Nine
I’M DISCHARGED FROM the rehabilitation center and wheeled out of the place over my objections.
I’m not driving a red Porsche today.
The truck is beat up pretty good by now but still functioning, if not nearly as well as it once had.
Like me.
Burt has followed Taylor in his Crown Vic, so they’re both waiting for me, just as they’d sworn to EJ.
Taylor asks if I’d like company for the ride.
But I tell her that after the nonstop company in this place, I’ll be happy to be alone for a couple of hours.
“Just don’t make a habit of it,” she says.
“Habit of what?”
“Alone,” she says. “It’s not good for you. And it sure isn’t healthy.”
I take my time heading back, in no rush, resolved never to drive any vehicle fast ever again.
I think about making a stop at Blue Yonder, knowing that in the late afternoon Gideon’s dad will be there, fixing to open the place up.
Mitchell Garland, already looking ten years older than he had the night of the party, had come to see me just the one time in the hospital.
A few awkward minutes after he sat down, I realized that when he left that day that the idea we were still family was walking right out that door with him.
When I’m out on the open road, Wilco comes on the truck’s radio, singing a song called “The Late Greats.”
The best song will never get sung…
I roll down the windows, the way OST—the Original Silas Tucker—had when he was behind the wheel of this truck, when he was the one with the radio blaring, and he was so often singing along, even when I was with him and would make a show of covering my ears to try to get him to stop.
So good, you won’t ever know…
Over time, I came to love country music even more than he did, because I thought that was where so many great stories were, like a novel being written in a handful of verses and just a few minutes on a car radio.
It was Taylor McCarter who’d first told me the joke about how if you played songs like them in reverse, they always had a happy ending.
“It’s a pretty good deal, if you think about it,” she’d said. “In the end, you un-lose it all.”
I’m thinking now that maybe I should have asked her to ride back with me, because her being around has always made me feel better about almost everything.
The way Gideon had.
Damn, I missed him.
Every damn day.
When he wasn’t calling me 109, sometimes Gideon used to call me Bartlett. From Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, one of the few books he himself knew anything about, for emergency situations when he was writing a term paper.
I used to wear his ass out, just for the fun of it, quoting this book or that book, this writer or that one, knowing he had no interest in any of it, he humored me by listening to me. The two of us just being the two of us.
I turn the radio up even louder, to get his voice out of this car and out of my head, if only for a few minutes, because Gideon is the sad country song that I can’t reverse, one about how my best friend is gone.
And soon I’m the one singing along when the Cults come on the radio.
Bad things happen to the people you love…
Getting after it with them good and loud and off-key until these words stop me like a red light:
Those bad things, I always saw them coming for me…
Truth be told, I hadn’t seen bad things coming. Not for me, anyway. How could I after I showed everybody how much arm I had, how I could throw a baseball and a football the way nobody before me ever had?
Oh, I had known bad times in my life, no doubt and no getting around it, terrible times with my father dying the way he had and then my mother dying so soon after.
As young as I was, and as much pain as I carried around in me then, I still thought the worst things that could possibly ever happen to me had already happened.
I turn off the radio finally. Close the windows.
Only then the quiet closes in, feeling thick enough to suffocate me.
So I turn the radio right back on, no music now, and listen to one of the sports stations, some of the callers already worrying themselves sick about what’s going to happen to the Tar Heels in the fall without me behind center calling the signals.
“We didn’t know how good we had it when we still had that boy,” the caller says.
“Tell me about it,” I say out loud. “Tell. Me. About. It.”
Before long, I’m on State Road 31, the road on which my father was found, passing the crazy-ass sign at the city limits that the good folks of Cross Rivers are afraid to take down:
Cross Rivers, North Carolina
Population 22,000
Ranked #3 Most Violent Small Town in America
And proud of it.
Nobody has ever been able to prove that the sign had been put there by the Crocketts, stuck in the ground one day for everybody to see.
The townspeople just knew, and still did, that it was one more element to the Crockett mythology, one more reason for the constant fear most people in Cross Rivers lived with because of them.
So no one had ever had the stones to take it down and do what somebody should have done with it—use it for kindling.
But that’s the reality of life in Cross Rivers, and all over Watauga County. And what’s going to be the reality of my life, now that I’m back. We’re known for farming, lumber, coal, proximity to Appalachian State University…
And the Crocketts.
Recently, this part of the state has been in the news because, since the start of summer, five young girls from around the county have gone missing, not one of them found yet, all gone without a trace.
My father always told me that no matter what your troubles were, there was always somebody with worse, all’s you had to do was open up your eyes and look around.
I make a right-hand turn about a half mile past the sign and then another, on my way to the farm where my grandmother is waiting for me, supper probably already on the stove, maybe even a pie just out of the oven.
I switch to an all-news channel now and hear that another girl has gone missing.
This one is from Cross Rivers.