Up Jumps the Devil dk-4 Page 4

  “Billy here picked it last month and it’s stored in that barn back of Dallas’s house.”

  Mr. Jap had always grown a strain that he swore had been handed straight down from a great-great-grandmother who befriended an Indian woman who gave her some seed stock in return. The colorful red, black, orange, and yellow ears were small and perfectly shaped, “and them fools over’n Cary and North Raleigh’ll hang it on anything that opens or closes,” he told Daddy gleefully. “Hell, they even buy corn shocks and hay bales and stick ’em all over them fancy yards they got.”

  He’d shaken his head at the folly of city folks, but he was happy to take their cash. And was evidently eager for more.

  “Billy here and me go halves on it,” Mr. Jap told us now, which explained the larger crop.

  “Billy Wall?” I asked the young man. “Troy Wall’s boy?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said shyly.

  “I didn’t know your daddy farmed.”

  “He don’t. But I’ve always wanted to ever since I was a little boy.”

  Troy Wall had been five or six years ahead of me in school and this boy, about twenty I’d say, was his spitting image. “What’s your dad up to these days?” I asked.

  “Oh, not much. He lays floor tile for Carpet Country when his back don’t act up on him. They got the contract to do all the houses in Mr. Sutterly’s new subdivision over on New Forty-Eight.”

  Dick Sutterly was the developer who’d tried to buy the farm from Dallas.

  Mr. Jap dropped his cigarette, ground it out with the toe of his brogan. “That’s the old Holland homeplace,” he said. “Used to be one of the prettiest farms around, yes, it was. And James Holland always had the best yield of sweet potatoes of any man in the township. It’s a downright sin to put houses on such mellow land.”

  “Been mine, I’d have never sold it,” Billy said wistfully.

  “Well, everybody ain’t as willing to work as hard as you, boy. No, they ain’t.” Mr. Jap shook his head. “I reckon some folks would sell their soul if you offered ’em enough.”

  I didn’t know if he meant the Holland heirs or his daughter-in-law sitting in the jailhouse over in Dobbs, and for a minute I thought he was going to launch into a discussion of sin and redemption. Instead, our conversation turned to crops and the weather.

  Billy had come over today to see if Mr. Jap wanted some help getting up his pumpkins, which the old man peddled out of the back of his pickup at the flea market. Otherwise, he was going to bring out a crew this week to ready another load of ornamental corn for market. I gathered that it was a matter of carefully pulling back the dried shucks, tying them in bunches of threes, and then packing them into crates. Mr. Jap thought they might have a thousand dozen all told.

  “Been such a good year, I’m a mind to run a load up to Washington,” said Billy. “I think I can get a dollar and a half an ear up there.”

  A couple of short rows were still standing next to the pumpkin patch. Although some of the colorful ears had been nibbled down to the cob by squirrels and coons or carried off by crows, we found more than a dozen nearly perfect specimens for Aunt Zell, who was in charge of decorations for the County Democratic Women’s November meeting. Kidd loaded them in the van while I tried to pay Mr. Jap, who put his hands in his pocket and said, “Even if it won’t Sunday, I couldn’t take no money from Kezzie’s girl. ’Sides, y’all better go on and get them fool dogs ’fore that rabbit takes ’em across the road.”

  In the distance we could hear the dogs yipping like crazy, so I thanked him and climbed back in the van. We drove on around the edge of the big cornfield, through a stand of pines and straight across a fallow pasture, through chest-high hogweeds, cockleburs, and bright yellow camphorweeds till we could actually see the two pups.

  Whatever they’d been chasing had gone to earth somewhere beneath the tumbledown outbuildings there on the edge of Mr. Jap’s farm. The young dogs were running in and out and underneath the sagging wall of an old log tobacco barn, trying to figure out exactly how to get at their quarry.

  We hurried over to them and Kidd had to speak smartly to them before they’d listen long enough for us to each grab a collar while he snapped on the leads.

  Shelters with dull tin roofs shedded off three sides of the barn, which had almost disappeared under a tangle of kudzu vines. Hundreds of tobacco sticks were bundled and stacked under one; five old wrecked vehicles, four cars and a pickup, were nosed up under the other two shelters. They were dirty and covered with bird droppings, but their windows weren’t broken and they didn’t seem to be as rusty as the half-dozen that had been left to the weather out behind the shelters.

  “Well, would you look at this!” Kidd said. He ducked beneath the kudzu vines and walked around to the front of a sporty little car with a smashed-in rear. “A 1967 Ford Mustang. That was my first car.”

  “Was it red, too?”

  He nodded.

  “First boy I ever went steady with drove an old Mustang. Candy-apple red.” (Benny Porter. He’d had great potential till that warm spring night when four of my brothers boxed us in with their cars and trucks at the drive-in.)

  Kidd smiled as his hand touched the frisky little grille ornament. “Y’all make the horse buck?”

  “Why, Mr. Chapin,” I drawled. “What kind of a young girl do you think I was?”

  (My brothers had kept their eyes on the screen and didn’t say a single word, but poor old Benny was so intimidated that he would barely kiss me after that and we broke up before school was out.)

  “I bet you were hell on wheels.”

  I laughed as he caught my hand and pulled me to him. The pups yipped and strained against their leads.

  They barked again and we heard a deep male voice say, “Can I help y’all with something?”

  Standing out in the sunshine was a heavyset muscular man with a thick mop of straight brown hair just beginning to go gray. He had a strong nose and square chin and his mouth was curtained by a salt-and-pepper mustache that bushed out over his upper lip.

  Kidd and I were at the rear of the shelter, in deep shadow, of course, and the man squinted against the bright sunlight, trying to make out our features. We still had our arms around each other and Kidd gave me an inquiring glance. When I shrugged my shoulders to show I didn’t recognize him, Kidd stepped forward, looping the leads around his hand so the over-friendly pups couldn’t jump up on the stranger.

  The man wore sun-faded jeans and a brown leather vest over a blue plaid shirt. The big buckle on his belt was enameled green-and-white and shaped like the logo of a popular motor oil.

  I took a longer, harder look and my heart sank straight to the bottom of my stomach as I mentally shaved off that thick straight mustache and lengthened the hair into a ponytail. And maybe it was my imagination, but I could almost feel a tingle in my left shoulder where I’d once carried the tattoo of a small black star. Cost me a bunch to get the damn thing lasered off. When this man turned his left hand, I saw the mate of my black star on his palm and I knew that if he took off his shirt, there’d be a red, white, and blue American flag on one deltoid and a pair of black-and-white checkered flags on the other. (Not to mention a couple of raunchy tattoos on more intimate parts of his anatomy.)

  He had to be at least fifty now, but he squatted down on the heels of his cowboy boots as easily as a teenager and rubbed the dogs’ ears. Suspicion was still in his eyes. “Y’all ain’t friends of that Tig Wentworth, are you?”

  The name of the man that’d shot Dallas Stancil meant nothing to Kidd and he shook his head. “No. My dogs got across the creek and we came over to get them. Then I saw this old Mustang and had to take a closer look.”

  He stretched out his hand. “I’m Kidd Chapin. From down east.”

  “Allen Stancil,” said the man, sticking out his own hand as he stood up again. “From out near Charlotte.”

  They both turned to me and since the Enterprise hadn’t suddenly beamed me off the planet like I’d been
praying the last forty seconds, there was nothing for it but to come out of the shadows from behind the wrecked car and say, “Hello, Allen. What’re you doing here?”

  “Well, I’ll be damned! Debbie?”

  “Don’t call me Debbie,” I snapped automatically.

  “Y’all know each other?” asked Kidd.

  I hesitated and Allen Stancil said smoothly, “Yeah, I used to do a little work for Mr. Kezzie. He’s sure looking good these days to be as old as he is. You, too, Deb.”

  “Don’t call me Deb,” I said, enunciating each syllable through clenched teeth. “And just when did you see my daddy?”

  “Coupla days ago. I was driving into Uncle Jap’s yard while he was driving out. I throwed up my hand to him, but I don’t guess he knowed who I was.”

  A damn good guess. If Daddy knew Allen Stancil was anywhere within a hundred miles, he’d have told me. Assuming he didn’t shoot the bastard first as he’d once threatened to.

  All through Dallas’s funeral, I’d been thinking about Allen, wondering if he’d show, wondering what I’d say if we came face-to-face before I could slip away. And here he’d jumped up like the devil when I least expected him.

  “How long you planning on staying?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Long as Uncle Jap needs me, I reckon. Dallas getting hisself killed sort of knocked the fire out of him, didn’t it?”

  “Or put a different kind of fire into him,” I said, thinking of that Holyness Prayr Room. “We just saw him over at his pumpkin patch with Billy Wall.”

  “Dallas and me, we was more like brothers than first cousins,” Allen said mournfully. “I’m gonna have to be Uncle Jap’s son now.”

  That pious tone made me snort, but it was drowned in the yips and yells as the dogs got loose again.

  Once Allen quit paying them any mind, they lost interest in him and suddenly remembered the rabbit that was hiding somewhere under the shelter. Their lunge caught Kidd off guard and the leads slipped from his hand. An instant later they dived under an old Chrysler that was sitting up on blocks. I saw the rabbit squeeze underneath the side wall and light out for the tall weeds, but the pups never missed him. They just kept on yipping and whining around the cars until Kidd stepped on one lead and Allen got hold of the other.

  And when Kidd opened the door of the steel cage in the back of the van, Allen hoisted up the dogs and helped get them inside. I could see him sizing Kidd up as they talked dogs a minute or two before getting off on cars again.

  “I’d forgot about all the old beauties Uncle Jap has sitting round this place,” he said. “There’s a ’sixty-one Stingray and a straight-eight ’fifty-nine Packard Clipper. And you’re probably too young to appreciate it, but damned if he ain’t got a ’forty-nine Hudson Hornet setting over yonder beside the feed barn.”

  “I know a doctor down in New Bern with a classic Stingray,” said Kidd, “but I don’t think I ever heard of a Hudson Hornet. Good car?”

  “Good car? Hell, bo, it was just the prettiest aerodynamic body anybody ever saw,” Allen said. “Had this incredible overhead cam in a one-eighty-two horsepower engine. I tell you, around here, Hornets flat-out dominated stock car racing in the late forties. Then along came the Olds Eighty-eight and after that the Hornet was finished. Hudson merged with American Motors and now the Jeep’s about the only thing Chrysler kept when they took over AMC.”

  He pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He knew better than to offer me one, but he did hold out the pack to Kidd, who shook his head.

  There was a faraway look in Kidd’s eyes, as if seeing something wonderful and long gone. “My dad used to have an old ’fifty-two Thunderbird,” he said.

  “Man, they were something else!” Allen agreed as he took a long drag of smoke and exhaled it through his nose. “Don’t suppose he still owns it, does he?”

  Kidd gave a rueful shrug. “Mom made him sell it when my little brother came along. She couldn’t hold both of us on her lap anymore.”

  “Too bad. A ’fifty-two T-bird in good shape, it’d be worth a bundle now.”

  “That’s what my dad keeps telling her,” Kidd said with a wide grin.

  Car talk bores the hell out of me. I’ve never felt the allure of carburetors, rings and spark plugs and whether an engine’s a V-6 or a V-8. All I care about is how it looks and whether it’s got decent acceleration. Long as it’s not too shabby, long as I can turn the key and get to court on time, what difference does it make how big the engine is or how many cylinders it has?

  My brothers spent half their growing-up years with their heads under the hood of some old broken-down piece of junk. Any time one of their friends drove over, the first thing they’d do is troop out to look at the new set of chrome-plated exhaust pipes or marvel at the size of the big wheels somebody’d just put on his truck.

  I can still hear my mother: “You boys change clothes before you go crawling up under that car. You get grease on those school shirts, it’ll never come out.”

  While Kidd and Allen talked Cougars, Impalas, and Goats and the pleasures of a manual transmission over an automatic, I sat down on the back of the van and let the hatch shade me like a beach umbrella. The pups nuzzled my fingers through the steel wire for a few minutes and then went to sleep.

  Eventually, Allen glanced over at me and, casual like, said, “Last I heard, Debbie—”

  He caught himself and my name came out “Debbierah.”

  He must have remembered what happened the last time he called me Debbie. I’m not a cupcake and nobody shortens my name too many times. Nobody.

  “I heard you’re a lawyer.”

  “Used to be,” I admitted.

  “So what’re you doing now?”

  “I’m a district court judge.”

  “A judge? Really? Hey, way to go, girl!”

  Was it my imagination or were his congratulations a bit forced?

  “How ’bout you, bo?” he asked Kidd. “You in the law business, too?”

  Kidd propped one foot on the back of the van next to me, leaned an elbow on his knee, and gave Allen a lazy smile. “You could say so. I’m a wildlife officer.”

  “A game warden?” Allen shook his head. “A game warden and a judge? I better watch my step, hadn’t I?”

  “And what are you doing these days?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, some of this and a little of that. Still messing around with cars.” He held out his big square work-stained hands. “Ain’t got all the grease out from under my nails yet.”

  “Still hanging around racetracks?”

  “You race?” asked Kidd, showing me a whole different side that I hadn’t seen in the six months that we’d been together.

  “Not anymore,” Allen told him. “It’s a young man’s game and I ain’t got the reflexes I used to have.”

  He’d heard the quickened interest in Kidd’s voice and was giving back a regretful nostalgia for races run, for records set, for roses and beauty queen kisses in the winner’s circle. Charlotte and Rockingham were in his drawl. Maybe even Daytona and Talladega, too, for all Kidd knew. But unless things had changed a hell of a lot in the last few years, Allen himself had never raced on any track longer than a half-mile and had never won a purse larger than three or four hundred dollars.

  “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.