The glowing red digital numbers of the alarm clock read 4:30 the last time I looked at it. I drifted off finally, into an uneasy and troubled sleep that was anything but rejuvenating. I woke up around seven. I was exhausted.
I spread the Sunday paper out on the kitchen table, but didn’t have the concentration to get very fer. My eyes burned from lack of sleep. I felt brittle, old.
Even then, I couldn’t stop thinking. I kept seeing Rachel’s house, with its great lawn and expensive furniture, the cars, the clothes. The more I pondered, the odder it seemed that Conrad Fletcher could afford all that, yet couldn’t afford to pay off his bookie. A hundred thousand dollars, Bubba said he owed. Not exactly pocket change, but probably only a few months’ salary to Conrad. A fortune to me. If I owed that kind of money to a bookie, it could just as well be a hundred million. But Conrad could have paid it off. How come he didn’t?
Maybe the truth lay somewhere else. Maybe, I thought, it was the house and the cars and the lifestyle that kept Conrad from paying off Bubba.
If that were true, then the mirror was cracked. All the perfect reflections I’d seen were false, tricks put before my eyes like a magician’s scarf covering sleight of hand. I sat at the kitchen table staring at the wall for over an hour, my thoughts reduced to pure, nonverbal essence.
Something’s stinko.
“You rook awfuh.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Lee. Good to see you again, too.”
“Weah you been? It been days now.”
I looked across the counter as Mrs. Lee scribbled my order down on her green lined pad. She was as crotchety as ever, the result, I guess, of risking your keister to escape to the land of freedom and opportunity and discovering that freedom and opportunity meant opening up at 7:30 in the morning and closing at 9:30 at night seven days a week for the rest of your life.
“Don’t tell me you missed me.”
“I nevah miss anybody,” she spat. “We just made too much chicken tree days in row ’cause you didn’t show up. Cost me money.”
“I’ll leave you a big tip.”
“Oh, yeah, weah I heahd dat befoah?”
She disappeared behind the stainless steel counter between the cash register and the kitchen. I could see her husband back in there, slaving over a hot wok.
Maybe things weren’t so bad for me. Then again, maybe Mrs. Lee would give me a job. I used to make a pretty mean Mooshu Pork back when Lanie and I were married.
Mrs. Lee came back around with the steaming plate a moment later. She shoved it across the front counter.
“I put exta chicken on theah foah Shadow. Doan you eat it all.”
I smiled at her. “Mrs. Lee,” I said, “you’re one of the few truly wonderful people I’ve ever met in my life. I mean that.”
“Yeah, and you fuh of it.” She waddled off behind the counter with a load of dirty plates.
This was the longest I’d gone without a visit to Mrs. Lee’s since I moved to East Nashville. I guess I didn’t realize how much this part of town had become home for me. It’s weird to think that I used to eat at joints with names like Mario’s and Chef Sigi’s and Arthur’s, all restaurants where you were as likely to run into the mayor as anyone else, or maybe the chief of police, or maybe the head of the Nissan plant in Smyrna. With two people, you’d walk out with a VISA that was three figures closer to being maxxed out than it was before you walked in.
I used to think I enjoyed that life, even regretted losing it, but realizing that Mrs. Lee had honestly missed me the past few days made me feel better than all the three-figure dinners ever had.
This was home. How odd.…
I guess it was okay that I wasn’t going to be moving back across the tracks to live with Rachel. I ate the Szechuan chicken with a delight that bordered on the sociopathic. I realized that the dinner I’d paid twenty-five dollars for in Green Hills hadn’t filled me, and that the $3.95 I’d just spent at Mrs. Lee’s would do me for the rest of the day.
I pulled the last few pieces of chicken out of the gloppy sauce and dipped them one at a time into my water glass, washing off most of the hot pepper and chile oil. One of these days, I was going to get in a hurry, feed Shadow some unwashed chicken, and she was going to tear my head off.
I wrapped the chicken in a couple of paper napkins and stuffed them in my jeans pocket. I pulled out onto Gallatin Road at 11:30, which meant the church traffic would be just about peaking. No matter, I wasn’t in any hurry, wasn’t even sure if I could find out what I needed to know on a Sunday.
It was a gray day; the clouds overhead looked like rain. I felt better after eating, though, and I’d set out that morning with something that resembled a plan of action. It took twenty minutes to make it up the street to Lonnie’s. The side road that led to the junkyard was completely deserted, the garages and body shops closed, the bikers having locked their building down and gone off somewhere to sleep off Saturday night’s binge. I pulled up in front of the gate and stopped.
Overhead, the thick clouds grew more menacing by the minute. These late summer thunderstorms come up out of nowhere in this part of the country, and you can go from dazzling sunshine to inside a tornado in moments. I stepped up to the gate and raided it, hoping to get inside the trailer before the gullywasher started.
Shadow padded out from her nest behind the trailer, her tail and head held low in alert.
“Hi, Shadow,” I said brightly, hoping my voice would relax her. She hadn’t seen me in days, and would be suspicious for a bit until her doggy synapses located the right memory bit and cleared me through security.
She approached slowly, cautiously. Then her tail began to wag and her head came up, her eyes widening from the narrow slits they’d been.
“Shadow, girl, how’s it going? How you been?” I unlatched the gate catch, swung the door open, and stepped in. She was on me in one leap, her great paws on my shoulders, her stale hot breath right in my face. I wrapped my arms around her back and hugged her, delighted to see her again.
Over her shoulder, the trailer door opened. Lonnie stood there in a pair of worn jeans and a white T-shirt. He could do James Dean with the best of them, I thought.
“Hey, stranger,” he said.
“Lonnie,” I said, nodding. Then I stepped back, pulling Shadow’s paws off my shoulder, and backed up a step. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the fist-sized wad of chicken, and held it out in front of me. I pulled the paper off.
“Speak. Speak, Shadow.”
She dropped to her haunches, her head pointed up eagerly.
“Speak!”
She let out a bark that was more of a bellow than anything else, and at that moment I sent the chicken flying in a slow arc toward her. She sprang up, her jaws snapping shut like a bear trap.
“You’re going to spoil her, goddamn it. I got to live with her.”
“That’s okay,” I said, scratching her ears, then walking past her to the porch. “She deserves it.”
“Yeah, right,” Lonnie said. I stuck out my hand to him, which was prompuy refused. “Wash that crap off your hands first.”
He led the way into the trailer, the door swinging to on its own behind us. I walked over to the filthy sink, with auto grease and used, dried crankcase oil caked around the edges, and turned the water on.
“You won’t shake hands with me because I’ve got a little chicken on them, but you’ll drink a glass of water that comes out of this filthy sink.”
Lonnie laughed. “Who said I drink water? I don’t drink water. Stuff don’t taste right.”
“Need to get you one of those water filters. Filters out all the chlorine and crap they put in it.”
“It’d have to be some filter to make Nashville water taste good. Like sucking up a swimming pool.”
The table with the scorched hole in it had been pushed into a corner. In the middle of the room on an old blanket sat some kind of disassembled motorcycle engine.