They were riding under live oaks. Paul squinted at the silvery Spanish moss hanging ahead. Colette looked nothing like Judy Garland.

Five

The next morning he felt a raspy hand on his foot, rocking it back and forth. Paul did not open his eyes. “Hello, Daddy.”

“You got a headache, I bet.”

“Who told you?” He opened one eye and focused on his father’s khaki shirt.

“Never mind. Just be glad that poor fellow they fished out the toilet ain’t hurt bad.”

He sat up and blinked, working his tongue through the cloudy mass in his mouth. His father, round-shouldered and tawny, watched him. Through the window, the backyard shone bright with midday sun. “My God, what did I do? I remember some kind of fight at Black Alice’s. Did I get sucked into the fan?”

“Scadlock’s,” his father corrected. “T-Bub, ain’t you getting kinda old for that stuff?”

“Awwwww.” He rubbed his head with both hands.

“Here,” his father said, holding out a parched palm. In it were three headache tablets.

“How’s the Texas dude?”

“He’s all right. They used a gallon of peroxide on him at the clinic and turned him loose. He’s not no common white trash, you know. He’s a lease buyer. You lucky he didn’t press charges.”

“He just didn’t want it to get out what I did to him.”

“How you feeling?”

He felt his left cheek. “Sore inside and out.”

His father looked down at his bulky work shoes. “You ever hear from Colette?”

“No.” Paul put his head down in his hands.

His father handed him a glass of tap water. “Why not?”

He drank and looked out of his window. “Daddy, I think I might never see her again. It’s like she’s on the moon.”

“Just be thankful she can’t see you right now. Clean up and come out on the porch and let’s us talk.”

In a half hour he went out into the sun, pale and trembly, trying not to spill an ironware mug of dark-roast coffee. Across the grass of the backyard, the silver whorls in the lumber of the gray cypress shed leapt at him and he stepped back. Slowly, he lowered himself into the green rush rocker. “Daddy, you think this is an ugly town?”

The old man rocked and scratched an arm. “Hell, I don’t know. When a man lives somewhere all his life, he don’t know if that place is ugly or not. I guess it was better when I was a kid, before the oil people came and set up all these tin buildings and yards full of junk.”

Paul took a long sip of coffee and felt it burn all the way down. “Did you ever spend time anywhere else?”

“Before you was born, Uncle Medric passed away up where he had moved to in north Alabama. I had to go up, up, way up the country. He lived alone, and nobody else where he lived would do it, and I had to sell off everything he owned. Took me a month to clear things up. He had a house and two barns plumb full of stuff.”