Possum Creek.
I cut off my lights and started down the long curving slope, my foot easing down on the accelerator as my eyes adjusted to the moonlight. By the time I hit the bottom where the air flows sweet and cool even on the hottest summer nights, the needle was on 78 and still climbing.
At the far end of the sharpest curve, on the right-hand side just before the bridge, an anonymous dilapidated mailbox—no name, no box number—stands beside a dirt lane that winds up through the underbrush, over a low ridge and then down to the homeplace. When I go home, and if nobody’s coming from the other direction, I bank off the left side of the blacktop, accelerate again as the turn tightens, then, at the last possible moment, I take my foot off the gas and let momentum carry me halfway up the lane. Even my little Firebird will kick up a wide arc of dirt if I’ve cut it sharp enough, but it takes a longbed pickup to sling a really good nasty.
Daddy used to growl about the ruts the boys made fish-tailing their trucks in and out of the lane, but all his life he’d slung too many nasties of his own not to let them get away with it most of the time.
Tonight I had the road to myself, and I wasn’t going home. Instead I banked on the curve, gave it enough gas to corner sweetly, and raced across the bridge doing close to 85.
A few hundred feet past the bridge, I saw headlights in the distance and reluctantly took my foot off the gas pedal and switched my own lights back on. As I flicked them back to high after the other car roared past, I caught a glimpse of fluorescent orange ribbons tied to a stake on the opposite ditch bank and I almost stood on the brakes.
Surveyor’s ribbons.
Oh, shit. Not out here, too.
I tried to remember whose land this was. I could hope it was merely someone selling off his timber, but I’ve seen too many of those orange ribbons across Colleton County these last few years not to realize that they could signal yet another new subdivision.
Ever since I-40 came through, linking Wilmington, North Carolina with Barstow, California, not to mention putting much of Colleton County within forty minutes of the Research Triangle, more and more of our fields and woodlands have been bulldozed under for cheap housing.
No, I don’t want us to go back to 1910 or to mules and wagons that took six hours to haul a load of watermelons to Raleigh, but damn I hate how cars and highways are destroying the places where I grew up.
I’d have to worry about it another time though because I was coming up on Dallas Stancil’s house. Since I hadn’t given it much thought in the last few years, I had to look sharp or miss the turn-in—especially since my headlights didn’t seem to be as bright as they should be even though I’d had a new battery installed less than a month ago.
First comes Mr. Jap’s trashy, unlovely place—a boarded-up cinderblock garage set back from the road in a grove of oaks. Moonlight glinted dully on the old tin roof. In summer, shoulder-high hogweeds disguise the rusted hulks of junker cars out back, and curtains of kudzu and Virginia creeper swing over the tumbledown sheds where more derelicts sit on concrete blocks. In winter, when all the weeds die and the vines wither, the place is a true eyesore; but there aren’t any zoning laws out here nor many neighbors to complain about Jap Stancil’s mess.
I saw lights at the rear of the old man’s house and several cars and pickups were parked by his back door.
That surprised me a little. I’d have thought he’d be on down at his son’s house, grieving with his daughter-in- law.
Whose name, I suddenly realized, had fled from my mind.
A couple of hundred feet further along, past a thicket of sassafras, wild cherries and scrub pines, was the mailbox with Dallas’s name painted on it and I turned in.
And there I got another surprise.
A house of bereavement is normally lit up like a Christmas tree. Cars come and go, men stand around in the yard talking, and women stream in and out of the house bearing enough food to get Moses halfway to the Promised Land.
Not here.
The front part of the brick house Dallas had built for his second wife—one of the Otlee sisters from Makely— was dark and unwelcoming. As I drove around to the back (out in the country, some front doors haven’t been opened in ten years), only the kitchen and porch lights were on. Dallas’s rig was parked off to the side underneath one of those tall security lights, and yellow crime scene ribbons marked the place where he must have died.
Further up the lane, another security light guarded a black Nissan pickup and a single-wide mobile home. I’d heard that Dallas had let his stepdaughter move her trailer in when her husband lost his job at the lumber yard in Makely. A blue Toyota truck and a white Ford sedan were parked in the carport and a black-and-silver Jeep Cherokee stood near the back steps.
For a moment, I was tempted to turn around and drive right out again, wondering if those bailiffs were mistaken about who’d been shot.
But then I remembered the sheriff’s deputy. They couldn’t all be wrong.
I got out of the car with more confidence than I felt and carried Aunt Zell’s casserole before me like a shield against awkwardness. I figured whoever walked me back to the car later could carry in the ice and soft drinks.
The inner door was open on this warm evening and as I came up onto the porch, a plump young woman with lots of curly brown hair got up from the table and met me at the screen door. Dallas’s stepdaughter?
I didn’t know
This was getting to seem more and more of a bad idea, but I took a deep breath and gave her my best politician’s funeral smile, half friendly, half mournful.
“I’m Deborah Knott,” I said. “I used to be a neighbor of Dallas’s.”
She wore green biker pants that were two sizes too small for those hefty thighs and a ruffled pink-and-green striped top that was so loose I couldn’t tell if she was pregnant or merely overweight. Her eyes were swollen and her round pink face was blotched from crying as she held open the screen. “Ma’s over there.”
