DIXIANA Preview: The Second Chapter

Here, we meet the grandfather to whom fruitshake millionaire and heartbroken cuckold Roy E. Pettus flies under duress in chapter one. Full text of Dixiana Book One: Dirt Surfer will pop on Amazon KDP in the next couple of weeks.

2. Gaston “Gooch” Bundrick and

Reynolds “Rabbit” Pettus

By the time Gaston hobbled down the flight of steps, supporting himself on the track of the AmeriPro Premiere Series stair-lift his disabled second-in-command, Dobbs, used to ascend to the second-story offices of the Edgewater Advocate, the publisher and editor of the paper for the last two decades had managed to forget his purpose in the world.

Out on the sidewalk, he squinted through the monuments and trees on the town green. His stomach rumbled at the smell of the chicken broasting before the lunch rush, from kitchens in both The Dixiana and Manny’s on the Green. The Dixiana didn’t enjoy a lucrative lunch trade anymore. At one time diners had come from all over the county and beyond—not for the honkytonk, but the barbecue. As late as ten years ago, even the President of the You-Knighted States picked up a to-go basket. Glory days.

Gooch sighed—and yet, there Rabbit Pettus still stood in front of the honkytonk. Smoking, spitting, hitching up his pants. Seeing the man, older than dirt but still on his feet, brought everything back.

Most everything, anyway. Involved Rabbit and The Dixiana. That’s all Gaston knew.

His reporting task.

Purpose in life.

Immediate assignment.

However one perceived the present moment, Gaston Bundrick slip-streamed through the hours and days grasping with a tenuous fingertip grip on the where and how and why of his duties. It had become a problem, his mental acuity, but so far no one else had noticed. Thank god.

He’d fake his way through. As before, so ahead.

Saluting Sheriff Oakley passing by in his unmarked cruiser, Gaston shuffled by the salon and tattoo parlor and jaywalked toward the angled parking spaces along the green, most of which were empty, especially this time of the day. His knees crackling like a bowl of Rice Krispies, Gaston caught sight of the columned, granite old bank building where the Edgewater Ladies’ Munificence Society held their meetings, and more of the story he was chasing down today came back to him:

The mural. The damned mural, again. At least it was a story that, in these times of renewed sensitivity about the Confederate flag, had some steam behind it.

Feeling outside himself, the old reporter ambled over and stood alongside the even older tavern owner, the men crafting for themselves small talk for which resplendent Carolina mornings on the green in downtown Tillman Falls were created. Innocuous and casual, the conversation included a rumination on the grueling, humid summer now ending; progress on the nuclear plant expansion; who was and wasn’t running against Hill Hampton for mayor next year; the special race for the new seat on the expanded town council the Reverend Roosevelt Nixon seemed destined to win, which was fine with Rabbit Pettus; how the fighting Southeastern University Redtails looked so far this season, about which Gaston Bundrick couldn’t give two poops, whether we’re talking football or any sport; lastly, activities in the back rooms over at Pike’s Bait & Pawn, which far as Gooch knew involved typical vice and licentiousness, which Pettus knew with intimacy from the years when hosting the county’s criminal cognoscenti upstairs at The Dixiana.

No news in any of it.

Blather.

Nothing of any use to a newspaperman like Gaston Bundrick. Small talk made him feel enervated and useless, like after watching too much TV.

No, only raillery from old man Reynolds Pettus, or else gossipy BS that rolled off his soft-voiced tongue with no useful mention of the mural; the mural, but more to the point, Rabbit’s response to the proposal to restore the artwork.

Fifty years old last year. That’s what people kept arguing. Historic.

Jiminy Cricket—that’s what he came to see about. The ELMS meeting to propose funding a successor mural. To replace the offensive one. On the side of the honkytonk.

Gooch, forgetting the mural question and instead asking Rabbit if he had childhood memories of the Sunbury School Fire, which the old man said he didn’t; and also that Gooch had asked him that just yesterday. Reminded Gooch that the Pettuses had come here from West Virginia coal mining country when he was a teenager, not long before he joined the army to get away from his daddy.

“Folks talked about the fire back then,” sounding like far, more of an upcountry accent, still, despite his long life here in Tillman Falls. “Can’t be time for another article about that mess.”

“Anniversary coming up.”

Dry. “Coulda swore y’all just had yourself one.”

His faulty memory again, dang it. “No—I’m thinking about a book project.”

“About the far?”

Shrugging. The idea wouldn’t fully form. “About this’n that. A county history.”

“You better narrow it down. You’ll have yourself a mess of stories to sort out.”

“Lord knows that’s the truth.”

For some reason, both men enjoyed a hearty and knowing laugh. If only every emotion Gooch experienced didn’t feel forced and false, he might feel less unsure of himself. Perhaps the humor to which he reacted would become apparent.

Besides the actual disturbing news of the world, like Ferguson and the ebola scare and going to war with Russia over Ukraine or Syria or both, the local stories of note unfolded in a fashion outrageous yet mundane: Bomb threats called into the local high school every other week. A teenage boy, covered in blood and showing up at school, confessing to the counselor in the front office that he had fatally stabbed his grandmother and grandfather over an issue of money for a videogame purchase. A young woman from a few counties over, high on meth in the parking lot of a church, gouged out her own eyes. Vandals apprehended digging up graves with the intention of mining fine jewelry to pawn or otherwise fence. A pair of deputies and a Department of Natural Resources agent decided to follow up on “outstanding warrants” late one night by kicking in the door of a little old black woman’s house, and when she emerged from her bedroom holding an air rifle, shot her to death; the cops, cleared of wrongdoing, but when the family filed a civil suit the county settled out of court, the third such case in a decade. Two prepubescent boys facing lifelong disfigurement and pain lay in the Augusta burn center after playing with matches and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. An area judge, convicted of sentencing teens to jail time over minor infractions in exchange for kickbacks from mysterious elements lobbying on behalf of the private prison complex. A pair of high school seniors reported seeing an enormous, man-sized bird crouching in the national forest near the crossroads called Red Mound; the boys claimed the creature, glimpsed at dusk during a quail hunting excursion from which they were returning, took off with a flapping of wings as large as “fifteen or twenty feet.” Not the first local giant bird sighting. They happened every few decades. Probably on dope, those boys.

But in this era of almost-daily shooting events carrying high body counts like evil, liturgical public mega-rituals, none of these modest items presented as novel. None close to breakout, wire story material. Only another day in Edgewater County, USA.

Now, you get a Sunbury School Fire, or an event like San Bernardino or Sandy Hook? Here would be juicy news into which partial plates could be sunk.

The biggest such story of late, one of the first local items to crawl across the worldwide wires since the Coy Wando murders a few decades ago—not that anything would top Coy Wando’s depraved child-killings—involved a woman, Sheba Lynn Swampscott, 56, who in the course of shacking up with two men in a Mayfield Acres mobile home, had murdered one with a shot from a handgun. Gun violence a common enough occurrence nationwide, true, but the angle here resulted from her stated grievance, that he wouldn’t stop playing a particular Pink Floyd album. Gracious, but the “hits” Dobbs Vandegrift, junior editor-in-chief and web guru, said the paper had gotten on its online edition over it. Dobbs knew all about the complicated tech world leaving folks like Gooch behind, all these gadgets and hoodoo. Dobbs even had “his own cloud,” whatever that meant. Mercy, it sounded like being touched by angels, all this internet connectivity.

Gooch sat amazed as he read comments on the Swampscott story coming in from all over the world. “Bless its little heart, but South Carolina does it again,” John Stewart crowed with glee later that night on live global TV. “Good girl!” Fame was Edgewater County’s, if only for a news cycle.

About the Pink Floyd kerfuffle, everyone seemed to want to know the same question: not about the victim’s injuries or the perp herself, but rather, which record? The album with the prism on a black background? Or the one with the man on fire? Foolishness. Myopia. What did it matter? Wasn’t the fact that a person had come unhinged enough to kill another human being over playing a record sufficient fodder for discussion, and about more than irrelevant details? Who cared which record? People losing the thread. Burying the lede.

The succinct saying, a truism explicating this idea, sat right on the tip of his tongue, but wouldn’t form. Dang it.

Rock music, too much for Gooch. All those wailing guitars and thudding, bombastic drums. Playing an obnoxious record on repeat might have driven him to kill too, come to think of it.

Hell, he’d never cared for country music either, not after the whole Outlaw trend back in the 70s, when The Dixiana had started going downhill. Greasy-headed, pill-popping Waylon Jennings. Dope-smoking Willie. You could keep all that. Give Gooch the Chet Atkins-era material. Lush production. Melodies, plaintive and memorable. Human voices. Little short stories about failed romance, longing, poverty, faith. Country music—real country music. The kind you still heard played inside these walls.

The wall, the mural, and the meeting—that’s why Gooch was standing outside The Dixiana. Check.

A step-van rumbled down Common Street and backfired, the shot heard round the green. Gooch’s loafers cleared the gritty sidewalk, and he farted with involuntary suddenness.

The Mexican driver, in paint-spattered coveralls, stared straight ahead and zoomed around the corner north toward the bypass, clattering ladders echoing in his wake. KA-pow, a second backfire, echoing back from the wall containing the mural.

Rabbit cussed and spat and wrenched his shoulder around like he’d suffered a bee sting. “Great God almighty,” his voice but a wheeze. “Thought somebody decided to take me out.”

“Same here. When you’re a newspaperman long as I’ve been, one earns himself many enemies.”

“Don’t doubt that one bit.”

His eyes found a nearby war monument, a squat, obsidian obelisk placed in tribute to a variety of twentieth and early twenty-first century international altercations. “You ought to know what it feels like to get shot at.”

“Them Germans did their best. Took a few potshots at my ass. Damn straight about that.” Checking his watch. “Reckon Burnie’ll be along soon.”

“Surprised he’s not here already.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

In the old days Gaston would wait for a meeting like this across the green at Lucinda’s Lunch. How her coffee had been so right. So consistent. A cube of sugar, a dash of half & half. Delightful.

Gaston, damn near believing he could still see the old Lucinda’s sign instead of the fresh paint of the sandblasted Manny’s on the Green logo, wishing he could walk over and eat one more time. Get that coffee. Sit at his favorite table and write or interview or politick, or read the New York Times and the Columbia paper. Imagining the Bunn coffee machine and the angle of its stainless steel boxy body, how it sat behind the counter warming its handled round pots, black for regular and orange for decaf. The comfort of the pies, the meat-and-three blue plate specials, the Friday night buffets featuring fried catfish bites and greasy fresh-cooked collard greens; the sense that, whatever happened, it’d all be okay.

The world without the old diner across the way?

A pervasive malaise, an encroaching lack of permanence and continuity in the ongoing, presumptive thousand-year epoch of American peace and prosperity, what with reality playing out more on a smartphone near you than the streets of the cities and towns. With citizens mesmerized into sedation and unperturbed by the building wave of tumultuous social and cultural change looming in the distance, as Gooch had railed in a recent editorial column the younger and more socially savvy Dobbs had talked him out of printing, community engagement, civil discourse and interpersonal relations were all crumbling into vacuous tit-for-tat sniping in online comment sections, useless rhetoric better suited to the schoolyard than the public square.

Nothing about life felt all right. Not close to the old standards anymore. Whether in the world at large, or within Gooch’s own head and heart.

His insides quivered all along his ribcage.

He realized he had wandered into the street.

Rabbit called to him. “Going somewheres?”

His hard leather soles crunching, Gooch wandered back. Felt a touch dizzy. “Guess it’s not quite time. For the meeting.”

“Look like one of them pickers coming in here with the Chinese eyes going on. You smoking dope, now? Like all them crunchy granolas out in Colorado?”

Gaston, not knowing how to answer. Taking a breather, sitting on the bench, Rabbit’s bench. Sweating. Another hot day. Autumn couldn’t get here soon enough.

Cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Rabbit gripped his own left wrist as though it hurt. “Boy, you look peaked.”

Fanning himself and checking his Blackberry for email—spam, a good bit of gay porn spam today—it occurred that Gooch already knew Rabbit’s news, which really wasn’t news: the man didn’t give two shits about history, whether the damn mural, or the war he went off and fought seventy years ago.

Rabbit managed to give at least one shit: when he could tell folks were set on stirring a pot that, at this late date in such matters, needn’t be disturbed. Back then, 1963, Burnie Sykes had been the one who wanted the mural put on the building, about the same time they raised the naval jack atop the State House dome down in Columbia, a flag no boy in gray had ever flown on any battlefield. The politicians, and Burnie, both swore with hand upon heart their gestures weren’t over the colored students being let into Southeastern University. It went without saying, however, that integration of the state school hadn’t gone over well with the more entrenched class structure conjoined to a vision, and version, of the past no longer tenable.

Hadn’t been tenable back in 1963, either. That’d been the point of integration.

Painting that old General Reb mascot, though, with his confederate battle flag flapping behind him? That told the black children of Edgewater County, perhaps dreaming of matriculating to Southeastern and bettering their lives through higher education, nothing about history, only that they’d better remember who and what still reigned here in the modern age. As a layperson, Gooch, long in favor of the mural’s removal. But he didn’t let that change the way he wrote and reported the issue. Trained in objectivity, objective he’d remain.

“Should’ve heard what that grandbaby of Burnie’s done last night.” Rabbit, offhand and untroubled through a dry belch. “Stinker pulled a fast one on old Uncle Rabbit.”

“Do tell.” Bundrick, wondering if he ought to note the coming information. As a reporter, such action dwelled inside him as a first instinct, but of late if he didn’t take extensive notes he’d forget minor details—who he was, where he was, what he was doing, and why. A wee problem. “But I can probably surmise.”

Rabbit described Button’s subterfuge, a ‘comedy’ routine she’d talked him and Jasper Glasscock, who ran the open mic night on Thursdays at The Dixiana, into letting her do, which Rabbit said she kept describing as her “tight twenty.”

“Do what, now?”

“Some show-biz bullcrap.”

This, a phrase Gooch had to write down: The flip-top notebook appeared in hand, the reporter muttering and scribbling as fast as pen would pull. A lightbulb. “Twenty minutes of decent jokes.” So relieved he thought he’d weep. “I get it, I get it.”

“Damn, son. You ain’t right.” Rabbit, suspicious and squinting against the brilliant Carolina sunshine of late summer. “And this ain’t no interview.”

“I can almost guess—the reactors.”

“Said she was thinking about becoming a ‘consciousness comedian,’ whatever that means. Hey—what you writing down?”

“‘Tight twenty.’ Haven’t heard that.”

“You writing it down again?”

“Oh—no.” He regained control of the interview. “It’s a—wait. A conscientious comedienne? Like a conscientious objector?”

“Hell if I know. The point is, she lied through her teeth. That little squirt.”

“Who?”

“Burnie’s grandbaby.”

Gooch’s mind raced. He’d been getting so forgetful. Burnham Sykes’s grandbaby. Burnie’s grandbaby. Button. “Oh—the one working for the governor.”

Rabbit gave Gooch the once over. “Son, you need another cuppa joe this morning? We talking bout Button. Not the other’n.”

Okay. Not Thim Sykes, the governor’s aide-de-camp, of late advising the Reverend Nixon in his town council candidacy. Not the political consultant, Thim; the younger sibling, the hippie, the flake—Button. The one they’d just been talking about, as Gooch castigated himself. “I’m with you. Sure, sure. Button.”

“They don’t understand nothing. Young’uns. There’s got to be jobs. But she got up there and started hollering about them new reactors like they was the devil.”

Now Gooch felt up to speed. Ever since the reactor construction announcement, a national story and the most positive jobs news the county had seen in ages, Button Sykes had been agitating against the expansion at the Sugeree Nuclear Station. “Not to mention all the electricity.”

Rabbit, scoffing and spitting. “They don’t know shit. Young’uns.”

“They’ll find out.”

“Damn straight they will. Less they want to end up bumfuzzled.”

Gooch, musing to himself and chuckling at not only what Rabbit meant—bumfuzzled was a catchall term for him—but also regarding who ‘they’ were. Damn if he hadn’t misplaced the beginning of the conversation.

Again.

Happened sometimes. His old bean could only hold so much new information—that’s what he kept telling himself. Wasn’t but into his early 60s. Way too early for Alzheimer’s. Too young. Look at Reynolds Pettus standing next to him—eighty-eight and strong and spry as the oaks providing shade in the courthouse plaza.

Gooch concentrated: Button. The reactor. There we go.

Or, wait—the mural. Reactor, or mural?

“Ain’t like there wasn’t one there already.” The Sugeree River Nuclear Station, a 1950s construction contemporaneous with the opening of The Dixiana, had been pumping out electricity ever since. “And the hydro-dam before that.”

“It can’t be denied.”

“She gets idears all up in that noggin of hers. Little hippie doper.”

“Mercy—don’t I know it.”

“Ain’t changed. Still smokes grass. Smell it all over her when she come to work.”

“These kids. I tell you what.”

Rabbit shrugged. “I was always thankful Roy never got into that mess. Or, who knows, he might’ve anyway. Don’t take much to fool an old man. Which I always was to him.” As Rabbit launched into a fond reminiscence about his successful, beloved grandson, Gooch grunted, his mind itching to wander.

About once a week submissions from Button Sykes arrived over the transom at the Edgewater Advocate, letters he’d declined to publish but for the first one or two printed out of deference to her grandfather Burnie. The way Rabbit, he supposed, had by giving the little freak the job of running the PA at The Dixiana. As well as allowing Button up on stage, it sounded like, to make her nuclear-reactor protest.

All very interesting.

He supposed.

Far as Gooch Bundrick knew, Button Sykes was the only person in Edgewater County who didn’t want the power company to build the new reactor. Plenty, on the other hand, would love to see the mural gone. Now that was a topic that seemed worth debating.

In fact, the mural situation represented the primary topic of discussion at the biweekly meeting of the influential ELMS about to convene, and constituted what Gaston hoped might become the biggest story to hit the town in years. Folks held superstitions about the mural relating to the success of Redtails teams the university fielded in various sports; other than minor-league versions of baseball and hockey squads, and the occasional PGA or LPGA tournament down on one of the sea islands, South Carolina enjoyed no actual professional sports teams. Men like Jez Rembert, a local underground economy entrepreneur, often seen on football Saturdays making a pilgrimage to the mural and placing hand over heart before General Reb, a gesture of respect said to energize the luck surrounding the squad. You didn’t want to mess with tradition. Rabbit, wise and deferential, knowing to leave well enough alone.

So here, as Gooch understood it, was Rabbit’s compromise—no restoration. Too contentious an image, this he understood and mostly agreed with, and always had. Let it fade away with him, he said. Let it stand as a teaching tool, fading not into further glory, but ignominy. That’s what Rabbit planned to say to the ELMS around their long and storied and burnished conference table, candlelit and dripping with money and atmosphere and authority as their civic-minded presence and pedigree commanded.

In truth? Gooch already had his story. He’d type it up, print it tomorrow. The way of his world. For now, he enjoyed hanging out in the sunshine. The news would get to writing itself. Eventually.

Before long, Burnie Sykes got dropped off by the granddaughter in question. So short you couldn’t see her behind the steering wheel, Button, waving a curt karate chop to the men and speeding away in her silver, muddy, four-wheel-drive Subaru Baja, an SUV-pickup hybrid, squat and stubby like the woman’s own body.

Gaston shouted about getting a statement regarding the comedy-routine protest, which had turned heads, or so he’d heard from somewhere, somewhere, he knew not where. In response, he got only a lungful of her exhaust.

Who told Gooch about her onstage protest, anyway? It had slipped his mind.

Rabbit did. Not five minutes ago.

Jesus, boy. Pull yourself together.

After hobbling inside the dim bar and helping himself to a draught PBR, first of the day, Burnie, swaying on bad hips, came back out onto The Dixiana’s front porch to join the other codgers with hands stuffed into their pockets.

Wasting no time, Burnie launched into his best friend Rabbit over the mural, and for a time Gaston stood watching like at a tennis match as the men grumbled and groused to one another about their respective positions.

“But think about history. We need to talk them women into paying to repaint it as it stands.” Gooch noted how Burnie said this in a manner more pleading than angered, slurping his foamy draft beer and wiping his mouth on a flannel sleeve. “Think how much it means to Redtails fans here, and all over the state. The country. The world.”

Rabbit squeezed his eyes. Grunted. Seemed preoccupied. Worked his sore left shoulder around.

“Well?” Burnham Sykes lolled slack-jawed and bleary-eyed, as though he were trying to shake off a bad dream. “You gonna give them what-for?”

“I don’t give a good god-durn, to tell the truth. Let the wind blow it all away, for all I care.”

Burnie screwed up his mouth and sucked his dentures and said, “Mm-mm-mm. Mighty sad.”

“But what’s sad is, a bunch of busybodies—trying to—” Belch. “Tell me what to do with my brick wall. Damn straight I’m gonna tell them what’s what.”

“That’s more like it.” Burnie, mumbling and cursing. “I tell you, it’s hubris,” with a denture whistle on the ‘S’. “Hubris, plain and simple.”

“Might as well be standing around a bubbling cauldron, them ELMS’s.”

Gooch couldn’t let it stand. “Now, boys. The ELMS do a lot of good for this community. Worth hearing them out.”

Burnham, stomping his foot and disagreeing in a manner as vituperative as possible with his weak old-man’s breath, which as Gaston observed with a poetic flourish sounded like the wind on a high, lonesome mountaintop.

Burnie found his breath, and with it came a full measure of roiling, dyspeptic disapproval concerning the ELMS and every woman in the damnable coven. Questioning their charter to exist at all much less lead, which in execution went way in the damn hell past what you expected from a gaggle of puffed-up old geese with long noses, in his words. It took place because every last one had too much time and money on their manicured hands. Lousy with hubris-s-s, he kept repeating, what with their call for Rabbit to remove the mural and allow them to commission an image more modern and agreeable and less, far less divisive greeting motorists coming from the northern part of the county into downtown Tillman Falls.

Rabbit belched and cussed. “But Burnie—they ain’t wrong. Maybe it ought,” sounding like ort, “to be took down. Like maybe this whole dump. Don’t nobody give a shit but Jasper and Trudy. Roy ain’t never gonna want nothing to do with it. Ain’t none of it mean what it used to. Not even to me.”

“I give a shit.” Burnie, gripping his mug of PBR close. “Damn if I don’t.”

“You can drink cheaper buying at the IGA, boy,” a line familiar from many such afternoons sitting outside at The Dixiana. “Or run over yonder to see old N’awlins. Drink his high priced rotgut.”

“Sooner drink muddy water out of the Sugeree. Or paint thinner.”

Gooch watched Burnie hack and cough and swirl the dregs in the cracked and chipped stein. To say Burnham Sykes hated ‘N’awlins,’ which was what he and Rabbit called Manny Theodore, a New Orleans ex-pat who’d bought Lucinda’s diner and turned into a juke joint right there on the beloved common green of Tillman Falls, an understatement. Manny and Neecie put on a hell of a vinegar-based barbecue lunch buffet, though. Had to admit that.

It didn’t help matters with folks like Burnham Sykes, one of the townsfolk responsible for painting the mural in the first place, that Bernice Theodore, Manny’s wife and business partner, had been the one leading the charge against the mural. “Ain’t even lived here five blamed minutes.”

But she was no interloper or carpetbagger in terms of town politics. Her place on the ELMS, earned both through the co-ownership of their restaurant, but also a civil rights legacy: her mother had conducted a famous sit-in at the mill, pressing the company about the hiring of Negro women, which at the time represented a high percentage of the working-age population in this region of the state. The argument had been sound—she and many other young women offered labor-ready workers for what had traditionally been a man’s game, the struggle coming fraught with as much gender and class issues as racial ones, though considering the times, an angle also playing into the situation.

Burnham, bitter: “Damn so-and-so’s from across the bridge are taking over.”

Rabbit cleared a frog out of his throat. “I like Manny. He’s all right. Blows a mean sax, he does.”

Burnie, a crusty old dog—worse’n Rabbit Pettus ever was—offered a stream of racially charged invective that all but burned Gaston’s ears. Clinging to the old ways. But even hardcore race-baiters like Sykes had learned to tone down the rhetoric even among supposedly safe ears, which by any modern standard oughtn’t to have been the town’s principal journalist. These men thought of Gaston like a fellow gentleman of the town, however, not a reporter per se.

At their age, what useful secrets could they carry and protect? Likely few. Their power, now at a low ebb.

Gooch’s power and influence waned, too. His reporter’s instincts told him to get used to it.

Burnie, despite only having had the first of the day, seemed unsteady on his feet. Rabbit feeding him PBR all afternoon didn’t help. But Burnie had had a rough time of it—losing his son Buddy, all the failed businesses. A onetime county big-shot, now reduced to slobbering and drinking and watching the light fall on the town green every day, all day long.

The way Gooch himself felt, he had to admit, from his second-floor office across the way, eating his sorry bag lunch and smelling the hair chemicals from the downstairs salon. Only, his melancholy watchfulness came without the drinking. Never touched it.

This old newshound was getting forgetful as a drunk. That much for sure.

“Well—let’s go, so we can get on back.” Rabbit rubbed his wrist and coughed through a fresh Pall Mall he’d sparked into life off his scarred and scratched Zippo. “Burnie, you gonna hold down the fort whilst I go and deal with these busybodies? Fridge and Idahlia is back yonder doing the lunch prep.” Rabbit took himself a good long look at the facade of his old honkytonk. “And Trudy’ll be along any minute to get the bar opened up.”

Burnie said he reckoned he could manage. “Don’t nobody need your crusty old ass, Pettus. This dump could run itself.”

“Try to keep from draining the keg this time. My back’s too tender to change it today.”

Gooch, trailing behind, called over his shoulder. “Yeah, Burnie. Try not to drink the man dry.”

The old drunk cussed him sideways, a nasal twang carrying down the block. Told Gooch he could shove his sorry little snot-rag of a paper up his puckered ass sideways.

Rabbit, still a robust, broad-shouldered man despite being stooped with age, shuffled across Congress Street toward the old bank building on the next block. It had been built as the Farmer’s & Merchant’s Bank of South Carolina, later becoming the Palmetto State Bank. It failed following a Depression-era robbery, its lost deposits among the first FDIC claims ever fulfilled. Why he carried all this useless ancient trivia but lost track of the last five minutes, this reporter couldn’t say.

Gaston scurried alongside as Rabbit strode across the town green, with its small patch of azaleas and trees. Like almost everything else in downtown Tillman Falls—Burnham Sykes, Gaston Bundrick, and Reynolds Pettus included—the monuments and sidewalks seemed grimy and worn-down.

Rabbit Pettus stopped in the street. Looked back at the building he owned, a cornerstone of the town for decades. He made a gesture in its direction, the sign of the cross three times with his thumb. Muttering under his breath.

“What’s all that, Rabbit?”

“Nothing I should’ve let you see. But you won’t remember anyway, will you, son?”

Gooch winked and waved his reporter’s Moleskine. “Nothing gets past Gooch Bundrick.” He put the notebook back into his satchel without noting Rabbit’s Catholic-like blessing of the honkytonk.

On the block opposite the newspaper offices sat the imposing gray granite columns of the ELMS headquarters. After its life as a pre-Depression financial institution and later the district Masonic lodge, for the last two decades the iconic downtown building had served as home base for the county’s longest standing philanthropic organization. Elegant, candlelit and still as a mortuary, Gaston always found the conference room inside calming, the air seeming to vibrate with legitimacy and power.

“For all I know?” Rabbit rubbed out his cigarette on a lamppost and put it in the green wire trashcan, rusty and caked with years of grunge. “They’re liable to cut off my crooked redneck prick in there.”

“Who knows what secrets and occult rituals have gone on behind these doors.”

Rabbit shot Gooch a glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, look at today—‘executive session’,” a posted notice read. “That means I’ll have to wait out here. Dang it.”

“Oh. Ain’t gonna take me long to say what I got to say. Back in a jiffy.” The thud of the big door shutting behind Rabbit Pettus resonated in old Gooch’s brittle ribs.

He tingled; sensed the approach of news. A story, breaking like a wave on the sandy shores of Myrtle Beach. The future, arriving heralded, fully-formed. And making now more now than now had ever been.

A story about what, though? Now? What they hell did that mean?

Wait—what was he doing over here across the green?

Maybe about the time Gooch’s fabled news arrived, this time a real doozy, it’d all come back to him. Again. He’d wait out the confusion, find his way back. He always did.

---

Next, we meet Chelsea Collete “Creedence” Rucker-Pettus, the unfaithful spouse of our protagonist.