“These days I do a little pit crewing to keep my hand in. Mostly though, I’m moving into restoring classic cars. Like your daddy’s T-Bird,” he told Kidd. “Or like that little Mustang there.”
His eyes moved speculatively from the dilapidated outbuildings to a cinderblock building sitting halfway between us and the road. It was encircled by even more wrecks rusting away in a thicket of ragweeds and sassafras trees.
“In fact,” said Allen, “I was thinking I might even open up Uncle Jap’s old garage. All these new houses going up, I bet Jimmy can’t keep up with them.”
He had that right. Bad as my battery needed checking, I’d have to call Jimmy first and make a real appointment and I kept forgetting.
I’ve been taking my cars to Jimmy White ever since the white Thunderbird my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday slid into the ditch on the curve in front of his newly opened garage. He was standing right there in the open doorway, and after he made sure I wasn’t killed, he went and got a tow rope, pulled my T-bird over to his garage and hammered out the dent in my fender.
“You going to tell my daddy?” I asked.
“Ain’t Mr. Kezzie’s car, is it?” said Jimmy as he handed me his bill for fifteen dollars. “ ’Course, I see you take that curve that fast again, I might have something to say to my Uncle Jerrold.”
Jerrold White was one of the first black troopers in North Carolina and I knew if I got another speeding ticket, Mother and Daddy would take away my keys for a month.
So I still go slow when I drive past Jimmy’s and I still bring my car to him even though he has so many new customers I can’t just drop in and get it fixed while I wait anymore.
Intellectually, I know that people (and their cars) have to live somewhere, but selfishly I can’t help feeling that way too many houses are sprouting up on our fields and in our woods. All these new people looking for the good life—crowding up against us, taking up the empty spaces—they’re changing the quality of our lives.
That’s why I flinch every time I see orange ribbons. Seems like they’re all followed by dozens of Dick Sutterly’s For Sale signs.
“Gracious Southern Living in a Spacious Sutterly Home. ”
Right.
Twelve-hundred-square-foot cardboard boxes slapped down on a bare acre lot and built cheap enough to compete with double-wide trailers.
Car keys jingling in his hand, Kidd straightened up and said, “Well, I reckon we’d better roll if I want to make it back to New Bern before dark. Nice meeting you, Stancil.”
“Same here,” Allen told him. To me he said, “Now don’t you be a stranger, Deb’rah.”
With the dogs and the ornamental corn giving off familiar earthy smells, we drove down the rutted lane to the road and headed back to Dobbs.
“Stancil seems like an interesting guy,” Kidd said.
I made a noncommittal sound.
“Nice of him to come spend some time with his uncle.”
I was wondering about that myself, but all I said was, “Uh-huh.”
Kidd glanced over at me. “Been a long time since you last saw him?”
“Years,” I said.
“So how come you’re still so pissed at him?”
“Marriage’ll do that,” I said.
“Marriage?” he asked blankly. Then it registered, and the van suddenly veered so far into the passing lane that one wheel hit the shoulder and Aunt Zell’s corn went flying. “You were married? To him?”
“What happened to ‘interesting’ and ‘nice guy’?”
He was too steamed to smile. “The whole time we’ve been together and you never found a spare minute to say ‘Oh, by the way, I used to be married to some redneck speed jockey’?”
“I thought we agreed not to talk about past relationships.”
“Relationships, yes, but marriage is more than a one-night stand. Wasn’t I up front about Jean and Amber?”
“You were married for twelve years,” I said. “And you could hardly keep Amber a secret. Sooner or later I was bound to wonder why your spare bedroom’s done up in ruffles and lace.”
Kidd’s fourteen-year-old daughter is very retro-feminine.
“It’s not funny, Ms. Judge. Is there a kid you forgot to mention, too?”
I was starting to get a little steamed myself. “Does it matter?”
“Jesus Christ, Deborah! Of course it matters. I thought we had something open and honest here. I thought—”
Both hands clenched the steering wheel and he drove in moody silence.
This had the makings of Our First Fight and I was bedamned if it was going to be over Allen Stancil.
“Look,” I said, twisting around till I was sitting on my left leg and facing him across the width of the van. “If you really want to know why I don’t talk about it—why I try to not even think about it—it’s because Allen Stancil’s the stupidest thing I ever did in my entire life.”
My internal preacher gave my conscience a jab and I amended, “Well, one of the stupidest, anyhow. Sometimes I still can’t believe I was ever that messed up. My only excuse is that Mother had just died. I was eighteen and a freshman at UNC-G, away from home for the first time. I was mad at God, mad at Daddy, not talking to at least eight of my brothers, even mad at Mother for dying.”
The van suddenly felt hot and stuffy. I cracked the window and took several deep breaths. “Running off to a Martinsville magistrate with Allen seemed like a way of getting some of my own back. Of course, we hadn’t been married twenty minutes when I knew it was a mistake, but by then I was so high on pot and tequila, I didn’t really give a damn.”
I lowered my window all the way and cool wind whipped my hair into tangles.
Kidd reached over and laid his hand on my drawn-up knee. “You don’t have to tell me any more if you don’t want to,” he said gently.
“There’s not much more to tell. About a week after we married, he went and called me Debbie one time too many. I was slicing limes with a rusty old butcher knife and I guess I overreacted. Scared the hell out of me. I got him to the emergency room before he bled to death, and then I just walked out the door and kept walking.”
“Home?”
“No. There were some other girls. Women. Race car groupies,” I said vaguely. “I crashed with them.”
I don’t like to think of that brief period. It had seemed like an eternity when I was living it—terrified that Allen might die, then scared he might live and have me arrested for trying to kill him. I freaked and crawled inside a tequila bottle carrying my saltshaker. To this day I still can’t look a margarita in the eye.
“Dallas was the one who’d given us a ride up to Martinsville and when he heard what happened, he came looking for me and tried to bring me home, only I wasn’t ready to come back and be preached at. I did let him take me on up to my Aunt Barbara’s house in Maryland, and while I was there, Daddy and my cousin John Claude— the one that’s a lawyer over in Dobbs? They had the marriage annulled before half my brothers were even aware I wasn’t still at school. It was over two years before I finally came home, so I doubt if there’s ten people outside my family that know it ever happened.”
“Eleven now,” said Kidd.
I slid across the wide seat and tucked myself under his free arm. “I said outside my family.”
4
« ^ » It is indeed astonishing, how far ignorance, partiality, and prejudice will often carry people.“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
As so often happens, I no sooner meet someone than he appears in my courtroom.
Wednesday morning, the first day of November, I looked up from the papers before me to see young Billy Wall called to the defendant’s table for issuing worthless checks. A very young, very pregnant woman with short brown curls sat on the bench beside him and she gave his arm an encouraging pat as he stood up and came forward.