Fanta unbuckled his seat belt with a sigh and slung out into the ass-scorching air. He shambled several steps and peered around the end of the semitrailer to find that the woman had also left her vehicle… and stood behind it, between the truck and the low brick American Legion building. Up to what?

Fanta checked the picture window of the prefab for curtain movement, for hellhounds, then set sail across the trucker’s yard for a better angle. He wallowed up behind an LP gas tank racked crookedly on cinder blocks. From here he could see her. And she was…

Hallelujah!

Making Calls of Duty

This had been his real headline a few years ago when he had done a story about the Mastodon American Legion Post, where there was still a working pay phone, one of the last of its kind anywhere.

The woman stepped close to the phone, the helmet-shaped, faded blue fiberglass pod fastened to the bricks, with its coin slot, its graffiti-altered dialing and payment instructions, and its hard-plastic receiver on an armored cord.

Gene Oostertag had since passed away, but at the time of the story, this phone was used by the region’s last surviving World War II vet to call his sixty-five-year-old grandson to pick him up after his Friday-night old-fashioned at the bar.

The woman was making a call. Or at least the receiver was off the hook and in her hand. It took Fanta a few moments to understand what she balanced on her other hand, black and rectangular, the size of a large book, held level beneath the receiver.

Then he got it.

Of course. What else could it be?

He celebrated his discovery by not stepping in dog shit as he hustled back to the Tercel.

She had been holding the phone receiver over a portable cassette tape recorder.

Liar! I sent you a letter. You didn’t print it.

FROM HELL HOLLOW at this moment ranted in recorded form at someone, somewhere—possibly another media outlet, or possibly Fanta again.

Over the next hour, while Fanta sweated inside the Tercel, eyeing the prefab window, eager to go, she made several more calls, answering his question. FROM HELL HOLLOW spread his rants around.

At last the woman finished. She drove out the other end of Mastodon and he gave her a long lead. Then he followed the white truck away.

CHAPTER 12

“What happened at the pool, Mom?”

Belle Kick unplugged a Marlboro Gold and gushed accusing smoke.

“Your little boy pushed a lady in.”

“Which little boy?”

“Which little boy do you think?”