Drifting South

“About our age, I’d reckon.”

“Where’s she now?” I asked.

“She’s checking in at the Alton House. Had three leather bags. I carried them in for her and she tipped me three dollars before ol’ Mr. Alton saw me and started running me off.”

“Three dollars? Shit.”

Herbert showed me the money and I couldn’t figure what a good-looking rich girl with three dollars to blow was doing looking for me. It had to be for a bad reason because I couldn’t come up with a good one.

“What’s she look like?”

“Just wait till you see her.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“You know that blond dancer that came through here a while back performing at Barton’s Opry Show? Me and you kept sneaking in and—”

“Yeah.”

“She looks like her, but even prettier. She sorta don’t belong here though like that dancer did, know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“When she first pulled up and asked me where the best place to stay is, I told her, and then I asked if she needed help with the bags because she looked so rich and everything. She looked scared, too.”

“What’d you do?”

“No, I was kind to her. She was just scared looking, I don’t know.”

“You sure she asked for me?”

“I’m sure. She asked me if I knew Benjamin Purdue.”

“You swear it.”

“I swear, Ben.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told her I knew you and that me and you were pals.”

“What’d she say then?”

“She wanted to know where you lived but I didn’t tell her. I didn’t know if you’d want me saying you lived overtop a saloon to a girl like her, so I just said that I’d find you and tell you to meet her at the Alton House.”

“She with anybody else?”

“I didn’t see nobody.”

“Get her name?”

“She told me, but I ain’t sure if it’s right, because she told me when she was digging in her purse handing me those bills, and I saw a lot of other bills in there, but I think she said her name is Anna or Amanda, Annie, something like that.”

I felt nervous all of a sudden when he said Amanda.

I thought as hard as I could. I’d known a few gals named Ann but only one Amanda. None of the Anns would come close to the description of this girl Herbert had just given me. Not even Anna Jean Davis. But Amanda Lynn would.

But it couldn’t be Amanda Lynn. Couldn’t be. She lived in Durham County, North Carolina, on a plantation a thousand times the size of Shady Hollow, with tended gardens and pastures, and tobacco and soybeans and field corn growing as far as you could see. It was then that I recalled the new Ford up the street had North Carolina plates.

“Amanda Lynn Jennings?” I asked.

“That’s it,” Herbert said. “Amanda Jennings.”

I drew back and couldn’t say another word as Miss Paulene brought me my fish chowder. She always gave me a local’s portion with big chunks of catfish and set it down in front of my stool with buttered crackers and the free side of barbeque slaw, but I looked at all of it, and then at Herbert, and then flew out the double doors. I didn’t even think to pick up the four cents change she’d left on the napkin.

“Who is she?” Herbert yelled, as I took off out of Merle’s like the place was burning down around me. I didn’t know right then that it may as well have been.

I’d never see that place or any of those folks ever again.

Chapter 4

At some place outside of a dirty window that separated me from all of what I couldn’t stop staring at on the Trail-ways bus, I found myself drifting back to Shady Hollow, back to when I was free and running with the devil at my heels. I was young and fast then, but he was about to catch up to me as I tried to holler something back at Herbert. In that old memory, I couldn’t say a word, as naturally talky as I was back then, generally. I’d been quiet like that, too, around Amanda Lynn the first time I ever saw her, for a short spell anyway when she’d first cast her spell on me, and just the thought of her showing up in Shady so unexpected had knocked the wind right out of me.

I knew Herbert wasn’t trying to pull one on me because I’d never told him about Amanda Lynn or where I’d been taken the year before. After the elders had hauled me back to Shady, Ma told me to never tell nobody about going to Durham County because the elders had ruled on it. I never did because the last thing I needed was to get on the wrong side of the Shady elders.

But ever since they’d brought me back home, I never told Ma or nobody else that I’d been saving up to go back to North Carolina to be with Amanda Lynn one day. I couldn’t wait to get back there.

I always told folks in Shady Hollow that I didn’t have nothing but a bent slug dime, but I had a canvas sack full of real money, twelve hundred and fifty-seven dollars and change, most of it poker loot from the days when nobody knew I was lucky but was only just catching on to it. I’d saved all of it and kept it hidden under a floorboard that I’d pried up in my bedroom, and I had a ten-dollar bill hidden in my shoe at all times just like Uncle Ray had told me a man should keep.

My road stake was to go back and find Amanda Lynn when I turned eighteen, because that’s the day Ma had always told me I’d have my own way about things. And even though Ma wasn’t firm about much, she’d always been firm about that with all her boys. My eighteenth birthday was coming around soon enough, and that’s the day I’d planned to leave Shady Hollow.

A tugging part of me didn’t want to leave because I loved Shady, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d be moving up Hoke’s pool shooting ladder to play the bigger games. But I never ever figured that Amanda Lynn would come there, so I always figured I’d have to leave. It would be hard saying farewell to my ma and brothers and all my old pards, I dern knew it would, but the older I got, I felt that place shrinking around me. I was being pulled away from there a little at a time even before I met Amanda Lynn.

The biggest part of me was pulling harder to leave than the tugging part of me was to stay, is what it was. That bigger part wanted to see all the things I’d heard so much about from so many who came and went from Shady. The best thing I’d ever seen was out beyond those mountains and far from the cold river that ran shallow and fast along the rocky banks, but so deep and slow and silent in the pools.

I’d never told Amanda Lynn anything about me but a pack of lies. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of me or Ma or my brothers or Shady or nothing like that, because I wasn’t.

But I guess Aunt Kate was right, telling me upon my welcome to the flatland the year before, that to someone who hadn’t spent time actually living on the side of the Big Walker in a whorehouse called the Last Rebel Yell, there didn’t seem a way to talk about any of it right that would come out without grit and dirt and blood and other things not suitable for dinner table talk all over it.

But Amanda Lynn had come to see me.

I didn’t know how she’d found me or why she’d come, but I kept hoping it was for the same reason that I wanted to go back and see her. I kept hoping that with all my might.

Running as hard as I could up the brushy banks of the river behind all of the businesses while trying to dodge cans smoldering with burning trash, and getting bit by chained-up dogs that were there to keep drunks from trespassing behind those same places, my mind was filled with Amanda Lynn and the times we’d spent together on the plantation. All of those long nights and the laziest days that went by too quick. I didn’t long for nothing else when I was with her. Nothing.

I wanted to hold her again to me tight so bad that it made me hurt all over. I prayed to myself, hoping that she’d be able to forgive me for just leaving her like I did with no notice and not a word or look said between us. And I prayed more that she wouldn’t ask me why I left so sudden, because I still didn’t know the full answer to that.

I still didn’t even know the real reason why my Aunt Kate took me away in the middle of the night to go there with Ma’s permission, except Ma said her and Aunt Kate finally agreed that a summer in North Carolina would do me some good.