As it happened, by the end of the day the count had dropped to one, a ninety-year-old man, Earl Vancey, who hardly anybody knew. Didn’t go to any church, sat by himself each morning at the Circle Café, same coffee and oatmeal, same denim shirt. When the tornado came he’d crouched in his bathtub and the wall above him had fallen in. Everyone said they were relieved it was only the one, a blessing, especially with him being so old. But now the president and the governor wouldn’t come, and there’d be no movie stars or other famous people to escort through the wreckage. We were lucky to make the scroll on the bottom of the twenty-four-hour news. Still, the destruction was enough to attract Baptist men’s clubs, who roved the tornado site wielding chain saws, and mission groups with their crates of bottled water and sacks of donated clothes. It was enough to get me this job and Angela in my arms.
AFTER THE GREENHILLS DROP Jimmy looped us back to 259, but instead of keeping straight on toward Longview he turned left on 31. “Stop one, need to swing by the house,” he said.
We’d never before gone home while on the clock. Pulled over for tacos, lingered in convenience stores, taken long routes, sure, but this was a line we were crossing. Still, I hadn’t bargained for a veto, so I kept my mouth shut, crossed my fingers, and soothed myself with images of me at The Hangout, right on time.
I didn’t know where Jimmy lived and was surprised when he took the ramp onto 135 and we drove past the oilfield shops that lined the edge of town. Out here there was no trace of the tornado, but it was ugly all the same. The road was four-lane, a big highway in the middle of nowhere, and after we got to the last of five identical mustard-colored buildings with their attendant gravel lots, we pulled into a potholed driveway. Houses floated around us in a sea of tall grass. They sat on metal beams, hides of shagged tarpaper gathered about grayed, termite-ridden wood. Jimmy drove past them to a yard of smoothly packed dirt where a house in only slightly better shape than the others squatted on cement-block feet.
“My dad buys them,” Jimmy said, when he noticed me looking back at the houses in the field. “He’s going to turn them into lake cabins.”
He leaped out of the truck and, passing the front porch, started climbing through a window. I didn’t want to think about why, and staring out at the field of houses I ignored his legs wiggling over the sill and let my mind drift to the moon-flesh beneath Angela’s shirt. I struggled with my inadequate map, itched at not knowing how much ground had been lost to the guy from Jasper. Then a banging on the hood set my heart knocking in my chest. Jimmy. He opened my door and started pushing me toward the steering wheel.
“You’re going to drive,” he said. He’d shoved me halfway across the cab and now lifted himself up to where I’d been sitting, pulled a joint out from his pocket, and punched the truck’s lighter with his thumb. “I’m going to smoke.”
“We both have so much to live for,” I said. To no avail — one last push had me behind the wheel. I sucked at driving the trucks and I didn’t have my CDL. But the afternoon tugged, and fighting Jimmy would mean losing more time. I did some active visualization, me returned to the yard safe, then started the truck, backed around to straighten us up, and pretended not to be frightened as I got us past all those houses and onto 135, shifting through the gears and popping the stick until the engine stopped making its horrible grinding noises.
A mile gone, the lighter released and Jimmy grabbed it and touched it to the end of his joint. “Snow cones,” he said. “That’s stop two.”
THE SNOW-CONE STAND JIMMY WANTED was on the edge of the Family Dollar parking lot in Sabine. As I drove us there the truck kept losing its smooth gear, bucking and heaving until I tamed it with blind shoves of the stick. Meanwhile, Jimmy preened: he took off his glasses, undid his ponytail, combed his fingers through his hair, all with the joint pinched between his lips. When I at last got us to the stand he said, “Keep going, keep going,” until we were clear on the other side of the lot. I lurched the truck to a stop in a row of empty spaces, but Jimmy didn’t shift from his seat. Instead, he pulled a five from his pocket, passed it to me, and told me to get him a pink lemon.
“You’re not getting out?”
“Does it look like I’m getting out?” Then, calm again, “Get yourself something, too.”
“Okay, but you’re driving after this.”
“Fine. Just let me finish.” He held up the end of his joint.
I walked across the asphalt toward the stand, a cube of slapped together plywood painted white. On each side, above red, yellow, and blue circles, stenciled letters spelled “Sno-Cone.” Inside the stand a blond girl leaned against the back counter and paged through a magazine covered with exposé photos of some celebrity’s fat-curdled belly. A donation canister for the tornado victims sat beneath the list of flavors.
“One pink lemon, one blue coconut,” I said, putting Jimmy’s five on the counter. The girl flicked her eyes at me, smacked her gum, and repeated, “One pink lemon, one blue coconut,” as if they were the two most boring flavors ever. She dropped the magazine on the counter and took two cups from the stack beside her, then turned around and filled them with shaved ice. The stand was raised up so that my eyes pointed directly at her butt. I envisioned myself somehow lodged in the tuck of denim between cheek and thigh.
“Is that Jimmy in that truck?” the girl said, back still to me as she stood at the jugs of syrups and pumped the cones with color.
“Which Jimmy?”
“You know which Jimmy,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “within the infinite possibilities of Jimmys, that very well could be the Jimmy you want it to be.”
She set the snow cones down. “Whatever. You can tell that infinite Jimmy to stop bothering me. Next time I see him I’m going to slap him upside his head.”
“I’ll pass that on to the Jimmys I know,” I said.
She picked up a rag and gave me a slit-eyed scowl. “Whatever it is you want, you ain’t getting it.” Then she turned around and ran the rag along the shelf beneath the syrups, where drips collected from the gummed and crusted nozzles. “But you can go right ahead and stare at my ass again.”
I blushed, didn’t say anything, and took the snow cones back to the truck. Jimmy was slouched in the driver’s seat, his head just above the window, watching the girl. I gave him his pink lemon, told him what she’d said, and for a few seconds we studied her together.
“She dispenses nectar,” Jimmy said, and scraped his teeth over the syrupy ice, slow and reverent. Sure, he had ape muscles and went to parties where people got drunk and naked, but he read fantasy novels, too.
After he tipped the last of the snow cone into his mouth he put the truck in gear and guided us to the street. Loose asphalt crackled beneath our tires. I ran over one more time what I’d decided to say to Angela that night. First I would ask her if she wanted a Mountain Dew, and when I brought her one I would put my hand on her arm and look her in the eyes and say she might be going back to Nacogdoches and I might be moving to Dallas someday, but now that we lived in a world with tornadoes what did that matter, we had tonight. Then I’d stay quiet for a moment and she wouldn’t say anything, just nod and let me take her to her car. And that would lead to other nights. Nacogdoches was only an hour away. I could drive there at least once a week.