"Oh," Augusta says. "All right."
In a photo the white man holds a large diamondback in one smooth loop between its head and tail. The mouth is open, slack. "We enjoyed each other," the proprietor says. Augusta looks at him with quick, hard, mock disapproval and some real disapproval. Apparently the proprietor is seeking to have Augusta believe the snake was alive and his pet.
"That's a dead snake," I say.
"Yeah, he died."
"No, he's dead right there."
The proprietor does some sizing up of me. I get two quarts of beer I do not want, to remain casual and fluid.
"That snake was dead before you ever got near it."
Augusta studies the picture.
"These two quarts of beer are for Augusta, a man who knows bullshit."
Augusta says, "That I do." He looks at the proprietor in a way designed, however, to let him know he thinks I'm crazy.
I'm on the bus. I've hit on something. I may be nuts, feebleminded, but I've run agreeably aground on something.
When my degree at Tennessee is conferred or not, when James has forgotten my room of stuff, the carp my symbolic lock, Ebert his basketball, Camel Tent the collegiate new girl, Mary our quaint ride, Wallace my kiss-ass leave, I will be remembered along here as the guy who said Floyd Drowdy's alleged pet rattlesnake was a dead fake, and Augusta will take less shit and do less jiving around that rotten-tooth white simp than before, and every day he walks in there and says, Let me have a look at that pet, the role I played will continue to be remembered.
* * *
We get back up out of this coast-run hernia and head true west-on the same road Mary and I took, I think, U.S. 90-we stop at a gas station. I'm amazed; it's the one where Mary and I stopped, behind which Bobby Cherry and the geezers talked of owls. I look behind it. Everybody's there. I wave. They look at me. Then a look of recognition. Cherry is the first to disacknowledge this, by looking down at his own beer, so I sit at his table, where I sat before.
"Bobby."
"Sport."
After a beer, in utter silence, I lean over to him.
"Are you the kind of guy does what he says he's going to do?"
"What?"
"You heard me."
"Get him a beer." Bobby Cherry points to me. A geezer in an apron goes to the cooler.
"I take it that's important, still. The word."
"Damn straight."
"And you're that kind."
"Damn straight."
"Good."
Bobby Cherry's getting concerned. "Why is it good?" he says.
"I want you to be the kind of guy you say you are."
"You don't think I am?"
"Didn't say that."
"I better get in my truck before I do something I regret."
"Get in your truck."
He does. Easy as that.
In a dime store in Milton, Florida, I tell the clerk, "I don't think I'm a Communist."
She passes my items past her: a balsa glider in a flat pack, tube socks, a tin box of split shot. "I know you're not a Communist," she says. "I wish it would rain."
"Yes, ma'am. I know you do. It's a shame we undid the Indians," I say. "They had those rain dances. Marched about a million of them right by here on the way to Oklahoma, too."
"Nope," she says, sacking my airplane, socks, shot.
"No?"
"Trucked 'em. Wouldn't let 'em touch the ground."
"Shame."
"Pity."
"We are bad."
She looks at me. I am testing her now.
"We are bad," I say again. "You have hundreds of rubber buffalo and Indians in here for sale." Perhaps she will think I'm a Communist, after all.
It is the old kind of dime store: brass nails are worn up through the pine floors, large white opaque global lights hang from the ceiling. Nothing of any value can be seen on the shelves, in the bins. Yet several poorlooking women feel things, load them, buy them-orange plastic toys, nylon hose, clothes pins, perfume. The soda fountain is intact, closed. No public-address voice will ever exhort shoppers to pay attention to anything in here. No yellow light will be wheeled around to sale zones. As a consequence, everyone pays attention to everything, regards everything as a sale item. I have narrowly avoided purchasing a menagerie of small rubber monsters, after feeling them for minutes, watching for the bus driver, who I think has started nipping. He is clever. He disappears for a few minutes at these endless country stops, where there is rarely a formal bus station. I believe he would leave me if he could. Our cold war is strong.
I have begun distributing gifts to children on the bus, for which he doubtless thinks me a pederast. I get back on and whisper to the driver, "I'm an existentialist, pure and simple." He says nothing.
In Fairhope I follow him, catch him in the men's room pulling on a half pint of Seagram's. "You're an existentialist, too," I say, washing up.
"I'm a drunk, kid." He says this with no emphasis, no confession, no self-pity. I offer to shake hands. We have a good, firm, countryman's shake.
"When the hell is this ride over?"
"Mobile."
"Not New Orleans?"
"Not me."
"It's been a good one."
He is taking another tight-lipped shot, which he sucks in with a teeth-baring grimace. He cants the bottle to me. I roll a long slug in, open-throated, careful not to lip his bottle. We exit together, I get the door and he touches my shoulder in return.
* * *
It has been a good bus ride. Now the driver and I are on even terms: I am above the common passenger, he is lower than ship's captain. In Mobile, end of the line, we run into each other at the same run-down hotel where he stays regularly. "Lot of Greek in this town," he says in the lobby. He is out of uniform. In a flowered shirt, he suddenly looks seedy, dangerous.
"Are you Greek?" I ask.
"Hell no." He laughs. "I eat Greek. Plenty Greek to eat here."
We wind up in the Athens Bar & Grill, where a woman in green chiffon is trying to smother seated gentlemen with her breasts while undulating her fatty navel at them. After a couple of bottles of retsina, we eat something. The dancing gets wilder. Fatima-Helen retires and middle-aged Greek men take over. They make mime breasts, sculpt them out of air, and tease one another with them. They hunch one another. One falls on his knees, miming sucking his partner.
"Shall we have more turpentine?" I ask.
"I've had enough."
"You must not be Greek."
"I'm normal. I drive that bus twelve years. My wife has cancer. My son works for the highway department. My wife will die."
"I'm sorry."
"They're burning her now. They're in that stage. This is not a joke. She stays hot."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't mention it."
We watch the show, the men dancing, their own wives watching them perform these suggestions. I suddenly know I am going back to Knoxville.
"These Greeks are sports, aren't they?" I say.
He-the driver, we have not exchanged names-shakes his head, agreeably, sadly, gets up to go. In the hotel corridor the next morning I pass two black women eating bagels. They are in custodial blues, sitting heavily in a supply room, watching a fire-alarm light blinking on the wall.
"Is the building afire?" I ask.
One of the women says, "The buzzer ain't gone off."
We look at the light, blinking regularly, fast. "I thought it smelled like fire in here last night," I say. "It stank."
"Yes, it did," the second woman says. She is farther into the janitor's closet, not eating. She has a bagel with a neatly applied quarter inch of butter troweled onto it. It is as if she will not begin eating until the message carried by the blinking light is understood.
"Well," I say, "I'm checking out."