“Who cares?” said Hely. “I don’t play with it any more.”
“Somebody might find it.”
“Nobody’s going to come up here.”
They ran down the concrete ramp—it was fun, wind in their hair—and the momentum carried them halfway across the dark pastureland before they got breathless and slowed to a jog.
“It’s about to rain,” said Harriet.
“So what,” said Hely. He felt invincible: ranking officer, conqueror of the planet. “Hey, Harriet,” he said, pointing to a fancy illumined sign glowing gently in a moonscape of bulldozed clay scraped in the pasture opposite. It read:
“The future must suck, huh?” said Hely.
They scurried down the margin of Highway 5 (Hely mindful of the dangers; for all he knew, his mom wanted ice cream and had asked his dad to run to Jumbo’s before it closed) ducking behind lamp posts and garbage bins. As soon as they were able they turned off into the dark side streets and made their way down to the square, to the Pix Cinema.
“The feature’s half over,” said the shiny-faced girl at the ticket window, glancing at them over the top of her compact.
“That’s okay.” Hely pushed his two dollars through the glass window and stepped back—swinging his arms, legs jittering nervously. Sitting through the last half of a movie about a talking Volkswagen was the last thing in the world he felt like doing. Just as the girl snapped shut her compact and reached for her key ring so that she could come around and unlock the door for them, a steam whistle blew in the distance: the 8:47, bound for New Orleans, on her way in to the Alexandria Station.
Hely punched Harriet on the shoulder. “We ought to hop on that and ride to New Orleans sometime. Some night.”
Harriet turned away from him, folding her arms across her chest, and looked out at the street. Thunder growled in the distance. Opposite, the awning of the hardware store flapped in the wind, and bits of paper skittered and somersaulted down the sidewalk.
Hely looked at the sky, held out a palm. Just as the girl clicked the key in the lock of the glass door, a drop of rain splashed on his forehead.
————
“Gum, can you drive the Trans Am?” said Danny. He was high, high as a kite, and his grandmother looked as spiny as an old cactus in her red flowered house-dress:
And Gum—like a cactus—stood vegetating for a moment before she gasped and responded, in her spiny voice:
“Driving’s not the problem. It’s just real low down to the ground for me. This arthuritis.”
“Well, I can’t—” Danny had to stop and reconsider, begin again—“I can drive you to Jury Duty if you want but that aint going to fix the car being low on the ground.” Everything was the wrong height for his grandmother. When the pickup was working, she complained that the cab was too high.
“Oh,” Gum said peacefully, “I don’t mind if you drive me, son. You might as well do something with that expensive truck-driving education of yours.”
Slowly, slowly, with her light little brown claw of a hand resting on Danny’s arm, she hobbled out to the car—through the packed-dirt yard where Farish sat in his lawn chair taking apart a telephone, and it occurred to Danny (in a vivid flash, as these things sometimes did) that all his brothers, himself included, saw deep into the nature of things. Curtis saw the good in people; Eugene saw God’s presence in the world, how each thing had its own work and its own orderly place; Danny saw into people’s minds, and what made them act the way they did, and sometimes—the drugs were making him think it—sometimes he could even see a little bit into the future. And Farish—before his accident, anyway—had seen more deeply into things than any of them. Farish understood power, and hidden possibilities; he understood what made things work—whether it was engines, or the animals out in the taxidermy shed. But nowadays, if he was interested in something, he had to cut it up and strew it all over the ground to make sure nothing special was inside.
Gum didn’t like the radio, so they rode into town in silence. Danny was aware of every bit of metal in the car’s bronze body, whirring simultaneously.
“Well,” she said placidly. “I worried from the start that nothing was ever going to come from that truck-driving job.”
Danny said nothing. The truck-driving days, back before his second felony arrest, had been the happiest of his life. He’d been running around a lot, playing guitar at night, with vague hopes of starting a band, and driving a truck seemed pretty boring and ordinary in comparison with the future he’d had lined up for himself. But now, when he looked back on it—only a few years ago, though it seemed a lifetime—it was the days in the trucks and not the nights in the bars that he remembered with longing.
Gum sighed. “I guess it’s just as well,” she said, in her thin, wispy old voice. “You’d have been driving that old truck till you died.”
