about the dream again.
“Knock it off,” Jimmy said. He put two packs of gum down hard on the counter. “Carter doesn’t want to hear that shit.”
Newland took his eyes off Carter and glared at Jimmy. “How’s your brother? How’s Carl?” Jimmy’s brother had once been married to Newland’s half-sister. Rumor was he had an itchy fist.
Jimmy turned his back on Newland and handed Carter a ten. “Carl couldn’t be happier. I’ll tell him you asked.”
“Don’t rush off, Jimmy,” Carter said. “How about a cup of coffee?”
“Some other time.” Jimmy ripped the tab on a pack of gum and shoved a stick into his mouth. “Too crowded in here.”
Before Jimmy was out the door, Newland started in again.
“Stop it,” Carter said. But he ran on, talking about titties and his dick against her thigh. Cawteh you make me hawd. Her legs grew weak and the knot in her stomach twisted like a snake. She pretended to dust under the counter and kept her head down until Mitzi Gander came in with her two little boys and Newland left. Carter pulled the pack of Tums from her purse and popped two. Mitzi set a carton of milk and a box of tampons on the counter. “Too much Mexican dinner?”
“Too much Newland Sparks,” Carter said.
“Oh, that. Can’t Roy do something?”
“If he doesn’t, I will.”
Roy Bostic had lived all his life in Chireno County, so a drive to the next county for beer did not seem odd. The Baptists had a choke hold on East Texas. The rest of Texas laughed, and called it the hundred miles of dry. Roy would split the Friday beer run with friends and this week, thank God, it was someone else’s turn. He was beat. His doctor had told him he had gout, and that was why his big toe felt like there was gravel sticking in it. He limped into the house. With work over, he didn’t have to suck it up and pretend.
Carter wasn’t home, and he hoped that meant she was buying groceries. They were out of everything. She’d called him at the warehouse to apologize for driving off in a huff this morning, but he suspected the real reason she’d called was to let him know that Newland Sparks had been in again. Roy didn’t like what Sparks was doing, but the guy was basically harmless. Someday he’d find someone else to bug.
Roy popped a beer and scrounged around for the package of crackers going stale in the back of the pantry. In the den, he turned on the clumsy computer and watched it dial up the online medical world. He’d never known anyone with gout. He thought it was a disease of fat old men.
Carter came in a half-hour later, no grocery bags in sight. She set her purse on the table next to him. “If your toe’s hurting, you shouldn’t be having that beer.”
“Where’ve you been?” He flipped off the website he was on.
“Reba was late for her shift again. I tried to call, but the line was tied up. I figured you were on the computer.” For once she didn’t say he ought to turn on his cell phone because otherwise why have it.
“We needed groceries,” he said.
“You could have stopped for groceries. When you went over to Phil’s to get the beer you had to pass Brookshire’s twice.”
“But you always buy the groceries.”
“Because you never do.”
Carter turned on her heel and headed for the kitchen. He heard her rummaging in the cupboard and figured she’d find the bow-tie pasta in there. He wasn’t in the mood for pasta. She would open a can of tomatoes and dump a lot of cheese on it and the whole thing would go straight to their waistlines.
Inside Carter’s purse, her cell was ringing. “Let it ring,” she called. “I’ll be right there.” He pulled out the phone and answered. It was Jerome.
“She’s not interested,” he said. “I appreciate your calling but she’s going to be tied up. Our daughter’s having a baby.”
Carter came in. “Is that Jerome? Let me talk to him.”
“I’m sorry,” Roy said into the phone, turning away from her as she reached for it. “I don’t know. Yeah, it’s just bad timing for her. Appreciate your calling.” He hung up.
“You told him no? I told you to let me talk to him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me he’d asked? You should have just told him no straight out. We’re doing inventory tomorrow so we can get it done before the baby comes.”
“Since when? Give me the phone. You were rude. Why shouldn’t I go to Baton Rouge? We need the money.”
“We don’t need it that bad. There are people down there you don’t need to be around.” He talked on about crime and city blight and for emphasis he used the n-word.
“Don’t say that word. You just hung up on one of the most respectable men I know.”
“So maybe he’s not like a lot of them. But we can’t afford to hire somebody to cover for you in the store.”
“Which just proves we’re not making any money and never will. Inventory? You just made that up.”
“We’re doing it tomorrow. Sunday, too. We talked about it last week.”
“You said you were thinking about it. I thought you had to work.”
“I’ll be done by noon. I told you that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
Carter stalked into the kitchen. He heard her running water into the pot for pasta, probably twice as much as she needed. It would take forever to boil. He stayed on the computer, looking for a new doctor. There was one over in Toledo Bend he hadn’t heard of so he wrote down the phone number. He was only forty-one; he felt like his body was moving toward ruin.
Across the highway from Bostic’s store, high on a grassy knoll in Horace Chadwick’s weedy pasture, a clump of rocks poked out where the members of Spring Creek Baptist Church liked to gather for Easter sunrise service. Pastor Will Simpson would take his place on the granite and face west toward Truman Wally’s dilapidated barn, grateful he could skip a hot sanctuary blotted by twice-a-year comers. A mile behind him, as the choir sang the sun into the sky, light would break through the trees into the brown waters of the Atoka River, nothing left of its Ayish past but Indian legend and white man’s guilt. To the pastor’s left, seventeen miles away, was Yellowpine Reservoir, a man-made flooding that sixty years before had covered twenty-odd buildings, scores of junk cars and the unmarked graves of six black families. A sprinkle of boaters would be there at sunrise on Easter, trading Jesus for sport. Pastor Simpson, acknowledging so much of the Lord’s work still to be done, would raise his arms to the sky and declare that the Maker had blessed them all with a front row seat to the miracle of resurrection.
On a different Sunday morning, also at sunrise but weeks before Easter, Air Force Col. Charles Bradley had climbed the grassy knoll and looked out over the torn bits of a splendid, gargantuan, trouble-prone spacecraft. It had been his privilege to fly this particular dream of man, a collection of high hopes and low bids. Now a scatter of tiles from its skin lay in the weeds. He thought he could make out something gray that might be the arm of a flight deck chair. He could not remember, at this startling moment, whether the flight deck chairs were gray, or if those were blue. The white box he saw, that he knew. It was part of a cabinet for keeping clothes. Perhaps it had once held his, the golf shirts and shorts he favored in zero gravity. Half a mile from where he stood, though he did not yet know it, was the secluded sanctuary of Spring Creek Baptist, so out of the way that one of its downspouts held a dime bag in transit. In the woods beside the church lay another small bundle, this one much more troubling. It was a handful of flesh that would soon be identified as most of the heart of Mission Specialist Brian Goodwin.
The astronaut walked back to his car, which he’d parked by the gas pumps in front of a low-slung