(2007) Chasing Fireflies - A Novel of Discovery (2 page)

The driver of the Impala was female. Skinny fingers. Thin skin. White knuckles. A half-empty brown bag bottle pressed between her high-mileage thighs. Sunglasses dwarfed her face, covering the hollow sockets, and a purple shawl covered her ears and hair. She was screaming at someone on the other side of the spiderweb.

The boy next to her might have been eight, but his meals had been sporadic and less than nutritious. He looked like an alley cat in a ghost town. He wore only cutoff jeans-fraying across his thighs like dandelion wisps. A safety pin held together the right hinge of his glasses, and both lenses were grooved with deep scratches.

The glasses had been given to him by one of the men who was not his dad. They had been at Wal-Mart walking past the optometrist. The kid tugged on the man's leg, looked at the doctor's door, and then at the man. The man frowned and walked over to the bin where folks throw their old glasses. He looked over his shoulder, and then stuck his arm into the mouth of the mailbox, pulling out the first pair his hand touched. He turned them over in his hands, and then slammed them on the kid's face. "There. Better?" The kid looked at the scars on the man's hand, the grease under his fingernails, and nodded. That'd been two years ago.

The kid looked straight ahead, clutching a spiral-bound notebook and pen. His skin was white and covered in scars. Some new, some old, all painful. Some were circular, about the size of the head of a pencil, while others were about an inch in length and maybe half an inch wide. On his back, in the middle of his right shoulder blade, the most recent wound oozed.

The woman turned toward the kid, pointed an uncertain finger in his face, and continued screaming. In the background a hollow, distant horn sounded. The kid didn't flinch. He'd quit flinching a while ago.

She grabbed the brown bag, sucked hard on the courage, and turned her spit-filled tirade back at the windshield. In the distance, the train's headlamp appeared.

She pounded the steering wheel, sucked hard again, and then backhanded the kid, rocking his head off the right door. He picked his glasses off the floorboard but never let go of the notebook.

Her fingers tapped the seat next to her while she caught her breath. She lit a cigarette, breathed deeply, and then exhaled out the window. He watched the glow out of the corner of his eye. Two more quick puffs, one more swig, and then she ran her fingers through his hair. It had been cropped short, shorn like a sheep, and the back of his head looked like a soccer ball where patches were missing.

A half mile away, the train passed a white signal post and sounded again. She finished off the bottle, stamped out the cigarette, and then placed her hand on his shoulder. Her finger touched a scabbing scar, causing her brow to wrinkle and sending tears cascading down a face stretched taut across her skull. The temperature hovered in the eighties, but the kid shivered beneath a blanket of sweat and a trickle of puss. As if flipping a switch, she threw the bottle at the face beyond the windshield. It ricocheted off the dash and the empty carton of Winstons. Another long horn caught her attention. She turned to the boy, pointed again, and screamed from her belly-the veins in her neck bulging like kudzu vines.

The kid shook his head, his shoulders trembling. The woman banged the steering wheel, pointed at the train, and then reached across the car and backhanded the kid hard across the mouth. His head flew back, slammed into the side of the door, and sent his glasses and both lenses flying in three separate directions across the asphalt. His hands clutched the notebook, and his arms and face shook as the blood trickled out his nose. When he still didn't budge, she reached across him, threw open the car door, and then leaned against her door, raising her heel high.

The horn was constant now, as was her scream. When the rumble of the train shook the car and the clackingof the wheels hammered in his eardrums, she gripped the steering wheel with one hand and the seat back with the other, then let go with her foot and caught him square in the temple, rocketing him out of the car. The blow sent him tumbling like Raggedy Ann while the notebook spun through the air like a Frisbee. His limp body skidded across the asphalt, rolled across the gravel and a patch of broken glass, and tumbled down into the ditch, where his nose came to rest just inches from the water.

With the train just four car-lengths away, she redlined the tachometer, threw the stick into first, ground gear on gear, and lurched forward.

Six feet later the tires stopped spinning, and several of the lug nuts snapped off from the impact.

The hundred-plus car train, traveling nearly sixty miles an hour and ferrying Toyotas to the port in Jacksonville, T-boned the car, which bent in the middle like a boomerang, then arced upward like some sick synthesis of a Harrier jet and a knuckleball. It sailed across the tops of the seven-year-old saplings and landed like a meteor in a bed of fresh pine straw. A hundred feet too late, the conductor slammed the brake amidst a chorus of Mother Marys.

A half mile later, the train-nearly a mile in length-stopped. Screaming into a radio, the conductor jumped off his engine and ran flat-footed toward the flames. By the time he arrived, the paint had bubbled and the tires had melted. Seeing the driver's fingers still wrapped around the wheel, he covered his nose and averted his eyes.

Twenty minutes later the paramedics arrived, along with two fire engines, a sheriff's deputy, and a farmer who'd seen the explosion from his tractor more than a mile away. In the three hours they spent dousing and talking about the fire, the explosion, and what remained of the woman, they never saw the kid, and he never uttered a word.

stepped out into the sunlight humming a Pat Green tune, slipped on my sunglasses, and stared out over the courthouse steps. After three days of incarceration, not much had changed. Brunswick, Georgia, was like that. Discarded bubblegum, flat as half-dollars, dotted the steps like splattered ink. Lazy, blimpish pigeons strutted the sidewalk begging for bread scraps or the sprinkles off somebody's double-shot mocha latte. In the alley across the street, an entire herd of stray cats crept toward the wharf just four blocks down. The sound of seagulls told them the shrimp boats had returned. And on the steps next to me, two officers lifted a tattooed man, whose feet and hands were shackled and cuffed, up the steps and, undoubtedly, into Judge Thaxton's courtroom. Based on the mixture of saliva and epithets coming out of his mouth, he wasn't too crazy about going. No worries. Given my experience with Her Honor, his stay in her courtroom wouldn't be long.

His next short-term home would be a holding cell downstairs. These were cold, dark, windowless, and little more than petri dishes for mold and fungi. I know this because I've been in them on more than one occasion. The first time I stayed here as a guest, I scratched Chase was here into the concrete block wall. This time I followed it up with Twice. Makes me laugh to think about it. Sort of following in Unc's footsteps.

Two blocks down, rising above the rest of town like the Ferris wheel at a county fair, stood the bell tower above the Zuta Bank and Trust. Most churches-turned-banks have that. At the turn of the century, its Russian Orthodox congregation had dwindled down to nothing, leaving the priest to roam the basement like the Phantom in his catacomb.

And while the Silver Meteor was the most famous rail ever to run these woods, she couldn't hold a candle to the one that ran underground.

When the first Russian immigrants appeared in the late 1800s, they built on an existing footprint. A hundred years earlier, the local inhabitants had built their own meetinghouse. The building served several purposes: town hall, church, and shelter. Unique to the structure was a basement. Because much of South Georgia rests so close to the water table, they dug the basement into a hill, then lined the walls and floors with several feet of coquina. This did not mean it stayed dry, but it was dry enough. Through two trapdoors and one hidden stairwell, the townsfolk survived multiple Indian attacks and two Spanish burnings of the building above. Few today know about the basement. Maybe just the four of us. Sure, folks know it was there at one time, but most think it was filled in when the ZB&T was built. Scratchings on the walls show the names of slaves who knelt in the dark, listened, and prayed while dogs sniffed above.

Eventually the Phantom vacated as well, leaving the building empty for nearly a decade. Hating to see it go to waste and needing a place from which to loan money, a local businessman bought the building, ripped out half the pews, one confessional, and most of the altar, and installed counters and a vault. Local sentiment swayed in his favor. The depression was still fresh on people's minds, and in that mind-set you couldn't let a perfectly good building go to waste. If you built the church, don't take it personally. Just because folks around here don't like your brand of God doesn't mean they don't like your brand of architecture. Count your blessings. Most in Glynn County echoed this sentiment. Some of the locals proudly traced their roots to the Founding Fathers-the English prisoners sent from England to inhabit the colony back before the Revolution. Such sentiment was not unique; folks in Australia did the same. In the sticks of Brunswick, Georgia, rebellion was as hardwired into the DNA of the residents as was the love of Georgia Bulldog football.

While South Georgia found itself squarely embedded in the Bible Belt, and most churches were filled on Sundays, only Saturdays were sacred. Saturday afternoons from September to December, folks huddled around the altar of an AM station and worshipped the red and black of the Bulldogs. And while local pastors were much admired and respected, none carried the weight of the radio voice of the Bulldogs, Larry Munson. If Larry said anything at all, it was gospel. Throughout the decades, much has been written about Notre Dame and Touchdown Jesus, The Crimson Tide and Bear Bryant, and Penn State and Paterno, but from the salt marsh to the mountains, it was a certifiable fact that God himself was a Georgia Bulldog. How else did Larry Munson break his chair?

November 8, 1980. A minute to go in the fourth quarter. The Gators led the Bulldogs by a point. The Bulldogs had the ball, but ninety-three yards stood between them, the goal line, and their shot at the national title. On the second play of the game, Herschel Walker had bounced off a tackle and scorched seventy-two yards for six points and the beginnings of immortality. Now he stood on the field, having rushed for more than two hundred yards, either a target or a decoy. Buck Belue of Valdosta, Georgia, took the snap, pump faked-causing Florida Gator Tony Lilly to stumble-and dumped the ball down the left sideline to Lindsey Scott, who high-stepped ninety-three yards and joined Herschel atop Mt. Olympus. Amidst the mayhem in the press box, Larry Munson would break his folding chair, solidifying his place alongside the commentating gods and inside the heart of every man, woman, and child in the state of Georgia. Sports Illustrated later called it the "Play of the Decade," and many sportswriters agreed that Herschel Walker was the greatest athlete ever to play college football.

Folks in Georgia need no further argument. The State rests.

My office at the Brunswick Daily sat across the street, looking down on me. I could see the rolling slide show of my screen saver shining through my third-story window. My perch. As a reporter assigned to the court beat, I kept my finger on the court's pulse by watching these steps. The sign above my head read GLYNN COUNTYJAIL, but I didn't turn and look at it. Didn't need to.

After three days in jail, I was pretty sure that my editor had bitten his nails to the quick and was up there eyeing me from his perch, just seconds from walking out the double doors across the street. I looked east, toward the water and my boat. Home sounded like a good idea. I needed to get a shower, put on some deodorant, and breathe something other than dank cell stench. The paper could wait.

Uncle Willee sat in the driver's seat smiling at me from beneath his wide-brimmed palmetto leaf hat, called a "Gus." It's a cowboy hat for hot weather, a lightweight version of the hat made famous by Robert Duvall in Lonesome Dove. The brim was soiled and crown wrinkled, worn dirty by a farrier with a fishing addiction. It sagged a bit around the edges but curled up at the ends-a mirrored contrast to his face.

I stuffed my hands in my pockets and sniffed the salty air blowing in over St. Simons, across the marsh, and bringing with it the ripe smell of curdling salt and mud-a function of our geography. The Gulf Stream, some hundred and fifty miles due east, keeps constant pressure against the East Coast's most western edge-something akin to a hedge-causing the "Bermuda High." Thanks to it, the Golden Isles live under a constant sea breeze that keeps both the nosee-ums-invisible gnats with an attitude-and hurricanes at bay.

The coastal rivers of Georgia, like the Satilla, the Altamaha, and the Little Brunswick, flow out of the west Georgia mountains through the Buffalo Swamp and empty into the cordgrass of the marsh flats. Like a seine made of cheesecloth, the marsh filters the flow and sifts the sediment, creating a pluffy, soft mud.