Up Jumps the Devil

3

« ^ » … but, in the month of October, there cannot be a more temperate air, and finer climate, than here, the weather being mild and dry for the space of forty or fifty days.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

By the middle of October, I get pretty tired of any leftover summer dregs—the midday heat, the dust, the grasshoppers, the dogflies from hell. I’m usually ready for some serious rain and a killing frost. Especially one that’ll kill dogflies.

(Takes a sleet storm to kill grasshoppers. They just hunker down in the broom sedge and wait for sunshine. I’ve flushed grasshoppers five inches long on a sunny January day.)

So far, the nights had been cool enough to start coloring leaves and brown off most of the weeds, but one last dogfly had somehow managed to survive and it had been circling my head for several minutes, eluding my flailing hands and waiting for me to lower my guard long enough so it could land on bare skin and dig in.

Exasperated, I started to duck into a thicket of hollies to get away from it, then recoiled in automatic reflex.

Hanging upside down between two young holly trees was a spider that looked like a tiny yellow-and-white hard-shell crab, and I had almost put my face through its large delicate web. One minute the dogfly was following my head. The next minute it was entangled in the sticky strands. The more it struggled, the tighter it was held and already the spider was hurrying over, playing out more sticky threads of silk to tether those kicking legs and buzzing wings before they could break loose.

“Hey, cute trick!” said Kidd. “I never saw anybody do that before.”

If a man thinks you’ve deliberately maneuvered a pesky winged bloodsucker into a spiderweb, why tell him it was a pure accident? Can it hurt to have him think you’re uncommonly clever in the ways of the wild? Especially when he’s so crazy about the outdoors himself?

Picture six feet three inches of male lankiness. Long skinny legs. Flat belly. A face more homely than handsome. Crinkly hazel eyes that disappear when he laughs.

Kidd Chapin.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation.

You know how you’ll see pretty shells lying on the sandy beach, cast up wet and lustrous from the ocean floor, so colorful you can’t resist picking them up? You know how, months later, you find them dry and dull in a jacket pocket or stuck down in a desk drawer, and you wonder what on earth made you bring them inland?

Kidd Chapin’s a wildlife officer. I found him down at the beach back in the spring.

So far, I haven’t once wondered why I brought him home with me.

Not that I have, actually. Not in the literal hang-your-jeans-in-my-closet sense. For starters, he has his own house on the banks of the Neuse River above New Bern, and he’s assigned to cover an area down east.

“Inland” is complicated by the fact that I live in the middle of a small town with an aunt and uncle. My own quarters are relatively separate, with a private entrance which I seldom use, and no, I don’t think Aunt Zell would get out her scarlet thread and start embroidering my shirts if I chose to let Kidd use that entrance. I don’t know if it’s manners, my abiding awareness that it is their house, or an active neighborhood watch system (made up of active voters, be it stipulated) that keeps me from giving him a key.

If I were eighteen years old again, maybe I would. Maybe I’d even stand on the front porch and make a speech about hypocrisy and honesty, about personal freedom and modern morality.

But I’m a district court judge. I know the value of hypocrisy. I’ve also learned a little bit about discretion as I’ve passed thirty and race toward forty: don’t do it in the road and scare the mules. I don’t want to watch Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash struggling to be broadminded and tolerant, and I certainly don’t want judgmental neighbors putting my morals on the ballot come the next election.

If Kidd’s still around after Christmas, I may finally think about getting my own place. In the meantime, instead of taking him into my bed like a mature woman whenever he drives over, we sneak around Colleton County like a couple of horny teenagers. His new minivan has four-wheel drive, tinted windows and seats that let down flat, and it’s been up and down just about every secluded lane and byway along Possum Creek.

Kidd and I were out on the back side of my daddy’s farm that warm Sunday afternoon. We’d been to church that morning with Nadine and Herman, the brother who worries most about my soul. We’d eaten dinner with Minnie and Seth, the brother who cuts me the most slack. (Being the closest thing I had to a campaign manager, Minnie’s also the sister-in-law who’s least interested in seeing me married. She’d rather see me in the state legislature.) Now we were out running a pair of young rabbit dogs Kidd had just bought. They were barely past puppyhood and eager to please, but they didn’t have a clue and if you didn’t watch them every minute—

Well, let’s just say we both got distracted for maybe a bit more than a minute. By the time we came up for air, the dogs had got into the woods and across the creek and sounded as if they were heading for Georgia.

Kidd whooped and hollered, but they were too excited to mind and there was nothing for it but to jump back in the van and go chase them down. We both had our heads out the windows, listening for the dogs, when we rounded a corner of the field and surprised a huge flock of blackbirds. As one, they rose from the earth in a great rush of wings to settle raucously in the trees around us.

All through spring and summer, grackles and starlings are little-noticed birds. In the fall, though, they band together by the thousands in flocks so large that it can take a full two minutes for them to cross the sky. Their chatter was so noisy that the dogs could have been just beyond the trees and we wouldn’t have heard them.

When we got to the homemade bridge across the creek, Kidd wasn’t sure he wanted to risk his van on something built out of hickory logs and some scrap two-by-fours.

“It’s strong enough to hold a tank,” I assured him. “Shorty and Leonard and B.R. drive over it twice a day.”

“Who’re they?” Kidd asked as we crept across, going maybe half a mile a minute.

“Some of Daddy’s old tenants from when he was still suckering tobacco by hand. He lets them live rent-free on our side of the creek, but they work for part-time wages at Gray Talbert’s nursery and this is their shortcut.”

Kidd breathed easier when his back wheels were on firm dirt again. Not me. I’m never comfortable on Talbert land.

G. Hooks Talbert is head of Talbert International and a power player in the reactionary right wing of North Carolina’s Republican party. He has a hundred-acre country estate near Durham with a private airstrip and a couple of Lear jets. He also has two sons: one’s a grasshopper with the morals of a cowbird; the other’s a conscientious ant whose morals are probably whatever G. Hooks tells him they are.

When G. Hooks needed to stand the grasshopper in a corner, this little piece of land he’d inherited through his mother’s side was the corner he chose. Gray Talbert raised a lot of hell at first, then, to everybody’s surprise, he seemed to settle right down. Repaired the greenhouses. Started a profitable nursery.

According to Daddy, who twisted a knot in G. Hooks’s tail over that nursery, it’s totally legitimate these days, if maybe not quite as profitable as back when Gray was running it unsupervised.

Nevertheless, I was glad when Kidd stuck his head out the window again, heard the dogs, and said they’d veered off to the east. We doubled back along a lane that followed the creek bank and soon passed the iron stake that marked the corner between our land, G. Hooks’s, and Mr. Jap’s. One of those ubiquitous orange plastic ribbons was tied around the stake and the loose ends fluttered in the breeze.

Kidd slowed down to a crawl when he saw me twist around to stare out the back window. “Something wrong?”

“Just wondering who’s surveying what,” I said.

Sighting back along the Talbert line, I could see more orange ribbons tied to a distant tree at the edge of the creek bank.

“My daddy has a standing offer to buy this piece of land, but G. Hooks would dig up the whole forty-six acres and ship it to China before he’d let Daddy have a square inch. If he’s getting ready to sell, you can take it to the bank that he’s found a buyer he thinks’ll give Daddy grief.”

“Why should your dad care who Talbert sells to?” asked Kidd. “He’s already got a mile-wide buffer around his house.”

An exaggeration, but not by much.

Daddy’s always happiest when he can put a little more land between himself and the outside world and he’s been adding to it ever since he was a boy of fifteen. He and my brothers own at least twenty-five hundred acres between them. A hundred or so of those acres are mine.

Some people spend money on fancy cars and lavish houses or expensive toys. We Knotts like to put our spare change in land. As Daddy always reminds us, it’s not like God’s making any more of it.

We cleared the trees and there, blocking the lane, was a shabby black two-ton farm truck with bald tires and homemade wooden sides to the flatbed. A wiry young white man in blue jeans, a faded red T-shirt, and a green John Deere cap leaned against one of the fenders as he talked with Mr. Jap. Beside the lane was a nice patch of bright orange pumpkins that looked big enough to harvest even though the vines were still green.

I hadn’t seen Mr. Jap since the funeral, so I motioned for Kidd to stop and got out to say hey.

He looked old and frail standing there with the sun beating down, as if Dallas’s death had drained off ten years of energy, and he didn’t seem to place me till I mentioned Daddy, introduced Kidd, and explained why we were there.

Then he smiled and said, “Oh, yeah. A pair of hounds went streaking past here about two minutes ago. I wouldn’t be surprised but what that rabbit’s holed up down yonder at the sheds. You just go ahead, but try not to run over no pumpkins if you can help it.”

“I’m glad you reminded me,” I told him, “because Aunt Zell asked me to bring her a dozen ears of your corn if I was out here before Halloween.”

Mr. Jap was never much of a farmer, not even in tobacco’s glory days. He so preferred working on cars that he rented out his acreage and even let some of his fallow fields go back to nature. A few years ago, though, when the influx of new people started and those newcomers couldn’t seem to get enough of the ornamental corn he brought to the crossroads flea market, Mr. Jap planted a couple of acres so he could pay for his winter heating oil. Now, to my surprise, he seemed to be in farming with both feet. Except for that small pumpkin patch, the whole back side of his farm was covered with broken stalks and culled ears.

“Billy here picked it last month and it’s stored in that barn back of Dallas’s house.”

Mr. Jap had always grown a strain that he swore had been handed straight down from a great-great-grandmother who befriended an Indian woman who gave her some seed stock in return. The colorful red, black, orange, and yellow ears were small and perfectly shaped, “and them fools over’n Cary and North Raleigh’ll hang it on anything that opens or closes,” he told Daddy gleefully. “Hell, they even buy corn shocks and hay bales and stick ’em all over them fancy yards they got.”

He’d shaken his head at the folly of city folks, but he was happy to take their cash. And was evidently eager for more.

“Billy here and me go halves on it,” Mr. Jap told us now, which explained the larger crop.

“Billy Wall?” I asked the young man. “Troy Wall’s boy?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said shyly.

“I didn’t know your daddy farmed.”

“He don’t. But I’ve always wanted to ever since I was a little boy.”

Troy Wall had been five or six years ahead of me in school and this boy, about twenty I’d say, was his spitting image. “What’s your dad up to these days?” I asked.

“Oh, not much. He lays floor tile for Carpet Country when his back don’t act up on him. They got the contract to do all the houses in Mr. Sutterly’s new subdivision over on New Forty-Eight.”

Dick Sutterly was the developer who’d tried to buy the farm from Dallas.

Mr. Jap dropped his cigarette, ground it out with the toe of his brogan. “That’s the old Holland homeplace,” he said. “Used to be one of the prettiest farms around, yes, it was. And James Holland always had the best yield of sweet potatoes of any man in the township. It’s a downright sin to put houses on such mellow land.”

“Been mine, I’d have never sold it,” Billy said wistfully.

“Well, everybody ain’t as willing to work as hard as you, boy. No, they ain’t.” Mr. Jap shook his head. “I reckon some folks would sell their soul if you offered ’em enough.”

I didn’t know if he meant the Holland heirs or his daughter-in-law sitting in the jailhouse over in Dobbs, and for a minute I thought he was going to launch into a discussion of sin and redemption. Instead, our conversation turned to crops and the weather.

Billy had come over today to see if Mr. Jap wanted some help getting up his pumpkins, which the old man peddled out of the back of his pickup at the flea market. Otherwise, he was going to bring out a crew this week to ready another load of ornamental corn for market. I gathered that it was a matter of carefully pulling back the dried shucks, tying them in bunches of threes, and then packing them into crates. Mr. Jap thought they might have a thousand dozen all told.

“Been such a good year, I’m a mind to run a load up to Washington,” said Billy. “I think I can get a dollar and a half an ear up there.”

A couple of short rows were still standing next to the pumpkin patch. Although some of the colorful ears had been nibbled down to the cob by squirrels and coons or carried off by crows, we found more than a dozen nearly perfect specimens for Aunt Zell, who was in charge of decorations for the County Democratic Women’s November meeting. Kidd loaded them in the van while I tried to pay Mr. Jap, who put his hands in his pocket and said, “Even if it won’t Sunday, I couldn’t take no money from Kezzie’s girl. ’Sides, y’all better go on and get them fool dogs ’fore that rabbit takes ’em across the road.”

In the distance we could hear the dogs yipping like crazy, so I thanked him and climbed back in the van. We drove on around the edge of the big cornfield, through a stand of pines and straight across a fallow pasture, through chest-high hogweeds, cockleburs, and bright yellow camphorweeds till we could actually see the two pups.

Whatever they’d been chasing had gone to earth somewhere beneath the tumbledown outbuildings there on the edge of Mr. Jap’s farm. The young dogs were running in and out and underneath the sagging wall of an old log tobacco barn, trying to figure out exactly how to get at their quarry.

We hurried over to them and Kidd had to speak smartly to them before they’d listen long enough for us to each grab a collar while he snapped on the leads.

Shelters with dull tin roofs shedded off three sides of the barn, which had almost disappeared under a tangle of kudzu vines. Hundreds of tobacco sticks were bundled and stacked under one; five old wrecked vehicles, four cars and a pickup, were nosed up under the other two shelters. They were dirty and covered with bird droppings, but their windows weren’t broken and they didn’t seem to be as rusty as the half-dozen that had been left to the weather out behind the shelters.

“Well, would you look at this!” Kidd said. He ducked beneath the kudzu vines and walked around to the front of a sporty little car with a smashed-in rear. “A 1967 Ford Mustang. That was my first car.”

“Was it red, too?”

He nodded.

“First boy I ever went steady with drove an old Mustang. Candy-apple red.” (Benny Porter. He’d had great potential till that warm spring night when four of my brothers boxed us in with their cars and trucks at the drive-in.)

Kidd smiled as his hand touched the frisky little grille ornament. “Y’all make the horse buck?”

“Why, Mr. Chapin,” I drawled. “What kind of a young girl do you think I was?”

(My brothers had kept their eyes on the screen and didn’t say a single word, but poor old Benny was so intimidated that he would barely kiss me after that and we broke up before school was out.)

“I bet you were hell on wheels.”

I laughed as he caught my hand and pulled me to him. The pups yipped and strained against their leads.

They barked again and we heard a deep male voice say, “Can I help y’all with something?”

Standing out in the sunshine was a heavyset muscular man with a thick mop of straight brown hair just beginning to go gray. He had a strong nose and square chin and his mouth was curtained by a salt-and-pepper mustache that bushed out over his upper lip.

Kidd and I were at the rear of the shelter, in deep shadow, of course, and the man squinted against the bright sunlight, trying to make out our features. We still had our arms around each other and Kidd gave me an inquiring glance. When I shrugged my shoulders to show I didn’t recognize him, Kidd stepped forward, looping the leads around his hand so the over-friendly pups couldn’t jump up on the stranger.

The man wore sun-faded jeans and a brown leather vest over a blue plaid shirt. The big buckle on his belt was enameled green-and-white and shaped like the logo of a popular motor oil.

I took a longer, harder look and my heart sank straight to the bottom of my stomach as I mentally shaved off that thick straight mustache and lengthened the hair into a ponytail. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could almost feel a tingle in my left shoulder where I’d once carried the tattoo of a small black star. Cost me a bunch to get the damn thing lasered off. When this man turned his left hand, I saw the mate of my black star on his palm and I knew that if he took off his shirt, there’d be a red, white, and blue American flag on one deltoid and a pair of black-and-white checkered flags on the other. (Not to mention a couple of raunchy tattoos on more intimate parts of his anatomy.)

He had to be at least fifty now, but he squatted down on the heels of his cowboy boots as easily as a teenager and rubbed the dogs’ ears. Suspicion was still in his eyes. “Y’all ain’t friends of that Tig Wentworth, are you?”

The name of the man that’d shot Dallas Stancil meant nothing to Kidd and he shook his head. “No. My dogs got across the creek and we came over to get them. Then I saw this old Mustang and had to take a closer look.”

He stretched out his hand. “I’m Kidd Chapin. From down east.”

“Allen Stancil,” said the man, sticking out his own hand as he stood up again. “From out near Charlotte.”

They both turned to me and since the Enterprise hadn’t suddenly beamed me off the planet like I’d been praying the last forty seconds, there was nothing for it but to come out of the shadows from behind the wrecked car and say, “Hello, Allen. What’re you doing here?”

“Well, I’ll be damned! Debbie?”

“Don’t call me Debbie,” I snapped automatically.

“Y’all know each other?” asked Kidd.

I hesitated and Allen Stancil said smoothly, “Yeah, I used to do a little work for Mr. Kezzie. He’s sure looking good these days to be as old as he is. You, too, Deb.”

“Don’t call me Deb,” I said, enunciating each syllable through clenched teeth. “And just when did you see my daddy?”

“Coupla days ago. I was driving into Uncle Jap’s yard while he was driving out. I throwed up my hand to him, but I don’t guess he knowed who I was.”

A damn good guess. If Daddy knew Allen Stancil was anywhere within a hundred miles, he’d have told me. Assuming he didn’t shoot the bastard first as he’d once threatened to.

All through Dallas’s funeral, I’d been thinking about Allen, wondering if he’d show, wondering what I’d say if we came face-to-face before I could slip away. And here he’d jumped up like the devil when I least expected him.

“How long you planning on staying?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Long as Uncle Jap needs me, I reckon. Dallas getting hisself killed sort of knocked the fire out of him, didn’t it?”

“Or put a different kind of fire into him,” I said, thinking of that Holyness Prayr Room. “We just saw him over at his pumpkin patch with Billy Wall.”

“Dallas and me, we was more like brothers than first cousins,” Allen said mournfully. “I’m gonna have to be Uncle Jap’s son now.”

That pious tone made me snort, but it was drowned in the yips and yells as the dogs got loose again.

Once Allen quit paying them any mind, they lost interest in him and suddenly remembered the rabbit that was hiding somewhere under the shelter. Their lunge caught Kidd off guard and the leads slipped from his hand. An instant later they dived under an old Chrysler that was sitting up on blocks. I saw the rabbit squeeze underneath the side wall and light out for the tall weeds, but the pups never missed him. They just kept on yipping and whining around the cars until Kidd stepped on one lead and Allen got hold of the other.

And when Kidd opened the door of the steel cage in the back of the van, Allen hoisted up the dogs and helped get them inside. I could see him sizing Kidd up as they talked dogs a minute or two before getting off on cars again.

“I’d forgot about all the old beauties Uncle Jap has sitting round this place,” he said. “There’s a ’sixty-one Stingray and a straight-eight ’fifty-nine Packard Clipper. And you’re probably too young to appreciate it, but damned if he ain’t got a ’forty-nine Hudson Hornet setting over yonder beside the feed barn.”

“I know a doctor down in New Bern with a classic Stingray,” said Kidd, “but I don’t think I ever heard of a Hudson Hornet. Good car?”

“Good car? Hell, bo, it was just the prettiest aerodynamic body anybody ever saw,” Allen said. “Had this incredible overhead cam in a one-eighty-two horsepower engine. I tell you, around here, Hornets flat-out dominated stock car racing in the late forties. Then along came the Olds Eighty-eight and after that the Hornet was finished. Hudson merged with American Motors and now the Jeep’s about the only thing Chrysler kept when they took over AMC.”

He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He knew better than to offer me one, but he did hold out the pack to Kidd, who shook his head.

There was a faraway look in Kidd’s eyes, as if seeing something wonderful and long gone. “My dad used to have an old ’fifty-two Thunderbird,” he said.

“Man, they were something else!” Allen agreed as he took a long drag of smoke and exhaled it through his nose. “Don’t suppose he still owns it, does he?”

Kidd gave a rueful shrug. “Mom made him sell it when my little brother came along. She couldn’t hold both of us on her lap anymore.”

“Too bad. A ’fifty-two T-bird in good shape, it’d be worth a bundle now.”

“That’s what my dad keeps telling her,” Kidd said with a wide grin.

Car talk bores the hell out of me. I’ve never felt the allure of carburetors, rings and spark plugs and whether an engine’s a V-6 or a V-8. All I care about is how it looks and whether it’s got decent acceleration. Long as it’s not too shabby, long as I can turn the key and get to court on time, what difference does it make how big the engine is or how many cylinders it has?

My brothers spent half their growing-up years with their heads under the hood of some old broken-down piece of junk. Any time one of their friends drove over, the first thing they’d do is troop out to look at the new set of chrome-plated exhaust pipes or marvel at the size of the big wheels somebody’d just put on his truck.

I can still hear my mother: “You boys change clothes before you go crawling up under that car. You get grease on those school shirts, it’ll never come out.”

While Kidd and Allen talked Cougars, Impalas, and Goats and the pleasures of a manual transmission over an automatic, I sat down on the back of the van and let the hatch shade me like a beach umbrella. The pups nuzzled my fingers through the steel wire for a few minutes and then went to sleep.

Eventually, Allen glanced over at me and, casual like, said, “Last I heard, Debbie—”

He caught himself and my name came out “Debbierah.”

He must have remembered what happened the last time he called me Debbie. I’m not a cupcake and nobody shortens my name too many times. Nobody.

“I heard you’re a lawyer.”

“Used to be,” I admitted.

“So what’re you doing now?”

“I’m a district court judge.”

“A judge? Really? Hey, way to go, girl!”

Was it my imagination or were his congratulations a bit forced?

“How ’bout you, bo?” he asked Kidd. “You in the law business, too?”

Kidd propped one foot on the back of the van next to me, leaned an elbow on his knee, and gave Allen a lazy smile. “You could say so. I’m a wildlife officer.”

“A game warden?” Allen shook his head. “A game warden and a judge? I better watch my step, hadn’t I?”

“And what are you doing these days?” I asked suspiciously.

“Oh, some of this and a little of that. Still messing around with cars.” He held out his big square work-stained hands. “Ain’t got all the grease out from under my nails yet.”

“Still hanging around racetracks?”

“You race?” asked Kidd, showing me a whole different side that I hadn’t seen in the six months that we’d been together.

“Not anymore,” Allen told him. “It’s a young man’s game and I ain’t got the reflexes I used to have.”

He’d heard the quickened interest in Kidd’s voice and was giving back a regretful nostalgia for races run, for records set, for roses and beauty queen kisses in the winner’s circle. Charlotte and Rockingham were in his drawl. Maybe even Daytona and Talladega, too, for all Kidd knew. But unless things had changed a hell of a lot in the last few years, Allen himself had never raced on any track longer than a half-mile and had never won a purse larger than three or four hundred dollars.

“These days I do a little pit crewing to keep my hand in. Mostly though, I’m moving into restoring classic cars. Like your daddy’s T-Bird,” he told Kidd. “Or like that little Mustang there.”

His eyes moved speculatively from the dilapidated outbuildings to a cinderblock building sitting halfway between us and the road. It was encircled by even more wrecks rusting away in a thicket of ragweeds and sassafras trees.

“In fact,” said Allen, “I was thinking I might even open up Uncle Jap’s old garage. All these new houses going up, I bet Jimmy can’t keep up with them.”

He had that right. Bad as my battery needed checking, I’d have to call Jimmy first and make a real appointment and I kept forgetting.

I’ve been taking my cars to Jimmy White ever since the white Thunderbird my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday slid into the ditch on the curve in front of his newly opened garage. He was standing right there in the open doorway, and after he made sure I wasn’t killed, he went and got a tow rope, pulled my T-bird over to his garage and hammered out the dent in my fender.

“You going to tell my daddy?” I asked.

“Ain’t Mr. Kezzie’s car, is it?” said Jimmy as he handed me his bill for fifteen dollars. “ ’Course, I see you take that curve that fast again, I might have something to say to my Uncle Jerrold.”

Jerrold White was one of the first black troopers in North Carolina and I knew if I got another speeding ticket, Mother and Daddy would take away my keys for a month.

So I still go slow when I drive past Jimmy’s and I still bring my car to him even though he has so many new customers I can’t just drop in and get it fixed while I wait anymore.

Intellectually, I know that people (and their cars) have to live somewhere, but selfishly I can’t help feeling that way too many houses are sprouting up on our fields and in our woods. All these new people looking for the good life—crowding up against us, taking up the empty spaces—they’re changing the quality of our lives.

That’s why I flinch every time I see orange ribbons. Seems like they’re all followed by dozens of Dick Sutterly’s For Sale signs.

“Gracious Southern Living in a Spacious Sutterly Home. ”

Right.

Twelve-hundred-square-foot cardboard boxes slapped down on a bare acre lot and built cheap enough to compete with double-wide trailers.

Car keys jingling in his hand, Kidd straightened up and said, “Well, I reckon we’d better roll if I want to make it back to New Bern before dark. Nice meeting you, Stancil.”

“Same here,” Allen told him. To me he said, “Now don’t you be a stranger, Deb’rah.”

With the dogs and the ornamental corn giving off familiar earthy smells, we drove down the rutted lane to the road and headed back to Dobbs.

“Stancil seems like an interesting guy,” Kidd said.

I made a noncommittal sound.

“Nice of him to come spend some time with his uncle.”

I was wondering about that myself, but all I said was, “Uh-huh.”

Kidd glanced over at me. “Been a long time since you last saw him?”

“Years,” I said.

“So how come you’re still so pissed at him?”

“Marriage’ll do that,” I said.

“Marriage?” he asked blankly. Then it registered, and the van suddenly veered so far into the passing lane that one wheel hit the shoulder and Aunt Zell’s corn went flying. “You were married? To him?”

“What happened to ‘interesting’ and ‘nice guy’?”

He was too steamed to smile. “The whole time we’ve been together and you never found a spare minute to say ‘Oh, by the way, I used to be married to some redneck speed jockey’?”

“I thought we agreed not to talk about past relationships.”

“Relationships, yes, but marriage is more than a one-night stand. Wasn’t I up front about Jean and Amber?”

“You were married for twelve years,” I said. “And you could hardly keep Amber a secret. Sooner or later I was bound to wonder why your spare bedroom’s done up in ruffles and lace.”

Kidd’s fourteen-year-old daughter is very retro-feminine.

“It’s not funny, Ms. Judge. Is there a kid you forgot to mention, too?”

I was starting to get a little steamed myself. “Does it matter?”

“Jesus Christ, Deborah! Of course it matters. I thought we had something open and honest here. I thought—”

Both hands clenched the steering wheel and he drove in moody silence.

This had the makings of Our First Fight and I was bedamned if it was going to be over Allen Stancil.

“Look,” I said, twisting around till I was sitting on my left leg and facing him across the width of the van. “If you really want to know why I don’t talk about it—why I try to not even think about it—it’s because Allen Stancil’s the stupidest thing I ever did in my entire life.”

My internal preacher gave my conscience a jab and I amended, “Well, one of the stupidest, anyhow. Sometimes I still can’t believe I was ever that messed up. My only excuse is that Mother had just died. I was eighteen and a freshman at UNC-G, away from home for the first time. I was mad at God, mad at Daddy, not talking to at least eight of my brothers, even mad at Mother for dying.”

The van suddenly felt hot and stuffy. I cracked the window and took several deep breaths. “Running off to a Martinsville magistrate with Allen seemed like a way of getting some of my own back. Of course, we hadn’t been married twenty minutes when I knew it was a mistake, but by then I was so high on pot and tequila, I didn’t really give a damn.”

I lowered my window all the way and cool wind whipped my hair into tangles.

Kidd reached over and laid his hand on my drawn-up knee. “You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want to,” he said gently.

“There’s not much more to tell. About a week after we married, he went and called me Debbie one time too many. I was slicing limes with a rusty old butcher knife and I guess I overreacted. Scared the hell out of me. I got him to the emergency room before he bled to death, and then I just walked out the door and kept walking.”

“Home?”

“No. There were some other girls. Women. Race car groupies,” I said vaguely. “I crashed with them.”

I don’t like to think of that brief period. It had seemed like an eternity when I was living it—terrified that Allen might die, then scared he might live and have me arrested for trying to kill him. I freaked and crawled inside a tequila bottle carrying my saltshaker. To this day I still can’t look a margarita in the eye.

“Dallas was the one who’d given us a ride up to Martinsville and when he heard what happened, he came looking for me and tried to bring me home, only I wasn’t ready to come back and be preached at. I did let him take me on up to my Aunt Barbara’s house in Maryland, and while I was there, Daddy and my cousin John Claude— the one that’s a lawyer over in Dobbs? They had the marriage annulled before half my brothers were even aware I wasn’t still at school. It was over two years before I finally came home, so I doubt if there’s ten people outside my family that know it ever happened.”

“Eleven now,” said Kidd.

I slid across the wide seat and tucked myself under his free arm. “I said outside my family.”