“Nah, guess not,” Lafayette said again. “Suppose we can go fishing now.”
Lafayette’s operation was scheduled for noon. He was due in Olive Branch at 11:15 to get prepped for surgery: blood tests conducted to determine the type and strength of anesthesia, a tissue test to make sure his body wouldn’t reject the lung. It was 8:45 now. I’d filled the gas tank that morning on a generator-run pump at a buddy’s farm, which left Lafayette and me plenty of time to make the hour-and-a-half haul up US 78 to the transplant clinic just outside Memphis. I called up to Lafayette to get a move on then. He stepped forward and twirled his fingers to remind me of the predicament he’d gotten himself into. “Be right up,” I said.
I retrieved the ladder lying out in the front yard and propped it against the house. When I reached Lafayette he had his head down. The plow lines of his gray comb-over revealed freckled sections of scalp. Erin could write a thesis on the number of tales her father contributed to the community mythos, like when he very nearly pummeled the testicles of an unfortunate rival while in a dog pile on the thirty-yard line during the county football jamboree. Rode through pharmacy school at Ole Miss on an athletic scholarship, played for the legendary Johnny Vaught. Returned to our good town after graduation to open Bodock’s second drugstore. That was all before I was born, thirty years ago about. But Lafayette wasn’t indomitable. The inflammatory lung disease and his wife’s murder and six months in a low-security prison wing had left him a pathetic reflection of the man he used to be.
When I removed the noose from his neck and asked what pocket the handcuffs key was in, it was hard not to show my frustration when he raised his head and said, “The yard, somewhere.”
“You not think to tell me that before I got up here?”
“Shit, Topher. This ain’t exactly one of my best days.”
The key had landed on some plastic sheeting I’d covered the hedges with when news of the possible storm first reached Bodock. After I got him off the roof, I brushed the asphalt grit from my hands on the legs of my jeans and looked at him bent over in the lawn. The scar on his calf from when he last went hunting and his bare feet positioned on the spiny gumballs. Chest heaving whatever was left of his lungs.
When he was finished coughing, I said, “You ready to go?”
Lafayette Cummings, standing straight as he could in the front yard, wiped a spot of blood from the corner of his mouth on his boxers and said, “Been waiting on you.”
While Lafayette was in the house getting dressed, I waited out in the truck, honked the horn once, rested my arm on the Igloo cooler I had forgotten to unload.
It wasn’t quite nine o’clock, but I appreciated the obvious sense of urgency lent to the task of escorting a transplant patient. I honked again.
Gave it exactly two minutes. Then honked a third time.
Lafayette appeared on the front porch then. He wore a denim jacket over an Old Milwaukee T-shirt tucked into his beltless jeans and a pair of sunglasses draped around his neck by a red Croakie. Boat shoes on his feet. I retired the cooler to the backseat. In one hand Lafayette had a Shakespeare rod and reel he set in the truck bed. In his other hand was a half-case of Old Milwaukee which, when he tucked the box between his feet on the floorboard, I saw held only four bottles.
“Lafayette.” I nodded my head as I turned over the ignition.
He inspected the cab as I backed downhill out the long drive. Just the walk from the house had spent him. What the hell sort of adrenaline had to have pumped through his old arteries this morning, allowing him to climb up on his roof without keeling over?
“Notice you ain’t brought any fishing gear with you,” he said. “Don’t you think it would’ve helped the illusion some if you’d at least put a fishing pole in the back there? A tackle box at least?”
I forced a laugh. “I think you got the imagination for it, Lafayette.”
“Shit. You got the cooler though, I see. I guess that could work. Coolers’re essential for a day on the lake.”
At the end of his street I threw the truck in park. “You want, I can go back and get my damn fishing gear, Lafayette.”
“Nah,” he said and winked. “I’m just yanking that rod and reel you did bring with you.”
I shifted back to drive. “You was easier to get along with on the roof.”
I made a left out of the neighborhood and then hung a right, which put us northbound on Highway 54. Lafayette cracked open a beer, the bottle sneezed. He cleared the neck and said, “Want one?”
“They ain’t going to use anesthesia on you if you’re drunk.”
He bent down and handed me a beer. “So help me drink ’em then.”
I imagined the shit storm of arriving in Olive Branch only to have Lafayette denied for surgery because I didn’t deny him a preop beer, a mock-fishing-trip beer. Figured I should be less worried with whatever condition he arrived in so long as I got him to the surgery. Besides, there were all the stories of Lafayette’s drinking exploits before a pregnant Betty ultimatumed him into sobering up. Hauling ass down back roads with a fifth of Evan Williams between his legs, the green cap discarded out the window miles behind him as a sort of insurance the bottle would be emptied in that single sitting. Usually it was. That kind of tolerance doesn’t desert a man. Further, he only had four beers on him — two if we split them — which I reckoned would leave plenty of time in the next couple of hours or so for him to piss it all out before surgery.
I nursed the Old Milwaukee and we rode up Highway 54 in silence except for the news station out of Memphis and something between a wheeze and a growl from Lafayette’s chest. According to the news lady’s voice, power had been restored in Nashville and parts of Memphis that morning, and some of the larger towns in north Mississippi: Corinth, Gum Pond, Oxford. We hit the US 78 on-ramp in New Albany at 9:15, which would take us north all the way to Olive Branch. Out on the four-lane we saw not one wooded acre that had been spared. Many hardwoods — oaks and hickories, some of the older, more resilient gums — were still standing, but even their spread had diminished some. The bright wood of their exposed flesh marked their shed poundage, a pallet of broken trunks and branches carrying for miles across the roll of ridges. Besides the occasional eighteen-wheeler, there wasn’t much traffic. Cleanup crews were set up every ten miles or so, removing branches or the occasional utility pole that had fallen onto the highway.
“Be better if we could keep them beers cold,” Lafayette said at some point, and nodded toward the backseat. “There ice in that cooler?”
I told him no.
“Too bad we couldn’t transport the lung ourselves. Would’ve appreciated seeing what a Pentecostal lung looks like.”
“Perhaps they’ll let you look at it just before surgery.”
Lafayette gulped the last of his first beer as we passed a group of orange vests catapulting branches into a dump truck. Then northbound US 78 relaxed back into two lanes and Lafayette rolled down his window and sailed the empty beer bottle at the Myrtle corporate limit sign. The bottle missed high, swallowed up by the kudzu spilling from the tree line, where some of the more flexible pines made top-heavy by the ice collected in their branches were bowed over toward the highway like the Pentecostals who’d soon be congregating in Lafayette’s living room. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and coughed violently into it, wiped his mouth, and folded the handkerchief back behind his wallet.