Up Jumps the Devil

“Y’all know each other?” asked Kidd.

I hesitated and Allen Stancil said smoothly, “Yeah, I used to do a little work for Mr. Kezzie. He’s sure looking good these days to be as old as he is. You, too, Deb.”

“Don’t call me Deb,” I said, enunciating each syllable through clenched teeth. “And just when did you see my daddy?”

“Coupla days ago. I was driving into Uncle Jap’s yard while he was driving out. I throwed up my hand to him, but I don’t guess he knowed who I was.”

A damn good guess. If Daddy knew Allen Stancil was anywhere within a hundred miles, he’d have told me. Assuming he didn’t shoot the bastard first as he’d once threatened to.

All through Dallas’s funeral, I’d been thinking about Allen, wondering if he’d show, wondering what I’d say if we came face-to-face before I could slip away. And here he’d jumped up like the devil when I least expected him.

“How long you planning on staying?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Long as Uncle Jap needs me, I reckon. Dallas getting hisself killed sort of knocked the fire out of him, didn’t it?”

“Or put a different kind of fire into him,” I said, thinking of that Holyness Prayr Room. “We just saw him over at his pumpkin patch with Billy Wall.”

“Dallas and me, we was more like brothers than first cousins,” Allen said mournfully. “I’m gonna have to be Uncle Jap’s son now.”

That pious tone made me snort, but it was drowned in the yips and yells as the dogs got loose again.

Once Allen quit paying them any mind, they lost interest in him and suddenly remembered the rabbit that was hiding somewhere under the shelter. Their lunge caught Kidd off guard and the leads slipped from his hand. An instant later they dived under an old Chrysler that was sitting up on blocks. I saw the rabbit squeeze underneath the side wall and light out for the tall weeds, but the pups never missed him. They just kept on yipping and whining around the cars until Kidd stepped on one lead and Allen got hold of the other.

And when Kidd opened the door of the steel cage in the back of the van, Allen hoisted up the dogs and helped get them inside. I could see him sizing Kidd up as they talked dogs a minute or two before getting off on cars again.

“I’d forgot about all the old beauties Uncle Jap has sitting round this place,” he said. “There’s a ’sixty-one Stingray and a straight-eight ’fifty-nine Packard Clipper. And you’re probably too young to appreciate it, but damned if he ain’t got a ’forty-nine Hudson Hornet setting over yonder beside the feed barn.”

“I know a doctor down in New Bern with a classic Stingray,” said Kidd, “but I don’t think I ever heard of a Hudson Hornet. Good car?”

“Good car? Hell, bo, it was just the prettiest aerodynamic body anybody ever saw,” Allen said. “Had this incredible overhead cam in a one-eighty-two horsepower engine. I tell you, around here, Hornets flat-out dominated stock car racing in the late forties. Then along came the Olds Eighty-eight and after that the Hornet was finished. Hudson merged with American Motors and now the Jeep’s about the only thing Chrysler kept when they took over AMC.”

He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He knew better than to offer me one, but he did hold out the pack to Kidd, who shook his head.

There was a faraway look in Kidd’s eyes, as if seeing something wonderful and long gone. “My dad used to have an old ’fifty-two Thunderbird,” he said.

“Man, they were something else!” Allen agreed as he took a long drag of smoke and exhaled it through his nose. “Don’t suppose he still owns it, does he?”

Kidd gave a rueful shrug. “Mom made him sell it when my little brother came along. She couldn’t hold both of us on her lap anymore.”

“Too bad. A ’fifty-two T-bird in good shape, it’d be worth a bundle now.”

“That’s what my dad keeps telling her,” Kidd said with a wide grin.

Car talk bores the hell out of me. I’ve never felt the allure of carburetors, rings and spark plugs and whether an engine’s a V-6 or a V-8. All I care about is how it looks and whether it’s got decent acceleration. Long as it’s not too shabby, long as I can turn the key and get to court on time, what difference does it make how big the engine is or how many cylinders it has?

My brothers spent half their growing-up years with their heads under the hood of some old broken-down piece of junk. Any time one of their friends drove over, the first thing they’d do is troop out to look at the new set of chrome-plated exhaust pipes or marvel at the size of the big wheels somebody’d just put on his truck.

I can still hear my mother: “You boys change clothes before you go crawling up under that car. You get grease on those school shirts, it’ll never come out.”

While Kidd and Allen talked Cougars, Impalas, and Goats and the pleasures of a manual transmission over an automatic, I sat down on the back of the van and let the hatch shade me like a beach umbrella. The pups nuzzled my fingers through the steel wire for a few minutes and then went to sleep.

Eventually, Allen glanced over at me and, casual like, said, “Last I heard, Debbie—”

He caught himself and my name came out “Debbierah.”

He must have remembered what happened the last time he called me Debbie. I’m not a cupcake and nobody shortens my name too many times. Nobody.

“I heard you’re a lawyer.”

“Used to be,” I admitted.

“So what’re you doing now?”

“I’m a district court judge.”