I felt bad that I’d lied to Dori, or really just told her nothing, but she’d have gone to pieces to hear I was leaving the state. My bigger worry was getting through this whole day without a bump. I’d fueled up on the front end obviously, but with nothing additional for the road. Laws were laid down. We were taking I-75, the oxy expressway from Florida. June was so clean and prepared on all fronts, she probably wanted us to get pulled over.
June and Everett spent a full five hours bickering. Which way was faster out of town, Veterans Highway or 58. Whether the car was too warm or just right. Whether Easy Cheese was God’s gift or a disgusting waste of a good metal can. June would put the radio on an eighties station, and Everett would drive us nuts singing in a ridiculous high voice with Eddie Rabbitt or Rosanne Cash, until she’d let him change it. Then June would grunt out her own made-up words to Beastie Boys and Jay-Z. “Ooh ooh bitch, gotta big dick for ya here.”
“You are so far out of it, Junie. ‘Song Cry,’ it’s this beautiful love story.”
“Just playing it how it lays, brother. That’s what it sounds like to me.”
“Heartbreak of old age. Hearing’s the first thing to go.”
Everett and June were five years apart, and took no time at all getting back to seven and twelve. They argued over whether Everett peed on his shoes at the Peggot reunion one time, and whose fault it was the dog got run over, and an entire year of the older kids supposedly stealing Everett’s lunches and convincing him their mom wasn’t packing one for him.
“Oh my God Everett, are you never giving that up? That did not happen.”
“Uh-huh, sad. I reckon it’s the memory that goes first.”
The surprise to me was Mrs. Peggot packing lunches at all. Maggot always bought school lunch. You could see how those seven would have worn her down before he ever got there.
By noon, we were looking at Atlanta. Cloud-high buildings spiking up in the distance, pointy or square on top, the colors of steel and sky. So much like a movie, your eye couldn’t accept it was real. June’s car was pretty sweet, I should mention, Jeep Cherokee, white leather upholstery. All of this briefly being cool enough to forget the FUBAR aspects of this road trip and pass around the snacks. I was still in the good part of my day, before fine and dandy edges over to sad and irritable. Then come sweats, yawning, itching, goose bumps, shaking and puking. These phases I could read like a watch. I was optimistic on getting home before fucked o’clock.
June had her maps and her battle plan. City driving didn’t faze her, due to the Knoxville years. She was all center lane this, right on red that, arm-over-elbow turns through these hectic parts of town where there were more people in the intersections than cars. Peachtree Street, she announced, steering us down this video-game canyon of sky-high towers with few trees in sight, peach or otherwise. “Stopping for coffee,” she announced, and parallel parked like no driver I’ve seen before or since. Slick as a rabbit finding its hole. I added it to the list of June’s superpowers. We went in a tiny restaurant where she knew the rules, pay first, order off the long list of items that in no way shape or form sound like coffee, but are coffee. Tall flat frappo nonsense. She said this was to fortify our nerves, and bought me a blueberry muffin.
We sat at a tiny table and finally those two went quiet. I thought of the day I met June, the Knoxville restaurant where I couldn’t eat due to everything going on outside. I’d felt like I did now, jumpy. Anxious in the back of my mind for a doorway out of all this, back to the green true world. But I wasn’t a kid now, I knew things. For one, that Xanax would put much of that feeling to rights. A couple near us drank their coffee and had a whisper fight. Hundreds of people passed by outside hugging their coats around them, looking at their feet, walking fast. I wondered what they were taking for the brain alarm bell that goes off in a place like this, where not one thing you see is alive, except more people. Everything else being dead: bricks, cement, engine-driven steel, no morning or evening songs but car horns and jackhammers. All the mountains of steel-beam construction. And this, June informed us, was the good part of town.
After we got back in the car, she realized Everett had hidden his pistol in the glove compartment and said technically that was a conceal. He said technically he was not getting his five-hundred-dollar Kel-Tec stolen while she drank her fucking latte. I was about an inch from You kids quit fighting or that piece goes out the window. Irritable phase possibly under way.
The directions she’d written down got us to a neighborhood that was less crowded, in fact the opposite. Not a soul walking around. It looked somewhat like various parts of Lee County thrown together at close range. Bluffs, she called it. This is February so it’s still pretty bleak, but you could see how it might green up in the right circumstance. Sad-looking trees, embankments, tall dead weeds standing up between the small houses. Junked-out porches to rival the Woodway crack house, other houses abandoned, boarded up, or burned out. About one in ten, though, were tidy and painted up nice. Old people like the Peggots, you had to reckon, that stood their ground while the youth went to hell. But everything was jammed together, a lot of houses with no space between. Tires lying on the sidewalks, trash blown up against chain link.
“Where the mothafuck are we?”
“Everett,” June said. “You need to shut up.”
The first human we saw was an old guy lying in the street on his side, slowly moving his legs like riding a bike. A few blocks later, some young guys in big clothes, carrying black plastic bags that pulled down with heavy weight, like full udders on a cow. Then another old guy in a hat and mittens parked on the street corner in a wheelchair, watching nothing go by. Here and there, a little store would have people hanging around, but mostly the streets were deserted. Maybe because it was Sunday, with the Godly in church and the rest sleeping off their sins.
“Damn, mothafuckers,” Everett said now and again, until June blew up.
“Everett. You’re one of about twelve men I know that aren’t in any kind of trouble. Definitely not a thug. Could we just agree on that being a good thing?”
The address turned out to be a rough-looking place. We pulled up in front, killed the engine, and sat looking at this house. Low and wide, flat roof, moldy white paint, a lot of the windowpanes covered with cardboard. It looked like a brutal smile with missing teeth. Everett picked up his Kel-Tec and checked the safety. “You two stay in the car, I’ll bake the cake.”
June made this explosion, like a crying laugh. “I really am going to kill you with that.”
Everett put the piece on his lap.
“I’m just going to knock on the door,” June said. “If it turns out she’s here, I’ll ask if we can all come in and talk to her. For God’s sake, Everett, behave yourself.”
To get to the door she had to step over a pile of what looked like Pampers and blue plastic. In her jeans and red winter coat, she looked like a kid waiting outside for somebody to let her in. Normally she’d have her doctor outfit, with the whole authority aspect. She waited a long time. We had the car windows down, listening, ready to leap into action. I could hear Everett breathing. If I had to guess, I’d say he was terrified. More knocking, more waiting.
Anybody else would have given up. After about ten minutes she went around and started knocking on windows, calling Emmy’s name. I never fully believed we were going to find her, but watching June duck under hanging gutters, banging her knuckles on broken casement windows, I saw it was the opposite for her. No other option would fit in her brain. I got a full-body memory of the Undersea Wonders Aquarium, Emmy and June’s standoff over the shark tank, nobody backing down. I’d helped Emmy into the tunnel that day, but I also lied to her. If something scares you, get your ass out of there, I should have said. Everything will not be okay.
The house next door was one of the nicer ones. Painted shutters, one of those whirligig garden things in the dead flowers. A guy was standing on the porch watching June. We hadn’t noticed him until he yelled something like “Hey, lady,” and both Everett and I jumped, and then we saw him. Old guy in a coat and cloth slippers. White ring of hair around his mostly bald brown head. June walked over to his porch and shook his hand. We watched them talk, June nodding, looking back at the grimace house. Touching her eye, asking questions, nodding.
She came back to the car, belted up, didn’t start the engine.
“He said there were some people living there, and they were evicted. Including some young women. One was white. Evicted is not exactly what he said.” She shook her head fast, like trying to clear it. “There was a shooting. And they left.”
“June. We should just go home,” Everett said.
“He thinks they went to a house not too far from here. He doesn’t know the address, but he said it’s a brand-new place. Like maybe just built, with nobody technically living there yet.”
“He’s making shit up to get rid of you,” Everett suggested. “Who’d build a house here?”
“I told him I was looking for my daughter, and he said he understood. He said this new house is a place they’re using right now, I don’t know for what. But she could be there.”
“This is crazy, June. It’s too dangerous.”
“Damn you, Everett. Where’s the gangland tough shit now?”
No answer to that.
She banged her open hands on the steering wheel. “There’s not a damn thing messing people up around here that I’m not seeing in my office ten times a day.” She threw the car into drive, and we drove. Up and down the blocks. The same old man still in his wheelchair, the other one still lying in the road. The leg-pumping had ceased. We didn’t know what we were looking for. Nothing looked remotely new. I was hungry and itchy, moving towards the sweats. Everett kept picking up his piece and putting it down, until June smacked his hand.
Then we saw the house. Like it had dropped out of the freaking sky of newness.
We all three got out of the car. A front yard of fresh bulldozed dirt, factory stickers on the windows. The front door was the modern type with an oval-shaped fake church window in it. June knocked, no answer. A little metal box type thing hung on the doorknob, sprung open, with a key sitting there in plain view. June tried the key in the lock, and then we were in.
It was all new everything: nice wood floors, strong smell of paint, no real furniture. Just a card table with bags and a scale, a white dust of coke. In the corner a guy was slumped on the floor with his back against the wall, head flopped forward. We held our breath, watching. The bill of his oversize black ball cap covered his face, so it was pure guess as to sleeping, dead, or dipped out. I thought number three, based on the splayed legs and open hands.
June touched Everett’s shoulder, then his pistol, and pointed to the guy. Held up her flat hand: Keep him there. She and I moved through the house. A hallway, bedrooms. We made almost no sound, but the place was so empty it echoed anyway. I pushed open a half-closed door and almost pissed myself. Little kids, two of them, on a pile of opened-out cardboard pizza boxes. One was asleep and the other one sitting up, playing with the plastic rings of a six-pack. The awake one looked up at us wide-eyed, like June and I might be just the ticket. June stood with her hand over her mouth. I had to pull her back out the door.
