mixed with the ash from the broken forest. As Arch weaved in and out of the maze, the fall moon hanging low, full and bright, he lost himself for a moment, half expecting to see his breath crystallize before him. Instead, he stopped, his heart jackhammering in his chest, and took another drink. He decided to walk back to his house for his keys and shaving kit. He stopped for only a moment, Madeline awake now, and kissed her on the cheek and told her he’d be right back.
“Arch?” she asked. “Where are you going?”
But he had already started his car, a new-model Pontiac, and he turned quickly from the gravel and the new boxed ranch with big modern glass windows that let in plenty of light and out onto the open road, the moon a traveling friend as he headed back to the soft glow of Phenix, soon finding the turn to Highway 80 and Montgomery. He lit endless cigarettes and finished the last of the Jack Daniel’s, both hands on the wheel and sweating, hearing only the purr of the big motor and the warm morning air coming in through the windows as he got to Montgomery, quickly cutting south and soon finding daybreak just around Fort Deposit. But it was a false dawn, just purple and black, and in the darkness he watched the Alabama city signs flash by, in minutes and hours or seconds, coming right after one another. GREENVILLE, CHAPMAN, EVERGREEN, CASTLEBERRY, POLLARD, FLOMATON, ATMORE. And soon it was midmorning, and he looked at the scruffy, unshaven face in the rearview mirror before crossing the bridge over Mobile Bay and through the little town of Grand Bay – where he stopped for two cups of coffee, gas, and to use the bathroom – and then over the Mississippi line, hugging the green shore of the Gulf of Mexico, and the little beach towns mixed with the big ones, taking him to places he hadn’t been in years, not since becoming county solicitor in ’47, and he crossed through Pascagoula, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pass Christian, and over the St. Louis Bay. It was late summer, and children played on wide green lawns and people sat on wide stately porches built sometime around the Civil War, living in their own world covered in a canopy of ancient oaks disguised in those sloppy beards of moss.
Before he knew it, he was in Louisiana, with New Orleans seeming like a dream. In the roughneck town of Morgan City, he stopped for a piss again and found himself in a vile, filthy bathroom puking in a dirty toilet, and when he washed his face in the lavatory he had no idea why his nerves had acted up.
He bought a Coca-Cola and a piece of fried chicken to settle himself, pumping gas, and moving on over the bayou in New Iberia and Lafayette. It all was a storybook down there, with the wildness of it all and all the little waterways and clapboard shacks and sunburned people with sharp eyes who seemed to see something in the man with the Alabama plates that made them stare. Hell, he wasn’t even tired by the time he hit the Texas line and Port Arthur by Sabine Lake and hugged the lapping green waves of the Gulf, feeling stifled and hot and sweaty even though the windows were down, the Gulf and Texas bringing him nothing but humidity and hellfire gospels and twangy country music on the radio.
He knew that if he was caught, they’d revoke his bond, but he was sick of just sitting on the couch smoking cigarettes and drinking Jim Beam and watching
When he got near Galveston, he found a city park to change into a seersucker suit and black shoes. He mopped his face with a fresh handkerchief the whole ride out onto Galveston Island, listening to a sermon about the dangers of vanity and how even the slightest bit could invite the devil for dinner in your very home. The man said it as if the devil was a little red man in a red satin suit who could pass you the peas.
Arch found a circular drive winding its way to a grand old Victorian with a big wide porch where people in white spoke to each other from rocking chairs and played chess and cards. It looked like a postcard of heaven.
There was a nurse and then a doctor and then another nurse, and then finally they brought him out back to a soft little garden under two big oaks, a fine view facing the Gulf. A group of five or six people played croquet, and they laughed and cheered with each other, in their short pants and knit shirts, and, to Arch, they didn’t seem to be all that crazy.
He took off his coat and sat by the fountain under the canopy of oak arms with curtains of Spanish moss. He unbuttoned his tie and lit a cigarette, the aftereffects of the booze from a day ago floating through his head. He took a long breath as if it was his first since first starting his car early that morning.
Then he heard the squeak and turned to see Si Garrett being pushed along in a wheelchair, one arm and one leg in a cast, his neck in a high brace, looking like a curious turtle, his eyes magnified by those great circular glasses.
The nurse in the little white hat left them. Si didn’t say anything, and Arch just sat on the edge of the fountain, it trickling down in a soothing way along the rocks, mixing in a nice way with the Gulf surf.
“They don’t keep score,” Si said, finally.
Arch looked to him.
“Every one of them is crazy but doesn’t know it,” he said. Arch could tell it was hard for him to enunciate with the brace on his neck. “I told them I could keep score, you know. I can write with my left hand, and since I don’t seem to have much else to do I thought they would appreciate it.”
“When are you coming back?”
“That’s up to Dr. Edwards.”
“Who’s that?”
“My physician.”
“I didn’t figure he was your barber.”
“It’s in God’s hands now,” Garrett said. “I tried to come back. You know that. But it wasn’t meant to be.”
“You think God made you crash that car?”
“I felt the strangest sensation in my fingers before I veered off the road, as if someone had pulled my hands from the controls, to show me the way.”
“They showed you into a fucking tree.”
“Perhaps.”
“That’s funny,” Arch said, squinting into the smoke and watching the surf, feeling like Seale, Alabama, was on the other side of the earth. But he was ready to take that drive back just the same because it wasn’t a place he wanted to leave. It was a place where he wanted to make a stand. “I just kind of wanted to hear you say it.”
“Say what?”
“That you are a coward in hiding.”
“Are you angry?”
“Hell, no. I’m not angry. Why in God’s name would I be angry? My life has just been flushed down the toilet.”
“Would you push me to the ramp over there? The sunset looks so beautiful out in the ocean. The water looks like emeralds and gold.”
Arch stood behind Si Garrett and pushed his heavy mass around the garden and the croquet court and up onto a wooden landing and a small boardwalk. They were in full sun now, but every few moments the sun would dip back into a stray cloud or two.
The two men watched the surf. They watched the sun drop near the lip of the ocean. They didn’t speak for a long time.
“Just what happened in that alley, Arch? Where did all this go so very wrong?”
“Nothing went wrong,” Arch said. “Everything went according to your plan. You said what we did was for the state of Alabama and that you’d protect us all. But where did you go, Si? Are you hiding in there?”
Si just looked out at the water.
“I never hurt a soul,” Arch said. “I dare any man to say that what I did was wrong.”
A COUPLE OF GUARDSMEN FOUND HER LATER THAT NIGHT. She must’ve been there for at least a day, they said, broken and bleeding on a big gray slab of rock on the banks of the Chattahoochee. Her dress had been torn away, and the hard rains from the night before had left her shriveled and pale, her body curled and white on top of the rock dimpled with pocks of green mossy water. The men had been walking patrols and had heard her animal cries, until the swath of their flashlights found her body. She was naked and bloody and resembled something out of an old mariner’s book. Her breathing came in ragged gasps of air and muddy water.
