“Got room for one more?” Lee Malone said, holding an overnight bag in his right hand.
“Sister, get in back.”
“Where’s Buckshot at?” she asked.
“He ain’t coming this time,” Lee said.
They rode a good stretch without talking. Even Janie the girl could feel a tension. She leaned into the wind, let it dance her hair and tickle her neck. Maybelle slowed down coming into Bankhead and pointed out a restaurant called The Bird’s Nest, which set just up and across the road from Big Connie Ward’s used-car lot. Janie leaned forward to listen and look as her grandmomma pointed out other places from her childhood. Lee dangled his arm out the window and slapped the door in time with whatever came on the radio. Beyond Bankhead they hit a stretch of road where nine armadillos lay split open like somebody had fixed them thataway.
“They ball up,” Lee said, making a fist. He glanced at Janie in the rearview mirror. “Carry leprosy too.”
“Lie,” Maybelle said.
“What’s leprosy?” Janie asked.
“Like in the Bible,” Lee said. “Boils and blood and puss.” He turned toward Maybelle and said, “I do not.”
“Lie again,” she said.
Lee kindly scoffed. After a moment he reached over and not-so-slyly pinched her arm. She slapped his thigh and it made a raw sound. Swerved, gravel sprayed the underside of the vehicle. Lee grabbed the steering wheel and she grabbed his hand. They held like that for a little while then both let go.
“Let’s see if we can’t make it in one piece.”
“Aw, foot,” Maybelle said, a grin sneaking onto her face.
Hours later they turned onto what Maybelle called the Gulf road. Janie couldn’t see the salt water for tall dunes covered with silver grass. But she could sure enough smell it. Smelled like when you didn’t wash between your legs for a few days. She waved at seagulls waddling in groups alongside the one-lane road. Sand swirled in front of the vehicle like ill-formed ghosts. When Janie finally caught sight of the open beach and the navy-blue Gulf of Mexico stretching out toward the horizon, it was unlike anything she could imagine. Seemed like the edge of the world. Here shadows came and went too quickly to know if they had been there all. Everything was the present, everything forever moving on.
“Can we stop?” she asked.
“Not here Sister,” Maybelle said.
They drove the rest of the day, eventually turning away from the Gulf. Janie pouted where she sat in the hot backseat. They stopped only to piss on the side of the road. Maybelle had packed a cooler with coke-cola and baloney sandwiches, and Lee’d brought a basket of Elberta peaches. Janie ate half of one then chucked the rest out the window when nobody was looking. The broken peach bounced off the road into some weeds.
It was dusk and they’d crossed into Florida time they came to a little brick motel with a fishpond out front. Maybelle stopped the vehicle but left the engine running.
“We ought to just keep on,” Lee said, ducking below the dashboard. “I ain’t tired yet. Let me drive for a spell.”
“This is far enough,” Maybelle said. She got out and walked into the motel’s office while Lee hunkered down farther in the front seat.
Janie could see an old man and woman standing behind the front desk. Her grandmomma was pointing at the vehicle as if to prove it was there. She waved and Janie waved back—but not Lee Malone. The old man took down a set of keys and handed them to Maybelle. Then he and the old woman followed outside and watched as Maybelle took a bag, and Janie, out the backseat. The girl didn’t understand why Lee wasn’t getting out too. She tried to say something, but her grandmomma shushed her.
“You go,” Lee whispered to the girl, winking that it was alright.
He snuck into the motel room after the old man and woman had gone to bed and turned out their light. Maybelle seemed to relax some then. She went into the bathroom and washed herself. Janie had never imagined a trip to Florida could wind up so boring. This motel didn’t even have a swimming pool out back.
“Tell me a story,” she said to Lee.
He said, “You know where we’re going to, don’t you?”
“Nuh uh.”
“Why, to the Fountain of Youth, Sister!”
He went on to tell how before Hernando de Soto arrived another Spaniard had landed farther south in Florida and discovered a freshwater spring that if you drank from its water you’d live forever and ever.
“And we’re going there?”
“That’s right,” Lee said. “Who knows, maybe even take a sip ourselves.”
“But how’ll we find it?”
“There’s signs to show the way,” Lee said.
Janie fell asleep between her grandmomma and Lee Malone that night, and she dreamed about eternal life. A peach that could never be eaten down to its wrinkled pit, a walk through The Seven that never ended. She sank down into the Fountain of Youth till she became a bald baby, a salamander, a pink tadpole with purple scab eyes. Then, sometime before dawn, she woke alone on the hard motel mattress. She could hear them talking, but it took a moment to spot her grandmomma and Lee in a slat of blue light.
“Go in the bathroom and shut the door,” Maybelle said.
Janie did as she was told. She pinched herself to wake up. After a few minutes she pressed her ear to the door. Heard nothing. She climbed up onto the toilet and looked out a small window facing the swampy woods out back. Something moved among the branches and brush. Looks like, Janie thought, some big-old birds. She cracked the window and whistled. The birds stopped moving. She’d never seen birds so big—not even cranes. Maybe Florida birds were different, she thought. They started moving again. When the first one stepped out of the woods, Janie saw it was no more bird than she herself. She slung open the bathroom door and hollered, “They’s some men out back!”
Maybelle was holding the door to the room partway open. The woman who owned the motel stood just outside. Lee was crouched below the window with a rolled-up phone book in his hand. They all three looked at Janie standing there in her nightshirt.
“You old bitch,” Maybelle said, snatching the motel owner by the neck and pulling her into the room.
Lee dropped the phone book and scooped up Janie. He pushed past the women and ran across the parking lot. Janie saw the old man standing by their vehicle with a ballbat in his hands. Lee pressed the girl’s face into his shoulder and said, “Don’t look.” She felt him slam into the man, heard him grunt. She was thrown into the backseat. Her elbow hurt from the landing. She saw her grandmomma running toward the vehicle then. Maybelle jumped behind the wheel and cranked the engine. Janie watched Lee Malone land a fist upside the old man’s head two times, then kick him where he lay in the gravel. The other men were coming around the side of the motel. They toted lumber and chains and, looked like, a few guns. Maybelle hit the gas just as Lee jumped in back next to Janie, the door hanging open like a tongue as Maybelle swerved out onto the road and sped away from several wayward gunshots.
They drove through farmland not so different-looking from Elberta, except for being flatter than a pancake. Lee was bleeding on his face. He wouldn’t let Maybelle see how deep was the cut. Oak trees with big tumorous roots crowded the road. The only water in sight held a spoiled orange tint. Not a single sign pointed toward the Fountain of Youth. For a while Janie kept determined watch. Then the girl gave up. Fishing boats set catawampus in sandy yards where dogs were chained to iron bars hammed into the ground. For the next two nights they parked at tin-roofed rest areas and slept in the car—Maybelle and Janie did anyhow. Lee sat up all night on the hood keeping lookout.
It was night again when they got back to Elberta. Janie woke to blue lights, the car easing off into a ditch. Sheriff Guthrie peered into the back window, then trained his flashlight on Lee Malone in the passenger seat.
“You was speeding.”
“We come a long way Sheriff,” Lee said.
“Who you got back there?”
Maybelle
turned around in the driver’s seat. Something passed over her face and she frowned. “I, I don’t know.”
“Belle,” Lee said, touching her arm.
She moved away from his touch. “Who are you?”
Something was wrong, something was happening. Janie didn’t understand.
The sheriff laughed as if Maybelle was pulling his leg. He patted the door two times and said, “Slow down now, hear.”
Janie stayed at The Seven for a few days after they returned from their trip. The way Maybelle acted frightened the girl. She had no interest in telling stories, in walking the woods. Janie wanted to go home to her parents, but she didn’t want to hurt her grandmomma’s feelings by asking. Finally the morning came when Maybelle carried her home. As Janie got out of the car, her grandmomma grabbed her by the wrist. “We swam in that Gulf,” she whispered. She was shaking. “Tanned our legs, hear me now Sister? Ate boiled shrimp and taters with corn still on the cob. Hunted ghost crabs at night then woke up early for ice cream breakfast. Just you and me Sister. Hear now, just you and me.”
Janie never had told this story. She didn’t know how come she’d decided Goodnight would be the first to receive it. She felt a pang of betrayal, but also lightness. She lifted the patch and rubbed the mucus out of the corner of her blind eye.
Before Goodnight could react to anything Janie had said, Lyle came hurrying around the corner of the building. He got in the truck, put it in reverse and started backing out.
“Wait,” Goodnight said, “the snakes.”
Lyle peeled out onto the road. Goodnight kept asking what happened, what did the man say, what about the snakes, but Lyle would not respond. Even Janie realized he wasn’t going to no matter how many times Goodnight asked. Several miles down the road Goodnight seemed to realize this too and she hushed.
Rather than drive that night, they made camp in a field behind an Indian mound. Janie’d been taught by her grandmomma how to pick out real Indian mounds from natural knobs. Used to there were mounds on The Seven, Maybelle told her, till somebody dug them up. An owl watched from a hickory tree while Lyle built a small fire. They ate another jar of vegetables—butter beans this time. Janie sat across from Goodnight, her face aged in the flickering light.
“Let me see him.” Goodnight gestured at Crusoe. Janie passed him around the fire. “Look here Lyle, what if we have us one of these.”
He ignored her yet. Something had happened in that service station bathroom.
When Lyle was ready to sleep he climbed into the truck instead of onto the pallet next to Goodnight. The rattlesnakes stirred and thumped. Goodnight got down on the quilt. Without turning over she said to Janie, “You can lay down here if you want to.” Janie did. With her back to Goodnight, she hugged Crusoe till she fell asleep.
Lyle woke them up in the middle of the night. After several days it still felt disorienting for Janie to get up in such darkness. She stretched then went off to change into a clean pair of bloomers. The old ones she balled up and stuck in her bag.
Time they got to Bankhead it was daylight. Lyle aimed to get some decent food. He parked outside The Bird’s Nest restaurant. “Need me a damn cheeseburger,” he said, taking money out of his britchespocket and handing it to Janie. “And fries too.”
Janie opened the door and got out with Crusoe.
“Not with that goddamn thing,” Lyle said.
Goodnight held out her arms. Janie reluctantly handed over the dirt boy then went inside the restaurant.
The walls were pink-and-honey-colored cedar. On them hung miners’ helmets and lamps, black-and-white pictures of grim men sparkling with Earth’s flammable innards. The floor was scuffed green tile, some squares missing like a drunkard’s teeth. A frizzy-haired and painted waitress shuffled up and asked Janie what she wanted to order.
“Cheeseburger and fries to-go.”
“We don’t do that for breakfast,” the waitress said. “Got biscuits. Eggs and grits. What else … hash browns.”
“Okay,” Janie said. “Biscuit.”
“Sausage?”
“And egg.”
“Be just a few minutes,” the waitress said.
Four men wearing faded ballcaps sat at a table near the back of the room and watched Janie over the tops of coffee cups. The men could of been statues but for their blinking eyes and the occasional phlegmy cough. She could feel the waitress watching too as she adjusted the patch covering her eye and smoothed the money Lyle’d given her on the tabletop. She glanced out the window to make sure they hadn’t ditched her.
“You want something to drink while you wait?” the waitress asked.
“Coke-cola,” Janie said. The sounds and smells of grilling meat and fried things made her mouth water. She wished she’d ordered food for herself too.
When the waitress set a bottle on the table, Janie jumped. “You alright?”
“Uh-huh.”
She drank half the coke-cola in one gulp and checked at the wall clock. Next to it was a corkboard covered with announcements and ads and, right in the middle of them all, a poster of her aunt Tammy’s face with the word MISSING written above it. Janie reached for the bottle and knocked it over. “Shit,” she said. “Shit, sorry. I’m sorry.”
The waitress went for a rag to clean up the spill. A bell chimed and the cook hollered. The waitress returned from the kitchen with a greasy sack. As she handed over the order she said to Janie, “I’m here just about every day.”
Back at the truck Janie gave the sack to Goodnight. Lyle gestured for change while Goodnight unwrapped the biscuit and held it out to him. He took a bite and said, “This ain’t cheeseburger.”
“It’s breakfast,” Janie said.
He griped as if the time of day was somehow Janie’s fault as he backed out of the parking lot then turned around, heading farther into town instead of back into the national forest. Big Connie Ward’s used-car lot was coming up on the left-hand side of the road. Out front was one of his famous Peach Days displays. He would borrow animals from Ray’s Taxidermy and re-create elaborate scenes culled from Elberta’s history. Bankhead did not have a history like its neighbor to the north. For this particular display Big Connie had set up a life-size De Soto figure to wave folks into the lot. As the pickup truck approached, De Soto moved. Walked. Janie wondered if she was imagining this. But no. De Soto now stood in the middle of the road, wildly waving for them to stop. Instead Lyle sped up.
“Fuck,” Goodnight said. “You’re going to fucking hit him!”
At the last moment Lyle swerved, narrowly missing not De Soto but Big Connie Ward hisself.
“Did he recognize us?” Goodnight asked, turning in the seat to look back.
“Shut up,” Lyle said. “Just shut the hell up.”
He turned off the main road soon as possible, without a clue as to where he was headed. Kept turning, turning, driving deeper into the hills. They followed an old logging road to its inevitable end. Lyle hid the truck in a clear-cut then got out and disappeared hisself. Goodnight started building a fire, knowing not what else to do.
“They’re liable to see smoke,” Janie said.
“Fuck do you know?”
“I know stuff.”
Goodnight couldn’t get the fire to catch. She screeched, gave up, pulled her knees to her chest. “Like what?”
“Stuff.”
“Who about?”
“Nobody.”
Goodnight chucked a green pinecone at the girl. “Well why’d you bring it up for then?”
The yolky sun hung directly overhead time Lyle returned from wherever he’d been. Goodnight wrapped him in their ratty quilt and whispered in his ear. Janie toted Crusoe to the shade, smashed flat some ironweed and rabbit grass, then bedded down. Her eye’d begun to hurt. She clutched it shut and tried to sleep.
They stayed in this clear-cut through the day and the coming night, when Janie abandoned the weeds and fixed herself a nest in the cab of the pickup truck. She laid Crusoe in the floorboard. T
he keys dangled from the ignition switch. She flicked them when she could not sleep. The truck was a stick. She wondered could she drive it away.
Sleep ran shallow when it came. Somewhere among it Janie heard a voice singing, Very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more … When she sat up she saw Lyle leaning against the truck. His eyes closed. Janie touched the soft patch hiding her injury and listened to him for a while. When she slid open the back windowglass Lyle hushed.
“How come you keep your eyes shut?”
He walked around and climbed into the cab. Janie worried she’d said the wrong thing. “Just can’t keep them held open,” he told her. “Don’t know how come.”
“Try.”
She was surprised when he did. Three words escaped from Lyle’s mouth before his eyes pinched shut again. “See,” he said.
They sat in silence but for night sounds. The fire’d extinguished itself. Goodnight lay asleep next to the ashes. Janie couldn’t stand silence anymore. She’d run off, or been carried off, and still couldn’t escape the guilt and the horror of what she’d done to her aunt, because it lived in every quiet moment, or stillness, of which there now seemed to be an infinite number.
“What happened back yonder at that service station?”
Lyle shifted in the seat. “You got to swear not to tell.”
The man who said he’d buy the rattlesnakes had instructed Lyle to walk into the bathroom at this service station, go in the last stall and sit down on the commode. There’d be a hole in the wall, he said. Lyle was to put his lips to it and whistle so the snake man’d know it was him. This didn’t seem right, but Lyle did as he’d been told. Sat, pursed his lips into the cool interior darkness of the cinder block wall and whistled. For a moment nothing happened. Then something warm and fleshy touched his lips. He jerked back and wiped his mouth. Nothing else happened, so he put his lips back to the hole and whistled again. This time the fleshy thing pushed past his lips and bumped his teeth. He jerked back. Something wasn’t right. He heard laughing on the other side of the wall and asked who was there. Slowly, the red head of a pecker peeked out of the hole.
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