Harvestman Lodge (29 page)

IN THE SAME PARKING LOT where Eli and Melinda had parked their cars for the bicentennial committee meeting, Curtis Stokes was meandering about, bored but not ready just yet to head for the night to his quarters in Coleman Caldwell’s basement. He was pondering the possibility of slipping inside to where the meeting was going on.

Curtis cared nothing about bicentennial celebrations and planning committee meetings. He did, though, like free cookies and coffee, and sometimes there were tables laden with those items at public meetings. Curtis’s stomach was growling; supper had been a can of Vienna sausages he’d bought with pocket change at the Piggly Wiggly … an insubstantial meal rendered even more so because he had shared it with a stray cat. He was a soft-hearted man where animals were concerned; once he’d even freed a rat he found pitifully stuck in a glue trap behind the old Spancake Jeweler’s location.

As a fellow rejected creature of the world, Curtis Stokes understood rats, understood being stuck. And how important a rescuer could be when you needed one.

He looked back toward the power company building and the lighted window beyond which the bicentennial planners were meeting.

Two things so far had kept him from actually going on in to the meeting: fear of being thrown out and embarrassed, and the fact that lights east of the parking lot were casting pole shadows across the pavement he would have to cross. Shadows that would grab him and jolt him as he passed through them.

A lot of people had explained to him that pole shadows were just shadows like any other kind and it was absurd to fear them. He believed them, but still felt the dreaded grab-and-shake whenever he passed through. He’d made sincere efforts to shake off his problem. It hadn’t worked. He expected he would go his entire life avoiding pole shadows, with people laughing at him for it, using that “Curtis-crazy” term he despised, and whispering about how liquor or drugs must have damaged his mind.

That part really made him mad. He used no drugs and certainly was no drunk. He was a lifetime teetotaler, in fact, never touching the stuff. He’d seen what liquor had done to his alcoholic mother, and to his fellow man of the streets and former tent-mate, Plunker Williams. Curtis Stokes wanted nothing of the kind of life Plunker Williams lived. Poor old Plunker spent most of his time drunk and the rest wishing he were.

The liquor would kill Plunker in the end, and Curtis knew it. So no drinking for Curtis. Life was hard enough just being Curtis-crazy and having to suffer the jolting effects of pole shadows.

“You’re crazy as hell, you know that, don’t you, Curtis?”

The male voice came from somewhere in the dark recess leading to a rear door of the church building that back-faced this lot. That was the door the church secretary used when she came and went each day, as she had for more than twenty years. She was a kind woman who smiled at Curtis whenever she saw him, told him she prayed for him, and sometimes gave him a twin package of those commercially packaged chocolate cupcakes she brought in every day. The kind with a white squiggle of icing across their tops. Curtis wished he had one right now.

“Plunker? Is that you back in there?” Curtis said into the darkness. The shadows in the church alley did not threaten him. They were not the stretched-out, long kind that grabbed and shook a man until his bones rattled.

The man who had spoken from the darkness stepped forward, slightly limping, and became visible. It wasn’t Plunker, but a much younger man whom Curtis would never have expected to see. The last he’d heard, this man was still serving a drug-related prison term. Obviously that was no longer the case.

“No, it ain’t Plunker, Curtis. Not by a long shot. It’s me, your old buddy Rawls Parvin.”

“Hello, Rawls. Uh … welcome home, I guess.” The lack of enthusiasm in Curtis’s tone was honest. Rawls Parvin had taken great joy over the years in mocking Curtis in public, then, when he had no audience, pretending to Curtis’s face to be his friend. He’d even tried to fuel the fire of Curtis’s well-known phobia, claiming he’d heard on television that scientists were recognizing the dangers of walking through telephone pole shadows. Curtis was quite sure Rawls was lying to him. His unshakeable fear of pole shadows was a feeling, not a belief. He was crazy, not stupid.

“How long you been out, Rawls?”

“Since around the first of the year. Mighty glad to get out of that hole, I can tell you. I’m staying out of trouble from here on out. No plans to go back inside.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah … I learned my lesson. That lesson is: be careful as hell anytime you do whatcha do. You’re only in trouble if you get caught.”

Curtis nodded, finding nothing to say.

“Hey, Curtis, I seen you a time or two when I was driving around since I got home, but you didn’t see me. Honked at you once but you didn’t hear. Either that or you think you’re too high-and-mighty to wave at a Parvin.”

“I’d have waved at you if I’d heard you honking.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know you would have. I’m just redneckin’ you, that’s all. You’ve always been a friendly man, Curtis.”

“Got to be friendly in my line of work.”

Rawls barely squelched a mocking chuckle. “‘Line of work’? Your ‘line of work’ still selling pencils at the front door of Discount World?”

“Yeah.”

“Business good in the pencil industry these days?”

Curtis sensed he was being ridiculed and it made him want to stomp off in a huff. But that would be rude, something he wasn’t.

“It’s good enough. Folks always need pencils.”

“Lucky for you, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Why are you out here in
this
parking lot, this time of the evening? There’s nobody looking to buy crazy-man pencils here, I don’t think.”

“A man’s got to be somewhere.” A burst of annoyance at Rawls’s snideness and disrespect gave Curtis a moment of courage, so he asked a question of his own. “Why are
you
here, Rawls? You out here selling drugs?”

“Out here for personal reasons, Curtis. Personal reasons.” Parvin looked over at the power company building as he said it.

Curtis had no idea what Parvin meant, and asked nothing more. It never paid to annoy a Parvin, no matter how much the Parvin annoyed you first.

Parvin pointed at a powder-blue Bronco parked nearby. “That Bronco there, you know who drives that?”

“Don’t know.” In fact Curtis did know, because he’d been at the corner of the parking lot when Melinda Buckingham had driven in for the meeting in the power company building across the street. It would take a brasher man than he, though, to mention that particular name to Rawls Parvin.

“Well, I’ll tell you who drives it,” Parvin said. “The prettiest girl in Tennessee drives that Bronco. Melinda Buckingham. Works in TV now. I kept some company with that sweet thing a few years ago, but that got ruined by lies that were spread about me, and because her old man’s a nut-case who thinks his little girly is too good for a man to so much as look at. Damned old religious fanatic! And as big a hypocrite as any of them. And they’re all hypocrites, Curtis. Every damn one of them. You know what a hypocrite is?”

“Yeah.” It was a lie. The image in Curtis’s mind was of a big, lumbering beast he’d seen wallowing in mud at the Knoxville Zoo years ago. He figured that probably wasn’t what Rawls was talking about, so he moved the conversation on.

“I know who Melinda Buckingham is, and I know who her daddy is,” Curtis said. “She grew up in this town. I’ve seen her on the TV in my house … Coleman Caldwell’s house, I’m talking about.”

“Coleman Caldwell? Damn! You still living in that old lunatic’s weed thicket? Two loons under one roof! Ha! I guess not much has changed around here since they sent me up the river … which shouldn’t have ever happened, you know. I never sold drugs in my life!”

“Yeah.” Curtis knew better. Rawls Parvin had been one of the best-known drug dealers in Kincheloe County in his teen years.

Curtis also knew, as did most everyone in Tylerville, about Rawls’ brief and ill-fated courtship of Melinda Buckingham, a young woman so far out of his league, and from a background so incompatible with Rawls’s own, that even Curtis had known it couldn’t work.

Melinda in high school had been the toast of the community, winning local pageants, talent shows, cheerleading contests, citizenship awards, newspaper essay contests, student government elections, church youth group and denominational honors, oratory competitions, and eventually, scholarship offers from nearly every civic organization in Tylerville and from colleges and universities across the Southeast and beyond. She was a star in her small-town world.

Melinda’s hard-working and religiously devout parents were intensely proud of her, and took every effort to make sure no one forgot whose daughter she was, until …

Until Rawlston “Rawls” Parvin came along. Rawls came from poor stock, a rough family of low reputation and bad associations. Over nearly a century, several male Parvins, and a few females, had spent time behind bars for offenses both petty and large. During the first half of the 20th century, Parvin moonshine was the most noted product to come out of mountainous southern Kincheloe County. Starting in the 1960s the Parvins slowly updated their focus more to marijuana production, changing with the times while still maintaining the family’s transgressive tradition.

Rawls, as Rawlston was generally called, had in his teen years been seen as the Parvins’ great rising hope to give some long-missing luster to the family name. He was a healthy and strong youth, intelligent beyond his family’s norm and even handsome … though his looks were marred somewhat by what was known as “the Parvin eye” or “the Parvin glare”. This common local descriptive term referenced a distinctive look possessed by most Parvin men around and in their eyes, a kind of wild, piercing glare that made them look perpetually furious and menacing.

Parvin glare aside, Rawls could actually be charming, in his way, when required. Most importantly, he was athletic, with the ability to turn a football into a guided missile that went exactly where his eagle eye and steel-spring arm sent it. That he was prime quarterback material was evident by the junior high level. As the boy grew and became better and better on the gridiron, local football worshipers could talk of no other name than Rawls Parvin, their minds full of championship dreams on down the road when Rawls was just a few years older, followed by a university football career (as a Tennessee Vol, it was hoped) and then a successful pro career to put the cap on it all. Patience, patience, they counseled themselves. Rawls will be out there on that field in a few years, and it’ll all be ours, then. Skill in football, as always, covered a multitude of sins. It was also, probably, one of the few things about him that would make him worthy of notice by such a worshiped local angel-princess as Melinda Buckingham.

Even so, Rawls remained a Parvin, a name that hung on him like a badge of dishonor. Two Parvins had been lynched as thieves at the turn of the century, another had been shot to death by his in-laws because of how he treated his wife, and several had been run out of the county for everything from simple obnoxiousness to livestock theft and barn-burning. In more recent years, one Parvin, Lukey, had further darkened the family name by enrolling in a vocational program and learning to be a camera operator, after which he went to Los Angeles to involve himself as a cameraman for the movie industry. He’d actually succeeded in getting work, giving his family some bragging rights until it was learned that the kind of movies Lukey was helping make were far, far removed from the variety shown in mainstream theaters, and were typically created in seedy motel rooms in ways that violated every kind of law, legal and moral.

Even after the true nature of what Lukey was doing was known, some of the rougher Parvin men, Lukey’s father included, were “proud of the old boy for making a name for himself out amongst your Hollywood perfeshunals.” When the unflattering truth about Lukey’s disgraceful career began to be known, the Kincheloe County public marked up one more demerit for the Parvin name. After a narrow escape on a pornography-related charge in California, Lukey Parvin fled his grim new life and temporarily came back home, finding work in the local Farmer’s Co-op store and learning to ignore the whispers and behind-the-back finger-pointing his background aroused among the locals. Being a Parvin by birth, he was used to being looked down upon, anyway, so being reviled as a moral pestilence wasn’t much different from past experience. He eventually grew sufficiently tired of it, though, that he returned to LA and a world where people lacked Bible Belt judgmentalism, and a man could do what he had to do for his living, as long as he could find shadows dark enough to hide in.

Even Lukey’s activities in the underground smut industry, however, didn’t overshadow the darkest blot on the Parvin name. That remained the 1951 crime of one Dalton Parvin, who got into a beer joint shooting fracas with a Tate, Tate being the only local family name held in lower regard than Parvin. Had Dalton’s shot hit its intended target, it would have been just one more fast-forgotten white trash barroom shooting. But Dalton Parvin’s shot inside the Wildcat Bar had gone wide of its intended Tate target, passed through a window, and lodged fatally in the brain of the then-sheriff of Kincheloe County. The sheriff was a Sadler, albeit one of the “lower branch Sadlers,” as the country-cousin outliers of the family were called. Someone had seen the lawman driving past just as it was growing evident the fight between Parvin and Tate was going to turn serious. The sheriff was summoned to stop with a frantic waving of arms. Sheriff Buck Sadler had been striding across the beer joint parking lot to resolve the problem inside when, in the later words of the Free Will Baptist preacher who led his funeral, “the good Lord called our brother home” by the seemingly very irreligious means of a drunk’s wrongly aimed bullet through a honky-tonk window.