Hear that lonesome whippoorwill? He sounds too blue to fly. The midnight train is whining low, I’m so lonesome I could cry.
- Hank Williams
In journalism school, you are taught three things. One, stick to the facts. Two, keep it simple. And three, know your source material. Dr. McPherson, my Reporter’s Ethics professor at Columbia, scratched these rules with a squeaky dry-erase marker onto the whiteboard the first day of class. He made us write these rules down on scraps of paper to keep in our wallets. He also had these rules literally etched in stone: his granite kitchen counter-top at his house in Park Slope. On Fridays, our class would go to his place and pass dirty glasses of Jaegermeister back and forth over the counter-top with mocking grace – as if he had climbed Mt. Sinai to retrieve them. He scolded us as we laughingly ran our fingers over the crude cuts. “Laugh now, but these are your Commandments. These are the laws that will lead you to the Promised Land.” We laughed even harder when he suddenly lurched forward and upchucked a Jaegerbomb all over said Commandments. Only God cried that evening.
Journalism school teaches you these three things. It doesn’t teach you car maintenance.
I saw an animal cross the street. It was a yellow, armored thing no bigger than a large cat. It scurried like a cat too — low to the ground, determined. My presence did not seem to deter it from its path down the hot, pock-marked asphalt. I watched it disappear into the thin pine forest behind me.
The smoke curled out from underneath the hood of my Taurus. I sat on the side of the road, watching the panels of my overheating rental glisten in the high noon sunshine. Thick, wiggling waves of heat sizzled off the car and I heard my stomach growl when I thought about the bacon I turned down for breakfast. I had little else to do beside sit on the shoulder and watch the Taurus with a stomach empty of food but full of hunger pains.
This is what happens when you ignore the check engine light.
I had the good sense to charge my phone overnight but a full battery wouldn’t help me without a signal. It would be easy to assume that, because New York had the greatest towers this side of the Mississippi, the rest of the country did as well. I wondered if this was true of the internet, too — if the heavy roped power lines I saw running up I-65 were just decorative additions to a crimson, rural landscape. The soles of my shoes were covered in it — rust-red dirt coughed up from the parched throat of Satan herself.
It dawned on me in my second hour of solitude by the side of the road – or maybe it was heatstroke or sunstroke. Red dirt. Unrelenting heat. Dilapidated churches lining the interstate. This was Hell.
No. This was Alabama.
I heard the car pull up behind me after the third hour passed by. Finding the heat unbearable, I took a white T-shirt out of my luggage and tied it to the antenna — a lot of luck it would do having not seen a single car pass me the entire time I was outside. I curled up in the back seat, flinging the passenger side doors open to let in any bit of cool air I could. After five minutes I lost my nerve and shut the back door — if that animal came back, I would have time to get away if it crawled into the front seat; I couldn’t if it gnawed on my feet. Time passed while I thought I slept until I heard the car’s brakes groan. The blessed image of a heavy-set man in a police uniform approached from the cruiser.
I caught his red-cheeked face and beady eyes peering at me from above walled sunglasses.
“I take it you’re in some kind of mess.”
*
Chief William Harrison Hutto knew more about engine repair than I did — he said so right as he opened the hood of my car. Went to VoTec after high school. Liked that I picked an American car as a rental. “The last thing I wanna see are highfalutin’ Yankees with their dadgum smartcars that run on tree sap an’ olive oil and all that other shit. Gimme a fine American-made vehicle any day.” He surveyed the damage. “Well shit. Looks like you done bust a head. You know what that means, right? You’re dadgum engine needs to be replaced. Sure glad you got insurance.”
The woman at the rental place in Montgomery told me as I signed the papers, It needs an oil change. But I think you’ll do just fine if you’re going to Mobile.
“Ha! Mobile! You know how I know you’re not from around here? You say MO-beel instead of Mo-BEEL. Yeah, there’s a difference. It’s one of them things. You gotta be from around here to know it.”
Hutto had a guffaw that registered a 7.0 on the Richter scale. He was thick and barrel-chested — remnants of a possible football career in high school. He spoke slowly – painfully so, pausing after each sentence as if each word had caused him agony and he needed precious seconds to recover from talking. I wondered how he managed laughter.
“Glad you didn’t go with the rental’s insurance.” He slammed the hood of the Taurus and the noise took off like a bullet. “Where you goin’ around here, anyway? You got somebody you can call? I know we ain’t got good service ’round here — pain in the ass, that is. Wanna get my wife one of them cell phones but we ain’t got any service ’round where we live.”
When I bought my cell phone two months ago, the most trouble I had was deciding on which color shell casing I wanted to get.
“I can drive you into town — there’s a pay phone at Winkee’s. Think it’s the last in the county.” Actually, it was the last in the country. “Aw, it ain’t no problem. Better’in sitting out here in this heat waiting for the wrecker lot. They ain’t twenty-four seven ’round here like you’re used to where you live. But I bet you already knew that.” He smiled at me, knowingly. He sounded like he was giving a half-hearted apology.
I gathered my luggage from the car. The cruiser emitted a glorious burst of air conditioning when he opened the passenger door.
“You ain’t armed, are you?” Hutto guffawed again. “Then you can sit in the front.”
*
We must have driven past a million pine trees. Each of them was tall and thin, stripped of their lower branches. They thrust up from the red dirt like probing, withered fingers.
“You know, if you wanted to get to Mobile you should have stayed on 65. Take you right there.” Hutto’s voice was considerably quieter in the cruiser. “Sorry you won’t make it there by tonight – coulda made it by sundown had you not blown your head. Might could make it by tomorrow.”
My hotel in Mobile had been booked for three days. I pictured the conversation with my boss before it could happen. I pictured my bank account empty.
“My cousin lives in Mobile. Haven’t talked to him in years. We ain’t on bad terms or anything, we just don’t talk. It’d be nice to know how he is, if anything happened to him. Maybe you’re some sign from God that I shoulda been a better cousin. Family is everything you know.” He set his mouth in a grim line. “But damn. I got family of my own to take care of. Job too. Cain’t drop all that shit just for one man you ain’t seen in a few years. Sure would be nice though.” He cleared his throat. He didn’t seem to be a man of emotion but he gave the appearance that he wanted me to think he was. “So, New York huh? Well shit. Don’t think I ever met no one from there before. Ain’t never been, neither. My wife, Arlene. She wants to go one day. Maybe after the kids move out we can go.” Guffaw. “That’ll be the dadgum day.”
The speed limit dropped; the cruiser’s pace remained unchanged. On the right, we passed a sign.
Bottom Hill.
*
The city was dingy. Dilapidated buildings, George Wallace wall murals defaced with scribbly graffiti, and traffic lights with .22-sized holes shot into them. We passed a house with a decent sized front porch, cluttered with dying plants and mechanical debris.
I didn’t know what road we were on, but it intersected at Main Street. At each corner sat a locally owned business that seemed like inferior clones of retail chains — a Maw’s Restaurant, Rusty’s IGA, Natalie’s Floral Arrangements, and Winkee’s, which to my great relief was a gas station.
Hutto let me out by the pay phone and idled nearby while I tried to make a call. I got my boss’s voice mail which was both the best and worst way to break bad news to him. Best because you’re spared from the vitriolic tear down. Worst because you get it only worse the next time you speak to him.
I went to make a second call – to the insurance company – when the phone lost connection completely. I hung up the phone and quietly mourned the loss of the last remaining pay phone in the country.
“Datgum it — gotta talk to Winkee about getting that thing fixed.” Hutto’s hands left wet marks on the steering wheel. “Well, what do you want to do now? Tell you what — it’s almost five o’clock. I can take you the Bottom Hill Inn across town so you can get a room and a telephone. I ain’t never been stranded in no place I didn’t know so I don’t know what else to tell you in this situation. I know if I were stranded in New York, I’d want to at least sleep somewhere decent. And if I know about New York, you’ll probably be happy with how much we charge for shit like hotel stays down here.”
Expectations be damned, I was headed for the Bottom Hill Inn.
*
Hutto wasn’t a man who liked to trouble himself with speed limit signs, turn signals, or red lights. I took a psychology class in my undergraduate years and learned that the majority of bullied children go on to take jobs in authority-figure positions — military drill sergeants, school principals, managers at fast food restaurants, and police officers. If this was true, this wasn’t the case of Bill Hutto. From the way he drove his cruiser, he simply wanted to be a police officer so he could disobey road signs and get away with it. Maybe he was a chief so no one would tattle on him.
He double parked outside a motel with an ancient blue-and-white sign outside that decoratively displayed the words “Bottom Hill Inn” in a retired font. There was still sunlight outside, but I knew that at least three bulbs in that sign were broken and I guessed which ones were based on what crude message it might display.
Hutto said goodbye as I took my belongings out of the cruiser. “Well, good luck to you. The wrecker place is called Moe’s — don’t know the number off hand, but there is a number in the phone book probably in one of the drawers.” He pointed to one of the cabins so I would know what drawers he was talking about. “Don’t know Moe very well — he’s got weird hours. Probably open from 8 to 10 on the weekends.”
Again with the half-apology.
I got a room from the front office – a window with a VACANCY sign hanging inside. The stench of must and mold hit me before I even got the key in the door, and nearly overwhelmed me when I opened it. The room looked like it smelled – pea green decor, rotted wood furnishings, and flaking ceiling popcorn. There was a queen-sized bed with a green, floral-print comforter; a desk with a phone; a small bunny-ear TV atop a bureau (the drawers Hutto mentioned, I assumed); and a moldy sink. The stench seemed to float out from the bathroom, which had enough penicillin growing on the tile to cure Ethiopia.
I stripped the bed. I opened the windows. I opened the door. I called the office to complain about the stench. The clerk promised me the room would be cleaned tomorrow morning, but didn’t offer me another room. In a way, I was sort of glad for that.
I made three phone calls. I found Moe’s phone number in a phone book — a spiral-bound housewife’s project with a bubbly font emblazoned on the laminated cover – and left a message on the answering machine. Hutto was right about the weird hours – tomorrow, Moe’s stayed open from 10 to 1 and didn’t open on Sundays.
The next phone call I made was to the insurance company. We agreed that the rental place would be paying for every cent of my stay in Bottom Hill — after they sent an adjuster out to survey the car, which they couldn’t do until Monday. Just like that I would be spending the weekend here.
Finally, I called my boss again. He answered.
“You’d better goddamn well know I want all of this reimbursed. I don’t care who reimburses me – you or the insurance, I don’t care. And Monday? I want you out of that shitty podunk town and checked into your hotel in Mobile by nightfall. Do you fucking hear me? And where the fuck is Bottom Hill anyway? One of those stupid fucking southern towns too small to even be included on a map?”
When I hung up, I saw a shadow pass by the window. Hutto appeared in the open door way and knocked on the wall outside. “Stinks in here — what the hell did you do?” Guffaw. “Look, I feel bad about your situation. I got to feelin’ worse after I talked to Arlene and told her I was late on account of you — she said I could have at least invited you for supper.” He looked at his boots and then back up at me. “I know you Yankees ain’t used to Southern hospitality and’ll probably think me weird for asking, but — you hungry?”