Fifth Row from the Front (1)

The road came into the forest twelve miles out and did not come back out of it for a long time.

It was two lanes with no shoulder and the pines stood up close on both sides, and where the pines gave out there were hardwoods that had already turned and gone half down, so that the light coming through was the color of weak tea. The road went up and it went down. It did not go around anything. Whoever had laid it had put it straight over hills that were older than any mountain west of them and had been worn down to about the height of a barn.

Dennis had the window cracked two inches because the heater in the car ran hot or ran not at all.

"Is this still Carolina," Bobby said.

"It's all Carolina."

"It don't look like it."

"What's it look like."

Bobby considered it out the window. "Like nobody lives here."

"People live here."

They went a mile on that. Every so often there was a cut in the trees with a track going back into it and a mailbox on a post, and once a doublewide up on blocks with a burn barrel out front and a dog that came to the end of its chain and stood there, and once a church, white, with six cars at it on a Friday afternoon and a sign out front with the letters not quite level.

"What's that," Bobby said.

"Church."

"On Friday?"

"They'd have something going."

The creek came in on the right and went under the road and came out on the left, and after that the ground got rocky and there were places where the bank had been cut away and you could see the quartz laid through the red clay in seams like fat through meat.

"They dug gold out of here," Dennis said.

"When?"

"Before your great-granddaddy."

"Did they get it all?"

"They got enough of it that they quit."

Bobby put his head against the glass to see up the bank. There was nothing up there but pine and a fence that had been cut off level by whoever put the road in and was now just two ends of a fence with sixty feet of nothing between them.

---

The forest let go of them about a mile out and the ground went flat and open all at once, pasture on the left with three horses in it and, on the right, the first of the houses.

Then the town came at them the way small towns do, which is all together and then over with.

There was a Gulf station that was a Gulf station and then a body shop and now had a sheet of plywood where the glass had been. There was the high school, which was three buildings instead of one, with a sign out front with plastic letters and a marquee arrow pointing at a parking lot. There was a block of storefronts with the awnings gone off them, and a State Employees Credit Union in the corner one.

"That was a drugstore," Dennis said.

Bobby looked at it going by.

"They had a counter in there. You could get a cherry Coke at it."

"Is it still in there?"

"No."

"Then how come you told me?"

Dennis did not have anything for that. He drove on through the light, which was still the only light, and turned at the bank.

They passed the road that went out to the mine works. From the highway you could see the fence and the pines coming up out of the tailings, and the gate standing open with the grass grown up in the swing of it.

"There's nothing there," Bobby said.

"That's what I'm showing you."

---

They turned past the old Sink Creek Cemetery on the rise, its markers leaning into the slope like they were trying to lie down out of the wind. From up there, you could just barely see the top of the drive-in screen farther down on the edge of town. Dennis pulled the car into the gravel lot behind the feed store, which was closed today. He left the engine idling for a moment.

"You want a RC cola?" Dennis asked.

"Is the machine on?"

"The machine's always on. I've got two nickels and a dime in the glove box."

"That ain't enough."

"I know it ain't enough," Dennis said. The engine had a lifter that ticked like a watch under the hood. He turned the key and the engine gave one shudder and died, leaving them in a sudden, heavy quiet that smelled of dry dust and old machine oil.

"Get out," he said.

They walked up the embankment toward the fence line of the cemetery. The grass had gone to seed, tall and grey-white like horsehair, and it rasped against the cuffs of Dennis' trousers as they climbed.

The graveyard sat higher than the rest of the bottomland, catching whatever breeze came off the river three miles south. The stones were mostly limestone, darkened with lichen that looked like dried mustard. Some of the older ones had sunk so deep into the clay that only the tops of the Rest in Peace letters were still showing above the sod.

Bobby kicked a loose fragment of shale. It rolled three feet and stopped against the base of a granite square belonging to a family named Vance.

"Which one is yours?" Bobby asked. He kept his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his windbreaker, his shoulders hunched against the damp coming up through his sneakers.

"Over by the cedar," Dennis said.

---

It was four rows in and the ground there was soft from the roots.

MARGARET ANN SHAW
1919 — 1983

"That's your mama," Bobby said.

"That's her."

Bobby leaned around him to look. He had the look on his face of a boy at a museum, waiting to be told what the thing was for.

There was a jar sunk into the clay at the base of the stone with the stems of something in it, gone black. Dennis crouched and pulled it out and turned it over and knocked the stems into the grass and set the jar back in its hole. The clay had held the shape.

"Somebody's been coming," Bobby said.

"Aunt Ruthie, probably."

"Are we going to see her?"

"Not this trip."

He put his hand flat on the top of the stone. The limestone was colder than the air. He left it there long enough that Bobby started looking off at the fence, and then he took it off and wiped his palm down his trouser leg and stood up.

"Come on," he said.

They went back down the slope. Bobby got out ahead of him and ran the last twenty feet, arms out, banking through the tall grass, and Dennis let him get to the fence and waited.

---

The RC machine was at the corner of the feed store under the overhang, a tall red box with a rounded top, and there was a light on inside it.

Dennis got the nickels and the dime out of the glove box and stood in front of it counting them into his palm like he might have miscounted the first time.

"Told you," Bobby said.

Dennis put the change in his pocket and got out his wallet and fed a dollar into the slot, and the machine took it and gave the bottle up with a sound like something falling down stairs. Bobby got it out and hooked the cap off on the opener and held it out to his father first, which he had been taught to do, and Dennis waved it off.

"Yours."

They drank it in the car with the doors open. It was four o'clock and the light was already going long across the gravel, and out past the feed store a truck went by on the highway with a load of pallets on it and a man in the passenger seat with his arm out the window in the cold.

"How long till it starts," Bobby said.

"Couple hours."

"What do we do till then."

"We sit here," Dennis said, "and you drink that."

---

They ate at a Hardee's out on the bypass and Dennis called Diane from the payphone by the ice machine and told her they'd be back Sunday, and put Bobby on for a minute, and Bobby said yes ma'am four times and handed the receiver back.

By six the sky over the hills west of town had gone the color of a bruised peach and the traffic on 109 had thickened up with cars going one direction.

---

The Starlite had a marquee out on the highway with letters you had to climb a ladder to change, and somebody had climbed it.

DUSK TO DAWN — ALL NITE
4 FEATURES
LAST SHOW EVER
THANK YOU SINK CREEK

And underneath, in the letters that were left:

PLUS LOCAL FILM BY B GENTRY

There were forty cars in the line ahead of them when they got there and the line was going back out onto the shoulder. Dennis put it in park and let it roll and put it in park again. Ahead of them a station wagon had its tailgate down and three kids were sitting on it facing backwards, and one of them had a rubber mask pushed up on top of his head so it sat there like a second face looking at the sky.

"How much is it," Bobby said.

"Per car."

"How much per car."

"It don't matter how much per car."

The kid in the ticket booth had a cash box and a roll of tickets he wasn't using. He leaned down into the window and looked at Bobby and then at Dennis.

"Y'all know it goes till daylight."

"We know it."

"Four dollars," the kid said. "There ain't but the one restroom working, the one on the far side. And the third row's got a mud hole in it, so don't take the third row."

"How long's this been happening?"

"The mud hole?"

"The closing."

The kid looked back over his shoulder at the field like the answer might be standing in it. "Since about June," he said. "My mama's been crying about it since about June."

Dennis gave him a five and told him to keep it and pulled through the gate, and the field opened up in front of them, and the screen stood at the end of it white against the last of the light with the whole town parked underneath.

 

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