ART DIDN’T hesitate when I asked if he’d be willing to accompany me to Georgia. “When you want to go?”
“Whenever you can,” I said. “I was supposed to be testifying this week at Garland Hamilton’s trial, but that particular engagement seems to have been postponed for now. And UT doesn’t start fall classes for another couple weeks. How short a leash are you on with this Internet assignment?”
“If we left early in the morning and could get back by late afternoon, I can probably swing it,” he said. “The chat rooms don’t start heating up till around three or four, and they stay pretty lively till bedtime. Tiffany needs to be in school all day anyhow-that’s where innocent little fourteen-year-olds are supposed to be between eight and three-thirty. Unless it’s the weekend, and then they’re sleeping late.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“How ’bout I pick you up around six-thirty? That would put us down there around eight.”
“How ’bout five-thirty,” he said, “so we’ve got time to grab breakfast at a Cracker Barrel down Chattanooga way?”
“Deal,” I said. “I’ll buy.”
“I think your buddy Grease should pick up the tab.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “Grease’ll buy.”
“Be good for you to get out of town for a day,” he said, “and away from the Hamilton stuff.”
He was right about that, too.
CHAPTER 14
FRIDAY MORNING DAWNED HOT AND BRIGHT, AND BY the time it dawned, Art and I had been on the road for an hour already. At seven we bailed off the interstate at the Ooltewah exit, about ten miles north of Chattanooga. The acres of asphalt outside Cracker Barrel were virtually empty.
“This parking lot is nearly as big as Neyland Stadium’s,” I said.
“An hour from now, it’ll be full,” said Art. “You’d have to wait thirty minutes to get a table.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said.
“Wouldn’t have to?”
“Wouldn’t wait,” I clarified. “I love the food here. Great breakfast, great vegetables. But I’m not willing to wait half an hour to get it.”
“Me neither,” said Art. “I might be, though, if they’d ever get the biscuits right.”
“You’re boycotting them over their biscuits?”
“Not boycotting, exactly,” he said, “but less likely to fight the crowd on account of ’em. You’d think a place that prides itself on southern country cooking would make a decent biscuit, but theirs are sorry. Heavy and doughy, too much baking powder, or maybe they’re even using Bisquick. The ones at Hardee’s are ten times better. Golden and crispy on the outside, light as air on the inside.”
“Hardee’s does make a better biscuit,” I agreed. “We should point that out to Cracker Barrel. In the spirit of constructive criticism, of course.”
“I have,” he squawked. “I do. Every blessed time I eat at a Cracker Barrel, I fill out one of those customer- comment cards. ‘Your biscuits are sorry,’ I say.”
“That’s your idea of constructive criticism?”
“It gets more constructive after that. ‘Make better biscuits,’ I tell ’em. ‘Hire a biscuit maker from Hardee’s.’ You’d think they’d get the message. But they never do-not unless they’ve been hiring folks from Hardee’s and then making them follow the same sorry Cracker Barrel biscuit recipe. I’ve pretty much given up now. Always get the corn muffins instead.”
“The corn muffins aren’t bad,” I said.
“They’re not,” he said, “but at breakfast you really want a good biscuit. And anyhow, you’d think-”
“Yeah, you’d think,” I said. “This world is a vale of tears, Art-rife with injustice and disappointment.”
“And sorry biscuits,” he said.
The peach pancakes were delicious, and the smoked sausage was worth every deadly glob of cholesterol. But I couldn’t help wishing for a decent biscuit, soaked in butter and honey, for dessert. I reached for the customer- comment card and wrote. Art did the same.
AFTER CLIMBING East Ridge and dropping down into the broad valley that cradled Chattanooga, we took the Rossville Boulevard exit and headed south on U.S. 27, through the town of Fort Oglethorpe and then the well-tended lawns and woods of Chickamauga Battlefield, where the Army of the Confederacy had won a stunning victory, only to lose the bigger prizes of Chattanooga and then Atlanta not long afterward. South of Chickamauga the highway ran mostly straight and flat through stretches of pinewoods and pastures, punctuated by service stations, hair salons, and Baptist churches. We passed the crossroads of East Turnipseed and West Turnipseed roads, and a few miles beyond those we turned off the highway onto the blacktop road Miranda had marked on the map. The road was a lane and a half wide, with no centerline. Art and I both watched for a crematorium sign, but there wasn’t any. When we got to the end of the road, I knew we’d missed it. I turned and retraced the blacktop route, partly because I was determined to find the place and partly because there was no other way back to civilization.
About a quarter mile after doubling back, I saw a gravel driveway on the left. The drive was blocked with a metal farm gate, the kind that resembles a ladder that’s four feet high and ten feet wide, the rungs made of tubular galvanized steel. A stout chain and padlock fastened the gate to a fat wooden fence post. A battered mailbox was nailed to the top of the post, and when I looked closely, I made out the name LITTLEJOHN in small, hand-painted letters.
Fastened to the posts at both ends of the gate were large No Trespassing signs. Underneath each of those was another sign, adding Private Property. Under each of those was one that ordered Keep Out.
“Not a very welcoming establishment,” I said to Art.
I pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road, not that there was much risk of traffic, as best I could tell. Art and I clambered out and stood at the gate, peering down a tunnel of trees and underbrush lining the gravel drive. We could see about fifty yards down the narrow drive before it entered a gradual curve and the view was blocked by a wall of trees. I listened for sounds of human activity, but all I could hear was the chittering of cicadas in the summer heat.
“Hello,” I called, tentatively at first. When I got no answer, I called again, louder. “Hello there. Can you hear me? Anybody there?” Still no response. I tried once more, this time at the top of my lungs. Nothing. I went to the truck, leaned in the open window, and honked the horn three times. I waited a minute, then laid on it awhile.
“I could be wrong,” said Art finally, “but I’m thinking either they’re not home or they don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Could be they’re deaf,” I said. I studied the six signs posted on either side of the gate. All six encouraged me not to enter the property, but I’d driven three hours to get here and I was seeking answers to what I considered disturbing questions. I looked at Art. “Shall we?”
“Age before beauty,” he said, waving me toward the gate. Using the bars of the gate as a ladder, I climbed over, turned around, and descended the other side.
My foot had scarcely touched the ground when I heard a low snarling sound. I spun. Rocketing down the driveway toward me, mouth agape and teeth bared, was the biggest, meanest-looking pit bull I’d ever seen. He moved remarkably fast for such a big animal, and I found myself moving with surprising swiftness, too, back up the bars of the gate, over the top, and down the other side. I’d just removed my hands from the top bar when a pair of jaws snapped shut like a bear trap, an inch away from my fingers. The dog was too big to get more than his muzzle through the bars, but that didn’t stop him from lunging and snapping. I remembered a documentary I’d seen once on Animal Planet, in which a shark attacked the bars of a protective cage so ferociously that it gradually began bending the bars aside, nearly consuming the human quivering inside. Fortunately, this gate was made of sterner stuff; it rattled and strained against the chain, but it held.
Eventually the dog’s fury subsided a bit, but not the sense of menace it conveyed, and I decided we’d
