Long Time Gone

By Richard Sanford

An epic novel of passion, loss, and discovery set in the days that defined a generation.

Vernon Case is missing. For Cal Stewart, a disc jockey in Harriet, Mississippi, Vernon is much more than a runaway. He is the only heir of Po Case, the old man who raised Cal like a father. With an oath to bring Vernon home, Cal is caught up in the winds that whip the American firestorm in 1968, the year of RFK and King and Daley’s army in Chicago.

A Detroit Buddhist, a ghost of a best friend, a band gone underground on the Boston wharves, a girl-woman lover and soulmate—all swirl together in a river of change that sweeps Cal from his homeland to another America. For Cal and everyone he meets, and for all who knew that precious time or want to know it, Long Time Gone is the way it was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Sanford
• Release date: May 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9780985165680

Richard Sanford

Richard Sanford came of age in a small town in the Deep South suspended in time and haunted with stories. In Chicago, he was an editor of Banyan Press, which published and hosted readings by Charles Wright, Sandra Cisneros, Galway Kinnell, and many others. He is the author of four published novels, poetry, short stories, and a play. Today he makes his home in the Pacific Northwest, east of Seattle. Novels • The Soul Snatchers • Ring of Stars • Long Time Gone • Roadkill • The Calling

Book preview

Chapter 1

HARRIET, MISSISSIPPI

Spring, 1968

Pearl was talking in her sleep. It woke me because it was a blue-black night and I had been in and out of a dream I couldn’t remember. I rolled over and watched her lips that looked dark silver, wide and slightly parted over her teeth. All the moonlight was gone, and the hot air that was left of the night stood still in the room.

I was waking slowly and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. The sheet crossed her breast and her breathing was slow. Pearl was far away.

Watching her lips, I thought of waking her. Whatever she would say I didn’t need to hear. A man’s name for all I knew. The silence was full and perfect between us. Her lips were inches from mine and I could taste her words before they formed out of cigarette flavor and sweetness.

I studied her lips and waited. The cooler night outside pressed heat in until the minutes before sunrise, while the underbrush and high grass were still loud with bullfrogs and crickets. It seemed that we were the only creatures of silence.

The night heat lay around and between us. Pearl’s skin was silver-gray, and the side of her face and shoulder would have made a fine photograph. We had no pictures of each other, but I could have kept an image of her face like that, half-in, half-out of the way the world sees her. And the camera would be good to her, the way her bones wore the light. I had always liked Pearl’s face with her even features that seemed to fall straight like a clean rain.

I was tired in the bone. I wanted to return to sleep, even a thin sleep. But the cells have memories, reflections of stirring to life at an inhuman hour five mornings a week for two years. It was the hour to drink coffee black five minutes before airtime and settle in until breakfast at noon. And take a place at the microphone that was tuned to long-haul drivers and cotton farmers who started the day with my voice and Hank Snow in their cabs and their kitchens while roads and fields waited and prepared themselves with their own memories. The memories of the fields were long and perfect. That was wisdom, if all knowledge is only remembering. That big eight wheeler rollin’ down the track means your true lovin’ daddy ain’t comin’ back, I’m Movin’ On. Turn it up, mama, I’m gonna make it home tonight.

I was becoming aware of a sound I knew but couldn’t place, a kind of hum somewhere in the apartment outside our room. I listened and waited and imagined Pearl’s lips forming a phrase I would never hear her say. The hum remained constant, a pitchless volume. I felt tight inside and something familiar coiled in my arms and legs. I had waited to hear the same thing from her forever. She had said it in a dream while my head was turned as though we had passed in a crowd and I had reached for her too late. Pearl’s face was the color of marble as I lifted the sheet. The bed creaked as I rose. I gathered my clothes and she slept.

The hum filled the living room, and her old haunted furniture seemed more real to me in the green light. I switched off her amplifier that had played static all night and the room fell dark and quiet. I pulled on my pants and shirt and took two deep breaths. The tightness was still there with the restlessness that woke me. I didn’t think Pearl had said anything at all. I thought of leaving her a note and decided not to. I opened her door and screen door and went out into the end of the night.

Harriet was waking slowly. Since I had been old enough to notice, Harriet had done everything slowly. The street lights were still on at five-thirty as I walked south from Pearl’s apartment on Euclid. Across the street, a paperboy was tossing the Vicksburg Post. He crossed a lawn to pick one out of the bushes as I turned left onto Hawkins.

White houses and the liquid smoke of near-morning moved in the yards and back yards like the last dreams of everyone inside the square, cooling bedrooms. Hawkins was clear of traffic, and the mist carried a moist, green smell. The ends of my shoes were wet from the tufts of grass and sand spurs that grew through the sidewalk cracks, and everywhere, indistinct in the mist, overflowing fences and gathering over roofs like July thunderheads, were the crowns of oak and magnolia and below, the bougainvillea and columbine.

I was three blocks from the river. At Hawkins and Main, lights were on in the White Star Cafe. Carmen was sponging a table, and I saw the back of Lonnie’s head in the kitchen, but no one would be served for twenty minutes. Six on the dot every morning.

River Road lay empty and I crossed the wet blacktop, leaving the only prints as far as I could see until the pavement twisted out of sight. On the other side the grass was knee-high. I made a channel through it and picked a way through the dark tangle of shrubs. My feet remembered the crevice and the short descent to the big limb, and I climbed up on its wet, solid back.

Something about the big limb was the same. Something had remained the same since I climbed on it the first time and looked out on the river from the bluff, imagining the flat-bottom skiff I could pole south, slick as a cottonmouth past the bearded trees and snatches of camptowns, smoky in the clearings—traces of towns I would leave behind all the way to New Orleans and the delta passes, riding above the clouds of rolling sand. That never happened. Other things did, but I came back to that spot on the bluff more times than memory could distinguish and sat on the long fallen trunk of oak that branched off from the other trunk the wind had spared.

The Mississippi makes a bend at Harriet that starts where the Yazoo joins north of Vicksburg. It flows slowly and cuts deep at the bend, and the two miles of it that flow past Harriet disappear quickly in both directions, turning northwest to Vicksburg and south to lose itself in the woods. The mist in the morning rises like ghosts from the water. I could barely see the opposite bank, layered strata of red and gray and mud-colored bands moving out of the haze. Behind my back, over the town, the gray sky was turning rose.

The wind disappeared and the ripples flattened as the johnboat entered the cove. Wayne stood with his back to me. His shirt was white and his hair lay thick and dark on his collar. A gray heron flushed from the reeds and beat its wings across the water. He was the color of Spanish moss, and his wing tips touched the glass, circles spreading. We waited to breathe until he was gone.

The heavy air clung to my face like yesterday’s growth. The dampness was breathing inside me. It breathed in all the white houses under the patched ceilings and the tin roofs in the bodies on the final edge of their sleep, the bodies on the broad white beds passing into the light. The mist filled them until they rose from it, out of their dreams, and stood emptied, out of the one life and into the other.

I stared down into a brown eddy. Pearl was turning in bed, I was sure. I saw her face on the pillow as she rolled toward me, her beautiful and simple image. It said to me, let go. What does it matter? Whatever has had you out walking in the pit of the night and sitting on the same log like a spook for twenty-seven years, drop it. Boy, I’m giving you another chance, every day we’re together. But nothing was said. Everything unsaid, and Pearl lights a cigarette at the kitchen table and I think she’s smoking a lot these days. I try to imagine her eyes filled with tears. But she’s tough.

Avocados grow in pots on Pearl’s window ledge the way they did in Po Case’s house when his wife was alive. Po Case hung a miner’s lamp in the back yard for Wayne and me to clean the bass and bluegill. The first time I filleted a fish, I watched Po slit the belly cleanly and carve an arc behind the gills. The flies and mosquitoes were fierce.

Po Case was lean and rangy, and something about him seemed old before he was old. He cut the fish along its side and lifted, and the slice gleamed gray-white under the lamp. The backs of his hands and forearms were chords and knots, and the mosquitoes refused to land on him because of the years the sun had darkened his skin. Po Case was a quiet man, but I had the feeling when I was twelve that his backhand could send you flying if he ever had that intention.

The sun struck the far bank, and the shadows in the clay looked like old faces. Po had seen every sunrise from the old house. Wayne and I had seen the sunrise there and so had Vernon.

When he couldn’t have been more than five or six, Vernon got lost for most of a day in the woods adjoining the Case land. Wayne and I shouted ourselves hoarse when we found him gone because he was Wayne’s little brother and our responsibility. It was almost dark when we found him; he had just decided to wander off a while on his own. Wayne was the coolest kid I knew and slow to rage, but I remember him grabbing Vernon by both arms and shaking him until I was sure his red head would disconnect and leave us both with a lot of explaining to do. I had never seen Wayne so mad. It was because he couldn’t understand the kid doing that. He didn’t know why Vernon would split off and get lost without a trace of common sense.

Now Vernon had lost himself again, and I was probably the only one in Harriet who knew where he was and could do a thing about it. I knew why he left us in the woods that day and I had an idea of why he left now. Vernon was always more like me in some ways than like Wayne. I couldn’t say how except that Vernon had been running since the day he was born. We had always expected him to change, the way we expected his carrot-red hair to turn to some everyday color. It never did.

A motorcycle ripped around the corner behind my back, a huge bike, all black. The rider seemed massive. The human and the machine were one, and the slick black form bloomed and vanished. For a moment I only stared at the roadbed that seemed to have been seared by the tire’s heat. I stood up on the limb and my chest was pounding as I felt the red morning sun over Harriet full on my face.

I breathed the mist that had started to lift and separate from the air as Po Case was breathing it and the day was taking it away. I was hungry for it and breathed it in even as the sun was stealing it. That mist was nothing but vanishing. Everything was passing in it. This morning, beginning this moment, was leave-taking. Because somehow Vernon had worked his way into the disappearing center and I was preparing to follow him. Hands tingled. Blood tingled. The weeds would grow too high to cut back. Po Case was dying in the house he had made with his hands.

That was why I had packed the suitcase and why when I had sold the car I hadn’t told Pearl and why Bob Terry was at the microphone this morning in my place. By Greyhound I could be in New Orleans by afternoon. I was walking on River Road in the mist that clung to the blacktop like skin, and Harriet looked brand new under the rising sun.

Chapter 2

HARRIET

Summer, 1951

Don’t move now, the boy in the bow said after the motor fell silent. The johnboat glided into the cove trailing a low wake. The boy in the stern sat still, his hand on the grip of the five-horse outboard he had steered down the river.

Nothing moved. The squirrels stopped chattering as the boat slipped in. The cove was closing around them. In the skirt of reeds, a gray heron turned its head and stood still. The smaller boy in the stern saw it first.

Wayne. He pointed as the heron snapped its head sideways.

Wayne stared at the bird, gripping the yellow nylon anchor rope he had spliced that summer, the anchor riding inches above the water. The tall cypress hung with Spanish moss formed a gray canopy as the boat slipped forward silently. The two boys stood like statues moving closer in the heron’s eye.

The boy in the stern saw the wings begin to lift. In the muted light, the bird’s eye shifted slightly like a coin. Then it was up, struggling at first, the wings churning the air like a swimmer, the legs like reeds pulling from the water. The heron’s dark eye looked wide and frantic as it strained to lift its weight and hold in the air. It gained momentum and stroked clear of the reeds, soaring out above the surface of the cove. Over the light chop of the river it turned, banking toward the shore, and was gone.

Wayne lowered the rope until the anchor disappeared. It made no splash but began concentric rings of ripples that intersected other rings spreading from the spot where the heron’s wings had touched the water. It settled in the muck and sand bottom, and the johnboat swung in a wide arc, the stern drifting toward the shore until the boy in the stern sat at the edge of the reeds. An inch of water surrounded his tennis shoes, and his shirt was wet with spray. A little wind and a light chop always got the driver wet, but to Cal it was worth it.

You still using that red worm? Wayne asked as he picked up his rod. It looks half bit through. Here, let me see it a minute.

Cal picked up his rod from where it had ridden with the tip end resting on the middle seat and the butt under the rear seat beside his leg. He examined the red plastic worm, its head partially severed below the hook, and swung it toward Wayne. Wayne studied the worm for a minute then carefully worked it backwards over the barb. When it was free of the hook, he bit down on the torn place and spit the head into the water. Cal saw the piece drift slowly down and watched for a bass to strike it. Then Wayne reinserted the point and fed the worm up the shank of the hook until it looked new. He dropped it over the side.

Thanks, Cal said.

Thing was too long anyway.

Cal dragged the worm through the water to test its action then aimed a cast at a pocket in the reeds. He counted to himself as it sank—one thousand six, one thousand seven, one thousand eight—closed the bail on the open-faced reel, and began to work the bait in.

Wayne threw in the opposite direction, and the topwater plug splashed a few inches from a cypress tree. Ripples spread and he let them pass before starting to reel. The plug shaped like a bullfrog with treble hooks in place of legs had a wide metal lip that caused it to oscillate and gurgle furiously as it swam.

So you starting high school Monday? Cal asked the rhetorical question.

Yeah.

So this is the last day we’ll be fishing for a while.

We can go on the weekends, though, Wayne said. Cal was quiet a minute, then he went on.

She wants to take me to Vicksburg tomorrow to buy shoes. I hate trying on shoes.

Cal disliked calling his adoptive mother by her first name, Alma, and he only said ‘Mama’ and ‘Dad’ to their faces. With other people he referred to them as ‘he’ and ‘she.’

Yeah, I already got my stuff. Went to Geiger’s. In high school you can’t wear that eighth grade crap anymore. It’s okay when you’re in eighth grade.

Cal knew what he meant. Cal didn’t care one way or the other as long as he didn’t have to waste a lot of time trying on new-smelling clothes. But to Wayne it would be important because Wayne would be cool in high school and Po Case was pretty rich.

You know how much work they give you? You’re gonna have homework every night.

Where did you hear that?

I just know, that’s all, Cal said. You get a ton of work in high school.

You’re full of it, Wayne scoffed. Cal could hear the lack of conviction but decided not to press it.

You going out for football?

Probably, next spring. They have the try-outs real early. Then you’ve got to practice in the summer—they’re having practice right now. I’ll go to all the games this year, though. We’ll probably play Jackson on Homecoming, get our ass kicked. Wayne drew the plug out of the water and watched it drip. Turn your hat around, will you.

Cal grinned and turned his green baseball cap around for luck. As he started to reel again, the rod performed an astonishing dip. He felt the weight at the end of the line and flipped the bail to give slack. Wayne stopped his cast and watched the line.

Let him swallow it now, Wayne said. They both stared at the loose line that billowed from the rod tip and lay on the water in a widening arc.

He’s going to eat it before he runs, Cal whispered as though the fish could hear. Wayne waited and said nothing. One thousand ten, one thousand eleven. The line lay flat on the surface, refused to disappear.

You better set it before you hook him in the ass.

Cal laughed and it broke the tension in his stomach. Wayne could always say something like that. Wayne laughed too and both of them were fairly certain what was on the other end of the line. Cal reeled until the weight bent the rod tip to the water. Then he set the hook and it caught fast. He started to reel but the reel whined as he pulled against the drag. Nothing moved on the other end.

Real estate, Wayne confirmed.

Cal laid down the rod and pulled on the line with his bare hands. He imagined the hook impaled on a slimy root. He pulled hand over hand as the boat slid toward the obstruction. When they were nearly above the spot, the weight lightened suddenly, and Cal anxiously retrieved the last six feet of line. The worm was still attached.

See, I knew that hat would bring you luck, Wayne said when he saw the worm. They both laughed and Cal picked a clump of weeds and sticks off the barb.

A light breeze blew in from the river, rippling the cove. The small waves slapping under the bow made a hollow sound. Wayne cast again and Cal followed, working the perimeter of the cove in opposite directions. Close to the other shore, a garfish flipped in the shallows, its long snout breaking water and disappearing in a single lunge.

Cal worked the worm carefully, feeling every bump of the bottom in the light rod tip. He thought back to night fishing in June with Wayne and Po Case when they used topwater plugs. Po’s seven-pounder came up from below, smashing through the flat, silver sheet of water, throwing spray six feet in all directions in the moonlight. Po said he fought him for ten minutes, but it seemed to Cal like half an hour at least before the bass slid the last few feet on his side to the boat, big mouth open and red gills fanning slowly. Wayne held the hoop of the net still under water then raised him into the air as the droplets shook from him and fell like silver scales.

Cal imagined a ten-pounder crashing through the surface and pulling the bubbles down with him in a deep dive out into the current. Each trip of the worm over the bottom was a new chance.

The boys were quiet for a long time as their casts explored the vectors of the inlet. The sun gradually lost itself, and the dark, separate shadows of the cypress trees washed into a wide gray shadow that floated all the way across the cove.

Let’s get out of here, Wayne said finally. The water was clapping under the flat bow of the boat when he said it and his voice was too tough. Cal knew why and knew that they had stayed as long as possible on the last day of summer before the storm would make the river dangerous. Water was already high, and the waves and whirls meant a challenging trip home. That was the only thing that made leaving possible on the last day with empty stringers.

They hooked their lures to the silver guides and stowed the rods. Wayne weighed anchor and Cal cranked the five-horse in neutral three times before it caught. Then he pointed the nose of the johnboat toward the river and angled into the waves that broke over the bow and sprayed their faces. Cal glanced over his shoulder at the receding cove, and fine mist filled the intervening air.

Summer thunderheads had folded over them and the wind was stiff on the bow. The light outboard churned against the waves. Cal and Wayne felt the kick of the river in their shoes and the seats of their pants and laughed. Wayne leaned over and grabbed the sides of the bow with both hands and hung on as the bow bucked high in the air. Cal crouched low in the back, cutting wind resistance, pretending he was at the wheel of a slick hydroplane that skimmed from wave to wave, throwing out wings of spray on both sides.

The trip down river to the cove had taken less than ten minutes, but they would spend twice as long returning. The river was brown and angry, as though it had been roused from sleep. Cal watched a gangling branch twist past them in the current and imagined how easy it would be for their boat to be whipped away and lost in Louisiana if the outboard failed or if they ran out of gas. He kept in the lee as close to the bank as he could without tangling the prop in roots and weeds. Cal believed he knew where the stumps and roots were. He had seen some of them on calm days when the water was almost clear, but others he had never seen, even though he knew they were there and could feel them the way he could feel it if someone stared at him from behind.

The old dock marked the beginning of the home stretch. Two lines of jagged pilings reached thirty feet from shore. On peaceful days, the remnants of the dock were perches for herons and water turkeys, but the wind had cleared them and Cal saw only two black coots bobbing in the reeds.

The waves were stiff and Cal held the bow into them. Both boys saw the big one coming and Wayne ducked low and held tight. The front of the boat rose with all of Wayne’s weight until it felt to Cal like tilting back too far in a chair that was about to spill over at any minute. Then the bow rose even higher and slammed down into the flat trough that followed.

Sheee-it! Wayne yelled as a cloud of spray drenched them both.

You better keep your mouth shut, Cal sputtered as soon as he could see and nodded toward the slope of shore fifty yards ahead.

Thunderheads had shouldered in over the big frame house and the woods behind it. The wide lawn in front was dark green, and the Case house was a clear and precise white. Wearing an apron and gloves, Wayne’s mother was halfway down the long yard that sloped toward the river. Cal had seen the gloves before and knew that Mrs. Case had been behind the house weeding the garden. She waved one of the gloves at them and Wayne and Cal waved back. Wayne’s mother looked so small from that distance out in the river with the long hill behind her and the big house at the top.

Cal swung the bow toward the mouth of the Case’s boathouse, cutting diagonally across the waves and only turning completely when the boat was in the lees. Wayne raised his hand, which meant to stay straight on course. Cal cut the motor and they slipped in on their momentum. Wayne grabbed the suspended cable and hooked it to the bow as Cal attached the two rear cables to eyelets on the transom.

Looks like you made it in the nick of time, Mrs. Case called as Cal hit the dock.

Yes, ma’am, in the nick of time, Cal answered proudly. Mrs. Case smiled and Cal felt good.

We better crank this thing up ’cause we’re gonna get flooded in about two seconds, Wayne said as he handed the rods and tackle box to Cal. He climbed up on the dock and took a tight grip on the handle of the boat hoist. Although Cal was big for his age, Wayne could raise the boat faster. Cal watched as he whipped through the sixty turns and the boat rose a full four feet above the waves.

Where are the fish? Mrs. Case teased. Cal shrugged.

Threw ‘em back, Wayne said. We gonna eat cone bread tonight, he drawled, and the two boys laughed at his imitation of Santez. Mrs. Case knew whom they were mocking but let it go this time.

I suppose we will, she said. Let’s get up to the house now.

Cal and Wayne followed her up the hill and the warm wind flooded over them. The tall hickories behind the house were shaking, chunks of moss dropping from the branches.

The white swing creaked in the wind at one end of the porch that ran along the front and north sides of the house. A few small branches had blown down onto the dark green boards, and Cal remembered Wayne’s story of the limb that once crashed through the bedroom window upstairs. Cal had missed that one, but he had a good chance to see another today. Mrs. Case opened the screen door and the boys followed her in.

Cal felt good the minute he stepped inside. He always liked the feeling of the dark rugs and old heavy chairs and the mysterious piles of books and the magazines called National Geographic in Po Case’s study.

Get out of those wet things now, Wayne’s mother ordered, and the boys scrambled up the stairs to Wayne’s room with the rods and tackle box.

Later in the kitchen, Cal felt strange in the T-shirt and pants Wayne had outgrown, but they were warm and dry and the glass of lemonade Wayne’s mother poured was a cool mixture of tart and sweet. The storm began with a sudden clutter of rain on the porch and roof. Wind billowed the yellow curtains and Wayne’s mother closed the kitchen window to protect the avocado plants on the ledge. She was in her forties and a fairly handsome woman, it seemed to Cal, despite the bands of gray in her brown hair.

The boys sat at the kitchen table in the white ladder-back chairs and both reclined to the tottering point. Cal could see the dining room from where he sat and remembered Thanksgiving dinner with the Cases when he had to sit on the edge of the chair because the back had a bump that hit in the middle of his spine. He would probably be staying for dinner because it might take overnight for his clothes to dry and that was all right with him. Cal always felt fine in the Case house because it was big and dark and almost seemed to hold you. He felt more at home there than at home, and Alma probably knew it and didn’t mind if he spent the night.

The storm rushed through the woods outside. Wayne rocked his chair and imitated the sound of the bow slapping down on flat water. Cal did the same and soon Mrs. Case was chasing them from the kitchen and going upstairs to mind Vernon.

Wayne turned out the light in the living room, and the two boys sat in the stuffed chairs and looked out the window toward the river through the curtains of rain that fanned over the yard. Mushrooms floated on a sea of grass. A white wicker rocker sat with its back toward the screen door, halfway between the living room and study, rocking slightly in the ebb and flow of wind. Cal scooted back in the big brown chair. The upholstery felt rough to his hand and smelled musty. Wayne dangled his legs over the arm of his chair and swung them a little as though he were still feeling the pitch of the water.

Cal tilted the tall glass for the last drop and watched the river that had begun to soften under the pelting rain. Everything seemed to be the silver-gray color of the rain, and everywhere, it seemed to Cal, was the cool smell of the water and earth, even flowing through the old house, in and out of the white window casements. All the air was damp and full in the tall square rooms which Po Case had raised from rough-cut timber.

Cal saw lightning flashing somewhere over Harriet and started to count the seconds the way he did when he felt his rod tip bend and gave slack and waited. He stared at Po Case’s fishing tackle in the corner and knew this was where he wanted to be. The thunder rolled. One thousand seconds times how many feet? He wished it could always stay this way. Cal knew that when Wayne started high school, things would change. He had had that notion about everything since before he could remember and it gave him a hollow feeling. He closed his eyes until the feeling passed. Lightning filled the room. He could stay overnight at least and school hadn’t started yet. Thunder exploded around the house and his heart raced. He closed his eyes tight. Cal could hear Wayne’s kid brother start to cry somewhere upstairs.

Chapter 3

HARRIET

Spring, 1958

The clouds had emptied over the town, blowing east toward the river in a blue-white haze, and the sun returned like revenge. The asphalt track had begun to bake, and Cal imagined it would be gummy under foot if it were June instead of April and he wished to God it were. Heat curled up from the track like snakes in the distance, and the air filled his mouth as he ran. He kept his breathing deep and regular and measured at least two strides for each breath. Concentrating on the sound of his breathing and the curve of the track in the distance, he pretended not to hear.

So how’s the submarine? a voice chugged behind him—Dorsey Pitts, a twenty-year-old senior whose only saving grace was his ability to fly in track shoes.

Cal thought shove it but didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything but focused on the breath and the black surface shooting by under his feet. He hoped they were the only two leading the pack. That wouldn’t be so bad. Dorsey blew off all the time and no one paid much attention.

You better run, another voice came from behind, the reverend’s back here and he’s gonna beat your ass. Kenny Long getting his shots. Cal knew Fairbanks would be around Long and he sprinted harder to put distance between them.

They were nearing the turn where Cal usually felt the pressure of the pace, halfway into the four-forty. Today it was a different story. He felt as though he could run forever, a little faster all the time, over the fence and away from the football field and the track, over the rooftops and the river and into some other state of mind. It just kept burning in him and kept him in the lead on the inside of the track in the first turn.

I didn’t see Sharee in class today. Where is she? Long again.

At home, man—waterlogged. Fairbanks this time. A human prune.

Cal refused to look back but he did visualize Sharee Moffet’s skin like fingertips and toes held in water too long. It was an arresting image. He saw them both old and wrinkled and wondered if she would forget last night by the time she turned sixty-five. He never would.

It had been the feeling of the free fall, surprising and inexorable. The road had been there and then wasn’t there. The heavy front end of the coupe slid in the soft sand, and his reflex to pull back on the steering wheel was useless. The headlights opened on the black water and the car kept sliding on its belly in slow motion, the grill nosing down to the edge like an animal to a water hole.

Dorsey had started to sprint seriously. Cal saw his white shoes first in his peripheral vision, then they were running shoulder-to-shoulder in the turn. Cal knew he had a lot left and pounded the track harder until he edged ahead by a stride into the backstretch. He saw Coach Hentzel crossing the football field in a pith helmet, watching the gym glass come out of the turn. He was heading for the finish line, swinging a stopwatch in his right hand. Cal tried to replace the image of the sliding car with a vision of the line. A game of inches.

His breath and heart were pounding in a syncopated rhythm. They were musical instruments and his heart played double time to his breathing. Over both of them he heard That’ll be the Day and he sang it in his head to forget the distance.

Dorsey’s feet caught the corner of his eye. Then his fists were in view like pistons in front of his chest and Cal knew he was making a break. The sun pounded off the track and seemed to Cal to reverberate on the white sideline of the football field. He hated being in that spot against Dorsey Pitts, hated gym last period, and hated the flea-hole cat-trap town and the rust-bucket black Ford coupe he had worked all summer in the snake-pit concrete yard for, sitting full of sand and water in Meisner’s garage and hated the garage. He hated the look of his own face. Hated everything but Sharee Moffet who, he hoped, did not hate him.

That’ll be the Day, when you say good-bye.

That’ll be the Day when you make me cry.

You say you want to leave, you know it’s a lie.

Well, That’ll be the Day when I die.

Dizzy heat rose from the blacktop going into the final turn. Fairbanks was probably out of it, but Cal could hear other steps closing in and he was sure Kenny Long was one pair. His chest hurt and it was hard to ignore.

You say you want to leave, you know it’s a lie.

Cal was still on the inside, which gave him the advantage, although Dorsey had pulled even to a little ahead. Coach Hentzel stood, pounding and blurry, at the finish line.

So did you make her first?

Cal heard it but couldn’t believe it. Long had used the last ounce of breath in his chicken chest to say that and laugh. Cal turned his head for a second and saw Long’s red face grinning even as he was losing breath and being passed on the outside. It was worth it to him to say that and laugh.

Jesus Christ, Cal thought. And in the same second thought of sitting under the trees in the hot coupe with the front windows down and the smell of Sharee’s perfume and nothing around them but the crickets and the enormous warm press of the night. She was there in the back seat again, yellow pleated skirt and tanned legs. The entire recollection of the car and the night and Sharee Moffet flashed by in the space of two strides. That was enough time for Dorsey to pass him and two others to slip in by his side.

The heat was a punishment. Cal’s lungs had become one dull ache, but he pulled through the ache toward the place where the finish line should be and finished third. He kept trotting straight down the track as the blood rushed into his temples and caused them to tingle along the veins that spread like branches of a tree.

Cal was the first in and out of the showers, which meant that he got only cold water until he was nearly finished. In the locker room that smelled of old gym clothes and stale heat, he dressed before anyone else then carried his books down the short hall that opened onto the auditorium stage.

He sat down on the stairs at the end of the stage to wait for the bell and felt the three o’clock heat that rolled in through the open side doors. Cal was ready to leave. He checked his watch and calculated eighteen hours since the events of the night before and wondered if enough time had passed to call her. Alternatively, he considered waiting for Long on the way home, catching him in a cross-arm unbreakable stranglehold and smashing his face into a concrete wall. Then he thought of being expelled, perhaps arrested. It was pointless. Alma would go nuts.

It had been a tough year, Cal reflected, even though he knew that in a month he would receive most of the scholastic honors in his class while half the town jammed the hothouse auditorium to applaud their graduating seniors. Principal Cauthen would call his name, Cal would climb the same stairs at the end of the stage, and the parents in the audience would wonder just who this kid was and watch closely the reactions of the ones who had been their own children and who were now another step away from being children. His classmates had their own ideas about Cal, and they merged and combined with one another until they became less ideas than a sort of cartoon that was a reputation and stuck like an epigram in a high school yearbook.

The parents would look to their own kids for clues. They would look for what the children saw in Cal, and that was a precarious combination. They saw a very dark brown, nearly black, unruly swirl of hair over a high forehead, and more than a few envied the brain inside. They envied the grades Cal made without cracking a physics book until the morning before the test. They saw a tall, almost gangly but not unattractive young man who stood close to a head taller than most boys in the class. His advantage allowed Cal to stand a few inches above the crowd and let him see things first, and the advantage was partly his height and partly his brain.

They saw a thin, even mouth and straight nose. When anyone, even total strangers, looked Cal straight in the face, into his pale blue eyes, they saw a shyness and something else. They saw deep-set eyes that had a way of fixing their subject for a second and then shifting away, over the shoulder or down to the ground or off into some other distance. If they were perceptive, they noticed a curiosity that flickered through his eyes like a hint of otherness. It glinted in the eyes and through his smile for a second or two, under the surface, as a fish might turn a silver side to the light for an instant and then right itself, becoming normal again and invisible.

Cal was staring into the brown rows of empty seats when the bell rang. It rang once in the nearly solid heat of the auditorium and then in succession in the other classrooms and hallways of the school. He was already out the side door when it stopped, and he hurried along the footpath behind the classrooms, headed for the short hump-backed bridge that was the most discreet route away from campus.

The creek was active from the afternoon rain and the air smelled damp and cooler on the bridge. He glanced back at the schoolhouse that sat like a Spanish gothic monastery on Highway Twenty-seven, and at the area of newly cleared land beside it that would become the high school annex by next year, the year he would be gone to college or the job. He had already talked to Larry Strickland at WJFL, and his test scores would be good enough to qualify for some school out of state or at least for Ole Miss where Wayne was.

He hit the dirt road called Fain Street that intersected the spot where the footpath ended in a clump of magnolias. No one used Fain going home from school, which was the reason he chose it over the highway or another main-traveled road for one day only, partly to avoid wisecracks and partly as a self-imposed act of penance.

The sound of cars gunning out of the parking lot behind him made him slightly sick. The creeping image of the yellow Ford nosing into water persisted and the black vision of Meisner’s tow truck pulling it out in the hot night persisted. The raw blood rush of the four-forty was catching up and making him stiff. Cal stayed in the middle of the dirt road and kicked a stone, hoping that earth was just one more stone in the universe. If so, last night was not terrible; it was insignificant. But that seemed like a lie.

He crossed Highway Twenty-seven and took the long way home on Pine Street, which bordered the black section of Harriet. A sick-looking mongrel crossed the road from under a broken and rotting porch and began to follow Cal a few steps behind. It walked with its head down