Alabama Moon (22 page)

I stood and grabbed my rifle. Mr. Abroscotto ducked behind the counter. “Hey, now!” he yelled.

I stood there with the rifle in my hands, watching the counter. “Moon?” he called out.

“What?”

“What are you doin'?”

“Leavin'.”

Mr. Abroscotto peered slowly over the counter.

“I can tell you're not my friend,” I said.

“I am your friend, Moon. I just know you need help, and I'm tryin' to talk sense into your hard little head.”

“You don't know anything about me, and I've known you longer than anybody except my pap. You know I wouldn't shoot at you.”

Mr. Abroscotto shook his head. “I'm sorry,” he said. “It's just that the news—”

I turned and left.

I sat inside the edge of the forest for about fifteen minutes before Hal pulled up near the stake I'd used as a marker. I stood and walked to the road holding Pap's rifle. Hal watched me out of the truck window.

What kind is it?”

“.22.”

“That all you wanted?”

I climbed into the truck and put the rifle between my legs. “No. You'd best mash that gas pedal.”

“What'd you do now?”

“I went to that store. Mr. Abroscotto's likely to have Sanders around here lookin' for me.”

“Shit,” Hal said. He slammed down on the gas pedal and the tires threw dirt until they caught the asphalt and squalled.

“I wanted to ask him about Pap.”

“I should've seen that comin'.”

“He said Vietnam made him want to live in the forest.”

“You happy now?”

“No. What happened in Vietnam?”

“I don't know. Ask Daddy.”

“I will. You know what else?”

“What?”

“Someone's been to my old shelter and torn it up.”

“You mad about it?”

I shook my head. “I don't care now. Nothin' else there I needed.”

Hal turned the truck around and we headed back towards Union. He kept looking in the rearview mirror for a while, then relaxed. “You hungry?” he asked me.

“Yeah. You?”

“We'll stop up here at the lock and dam. I got some Vienna sausages and crackers. You okay?”

“Yeah.”

Hal looked at me sideways. “All right.”

We stopped at a point along the river where we could see the lock and sat on the tailgate. I pulled a sausage from the can and put it between two crackers and took a bite. “Pretty good sausage,” I said with my mouth full.

“Yeah. They're pretty good . . . What you wanna do this afternoon?”

“You know what I wanna do.”

“All right, all right, we'll go call him! I swear I ain't takin' you to visit everybody in the whole damn state!”

 

We stopped at a store not far from the clay pit. Hal looked up the number for the hospital in Tuscaloosa, put some money in a slot, dialed the phone, and handed it to me. I felt my stomach become jittery as I waited for someone to pick up. After a few seconds a woman answered.

“Bryant Memorial,” she said.

“Is Kit there?” I asked her.

Hal shook his head like I'd done something wrong. He took the phone from me and spoke to the woman. “The boy they found on the road who's been in the news. Kit Slip . . . Yeah. He's a friend of ours . . . Yeah.” Hal nodded with the phone squeezed between his chin and shoulder.

“He there?” I asked.

Hal shrugged. Close to a minute went by before Hal spoke again into the phone. “Okay. We'll call back later.”

He hung up the phone. “They said he's restin' and he can't talk right now.”

I felt my stomach grow calm again. “So he's prob'ly okay, then?”

“Sounds like he's fine. We'll try again in a few days. Give him time to rest.”

Hal said he knew of a place to get parts for the truck. We drove through the countryside until we came to a field of wrecked cars. I walked with him as he looked under their hoods and inside of them. After a while, we came to an old police car with the blue light still attached. Hal climbed onto the roof and sat with the light between his legs. He pulled and rocked until it popped loose. Then he stood and lifted it up until the wires snapped and he had it free. “What you think about this?” he said to me.

“I think it'd look good on top of your truck,” I said.

“You damn right it would.”

We took the blue light back to the clay pit and worked under the shade of the equipment shed installing it. It was close to dark by the time the unit was glued to the roof and the wires were taped along the side of the truck and under the hood to the battery. Mr. Mitchell came up from the clay pit and parked the front-end loader. He was watching us when Hal got the light to work for the first time. He shook his head and took a swig from a whiskey bottle.

“How you like that, Daddy?”

“You boys gonna get us all throwed in jail.”

“Hell,” Hal said.

“I went and talked to that store owner today,” I said to Mr. Mitchell.

“Oh yeah?” he replied.

“Yeah,” Hal said. He pointed at me. “He's about to have the law down on us.”

“What'd he say to you?” Mr. Mitchell asked.

“Said Pap got messed up by Vietnam.”

Mr. Mitchell nodded. “I can see that. I didn't take to it much myself.”

“What was it like?”

“It was a lot of people dyin' is what it was like. But all wars are that way. I think the difference with Vietnam was you had a lot of people that the government made go over there that didn't wanna go.”

“Pap must not have wanted to go. He always said he didn't like people tellin' him what to do. Especially the government.”

“I wish I knew more to say to you, Moon.”

I stared across the clay pit at the tops of the pines, gauging the breeze. “It doesn't matter much, now.”

“Maybe one of these days, when you decide to get back to civilization, you can find some more people that knew him. Might be they'll give you the answers you need.”

“Come on, Moon,” Hal said. “Let's go up to the house and get somethin' to eat. We got some Spam and Doritos up there.”

I looked over at Hal. “I've never had Doritos.”

“I know. It'll make you forget about your pap. Come on.”

We went mud-riding that night with the blue light on. Whenever the water and mud slid off our windshield, we saw the clay pit walls glowing an eerie blue.

“Need some noise to go with this,” Hal said.

“I like it all right.”

Back at the trailer, we lay in bed and listened to rain pouring down outside. Images of the flickering blue clay pit stayed in my head.

“Hal?”

“What?”

“Your truck gonna fill up with water?”

“No. Got holes in the floorboards.”

I thought of the shelter Kit and I had made, far away through the darkness, and wondered how it was holding up. I imagined that some animal had crawled into it and found it a snug home. When I thought of myself lying in that cramped space with leaves and pine straw hanging close to my nose, I felt my soft mattress and the blanket and I was glad to be where I was.

“Hal?”

“What?”

“I don't know what I'm gonna do.”

“About what?”

“About everything.”

“I thought you were gonna go live in the forest with Kit when he got better.”

“What if he doesn't get better? I won't have anybody to go with, then.”

“Well, most people would rather sleep in a house and buy things at the store.”

“Kit liked it out there.”

“Kit likes anything you tell him to like. You're the only guy I know that ever made friends with him.”

“How come?”

“I don't know. I guess most people at Pinson thought he was a wuss.”

“What's a wuss?”

“Like a crybaby.”

“He's not a crybaby.”

“I know. I just didn't know him before. Nobody else knew him, either. He was always goin' to the doctor.”

“But I think he really liked it out in the forest.”

“I know he did. I was just kiddin' with you.”

One of the bloodhounds whined outside the window, where it huddled under a woodpile roof. “You know,” I said, “I don't see anything wrong with havin' a real house . . . Long as it's in the forest or next to a clay pit.”

Hal yawned. “Ain't nothin' wrong with stayin' warm and dry.”

“That's what I want one day, Hal. I want a house trailer drug off into the forest with no roads goin' to it.”

“How you gonna get it out there?”

“I'll plant trees in the road after they roll it in.”

“Crap.”

“Maybe you could come live out there with me since I'd have that house trailer. It'd be fancy livin'. Cover it up with leaves. We'd never get caught.”

“What in hell would we do all day?”

I sat up and looked at him. “What do you mean! We'd—”

“Shhh!” Hal said to me. “Gonna wake up Daddy.”

I lowered my voice. “Rope swings and guns and traps and trees. Fishin'. All kinds of stuff.”

“What about livin' with Daddy?”

Suddenly, the perfect world I'd imagined was gone and everything was gloomy. “Oh yeah,” I said. “You've already got a house right here. Clay pit and all.”

Hal rolled over and looked at me. “Moon, I don't expect to be out here runnin' around for too long. Sooner or later,
I'm gonna have to hit the road or go to Hellenweiler. I ain't leavin' Daddy, so I guess I'll let 'em take me away when they come.”

I stared at him.

“What I'm sayin' is, I ain't tryin' to figure out what I'm gonna do, 'cause I already know, and I ain't really got much of a choice about it.”

I nodded.

“I'd rather be in Hellenweiler than livin' out in that forest or walkin' down some road somewhere,” he said.

I lay back down and stared at the ceiling. Then I spoke words that I never thought I'd hear coming from my mouth. “If I have to be all by myself, maybe I'd rather go to Hellenweiler with you.”

 

I spent the next three days helping Hal and his daddy in the clay pit. If Hal's daddy didn't need the front-end loader to fill a truck, we made trails through the forest with it, using the giant shovel to push a path ten feet wide. Afterwards we'd get in the truck, and Hal would see how fast we could run the new track.

On Saturday morning Mr. Mitchell brought us football helmets to wear while we were racing in the woods. The helmets made Hal want to drive faster. I'd never thought about wrecking before, but we went riding after lunch and hit a gum tree head-on. The battery flew out of the front grill and
jerked the police light from the top of the truck and flew it like a kite tail for twenty-five yards until it whipped into a tree and shattered into splinters. Both of us hit our heads on the windshield and knocked the spiderwebbed glass onto the truck hood. We rocked back into our seats and looked at each other.

“Whoa, horsey!” Hal yelled.

I pulled off my helmet and shouted, “What else you got!”

The truck was still running, and Hal racked it into gear and backed away from the tree. The windshield fell off into the weeds. We drove up the track to where the battery lay in the pine needles. Hal got out and followed the wire that led to the police light. When he saw the mangled piece of aluminum, he looked back at me and spit. “Damn tree.”

After getting the battery under the hood again, we made another trip to the field of wrecked cars. We found a windshield, a new grill, some headlights, a hood, and a horn off the top of a Peterbilt truck. We put all of these in the bed and started back.

That afternoon and night, we worked at the equipment shed installing the new parts. We put the windshield on first since so much dust and so many bugs had gotten all over us driving without it. After that, Hal screwed the horn to his roof.

“Hey, Moon!”

I looked up. “What?”

“I'll show you what else I got.”

Hal pressed the button for the horn. It was so loud I covered my ears as the sound echoed across the bottom of the clay pit and went skyward. The bloodhounds howled from up at the trailer, and the forest creatures ducked away and fell
silent. Before long, Mr. Mitchell was shuffling down the road towards us without any clothes on.

“What!” he yelled.

“I ain't callin' you,” Hal yelled back at him.

Mr. Mitchell made a motion like he was waving flies from his face and continued towards us.

“He gonna care that you mashed up the front of the truck?” I asked Hal.

“Hell no. He knows I'll fix it up better'n new.”

When Mr. Mitchell got to the truck, he stopped and stared at it. He was swaying so much I thought he might fall over. His cheek bulged with tobacco so that when he spoke I could barely understand him. “You boys,” he said. He looked away and spit. He was quiet for a minute and seemed to have forgotten what he was going to say. Finally, he looked at Hal again. “Damn,” was all he said. He turned and began to walk up the hill.

The next morning we went into town to get oil for Mr. Mitchell.

“We gonna pass by the Laundromat?”

“Yeah. You wanna try and call Kit again?”

“Yeah.”

We pulled into the Laundromat and went inside. I sat on a table next to the pay phone while Hal put in the money and dialed the number. He listened for a few seconds and then handed me the phone. “You know how to do it this time?”

I nodded and pressed it to my ear. When the woman answered, I looked at Hal while I spoke. “Can I have Kit Slip's room?”

“Hold please,” she said.

I felt my hands shaking while I listened to music play over the telephone. “Got music playin',” I told Hal.