SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Twenty-Five

148 Twenty-Five Just across the highway there was a tiny shack with grease and smoke smeared across the front and a faded Royal Crown Cola sign nailed crookedly across a gap in the boards over the door. Off to the side a mound of old tires leaned into the sun. A lone gas pump, the kind with the glass ball on the top, stood guard near the road. I pushed the Triumph up next to the pump and waited. It took him a long time but eventually a skinny black man wandered around the side of the building, not even looking surprised that I was there. He was wearing old cotton pants and a sleeveless undershirt, his bony arms dangling like broken parts. When he came up next to the bike I thought he was one of the men on the porch of the church back there in the village. But he couldn’t be. How the hell could he have gotten here before me? He just stood there and waited. He didn’t say a word. “Give me fifty cents worth,” I said, trying to keep my voice low and down in my chest. He pumped the gas, still silent, not meeting my eyes. “Thanks,” I said, handing him the dollar. “Didn’t think you’d be open on a Sunday.” “Wasn’t.” He didn’t even look at the bill, just stuffed it into his pocket, then from the same pocket pulled out a fifty-cent piece. He dropped the coin into my hand, making sure, I thought, that his hand did not touch mine. I pocketed the coin and threw my leg across the bike. “Boy,” he said softly, “let me give you some benefit of my age. That fifty-cent piece you got there . . . you spend it in a white diner. Get yourself some food you like. Go on down to the middle of town. Lots of white diners down there.” 149 “What’s a White Diner? They got cheap food?” I still didn’t get it. I didn’t get the no-neck deputy parked by the side of the road looking for Northern license plates; I didn’t get that anything north of the Carolinas was “north.” I didn’t get the back roads that led nowhere except maybe to some humped-up little black village on the edge of a swamp. I had never been to a black village before; there were no black people on Black Hawk Ridge, no black people in Crum, no black people in Wayne County, West Virginia. I didn’t get the old man’s single-pump gas station that was open only because he knew I was coming. I didn’t get any of this. And I sure as hell didn’t know what a “White Diner” was. “I said, do they have . . .” But he was gone. I turned the bike out on the road, mist and dampness still clinging to the blacktop. The town couldn’t be too far away. I knew I must be near the beach, but I had never been near a beach and I didn’t know exactly what to look for. I had never seen the ocean. A series of small unpaved lanes drifted off to my left, lined with strange trees and small wooden houses that had screened porches and tiny patches of concrete outside at the edges of the porches, with hoses and pipes that led to shower heads. Showers. Right outside the house. This was strange country. I was heading south in full darkness and I slowed the Triumph to a walk, trying to smell the air. The wind against my face was black and heavy with moisture, the whole thing tasting and smelling like the swamp back at the village. I knew the air was warm, but, still, I shivered. I started looking for a place to hole up for the night. Maybe an abandoned gas station. I was on a low rise, a hump in the road that rolled up and then off down toward the distance, suddenly curving. I drifted lazily around 150 the curve and was almost on top of the patrol car before I knew what the hell was happening. The car was parked on the side of the road, just behind another car, its red light on, turning, flashing. The deputy was standing beside the other car, leaning into...