Authors: Lisa Howorth
“I don’t think I’ll try to tell you
anything
, Cap’n Slay. I’d probably end up back there with the chicken parts.”
“But enough about me. How about some music? You wanna tune into that idiot preacher show, ‘Healing the Wheeling,’ on American Family Radio, or do you want a tape?” He suddenly straightened in his seat, ran a bandana over his face and hair, and composed his features—which had been pinched and twitchy—into a mask of serenity and normalcy. Mary Byrd sensed with relief that maybe his upper rush was over.
“A tape would be good,” she said.
Foote had great rig-rock: a mix tape he’d made of dozens of car and road songs, everything from the obvious stuff like “Bobby McGee” and “Deadman’s Curve” and “Leader of the Pack” to “Dynaflow Blues,” “East Bound and Down,” “Lost Highway,” and Jimmy Liggins’s “Cadillac Boogie,” the song, Foote maintained, Ike Turner had ripped off for “Rocket 88,” which was on the tape two times. And “Ramblin’ Man.” Was there anything better for driving and cheering you up than Dickey Betts? One of Mary Byrd’s local favorites was on there, too: the old blues singer Fairlane Ford’s “Cement Mixer Blues
”
:
I want to be a cement mixer, honey,
churnin’ it while we drive.
And if you don’t mix it with me, baby,
you won’t be goin’ home alive . . .
They listened, Foote and Mary Byrd, without saying a word for a long time.
The Beatles singing “Drive My Car” came on, giving Mary Byrd a little jolt; it had been Stevie’s favorite song on her
Rubber Soul
album that a boyfriend across the street had brought her back from England.
“Oh!” she said. “This song!” Foote ignored her.
Stevie must have been seven or eight and Mary Byrd had hauled out their mammoth Norelco tape recorder one day. She had wanted to record Stevie singing the song; she’d been babysitting him and trying to entertain them both, and she’d known her mom and Pop and Nick would be amused. They’d all listened to the tape so many times; it always cracked Nick and Stevie up. She still remembered every word of the tape. The two of them had been sitting on the floor in her room, and Stevie had only wanted to mess with the dials and the rotating tapes. She’d interviewed him first, to warm him up.
“Here we are talking to the famous rock ’n’ roll star Stevie Rhinehart. How are you, Stevie?” she’d asked.
“Can these wheels go faster, so we’ll sound like the Chipmunks?”
“Pay attention! You’re supposed to be one of the Beatles, dopey. If you do this, I’ll take you to Doc’s later for a cherry Coke and a candy bar.”
“O-
kay
, Mubba,” he’d said, grudgingly.
“And don’t call me that,” Mary Byrd had said. When he’d first come into the family, Mubba had been the best he could do for her name, and he still liked to use it because it annoyed her and got her attention, although he didn’t really get why. To her it sounded too much like “muvva.”
She had tried again. “Mr. Stevie, since you’re a rock ’n’ roll star, lots of girls want to know if you have a girlfriend. Can you tell us who she might be?”
“No-o-o-o,” he’d answered slyly. “But it’s not Sherrie,” he’d said, singsong, naming a girl in his class at school who Mary Byrd had known he had a crush on.
“It’s not Sherrie Finkelstein? Are you
sure
?”
“It’s . . .
you
,” he’d laughed.
Mary Byrd had broken character and laughed, too. “You know your sister can’t be your girlfriend, dummy.”
“Then it’s Mom,” he had said.
“And Mom can’t be your girlfriend either!” He had been sucking up, but it had made her happy that he liked his stepmother enough to even say that.
Switching back into interview mode, she had asked, “Well, Mr. Stevie, how about singing your favorite song, ‘Drive My Car,’ for all your fans?”
“Do I have to?” he’d said.
On the tape you could barely hear Mary Byrd whisper, “
Yes.
If you want to go to Doc’s. Stand up and do it!” She remembered how great it was to watch him pretending to play the guitar, doing an outstanding imitation of John Lennon’s plié playing style. Baby James could do it, too.
Stevie had begun singing in a desultory, gruff voice: “Baby, you can drive my truck. Yes, I’m going to be a duck.”
“Stevie, STOP!” she had shouted. “Why are you singing the wrong words?”
“Nick sings it that way!” he had said. “And there are some bad words, but if I sing them you’ll tell Mom or Pop.”
Mary Byrd had yelled, “Oh,
brother!
You’re both
hopeless.
” The tape ended there with Stevie chuckling goofily. She’d listened to it once after Stevie died, then thrown the old recorder and tape out.
Oh, brother
.
Foote watched his gauges and the slick road and the traffic and the signs, and Mary Byrd watched the windshield wipers and the low sky and the landscape and thought about Monday. She’d soon be in an office in downtown Richmond with some deadly serious strangers talking about deadly serious things. She guessed that Foote knew from Mann that she had something bad awaiting her, and that he was trying his rough best to distract and entertain her. Which was nice, even if it
was
dogfights and pig sphincters and hernias; it was still distraction and entertainment.
They stopped to eat at a truck stop. Foote had wanted to stop at a Cracker Barrel because he’d heard they didn’t hire queers. “You don’t need to tell Mann I said that,” he said.
“Gah. That’s a pretty . . .
wrong
thing to say.” She was pissed, given that Foote worked for Mann. “And Cracker Barrel learned their lesson. Why don’t you?”
“It’s nothing against them; I’d just as soon they didn’t handle my food. I would think you’d feel the same.”
Taken aback, Mary Byrd asked, “What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
Jeez. The truck stop café where they finally ended up was good, though. It had a wholesome meat-and-three menu, and she could see that there would be some fruitful trash-shopping in the gift shop. Many of the best presents she ever gave people came out of truck stops and roadside crap-o-toriums. And in the lot next door there was a fireworks store. They went ahead and ordered; Mary Byrd wanted a salad with chicken strips and Foote asked for the country-fried steak and vegetable plate. When the waitress asked him which vegetables he’d like from the list on the menu, he said, “Mac and cheese, grits, and bacon.”
“Bacon,” said the waitress, a pretty girl with too much makeup.
“Pork is a crop, isn’t it?” he asked Mary Byrd.
The waitress went away and Mary Byrd went to the gift area. There was a profusion of junk of all kinds: the usual stuff like Confederate license plates and incense and dream catchers and throat cutters or fish gutters—it was hard to tell what those things were for—and wooden hillbilly joke items, but there were a few finds. In with the wolf T-shirts and Tennessee shot glasses, Mary Byrd found perhaps the sickest thing ever: a shirt emblazoned with 50,000
battered women in america, and i’ve been eating mine plain
. Oddly, there was only one, and it had a worn look to it but it didn’t smell. She bought it so no one else could, and because it was so unbelievable. She also bought a pen in the shape of a finger that farted when you pulled it and a tiny Chihuahua that lifted its hind leg. Did the Chinese study us and watch our TV programs and make this stuff up, or did wacky Americans dream it up and go over there and have it made? Mary Byrd was ashamed to be buying the shirt and folded it so the middle-aged lady cashier could only see the price, not the slogan. While she waited in line, she looked over the disgusting generic candy selection: long, ropey jelly snakes, cotton candy in plastic tubs, Nik-L-Nips that looked left over from the fifties, candy barf and snot. Whatever had happened to Bonomo Turkish Taffy, Sky Bars, and BB Bats?
The cashier accepted her items, saying, “Isn’t that the funniest shirt?”
“Unbelievable,” said Mary Byrd.
They ate in silence, except for Mary Byrd trying to get Foote to eat some of her salad, and returned to the truck. Mary Byrd begged Foote to let her just run into the fireworks store and he said okay, but he didn’t turn off the roaring engine. Mary Byrd moved quickly around the fireworks display table and picked up some small ones, a Dragon Fart and a Monkey Drive. She loved the exotic, colorful graphics of the wrappers and boxes. They were gorgeous. William liked fart stuff –who didn’t—and monkeys, and he’d be happy to have a little stash; you couldn’t buy fireworks in the progressive state of Mississippi except around New Year’s and the Fourth of July. Probably she was a bad mother for giving her child fireworks. Big William often said he’d had to fix too many fingers and eyeballs because of them. Little boys adored explosives, though. William and his friends were crazy for them. Nick and Stevie had been, too. Big boys loved them as well, she thought, and that’s why we have war.
Back on the road again, headed across Tennessee toward the mountains, Foote and Mary Byrd rode quietly, a little bored and disappointed with each other and amusing themselves by reading off the weird roadside messages and bumper stickers they saw. It had started raining again, and the clouds were dark behind them. The backs of other trucks seemed to have become the new venue for religion and patriotism: 100%
american
and
on duty for america
and
jesus: legal in all 50 states
. What did that even
mean
? Foote might be a far-to-the-right kind of guy, but he wasn’t a big fan of Jesus. “Jesus,” he told her, “was just a big ole Socialist.”
Crossing into Virginia they began to see old churches and houses that still dotted the hills, charming as calendar photos, but more common were huge steel structures like airplane hangars or skating rinks. One near Wytheville looked like a flimsy, art deco twelve-plex theater with an electric billboard out front declaring that it was
the
church in the now
. Whatever that meant. As if anything in southwestern Virginia could even remotely be
in the now
, thought Mary Byrd. More like
in the then
. There had been so many more old, abandoned farmhouses along this stretch in the old days. She remembered being sad, twenty years earlier, when they had begun to be replaced by new trailers. Now some of the trailers were abandoned and new ranch-style houses stood by them. She guessed that this meant prosperity and better lives for those families, but still. There had to be so many things left behind in the old places; not TVs or recliners or carpeting, but fireplaces and hearths and caned rockers and hooked rugs, and the ways of making them. And not just tangible stuff, but stories and songs. Food. Blah blah. She stopped herself in mid-romantic-hillbilly reverie. She wondered what Foote thought, although she could guess.
“It makes me sad to see these old houses falling down, and all these people living in these crappy prefab things,” she said.
“
Sad
?” Foote said. “You think
they’re
sad to have places that are clean and don’t stink of all their ancestors’ fatback grease? You think they’re
sad
to be free of being cold and breaking their backs chopping wood and hauling water and being isolated and shit?” He turned to her and blew smoke out of a contemptuous smirk. “
That’s
some folk-ass, Yankee bullshit, right there. Don’t be one of those quaint-hounds, girl.”
Uh oh. Just as she thought. “Hey!” she said, “I’m not a Yankee! I’m from Virginia!”
“Puh,” Foote huffed. “Virginia is for lovers. And Yankees.”
“I call bullshit on
that
.” She wondered how many soldiers—husbands, sons, brothers,
boys
—had died in Virginia over the centuries. Foote would know, but she wasn’t asking. “And you live in
your
ancestors’ house.”
“Virginia is what Yankees think of now when they think of the South,” Foote said. “They don’t know the real deal. All that genteel old Virginia colonial horsey shit, and they think they’ve got so much more history than Mississippi. And my house is no farmhouse, thank you very much.”
“I didn’t mean that. But Virginia’s twice-soaked land, isn’t it? It is way older,” Mary Byrd said.
“Twice-soaked? What’s that mean?”
“You know—the Revolution and the Civil War were both fought and ended in Virginia. And Jamestown—”
“Jamestown? That place was sorry as shit. And hell, De Soto was in Mississippi at least fifty years before, in what? Fifteen forty-one.”
“Okay, well, lots of Mississippians are Virginians who went west to settle,” she said.
“Exactly.” Foote lit another smoke, sucked in, and exhaled. “Exactly. They came out to Mississippi to get away from the federal government, which was too close, so they could do what they fucking wanted. My mother’s great-great-grandfather came out of Kentucky—a sorry state that never could decide, by the way—and went to Virginia, where he grew and shipped tobacco on the Richmond and Danville Railroad, and then in the
War of Northern Aggression,
” here Foote enunciated pointedly, “he shipped guns for the Confederacy. The Yankees tore up the tracks, and then
somebody
blew up the arsenal. It blew for six days. He lost fucking everything. They came to Mississippi to start over. They made it the hard way. Mississippians are the survivors. Carpetbaggers poured into Virginia. J. P. Morgan bought the railroad.”