All Over but the Shoutin' (18 page)

I would have liked to talk to him, before all that mess, all that terrible pain, all those gallons of whiskey, and search his face and his mind for something he had passed on to me. Something good.

14
100 miles per hour, upside down and sideways

S
ince I was a boy I have searched for ways to slingshot myself into the distance, faster and faster. When you turn the key on a car built for speed, when you hear that car rumble like an approaching storm and feel the steering wheel tremble in your hands from all that power barely under control, you feel like you can run away from anything, like you can turn your whole life into an insignificant speck in the rearview mirror.

In the summer of 1976, the summer before my senior year at Jacksonville High School, I had the mother of all slingshots. She was a 1969 General Motors convertible muscle car with a 350 V-8 and a Holley four-barreled carburetor as long as my arm. She got about six miles to the gallon, downhill, and when you started her up she sounded like Judgment Day. She was long and low and vicious, a mad dog cyclone with orange houndstooth interior and an eight-track tape player, and looked fast just sitting in the yard under a pine tree. I owned just one tape, that I remember,
The Eagles’ Greatest Hits.

I worked two summers in the hell and heat at minimum wage to earn enough money to buy her, and still had to borrow money from my uncle Ed, who got her for just nineteen hundred dollars mainly because he paid in hundred-dollar bills. “You better be careful, boy,” he told me. “That’un will kill you.” I assured him that, Yes, Sir, I would creep around in it like an old woman.

I tell myself I loved that car because she was so pretty and so fast and because I loved to rumble between the rows of pines with the blond hair of some girl who had yet to discover she was better than me whipping in the breeze. But the truth is I loved her because she was my equalizer. She raised me up, at least in my own eyes, closer to where I wanted and needed to be. In high school, I was neither extremely popular nor one of the great number of want-to-bes. I was invited to parties with the popular kids, I had dates with pretty girls. But there was always a distance there, of my own making, usually.

That car, in a purely superficial way, closed it. People crowded around her at the Hardee’s. I let only one person drive her, Patrice Curry, the prettiest girl in school, for exactly one mile.

That first weekend, I raced her across the long, wide parking lot of the TG&Y, an insane thing to do, seeing as how a police car could have cruised by at any minute. It was a test of nerves as well as speed, because you actually had to be slowing down, not speeding up, as you neared the finish line, because you just ran out of parking lot. I beat Lyn Johnson’s Plymouth and had to slam on my brakes and swing her hard around, to keep from jumping the curb, the road and plowing into the parking lot of the Sonic Drive-In.

It would have lasted longer, this upraised standing, if I had pampered her. I guess I should have spent more time looking at her than racing her, but I had too much of the Bragg side of the family in me for that. I would roll her out on some lonely country road late at night, the top down, and blister down the blacktop until I knew the tires were about to lift off the ground. But they never did. She held the road, somehow, until I ran out of road or just lost my nerve. It was as if there was no limit to her, at how fast we could go, together.

It lasted two weeks from the day I bought her.

On Saturday night, late, I pulled up to the last red light in town on my way home. Kyle Smith pulled up beside me in a loud-running Chevrolet, and raced his engine. I did not squall out when the light changed—she was not that kind of car—but let her rpm’s build, build and build, like winding up a top.

I was passing a hundred miles per hour as I neared a long sweeping turn on Highway 21 when I saw, coming toward me, the blue lights of the town’s police. I cannot really remember what happened next. I just remember mashing the gas pedal down hard, halfway through that sweeping turn, and the sickening feeling as the car just seemed to lift and twist in the air, until I was doing a hundred miles per hour still, but upside down and sideways.

She landed across a ditch, on her top. If she had not hit the ditch in just the right way, the police later said, it would have cut my head off. I did not have on my seat belt. We never did, then. Instead of flinging me out, though, the centrifugal force—I had taken science in ninth grade—somehow held me in.

Instead of lying broken and bleeding on the ground beside my car, or headless, I just sat there, upside down. I always pulled the adjustable steering wheel down low, an inch or less above my thighs, and that held me in place, my head covered with mud and broken glass. The radio was still blaring—it was the Eagles’ “The Long Run,” I believe—and I tried to find the knob in the dark to turn it off. Funny. There I was in an upside-down car, smelling the gas as it ran out of the tank, listening to the tick, tick, tick of the hot engine, thinking: “I sure do hope that gas don’t get nowhere near that hot manifold,” but all I did about it was try to turn down the radio.

I knew the police had arrived because I could hear them talking. Finally, I felt a hand on my collar. A state trooper dragged me out and dragged me up the side of the ditch and into the collective glare of the most headlights I had ever seen. There were police cars and ambulances and traffic backed up, it seemed, all the way to Piedmont.

“The Lord was riding with you, son,” the trooper said. “You should be dead.”

My momma stood off to one side, stunned. Finally the police let her through to look me over, up and down. But except for the glass in my hair and a sore neck, I was fine. Thankfully, I was too old for her to go cut a hickory and stripe my legs with it, but I am sure it crossed her mind.

The trooper and the Jacksonville police had a private talk off to one side, trying to decide whether or not to put me in prison for the rest of my life. Finally, they informed my momma that I had suffered enough, to take me home. As we drove away, I looked back over my shoulder as the wrecker dragged my car out of the ditch and, with the help of several strong men, flipped it back over, right-side up. It looked like a white sheet of paper someone had crumpled up and tossed in the ditch from a passing car.

“The Lord was riding with that boy,” Carliss Slaughts, the wrecker operator, told my uncle Ed. With so many people saying that, I thought the front page of the
Anniston Star
the next day would read:
LORD RIDES WITH BOY, WRECKS ANYWAY
.

I was famous for a while. No one, no one, flips a convertible at a hundred miles per hour, without a seat belt on, and walks away, undamaged. People said I had a charmed life. My momma, like the trooper and Mr. Slaughts, just figured God was my copilot.

The craftsmen at Slaughts’ Body Shop put her back together, over four months. My uncle Ed loaned me the money to fix her, and took it out of my check. The body and fender man made her pretty again, but she was never the same. She was fast but not real fast, as if some little part of her was still broken deep inside. Finally, someone backed into her in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly, and I was so disgusted I sold her for fourteen hundred dollars to a preacher’s son, who drove the speed limit.

I
tell that story to show just how effectively I wasted high school, and came so close to wasting my mother’s sacrifice. I had dreams but no ambition. I cut class and shot twenty-foot jumpers in the gym. I made a solid C average. I never, ever did any homework. I read things I wanted to read, but I never studied the things the teachers thought important. I was the master of ceremonies of the talent show, in a borrowed suit. I won contests in public speaking, because talking was so easy, and joined the school newspaper, because words didn’t cost anything. I drank a little at parties and after ball games and on a road trip to Atlanta to try and get into a topless bar—which failed. I never, never danced no disco, unless some young lady wanted me to. I pitched for the Ed Fair Landscaping Dirtdaubers in the summer, and in one game I hit back-to-back home runs. If I needed money for dates, and there was no work because of the weather, my grandmother gave it to me from the change purse she hid under the mattress.

Because I worked, I paid for my lunches now. I had two pairs of blue jeans, which got me through the week, but nobody had to know that but me. I had a class ring made from fake gold, but nobody had to know that either. I was, if not bright, at least not bad-looking.

I should have studied hard and tried to win a scholarship to college, should have seriously prepared myself for the future, should have focused on dragging myself out of poverty, the way so many people do. But of the varied weaknesses in me, the strongest is a desire to live for the moment, and let tomorrow slide. That is fine, if you are a Kennedy. It was dangerous for boys like me, or at least, it should have been.

But I had a charmed life. The wreck had proved it, as other things would, all my life. Even then, I was smart enough to know that when you perform without a net, you by God better not fall.

When I took the girlfriend of the biggest and baddest ol’ boy in town to a football game, and he came after me with a carload of goons, I just out-ran him, first in my car and later on foot. The noble thing would have been to stand and fight him, and if honor had been at stake, I would have. But honor was not what was at stake, but a girl named Allison who was just a friend, anyway. If you are going to get beat to death, do it for love.

My senior year, I borrowed money from a friend—I still owe him a hundred dollars come to think of it—and bought a bright-orange Suzuki 750, water-cooled. It would run 125 if you could hold on, but people called it the Water Buffalo because it was so heavy. In the summer I rode it bare-legged in tennis shoes, which was suicide. A wreck on pavement or gravel would have skinned me to the bone, so I could not wreck. I laid it down only once, at a red light in Lenlock, Alabama. I was talking to some girls in a car beside me and, not paying attention, let it lean a little too far to one side. It fell on me, pinning me down like a bug under a brogan shoe.

On the weekends, purely because my uncle Ed had no one else to drive the big dump trucks to and from the jobs, he closed his eyes and said a prayer and gave the job to me. His regular drivers were always losing their licenses to DUIs, or else he would never have let me anywhere near one. A fool in a dump truck is more dangerous than a fool in a Camaro. I would shift through that Georgia Overdrive like I was Richard Petty at Darlington, and take curves on two balding tires. I would look over at the aging workmen beside me and laugh, like the devil himself, until finally they would ride in back of the flatbed truck with the fertilizer, to keep from riding with me.

I enjoyed my life as much a I could, and excelled at nothing in it. The only thing I was ever any good at was in the telling and hearing of stories, and there was no profit in that. I cannot truthfully even say that I went to work for my high school newspaper because of a love for writing. Writing was hard work. It made your hand cramp, and I couldn’t type a lick. Telling stories was something you did on your porch. Journalism seemed too much like work, like digging taters.

I took journalism at Jacksonville High because it was supposed to be easy. The press badge, safely protected by the First Amendment and lamination, gave me freedom to roam the halls, shoot baskets in the gym, stray over to Jacksonville State University to chat up college women, and just generally goof off. The journalism department consisted of one bespectacled teacher named Edna Baggs, who must have seen promise in me or she would certainly have kicked me off the newspaper for my flagrant abuses of power. My junior year, I was named sports editor of the paper because no one else wanted it. I probably was not very good, but I liked to see my name above the stories. It made me feel important.

I had no way of knowing, then, that it would be my salvation.

As I graduated from high school, the odds of continuing my writing were slim. I went back to work for my uncle Ed. I remember thinking that I could drive a truck for a living. As that summer died and I sweated with that fork in my hand, lifting and cussing rocks, I could feel that nonchalance begin to crack, replaced with regret, and finally with an increasing desperation.

The friends I had made, all the girls I had dated, were going to college, away from me, from my place in the dirt. I remember thinking, is this where I belong?

I had never pretended to be a rich kid, but I had pretended, for three years, that I was just as good as them. I was. Me, my brothers, my mother, we were as good as anybody. My mistake was in believing that other people had come to think so, too.

Nineteen years ago this summer, I was reminded, in a sickening and soul-killing way, of just how wrong I had been. There had been a killing, close by. I was a murder suspect, for an afternoon.

15
The usual suspects

F
or years, every time I thought of it, I found myself in a rage, eaten up inside. It was over in just a few minutes, the questions, the suspicions, routine police business. But it terrified my momma, purely because she believed the police would hang the crime on one of us. Because they could. Because we were who we were.

The gunshots were so close, less than a mile away. I should have heard them. I still don’t know why I didn’t. It could have been the crickets, or the rattle of the electric fan, or the canned noise from the television. I went to sleep that night, a Sunday, sunburned and wore out from swimming in the backwater of the Coosa River, peacefully unaware that murder was being done so close outside my window.

Germania Springs had been an idyllic place, before that night. The water was cold as ice but only a few inches deep, meandering between old trees. It bubbled straight out of the rock, as if by magic. Even before I was born, young people came to lie on blankets on the grass and plan lives, or live for the moment. Donna Tucker and Mark Martin, sweethearts, spread their blanket out beside the stream the night of July 17, 1977. They had graduated from Springville High School that May. Donna, a smart and pretty girl who wanted to work as a lab technician, was a freshman at Jacksonville State University. She had enrolled in college right after graduation, so that she could get her degree in three years instead of four. Mark, a popular all-around athlete, pumped gas part-time and planned to join her at Jacksonville State in the fall. Every Tuesday, he came to the campus to help her study. Every weekend, she went home to Springville. On Sunday nights, every Sunday night, he drove her back to the campus. They just assumed they would get married someday. They just assumed that everything, so perfect, would stay that way.