“So, is it true you actually made Waylon smile?” Lucinda asks as we walk along the left side of the dirt plus sign. Apparently, the “medical trailer” where I’ll be working is on the west side of the woods between the Ruthless Reapers compound on the north side and the trailer park town on its south.

Now that I can see the unnamed town in broad daylight, it's actually pretty cute and not ominous at all. It looks a lot like a small neighborhood, except instead of brick storefronts, like in Wilmington, there are large double wides with signs for a general store and the laundry where Meemaw must have headed to earlier to wash our clothes. Also, instead of regular people, the residents I see are primarily young women with pregnancy bellies like Lucinda or older ladies with lots of tattoos.

Many of the women turn and openly stare at me as I walk through the town. Because I'm a newcomer? Or because I'm African-American? I'm not sure.

If the women are any indication, the Ruthless Reapers seem to be a club made up of mostly Whites and Latinos. And I’m sure at least a few of them have to be like Waylon, a mix of both.

Anyway, everyone, white and brown, is living in a mobile home. There are a few other semi-wide modular ones like Meemaw’s. But most of them are on wheels, which makes me wonder about the nature of this town. How long has it been around? And what are they going to do in the winter? A few RVs are pop-ups—I can’t see those being livable come December.

Not that it matters, I remind myself. I’ll never know what the town does in winter because I won’t be here much longer. Going along with Lucinda to this job Waylon’s decreed for me is more about getting a lay of the land and making friends so that I can figure out how to get out of here.

But Lucinda turned down my request for help with a weirdly passive, “Oh, Waylon wouldn’t be happy about that,” when I tried to ask her about helping me leave their trailer park town.”

And she seems way more interested in peppering me with questions than answering mine.

“Who told you I made him smile?” I ask, refocusing on my conversation with her instead of my curiosity about the pop-up town that Meemaw insists makes taking orders from Waylon worth it.

“One of the guys who got here earlier than you last night said he saw it with his own eyes before the big meeting in Tennessee after the Griffin Latham concert.”

A meeting. So that was why we stopped at the roadhouse. Not just because Waylon was hungry. It made me wonder about all the other things he wasn’t telling me.