Chapter 1 — Caldwell
The truck made the last fifty miles into Caldwell on bad tires and a fan belt Wade had been meaning to change since Tulsa. The radio kept losing its signal and finding it again — gospel out of one tower, static out of another. He left it on. The window was down. September wind off the pines came in hot, pine and red dirt and dry leaves before any of them were down. The smell went through him.
There had been two stops that day. The first was ten minutes at a gas station outside Meridian. The second was forty minutes at a McDonald’s two towns over the state line, and that was the one that mattered. Wade had bought a coffee and not drunk it. His hands had stayed on the wheel the whole time, his eyes on a spot of grease somebody had left on the windshield. The cup went cold. The afternoon moved up over the lot. Then the truck started up. The turning around he had thought about, and not done.
The county road came down off the old highway from the south, past the church where his mother was buried and his father was not. Wade had driven it on a hundred Sundays as a boy and once at three in the morning at seventeen with a borrowed Civic, running on something he would later have a name for. The road had not changed in twelve years. The fence line had. Somebody had put a chain across the cattle gap at the McMurry place, painted the McMurry name out, and put up a sign that just said NO TRESPASSING in red. Wade’s foot found the same dips and rises in the road. The body had been keeping what the mind had let slip.
The Methodist church came up white through the pines, with the small cemetery off to one side. Wade did not slow and did not turn his head. His mother was in that cemetery. Diane Holt had been buried there in 2019 on a Saturday warm enough to take a coat off in. The son who had put her in the ground that day had not been back since. The pines closed over the road and the light went gray under cover. A buzzard sat on a fence post and watched him pass without much interest.
A mile farther on, an old man at a mailbox lifted a hand off the rim without looking up. Wade lifted his back, the way a man did out here. Only after the truck had carried him past did he realize he had not raised a hand to a stranger in twelve years. The country had put the gesture back in him. His fingers flexed on the wheel of their own.
Travis Beasley’s place was a half mile past a pin oak that had been hit by lightning the summer Wade and Travis turned twelve. The trunk was still standing, with a few branches that had grown back crooked the way an old man’s hand grows. Wade slowed at the drive and turned in.
The yard needed mowing. A swing set leaned in the side yard. A kiddie pool was tipped on its edge against the porch. Under the carport sat a four-wheeler with one tire flat. The porch light was not on yet. A wreath hung on the front door, probably hung there in August by Becca and not bothered with since. Wade sat in the truck with the engine still running and looked at all of it.
The thought of backing out the drive and turning south again sat with him. The route was one Wade could see in his head — Mobile, Diane’s old house sold three years now, Pensacola past that, the panhandle, the Gulf, on across to wherever a man went when he had run out of places. The thinking had been going since the McDonald’s. Some version of it had been going for about a year. It was the kind of thinking that solved nothing.
The screen door slapped, and Travis came out onto the porch with a dish towel over his shoulder and a smaller one in his hand. The sight of the truck stopped him on the top step. For a second he did not come down. Wade watched him work whatever was on his face. Then he came down the steps and across the yard, without hurry.
Wade cut the engine and got out. The cicadas got louder. They did not shake hands. Travis hit Wade on the shoulder with the flat of his palm and held there, gripping. Wade hit him back the same way and held on too.
“’Bout damn time,” Travis said.
Wade let himself smile. “I know.”
“You hungry?”
“I could eat.”
Travis looked past him at the truck bed — the duffel, the file box, a coat thrown over them. “You traveling light, Holt.”
“Most of it’s in storage in Texarkana. Bring the rest down later.”
“Becca’s going to want to feed you regardless.”
“Counting on it.”
A child’s voice came from inside the screen door — high and indignant and drawing out Becca’s name in the long-suffering vowels of complaint. Travis looked up at the porch, then back at Wade, and shook his head. “That’s Cole. He’s six. He’s mad about his sister most of the time. She’s four, and she’s already meaner than he is.”
“Sounds about right.”
Travis grinned, the same grin at twenty-nine as he had had at fifteen, just with more lines around it. “Come on. Becca cleaned out the room over the carport for you. New sheets, fan up there, the whole thing. She left a six-pack on the desk.”
“She’s a saint.”
“She is.”
Travis turned and started back toward the house. Wade went to the truck bed and lifted the duffel out. It was heavy. Everything he had brought from Texarkana was in it — clothes, a few books, the folder. The file box could wait. The duffel went up to his shoulder. Travis was at the screen door already, holding it open with his hip, watching him cross the yard.
The exterior stairs ran up the side of the carport, narrow, with a handrail Travis had nailed in himself out of two-by-fours that had not been planed. Wade went up. The top of the stairs gave onto a small landing, with a single bare bulb that Travis had not switched on. Below in the carport, the smell came up of years of motor oil and old wood and something old farm dogs had left there before any of these dogs had been born.
Becca had spent a Saturday on the room. The bed had been made up with a quilt folded at the foot, the sheets turned down at one corner, and a pillow on it that did not belong to him. A small desk sat under the open window, with a lamp on it and a notebook open to a blank page like something offered. The fan was running on low in the corner. The cicadas through the screen were louder than the fan. The walls had been painted recently. The smell of the paint came up underneath the smell of the September night.
Against the wall by the bed sat a dresser he did not recognize, with a glass of water on top, a folded towel beside it, and a small ceramic bowl that held a couple of pencils — pencils a guest probably wouldn’t use, but pencils nonetheless. Inside the closet hung three wire hangers and one wooden one. On the floor of the closet was a folded blanket, heavy and gray, of the kind a man might want in February. Becca had thought of February in October.
Above the desk, where Wade would see it every time he sat down, Becca had hung a framed picture: him and Travis at twelve years old, holding up a stringer of bream by a slatted dock that had since rotted into the river. In the picture Travis had a sunburn on his nose and was pointing at the largest of the fish. Wade was laughing at something the camera had not caught. The picture had been taken on a day he did not remember being photographed. The day itself he remembered. Travis had fallen in twice. Becca was the one who knew where to put a photograph.