southern lit
"I live in my car," he said, and pointed to the
directed them to the cornfield and put Charlie, the oldest of the
LTD. "Before that, I lived in Ybor City in Florida."
men, in charge. He scratched his head and said, "You feeling poorly, Miss Emmaline?" I never missed work. I assured him all
He didn't have the manners of a traveling
was well, and turned back to the house, to Winston, who was
salesman, which is to say he wasn't especially
still at the kitchen table.
charming, or quick, or fast-talking. He was twenty-seven, I learned later, a veteran of the
We spent most of the day at Monroe Lake. He could float on his
Vietnam War, and he had the look of someone
back for a solid hour; I'd never seen anything like it. He could
lost, or maybe of someone not wanting to be
read while he did it, and showed me so, the front page of the
found. He had a scar that ran around his right
local paper soggy by the time he finished. I sat in an inner tube
thumb. He had shaggy, barely brown hair that he
and watched him, transfixed.
kept pushing behind his ears. He looked a lot like Robert Redford, whose movies I adored.
"You started to tell me about your parents yesterday," he said, finally, when he'd grown tired of floating and began to
"I've never lived anywhere but here in Judsonia,"
tread water.
I said. "My parents," I said, and then stopped. I didn't talk about them with outsiders. They'd
"Ah, well," I said. "It's not a good story for a summer day."
trekked to the Alaskan wilderness and decided to disappear. I was supposed to go with them,
"Well, I'm sorry, all the same. For whatever happened," he said.
but I'd gotten a summer job at Bennie's Eating Emporium the year I graduated high school, and
I opened my mouth but didn't speak. He assumed they were
waved them off when they said they might not
dead. For all I knew they were. I paddled closer to him. "What
come back. They sent back one letter. One! In it,
are your parents like?"
they gave me the farm. "My mother is small and round and happy," he said. "My father His name was Winston Shockley. He'd never
is tall and thin and angry."
been to Arkansas before. He smiled when I asked him why, and then he sang a line from
"What was the war like?"
"Never Been to Spain," a Three Dog Night hit that was all the rage. He'd been to Oklahoma, he sang, and for
He splashed water with the palm of his hand. "Not a story for
some reason I laughed. His voice was a perfect baritone. He had
a summer day," he said. "Why aren't you married?" he asked,
little gold hairs on his arms. His eyes were the blue of heaven.
without missing a beat.
I put him up in the barn that night. It was foolhardy and I knew
"I don't believe in marriage," I said, as defiant as I could
it. Getting undressed for bed, I felt embarrassed, even though
manage in the presence of a man I feared had the power to
there were walls between us, curtains, doors, a quarter acre, a
change my mind.
barn door solid as the night. "Are you into free love?" The next morning, I walked to the barn and knocked tentatively. I invited him to eat with me. His hands swallowed the coffee mug.
I laughed again. "Nothing on this green earth is free." And then
I liked his elbows on the table, his eyes scanning the newspaper,
I said, "Why aren't you married?"
his eyes scanning me when he thought I was busy at the stove. "Not enough room in the LTD," he said, and laughed again. A truckload of day workers showed up, mostly high school kids from town, a few old men who'd worked for my parents. I
I might not have loved him if he'd left that day, but he did not.
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