by C. L. Bevill
He sat down and watched her leave. David trailed behind Willodean with a last hopeful look at Bubba. “Are ye sure ye don’t want Jesus to watch the bandy wench instead?” he asked.
Willodean laughed.
•
“Okay then,” Bubba said. “I got to work today. You want to hang out at the garage, Dan?”
“I reckon I could,” Dan allowed. “I kin meditate.”
Leaving an aggravated Precious at the mansion, Bubba drove them to Culpepper’s Garage. He deftly avoided the more packed areas of Pegramville. The blackened hood of the 1954 Chevy truck was actively rattling in the wind, but Bubba knew it was from its transgression with the telephone pole.
Culpepper’s wasn’t crowded. There was a single 1969 Chevelle waiting for an oil change. Bubba knew because its owner, Farmer Scoresby, brought it in every eight weeks, come hell or high water. The pristine muscle car had the original V8 engine in it and not a speck of rust on the undercarriage. The interior was original white leather. None of Scoreby’s cats ever got into that car. Reputedly it was put under a heavy tarp and locked in a garage with a security system. Farmer Scoresby had been known to patrol the garage with a shotgun. There had been another rumor involving mercenaries from Columbia, but Bubba attributed that one to exaggeration.
Gideon Culpepper was talking with Farmer Scoresby while Mrs. Scoresby waited in a newish Chevrolet Trailblazer. Mrs. Scoresby never got to drive the Chevelle, a fact for which she loudly broadcasted her dismay. It was said that Mrs. Scoresby was threatening to buy a Ford Thunderbird in retaliation.
Farmer Scoresby reluctantly dropped the keys into Gideon’s hand and turned away. He only spared Bubba a fleeting look of approval, since the younger man was driving a Chevrolet.
Gideon caught sight of Ol’ Green and winced noticeably.
Bubba took that to mean something bad.
As the Scoresbys drove off, the owner of the garage approached Bubba before the younger man could get out of the truck. Gideon waved his arms warningly. Bubba already had the window rolled down because that was the vehicle’s only form of air conditioning. Gideon didn’t come any closer than ten feet away. The garage’s owner was visibly antsy, unmistakably ready to take flight at a moment’s notice.
“Hey, Bubba,” Gideon said.
“Gideon,” Bubba said, waiting for the bad stuff to be announced.
Gideon peered past Bubba at Dan, who was sitting awkwardly in the passenger seat with his head tilted but still brushing the roof of the cab because he was so tall. Even old trucks weren’t made for Dan’s height. “Is that Daniel Lewis Gollihugh?” Gideon asked with abject dismay.
“Shore.”
Gideon’s voice quavered, and his eyes remained trained on Dan. “Ain’t enough work for two mechanics today, Bubba. I meant to call you. Be happy to pay for your gasoline for your trip.”
Bubba blinked. That didn’t sound like the typically tight-fisted Gideon Culpepper. Clarity came to Bubba after a moment. News of the bomb had trickled back to Gideon. He didn’t want Bubba anywhere near the garage in case of…another bomb. Duh.
One little part of Bubba couldn’t blame Gideon. He wouldn’t want his place of business blown up again either. Insurance only went so far, as Bubba was well aware, and then they ran away screaming. “Does this have something to do with bombs?” Bubba asked in a neutral voice.
Gideon looked around frantically as if something would explode based on Bubba’s words alone. “Cain’t you wait to come back to work once this whole thing has been cleared up? Lord Almighty, do you not remember what happened at spring break?”
“I need the money, Gideon,” Bubba said.
“Take the rest of the week off with full pay,” Gideon said hastily, with another horrified glance at Dan, who had leaned forward to look at Gideon.
“Why, that’s right nice of you, Gideon,” Bubba said, “but I ain’t one to take charity.”
“You can work the hours off a little at a time,” Gideon said rapidly as Dan shifted on the bench seat beside Bubba.
Bubba rubbed his chin. Slowly, he turned to look at Dan. Dan flashed a gap-toothed grin at Bubba. A fella could suck a lot of spaghetti noodles through that gap. “‘The greatest achievement is selflessness,’” Dan quoted with a nod toward Gideon. “I reckon that means that one shouldn’t be thinking just about hisself.”
“I guess so,” Gideon agreed with a little confusion in his eyes.
Bubba frowned at Dan and then turned back to Gideon. “We’ll work it out later, Gideon. I ain’t thought on the part about someone mebe following me here.”
Gideon wildly looked about again. “I thought we left that all behind.”
“I’ll go,” Bubba said and pulled out the choke in order to start Ol’ Green again. The truck was always cranky in the morning. “But I wonder ifin I can just order them parts for Rosa Granado’s Camaro. I believe I forgot to do that before I left last week. She’ll be needing them soon.”
“I’ll do it,” Gideon said quickly, peering at Dan as if the big man was a bomb about to go off at the least amount of applied pressure.
“Okay,” Bubba agreed. “Be shore and order from the GM shop at…oh hellfire and damnation.”
“What?” Gideon yelped and looked around. He looked left. He looked right. He looked up. He looked at his feet. “Where’s the bomb?”
“Ain’t no bomb, you durn fool,” Dan said. Then he glanced at Bubba. “Is his cabinet missing a few too many cups and saucers?”
“GM,” Bubba said. “I cain’t believe I didn’t think of that. GM stands for General Motors.”
“Ain’t no bomb?” Gideon said. “Of course GM stands for General Motors. It has for a hundred years or so. Are you sure there ain’t no bomb?” He backed away, muttering, “And they told me living in a small town would be boring.”
“And GM owns…Chevrolet,” Bubba finished as Gideon turned and fled for the relative safety of the garage.
Dan nodded. “Ain’t thought of it like that, but shore, like they own Buick and a few others, right? Cadillac and this and that and ‘tother.”
“There wasn’t any place around here to buy Chevrolets for a long, long time, but there was a GM factory, once upon a time.”
Dan shrugged. “Must have been before my time. Or else I was busy in juvenile detention.”
“Let me have your phone, Dan,” Bubba said.
Dan dug in his pocket for the cell phone and handed it to Bubba.
Bubba took a moment to dial information. Then he had the operator make the call. “I’ll pay you back, Dan,” Bubba said out of the side of his mouth.
Dan shrugged again. “Don’t rightly care. It’s bin an interestin’ couple of days. I ain’t beat up on nobody, and I’m feelin’ rightly proper about it. My karma’s getting a little cleaner every day. Should be pearly white in about…a hundred years.”
Bubba listened to the phone connect on the other end. When it was picked up, there was a teenager on the other end. The young man said, “Hey.”
“It’s Bubba Snoddy. Is your mama at home?” He had called Penny Sillen’s place forgetting it was a regular work day.
“She’s at work,” the teenager said sullenly. “Bye.”
“Wait,” Bubba said, knowing he couldn’t interrupt Penny at her employment but needed the answer sooner, rather than later. “It’s important. Your mama said Justin Thyme lost a job at a factory a whole lotta years ago.”
“Yeah?”
“Did Justin ever say what kind of factory it was?” Bubba asked.
The teen cogitated on the other end. “Auto parts place. He had a bunch of boxes in the shed out back. He used to sell them every once in a while. Then someone came by and bought the whole lot. Justin didn’t share a dime with Ma, the bastard, and she did all the work in the garage sale.”
“Auto parts?” Bubba repeated. “Is this Jimmy or Gage?”
“This is Jimmy,” the teen said reluctantly. “Look, my brother is about to kick my butt in World of
Warcraft, and I— ”
“Was it a General Motors plant?”
Jimmy didn’t say anything.
“Think hard, Jimmy. It means something very important.”
“Justin really is dead, ain’t he?” Jimmy said. “Ma already thinks he is. I thought he ran off, but I guess not.” The young man was resigned but sad. Bad things had already happened in his life and unfortunately, he expected more to happen.
“I think he is,” Bubba said.
“I think it was General Motors,” Jimmy said. “Why?”
“Not sure exactly,” Bubba said. “But I aim to find out.”
Chapter Twenty-one
Bubba Goes A-Huntin’
Wednesday, August 22nd
Bubba didn’t actually remember a time when the factory had been open. But the closing had been paramount because a substantial number of people had lost jobs. It wasn’t a huge factory, but in Pegram County, a job had been a job. People needed the money, and they needed the benefits that went with such a position. In the six months after the factory had closed, the population of Pegramville had decreased by two hundred and six people, who had packed up and left for cities with more employment potential. Bubba remembered the factoid because his mother touted it out on various occasions involving issues of social and economic improvement. (A twenty percent unemployment rate in Pegram County had once made Miz Demetrice picket the governor’s office for four weeks straight until the governor had signed some legislature that supplied special loans for country businesses.)
The old GM plant sat on the northern edge of Pegramville. The property stretched for about twenty acres, and half of that was parking and loading zones for trucks. The building itself wasn’t more than 10,000 square feet. The parking lot was a forest of pine trees. One could still see bits of asphalt here and there. There had been a chain link fence erected around the area, but it was teetering in spots and fallen over in other places. There were also a few “No Trespassing” signs nailed to rusting fence supports. He could see one now with so many bullet holes in it that only the N from the No and the ng from Trespassing were visible. There were a few animal trails leading into the gaping holes of the fence. The place might have closed down, but it was far from deserted.
Parking the truck on the side of a desolate road, Bubba turned the ignition off and got out. Dan unfolded himself out of the passenger side. “What ya’ll thinking, Bubba?”
“I’m thinking that those parts came from here. I think Justin Thyme took them from here and sold them to William Johnson who sold them to Paddy Sheedy. Then I bought them at First Monday Trade Days in Canton.”
“That’s a whole lot of guessing,” Dan said. “Shore be a luck thing, too, that you’d happen along something like that. Kind of like winnin’ the lottery, exceptin’ it’s the murder lottery.”
Bubba stared across the field at the empty building. The sun shone on broken glass in the windows. Someone had spray painted a message along one wall that said “No matter where you go, there you are.” “Maybe it was intended to be that way,” he said.
“Shore. God and Buddha work in mysterious ways,” Dan agreed. He turned his head. “Did you hear another car?”
“It’s like a great big jigsaw puzzle, and I got all the pieces,” Bubba said slowly, “only I got to figure out how they all fit together.” It dawned on him what Dan had asked, and he shook his head. “I dint hear anything but the wind. Dint realize how deserted this place was even though it sits within the city lines.”
“You found a note from someone you don’t even know,” Dan said. “In fact, you still don’t know who it is. Could be nothing at all. Exceptin’ someone wanting to kill ya’ll and all. That do put a damper on it, and also, it waves a big red flag.”
“What would you do, Dan?” Bubba asked as he studied the fence. What was left of the structure wouldn’t prevent anyone from coming or going. There were likely places that had been cut by teenagers and the like for the last few decades. Although on the edge of Pegramville, the property was isolated by a low hill line to one side and a draw on the other.
“Karma generally takes care of its own,” Dan remarked.
“What goes around comes around,” Bubba said.
“Exactly,” Dan agreed. “Sometimes in the next life or the one after that. I shore like Buddhism. It explains everything.”
“Sometimes karma needs a little bit of help,” Bubba said definitively.
The sun went behind a cloud, and the land grew dark. Bubba glanced up and recognized that it was going to rain soon. “You feel like exploring, Dan?”
“Shore,” Dan said agreeably. “A fella cain’t read the no trespassing sign, so it might as well not be there. It’s almost like theys a-beggin’ us to come on in.”
It didn’t take much work to find a section of broken fence that would admit two taller men. Bubba had to hold the chain link fence back for Dan to pass through. They waded through graying tall grass and cut through a stand of pine trees with a circumference of about a foot.
“You recollect anything about this place, Dan?” Bubba asked.
“Not really,” Dan said back, bending a pine back to pass through. “Obviously, it’s bin abandoned a whole lotta years. I prolly dint care because I was busy stealing other things.” He frowned to himself. “I should make a list about that. I got to make some amends to folks. Start puttin’ a polish on my karma for the next life so I won’t be reborn as a cockroach or something like that.”
Bubba vividly remembered the loss of jobs, but he knew that was due to his mother. His mother would have been rabid about the forfeiture of revenue in the area. But the memory was about the vagueness of a large place that employed a number of people and didn’t include specific details about what had been built there. “I don’t think they made cars here,” he said.
“Don’t look big enough,” Dan agreed. “Besides I think I’d recall that.”
“So they made parts for cars,” Bubba said. “GM makes a lot of transitional parts. One can go into a GM truck. The same part can fit into a Chevy truck. I put enough of ‘em in each other to know.”
“That’s right clever.”
“That’s why them folks have billions of dollars and their own island in the Caribbean.”
They made it to the front area and found the formerly glass doors had been boarded over with plywood. The plywood planks were splitting, and the nails were falling out. The place was like a cemetery, and it made a little shiver run down Bubba’s spine.
“Cain’t go in the front door,” Dan said. “Let’s walk around the sides and find where all the kids came and went.” He pointed at the graffiti. Ralph C. and Turtle 69 had been there once upon a time. Ralph C. had favored purple spray paint and Turtle 69 had liked orange. They made a smiley face, a demon with horns, and Ralph C. had drawn his very favorite pair of breasts.
Dan paused to briefly admire the breasts.
“Don’t suppose that’s Ralph Cedarbloom,” Bubba muttered.
“Not them tatas,” Dan said, “unlessin’ Ralph had surgery since I knowed him.”
They made their way around one side and found a section of wall that had collapsed. The roof had partially been blown away by a long-ago windstorm, and the rain had worked through the exterior wall until it had given up without protest. A raccoon exploded out of the wall and Bubba said, “Dang!”
Dan chuckled for a moment. “Prolly some other critters in there, too. Almost wish I had my rifle. I have a hankering for squirrel stew. But I be a vegan now, so I guess I could just et the stew without the squirrel.”
The inside was dark, and Bubba cursed at himself for not thinking of a flashlight. He glanced upward and gauged the impending rain. If the sun had been out, it wouldn’t have been an issue. The light would have been enough to spill inside and make everything mostly discernible.
However, Dan pulled out a little flashlight from his pocket. Bubba gave him a look and Dan shrugged. “I like to be prepared for anything. I also got a ha
ndkerchief for blowing my nose or for a tourniquet. It shore came in handy in the joint. You wouldn’t believe how many fellas bleed in there.”
Bubba gave him a look.
“It weren’t me that did it. Them fellas do it to themselves. I discouraged them the day I walked into the place, and they mostly left me alone.” Dan thought about it. “Mostly.”
Bubba took the lead. They went down long hallways and through a room that had been the cafeteria. The door was clearly labeled with a sign that still hung above the door. There were heavily rusted tables inside with a single overturned bench. The kitchen had been stripped of everything but a few wall cabinets. They found some offices. A large steel desk remained in one. The raccoons had also found the desk. One of the drawers had kits in it. The pair chattered and clicked nervously at Bubba and Dan as they went through. The two kits dived into the back of the desk searching for safety from the two large humans.
“What are we looking for?” Dan asked, and Bubba nearly jumped.
“Dunno,” Bubba said shortly. “Expect it’ll bite my ass when I see it. Not literally, I hope.”
The bathrooms had a few toilets left, and one urinal hung from the wall. Water sat in stagnant pools in various areas. A vine of poison ivy snaked up the outside wall and threaded its way through broken glass.
Bubba stopped once he saw the vicious strike of nearby lightning. The thunder rumbled through the empty building. A distant bird squawked and remote rapid flutters followed as a flock decided that it wasn’t a good place to roost.
The two men followed the hollow echoes, poking through empty rooms and deserted halls. There was more graffiti inside, as well as evidence of teenage occupation in the form of used condoms and empty beer bottles. Someone had set fire to one wall leaving it mostly smoke damaged. Undeterred by the vandalism, it was cinderblock and not prone to immolation.
The assembly line had also been stripped. There were bolts in the floors where machinery had been attached. There were a few pieces of metal still attached to the walls, and flaking, rusting ceiling lights moved with the breeze that was forced through the broken upper windows of the large room. Tattered sheets of plastic had once been nailed over the windows but now fluttered like ghostly fingers. The whispering noise the plastic made sent a chill down Bubba’s spine.