SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Four

18 Four I don’t know why he stopped and picked me up, that driver. He surely didn’t seem happy about it. He was a lean and narrow sharpfaced man who didn’t say a word for fifteen minutes after I got into the car. He stared straight before him through a cracked windshield as we rolled steadily beside the Tug River, the car’s engine making little noises that I had never heard from a car before. The old Ford pulled hard to the left and the driver held tight to the steering wheel, the car constantly trying to run across and off the other side of the road, and I thought that maybe the tires on the front were different sizes. Uncle Long Neck would do that, would put any tires on his old truck that would fit the rims. He would let me drive the truck along the rutted, rocky dirt road that ran beside Turkey Creek. The hubdeep ruts would grab the wheels, twisting the ancient truck until the frame groaned, the truck a rusting mechanical beast under torture. Every time we were together in the truck on that road he would say, See, boy, you don’t need for them tires to match. Makes no never mind on this road, and hit’s the best dirt road in the county. And, besides, we ain’t really goin’ nowheres anyway. But I was going somewhere. I didn’t know where, but it really didn’t matter. A few miles later we clunked through Steptown, and somewhere between there and Kermit we crossed the Wayne County line into Mingo, only there was no sign along the side of the road and I didn’t know exactly when we left the only county I knew anything about. “Glad to be out of there.” Trying to sound grown up, experienced. “Out’a where?” he mumbled. 19 “Out’a Wayne County.” He glanced at me, his eyes flicking over my whole body. “I’d a heap rather be in Wayne County than in Logan County, boy. Got no niggers in Wayne County. I seed two or three of ’em in Logan just last month. Come in to take minin’ jobs, I guess. Taking them jobs away from honest white folks.” He didn’t say it with any feeling. He just said it, flatly, as a fact. “Well, that don’t bother me.” “It don’t? You ever been up close to a nigger, boy?” Ninteen-forty-six. I was 10-years-old, standing on the front porch of the general store in Dunlow, down out of Turkey Creek and across the wooden bridge that rumbled like thunder when Long Neck’s old truck pounded across its timbers. I was listening to the old men talk about the war, talk about their sons in the war, as they leaned back in their chairs, chewed tobacco and waited in the stillness and the thick, damp summer heat for something, anything, to happen. Across the road Twelve Pole Creek hardly moved, dragonflies hanging suspended above the warm green water. Now and then Long Neck would look my way to see what I was doing, but he never said anything. I think he was just satisfied that I would stand there, leaning against a post, picking out the good parts from what the old men were saying. Gathering words, Long Neck would say. I heard it coming before I saw it. The faint rumbling grew in the distance, away and down the old, pitted two-lane highway, around a far heat-shimmered curve and out of sight. It wasn’t much of a rumbling, but it was enough to stop the talk on the front porch of the general store. And to me it sounded like music. I know now that it was a Harley, but I didn’t know it then. All I 20 knew then was that it was a glory machine, a freedom machine, a motorcycle. That much I was sure of. And when it swung around the curve and leaned into sight I knew that it was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen, or ever would see. I prayed silently for the bike to stop at the general store. The Harley slowed, drew even with the general store, and then curved in to a graceful stop at the steps. My prayer had been answered and...