had taken it down, looked at it, then grabbed the black plastic rope and pulled it back up there, back up in that tall ol’ pine tree.

First off, Ray says it could be a trap by the police trying to sucker some poor unsuspectings like us to take the money so’s they would have somebody to put in jail and make the police look good, pretend like they’re making the world safe. Nothing in the world makes rich folk feel better than to read in the paper that people like me/Ray/DC been caught doing some something and headed for jail. Even if it’s something made up, like DC’s uncle that paid his child support but they claim it ain’t been paid and he’s got no paper says he did pay it so he’s back in jail. Always some piece of paper, somewhere, with words saying you messed up. Ray says it’s all fixed, it’s all a trap.

Then, after ’bout an hour of talking that shit, Ray up and changes his mind and says, “Maybe this is the money due to me, the money made off what got stole from me. Maybe I’m the rightful owner of this money.”

“One thing for sure,” says DC, “you not the one throwed that prep-ass backpack up in that pine tree with that rope tied to it. Whoever did that, they comin’ back for it.”

Even Ray can’t deny that. “This is life or death. Our life or death. We have to watch who comes back for this.” He starts coughing like he’s about to cough out a lung.

I let him catch his breath. “And when we see ’em?” I ask.

“Then we find out if they on the up-and-up. See if it’s one dude or a crew. My guess is one dude. Alone. Us three find out easy from one dude what we need to know. That cash money gonna be ours. Pay off the money-man and let the rest sit around just waitin’ till the time is right. Then we invest. In product.”

DC speaks up: “Somebody talks. Somebody gonna know it’s us. Then payback come knockin’.”

Ray laughs. Then he’s quiet, talking low: “Nobody will be in no shape to talk.”

“But Ol’ Skunk’s the one told us to come here. Ol’ Skunk knows,” DC says.

Ray looks at me and DC and raises up his left eyebrow and I know he means Skunk, too, will be in no shape to talk when Ray finishes with him.

I feel sick enough to puke, and DC don’t look no better. Ray’s eyes are leaking water. And when Ray’s feeling sick, he only gets meaner.

Then Ray starts in on the money: “How much you think is in that pack?”

We take turns guessing just before we take turns telling what all we gonna do and buy with all that money. I think: Ray’s gonna tell how he will be the man for Yo, provide for her and all. But all he says is: Yo’s just a trick and he’s gonna leave her ass, maybe go to LA where he’s got cousins. Take me and DC with him. “We gonna make so much money scammin’,” he says, “that this money in this pack will look like chump change.”

The sun is full up now, not that we can see it. The gray just got lighter is all. “Lord,” DC says, “I’m tired. I’m past tired. Exhausted.”

I, too, feel like sleeping. Just too cold and hungry and in pain.

Ray is coughing more, seems to be comin’ down with a bad cough.

The air feels warmer now, but the wind when it kicks up cuts like a knife. My belly growls loud as a man talking, and I could use something to drink. DC looks sleepy. A squirrel rustles the dry grass and leaves, and Ray jerks, like he’s scared by the racket. He smiles a mean rusty saw-blade smile.

“I’m hungry,” DC whines too loud.

Ray’s face is dark.

“How you sure somebody gonna come?” DC asks.

Ray looks like he wants to waste DC now.

Finally DC says he’s cold and hungry and can’t sit out under no bush with stickers on it no more.

“What we need,” Ray whispers, “is somethin’ to eat and drink, somethin’ to warm us up.” Only his mouth is smiling. Eyes not smiling. Then he says to me, “Get down to the creek and follow it back to Yolanda. Can’t use no path. And don’t let nobody see you. Bring back some good stuff.”

“What if somebody comes while I’m gone?”

“Me and DC handle it.” Still, just his mouth smiling.

So I pick my way down the hill, almost falling it’s so steep, and walk alongside the creek, under the bridge, back up to where I know good the way up the hill to find Yo’s place. I knock and knock before she comes to the door. She’s sleepy-eyed in a big soft pink thing wrapped around her, nothing under that, far as I can tell. Just the pink thing wrapped around Yo’s smooth skin. She’s sweet like a sleeping baby, her voice tiny.

“Where’s Ray?” she asks.

I come in and tell her no more than she makes me tell. She’s been with Ray long enough to know better than to ask too much. I go in Yo’s kitchen and start looking in the fridge and in the cabinets. “Ray needs this,” I say, grabbing a plastic bag and throwing shit in it like crackers, cheese, meat.

She sits down in a raggedy-ass chair and puts her head in her hands. When she looks up at me, one big tear rolls down her cheek.

“He’s in trouble?” she asks in that tiny voice.

“Naw,” I say, “we just hungry.”

“So why did he not come himself?”

“He’s busy. Comin’ by later. Just to see you.” And no sooner I say it I know it’s a lie. Soon as that money is Ray’s and he thinks nobody can trace him, he leaves town and never sees Yo again. Truth is, Ray’s not taking me or DC to LA either. Then who is left around for the money-man to whack? Everbody — Yo, police, everbody — will think me and DC are responsible for whatever’s stole, whoever’s dead. And we’ll be too dead to stand up for ourself.

I grab the cognac off the table, pull out the cork, and take a big two-gulp swallow that burns like fire. Yo is still sitting at the table when I go into the bathroom and sit the cognac on the sink and close the door and put up the seat to be nice-like. I’m feeling gray and dirty, and I smell my own self. I’m not looking in the mirror because there’s nothing there I want to see. That ol’ cognac bottle sits on the sink, right below the medicine shelf, so when I zip up, I open up that mirror door and look inside. Cough stuff, rubbing alcohol, cotton balls, a bottle of stuff YoGirl takes off her fake nails with, deodorant. Usual stuff. I’m just standing there with both hands on the sink, leaning and thinking, when it comes to me. I take the cork out the cognac, drink down a whole bunch more, and then I take the top off the rubbing alcohol and pour some in that cognac bottle. Then I take the cough stuff bottle, open it up, pour some of it down the sink to make room, and then pour some of that nasty-smelling nail-remover shit in there with the cough stuff.

I shake it all up real good.

When I come back out, I can see more of Yo’s tears streaking down her face. I hold up the bottle of cough stuff. “I’m takin’ this to Ray,” I say.

“He sick?” she asks in that sweet little voice.

“Naw. Just coughing a little,” I say. Then I find in the fridge a blue Pepsi can for DC. Me and DC go way back to when we played Little League down at McFarland Bottoms, then middle school, then high school. Him pitcher, me catcher, but we could only do that when the rich coach’s own son got too tired to pitch. When I get back to that pine tree and hand DC that blue Pepsi can and look him in the eye a certain way, I tell you this much: he’ll know just what I mean. If DC don’t see me drink no cognac, he won’t be drinking no cognac neither. We read each other minds, me and DC. That’s my plan. First get Ray to drink a bunch of that cough stuff that probably tastes like poison anyway. When he says it tastes bad, I’ll tell him he must be coming down with a cold, and that’s when I hand him the bottle and tell him the best thing to do for a cold is to drink a big swig of cognac. Soon after that, he’ll be so sick we’ll have to take him to the hospital. He’ll be safe there. And me and DC can figure out what to do.

I didn’t even know I’d warmed up at YoGirl’s till I hit the outside again and the cold air slaps my face still too numb from cognac to hurt too bad. Air racing around with what my grandma call hominy snow in it, like little-bitty sleet but not enough to stick or pile up white on the ground. Bits of hominy snow caught in the dead leaves my boots push around trying not to fall down in the creek on the way back. Dead leaves covering the rocks make me stumble once and make a big racket, but I slow down and wait and listen. Sky still gray and the wind slows down. Creek runs slow, just a tinkle. Everything nice and quiet. I pick my way soft-like back to DC and Ray. Maybe the man has done come back for his prep-ass pack and is lying there dead, Ray and DC gone already. God knows what I’ll be walking up on, so I think I’d best be easing up that hill, one step, another step. I take so long and am so careful the wind starts back up, rattling all the dead leaves again, so I get off the trail and walk below the big rock DC pissed off of before. Then I start crawling up the side the hill, hanging that plastic bag on one wrist. When I get near the top, I look up and it is still there, that black backpack up in the tree, so I ease on up, thinking Ray and DC are still squatted back behind that prickly bush.

But what I see: DC lying there in a lump behind the prickly bush, not looking like he’s asleep but something worse, one leg twisted up under him. A cold clear feeling runs through me like I’m in a bad dream and I’m just now waking up to something worse. The backpack man has done sneaked up, I’m thinking. The backpack man might be two men. Somebody sure laid DC out like this.

I throw down the plastic bag and head to DC as quick as I can. I need to straighten him out, see if he’s still breathing, thinking I myself might be jumped any second, when Ray scares the shit out me, runs up from where the trail starts.

“What happened?” I ask.

“DC fell. Hit his head. I went lookin’ for you.”

About this time I see a big rock in Ray’s hand. I look down and feel the lump on the side of DC’s head and too much blood. When I start to move DC, blood is all under him. Then Ray comes at me. My head goes boom and my neck cracks, and I fall down hard over DC.

I try to get up and my head gets whacked again. I try to get up but my arms and legs are not doing what I say. My head hurts hot like part of it’s gone. I’m trying to tell my hand to feel my head but mostly my arm goes limp. I pass out and then a loud noise wakes me up and I know again that I’m lying on DC, which don’t seem right. Something tells me DC is dead and then me too if I can’t drag my ass up from here. But I can’t even pick my head up. My one eye is open, though. My one eye is seeing it all.

Ol’ Skunk standing by Ray, and Ray down on the ground. Half of Ray’s head gone. Skunk holding a pistol like it’s a snake. Skunk looking over to me.

Then another voice. Right behind me. “Come on over here, Edsel, and put that pistol in this white boy’s hand here. This boy ought to knowed not to hang out with these others.”

My one eye sees a shiny deputy boot toe-tap my hand, showing Skunk where to put it.

“Use this,” the voice behind me says. Voice throws a white rag over to Skunk. “Wipe it clean.”

The white rag and pistol now in Skunk’s hand. White top of Skunk’s head in my face when he bends down.

And then I’m light and free. Rising in the air, slow. Like I’m caught in some cold rising breeze. First I’m circling low just looking around, looking down at myself on the ground on top of DC, watching the sheriff deputy reach a hand down to his pocket, take out his radio, hear him say, “Derrick, you my backup, ain’t you?” before he says, “Well, get your ass on up here then.”

And Ol’ Skunk edging down the creek bank, whispering to himself, whispering low but I hear him. I hear it all now, from the loud right on down to the tiny sound every ripple in the creek makes. I hear Skunk whispering stuff makes no sense, like another language, and then: Don’t mess wi’ me. Don’t mess wi’ me. Don’t mess wi’ me. I’m OG. OG. I seen they kind. I seen they kind.

And then I’m higher and higher, higher and higher, watching Ol’ Skunk’s white head-top moving down the creek, crossing the footbridge, heading back to the Hollywood, hominy snow falling harder and hitting all the dry leaves, sounding loud now, flakes getting bigger and fluffy, and then me higher still, like a balloon somebody let go of, rising in the open sky where the flakes are falling thick now, sky soft and full of it. I look down and there the creek flows into the Tennessee River, and there are the miles and miles of cotton fields out Gunwaleford Road all frozen but with raggedy cotton lint like more snow. Higher still now, soft snow, flakes like cotton. Till the whole world’s looking exactly like nothing at all but white.

Gary Wright, in his expert, know-it-all way, insisted that what was happening on Turkey Branch was a crime. “A goddamned crime, you stubborn old coot. You can get fined for it. I’ve done googled it. The county site says five hundred dollars a day for every day you let them turds roll down in the branch yonder.” The man jabbed his pointer finger with every few syllables.

Yoder Everett ran his fingers through thinning hair, hair that had once upon a time been a thick home to the ladies’ painted fingernails that combed through it, now gone limp and thin as he traversed his sixties, alone but for this one pathetic friend. “You’re always so goddamned sure of yourself, Gary.”

It had finally come to a head, after months of back and forth, after Gary first noticed the oozing fissures in the grass, soil becoming a sloosh of fetid, foul stink. Yoder, tight with a dollar and loath to spend from the thousands he had hoarded over the years, managed to deny, pretend, and scoff his way out of taking any action, until Gary drilled down into something like research. Any fool could find out what was what, it seemed, on the Internet.

Now the two men stood beneath one of the massive live oaks that thrust their mossy arms to the summer sky across Yoder’s six acres of waterfront on a branch of the Fish River, studying the patch of yard gone to shit swamp. When breezes lifted, along with the undeniable stench, a chorus of clatters and clacks and tinklings and knockings rose and fell from the scores of wind chimes hanging from branches, from hooks on porches, from posts on the wharf and the pier, from the trash-can corral Gary had built to keep away the raccoons, armadillos, and possums. Gary was handy that way.

The noisy mobiles, though, were all fashioned by Yoder’s own hands, inspired by a fragmenting mind, that willy-nilly mishmash of chimes, along with paintings on plywood, palettes of muddy browns, reds, oranges; even murals painted onto the asbestos-shingled sides of his river house. His gnarled but nimble fingers strung together the cacophonous orchestra of objects tied onto lengths of fishing lines, knotted through the boards of driftwood or stripped sapling limbs or guitar necks or whatever, from which the lines dangled. He used all sorts of materials too, for the chimes themselves: old costume jewelry, a deconstructed clarinet, wooden kitchenware, beer cans, women’s stilettos, anything at all. “I make art out of junk,” he liked to boast. “I’m environmentally friendly that way.”

But here was Gary Wright’s dumb ass claiming Yoder was a major polluter, right up there with the goddam BP criminals who had ruined the gulf this past spring. Now into full-bore summer, the beaches from NOLA to Apalachicola were so gummed up with the crude that business owners along the coast were yelling bloody murder.

“It’s right there in black and white, son,” Gary went on. “It’s right there on the damn website. You know, that branch runs out to the river and the river runs to the bay and the bay—”

“Hell, Gary, don’t you think I know about geography and watersheds and currents and all? And don’t call me son.”

“And the bay goes to the Gulf of Mexico and then out to the whole goddamned world. You’re polluting the world with that rusted-out old septic system.”

“I told you I’ve fixed it. I worked on it all day yesterday, down in the bowels of it. Ha!”

“Naw, crawling down in the empty old thing and squirting a hosepipe through it ain’t fixed a damn thing about it. You’ve done broke so many laws I can’t count ’em.”

“Why don’t you google them up, then, the laws?” Yoder shot back. “Google is God now, I guess. Google is the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg looking down on the Valley of Ashes.”

“What the hell?”

“Forget it. Why read a book when you have the Google machine to impart life’s truths to your stupid ass.”

“It’s the law, that’s all I’m talking about. You can’t let a steady stream of turds and piss-water keep rolling down that hill and into that branch. You’ve got to call a septic service or I’m gonna have to turn you in to the county. You’re the property owner. It’s your responsibility.”

Yoder, clench-fisted, tight-toothed, gritted out, “Get off my property, then. I’ve a good mind to evict you.”

But they both knew it was an empty threat. They had a long history of disputes, even fistfights, going back to when they were young, potent warriors of the gridiron, back when women liked their looks and a loop around the town of Foley, Alabama, from drive-in diners to picture shows in a Ford Mustang, when a make-out chick in the front seat was the pinnacle of a life promising to be all downhill from there.

They were an odd couple, all right: Yoder, well-educated, creative, once-charming-now-cautious, carrying several DSM-referenced labels; and Gary, low of IQ, naive, spur-of-the-moment. Yoder taught art education in a community college before the mental meltdown that had him on disability by the time he was forty. Gary, no hope of a deferment, found himself, straight out of high school, chasing Charlie in the jungles of Vietnam. He spoke of it from time to time, though not with enough depth or detail to satisfy the curiosity Yoder kept in check.

“I seen some shit there, over yonder, in itty-bitty-titty land. Nobody ought to see them things.” He would fall silent for several beats, then, “I seen nothing BUT shit all my life,” he would repeat, to the air, to the nights, to anybody or nobody, “and shit don’t cool for folks like me.”

“You think you’re the only one that had it so damn bad?” Yoder would toss out, as a challenge, their routine one-upmanship of misery, on twilit evenings when they sat on the dock, working their way through a case of Budweiser. “Hell, my stepmother was cold and wicked and hated my guts,” and he would recount tales about how his real mama took the cancer when he was only six, went downhill fast, and how it was clear to everyone that his daddy had “Miss Dinah” waiting in the wings long before the cancer ever even hit.

His memories of his real mama, Janine, were warm and conjured something like reassurance, despite the odd quirks she had, the rituals, a prominent one being the taking of the castor oil, every single Friday evening of every single week. “Folks just believed in it back then, believed it kept you regular, like it was good for you. Mama was the queen of poop.”

Yoder couldn’t remember a time in his life, post — potty training, when his mother did not insist on inspecting his bowel movements, to see if his excrement was healthy or if it demanded more attention. He and Gary sometimes had a good laugh about Yoder’s fecal foundation. “No sir, I wasn’t allowed to flush, not until Mama checked — and she’d say things like, Oh, that one looks real good, Yodie, or, No wiggle worms to be found, or, That one’s a pretty picture of health. I didn’t think anything about it — that was just how our routines went along, until she got the cancer.”

When Miss Dinah took over, her two brats in tow, she showed no inclination to study Yoder’s bowel movements. In fact, when, all of seven years old and eager to please his new parent, he finally offered to show her what he had landed in the toilet bowl, she scrunched up her face, shuddered, and said, “Why on God’s green earth would I want to look at anybody’s BM? Let alone yours.” And it was the way she said it, yours, that planted her hatred of him in his mind, hardening him to her, young though he was, and by adolescence the reciprocal disdain was set in his soul.

“She was my ruination,” he would lament, blaming her for his bad luck with women. “And yeah, I had to call the bitch Miss Dinah, just like my daddy did. He was one goddamned pussy-whipped somebitch. But she sure did pretend-dote on him, waiting on him, baking seven-layer cakes and all,” and Yoder would recount how the chocolate confections were locked in the china cabinet, locked away from him in particular, locked away in such a way as he would have to see the sheen of the chocolate each time he passed by, lust after it, wish for it, but he never, ever gave her the satisfaction of doing something as brazen or pathetic as, say, asking for a piece of it. Even when she brought it out as an after-school treat for her own two children, his “steps,” Yoder refused to ever ask to be included.

“Don’t you want a little bit, baby?” she would singsong, if his daddy was there, and sometimes Yoder would accept a piece, sometimes not.

The two men shared a bottle of Jim Beam down at the dock that evening, to chase behind the beer, as they typically did of a dusky sunset, having sprayed down with deet, thrown their feet up on footstools, spending hours swapping memories and disagreements, flicking cigarettes hissing into the low tide, the high tide, the ebb and the flow.

“I’ll get some prices, then,” Yoder said, finally, his way of acquiescing to his foe in the great septic dispute of 2010. “But you have to kick in something. You gonna take that panhandle gig? The one that gal Sissy or Missy or somebody told you about? Because I’ll be wanting you to throw in on the new septic tank. It handles your shit just as much as it handles mine.”

“It’s Misty,” Gary said. “Like the song. Like that Clint Eastwood movie, Play Misty for Me. And she says disaster money is almost like free money, depending.”

Depending on what? Yoder wondered, thinking Gary might need a good lookout on this Misty person.

Gary and Misty had reconnected via the Internet, a landscape he had only begun exploring around 2007, when Yoder was threatening to put his desktop out with the trash. Yoder had bought the thing as he entered the twenty-first century in a feeble attempt at technology — an attempt that turned into his certainty and fear that the government was spying on him.

“There’s a camera on the things, you know,” he said, disengaging all manner of cables. “Ever since 9/11 they’ve been watching us all.”

“Why don’t they just watch them Islams?” Gary pushed back. “It’s them Islams that’s bombing themselves and all.”

“Muslims,” Yoder sighed. “Islam is the religion. Muslims are the practitioners of Islam.”

“I don’t understand. Baptist is Baptist, Cath’lic is Cath’lic, what the fuck?”

“Never mind.”

“Okay. Never-minding.”

But Gary took on the surfing of the Net with uncharacteristic vigor, networking his way through Classmates.com, navigating over to the high schools of some of his old army buddies, reconnecting, flirting his way past a few former girlfriends, before finding Misty again, just after the explosion in the gulf. She talked him through the skyping process and schooled him on the larger landscape of the Internet. He boasted to her about his artist friend Yoder Everett, embellishing, “Yeah, he’s a big deal around here. He gets big money for his wind chimes — well, he ought to be getting more.”

“Is there a website where I can look at them?” Misty asked.

“Hell no — Yoder hardly never touches no computer. He thinks they’re taking over the world.”

“Ridiculous,” Misty said. “You have to have a website these days, to advertise, to promote, to sell — you two boys need me. I can do all of that.”

And that was the springboard for their planned reunion. After they rendezvoused in Florida, after the work for BP played out, they would haul her trailer back to Turkey Branch, and she would barter her promotional work on Yoder’s art for something like rent.

Yoder, however, was skeptical. “Normal people don’t do that, just pull up stakes, drive off to meet a stranger and start up a new life.”

“Aw, she’s a good ol’ gal,” Gary countered, filling Yoder in on how he had dated her briefly when he returned from ’Nam, during a short, drug-fueled stay on the West Coast. “She was one of them hippie chicks — you know, titties flapping and bouncing, hairy pits, the whole deal. Which I ain’t minded no hairy pits at all — all I needed was that one little particular patch of hairs, you know? I was fresh out of the army, son. Horny as hell. And she was a wild thing, always into something. Hell, man, she wants to help you sell your wind chimes.”

“What the hell? And don’t call me son.”

“Yeah, she’s gonna make you a website. Says nobody can’t do no kind of business without no website. Says she has real experience in all kinds of business doings, advertising and whatnot.”

“Then what’s she doing in a double-wide in Arkansas?”

“She’s been hiding out from an ex-boyfriend, a mean one, a stalker type. She ran off from him in Portland, changed her looks and all — you know, like that movie, like Julia Roberts in Sleeping with the Enemy.”

“That’s even worse,” Yoder said. “All we need is some stalker nutcase to come around here. Hell, somebody’s likely to get killed.”

“Naw, man, you got it all wrong. Her guy can’t leave Portland, his job — and last Misty heard, he’s done took up with a whole ’nother woman. It’s cool.”

“I don’t know.”

“Shit, man, think of her like the business manager you never had. Remember you always said the business side of art makes you want to puke? Well, Misty’s a pro, knows computers, says she’s a real, for sure, people person. Which you ain’t, right?”

“Right.”

“So let her manage the crap you hate — the crap you suck at — and see if your income gets better. Come on, man.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Yoder mumbled, seeing a few dollar signs gathering in his future. He did, indeed, hate hauling the chimes around to all the fru-fru and chi-chi and cutesy-cute little galleries and shops in the Foley — Gulf Shores — Orange Beach area, making fake-nice with all the managers and artsy-arts folks. Even though his pieces were popular, unique, and sold quite well, he thought some of those “fancy ladies and gay boys,” as he called them, the ones running the shops, might be overpricing and skimming their own special kind of slick off the top of his profits.

It was his mind-set, to be wary. The older he got, the less he trusted folks, even old friends. He had just about stripped away anyone who ever mattered to him, stripped away with suspicion, always, of ulterior motives. His two children were long estranged, radio silent for over a decade, and the ex-wives did not even bother to try anymore. Gary was all he had. And Gary, like him, had alienated his own set of friends and family, not with paranoia but with his scattershot approach to living, his sheer and utter unreliability.

Gary and Misty had skyped throughout May, June, and into July’s haze, becoming more and more familiar, gestating the plans that would culminate in their reunion, in mere weeks, the revival of a long-ago hot second of a romance — all while the Deepwater Horizon vomited its ominous cloud of crude into the cesspit of the Gulf of Mexico, in ever-mounting numbers of gallons per day. It seemed like CNN had a picture of it on TV 24-7, the live, real-time movie of the slow murder of the gulf. And the numbers, the volume of the disaster, forever ticked upward.

“It’s an awful thing,” Gary told Misty’s image on the computer screen, “a terrible thing — not just the folks killed but no telling what all else is gonna die. They say it’ll kill the coral, even. Hell, I didn’t know coral was alive to begin with.”

“Well, that’s what a lot of the free money is for, to help with that, so I’m going to get there as quick as I can — no later than July’s end. Can’t wait to see you in the real flesh, sweetie,” she cooed.

Gary allowed that she had held up pretty well. She laid claim to the age of fifty-four but looked light of it, with long hair streaked blond, animated green eyes, and the distinctive laugh he remembered from all those years ago, “kind of a hoarse, horsey laugh,” he always called it. And the once — braless teenybopper showed him her relatively new fake boobs. “I was dating a plastic surgeon in San Francisco for a while,” she said, spreading her top open, unhooking her bra from the front, spilling them on out, right in his face, giving him the kinds of sexual itches he had not scratched in years. “The doc gave me these, plus an eye job, and a slight nose job — just got rid of that little bump. You remember that little bump on my nose?”

He did not. He was preoccupied with the not-little boobs.

“What do you think, daddy? Nice, huh? It’s a D-cup size.”

Gary was done for.

They spent more and more hours skyping, which soon became elaborate cyber-sexcapades full of dirty talk and all manner of autoeroticism the likes of which Gary had never imagined himself doing. “She sure does know about some variety,” he confided to Yoder one humid evening. “But hell,” and he took a long pull from the bottle, “why jerk off to a nudie mag when you can see everything right there, just a-writhin’ along with you?”

“Can’t argue with that,” Yoder exhaled his cheap cigarette. “Just seems kind of weird to me, having romantic doings like that.”

“You’re being old-fashioned, man. This is how it’s done these days — everything’s on the Internet line.”

“Can’t argue,” Yoder said again.

Romy’s elbow was in Bubba’s rhomboid when she said the name: Otis Owen. Dr. Otis Owen, she actually said, no s on the end. She started to add that even though she’d banged Dr. O when he taught her basic microcomputing her one semester of college, they were only friends now — no sex, no kissing, all touches strictly business. Before Romy could say that, though, Bubba, bare-bellied on her massage table, looked up with a hurt face.

“Otis Owen? You hang with that creep?”

“Dr. O comes here to work out the same kinks you do.” She pushed Bubba’s head into the table’s fleece-lined face cradle. “I feel sorry for him. I’m the age he was when he’d fuck me in his office ten minutes before class. He was a god to me then, but not anymore — he’s putty. I’ve never known a guy to go so squishy.”

“What you do for him out of pity you won’t do for me out of friendship?”

“I give you both what you want. Rejuvenation through humiliation.”

Her elbow descended into Bubba’s latissimus dorsi, grinding until his pancreas threatened to burst. He tried to ignore the discomfort, but her turquoise-painted toes entered his peripheral vision, along with the familiar smell of verbena and lavender, Romy’s favorite lotion, and Bubba knew his aches and pangs were inescapable.

“Listen, I know things about Otis Owen. It’s intel you should have, but intel’s not free. Humor me, and afterward I’ll not only pay your rip-off $85-per-hour rate, but I’ll take you out for drinks. What you should know about Otis goes down better with tequila.”

“No more humoring, Bubs. You’re just hurting yourself, and I’ve got a license to lose if anybody ever peeked in my window.”

She started to step back, but the only reliable man she’d ever known clutched her wrist. Lifting his torso, Bubba stared into her eyes, firm in need but weak with want.

“I had a manicure today,” she pleaded. “You’ll ruin it.”

“We’ve been friends twenty-five years, Romy. You’ve always needed me as a big brother, maybe a dad. I care for you enough that unlike Dr. O I’ve never taken advantage of that. Never even tried. That’s how much I respect our friendship. Otis Owen’s pulled some snaky shit; I’m not protecting you if I don’t tell you. But I need you first.” Bubba released her arm. “I’ll rest better too,” he added, “if you lose those cutoffs.”

Romy grunted at the obligation as Bubba recradled his face. He didn’t want to watch her wriggle down her shorts, didn’t want to know what she wore under them, two more tokens of respect for their friendship. He just liked the warmth of her — that part of Romy Bubba knew he was too good of a friend to ever get to experience — as she straddled his tailbone, her butt atop his. As her weight settled on his glutes she sank her nails into his skin, and he tensed in expectation. Then Romy raked her fingers along his spine in a long, euphoric scratch.

“Deeper,” Bubba told her.

“The oil’s getting scooped under my nails. Like ice cream. The skin’s too slick to break.”

“You’ve managed every time.”

The second scrape was shorter but more intense. Bubba whinnied softly. Romy reached back and swatted a flank.

“Don’t buck me, Seabiscuit. You do and no oats for you in the stable.”

On the fourth try she drew blood. On the fifth Bubba gripped the table legs and chewed his lips. Romy clawed until her friend lost count of how many times she stopped to crack her knuckles and stretch her fingers. Perspiring, Bubba felt furrowed, carved, whittled.

“I’m all nubs.” Romy lasted as long as she usually did, twenty minutes. “You’re done too. Any more and you’ll scar.”

“How’s it look?”

“Like you’ve been crosshatched.”

“Then you’re right. I’m done.”

He jounced hard enough to pop Romy off his sacrum. She landed on one foot and had to slide the other across Bubba’s greased thighs, holding his towel in place, he knew, so she didn’t have to see his hairy rump. She told him to get dressed while she washed him out from under her manicure, then left. Bubba rolled off the table, dropping the towel, half hoping she’d walk in on him, fully knowing she wouldn’t. He looked around the studio, spotting what he was after on the sideboard, tucked among flickering candles: a little Ganesha statue, new to the room since his last visit. Sure enough, when Bubba shook the porcelain figure, something inside rattled. He pried out the statue’s rubber stopper and tipped its contents into his palm. “Got it,” he said aloud, sliding an object into a front pocket of the jeans he pulled from the floor. He was adjusting the pen clipped to his shirt placket when Romy reappeared. Her blond shag was fashionably mussed and she wore a red shift with suede boots. She looked funky, like when she’d been jailbait.

“Sure,” Bubba chuckled, “let’s play dress-up, like tonight’s a night at the opera.” Blood driblets skied down his lumbar region. One rode over his coccyx and cascaded into his ass crack. “Because this fuckery Otis’s pulled is straight-up operatic...”

They drove from the bohemian district where Bubba had bartended for thirty-three years to a lounge in Montgomery’s black half. Exactly where black Montgomery began nobody could really say; it tended to start wherever white people started feeling uncomfortable. But Bubba liked black joints. He could name all the legendary ones from Montgomery’s past: Club 400, the Ty-Juanna on Highland Avenue, Laicos. In a booth at G’s he ordered four Agave Locos and shot two before an unamused Romy reminded him he still had to drive.

“And still a story to tell,” Bubba noted. “Two things about Otis Owen: he’s a bad drunk and a worse gambler. In two years he’s lost $80,000 to Biloxi casinos, every cent he ever saved.”

“He still has my $85-an-hour,” shrugged Romy.

“I didn’t say he’s broke. I said he’s blown his savings. To feed his beast he’s had to cook up a profitable scam...”

Romy hiked her brows. “I gotta beg for deets?”

“I’ll detail it — after you shoot that Loco. That’s how this story unfolds. We come to a plot twist, you gotta drink to learn the next chapter.”

Romy reluctantly drained a tequila and chewed the lime. Before she stopped puckering, Bubba flagged down a hostess and ordered another round — though not straight Agave Loco this time. This time the hostess brought three firecrackers: tequila with Goldschläger and Rumple Minze.

“Why you trying to get me drunk, Bubs?”

“Because it’s the only way you’ll believe this story.”

He set his third empty down. The shot glasses on the tablecloth began resembling chess pieces.

“Bitcoins,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Cryptocurrency, the fool’s gold of the Internet. Other types exist — Monero, Ether, Ripple. Computer dorks pay real dollars in online exchanges for this ‘money.’ It’s legal tender on the Darknet because transactions are untraceable. The problem is cryptocurrencies are easy to steal. Cryptopickpocketing’s a billion-dollar industry.”

“You’re telling me Dr. O’s an Internet safecracker?”

“Even Luddites like us can learn to five-finger Bitcoins. Websites galore teach how to hack into the virtual wallets where investors store this funny money, how to phish for log-ins to trading accounts.”

“I’ve heard of phishing,” Romy admitted. “But I thought only developed nations like Nigeria did it, not third world countries like Alabama.”

Bubba grinned before pointing at her remaining shots. “You’re behind three to one.”

Romy knocked back her second Agave. “You drink too much, Bubs.”

He ignored her. “Dr. O didn’t plan on hacking on his lonesome. He aimed to start a big-time operation, maybe forty hackers mining cryptocurrency side by side. He couldn’t post a Help Wanted ad for entry-level cryptocrooks, though. He needed a Fagin with a labor pool of Artful Dodgers — and that, my friend, is how Dr. Otis Owen ended up in business with Iv’ry Cole.”

Romy flinched.

“So Otis’s mentioned Iv’ry Cole to you,” Bubba realized. “I wish he hadn’t.”

“His last appointment, he got a call. Clients usually ignore their phones, but Dr. O said he had to take it. He downplayed the call, claiming he was helping a former student — Iv’ry was all he said, no Cole — set up a computer network. But the conversation upset him. The rest of his hour he was twitchy.”

“Former student? Maybe Dr. O taught Iv’ry Cole basic microcomputing like he taught you. Probably didn’t fuck Iv’ry like he fucked you, however.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you, Bubs.”

“Nothing does anymore, honestly. But about Iv’ry: he runs black Montgomery. Loansharking, coke, punani. All are big moneymakers, but nothing close to Darknet profits. Iv’ry’s wanted into cyber-scamming for a while, but he lacked technical know-how until Otis the computer wiz came calling... You buy this story so far, Romy?”

She shrugged. “I buy that Iv’ry Cole’s real, but only because I heard the name from Dr. O, not from you. Your motives remain suspect. Part of me thinks you’re slandering Otis to make yourself look good.”

Bubba raised his final firecracker in a mock toast. “I’m just the storyteller,” he assured her, downing the shot. “Now finish yours so we can roll.”

“Why? I like it here.”

“Because Club G’s is Iv’ry Cole’s front. He owns this place like he owns Dr. O’s ass. The first time Iv’ry heard of Bitcoins was in this room. Dr. O pitched his scheme two tables from where we sit. For all we know, Iv’ry and Otis are here now, watching our every move.”

Even over the deer’s intestines, Jimbo could smell her: green apple shampoo and Juicy Fruit. He felt himself harden. All those careful habits formed over the years like flossing every morning, keeping his knives on the magnet when not in use, washing with bleach between each kill, and doubling his condoms were suddenly in danger. Cassie DeBardelaiwin, he sensed, was that kind of girl.

Jimbo did, however, manage to decline her order. Some things could not be compromised. It didn’t matter if she wanted the Christmas sausage for her family’s millworkers or the queen of England, Jimbo Sutt did not process any animal that hadn’t been immediately field dressed and properly iced. No matter the season, Alabama heat advantages the maggots. Besides, Jimbo rarely took wild hogs because pork could be bought by the pound down at the Piggly Wiggly.

DeBardelaiwins weren’t used to hearing no, but Jimbo held firm.

“You see that sign out front? It says Custom Meats. Not spoiled. Not cheap. Custom. I don’t give customers anything I wouldn’t eat myself.”

Satisfied he’d made himself clear, he went back to finish the buck that had just been brought in. It was a beast of a specimen. Even with most of the blood drained out, it still felt warm to the touch. Large bucks required extra care around the neck, otherwise you could wind up having to quilt the hide together on the mount. Nothing ruined a trophy like patched trim. As a processor, he’d developed a reputation for the care he took, a trait seldom cultivated in an area now forced to survive through the short-sighted methods of strip-mining. Lately, though, Jimbo was achieving some renown for his white-tail testicle blend he sold in Mason jars that was said to be as potent as those little blue pills.

In the shop, Jimbo dressed and bled deer on a large slab of stainless steel surrounded by a drain his brother called The Moat and built right into the concrete floor. His new knife — the Jackal, according to the catalog from Zac Brown’s metal shop — had cost a small fortune, and the verdict was still out whether it was worth it. Before long it would feel like an old friend, but now, as he wrapped his fingers around the carved handle, it felt stiff and more than a little strange. Having a girl standing around in the shop also felt strange, but oddly tolerable, as long as she didn’t start up about the sausage again.

The scale read 212 pounds. This was what he called a jackpot buck because it would yield a twelve-point trophy plus a freezer full of quality venison. The girl gave no sign of leaving, so he steadied himself and tugged at the incision to widen it.

“You really set on giving out Christmas sausage?” he asked, tossing the question over his shoulder, wondering for the first time if she was jailbait.

She shrugged.

“Then I suggest Conecuh. It makes pretty good eating.”

“That so?” Cassie said.

Jimbo was imagining what she wore under her skirt. It was made of denim — the same color as her eyes — and had a zipper down the front. He didn’t respond to her question, if that’s what it was, nor did he notice the way her lips curled or how she strutted right up to him until she stopped with her crotch at his face.

“So what do you eat,” she asked, “besides meat?”

Jimbo pretended not to hear. He pretended to be engrossed in his work. He pretended not to wonder if her pubic hair also smelled like green apples. He pretended not to feel the jolt of electricity heating him up. Was she still trying to get him to take the hogs or was this something else? Was it some kind of game? Jimbo didn’t know chess but he’d played poker. He lifted the buck’s tail, revealing a thick stripe of white with a puckered hole of purplish skin in the center. He held the tail out of the way and suspended the Jackal’s serrated blade just above the anus. He let the overhead light bounce off the metal and reflect onto Cassie’s face. “It’s made from old sawmill blades.”

This was her chance to leave if she wanted to, before things got messy.

Cassie did not move.

Jimbo plunged the steel teeth about an inch deep and cut a circle around the anus. This was the point when most people left, or at least looked away. Cassie took a step back, but it was to get a better view. Jimbo pulled the rectum out a couple inches and closed it off with a rubber band. He reached into the belly — carefully, but firmly, so as not to puncture or damage anything — and pulled out the entrails with the intact rectum, like a magician with a scarf. Bowel leakage, like maggots, always ruins meat. With two fingers on either side of the blade, Jimbo reached inside, toward the deer’s throat, and threaded the lungs out from between the ribs, reading the bones like braille as he went. Even a single bump could signal TB. And with one case already reported this season by Fish and Wildlife, you couldn’t be too careful.

Cassie’d begun to breathe hard, but her color looked good. If she hadn’t fainted yet, he guessed she wasn’t going to.

“What’s next?” she asked.

Jimbo stood up and a couple strands of blood or something stuck to his forearm. Color bloomed across her cheeks — not the blush of embarrassment but the flush that comes from standing close to a fire. In heels, she’d be taller than him.

“Ice. Go roll that cooler over here,” he said. “It’s full.”

When she reached the Igloo, she hesitated and made sure he was watching, then she straddled the handle, slowly lifting it up until it disappeared beneath her skirt. Jimbo wasn’t sure whether to keep watching. She locked eyes and stared squarely at him, like she was lining up invisible crosshairs. It was impossible, at that moment, to tell who had whom in their sights. That her panties dropped to the floor without being touched or tugged didn’t strike Jimbo as anything other than good fortune.

“Maybe I need to cool off,” she said, and tossed her panties into the ice chest.

Her grin beat all he’d ever seen. And he’d seen his share of women. Having to raise his brother took certain sacrifices but it hadn’t turned him into a monk. Rather than wasting a whole evening on the rigamarole of dating, he preferred to buy off a menu, always glad they charged by the hour and not by the pound.

Cassie gave her hips a slow, final swivel, before she rolled the chest over to Jimbo. As she opened the lid, she bent over farther than Jimbo thought humanly possible and spread her legs. At that moment, it was Jimbo who was in danger of fainting. If Cassie’d asked him to reconsider making sausage for DeBardelaiwin Steel right then, he might have said yes.

The Jackal still lay beside the entrails. Not only did he neglect to put it up, he also didn’t wash his hands before he handled the ice. Contamination was the last thing on his mind, fear having vanished from his regular radar. In one seemingly fluid motion, Jimbo crammed the cavity full of ice and was done. It was the fastest he’d ever packed a deer, and probably the only time in the history of West Jefferson County that lingerie and ice had been thusly juxtaposed.

The fishy smell of Mobile Bay came through the open car window. Jackie watched the sun come up, casting gold shimmers on the light chop. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel of the old blue Plymouth Fury, listening to the radio and waiting. The local AM country station was filled with static and aggravation, but soon the Salvation Radio Hour would be on. Brother Fred March preached the fiery word of the Lord and offered to save sinners who bought his prayer cloths or blessed water. Stupid suckers.

Jackie sank deeper into the bench seat, shifting to avoid a spring. She lit a cigarette and let the smoke roll out of her mouth. She’d never learned to make smoke rings.

“Hey, you alive?”

She sat up taller and caught the image of the big man in her side mirror. Merle Boykin, one of her best customers.

“More alive than you want to mess with.” She opened the car door and got out.

“You a feisty thing.” Merle looked her up and down, lazy and deliberately offensive. “Like those cutoff jeans.”

“If you had gunpowder for brains, you couldn’t even blow your nose.” She brushed past him and opened the trunk. “There it is. You carry it inside if you want it. I’m not your pack mule.”

“Girl, your good looks take you only so far. Push a little harder and see what you get.”

Jackie grinned. “Try your luck, asshole.”

Merle turned his attention to the gallon glass jugs in the trunk. He lifted one and looked through the clear liquid. “You ain’t got your daddy’s manners but you inherited his touch with a still. Never knew a girl could cook mash like you.”

“You want it, haul it out of my trunk after I have the money.”

Merle counted out the bills in twenties. He handed her the cash and then lifted the moonshine out of the trunk. He made eight trips to the ramshackle building that sold bait, fishing gear, rented boats, and also offered white lightning to trusted customers. Jackie leaned against the side of the car and watched him work.

“Your daddy always helped carry it in,” Merle said as he hefted two more gallons.

“My daddy was a good man. He died about thirty yards from where I’m standing. Being good didn’t matter a bit to the man who shot him.”

Merle shook his head. “That eats at you long enough, you’re gonna be shittin’ in a bag.”

“Thanks for the medical advice.” She slammed the trunk. The rear of the car still sank low to the white shells of the parking lot.

“Jackie, there’s no undoing what happened to your daddy. I don’t know who shot him, and fact is, I wouldn’t tell you if I knew. You gone get yourself hurt. There’re mean and powerful people out there. They’ll shoot you too.”

“If I thought you knew, I’d see that you told me.”

Merle slammed the trunk hard. “See you in a week.”

“My date with destiny.” She got behind the wheel, closed the door, and spun out onto the two lanes of the causeway that connected Mobile and Baldwin counties. The bay ruffled on her left, and the marshlands and rivers on her right. In ten minutes, she was cutting under the Mobile River via Bankhead Tunnel, a span of roadway that made her feel like she was in the belly of a snake. When she shot up into the light and sun again, she was in downtown Mobile.

She snapped the radio back on.

“God offers sinners the perfect miracle, absolute redemption. Even those who have died and are moldering in the ground, awaiting Judgment Day, can be helped. God wants to love and forgive. I can intercede with God on behalf of those you love, those awaiting final judgment, those who will live eternally in the fiery lake of hell if you don’t take action. Cash, check, or money order will do. Don’t let the flames of damnation lick the flesh of those you love. Send twenty-five dollars right now and the name of the person I need to pray for. God hears me, and He listens. Let me save the ones you love from eternal hellfire.”

The city had begun to awaken as she drove past the businesses and houses, many sporting evidence of the long occupation of the city by the French and Spanish. Wrought-iron balconies, stucco, windows that opened wide and were used as doors, the patio entrances that led back to what had once been stables and elegant bricked courtyards. This was Mobile, all shaded by the monster live oaks she loved.

When she passed the small, cinder-block AM radio station, WRED, she pulled to the curb and stopped. Brother Fred March was inside, doing his live radio show. She recognized his brand-new black Cadillac parked right at the front door. The morning deejay who ran the station was playing a gospel song, “Jesus Is Coming Soon” by the Oakridge Boys.

For the next half hour, she watched the squirrels run up the live oak trees and listened to Brother Fred.

“The Lord Jesus carries your sins every day. He can wash you clean and intercede for those who have gone before you. Here’s that address again. Cash, check, or money order and the name of the person I should pray for.”

The show always ended with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Before the song had even finished, the door of the radio station opened and Brother Fred stepped into the October sunlight. Tall with wide shoulders, he was a handsome man with his pomaded black hair. Before the ministry, he’d been a dock worker. Ten years of hard labor had given him a physical presence. Greed had given him the golden ticket of fleecing the desperate.

March lit a cigarette and a big diamond on his finger glinted. He didn’t even glance at the old Plymouth across the street.

Brother Fred wasn’t a very perceptive man, but to be on the safe side, Jackie had put on sunglasses and a scarf to hide her white-blond hair. She watched the radio evangelist pull hard on his cigarette and then flick the butt into the grass. He walked around the car and she took note of his fancy suit and cowboy boots. They were made of ostrich and cost a pretty penny, but God wanted him to have them. Brother Fred said so on the radio, and his flock had ponied up the bucks to buy them.

The evangelist left the radio station in a spray of gravel. Jackie waited a minute, then fell in behind him, heading west. The minister’s Cadillac cut through the October morning like God’s black missile. Brother Fred paid no heed to speed limits, which forced Jackie to do the same. When he turned into a new subdivision of brick ranch-style homes on the outskirts of Mobile, she passed the entrance, then returned, cruising until she found his car parked halfway behind a redbrick house with gray shutters. She brought the camera with a telephoto lens from the backseat just as March got out of the Caddy and knocked on the front door.

The woman who opened it wore a flimsy white negligee and a big red smile. March swept her into his arms and hurried inside, but not before Jackie had half a dozen photos.

Dr. Blackwood taught literature at Miles College, but I knew him from St. Paul’s Lutheran, where Daddy had started to take us after we left the Presbyterians. Dr. Blackwood was a thin man, not much taller than five feet, a dapper dresser, with bulging eyes and a thin line of mustache, like it had been drawn with a fountain pen across the ridge of his lip. I loved to hear him speak. His voice was soft and crisp and he used words that I didn’t know the meaning of. I doubt if anyone who sat on the porch watch on that fall night understood half of what he said.

“Prof,” Mr. Snodgrass (we called him “Snotty”) said, “that’s a mighty good speech! Good ’nough to deliver from the pulpit at Sixth Avenue. You could drive ole Wilson right on outta there. He puts the dead to sleep. God up in heaven be snoring through his sermons. The Lord’s head be falling down and rolling around His neck like a ball on a billiard table.” Mr. Snodgrass spat tobacco in the bean can he kept with him. “’Cept nobody in hell know what you be talking about.” Mr. Snodgrass was a bulky man, whose size should have been intimidating, except his body slouched, making itself look soft. He walked with a stoop as well. He worked in the warehouse at the Golden Flake plant. “You never knew tater chips could be so heavy,” he often said.

I could see Dr. Blackwood’s lips twitching in the silver light that shone through the front-door window onto the porch. “I am too often amused by your flights of imagination, Snodgrass, but to make a spectacle of the Divine is defamation beyond redemption.” The whites of his eyes caught the light. My father, who made up the north-facing point of their triangle, shifted toward me, a sly grin, siding with neither man. The shadow of the Remington 11–48, a shotgun he had managed to keep from his time in the service, moved along the porch railing as it lay across his lap, pointing out into Center Street. I ducked behind the curtain, lest he saw me and sent me to bed.

Like in practically every other household in South Titusville, my parents were teachers. My father worked at Lawson State, a vocational college where he taught painting. The test of a good painter was that he could carry a loaded paintbrush across a room, like a debutante balancing a book on her head, without spilling a drop. Papa had studied at Tuskegee Institute, living among the black airmen who would make up the 332 Fighter Group, and the syphilitic farmers who unwittingly became the guinea pigs of the US Public Health Service. He occasioned, too, to meet the humble, effeminate, and by then very frail inventor George Washington Carver. This touch with greatness, he said, always inspired him to do right by people. Mommy taught second grade for Birmingham Public Schools, where in addition to buying school supplies with her salary, half that of white teachers, she would buy shoes, toothbrushes, clothes, and lunch for the poorer of her students.

Early that week, Williams’s Store, a mom-and-pop sundry shop, which Sister and I frequented after our trips to the library, had been dynamited. We loved to buy the hard candy from the store, not so much for its taste, but because of its price: two for a penny. A nickel could keep us in candy for days.

Why the store was bombed was a mystery. Bombings — dynamite, Molotovs — were common in Birmingham’s black neighborhoods, especially those that were encroaching into whites-only zoned areas. But South Titusville was not one of those communities. It was self-contained, mostly content, mostly complacent, or so it seemed on the surface. It was a neighborhood where nice colored folks minded their business, went to work, to church, to school, and prettified the front yards of their quaint brick and clapboard ranches. But beneath the surface, as in every black neighborhood, bubbled the slow boil of discontent, whispered in the churches beneath the call and response, or over the fence between neighbors, or on playgrounds among children tossing a softball. The city had closed all the parks that year in resistance to integrating them. The next spring would see thousands of children, some as young as six, march in protest, bitten by police dogs and bowled over by jets of pressurized water. I would be among them. That night, though, no one knew by whom or why Williams’s Store had been shaken off its foundation and gutted by fire from two sticks of dynamite tied to a brick thrown through the window. But for the week since the bombing, on nearly every street corner in Titusville, both North and South, sat men with guns on porch watch, waiting, as Mr. Snodgrass summed up, “to blow open any Klan sonofabit’ stupid enough to drive down Center Street.”

“The white man,” Dr. Blackwood said as he rolled the knuckles of one boney hand within the palm of the other, “has but one reason to oppress the Negro” — he lowered, shook his head, and recited — “Black as the night is black, / Black like the depths of my Africa.”

“Yass,” Mr. Snodgrass drawled. My father nodded in agreement.

“They deem to assert a hideous hegemony over us for their parasitic profit. But the Klansman is a white man who has no reason, none other than to brutalize. I am put in mind of Mr. Justice. The pitiable soul.”

Mr. Snodgrass folded his arms across his chest. As he was the south-facing point of the triangle, the pistol he held, also a take-home from war service, pointed briefly in my direction. “Reginald, it was.”

“Roland, if memory serves me well.”

“I knew his Daddy from when I worked over at TCI.” Mr. Snodgrass leaned toward Dr. Blackwood, but kept his arms folded around himself. TCI was a blast furnace, one of several which, though diminished, still sooted the skyline. “It was Reginald. He wasn’t doing nothing. Just walking down the road.”

“Black as the night is black.”

“Just minding his own business,” my father said, and let out a long sigh.

“And what they did to him, I didn’t see in Korea. And I saw a lot I won’t even tell ’bout. But they sliced him like a pig farmer take a razor to a shoat. Clean off. Then stuck ’em down his throat. What the purpose of that? Boy nearly choked to death and would have too.” For a long moment all that could be heard were the grinding screeches of the last of the cicadas. I turned away from the window, an ache from my navel to my knee, remembering the story of Ronald Justice and questioning my future as darkness swelled in me.

It was several minutes before the conversation picked up again, as if they were all lost in contemplation. I, too, was full of worried thoughts. I was twelve and beginning to feel the sap of manhood springing in my limbs, and with it, not so much a greening, but a blackening of expectations. What had happened to Ronald could happen to any black boy. I would have gone to bed at that point, but Mr. Snodgrass asked, “Whatever happened to Reginald? Did he go up north or something?”

“I never heard. Not even that,” Dr. Blackwood said.

I moved back to my peephole behind the curtain and saw that the men seemed to have drawn closer together, forming a conspiratorial circle cut across by the rectangle of light that came through the door. I put my ear closer to the window screen.

“There was that so-called reporter, an investigatory journalist from one of the Northern papers, he said. Philadelphia, he said.”

“Oh, yass. I do remember that fellow. Nosier than a six-toed mole. Come snooping around the yard at TCI asking about the boy. It was the end of late shift and that probably was the reason he snuck by the gate. He asking about Justice. By then they was gone. Where, I don’t know. Up north, I guess. But he come asking and nobody, and I mean nobody, would speak a word to him. You never seen so many shoulder-shrugging Step’n Fetchits shuffling through the smoke and shadows. No suh, boss, I don’ know nuffin’ ’bout what choo talking ’bout. Flares were going off and throwing that red light on them, and they looked like they just raised from the grave. The cub come round to me. First I act like he wasn’t even there. But then I said to myself that I wasn’t fixin’ to play no bug-eyed Sambo. I looked him right in the face, his eyes in shadow but somehow still sparking when those flares goes off. Do you know where the hell you is? Asking ’bout that boy? Do you even know where the hell you is? His mouth opened wider than a cow with a cattle prod up her ass. Too flabbergasted to get out more than a whoosh. He was a young fellow, Irish by the looks of him.”

“Yes. Yes. But of course, I recall him well. A scarlet-haired, freckled-face youth. A so-called all-American visage. His name was O’Brien. Thomas O’Brien.”

“O’Brien is right — nah! — Brown. Timmy — Timothy Brown it was. I know ’cause he followed me home. I was living round Avenue A in Fairfield then, not a quarter-mile from the furnace. Air in the house got so smoky you couldn’t sleep some days and for the clanking and clunking too. But not a minute after I got home I heard the dogs barking and growling and come a knock at the door. Sun not even up yet. Cracked the door and there he was standing in the slit of light and looking like a chicken. Hair standing up like a rooster. Asked if the dogs gone bite. What choo want? I said it just like that. I didn’t cotton to no white man. Them ain’t my dogs anyway. He mumbled out something ’bout the Inquisitor. ’Bout then, one of the dogs took a snap at him and I pulled him on in. Don’t need no white man bit up in my yard. What choo want?

“The fellow still looked shaken to me. Had that look like he got surprised one day and his face never went back. He wanted to ask me questions about that boy, and was it a better place here than at the plant.

“Ain’t no one damn place better than the other. You can get killed any damn place.

“He sat down like a fat man with broke legs. Heard my kitchen chair squeak. Wife gone to work, though. Day work over the mountain. She had left me a pot of greens, cornbread, and a little fried meat. I always ate my supper in the morning. So I offered the man some to be polite, never expecting he would say yes. So I fixed it up the best I could and served it to him. And he ate too. Right slow at first, like he had to smell it, and then a little piece and a little piece more. Then he was smiling and shoving it on in, chewing and grinning, ring pinkie in the air, like he always ate this way. Ain’t this one hell of a strange thing to see? I was thinking. A white man, sitting and eating at my table, eating greens and cornbread for breakfast. I had to shake my head.

“Then he took a pencil and a little pad of paper out of the breast pocket of his jacket and set them down on the table beside his plate. He looked up and smiled, but his eyes darted around like he was nervous too. You know Reginald Justice? he asked me.

“Naw, I said, I didn’t know the boy. Seen him once or twice, but can’t say I know him. I worked with his daddy, though.

“Well, tell me about his daddy. I told him what little I knew, but it wasn’t enough to get a story out of. Then he say, Did the daddy ever mention that the boy had been seeing anybody? A girlfriend?

“If he did, I don’t remember. I guess the boy was normal and that would have been a normal thing.

“A white girl. Girl the name of Ella Grimes.

“Damn! Bread dropped out of my mouth it hit me so hard. Grimes. That Grimes gal. I started to say I didn’t know a thing he was talking about — and truth be told, I didn’t. But I did know that Grimes gal, ’cause her daddy worked the snort valve just a way ’cross from where I was on the slag pot. Won’t let no colored work the valve. Thought we wasn’t smart enough. We shovel the coke and sinter. Pour off the slag. The gritty work. Controlling the valve was hot work too, but that was a white man’s job only. He had to be right up next to them air heaters. Likely, it would cook him if he wasn’t careful. But Grimes, as far as I knew, was a decent white fellow. He never said a word to me, but he never said a word against me, either. But you don’t know what a man will do if you mess with his daughter.

“When I got my tongue back I ask how he knew this. He said he had been investigating over in Hueytown. Talk was the boy and the gal had been seen together outside the plant gate. More than once. She would bring her daddy some lunch. But that would have been about midnight. What kind of gal be hanging around a plant yard at midnight?”

The glider squeaked as Mr. Snodgrass leaned over the arm to pick up his bean can. Dr. Blackwood cleared his throat, apparently to interject, but Mr. Snodgrass held up an index finger with the hand that still held the revolver. “I asked him how he knew. Who he talking to? I was hoping against hope it wasn’t Grimes. But no, it was some of them rough boys, three or four of them, over at Hueytown High School.

“He looked kind of nervous when he said it and run his fingers through that stiff lock of hair on his head. Then he said, and he looked down, They told me the girl liked the nigger — then he looked up — That’s their word, sir — he called me sir, but he might as well had kept it at nigger. No offense. I don’t talk like that. Then he stared at me, that surprised look on his face. I could have slapped him into next week.

“But I bit down hard and said, And then what?

“The girl said that she liked the boy.

“I snorted I was so mad. But they didn’t do nothing to the girl. They just cut up the boy?

“Well, one of them said that the girl was his girl and he was glad somebody taught the, uh... well... the, uh, Negro a lesson he won’t forget.

“But the boy you talk to, he didn’t do it?

“The cub shook his head. Said the rumor was the Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. He said it like that was funny. I just grunted. I knew who they was. Those gray-sheet-wearing sonofabit’. Don’t wear white like the regular Klan and the meanest sonofabit’ there is. They the ones beat up Nat King Cole. Beat Shuttlesworth and his girls too.

“Then he wanted to know if I could confirm the relationship. What relationship? A colored boy don’t have no relationship with a white girl. A white girl is death to a colored boy and any colored boy with a grain of sense know that, so unless Reginald had himself a death wish—” Mr. Snodgrass was shouting, realized it and quieted. “But had I ever seen the boy with the girl? he wanted to know. And what if I had? Seeing them together don’t mean they was together. Lots of people wait by the plant gate if they know somebody that work up in there. And then, I noticed he hadn’t wrote a word on that tablet. Not one scratch. Something don’t smell right here, I thought. What paper you say you work for? He said again something about the Inquisitor. Something close to that. I said, And you ain’t gone use my name?

“Confidential, he said.

“Well, confidential or confounded, I told him just like that, I’m done.

“But did you see the two of the together?

“You need to leave.

“Just answer the question.

“You need to leave, right now.

“But what about the dogs?

“I got a dog, I told him. It’ll bark over here and bite over yonder. Now get! I stood up and made like I was reaching for my pocket. He got my meaning and soon went on out. I watched him from the door as he was sidestepping the mud like a sneak dragging his shadow behind him.” Mr. Snodgrass spat a big plug of tobacco into the bean can.

A car accelerated on a nearby street, its engine rising to a whine nearly as loud as the cicadas. The men sat up, looking out from our hilltop porch into the darkness where neither streetlights nor moonlight shone, to TV-lighted windows and the rooftops of Titusville. After a moment they relaxed, the sound of the car muted by distance.

Dr. Blackwood let out a curt sigh and reached into his jacket’s side pocket and took out a shiny flask. “I believe that deserves an ameliorative.”

“And a drink too,” Mr. Snodgrass said. The men passed the flask among them sipping and coughing. Out of the same pocket, Dr. Blackwood took a matching cigarette case, triggered a switch that popped it open, and offered it to the other men. Neither of them took a cigarette and he asked if they were “quite certain,” and picked a thin hand-rolled cigarette out of the case and placed it at the corner of his mouth. He snapped open a shiny lighter which flared blue, casting momentary light on his bony face. He blew out smoke through his nostrils.

“Snodgrass,” he said to my father, “is a highly imaginative narrator. I doubt if any fact in his tale is accurate. Ah yes, To make a poet black, and bid him sing! Snodgrass sings like a whip-poor-will.” Dr. Blackwood’s lips twitched. My father broke into a broad smile. Mr. Snodgrass spat into the bean can. “Yours was not the only encounter with that intrepid investigator. He ventured onto the campus and somehow found directions to my office in the basement of Ramsay Hall. It’s a close, windowless room, so damp at times that the covers of my books curl. But it is the garret from which I launch like Daedalus. Yes. Yes. I know why the caged bird beats his wing / Till its blood is red on the cruel bars. Barely did he knock before poking that scarlet pompadour into my sanctuary. My goodness, I rarely let my dear students in, and here he is, a white man, broadcasting imperium with a swagger as if he were the primogeniture of Czar Nicolas and Cleopatra. I can’t say I wasn’t startled, but I restrained from outburst and continued to jot down the rhyme which he had nearly joggled out of my head. I made him stand for a minute, before I looked up.

“May I help you? I inquired.

“He dragged my bergère, my good reading chair, from its place in the corner to the front of my desk. He made some hasty, excited introductions, and I was to believe that he was an investigative journalist from Philadelphia. The Inquirer, he said. But something was distinctly off about him, and every hair on my head prickled. Fill-er-delf-ia, he said. Not Fila-dail-fia or FIL-de-fia, as natives might say.

“The Inquirer? Oh, how prestigious, I said. I put my pen in the stand, and turned the pages of my cahier against the blotter. So kind of you to visit. He spoke rapidly enough for a Philadelphian, but there was a lilt that placed him farther south. Maryland, Virginia, perhaps. So I inquired, How does it go in the City of Brotherly Love?

“Just great! he said.

“I suppose they must be, this time of year, the weather so pleasant in the spring. And the Swann Fountain at Logan Square as lovely as Trevi, but much more restrained. It’s called Swann Fountain, you know, but there isn’t a swan to be found. Not a one. It’s only named for a family called Swann, not the fowl.

“His eyebrows arched, or at least one of them did — and he took on that look Snodgrass described. He suspected I was testing him.You’ve been to Fill-er-delf-ia?

“Oh yes, I said. Mind if I smoke? I offered him one and he took it. I lit it for him, then my own. A minute passed as we took in our smoke, and not an iota of recognition from him of the trap. You see,” Dr. Blackwood turned to Mr. Snodgrass, “The Inquirer building is located near Logan Square where there’s quite a famous fountain, which is called Swann after the family and, incidentally, features many small figures of the bird, as well. But people get it the other way around, thinking the fountain is named for the birds. This urchin was an impostor.”

“I thought he was a rascal!” Mr. Snodgrass said.

“And to close the trap, I asked if he would like a cup of tea, or a glass of water. Except, I didn’t said wa-tah as a Southerner might, but wood-er as a Philadelphian would. And I observed him closely, and yes — not recognition, not familiarity, but the slightest crinkle of confusion on his brow. What should have sounded familiar to him did not! And so I leaned back in my desk chair, hoping my face did not show the smirk I bore toward him, and inquired as gentlemanly as I could muster, And how may I help you?

“Oh, he said, and took a pad and stub of a pencil from his pocket. Something he had seen in a movie, no doubt. I wonder if he’d thought to wear a fedora with a placard marked Press stuck in the band. He meandered — groping like a man destitute of vision in a room full of knives. Some whites are that way. Afraid to say the obvious, as if to acknowledge that I am a Negro is an insult to me. So I said it for him. And that very same question he asked you, Snodgrass. Did I know the Justice boy? Suspecting his perfidy, I declared that I had never heard of him, or the incident in which the poor lad was injured.

“You mean he was... what! I feigned shock. Eunuchized! Who would do such a thing? And in America too.

“The coifed clown went on quite awhile, chattering now that the subject was open. He explained as he explained to you, Snodgrass, about his intelligence from the hooligans at Hueytown High and the KKK of the Confederacy emasculating the boy and leaving him for dead. He went on about the girl too, Emma, not Ella. Quite the Queen of Sparta. A willowy, smoky-eyed blonde by the way he described her, his eyes bright and a pearl of spittle at the corner of his mouth. He claimed the Justice lad met her at the plant gate every night, by arrangement. She pretending to bring supper to her father, and he — well, it was never clear what rationale he was to give. This he claimed the girl said, though he never talked to her directly, or so he told me. He went on in a loquacious stream that grew more rapids-filled as he went. I learned more and more about the qualities of young Emma, even details about her fetching eyes and her nymphet physique. All the time, I remembered young Roland Justice, one of the few students I let into the office. Tall, he was, sepia, good-haired, and as athletic as a young John Henry. He would have been quite the ladies’ man, but he was a dreamer. Though he had more than a few infelicities in his articulation, I enjoyed listening to his dreams. He wanted to be an astronaut, he said. He wanted to fly off to the planets.” Dr. Blackwood paused, blew smoke through his nostrils, and added with a snort, “What Negro doesn’t? But I encouraged him. To dream, even so quixotically, adds a glimmer to the gloom.”

Like many boys back then, I too wanted to fly off to the planets. It was the years of the Mercury program and five men, that is to say American men, had gone up into space in the past year and a half. Just two weeks earlier, Wally Schirra had completed six orbits around the earth and the president said we were going to the moon!

“I had no heart to tell the boy of poor Captain Dwight. Why snuff out his flame? The example of Captain Dwight served as sufficient precedent.”

My father groaned, a sound of agony and agreement. I learned much later that Captain Dwight had been the first black man to apply to join the astronaut corps, but officials had bullied him away.

“Finally, I’d heard more than enough of the calumny, and was about to ask the white deceiver to leave my office, when he put a finger to the corner of his mouth to wipe away a luscious glob of drool that had collected there and I saw a small, broad ring on his pinkie. A woman’s ring. Gold and garnet. And I made out quite clearly the H-U-E-Y of Hueytown High inscribed around the stone. I checked my anger. The poem had been written, so to speak. Now only the rhyming couplet remained unfinished.

“And you believe them to have been lovers? I asked.

“His face flushed, a flare of anger or embarrassment or both. No, he said. Nothing like that. She wouldn’t have been caught dead... He composed himself. I’m only saying what I heard.

“But why would the boy have been so severely punished, if it were not true? If there had been no true romance?

“Romance? There ain’t no romance.

“Romeo and Juliet. O, happy dagger, / This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die.

“What? He rose from my chair in a near bolt, both fighting and fleeing. You need to be more respectful.

“Indeed, I said, and as he turned I changed my tone to lure him back, back for the final conceit, Young man, one question, please.

“He turned.

“When is her birthday? Emma Grimes? When is her birthday?

“January... He looked puzzled. January the fifteenth. Why?

“No important reason. Just curious. Always curious, I am. I thanked him for his visit, and slowly, as if he were struck dumb by my inquisitiveness, he left the office. I sat listening to the clank of his heels on the stairs. For some long moments my mind seemed clear, not a jingle or rhyme in it. Then the image of that poor lad, lying in a ditch in the darkness with his pants soaked with blood. What horrifying thoughts must have filled his mind. Worse than the pain he must have felt, he must also have felt the fetid gloaming of his future pressing down on him. And then my anger flashed. What an insidious pogrom this petulant pareidolia wages against us! While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, / Making their mock at our accursèd lot.”

The men were silent, but all leaning in, while Dr. Blackwood finished his cigarette and crushed the stub with his foot. “The garnet,” he said quietly, “is the birthstone of January.”

“You don’t think he did it?” my father asked.

“No.” Dr. Blackwood shook his head. “Not the crime. But he couldn’t believe that she hadn’t.”

“Damn!” my father said, and suddenly stood and brought the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder. The other men stood up too, staring into the distance, over the rooftops. I stood. To the north, far down Center Street, a bright light blossomed, momentarily casting an orange bubble in the blackness. There was no sound of the blast. No whine of the speeding car. No screams of children or shouts of the men who undoubtedly rushed to the flames. No sirens. Only the imperturbable cacophony of the cicadas.

What brings you back home? people want to know.

“Work,” she replies.

The assumption is that she has returned for a certain kind of work, as innocuous as it is forgettable. She’s in marketing, right? Or is it advertising? One or the other. For some big tech company in California. Married to a guy from San Francisco. She doesn’t come home much, hasn’t since she met the guy. That was probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. She loves it out there, despite the fires and the earthquakes.

Only after she is gone, after the puzzle pieces have fit together, will someone say, “Who knew?”

Well, she knew. She’s not one to make it up as she goes along.

Gordon V. Pumps whacked at the bamboo in the canebrake as if he were possessed. He saw in each whack of the gleaming machete a death stroke against his nemesis, Horace P. Dumpler, head of the Alabama Department of Revenue, who was trying to put him out of business — or so he was convinced.

Gordon V. Pumps gathered the cane in his arms and threw it into the back of his truck, then headed to his house in Point Clear, not far from the Grand Hotel. The hotel had been a fixture on its great spot of land since 1842, and was considered a queen of Southern resorts.

Gordon had unctuously befriended a desk clerk, knowing firsthand that Dumpler visited the hotel for a week every spring to play golf, at which he was basically no good since he was a hunchback, although he excelled at putting. He played in a foursome with several of his revenue agents. That’s how Gordon had encountered him, a year earlier.

For three decades Gordon had offered the public sightseeing trips into the exotic Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, which was the second largest of its kind in the country, and luxuriated in a diverse plethora of flora and fauna. Gordon had fished and hunted the Delta since he was a boy and knew as much, if not more, about it and its various features as anyone. He had a pleasant, folksy manner of speech and some people went on his trips just to hear him talk. He had a few years back taken courses and received a degree in what amounted to swampololgy from a local university, and he considered what he did more than mere sightseeing — it was educational.

That was where the rub with Dumpler came in. The previous year, while visiting the Grand Hotel, Dumpler had read a piece in the local newspaper on Gordon and his boat, and on a whim had booked a trip. The price was eighty dollars per passenger, and Dumpler had graciously included his revenue agents — cum — golf foursome in the retinue.

Everyone seemed fascinated as Gordon pointed out eagles’ nests, eagles, cormorants, mergansers, herons, pelicans, snipes, wood ducks, ibis, alligators, nutria, wildcats, deer, feral hogs, possums, raccoons, various types of snakes, poisonous and otherwise, and turtles that sunned themselves on logs in the early spring.

The revenue agents asked questions about all this, but Dumpler’s mind seemed to be elsewhere. Then, when Gordon cut off the engine to drift up on a flock of white pelicans, Dumpler broke the silence by proclaiming in a stentorian voice, “You must make a good living doing this.”

The pelicans, of course, flew off.

Gordon was somewhat taken aback. “Not bad,” he replied. “When the weather’s good.”

“Well, let’s see,” said Dumpler, “today with us you’re making $320. If you have an afternoon trip, that’s $640 — I’d say that’s better than just not bad.”

“Like I said, there’s a lot of days when I’m down because of weather.”

Since the pelicans had taken off Gordon cranked up the engine. They’d been out a good two hours so he headed back to the dock. Everybody left seemingly satisfied and Gordon thought no more about these men until Monday morning, bright and early — at seven a.m. in fact — when a woman, wearing a purple pantsuit and a man’s felt hat, showed up at the dock as he was preparing the boat for an eight o’clock trip. She said, “My name is Lucille Bratt and I’m from the Alabama Department of Revenue.”

Gordon smiled politely and replied, “Pleased to meet you.”

Lucille Bratt got right to the point: “Are you paying your Alabama State entertainment tax?”

“The what?”

“The entertainment tax. It was passed by the state legislature six years ago.”

“Never heard of it,” Gordon said.

“Ten percent of every dollar you take in,” said Lucille Bratt.

“Ten percent? What for?”

“You are entertaining people and they are paying for it. It’s taxable.”

“Well, my business is more educational,” Gordon told her. “There are 346 different birds in this Delta, and I can spot every one of them. From time to time.”

“Doesn’t make any difference,” the woman said. “People with these duck-boat tours, and those folks down at the gulf who have the parasailing concession — everybody’s got to pay it.”

“Well,” Gordon said, flustered, “I never heard of it. I’ve never heard any of the fishing guides mention it.”

“They got themselves exempted.”

Gordon stood there flabbergasted. Finally he said, “How did you come to be here telling me all this today?”

“My boss brought it up.”

“And who would that be?”

“Mr. Horace P. Dumpler, commissioner of revenue for the state of Alabama.”

“Dumpler? You mean the guy I took out last Friday?”

“I guess so,” Lucille Bratt responded. “He was the one who told me about you. Said to tell you he had a nice time.” She fumbled in her large handbag. “I’ve got these forms for you to fill out and sign. You’ll have to pay the tax this year and back taxes for every year from the date the act was made into law.”

“I’ve what?” Gordon exclaimed.

“It’s the law,” Lucille muttered resignedly.

She’d been so damn cute once, not even six years old, with big false eyelashes and a curly blond wig. People would travel for thousands of miles just to look at her on that shopping mall tour of ’08, get her to autograph her signature porcelain doll, or hear her sing her hit YouTube song, “Sweet, Sweet Baby.” Onstage, they’d dress her up as a rodeo chick, a genie, a pirate, and even a Vegas showgirl. Feather headdress, tall plastic heels, fishnet stockings, and attitude to spare. Her momma took a lot of heat for the showgirl costume, thousands of letters and e-mails to the cable channel asking why in the world a mother would want her child to look like a gosh-darn streetwalker. But her mother, Big Nadine, would look right in that camera, a Virginia Slim tucked between her fingers, nails long and red as blood, and say there wasn’t nothing wrong with the costume, only with twisted, sick minds.

“Did it all start with pageants?” the man asked. He drove the black van in shadow, a hulking shape over the wheel speeding east along Corridor X toward Birmingham. Speaking with no accent, sounding like some kind of Yankee.

“At first,” Cassie Lyn said. “After I won runner-up in Little Miss Lower Alabama, that’s when I got noticed by Rick. He was the talent scout up in Birmingham. Mainly he worked with rodeo dogs and race car drivers. But he told Momma he saw something in me. They took a video at that pageant in Wetumpka and that’s how I got on that show.”

“You sure looked good on TV,” the man said, following the highway blasted straight through hills of rock and stone, winding its way through the darkness from her hometown of Gu-Win. “You were so photogenic. So sassy. Such a cute little mouth on you. Blue eyes as big as marbles.”

“Is that why you come for me?” she said. “Now I’m nearly eighteen.”

The man didn’t answer as they shot past a Love’s Travel Stop and Cracker Barrel settled down in a valley below the interstate, Cassie Lyn hungry as hell, not eating since her evening shift at the video trailer. Cassie Lyn TV. She wondered if he’d feed her before he got to wherever it was they were going. He was a white man, maybe thirty or forty, with thin black hair and a mustache. He wore thick glasses and one of those shiny black windbreakers her granddaddy still wore. Members Only. The man didn’t give his name. And she didn’t ask.

She turned around toward the backseat of his car and saw a large section of rope, zip ties, and some silver duct tape. A shiny revolver, probably just a.22, showed from his jacket pocket.

“You didn’t need that gun.”

“Would you have come anyway?”

“I would’ve hopped in the car with the devil himself,” she said. “To get free of that place. Is that who you are? Mr. Satan himself come up to Alabama to find Miss Cassie Lyn, former pageant baby all growed up?”

The man didn’t answer, a long strange silence between them as they passed Cherry Road, and headed onto I-65 South that ran from Birmingham down to Mobile. His face flickering in and out of darkness from the tall lights along the guardrail.

“I wanted to hear you sing,” he said. “It’s sad you don’t sing anymore, Cassie Lyn. It makes me so very sad.”

“What do you want me to sing?”

“Come on,” he said. “You know. Everybody on this planet knows your song.”

“‘Lady Marmalade,’” she said. “Shaking my little tail in that French maid outfit? Like when I was a kid, on the show.”

“Exactly like the show. I even brought you that very same outfit. I bought it on eBay for a hundred dollars.”

“That all you want from me?” she said. “For me to shake my tail? Or are you wanting a whole lot more?”

“I don’t know. I guess I want everything.”

For his final meal, all Thomas Elijah Raymond asked for was the cake, the one he remembered from Rachel’s Luncheonette in Phenix City. Prison rules would not allow food brought in from the outside. Safety concerns. So if Rachel Walker said yes, she would have to come to Holman on the day of the execution and make it there. How to feel about such a thing. Reluctant but somehow compelled. When the day arrived, the warden’s assistant greeted Rachel and escorted her to the kitchen. She could now match a face to the familiar voice she’d heard so many times over the phone in the few weeks before.

“Mrs. Walker, the warden will be here in just a minute. Can I get you anything in the meantime?” Francine asked.

“No thank you. I believe I’m fine.” Rachel wanted to sound more certain, and to dismiss any worry on her behalf. She wanted to manage that on her own.

As Francine disappeared out the swinging metal doors, Rachel watched her through round windows. The secretary walked past the corrections officer stationed outside and made her way down the corridor. The sound of her heels on the concrete was muted by the thick steel doors that had by then stopped swinging. Rachel was alone now, in the newly constructed wing of Holman Prison. It was the biggest kitchen she had ever seen.

The smell of her restaurant kitchen had always given her comfort. It was not the smell of any particular dish, but instead, the slow, thin layers built up over the years. There was always cinnamon near, even if it wasn’t needed for a recipe. Bowls of it curled like scrolls used to write down histories. She wished she had brought some with her. This place smelled of bleach and ammonia. It whispered nothing.

Stainless steel shelves lined the freshly painted walls. Ceiling lamps spread a dull glaze across the metal fixtures. Fluorescent bulbs gave a uniform pale, except for a single lamp that flickered, blinking rays the color newspaper turns. A dozen parallel steel islands rose from the white tile floor, wrapped in thick blue plastic pulled taut over narrow shelves and secured around the edges of the counters. Two adjacent counters had been uncovered and arranged for her use.

Francine said that the new wing had been finished just a few weeks ago. The men would arrive soon, and from this kitchen they would be fed. In the meantime, the warden had arranged for her to work here. According to Francine, the warden thought the space would be ideal. Out of the way. Clean.

Rachel had dressed for a warm autumn evening. She was not prepared for the cold confines of the prison kitchen. It seemed the temperature was set for a space full of toiling and heat, so the cold air, unchecked, was too much. The place wasn’t walk-in cold, but damn near, with air washing over her feet in waves, snaking around her ankles, and running along the floor. She placed her purse on the counter and removed a black apron, Rachel’s Luncheonette: 35 Years in the Baking in silver lettering. The silver blouse beneath her black suit matched the silver in her hair. This was how she dressed for the events she catered. Yet she had taken pause when readying for this occasion. There was no proper dress for preparing a last meal.

She’d made the three-hour drive alone. Told her family she was driving to Atmore for the weekend. Her daughter and son-in-law were busy running the kitchen, had been for years. A few days a week, she would walk the dining room and the lunch counter, speaking to the first-timers who had her cookbooks, had seen her on television here and there, and she greeted her regulars as well, trying to dole out the same welcome to any and all. She could come and go, be there without being there — her face on the menus, and the sides of buses, and the coffee bags and cookie tins they sold in the gift shop. So when she told her family she had a small job in Escambia County, a repast for an old acquaintance, she’d saved herself the strain of a lie she may have to remember later. The truth itself was troublesome enough.

The prison kitchen was empty except for the ingredients. Francine had requested them a week before. Shortening, sugar, molasses, salt, baking soda, and flour had been lined up in a perfect row, labels turned outward. Someone had seen fit. Perhaps an eye for detail, but certainly a nod toward normalcy in a place where there was little.

On a nearby table sat an antique mixer. In the kitchen of a prison, the comforts of home seemed strangely out of place. She flipped the power switch on the mixer, and the familiar hum rang out.

She remembered having a similar one years before. Its heavy body and thick insulation produced a hum unlike the rattling of the new ones that cost more than they should.

Chrome, as beautiful as it could be, was hard to keep clean. Working folk had no time to worry about fingerprints and smudges. The matte metal about the kitchen reflected indistinguishable masses of light and dark, but in the chrome she could see herself.

She examined her reflection in the mixer’s oblong body, getting closer to it until the moisture of her sigh obscured her image. With one of the neatly folded dish towels, she wiped the chrome clean.

“It was my mother’s.”

She had barely grown comfortable in the silence when his voice rang out.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you, Mrs. Walker. I’m Lionel Peters. The warden here. I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to meet you previously.”

He walked over to greet her but waited for Rachel to extend her hand first. An old-fashioned stance that she hoped would fade; indeed, Lionel Peters looked a few years her junior. Set in his ways, she was sure. But he carried himself a little older than he was, and his clothes didn’t help. His suit surely had the right cut and hang before the years settled into it. He was conscious of his posture, but the slouch in his jacket remained.

“Did Francine offer you anything when you came in? Excuse me if she didn’t. We can forget our manners working in here. Can I get you anything, coffee or something?”

“She offered, but I didn’t need anything.”

“Well, everything you asked for is right there on the counter. Your perishables are in the refrigerator over there. The ovens are behind you. Officer Earle will be right outside. Holler if you need anything. He can escort you to the facilities if you need to use them. I apologize we didn’t build a ladies’ room on this end. You sure I can’t get you anything, coffee or something?”

She shook her head.

“What else?” the warden said while flipping through a deck of papers on the clipboard he tapped against the counter. “I feel like I’m forgetting something. Oh yes, the list. I want to make sure we got everything. Shortening, eggs, sugar, cocoa, flour...”

“There is one thing. I realized much too late that I left something off the list: my vanilla syrup. We make our own to sell in the gift shop, so I’m just so used to having it around and not buying it. Coming down here’s out of the ordinary, to say the least, so clarity has been a little challenging.”

She knew they had rules about bringing things in, but she prayed they could look the other way. The warden was killing a man, and he had made a show of this little bit of kindness, so certainly he could see fit to say yes. She took from her bag a bottle and set it down gingerly, almost like a beg-your-pardon for it being there against the rules.

The bottle rested between them, and the warden walked a bit closer and turned it so the label faced outward like the rest of the ingredients. He smiled a bit then, looking from the label to her, the pattern in the design the same as the embroidery on the apron she carried. Good branding. Her smile in the photograph was clockwork, perfected after years of showing her teeth because she had to, and then because her enterprise made it worthwhile.

“I understand. I got no qualms with it, considering.”

He was decent enough, but Rachel could tell the warden wanted no part of this. The letter in two places said he would understand if she said no. She could just send a recipe, and they’d honor his wishes. But if she’d said no, she would still know Thomas Elijah Raymond’s execution date, and she would probably look at the clock well aware of the hour. She would have wandered there in her mind even if she had said no to making this drive.

“We pick a fine time to pay attention, don’t we,” she said. Rachel was looking away, but the edge to her voice was unmistakable.

The warden said nothing.

She paused before she spoke again. “Nobody looking after him for years, and he’s got all kinds of eyes on him now. More this evening, I suspect. Spectators.”

“Witnesses. The family of the victim.” He pressed the clipboard flat against his waist, a stance that seemed automatic. “He doesn’t deny what he did.”

“I’m thinking about what we’re about to do. Me and you both. Trying to wake up and go about my business tomorrow and thinking back on this here.”

A hand on the counter then, like candor needed a different sort of balance before the words came freely. “You’ll probably feel worse about this tomorrow than you do today. I always do.”

“Why do it then?” she said.

And there they were on the other side of the nicety. She saw in the warden a decent man, but maybe that was part of the problem. What decent folks were willing to go along with. He was quiet for a minute, and he breathed in and out with too much intention. He glanced away in a room with no windows, and he seemed too accustomed to conjuring some good memory, a little daylight stored away for days such as this one. The ease in his face said as much.

“My wife reminded me this morning that we ate at your place awhile back. We were on our way to see some of her people in Tuskegee. Enjoyed it immensely — just a good meal on a good afternoon. I didn’t mention it to Raymond, because it’s rude to reminisce on things. Get casual with the outside world. Do you remember him?”

She shook her head. “So many kids over the years, it’s impossible to say.”

“Well, in any case, you’re appreciated.”

“Please tell your wife I said thank you. To you as well. Like you said, it doesn’t sit easy, so — well, thank you.”

It was quiet for a while again, except for the lights and the freezers, and the sound of Lionel’s wedding band against the countertop, a little sonar to bring him back to whatever was next on his clipboard.

“You sure I can’t get you some coffee or something?”

“No thank you. You’ve done just fine with the mixer.”

The warden excused himself then, and as he made his way down the corridor, the metal doors swung to silence. Rachel was alone again, her mind holding vigil. She had lied to the warden about Raymond. How could she not remember?

The boy couldn’t have been more than six or so, because she remembered him sitting at the table with what looked like his grandparents, coloring the children’s menu with the Crayolas she passed out in sardine cans. His family was on the way to Huntsville, the space center they said, and he had lined up the salt and pepper shakers, the Louisiana Hot, and the Heinz bottle as rocket ships taking off from the tabletop. To get dessert, he had to promise to finish the green beans, alone on the plate where the chicken had been, the wing and drumstick reduced to gristle and bone. He chewed with purpose but not enjoyment, like he was practicing handwriting with his jaws. But the booth they chose was across from the cake display, so he did a bit of window-shopping while he finished the last of the beans. Rachel was on the other side of the glass loading the shelf of red velvets. She remembered him studying his options. He didn’t like the green beans one bit, but he’d kept his word and intended to make the most of it.

He asked for the molasses cake, while his grandparents had red velvet and buttermilk pie. They thanked Rachel as they left, and then she looked away and didn’t see the boy fall to the ground. A child on the floor raised no alarm at first. Kids were prone to go from dillydallying straight to sprinting and stumbling. And the tantrums. But something was wrong because when Rachel finally noticed the boy on the floor, his eyes were widening as he struggled to breathe.

In the commotion, his people thought he was choking, but there didn’t seem to be any obstruction in his throat. He held his mouth open wide, still searching for air. Rachel got to the boy first, the allergy syrup from the first aid kit in hand. He coughed up the first dose, but she gave him more while his grandmother rocked him, his grandfather fanning with a napkin. By then the boy was breathing easier, and the gentle wheeze faded a bit.

After taking several deep, full breaths, the boy cried some and peered around. He hadn’t lost consciousness, but his eyes looked beyond them, apparently seeing nothing. Then he finally recognized them — Rachel, his grandparents — and it seemed he had to lock eyes on everyone gathered around him to fully return to the world. And then it was over, the scare behind them.

Rachel was always careful about nuts and other common allergies. But the boy’s reaction to molasses was a rare occurrence. People like to sue over such things, but these folks sent her a letter of thanks. She would find out later that the grandparents were guardians, new to his care, and they hadn’t known about his condition. She wondered then about his parents, what tragedy or rift had brought him to the care of his elders.

It was a blessing to discover his condition in caring company. Beneath the cursive of the grown-up handwriting, the boy had signed his name: JoJo.

In what she read about him during his trial, she discovered that his grandparents had died. He had made his money as a day laborer, and Thomas had killed a man who refused to pay him. He had gone through the victim’s pockets for the money he was owed. Murder in the commission of a robbery.

There would be no clemency. As part of the death decree, the state of Alabama would use three chemicals for his lethal injection. After the first drug, he would lose consciousness. The second would shut down his muscles. The third would stop his heart.

What Rachel carried in her bottle would do the same, answering the young man’s request for a final and private mercy. All he asked for was the cake like the one that showed him what his body could not take, what in the right dose might knock him unconscious or even kill him. Molasses had stopped his breathing once, but he’d been a boy then. She knew it wouldn’t be enough for a man, so she had turned to her garden.

She had years ago planted a small plot of cassava in her greenhouse and used it for her baking. The lined skin of the cassava felt as rugged as cypress knees, but the flesh, handled carefully, was a wonder to be fried or roasted or used in her baking. She took the time to learn how to prepare it safely. Cassava carried its poison in the coarse skin and the leaves, the parts exposed to the world. And perhaps that was how it should be, a shield to survive in a certain kind of world — to thrive even. To carry out JoJo’s request, Rachel had saved what was meant to be discarded, the cyanide in the pot liquor, thickened with the starch of the root.

During his trial, Thomas Elijah Raymond had been shuttled back and forth from the new county jail to the new courthouse. Depending on the road they took, he may have passed the hillside where Russell County did their lynching, out on a hill they named Golgotha. The name had confused Rachel when she heard those stories as a child. The killers had tried to sanctify their work, but it was nothing more than blasphemy. She knew that hilltop from the Easter hymns, New Testament scriptures, and the Sunday school books. Three crosses. The Bad Thief cursed it all, and the Good Thief asked for grace and mercy.

Thomas had asked her for the same, and she’d brought his grace and his mercy, and it floated there in the thick sweetness of her bottle, a dose large enough to claim his body. He would die that evening, but she wouldn’t let them make a carnival of him. The spectators would have nothing to witness, because he could do his dying, make his peace, in private.

She turned the dial on the oven to 350 degrees. The perishables, she retrieved from the refrigerator. The other ingredients, she opened, poured, and measured. The pans, greased and floured, lay waiting for the batter. When the time came, she turned on the mixer and listened to its baritone hum as it folded the necessary elements, one into the other.

Three months to the day — it was past time, she told herself — she drove to her son’s house to pack his things, get the place ready to sell. She hadn’t been back since cleaning up the mess in the bathroom, where he’d done it and given her five hours of hard work, so much bleach it burned her eyes and, perhaps permanently, irritated her throat. She’d avoided going inside the house since and left it locked, driving out here once or twice a week to make sure no one was vandalizing it, paying a black boy to cut the grass and collect the mail.

Now she stood at the door, finding the key among other keys and fitting it in.

Inside it smelled. She’d emptied the garbage before leaving three months ago so it wasn’t that; the fridge was empty too, and the deep freeze. She walked by the cellar door and stopped. That’s where it was coming from, something sour, a dead rat maybe. She’d never been down there, in all these years, just in the living room where they’d sit, her chattering and him grunting when he had to.

The cellar door was padlocked. Her last time here the slow-lidded deputy hadn’t even bothered to go down there he was so ready to get out. She’d tried the keys then and none had fit and none fit now either. It was why she’d brought a crowbar.

She went to the recliner where she’d left it by her purse and was sweating by the time she pried the hinge off.

The door swung in and she stepped back, the stench so awful she covered her mouth and nose. She was suddenly frightened, thinking how secluded this house was, the nearest neighbor a quarter-mile away. Her son used to say that was the one thing he liked about Clarke County being so isolated. He said he could be himself and not give a bleep what anybody else thought. She hadn’t wasted much time worrying about what he meant by being himself. Who else could he be? The truth was she had no idea why he’d done what he did in the bathroom. He’d always been a private boy, guarded, gone at seventeen, she never learned where. And he’d been back, here, in this house, a year before she even found out. Gone for a whole year and then back for another whole year, with no word! Worse, she’d heard about his return from Lamar Jones, of all people. How delighted Lamar had been to tell her, how everyone knew about the son before the mother, their dirty laundry flapping for the world. She’d come over that day all those years ago and knocked and then pounded, and her son had pretended not to be home. She’d known he was, though. She’d felt him.

She felt him here too, now, as she descended the stairs, tracing her fingers along a rail silky with spiderweb and dust, the crowbar heavy in her other hand.

At the bottom it was cooler, the smell worse, the concrete floor so cold she could feel it through her shoes. She stood among vague shadows, a washing machine maybe, or a giant sink, and swept her hand in the air until she touched a string.

When she pulled it and the light flickered on, everything became clear, everything, and she knew that she’d always known.

The crowbar clanged by her feet.

It had been him, her son, him all along. That missing girl, from Thomasville, from such a good family...

That poor girl, her poor, poor mother...

She backed up the stairs pulling at her fingers and at the top began to scream.

But nobody heard, not out here, this far out, not in Clarke County, and soon her voice was gone and her throat sore and she went into the bathroom, panting, thinking she might vomit.

But she didn’t. Instead she remembered her last visit, a few days before he did what he did, and she wondered now if the girl had been in the cellar then, if she’d heard them talking, above, through the ceiling, did the girl wonder at the mother’s high, empty chitchat? That’s your problem, her son would say. Who cares what she thinks? Sitting in that recliner of his, he would’ve reminded her of, say, the time that lady at the church said he stole from the collection money and she, his mother, believed the lady over her own son. He would remind her how, later, another boy confessed. One thing nobody told you about being a mother is that they grow up and remember all your mistakes.

But did he remember the croup, the screaming, how she had to sit up all night with him? Did he remember getting expelled from Bible school for biting? From elementary school for exposing himself to a girl? Did he remember all the snotty teachers, nosy neighbors, and ex-husbands? Did he remember ignoring the one who tore herself open to give him the very breath he seemed to resent?

Maybe she would throw up after all. At least the bathroom was clean. When she was done she would rise from her knees and go outside to her car and come back in with her bleach and her brushes and get to work.

Another thing nobody told you about being a mother: you never really stop.

The sliver, a lone ray of sunlight, slipped inside the crack of the door, cutting into the pitch-black darkness inside the building, and shined on the thick black curtains she hid behind. Where in the hell was Justin?

She was scared! Pissed and scared. She had told herself she would not be, but... She had promised her therapist she would not be, but... Her brain raced uncontrollably. She could not slow it down. What ifs chased each other in circles. She had to face it. That was part of the agreement with her therapist. But... what if it was going to start all over again? What if they were all waiting outside, cameras and microphones? What if it was a joke?

“You leaving?” asked Arnold, the big reliable engineer, her bodyguard, the closest thing she had to a friend other than Justin.

Mentally occupied, she heard him but didn’t. She looked right through the massive Arnold, but didn’t see him. Would mass hysteria again be a part of her life?

“Yes, waiting on Justin,” she finally answered.

“You okay?” Even though Arnold knew the whole story, he pretended he didn’t. She pretended she didn’t want or need Arnold to be standing there looking after her. Arnold pretended he didn’t notice.

Arnold was a Birmingham native, and like many Birmingham natives he was a daily lunch customer at Niki’s West on Finley Avenue, a popular buffet restaurant featuring home-style cooking. It was part of his daily itinerary and his three-hundred-pound legend. When he wasn’t working, he was eating. When he wasn’t eating, he spent many hours in porn chat rooms where women knew him by name but not physical appearance. He used his handsome cousin’s photo to entice the older, more mature women he preferred.

Justin and Arnold were Xenia’s entourage, confidants, and support system. Arnold, a childhood friend with no family of his own, was a brother to both Justin and Xenia, as well as a part-time bodyguard to Xenia. Justin trusted Arnold with Xenia’s life. Arnold saw it as an honorable calling.

Arnold opened the curtains and let in the morning sunshine. It shined brightly in the big window that was blacked out from the outside. Xenia gave him a look.

“I’ll just be right here,” he reassured her as he stepped into the next room. “Get my phone and call Justin.”

Call Justin. That had not occurred to her. Fear does that, she thought.

The juxtaposition of the beautiful sunshine and the ugly fear crawling inside of her... would have made her laugh if she was not so terrified. Now that she was back, the terror, like last time... struck a nerve.

Where was Justin? He was supposed to be here! DAMNIT, JUSTIN!

Betty dangled the first chicken by a yellowed leg above Russell’s head and waited till she saw his prehistoric eyes shift just a fraction up to see it. She’d worked the old wig onto it, poked a bobby pin through, and fastened it to the chicken skin as best she could. She waited only a second, let go, and marveled at how the fat old alligator snatched it out of the air. The wig had been made from Aunt Sip’s own hair, cut off when it was long and young, when Aunt Sip had no need for a wig. And now that Aunt Sip was old and sick and her real hair was falling out, she never wore it, go figure, didn’t even care if she was nearly bald and ugly as a troll.

The sky was clear and so bright blue you’d never know there was a hurricane coming into the gulf, supposing to hit land smack in the mouth of Mobile Bay. The tourists had already thinned out with the coming of September and the few remaining were packing up to leave before the storm. No one was taking time to visit the souvenir shop and museum, anyway. No one much stopped in anymore at all.

Betty climbed back down the little stepladder she’d set beside the pit. There were two chickens left in the sack. She’d taken them all out to thaw the night before. The butcher at Winn-Dixie saved and sold them to her for next to nothing after their color turned, which mattered not a whit to a gator. Russell was supposed to get one a day, but she’d held off feeding him the last two days and now was going to give him three at once. She thought he might like it that way better, more like in the wild, where some days he might catch something, and some days he might not.

Into the cavity of the second chicken she had tucked the reading glasses, gold watch, and stinking dental plate with two teeth snaggling down. Into the cavity of the third chicken she stuffed a handful of snot rags, a photo of Aunt Sip on the beach in Key West with maybe the man who was later half eaten by the shark, and a thimble Aunt Sip had stuck to her finger when she fell asleep that afternoon while sewing a patch of disintegrating calico back onto an old quilt. When Betty gently pried off the thimble, Aunt Sip had only murmured something she couldn’t understand, something like Never, and Mmm-hmm, and Onions, that’s what.

She climbed back up the ladder with the second chicken and held it with both hands, so the things in the cavity wouldn’t fall out. She could see Russell’s eyes looking up at it, wearing his smug, crooked alligator smile. She dropped it and Russell had it down in a snatch as if it were no more than a little leg or a thigh.

She took up the third chicken and wrapped it in a piece of the nightgown Aunt Sip had told her to throw away on Monday because it was rotten, saying it was rotten because she, Betty, hadn’t washed it right, which wasn’t true, it was just that Aunt Sip had worn it out and Aunt Sip was so nasty it didn’t take any time to soil her clothes. It had been rose-colored but now had barely the tint of any color at all, like the color of a pan of water if you’ve cut your finger and washed it in there. She tucked the loose ends of the nightgown into the chicken’s cavity, climbed back up the ladder, and dropped it in.

She put up the ladder and washed her hands in the tub sink outside and crept back into the apartment in the rear of the museum building, down the dim narrow hallway, past Aunt Sip’s bedroom, through the living room, and had the door open to enter the museum when she heard Aunt Sip.

“Betty,” Aunt Sip said, her voice a gravelly purr followed by a phlegm-racked cough.

“Yes’m.”

“Where the hell you going?” A voice both plaintive and peeved.

“Just down to the beach awhile.”

“Did you feed Russell?”

“Yes’m.”

“Bring me some warm milk when you come back.”

“Yes’m.”

All this poised in the doorway with one foot just above the museum floor, frozen midstep and praying she wouldn’t have to go back into the room, and when Aunt Sip didn’t respond to the third “Yes’m” she quickly stepped through the door and closed it quietly, then moved past the Native American displays and basin racks of shells and starfish and seahorses, rubber toy sharks, snorkel masks, the standing racks of postcards and suntan lotions, then she was out onto the shell parking lot and across the deserted highway, through the little pass in the dunes, and down to the surf. Nobody was out just then at all. She could see the hazy shape of a shrimp boat on the horizon. The breeze flapped her lank black hair around her pale cheeks and thin, wide mouth. She was so thin and runty she looked like a little crooked, stunted sylph on longish skinny legs, her tiny torso twisted with scoliosis, a small face and large ears that stuck out through her hair like a bush baby’s, and huge eyes that almost seemed to frighten people. She would stand in the middle of her tiny pantry bedroom looking down at her crooked chest with one healthy breast blossoming like a ripe nectarine and the other nothing but a discolored little prune. The scoliosis bent her to one side and down, so it was always surprising what strength she had in her skinny shoulders and arms. She was all too aware of her appearance, not that anyone ever let her forget. She had attended the high school up in Foley until her sophomore year, and then dropped out, tired of the snickers and jeers and the boys who would imitate her crooked hobble down the halls. Of course, the principal wouldn’t let her out of gym, where the other girls barely tried to hide their horrified laughter, their oh my gods behind their palms, their cow eyes cutting over to stare. But it was the mimicking that hurt the most. Hearing laughter after she’d passed a group in the hallway and looking back to see Jimmy Teal humping along, face twisted into a grotesque freak’s, one arm hanging down nearly to the floor, twisted that way, and loping along in a hobbled gait that, altogether, looking like someone doing Frankenstein’s Igor a lot more than someone imitating Betty. It was after one of these incidents that she left school early, caught a ride to the beach in the bed of an orange grower’s pickup, and never went back.

Up the shore where the state park pier jutted into the gulf she could see a scattering of people out on the beach. She thought to walk up there and get away for a little while but knew she’d better go back and get Aunt Sip her milk.

Building a coffin is a demanding but satisfying project for the ambitious carpenter to undertake, and entails a number of skills, including edging, corner joinery, trim, and finishing. You don’t have to be an expert carpenter, but the more experience you have the stronger the coffin will be. The last thing you want is for your coffin to fall apart. Ninety-four pounds may not seem like a lot, but if the corner joinery is weak you can bet on disaster. You can bet on catastrophe. Better safe than sorry, as my wife would say.

Choosing the wood. Hardwood veneered plywood is made of thin slices of hardwood, including oak, birch, maple, ash, or cherry, that are factory-glued to a soft, plywood substrate. You can buy this at any lumber store. Depending on the time of year it may have to be special-ordered, so it’s a good idea to start the process a week or two before you’re actually going to need it. You may find this difficult: building a coffin while its future occupant is still alive presents a number of questions, among them being, You’re not God, how do you know for sure she’s going to die? Well, just look at her. She weighs ninety-four pounds! You think she’s going to live? You hope so, sure, but hope was something you gave up last month, so the most productive thing you can do now is to build a coffin. It’s a good — and practical — distraction. Just hope she doesn’t hear you hammering.

Corner joinery. I know: I’m a broken record when it comes to corner joinery, but it’s by far the most important part of this project. You can use fluted dowels or plug-covered screws. Screws are especially attractive for three reasons: they don’t demand special equipment; they act as their own clamps by drawing the sides and ends together; and they are ideal for caskets destined to be shipped long distances, if, for instance, the future occupant insists on being buried in a plot in California, beside her mother and father, even if she moved to North Carolina years before, following her husband, who could find work nowhere else. One thing to take into consideration here is if this decision, this desire, to be buried so far, far away was made under duress, or if her mind was muddled by medication, or maybe the chemo. In those instances it should fall to the husband to decide, regardless of what other family members might think. But just in case, use the screws.

Trim and finishing. Moldings make an enormous difference to the look of any do-it-yourself casket. As a general rule, put the largest moldings along the bottom, smaller moldings around the lid. Personalizing your coffin, of course, is one big advantage of the handmade option. Create a design. Carve her initials on the side. You can add custom cushions to the interior, or maybe just wrap a favorite quilt around some bed pillows. Are you really going to keep those pillows anyway? They’re covered in hair, her hair, hair as brown as it was the day you met her. What kind of life would that be? Especially if you fulfill her last request, which is to remarry. The new wife can’t be expected to sleep with that quilt, those pillows, in that bed — not that you have plans to remarry, but who knows, things might change. Things will change. That’s the thing about things: change is all they do.

Summary. That about covers it. Following these instructions will ensure your coffin will be the best possible coffin you could build, a box you can be proud of — or a box of which you can be proud, for those of you, like her, whose goal in life it was never to end a sentence with a preposition. I don’t mean that. She had other goals, many, among them: to be kind, to love me with all her heart, to live a longer life. But what can you do? Nothing, it turns out. You can’t do anything, so you might as well build her a coffin. In a way it’s like holding her forever — like that, but not that. Nothing is like that. Nothing nothing nothing.

Colesbery Simon had been home three months and seven days before he decided that the way to get his life back was to deal with his ex-girlfriend’s father. Years since they’d seen each other, but her story had become his, no matter how long it had been, or how far away he was in the world. He and his ex, Chelsea Gradine, first met in a small side room of the library in their high school, a connected but isolated spot with walls of dusty books and a few shoulder-high shelves lined up in the middle, which created a space where Colesbery met Chelsea frequently in the months that followed. That first day he’d been looking for The Invisible Man, the Wells book, but Chelsea gave him the Ellison one with its near-identical title. He read the prologue that night and the next day asked her was she trying to be funny. She told him no, that her choice had nothing to do with them being different races, it was only that she had a crush on him and thought he’d like the book. She’d been like that about most things, direct, except when it came to her father. That, Colesbery learned on his own.

He didn’t make a plan. Instead, he called Lincoln Fontaine, an old friend who’d always had a knack for knowing what needed to be known. They were meeting at a pizza place on Birmingham’s Southside, a few blocks from his old high school. When Colesbery turned off University Avenue onto 20th Street and headed up the hill toward Five Points South, his mind entered a maze of memories, most of which involved Chelsea. A minute or two later he passed the new coffee shops and restaurants, the Storyteller’s fountain, the pizza place, and then turned right. The street was narrow, with cars parked on both sides and a canopy of trees that cast everything in shade until near the intersection, and when the reddish brick of the block-long high school finally came into view, Colesbery felt his breath, momentarily, snatched. He found a parking space, and stared through the windshield. The school rose up like a brick horizon, one that had not changed since he graduated five years earlier. In reality, the school both had and hadn’t changed. A few buildings had been added on either end, some cosmetic niceties done, but the main building was the same, still with the brick ramp that curved up and in front of the school and spanned much of its length, before curving down and back toward the street.

“Thinkin’ of a master plan.”

The voice was a smooth baritone and came from behind Colesbery, and he knew who it belonged to without turning around. “’Cause ain’t nothin’ but sweat inside my hands,” Colesbery replied. By the time he finished the lyric, Lincoln Fontaine was standing next to him. Even though they’d seen each other a couple of times since Colesbery came home, they grasped each other’s right hand, smiled at each other, then leaned in and embraced.

“What’s up, army man?” Lincoln said.

“Like I told you last week, and the week before that, and the week before that, just happy to be home, bro.” Somehow Lincoln had found out Colesbery was home two days after he got there. He stopped by the apartment the next day with a slab of ribs from Rib-It-Up and a prepaid cell phone for Colesbery, told him it was for when he needed something. Lincoln had kept his distance since, stopped by once or twice, mainly just called here and there to check, a minute conversation at the most.

“Thanks again for the ribs,” Colesbery said, turning back to stare at the high school.

“You don’t want to know,” Lincoln said.

“You found her?”

“I find everything.”

Lincoln was one of those people who could always make money, who could always talk to people, anywhere, and get them to talk to him. He was wearing jeans, an Ensley High School sweatshirt, and a pair of Converse, but he was equally at ease when in a pinstripe suit. He’d started his own computer consulting company out of college while he worked at Alabama Power, but he quit Alabama Power when it took off.

“Tell me,” said Colesbery.

“Tell me how you are,” said Lincoln.

“I’m good. I already told you that.” Colesbery turned toward Lincoln now. He’d heard some rumors about Chelsea having come back, and he wanted to know what Lincoln had found out. “How long since you seen her?”

“How long you gone play games?”

“Bro, relax.” Lincoln turned his head toward the high school. “You remember being there and—”

“Of course.”

“—how we use to sit in the parking lot after school listening to old-school rap. Remember when we first heard Eric B. and Rakim, drinking Thunderbird and smoking that good Bush Hills bud.”

“Of course I remember.” Colesbery knew Lincoln wasn’t stalling, but rather, trying to figure out if Colesbery really meant to do what he’d told him he was going to do. They’d been friends since they got into a fight on the playground as second graders at Holy Family Elementary. They had already known each other, but fighting made them respect each other, especially because neither of them had really won, just sort of knocked each other around and down, then wrestled to a stalemate.

“What do you think happened to her?” Lincoln asked.

“You know what happened.”

“I don’t mean the drugs,” Lincoln said. “Something was always off with that girl, always walking around with those feathers in her hair, disappearing for days.” He paused. “You dated her for two years. What was really up with her and those mood swings?”

“Just tell me what you found out.”

Lincoln turned away, started walking down the hill. “Let’s get that pizza first,” he said over his shoulder.

Colesbery watched him disappear around the corner. He turned and looked at the redbrick school once more, and began thinking about the library. He’d had girlfriends before Chelsea, but none like her. She wasn’t that glow-in-the-dark pretty, but her eyes were open whenever Colesbery asked for something in the library, like she actually heard him, like she wanted to help him. She cried right there between the shelves in that back room when Colesbery told her about how he’d walked in on his parents doing drugs so often as a child that when he walked in that last time, he just thought they were asleep. She’d taken his hand in hers, leaned her head on his chest, and cried.

By the time Colesbery entered the restaurant, Lincoln was already in a corner booth with a pizza, a pitcher of beer, and two mugs. He filled them both as Colesbery slid into the booth across from him.

“Thought you might want a beer.”

“I didn’t come here to drink beer.”

Lincoln took a sip from his mug. He bit a slice of pizza. Colesbery stared, not touching either.

“Did you call that number I texted you?”

“I don’t need to talk to anybody.”

They stared at one another. Colesbery waited, watched Lincoln’s face until it fell away, the public one full of pleasantries and vague language, and then Colesbery saw the face of Lincoln that he knew, a brown angular face with a narrowed heaviness in the eyes that only truth could render.

“He’s still here,” said Lincoln. “He moved out of the house in Ensley Highlands.” He plucked a piece of pineapple off the pizza and tossed it in his mouth. “But he still has that tire company down on Avenue F, and yes, he still walks around the block at lunchtime.”

The information at first swirled around Colesbery’s head, then he felt that twitch in his stomach that always came before a mission. The plan materialized in his brain — how he would do it, when he would do it, where he would do it. He rubbed his eyes and then stretched his fingers wide, balled them tight, stretched them again, and settled back into the moment.

“You sure about this?” Lincoln asked. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

Colesbery focused his eyes, picked up a slice of pizza but didn’t take a bite. There were too many ingredients, too much going on on the pizza. He put it on the plate. “Yes, I do,” he said. He didn’t say any more, just looked at Lincoln, his eyes steeling themselves as if seeing beyond his friend to a target.

“Well, I guess that’s that.” Lincoln refreshed his beer. “You don’t drink anymore.”

Colesbery took a gulp from his mug. The coolness felt calming on his throat, in his stomach. “How’s your business?”

“You don’t care about that, but I got a job for you when you’re ready.” Lincoln motioned for the waitress. “Remember Mrs. Gordon? She passed away last month.”

Colesbery knew Lincoln was worried, was trying to get him to back down. But it got to him anyway. Mrs. Gordon had been one of those teachers attracted to strays. And there was no more a stray than Colesbery when he entered her sophomore literature class. Dead parents, a halfway-locked-up alcoholic uncle he lived with, clothes that were ill-fitted and seldom clean — Colesbery became her cause. She lived in Bush Hills too, a few blocks away on the boulevard, and she often gave him rides to school, even invited him over for dinner sometimes. But he didn’t respond, didn’t accept her attention, until she put a book on his desk one day in class and walked away. He left it on the desk when class was dismissed, but she placed it on his desk again the next day, so he took it. At that time he was a skinny kid who only wanted to avoid attention, and confrontation. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was the first book he ever really read. He read it and reread it, especially the chapter where Douglass fights Mr. Covey.

“What happened to her?” asked Colesbery.

“Old, as far as I know. I just figured you’d want to know.” Then he asked, “What did you do with all those books she gave you?”

After he read the Douglass book, Colesbery had put it back on her desk one day before class. She’d asked if he’d read it, he’d answered yes, and that led to her bringing book after book after book. Every time he put one back on her desk, she reached into the top drawer and withdrew another one. He read them all.

“My uncle burned most of them when he set the apartment on fire.”

“She was good people.”

It was Mrs. Gordon who’d lost her copy of Invisible Man and told him to check it out of the library. He’d made the mistake in thinking she’d meant the Wells version (even though he also read it later). Mrs. Gordon had been a stout brown-skinned woman, widowed and childless, who always seemed so much taller when she stood in front of the class and peered over her glasses at each student, calling on them, cajoling them, encouraging them, correcting them, explaining things to them day after day through the semester.

“And Mr. Foster finally retired.” Lincoln drank from his glass. “Remember when he caught us with that beer behind the school?”

Colesbery was glad not to keep talking about Mrs. Gordon, but he also knew Lincoln was working him, trying to get to the real reason for his plans. Lincoln had always had a knack for getting people comfortable, getting them talking, and then getting them to reveal more than they intended.

“I need to go,” Colesbery said.

“Is it happening again?”

Lincoln had stopped by the apartment one day when things weren’t going well. There had been a smell, an odor like fried onions mixed with stale mayonnaise, which had triggered something, transported Colesbery, made him see things: jagged faces, torn limbs, trails of blood. Colesbery had heard the knock, yanked open the door to the courtyard, and tried to hit Lincoln, but Lincoln was strong enough to grab and hold Colesbery till he calmed, till he convinced Colesbery that what he thought he was seeing was not real.

“I’m good,” Colesbery said. “Thanks for the information.”

His name was Hiram. The moment she met him at the songwriters group she knew who he was named after. He’d right away told her no, he did not go by Hank as the man himself had done. If he looked his age, she put him at twenty-nine. When she asked, he nodded. She knew people thought of thirty-three, her age, as their Jesus year. “So is this your Hank year?” she asked. He only stared at her, and when he did, he looked way past twenty-nine, and she wondered, fleetingly, if that look was the only way he’d ever reach past the age Hank had lived, then dismissed this thought as the kind of dark notion she was prone to, dismissed it until later when she learned he’d done time for assault, twice, and after he told her the stories, she suspected the second time he’d meant to kill the man.

“Polly,” she told him when he asked. It was a name she’d hated as a girl, thought too plain, simple, old-fashioned. But at eighteen, after she’d learned to play guitar so well that her parents bought her a Martin D-28, she first heard the song “Pretty Polly,” and the beauty and tragedy of the hundreds-year-old murder ballad, its very intensity, made her hear her name in a new way that weighed heavy on her in a way she liked, felt connected to.

That first meeting had been eight months ago, though it seemed much longer. Now she was in the cab of his truck, their guitars stowed in hardshell cases in the bed, where they’d put them after playing at the bar on Fairview, and she wondered, not for the first time, if names could be destiny. Another dark thought. She knew their source, but that never made them go away.

They were headed again to the place they’d ended up that first night, Oakwood Cemetery, at the top of the hill where Hank was buried next to French pilots killed in training at Maxwell airbase during World War II. She remembered now, because she couldn’t not, the feel of the cold marble slab against her ass as they fucked over Hank at four in the morning. Even as she heard the slap of his body against hers she realized he knew what a younger man didn’t, that every stroke of his dick was a stroke against death, a futile one. Afterward, when they pulled their jeans back on, she told him about the French pilots, and that the French word for orgasm meant little death. “So did you die?” he asked. “Many times over,” she answered. What she didn’t say was that she’d been dying, many times over, for years.

When the light changed, he pulled off Fairview and onto Perry Street. He’d once joked about their moving into one of the big houses there, maybe next to the governor’s mansion, when he sold a song that ended up a hit. She noticed he’d talked about his success, not hers. So far, none of their group had sold anything to a Nashville publisher, which is why he’d said they should call themselves Songwriters Anonymous.

He reached toward the dash and turned off the Steve Young song, “Montgomery in the Rain,” that had been playing. Hi, as she often called himbecause she didn’t want to disparage Hank’s true namehad claimed Young was Hank’s heir. After the silence between them had replaced the music, he said, “You don’t have to do this.”

Her first thought wasn’t about his pleading tone, nor about the sound of too much whiskey mixed in his syllables, but rather how horribly predictable and unoriginal he sounded. He’d never allow such a line into one of his songs. That he thought he knew what she wanted did not surprise her. She’d counted on it. She had her ways of handling him, not the least of which, this night, was singing her harmonies off-key on every song, and that was a hard thing for her to do, took great effort, and he knew that too.

“I don’t understand why you did it. On ‘Seven Bridges Road’ you sounded like you’d never sung it before, never even heard it, when you know it backward and forward. Hell, you even know the road it’s about, know it like absolutely nobody else does, I’d say.”

“Fuck you for that last remark. Just fuck you.” They were passing the governor’s mansion now, heading up the hill to the bridges over I-85, which came to its end a mile farther down. “And I keep telling you, the song’s about a mythical road. That’s the only reason I can sing it at all.”

“How many bridges does Woodley Road have south of town?” he said.

“Seven.”

“And where was Steve Young living when he wrote the song?”

“Here.”

“You even knew the man whose backseat Young was riding in when he started writing the song.” He stopped talking, appeared to swallow against a dry throat, then opened and drank from the flask between his legs. “Let me tell you something else.” His voice began to shake now, not out of anger, she knew, but fear, afraid like a child, because that’s what he was, had always been, no matter how many men he’d beaten. She’d need to hear enough of both fear and anger in his voice before the night was over.

He took another drink. “You say you can only sing that song because it’s mythical. That’s bullshit. You live on that road, the real one, the one you can’t leave. Instead of you trying to break up with me at Hank’s gravebecause that’s what you want, that’s what you were telling me with all your shit harmonies, that’s what I been feeling from youwhy don’t we just go to your dead husband’s grave, the one you killed, and you can try breaking up with me there? How ’bout that?”

“Fuck you, Hi. Just take me to where we’re going, and then you can do whatever else you want.”

“Take you where you died up under me?”

“That’s right. Where I died over and over.”

“How often do you die? Every time you think of him?”

“Yes, and every time I think about how he died.”

They were headed downhill now, still on Perry, about to cross Dexter where parades and protesters marched their way to the capitol on Goat Hill, where politicians had once sent boys off to slaughter for reasons they little understood and where the politicians were still no better than the rutting animals that once grazed on its slopes.

“You say how he died. You mean how you killed him, don’t you? Just how drunk were you that night?”

“Not as drunk as you now.”

“Drunk enough, then.”

She had been drunk, enough so that she could not deny it or let go of the fact, but angry too, more angry than drunk. She’d been playing a dive way down Woodley Road, past its miles of Spanish moss and seven bridges. Her husband knew how rough the place was, so he’d gone with her. He sometimes turned jealous, ended the night by accusing her of playing up to the men, wanting more ones and fives thrown into her open guitar case, implying a woman with a guitar in a place like that was no better than a stripper, and some strippers, he told her, would take it outside, burn their knees on the carpet inside a truck. Was jealousy a sin punishable by death? She didn’t think so, but she had punished him, had killed him. A circle of red as bright as her anger hanging over them, her hands raised above ten and two, the impact slamming him against the door, and her husband’s body twisted into an impossible shape, dead on arrival, and the child she hadn’t known about would never arrive. All lost, lost as she was on Woodley Road and on Hank’s lost highway, but she knew the destination she sought, a place a man named Hiram might take her.

They were on Upper Wetumpka Road now, passing the backside of the police station and city court, and just on the other side of the station stood the main entrance to Oakwood, where the bodies of Confederate dead and Union prisoners lay.

After he’d told her about his time in prison, first as a juvenile and later as an adult, he’d finally unburdened himself. A man inside Kilby would not leave him alone. Out in the yard others had crowded around the predator, knew what was coming. Hi joined the gathering, entered it with talk and laughter, and a sharpened piece of plastic, his first shiv, broke it off deep in the man’s stomach, and edged away with the crowd, the body left lying on the ground in their wake. The story had not frightened her, had only drawn her closer to him.

Just past the main entrance lay the graves of lost children, and beyond them the site where Hank’s body had first lain before he’d been moved to another hilltop and French pilots dug up to make room, punished in death for one man’s tortured fame and immortality.

“Say my name,” she said now into the silent cab, needing the reminder of who she was, her identity something older than her age. “Please, say it.”

“Why? You already know your name.”

“Don’t be smart. Just say it.”

“Polly.”

“No. Say it. Say what I want to hear.” He turned onto the narrow asphalt drive that led up to the dead. Then she said, more quietly, “Sing it.” He would have to understand now, at least what she wanted to hear if not yet what she really wanted from him, what she knew he was capable of delivering.

“Polly, pretty Polly,” he sang and then began to hum the harrowed tune. “You want to end things with me the way the man ends things with Polly in the ballad? You want to kill me? That what you do to men? Because your breaking off with me will be my death. And why? Why do it? Aren’t we good together, or have been? Can’t we be again?”

The pleading was back in his voice, which meant the kind of fear a child feels was showing itself again. She half expected him to whimper, and realized if she did hear it, that’s when he would be at his most dangerous. He’d need to whimper.

He stopped the truck at the end of the French graves, where the final pilot had not had to give up his rest in peace, like the others, to the teeth of a backhoe. Hiram lowered his window and cut the engine. The hum of nighttime air filled the now-dark cab, a timeless song of crickets, a soft wind, distant frogs from the bank of the Alabama River, unseen but not far from them, down the far side of this hill they sat atop.

“You’re a child,” she said. “And it’s way too late for you to be a child at your age. Don’t you know that much?”

He surprised her by simply opening his door and stepping out of the truck. Then she heard him pulling his guitar case from the bed and dragging it over the side, as if something heavier than a guitar lay within.

She opened her door, closed it behind her, then walked around and closed his, watched the light inside the truck again dim and disappear. A three-quarter moon lit the white marble of the first of the two large, towering headstones, the grave on the left belonging to the first wife, who’d been determined to join her husband in death if she couldn’t lie beside his wrecked body while it still had lifeand that’s why his grave had been moved, easier to dig up Frenchmen than the dignified locals from wealthy families in order to make room for a headstrong ex-wife. Hank’s stone and marble slab lay to the right, and a low, white marble border wall surrounded the plot’s artificial turf, put down to prevent seekers from digging up pieces of hallowed ground. Beneath the moon the turf was subdued to a more natural, darker color. Hiram walked over to the marble bench, a dark figure but more than a shadow. He carried his guitar case, and then sat down, facing the stones. She slowly walked toward him, said his name, Hiram, quietly to herself, unsure why she now had that name on her tongue, felt as if maybe she were trying to conjure the spirit of something she couldn’t truly give name to. She sat down beside him, close enough so that in the warm night she felt the heat from his body.

He bent over, opened the case before him, and pulled out his guitar, a prewar Martin that had first been played before those pilots, with shouts or with silence, had met their deaths, most probably country or Appalachian songs echoing out of the guitar’s sound hole in some 1930s honky-tonk, or maybe more than one murder ballad. There were so many to choose from, such an ancient and timeless form. He began to play a quiet melody out of single notes, his fingers moving across the fretboard, his palm hard against the neck. He played so slowly it took time before she recognized the bare melody of “Cold, Cold Heart.” He always knew overplaying was senseless, could kill a song’s beauty.

“Why leave me now, why tonight?” he said as the melody disappeared into the dark reaches of two a.m.

“It’s the right time for me,” she said, and didn’t want to answer further, though she could have. But his knowing tonight was the ten-year mark of her husband’s death wouldn’t have been an explanation that made any sense to him as a cause for their end. Better to not offer him any explanation, leave him all the more frustrated.

“Have I not treated you good?” he said quietly over the sound of a diminished D chord.

“You have,” she said, “mostly.”

“Maybe that’s your problem with me. You’re a woman who wants awful treatment. Be careful what you wish for. I can give it to you. But you know that, don’t you?”

At first she remained quiet, gave herself time to think, to judge the moment. “Yes,” she said finally. “I do.”

“We didn’t have to come here tonight. You wanted this, whatever this is. Like in that song you love, when the man takes Polly riding into the night, toward her death, she knows where he’s taking her. He even tells her that her guess is about right, but it wasn’t a guess. It’s what she wanted.”

“That’s one version,” she said.

“It’s your version. Child that I am, as you say, I know you better than you think.”

“I don’t think you do,” she said, ready to push him now, goad him, play on his anger for the moment, later on his fears. She knew them, including one he’d never given voice to but was there, waiting for her to use.

“I’ve seen pictures of you as a teenager,” he said, “the ones you showed me where you’re wearing all that black, the crazy hair, the black makeup and fingernails. You were all Goth. Death as pretend. Little death. You’ve been drawn to it all your life, like some drug you want. Killing your husband and baby was the closest you’ve come. It wasn’t enough, was it? Just made you crave it more, thought it gave you all the more reason for wanting it. Fucking over a grave was foreplay for you.”

She waited to speak, bided her time, wanted to steel herself for all that would come. Then he began to play simple notes again, and she recognized the song she needed to hear but didn’t realize it until she heard the title line in the melody as he played “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” She could not look at him now, but she began, hesitantly. “That man in prison,” she said, “the one who wouldn’t leave you alone.”

He stopped playing. “What about him? Why bring him up now?” He looked toward the two headstones, appeared to read the engraved words, but she knew it was too dark for him to read them. He then began to sound two notes on the fretboard, the second note flat, the D string out of tune. He turned the tuning peg, tightening the string, hit the two notes again, waiting on her, she knew, looking for comfort inside the sound of the instrument.

“It wasn’t the way you told me, was it?” she said, ready now to push him beyond an irrevocable point. “He didn’t force you. You wanted it, and kept wanting it.”

He tightened the string again, hit the note that now grew sharper, and sharper again with another turn of the peg, and he kept striking the note, the sound climbing.

“You liked it. But you couldn’t live with wanting a dick. That’s why you killed him. So nobody would know.”

He twisted the peg hard, the sound beyond sharp, and she heard the sudden, awful snap of the metal, bronze-wound string. It sprang from the neck, and he caught a broken end, pulled its other end from out of the body of the guitar and held the two ends of the heavy-gauge string in his closed, tightened hands. She knew what he now wielded, and her blood surged and then seemed to thin, and she felt as if she were being lifted higher, climbing her way toward something without effort. All she had to do was let him bear her, not fight.

He raised his hands, the string taut between them, and in one motion threw it past her and toward Hank’s grave where it landed on his engraved marble slab, rolled toward the far edge.

She didn’t speak at first, waited only to see if his anger would show itself, but he neither moved nor spoke.

“You broke it on purpose,” she said. “For no reason? Just to throw it away?”

He took a slow breath, as if to mark the end of contemplation. “You know it wasn’t like that. The man did me harm, like you can’t imagine, unless you’ve suffered that and haven’t told me. Have you suffered it?”

“No,” she said, “not that.”

“Then why claim what you just claimed to know about me?” He lowered his guitar into the case, sat upright again, his back rigid, as if he were bracing or preparing himself for something he expected from her. “You had a reason. I want to hear you say it.”

Now she felt afraid, not of what he might do, but afraid to articulate the lie she’d told herself, afraid to reveal some empty, unfillable place within her for him to judge.

“You can’t answer. It’s all right.” He placed his right arm over her shoulder, gently. “I know the reason, and I know where you want to go.” He drew his arm higher, closer, pulled her toward him, intoning her name, and began to squeeze, his forearm now tight against the side of her neck, his bent elbow the spring-loaded hinge in a closing wedge. “I’m going to take you past where you want to go. Do you hear me? Are you prepared?” She felt his left hand upon her bare throat, felt his fingers tighten. She could not move her head, did not try. “Past it, and you’ll awake with breath. Are you ready?”

She could not answer with words, could only feel his hand closing, cutting off any form of utterance he might understand. All she could do was whimper.