Lit Riffs

by Matthew Miele

  It rains and then stops. People complain about the weather and then talk about the forecast for tomorrow, the next day, next week. The dinner rush is in full swing, and the end of the shift creeps toward her. Meg is mopping the counter when, coming from the entrance, she feels a dry heat that causes her to look up, to see him there in jeans and boots and a worn canvas jacket. He is pleasant looking, but nothing special—brown hair and the beginning of a dark beard. He is shorter than Meg had hoped, and when he hangs his jacket on the rack by the door, she sees he is a little heavy, too. Still, she feels that heat coming off him and her pulse quickens. That has to count for something.

  There is nowhere free but the counter. He strolls there slowly, not looking straight at her, but Meg can feel him watching just the same.

  Later Meg imagines ways it might have turned out differently. She could have put her notepad down, untied her apron, and taken a break, though the restaurant was too crowded for Raylene to let her off without a scene. Still, she could have slipped out to go to the bathroom at least—who could argue with that? Meg could have excused herself to Mr. Wilson and Tom, her regulars, and wiped the counter clean with one sweep like she always did before walking into the back, because a clean counter made her feel calm, returning to it was okay, while the dirty ones made her feet ache with the hours to come. She could have walked back through the swinging door and continued out to the Dumpster. Could have leaned against the brick wall and smoked a cigarette, slowly, until her hands stopped shaking.

  But she doesn’t. Instead, she watches this man saunter forward and holds her breath until he sits down. She tries to smile, but Leah brushes by, and for a moment it seems as though he will order from Leah, but he doesn’t. Meg watches Leah open a box of straws, and the man clears his throat. He waits until he has Meg’s attention before he speaks.

  You got good coffee? he says. I need a good cup of coffee.

  Meg licks her lips. She tries to swallow. For no sound reason there is something about him that makes her feel the future rush at her with enormous speed. It’s okay, she says. Not the best in the world, but it’ll probably do.

  She clenches her fingers to keep from rocking and he turns his attention to the menu, greasy and pie-stained. I’ll take some, he says. And some of that there.

  Meg follows his finger to the peach pie under glass. Right, she says. Okay. And it is like having a fever: she fades in and out of consciousness, all the time aware of becoming a planet orbiting around a sun.

  Her shift disappears in a blur of motion. Sometimes time behaves strangely in the restaurant—days lurch forward or hang still, minutes taking hours to tick by. But this is different. This is like being on fire.

  He is leaning against a battered blue pickup when Meg gets off. He flashes a wide smile and she swallows again, but doesn’t let herself smile back this time. She doesn’t have to. It was decided, it had all been decided before by her bones and her blood, by some other being, some other Meg back in that room full of dishes. It was already settled when he paid the check and put his hand over hers: she hoped it would feel like this.

  You want one? he says and thrusts a pack of reds at her.

  I got my own. Meg holds her purse close and feels them in her pocket, the pack smooth and loose. She can’t quite look at him, not directly. He hands her a lit cigarette, as though she hadn’t answered. She didn’t seen him with two in his mouth, lighting one for her, but it is damp, and Meg knows she is touching a place his lips have been.

  You’re not from around here, she blurts, so loudly that they both laugh in surprise.

  No, he says, but now she can look at that dangerous grin, at his big teeth, his small, dark eyes. I’m from Texas. Small town. You wouldn’t have heard of it.

  Try me.

  He runs a hand through his hair so it pokes up on top and looks at something over her head. It’s called Shuville, he said. S-H-U, not like footwear. It’s about four hours from anywhere you’d want to be.

  You still live there?

  No.

  A car passes, and then another. Each leaving the restaurant for the highway that twists out toward the horizon. She watches them go, waits for them to disappear from sight, one after the other. Any other night she might be out here alone, staring at that line that divides land from sky, wondering when she’ll ever get a chance to head there herself. She drags deep so he won’t see her hand tremble.

  It’s nice out, he says. She turns to him. It is about to rain again. He leans back on the hood of his truck, one arm propping him up, the other holding his cigarette. His blue jeans end in cowboy boots, and that makes her smile.

  You want to go for a ride? he says, and pats the side of his truck.

  Where to?

  Don’t know. Maybe we’ll just find someplace.

  Meg takes another drag and looks over her shoulder, back into the restaurant where she can see Leah watching, Raylene shaking her head. There is no good reason to go, she knows, but there is no way she won’t.

  You got something better to do? he says.

  No, Meg says. I guess not.

  They drive fast with the windows rolled up and don’t speak. His truck is old and dented, the seats patched with duct tape. It rattles and runs loudly and it smells like tobacco and sweat. And something else. She sees an orange pierced with a thousand cloves wedged in the slant where his dashboard and windshield meet.

  You do that? Meg says, and points, but he seems not to hear her. He stares ahead looking calm, sure of where he is taking her.

  At some point he turns on the radio and for a while they listen to a guitar and a lonesome voice sing to each other. Meg thinks of her twin brothers. She hasn’t until this moment, but she thinks of them now, fixing their own dinners and eating in front of the television with the sound turned low. They will have the lights off, she knows. And they will sit too close with no one to tell them not to. Maybe one of them will be called on to bring Mama something. Maybe they will spend the night in silence.

  Meg shakes her head to empty it and tells herself to focus on now, on this very moment, not what she is missing. She watches the headlights spear the dusk, then turns a little to watch him, too.

  What do they call you? she says. What’s your name?

  Jackson, he says, and she isn’t sure if it’s his first or his last, but she doesn’t ask.

  Aren’t you going to ask me mine?

  It’s Meg, he says. I can read.

  Meg reaches over, unpins the nametag, and tucks it in her pocket. She had forgotten it was there.

  It begins to rain lightly at first, then heavier. They drive into the night, and Meg sleeps and wakes, forgetting where she is or why she is there, forgetting how it seemed right to climb in the truck in the first place. But she isn’t afraid. She is thankful for the motion, happy to think of her life growing small behind her.

  Where are we? Meg says, raising her head from the glass when she sees a white church loom in the glare of their lights. Are we still in South Carolina?

  Jackson doesn’t look at her, but she sees him smile. You ever had catfish? he says.

  She sits up now and peers into the dark. Sure I have.

  Well, I thought of this place to take you to a while back and that’s where we’re going.

  And they make catfish?

  Like nothing you ever had before.

  You know I have to work tomorrow? Meg says. You know that?

  I figured as much.

  Well, how far is this place?

  Let’s just go, he says. We’re having an adventure, sweetheart, let’s just have it.

  Meg nestles back down, the road underneath them singing her back to the dream: She is at home, sitting on the front porch of their once-white house. Only it is white again, peeling paint grown smooth, and she understands somehow that it is Before. That her father is still alive, that her mother is well. That the boys are healthy and round-faced and that they all wait for her through that screen door, if only she will stand up off the steps
and turn around and walk inside.

  But Meg cannot do it. Her limbs are heavy and she cannot make herself rise to meet them. The sun fades from the clear sky until it is purple and then dark, and it grows cold. Then light spills beside her from the windows of the house, but still she cannot stand, because even in the midst of it, she can tell it is a dream and can’t bear to take it one step further.

  Something lurches her out of that place. She wakes with wet cheeks and wipes them hard, hiding her face from Jackson.

  They have stopped. She raises her head and looks around. It is dark and she doesn’t know where they are. He leans his chin on the palm of his hand, elbow propped on the truck window, still as granite.

  What is it? she says.

  Scrapyard.

  It emerges from the darkness then, the elements of metal piled in high towers as far back as she can see. There is a crane, too, empty and orange, with a bucket that looks like it could swing out as far as where they sit.

  Where are we?

  Nowhere, he says, and throws the truck into gear.

  My granddaddy owned that yard, he says a while later. It’s other people’s now, but that was where my daddy was born.

  I thought you were from Texas?

  Yeah. He turns the radio back on and spins the dial, looking for something he doesn’t find. He turns it off and the silence feels sudden to her, large.

  You born in Texas?

  Yeah.

  When did your people leave South Carolina?

  We’re in Georgia, he says. He looks over at her then and seems to be adding something up, something that she can’t see. My daddy wrote songs, he says finally. He wrote these songs and he got known for them and that would have never happened if he’d a stayed here.

  His words are fierce, his voice low. She isn’t sure what he expects of her. The windshield wipers slap back and forth. You out here visiting some folks?

  He cracks the window and lights a cigarette, flicking it with his thumb. My daddy left here when he was seventeen. Hitched his way to Nashville. Knew he’d never go back. His real name was Jackson, too. He never did come back here after that, but he talked about it. He told my mom and he told me. Didn’t tell me directly, I guess, but I know he meant to.

  There are things hiding in the darkness all around them. Probably was hard for him, leaving everyone behind like that, Meg says.

  He was a good person. Jackson hits the steering wheel with an open palm. He tried all along to be a good person. My daddy died, Meg says, startling herself enough to sit up straighter.

  He didn’t mean for what happened to happen, Jackson continues as though she hadn’t spoken. He was a good man, everybody says so.

  I’m sure he was.

  You have to make choices, Jackson says. You have to look at your life and what it holds and then you have to ask yourself what’s missing. That’s what he always said, and he was right. So sometimes you have to give up what matters most in the world to you because it gets in the way of something else.

  He is focused on the road, not looking at Meg, but she feels as though the things he says are being delivered in a random order for her to reassemble, everything a clue to something she can’t know.

  They hit a pothole. Jackson passes a white van. There is no one ahead of them.

  Did you know him? Your father?

  Of course I did, Jackson says, turning to her with a sharp look. Of course I did.

  They are quiet for a while and then Jackson pulls the truck into an all-night gas station and Meg stays in the car while he fills up.

  In Meg’s house, the absence is everything. One car turning the wrong way on a one-way street and the world stopped moving forward. Sometimes Meg lets herself think about the other family, the mother and daughter belonging to the drunk man driving the other car. She wonders what they have become, whether that night ruined them, too. The newspaper said the other driver was survived, just as her father was survived, but it was the wrong word, she knows. They don’t survive him, exactly. It is more fragile than that, more precarious. She and her brothers were crushed into tiptoeing shadows, moving soundlessly through the house so as not to disturb their mother, who rarely left her room before and now refuses to leave it at all. Meg doesn’t think of that as surviving him. They survive despite him.

  The rain has let up, but the darkness is inky, the center of night. Meg grinds the heels of her hands into her eye sockets until she sees bright spots of white, and opens them to find Jackson staring at her through the window. She rolls it down.

  You want a Coke? he says. I was asking if you wanted something to drink.

  I’m OK, she says.

  Well if you want to use the facilities, this would be a good time. We still got a ways to go.

  Meg nods. He opens the door and she climbs out of the truck. Her legs nearly buckle from hours of driving. In the sharp fluorescence of the ladies’ room she splashes water on her face and tries to neaten her hair. In the mirror, her eyes are wide, wider than she remembered, and she has the strange sensation of staring at an older vision of herself, as though the evening has aged her. I’ve been up all night, she mouths, but it feels different from that. It feels as though she’s been looking at a teenage version of herself for years and her reflection has suddenly caught up with her.

  Neither speaks when they began driving again. She holds the Coke that Jackson bought her but doesn’t open it, and eventually it grows warm in her hands.

  The night is bleeding into a predawn haze by the time Jackson turns onto an unmarked dirt road. They bump along and drive up clouds of dust, until they find another road, even more rough, that leads them to a weather-beaten shack, which leans impossibly. There is loud music playing, they hear it through the closed windows as they drive up, and the light from the shack gives it the orange glow of an invitation.

  We’re here, Jackson says, and climbs down from the truck.

  Meg sits there for a minute, wondering at what she has done, at where they are, but then he opens her door and offers his hand, and his touch is all it takes to push away her questions again.

  She straightens her smock and follows him up the dirt path. As they approach, laughter rings out over rowdy music, a loud thumping beat, yowling voices. Jackson holds the wooden door for Meg and she plunges into a room of dancing people. The place is thick with sweat and smoke and the heavy odor of fried food. The noise rushes through her.

  Jackson takes Meg’s elbow and steers her toward a raw pine bar. While he shouts for beers, she watches the whirling couples, each one moving faster than the next.

  They mind us in here?

  What? He leans in close, but still she has to yell.

  They mind us coming in here like this? She sweeps the room with her hand, trying to show him how her color doesn’t match, how they are different from everyone else there.

  I don’t think so, he says, but he presses his lips together and she is sorry for having asked.

  We’ll only be a minute, he yells. If you mind it, I mean.

  No, she says. No, I just—she circles with the hand again, then forces herself to clutch a wet beer with it instead. I just was wondering is all.

  He nods, his jaw set. Come on. He steers her back beyond the ever-spreading dance floor, until they come to a rough doorway that opens into a larger room crowded with rough-hewn picnic tables. You wait here, he says, and points.

  She sinks onto a wooden bench and he disappears again. The dark floor has worn smooth with age, but it is clean. A few people sit at nearby tables. Two coffee-skinned men in matching baseball caps and a huge woman with dark curls tumbling down her wide back are hunched over eating with great concentration, as though the place were quiet.

  Panic takes Meg by surprise. Where are they and how is she ever going to make it back in time for her shift? The thought propels her to her feet and she lurches toward the door, then takes a step back when she sees Jackson weaving toward her, a plastic tray piled high with food and more beer gripped tigh
t in his large hands.

  This is worth it, hon, he says. Worth the whole night’s drive. Don’t know what it was, but I had to take you here. Haven’t been here in years. Too long. But it’s the same. Catfish to make you cry. Here, taste—

  He shoves a paper plate at her. Though her stomach rumbles at the sight, she lifts the sandwich gingerly and sniffs it.

  Go on. His eyes are bright and focused on her. She flushes, but takes a bite, and the bread is warm and soft, the fish crispy outside and flaky inside, warm and tasty. She closes her eyes and takes another bite. Wow, she says.

  My mom took me here first, when she and my dad split, Jackson says. She lit out of Texas and we drove for days. Took me here and it was the best place I’d ever been. They played more country then, more old-timey stuff. First time I remember hearing the banjo. And I always meant to come back. Even when I was touring around.

  Touring? Meg wipes her mouth with a paper napkin.

  Yeah. I’m on the radio all over, he says. You didn’t recognize me?

  She stares for a moment, then shakes her head slowly and notices the light in his face dim a little.

  Well, I’m known, he says. Get recognized lots of places these days. Half the people in that restaurant of yours were whispering the minute I walked in. That’s some of why I figured you wanted to come with me. A little touch of fame. That’s why I picked you—seemed like you needed something special to happen.

  Meg stops chewing and puts the sandwich down. The magic of the evening rushes away from her. What do you mean? she says, but thinks she knows—she just wants to hear him say it.

  It’s nothing against you, sweetheart, he says. Never mind. Eat your sandwich and then we’ll dance.

  I have to work tonight, Meg says. I have to get back.

  He scowls. I said eat up. For chrissake. He takes a toothpick from the tray and leans back to clean his teeth. Most girls would kill to be in your place. It’s the least you could do, considering.