"You had me worried," he said.
"Don't waste a good worry on me."
Normally Odus wouldn't. Sarah Jeffers was tougher than beef jerky and had the backbone of a mountain lion. But toughness and spine didn't matter when you were standing up against something that ought not be. Odus ground the end of his toothpick to splinters as he spoke around it. "I seen him."
"Seen who?" Sarah said suddenly taking a great interest in the chub of gray liverwurst. Odus didn't see how anybody could eat that stuff. Bologna was okay, but he preferred good and honest meat, like ham, that looked the way it did when it came from the animal.
"We both know who," he said.
A tan, Florida-thin blonde approached the cash register, pigtails tied with pink ribbons. She wore a T-shirt that read This dog don't hunt. In her hands were a gaudy dried flower arrangement and a miniature wooden church, no doubt decorations for a seasonal second home. Sarah's face uncreased in relief as she went to ring up the sale.
"Are you the storyteller?" a voice behind him asked.
He turned and faced a man wearing sunglasses who held a cassette tape as if filming a commercial. Odus was on the cover, dressed in his folksy garb of denim overalls and checked flannel shirt. He'd even borrowed a ragged-edged straw hat for the photo because the university woman who had recorded it said the package needed what she called a "hook." Odus didn't know a damned thing about marketing, but he knew stories from eight generations back.
The Hampton family had passed along the Jack tales, in which Jack usually put one over on the old King. "Jack and the Beanstalk" was the best-known of the stories, but that one didn't have a king in it. The university woman said they were parables in which the Scots-Irish who settled the Southern Appalachians were able to get proxy revenge on their English oppressors. Odus didn't feel particularly oppressed by anybody in England, except maybe when Princess Diana got all that attention for getting killed, but he figured the university woman was a lot smarter than he was about such things.
"I did some telling on that one," Odus said. The tape was called The Mouth of the Mountain.
"So you're a celebrity." The man was eating a Nutty Buddy icecream cone, and a string of white melt rolled down the back of his hand. He licked it up.
"Not really. I just talked. The woman who made the tape did all the work." Odus looked over at Sarah, who was busy taking money for a gee haw whimmy-diddle, a folk toy that basically consisted of three sticks and a tiny nail. Retail value: $6.99 plus tax.
"Do you tell them in public? We're going to be up for two weeks and would love to hear some authentic Appalachian stories."
"They ain't authentic," Odus said. "They're all lies."
The man laughed ejecting a tiny peanut crumble that arced to the floor at Odus's feet. "That's good. I'm buying this one, and I'm sure I'll be pleased. If you're not holding any performances, can I hire you to come down and tell some stories around the campfire in our backyard?"
Sweat pooled in Odus's armpits. He didn't mind telling the stories to family or his few close friends, and he could even put up with talking them into a microphone, but the idea of spinning out some Jack yarns while a bunch of tourists yucked it up and sipped martinis was more than he could stand. "I don't do tellings in a crowd" Odus said.
"This won't be a crowd. Just us and the neighbors. Maybe ten people."
"Ten's a crowd."
The man looked at the tape. "Fifteen dollars for this, huh? I'll pay a hundred dollars for one hour."
Odus thought of the wallet in his back pocket, the leather folds so bare a fiddleback spider wouldn't hide in them. A hundred bucks would buy a case of decent whiskey, and decent whiskey would maybe drown out those dreams of the cheese-faced man in the black hat. From the park, the sounds of the string band blared from the PA speakers. "Fox on the Run," complete with three-part harmony.
The man was mouthing the waffle cone now, running his thick, pink tongue around the cone's rim.
"I'll have to think on it a spell."
The sunglasses hid the man's expression, which could have been disbelief or impatience. Odus didn't much care. It wasn't like losing a steady job or anything. If he'd even wanted a steady job, that was.
"I'll listen to the tape and get back to you," the man said. "What's the best way to reach you?"
Odus took the toothpick from his mouth and pressed the tip into his callused thumb. "I don't have no phone. Usually you can find me here at the store or around."
The man smiled, vanilla cream on his upper lip. "Okay, 'Mouth of the Mountain.' Have it your way."
He went to pay for the tape. He left the store, and Odus watched through the screen door as the man made his way to the park.
"Sold a tape," Sarah said. "There's another buck-fifty for you."
"Except I don't get it for six more months," Odus said. "That royalty thing."
Sarah took a five out of the cash register and held it out to him. "I'll report that one as damaged. Call it an advance."
Odus swallowed hard and went to the counter. The Store was quiet. An elderly couple was browsing in the knickknacks, and a kid faced tough choices at the candy rack. Odus reached out and took the bill, but as he pulled his hand away, Sarah grabbed his wrist with all the strength of a possum's jaws.
"Take it and buy you a bottle, and forget about it," Sarah said. "You ain't seen nothing, and I ain't seen nothing."
Their eyes met. Odus, at six feet two and 240, somehow seemed to be looking up at Sarah, who stood all of five feet and weighed in at a hundred soaking wet. "He's back, and getting drunk won't change that."
"Getting drunk never changed anything, but that never stopped you before." Sarah let go of his wrist. "Don't go blabbing it or people will think your brain finally pickled and they'll throw you in Crazeville to dry out."
"The people I tell it to will believe me, because they'll know." "I heard what you told that man. Your stories ain't authentic, they're lies." Sarah began fussing with the cigarette packs and cans of smokeless tobacco behind the counter.
"The biggest lies are the easiest to swallow," Odus said. "But they burn like hell when you puke them back up."
He went out into the sunshine and the last chorus of "Fox on the Run."
Jett stood by the pay phone in the school lobby, fumbling in her pocket-sized purse. Many of her classmates, especially the girls, had their own cell phones, but Gordon thought they were a "distraction to learning." As if she couldn't get Brittany to text-message her the answer to a quiz question. Phones were tools and were here to stay, so why couldn't Gordon get with the future already?
Because he was lame, that's why. She pulled out the phone card her dad had given her as a present when she and Mom left Charlotte. "Five hundred minutes, call any time," he'd said. Actually, he probably didn't mean any time, since he'd started dating the blond librarian. Mandy, Mindy, Bambi, something like that. Lots of checking out going on there, probably.
Noise leaked from me lunch room, typical middle-school jokes, flirting, me rattle of silverware on hard vinyl trays. She pressed her ear to the phone and punched in her card digits, waded through the operator's asking if she wanted to donate minutes to the troops, then entered the numbers for Dad's work.
"Draper Woodworking and Design," the female voice said.
"Could I get Mark Draper, please?"
"May I ask who is calling?"
"Jett. Jett Draper."
"Oh." Uttered with a tone of sympathy.
After thirty seconds, Dad came on the line, bluff and hearty and probably stoned. "What's up, pumpkin? Aren't you in school?"