Twenty six thousand four hundred and fourty four rare, used and (some) new parts. A call and within twenty four hours you too can have a new alternator for your late model Lincoln. Why shop anywhere else when all that you need is here. The outside may rust, but the inside is more than enough. Please make offer at front desk. Management on duty must approve all sales.
Jimmy worked hard with an adjustable wrench and a crowbar for 6 years out of high school. Hubcaps and waterpumps. A guy from Elizabeth City once broke down on the highway and he took the pickup truck out to meet him after the call. Helped to fit the pump on the Duster right then and there at the side of the road and did not charge labor. “Elizabeth City,” that always seemed a funny name.
Wayne lived in back of the yard with 3 kids and a doberman pinscher. Funny name, “pinscher.” He had a job at the factory and worked a Stuart’s on the weekend’s short ordering hash browns and fried eggs for late night drunks that had decided to lap it over till Sunday morning. Sylvia had left him three years earlier to follow a mountain man to the gulf coast of Florida.
Horton was the oldest’s name. After his grandfather, all hopes were he would be a famous MLB pitcher. He seemed to have no interest in baseball though. Preferring to read the E volume of the World Book Encyclopedia as of late, as he had already made it through the first four volumes. He could tell anyone in Enoree more about daffodils and the Bastille than they would ever care to know. He had CODed a picture of the Eiffel tower from a catlog that Wayne had ordered him from the magazine that comes in the Sunday newspaper. One of those with the business reply card, put your name and address here and the catalog number that you are interested in there and within eight to ten weeks you should be receiving it in the mail, no postage necessary. It was from somewhere like the Paris visitors bureau as all of the language, as much as Wayne could read, seemed a little off to him.
Mamie was the youngest girl, named by her mother because she had always thought it a beautiful name, and because the woman who had cared for near incessantly as a kid, while mom was doing whatever it was she was doing, was named Mamie. Mamie, the younger, seemed to have a proclivity for singing and could pick out a countermelody to any song on the radio as she and Wayne drove to the truckstop for more chewing tobacco, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola. She had a tendency toward picking up the impulse-buy chocolates at the register and forcing them into her mouth before Daddy could object. Only in the waning minutes of the transactions telling him that his bill would be a full five cents greater. Dolly Parton never sounded so good as Mamie harmonizing in the truck on the way home… “and all of this at six years old,” thought Wayne.
Then there was Deborah. A completely different story. She was twelve at the time the old lady left and Wayne had begun to resent the fact that he let her mother put too many letters in her name. Why could’ve it not been DEBRA? That would have sufficed wouldn’t it? As a solution, Wayne had started calling her Deb since her mother had departed and she didn’t seem to mind.
Deborah had recently started cavorting with a hispanic boy who went to school with her and Wayne had become distraught. It seems like she had never listened to him. Even as a child in the cradle by the bed, he would wake up at night and see her eyes open. He would start to tell her stories of how she would be the princess of a tropical island one day, and that all the boys, always, would love her, and that she would read signs in the way a sunset fell over the river, and that, through her, all of the world’s problems would go away. She would only stare into the corner of the room where her mom had begun painting a mural with a bright sun and rainbow that was only half-finished. She would laugh, and this struck Wayne straight to the core. He found nothing funny in what he was saying. He was filling her and himself with all the hopes of the world, and all she could do was stare at a half-painted, never-to-be-finished, bad painting on the sheetrock of the corner of the bedroom. He’d usually get pissed off and go into the living room and watch true crime documentaries on cable television until he feel asleep and awoke 2 hours later and finally returned to the bedroom where Deb was finally asleep and he, himself, would finally fall asleep on his good hip, so as not to disturb the other, inflamed one, and on occasion he would dream of Sissy Spacek, naked, in the middle of a freshly plowed field of sweet potatoes, singing ‘My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys’ as he wandered up the row to her on horseback in full western regalia, embroidered shirt, silver spurs and all, and pulled her aboard behind him with one fluid swipe of his hand and they slowly trotted through a now snow-covered field, up to a cabin with plumes of long white-grey smoke coming from the chimney. He never felt as good as the days after the nights of these dreams.
MORE TO COME…