(15)

The boy was having a screaming fit in the morning, early, when we left, after toast and scrambled eggs; after a night sleeping on a couch too short for me while Moira snored in the boy's room and the boy in Marcia's bed. I was never so glad to leave anyplace.

It was rush hour on the 40, but I rode between the lanes, occasionally hitting a sideview mirror as I went past the crawling traffic at a reckless clip. These days, with the oversized pick-ups and SUVs,  there isn't a lot of room for splitting lanes. Things opened up outside Memphis, then clogged a little going through Nashville, where I topped off the tank and Moira had a vicious texting cat-fight with June Colt's sister. She ignored the Total Bitch.

I was determined to ironman it out, so we went straight on to Knoxville through the foothills of the Smoky Mountains and turned north on the 75, then up to the 25 East with the sun glaring on my shades, without a stop until we got on Highway 11 in the boondocks. I gassed up in Cannon, a town of well-spaced tidy farm lots with red roofs and the surrounding forests beginning to turn from green to amber and red, but just a hint of it, like a sprinkling of blood.

Now it was like the roads were gullies winding through the wooded hills, and twice we stopped so I could check my bearings. Eventually we came to Little Bull Creek Road, which we dubbed Little Bullshit Road, and turned up a dirt route that followed a dry stream bed through thick forest where no bird sang and the sun was bits of tin in the overhanging limbs.

After awhile the shadows parted like a curtain and we came to a dirt drive as bumpy as a washboard. The house was a wooden tombstone amidst memorial bouquets; really a messy garden plot that encircled a barracks-like structure with a broad screened-in porch and split-log steps.

I had talked to Gwen to get precise directions, twice, and there she sat on the middle step to see her handiwork, her elbows on her knees, stringy black hair just short of her jawline, a pleasant face with small but pretty eyes more gold than brown. She was wearing an airy flower-print shift that drooped between her knees, hardly enough to conceal what seemed black panties. Maybe that was the reason for her big smile. She knew I was looking as I rode straight on toward her and braked not six inches from her sandaled feet. She didn't budge an inch.

"I liked your voice," she said. "And this is Moira." She stood up, all five-eight of her, slender and stately. I introduced her to Moira after the girl did her awkward little dance. I could see that Gwen was just tolerating her presence. She had thought I was dropping off a hitchhiker in town somewhere, which is what I seemed to imply when I was texting her in Marcia's kitchen. The smile she gave me was a facade, with questions staring out at me from the windows. We shook hands. This mollified her for the time being. She stared at me as though I was a noble artifact she had only seen before in books. As for Moira, she acted like a headstrong schoolgirl facing an unpopular teacher. Her cheerful attitude was gone. What she had really been feeling about this diversion was now out in the open.

But Gwen played the considerate hostess. She got Moira settled in a basket chair on the porch, a glass of lemonade in hand, and acquainted her with Ruff and Tuff, a pair of black mongrels with brown eyebrows. Moira, for her part, pretended to like them. I noticed her darting glances at the weedy field beyond the garden. She liked the look of the place, wished even that it belonged to her, but all was spoiled by the circumstances.

"Will you help me for a minute?" Gwen asked me as she took my arm and opened the screen door to the front room.  "Moira, we'll be right back."

I followed her through a narrow room of authentically antique furniture smothered in doilies and crocheted shawls, through a narrow kitchen dominated by a cast-iron stove, and down a hall flanked by two small bedrooms and a bath, out onto the back porch, a duplicate of the front one.

Here she paused just long enough to fish a dripping bottle of lager from a chest full of ice water, hand it to me, and take a deep breath before saying, "It's been fucking hell!"

So I knew then that she still wanted out of there. She took a pack of Camels from her skirt pocket. I took two cigs, put both in my mouth, lit them, and gave one to her. "Reb?" I asked. She blew smoke in a sideways slant and said, "I see him maybe three times a year. I didn't mind until I ran my man off, a drunken lout. I don't know, two-three months ago."

"How do you get by?"

"Sewing and laundry, and welfare," she said bitterly. "Reb's no help."

She added quickly, "Sorry," knowing quite rightly that I was no better than her brother. She got a handful of my shirt and pulled me forward just the slightest bit. "Can you stay long?" she asked. But what she meant was, 'Will you get rid of the girl?'

One of the dogs barked. I had nothing to add to it.