Gone South

by Robert R. McCammon

  “How you be doin’?” the waitress asked from behind the counter in thick Cajun dialect. “Goan set you’self anywhere.” She was a heavyset blond woman, maybe in her mid-forties, and she wore a red-checked apron over a white uniform. She returned to her conversation with a gray-haired gent in overalls who sat at the counter nursing a cup of coffee and a glazed doughnut.

  Dan chose a booth beside the window so he had full view of the parking lot. Sitting three booths in front of him were a young man and woman. Her back was to Dan, her wavy shoulder-length hair the color of summer wheat. The young man, who Dan figured was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, wore his dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, and he had a sallow, long-jawed face and deepset ebony eyes that fixed Dan with a hard stare over his companion’s shoulder. Dan nodded toward him, and the young man blinked sullenly and looked away.

  The waitress came with a menu. Her name tag read DONNA LEE. “Just a cup of coffee,” Dan told her. “As strong as you can make it.”

  “Hon, I can make it jump out the cup and two-step,” she promised, and she left him to go back through a swinging door to the kitchen.

  Dan took off his baseball cap and ran a hand over his forehead to collect the sheen that had gathered there. Fans were turning at the ceiling, their cool breezes welcome on his skin. He leaned against the backrest and closed his eyes. But he couldn’t keep them shut because the death of Emory Blanchard was still repeating itself in the haunted house of his mind. He rubbed his stiff shoulder and then reached back to massage his neck. He’d escaped two tight squeezes since midnight, but if a state trooper car pulled up right then, he didn’t know if he would have the energy to get up from his seat.

  “You know what I think? I think the whole thing’s a pile of shit!” It was the young man in the booth, talking to the woman. His voice dripped venom. “I thought you said I was gonna make some money out of this!”

  “I said I’d pay you.” Her voice was smoky and careful. “Keep it down, all right?”

  “No, it ain’t all right! I don’t know why the hell I said I’d do this! It’s a bunch of lies is what it is!”

  “It’s not lies. Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.”

  The young man looked as if he were about to spit something back at her, but his piercing gaze suddenly shifted, locking onto Dan. “Hey! What’re you starin’ at?”

  “I’m just waitin’ for a cup of coffee.”

  “Well look somewhere else while you do it!”

  “Fine with me.” Dan averted his eyes, but not before he’d noted that the young man wore a black T-shirt imprinted with yellow skulls and the legend HANOI JANES. The woman got him to quiet down a little, but he was still mouthing off about money. He kept cutting his eyes at Dan. Lookin’ for trouble, Dan thought. Pissed off about something and ready to pick a fight.

  The waitress brought his coffee. Donna Lee had been right; this Java had legs. “Keep the pot warm, will you?” Dan suggested as he sipped the high octane. She answered, “Goan do it,” and walked behind the cash register to take the gray-haired man’s money. “See you next run-through,” she told him, and Dan watched him walk out to his tractor-trailer rig at the diesel pumps.

  “Made a fool of me is what you did!” the young man started up again. “Come all this way to find a fuckin’ fairy tale!”

  “Joey, come on. Calm down, all right?”

  “You think I’m supposed to be happy? Drive all this way, and then you gimme this big load of shit and ask me to calm down?” His voice was getting louder and harsher, and suddenly he reached out across the table and seized his companion’s wrist. “You played me for a fuckin’ fool, didn’t you?”

  “Ease up there, friend!” Donna Lee cautioned from behind the counter.

  “I ain’t talkin’ to you!” Joey snapped. “So just shut up!”

  “Hey, listen here!” She strode toward their booth on her chunky legs, her cheeks reddening. “You can get your sassy tail gone, I won’t cry.”

  “It’s okay,” the young woman said, and Dan saw her pug-nosed profile as she glanced to the left at Donna Lee. “We’re just talkin’.”

  “Talks kinda rough, don’t he?”

  “Gimme the damn check, how ’bout it?” Joey said.

  “Pleased to.” Donna Lee pulled the checkpad and a pencil from a pocket of her apron and totaled up their order. “Hon, you need any help?”

  “No.” She’d worked her wrist free and was rubbing where his fingers had been. “Thanks anyhow.”

  Dan happened to catch Joey’s glare again for a split second, and the young man said, “God damn!” and stood up from the booth. His cowboy boots clacked on the linoleum, approaching Dan. “Joey, don’t!” the young woman called, but then Joey was sliding into the seat across from him.

  Dan drank down the rest of his coffee, paying him no attention. Inside, he was steeling himself for the encounter. “I thought I told you to quit starin’ at me,” Joey said with quiet menace.

  Dan lifted his gaze to meet Joey’s. The young man’s eyes were red-rimmed, his gaunt face strained by whatever inner demons were torturing him. A little tarnished silver skeleton hung from the lobe of his left ear. Dan had met his kind before: a walking hair-trigger, always a hot flash away from explosion. Dan said calmly, “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Oh, I think you’re askin’ for a whole truckload of it, old man.”

  Dan was in no shape to be fighting, but damned if he’d take this kind of disrespect. If he was going down, he was going down swinging. “I’d like to be left alone.”

  “I’ll leave you alone. After I take you out in the parkin’ lot and beat the shit outta —” Joey didn’t finish his threat, because Dan’s right hand shot out, grasped the silver skeleton, and tore it from his earlobe. As Joey shouted with pain, Dan caught a left handful of T-shirt and jerked the young man’s chest hard against the table’s edge. Dan leaned forward, their faces almost touching. “You need some manners knocked into you, boy. Now, I’d suggest that you stand up and walk out of here, get in your car, and go wherever you’re goin’. If you don’t want to do that, I’d be glad to separate you from your teeth.”

  A drop of blood was welling from Joey’s ripped earlobe. He sneered and started to fire another taunt into Dan’s face, which might have cost the young punk at least a broken nose.

  Whack!

  Something had just slammed onto the tabletop.

  Dan turned his head and looked at a baseball bat that had eight or nine wicked nails stuck through it.

  “Pay attention,” Donna Lee said. She was speaking to Joey, who had abruptly become an excellent listener. “You goan stand up, pay your check, leave me two dollars tip, and haul ass out my sight. Mister, let him loose.”

  Dan did. Joey stood up, his nervous gaze on the brainbuster. Donna Lee stepped back and then followed him to the cash register “Get you ’nother cup in a minute,” she told Dan.

  “Sorry. He gets like that sometimes.”

  It was the young woman, standing next to his booth. Dan looked up at her, said, “No harm d—” and then he stopped because of her face.

  The left side of it, the side he’d seen in profile, was very pretty. Across the bridge of her pug nose was a scatter of freckles. Her mouth had the lush lips lonely men kissed in their dreams, and her blond hair was thick and beautiful. Her eyes were soft blue, the blue of a cool mountain lake.

  But the right side of her face was another story, and not a kind one.

  It was covered by a huge purplish-red birthmark that began up in her hair and continued all the way down onto her throat. The mark had ragged edges like the coast on a map of some strange and unexplored territory. Because the left side of her face was so achingly perfect, the right side was that much harder to look at. “Done,” Dan finished, his gaze following the maroon inlets and coves. Then he met her eyes, and he recognized in them the same kind of deep, soul-anchored pain he’d seen in his own mirror.

  The instant of an inner glim
pse passed. She glanced at his empty coffee cup. “You’d better get somethin’ to eat, mister,” she said in that voice like velvet and smoke. “You don’t look so hot.”

  “Been a rough day.” Dan noted that she wore no makeup and her clothes were simple: a violet floral-patterned short-sleeve blouse and a pair of lived-in blue jeans. She carried a small chestnut-colored purse, its strap around her left shoulder. She was a slim girl, not a whole lot of meat on her bones, and she had that wiry, hardscrabble Texas look. Maybe she stood five-two, if that. Dan tried to envision her without the birthmark; lacking it, she might resemble the kind of fresh-faced girl-next-door in magazine ads. With it, though, she was traveling by night in the company of Joey the punk.

  “Arden!” His money had been slapped down beside the cash register. “You comin’ or not?”

  “I am.” She started to walk away, but Dan said, “Hey, you think he wants this?” and he offered her the silver skeleton. “Reckon he does,” she answered as she took it from his palm. “Fuck it, I’m goin’!” Joey shouted, and he stormed through the front door.

  “He’s got a mouth on him,” Dan told the girl.

  “Yeah, he does get a little profane now and again. Sorry for the trouble.”

  “No apology needed.”

  She followed Joey, taking long strides with her dusty brown boots, and Donna Lee said to her, “Honey, don’t you suffer no shit, hear?” After the girl was gone, Donna Lee brought the coffeepot over to Dan and refilled his cup. “I hate a bastard think he can stomp on a woman,” she confided. “Remind me of my ex-husband. Didn’t have a pot to pee in the way he laid ’round all day, and he had that mean mouth, too. You travelin’ far?”

  “A distance,” Dan said.

  “Where to?”

  Dan watched her set the coffeepot down on his table, a sure sign she wanted to stick around and talk. “South,” he decided to say.

  “Such a shame, huh?”

  “What is?”

  “That girl. You know. Her face. Never seen a birthmark so bad before. No tellin’ what that do to a person.”

  Dan nodded and tasted his fresh cup.

  “Listen,” Donna Lee continued, “you don’t mind me bein’ so personal, you don’t look to be feelin’ well. You up to drivin’?”

  “I’m all right.” He felt, however, as if he had the strength of a wrung-out dishrag.

  “How ’bout a piece of strawberry pie? On the house?”

  He was about to say that sounded fine, when Donna Lee’s eyes suddenly flicked up from him and she stared out the window. “Uh-oh. Looky there, he’s at it again!”

  Dan turned his head and saw Joey the punk and the girl named Arden arguing beside the red Camaro. She must’ve said something that made his hair-trigger flare, because he lifted his arm as if to strike her a backhanded blow and she retreated a few steps. His face was contorted with anger, and now Dan and Donna Lee could hear his shouting through the glass. “I swear to gumbo,” Donna Lee said resignedly, “I knew when I stuck eye on him he was gonna be trouble. Lemme go get my slugger.” She went behind the counter, where she’d stashed the nail-studded baseball bat.

  Outside, Joey had stopped short of attacking the girl. Dan watched him throw open the Camaro’s trunk and toss a battered brown suitcase onto the pavement. Its latches popped, the suitcase spilling clothes in a multicolored spiral. A small pink drawstring bag fell out, and Joey attacked it with relish. He charged it and gave it a vicious kick, and Arden scooped it up and backed away, holding it protectively against her chest, her mouth crimped with bitterness.

  “You get on outta here!” Donna Lee yelled from the door, her slugger ready for action. Two attendants from the gas station were coming over to see what the ruckus was about, and they looked like fellows who could chew Joey up at least as well as the slugger could. “Go on, ’fore I call the law!”

  “Kiss my ass, you old bitch!” Joey hollered back, but he’d seen the two men coming and he started moving faster. He banged the trunk shut and climbed into the car. “Arden, I’m quits with you! Hear me?”

  “Go on, then! Here, take it and go on!” She had some money in her fist, and she flung the bills at him through the Camaro’s window. The engine boomed. Joey shouted something else at her, but it was drowned by the engine’s noise. Then he threw the Camaro into reverse, spun the car around in a half circle facing the way out, and laid on the horn at the same time as he hit the accelerator. The wide rear tires shrieked and smoked, and when they bit pavement they left black teethmarks. As the Camaro roared forward, the two gas station attendants had to jump for their lives. Dan watched through the window as the studmobile tore off across the parking lot and in three eyeblinks it had dwindled to the size of its red taillights. The car headed for the I-49 northbound ramp, and very soon it was lost from sight.

  Dan took a drink of coffee and watched the girl.

  She didn’t cry, which is what he’d expected. Her expression was grim but resolute as she opened her purse and put the pink drawstring bag into it, and then she began to pick up her scattered items of clothing and return them to the suitcase. Donna Lee had a few words with the gas station boys, the nail-pierced slugger held at her side. Arden kept glancing in the direction the Camaro had gone as she retrieved her belongings. Donna Lee helped her round up the last few items, and then the girl snapped her suitcase shut and stood there with her birthmarked face aimed toward the northern dark. The two attendants returned to their building, Donna Lee came back into the restaurant and put the slugger away behind the counter, but Arden stood alone in the parking lot.

  “She okay?” Dan asked.

  “Say he’ll be back,” Donna Lee told him. “Say he got a bad temper and sometime it make him get crazy, but after a few minute he come to his sense.”

  “Takes all kinds, I guess.”

  “Yes, it do. I swear I would’ve brained him if I’d got close enough to swing. Knocked some that meanness out his ears.” Donna Lee walked over to Dan’s booth and motioned with a lift of her chin. “Look at her out there. Hell, if a man treat me that way, I swanee I wouldn’t stand ’round waitin’ on him. Would you?”

  “No, I sure wouldn’t.”

  Donna Lee gave him a smile of approval. “I’m gonna get you that strawberry pie, on the house. That suit you?”

  “Sounds fine.”

  “You got it, then!”

  The pie was mostly sugary meringue, but the strawberries were fresh. Dan was about halfway through it when Arden came back into the restaurant, lugging her suitcase. “Awful warm out there,” she said. “Mind if I sit and wait?”

  “ ’Course you can, hon! Sit down and rest you’self!” Donna Lee had found a stray to mother, it seemed, and she hurriedly poured a glass of iced tea and took it to Arden who chose a booth near the door. Donna Lee sat down across from her, willing to lend an ear to the girl’s plight and Dan couldn’t help but overhear since they were sitting just a couple of booths away. No, Joey wasn’t her husband, Arden told Donna Lee. Wasn’t even really her boyfriend, though they’d gone out together a few times. They lived in the same apartment complex in Fort Worth, and they’d been on their way to Lafayette. Joey played bass guitar in a band called the Hanoi Janes, and Arden had worked the sound board and lights for them on weekends. Mostly fraternity parties and such. Joey was so high-strung because he had an artistic temperament, Arden said. He threw a fit every once in a while, to let off steam, and this wasn’t the first time he’d ditched her on the roadside. But he’d be back. He always came back.

  Dan looked out the window. Just dark out there, and nothing else.

  “Hon, I wouldn’t wait for him, myself,” Donna Lee said. “I’d just as soon take the bus back home.”

  “He’ll be here. He’ll get about ten miles up the road, then he’ll cool off.”

  “Ain’t no kinda man throw a girl out his car to take her chance. I’d go on home and tell that sucker to kiss my Dixie cup. You got business in Lafayette?”

  “Yeah,
I do.”

  “Family live there?”

  “No,” Arden said. “I’m goin’ to meet somebody.”

  “That’s where I’d go, then. I wouldn’t trust no fella threw me out the car. Next time he might throw you out where there’s not a soul to help you.”

  “Joey’ll be back.” Arden kept watching through the window. “Any minute now.”

  “Damned if I’d be waitin’ here for him. Hey, friend!”

  Dan turned his head.

  “You goin’ south, aren’t you? Gotta go through Lafayette. You want to give this young lady a ride?”

  “Sorry,” Dan answered. “I’m not carryin’ passengers.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Arden said to Donna Lee, “but I wouldn’t ride with a stranger.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you somethin’ ’bout Donna Lee Boudreax. I’ve worked here goin’ on nine year, I’ve seen a lot of folk come and go, and I’ve got to where I can read ’em real good. I knew your friend was trouble first sight, and if I say that fella over there’s a gentleman, you can write it in the book. Friend, you wouldn’t harm this young lady, would you?”

  “No,” Dan said, “but if I was her father I sure wouldn’t want her ridin’ with a stranger in the middle of the night.”

  “See there?” Donna Lee lifted her penciled-on eyebrows. “He’s a gentleman. You want to go to Lafayette, you’d be safe with him.”

  “I’d better stay here and wait,” Arden insisted. “Joey’d really blow up if he came back and found me gone.”