“Thanks. And thanks for talking to me.”
“Not at all. Interesting conversation. And when you check in at the DuPray, tell Norbert Sheriff John said to give you one of the good rooms.”
“I’ll do that.”
“But I’d still take a look for bugs before you climb into the rack.”
Tim smiled. “I already got that advice.”
7
Dinner at Bev’s Eatery was chicken-fried steak, green beans, and peach cobbler to follow. Not bad. The room he was assigned at the DuPray Motel was a different matter. It made the ones Tim had stayed in during his ramble north look like palaces. The air conditioner in the window rattled busily, but didn’t cool things off much. The rusty shower head dripped, and there seemed to be no way to stop it. (He finally put a towel under it to muffle the clockwork sound.) The shade on the bedside lamp was burned in a couple of places. The room’s one picture—an unsettling composition depicting a sailing ship crewed entirely by grinning and possibly homicidal black men—hung crooked. Tim straightened it, but it immediately fell crooked again.
There was a lawn chair outside. The seat sagged and the legs were as rusty as the defective shower head, but it held him. He sat there with his legs stretched out, slapping at bugs and watching the sun burn its orange furnace light through the trees. Looking at it made him feel happy and melancholy at the same time. Another nearly endless freight appeared around quarter past eight, rolling across the state road and past the warehouses on the outskirts of town.
“That damn Georgia Southern’s always late.”
Tim looked around and beheld the proprietor and sole evening employee of this fine establishment. He was rail thin. A paisley vest hung off his top half. He wore his khakis high-water, the better to display his white socks and elderly Converse sneakers. His vaguely ratlike face was framed by a vintage Beatle haircut.
“Do tell,” Tim said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Norbert said, shrugging. “The even’ train always goes right through. The midnight train most always does unless it’s got diesel to unload or fresh fruit n vegimals for the grocery. There’s a junction down yonder.” He crossed his index fingers to demonstrate. “The one line goes to Atlanta, Birmin’am, Huntsville, places like ’at. T’other comes up from Jacksonville and goes on to Charleston, Wilmington, Newport News, places like ’at. It’s the day freights that mostly stop. Y’all thinkin about warehouse work? They usually a man or two short over there. Got to have a strong back, though. Not for me.”
Tim looked at him. Norbert shuffled his sneakers and gave a grin that exposed what Tim thought of as gone-country teeth. They were there, but looked as if they might be gone soon.
“Where’s your car?”
Tim just kept looking.
“Are you a cop?”
“Just now I’m a man watching the sun go down through the trees,” Tim said, “and I would as soon do it alone.”
“Say nummore, say nummore,” Norbert said, and beat a retreat, pausing only for a single narrow, assessing glance over his shoulder.
The freight eventually passed. The red crossing lights quit. The barriers swung up. The two or three vehicles that had been waiting started their engines and got moving. Tim watched the sun go from orange to red as it sank—red sky at night, sailor’s delight, his night knocker gramp would have said. He watched the shadows of the pines lengthen across SR 92 and join together. He was quite sure he wasn’t going to get the night knocker job, and maybe that was for the best. DuPray felt far from everything, not just a sidetrack but a damn near no-track. If not for those four warehouses, the town probably wouldn’t exist. And what was the point of their existence? To store TVs from some northern port like Wilmington or Norfolk, so they could eventually be shipped on to Atlanta or Marietta? To store boxes of computer supplies shipped from Atlanta so they could eventually be loaded up again and shipped to Wilmington or Norfolk or Jacksonville? To store fertilizer or dangerous chemicals, because in this part of the United States there was no law against it? Around and around it went, and what was round had no point, any fool knew that.
He went inside, locked his door (stupid; the thing was so flimsy a single kick would stave it in), shucked down to his underwear, and lay on the bed, which was saggy but bugless (as far as he had been able to ascertain, at least). He put his hands behind his head and stared at the picture of the grinning black men manning the frigate or whatever the hell you called a ship like that. Where were they going? Were they pirates? They looked like pirates to him. Whatever they were, it would eventually come to loading and unloading at the next port of call. Maybe everything did. And everyone. Not long ago he had unloaded himself from a Delta flight bound for New York. After that he had loaded cans and bottles into a sorting machine. Today he had loaded books for a nice lady librarian at one place and unloaded them at another. He was only here because I-95 had loaded up with cars and trucks waiting for the wreckers to come and haul away some unfortunate’s crashed car. Probably after an ambulance had loaded up the driver and unloaded him at the nearest hospital.
But a night knocker doesn’t load or unload, Tim thought. He just walks and knocks. That is, Grandpa would have said, the beauty part.
He fell asleep, waking only at midnight, when another freight went rumbling through. He used the bathroom and, before going back to bed, took down the crooked picture and leaned the crew of grinning black men facing the wall.
Damn thing gave him the willies.
8
When the phone in his room rang the next morning, Tim was showered and sitting in the lawn chair again, watching the shadows that had covered the road at sunset melt back the other way. It was Sheriff John. He didn’t waste time.
“Didn’t think your Chief would be in this early, so I looked you up online, Mr. Jamieson. Seems like you failed to note a couple of things on your application. Didn’t bring them up in our conversation, either. You got a lifesaving commendation in 2017, and nabbed Sarasota PD’s Sworn Officer of the Year in 2018. Did you just forget?”
“No,” Tim said. “I applied for the job on the spur of the moment. If I’d had more time to think, I’d have put those things down.”
“Tell me about the alligator. I grew up on the edge of Little Pee Dee Swamp, and I love a good gator story.”
“It’s not a very good one, because it wasn’t a very big gator. And I didn’t save the kid’s life, but the story does have its funny side.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Call came in from the Highlands, which is a private golf course. I was the closest officer. The kid was up a tree near one of the water hazards. He was eleven, twelve, something like that, and yelling his head off. The gator was down below.”
“Sounds like Little Black Sambo,” Sheriff John said. “Only as I recollect, there were tigers instead of a gator in that story, and if it was a private golf course, I bet the kid up that tree wadn’t black.”
“No, and the gator was more asleep than awake,” Tim said. “Just a five-footer. Six at most. I borrowed a five-iron from the kid’s father—he was the one who put me in for the commendation—and whacked him a couple of times.”
“Whacked the gator, I’m thinking, not the dad.”
Tim laughed. “Right. The gator went back to the water hazard, the kid climbed down, and that was it.” He paused. “Except I got on the evening news. Waving a golf club. The newscaster joked about how I ‘drove’ it off. Golf humor, you know.”