I thought she was going to cry. I got serious. “Do you want to go and visit Uncle Carl there?”

“Okay, no.” And then her lip started to tremble and she looked down the couch and out the window. She was afraid. There was no humor at all in connecting her very sharp mind to a broken voice.

“Is Vernon the county seat?” William asked.

“Yes,” Frankie answered, “same pissant courthouse on the same pissant town square as all the other county seats in this pissant state.” My brother did not like government.

“Have y’all paid her land taxes? I just paid mine a while back.”

Then my mother did cry out, “Okay, yes, yes, yes!” And wept and held out her hand to William, who took it. William sat down on the other side of her and settled in to looking at The Price Is Right on the television screen. Like there was nothing else that mattered in this world. My mother patted him on the knee and cut a smile now and then at me and her other son.

When William and I headed out later, my brother Frankie leaned over to me and said, “I like this man. Sort of figured I might. Just a feeling I had, you know?”

I do know. It’s what happens sometimes when you meet a good man.

That chapbook? The one by the writer I’d never heard of? I sat in the back seat of my Ford Explorer and read it aloud to two other men, Kyle Jennings and Frank Turner Hollon. We were southbound back home, toward Alabama. A story called “The Paperhanger, The Doctor’s Wife, and the Child Who Went into the Abstract.” When I finished, the vehicle had slowed from seventy-five to fifty. Somebody finally said, Damn! And I said, “I gotta get this guy down to read in my bookstore. But I heard he doesn’t drive.”

“Sounds like a road trip,” Kyle said.

Yes, and what a road trip it was. Here and there, over and over, again and again. Until one day almost six years ago I got the news, behind the wheel, on my way to pick up William and go to a reading at Lincoln Memorial University, that my traveling buddy had died. But, because he wrote books, and because this manuscript was finally found, the road trip continues.

Sonny Brewer

The Lost Country

Memphis
April 1955

The court had awarded her custody of the motorcycle, they were going this day to get it. Edgewater was sitting on the curb drinking orange juice from a cardboard carton when the white Ford convertible came around the corner. A Crown Victoria with the top down though the day was cool and Edgewater had been sitting in the sun for such heat as there was. The car was towing what he judged to be a horse trailer. It was early, not quite seven, but the sun was heavy on him, sensuous, a good spring morning.

By the time she came he had almost finished drinking his breakfast and smoked a cigarette and was idly watching cars pass in the street. Birds called aloft on the trees above him, children bicycled past on their way to school. She had just got off the midnight shift and had not even bothered to change out of her uniform. memphis police dept., the emblem on her shoulder said, she had a badge to prove it. She was a meter maid.

Claire eased the car to the curb and shoved it into park and left it idling. She wore a scarf over her dirtyblond hair and an air vaguely theatrical and, when she pushed her sunglasses up with a scarlet fingernail, her eyes were the color of irises.

What are you doing in this part of town, sailor?

Just waiting for someone like you to come along, he said.

You ready to roll?

He got in and slammed the door and looked out the window at the houses sliding by. Ready as I’ll ever be.

Where were you last night?

Here and there, he said. Around and about.

You weren’t anywhere you were supposed to be, that’s for sure. I asked where you were.

I’ve got an alibi, honest, he said.