pack of Nabs from the vending machines over in the old part of the courthouse. With court due to resume in fifteen minutes, it was all the lunch I had time for.
“If word gets out, it could send land prices right through the roof,” Sutterly told me.
Some big secret. As if he’s the only one who’s noticed the escalation of land prices in Colleton County these past few years.
Dick Sutterly’s just an opportunist who happens to be in the right place at the right time. His father was an itinerant carpenter who built a Skilsaw, three nail aprons, and two jackleg helpers into a small construction company that Dick took over when the older man had a heatstroke one summer. From building modest individual houses to order, he began building two or three at a time on speculation.
Those were leveraged into ten- and fifteen-house strip plats, and these became sixty- and eighty-house subdivisions with streets and cul-de-sacs.
“Now I’ve got the chance for something really big,” he said, his cheeks turning pink. “All I need is Adam’s little scrap of land and I’m in business.”
More than that he wouldn’t say.
“Leo Pleasant in on this?” I asked. “G. Hooks Talbert?”
Sutterly’s cheeks got pinker and pinker but my lunch break ended before I could break him.
7
« ^ »
I was headed home after a mental commitment hearing in Makely late the next morning. Despite fog and rain and dreary gray skies overhead, I was cheered by the seasonal sight of holly berries ripening into bright red amidst shiny wet green leaves. Deciduous trees had finally changed color, too, but even though crepe myrtles and pecans showed skeletal limbs through rapidly thinning orange and yellow leaves, oaks and sweet gums and a lot of the other trees had barely begun to shed good. That, of course, could change overnight if we got a real cold snap.
Growth has been erratic yet steady along New Forty-Eight between Makely and Raleigh. Tucked back behind tall rolling berms that are penetrated here and there by stately brick-and-brass gateposts are the roofs of high-end subdivisions with names like Horse Run Meadows or Dogwood Ridge. More numerous though are the nameless developments, the random results of different people deciding to sell off bits of their land to builders with no overall plan in mind: no berms, no stately entrances, just cheap-to-moderate tract houses, each with its own drive giving directly onto the four-lane highway.
I swear I don’t know where all these new people are coming from. Sometimes I wonder how places like Iowa or Ohio or upstate New York still have enough people to make it worthwhile keeping the lights on up there.
Doomed fields, as yet untouched by berm or bulldozer, bristled with real estate signs and surveyors’ ribbons. Soybeans had been picked, tobacco and corn stalks had been cut, a few fields were even planted already in their winter crop of oats. Intermixed were stands of unharvested cotton. The plants had been sprayed with a defoliant and the coarse dark leafless stems stood in stiff contrast to the soft white fibers bursting from their bolls. A couple of days of sunshine and the cotton would be dry enough to pick.
In the meantime, November was giving us its usual annual quirks, one day cool and damp, the next day warm. The temperature had climbed back into the high seventies this morning and sent a line of thunderstorms rolling through the area, some of them so violent that I had to pull over once because I couldn’t see the front end of my car.
Rain bucketed down on my sunroof and the windshield wipers were about as useful as a broom in a sandstorm. To make it even more harrowing, my lights had continued to dim in the last week and I worried that other cars, groping past me in the blinding downpour, wouldn’t see my taillights till it was too late.
When the rain finally slacked off enough to drive on, I realized that I wasn’t far from the cutoff to Jimmy White’s garage. Maybe he wouldn’t be too busy on a rainy Friday midday to at least tell me whether it was my new battery or something worse.
Two years ago, Jimmy’s single-bay garage expanded to three bays and he could probably add on another two if he could find competent mechanics willing to work as hard as he does. I doubt he’s really looking though. Having enough time for his church and family seems to be more important to him than money.
Even so, whether he wanted that much extra work or not, the yard was filled with cars and I had to thread the needle to pull mine up to the side door. Warm as it was, the middle bay door was open and I could see cars up on all three lifts, but no sign of Jimmy, his son James or Woodrow, their third mechanic. I splashed across the soggy ground, opened the door and stepped into their lunchtime matinee.
Clamped in the vise on Jimmy’s main workbench was a board that extended out like a short shelf. Sitting on the board was a small color television.
James had dragged up a stool, skinny little Woodrow sat cross-legged on the hood of a nearby pickup, Jimmy had swivelled his desk chair around, and two more black men I didn’t recognize were sitting on a low bench they’d jury-rigged from a plank and two concrete blocks. All had takeout plates balanced on their knees, and on the floor beside them were drink cups full of iced tea from my cousin’s barbecue house over on Forty-Eight. Except for their choice of china and crystal and eccentric seating arrangements, it could have been the Possum Creek Dinner Theater.
Everyone glanced over and nodded when I came in, but clearly I’d interrupted a climactic moment.
I stepped around to see what was so interesting. Another celebrity trial? Basketball previews? Highlights from the final car race of the season?
On the television, two impossibly gorgeous (and obviously naked) daytime actors were writhing together beneath tangled pink satin sheets. Talk about climactic moments— they were going at it so hot and heavy with hands and mouths and little animal noises that it’s a wonder the screen didn’t fog up.
