The Front Porch Prophet Page 4

  “I don’t feel like shooting your tree,” A.J. said. He knew he should respond to Eugene’s revelation, but his mind was blank. Impending death was not his strong suit, and the episode had taken on aspects of the surreal. He looked over at Eugene, who was staring down at the Colt in his lap.

  “How long?” he asked. It was the inevitable question.

  “Six months,” Eugene replied. “Maybe less. Doc Miller says he can’t be sure. It started in my pancreas, but now it’s all over.” He spoke matter-of-factly, like he was talking about an outbreak of crab-grass. He looked at A.J. “Of all the things in the world that could have killed me, I never thought it would be my fucking pancreas.”

  “You’re not taking Doc’s word for all of this, are you?” A.J. asked. He felt the need to find a solution for Eugene’s problem. “You need to let someone else take a look.”

  Doc Miller was the local physician. He was pushing eighty and still a pretty fair hand at setting a broken arm or sewing up a cut leg. He had relocated from somewhere in New York about thirty years ago, and the people of the town had been so overjoyed to have a doctor they chose to overlook the fact that Doc was a Yankee. Over the ensuing years, vile rumors worked their way south, tales of bitter lawsuits and large malpractice settlements. The townspeople’s view was that nobody was perfect, and Doc had always taken pretty good care of all of them. Still, medical science had made great strides in fifty years, and it was A.J.’s hope that Eugene might receive a different diagnosis and a less-final prognosis from someone who had attended medical school since the Roosevelt years.

  “No, Doc sent me down to Emory for tests.” Eugene swallowed before continuing. “It’s official. I’m dead. I just haven’t fallen over yet.”

  There was no panacea for his malignancy, and he had come back to his mountain to die on his own terms. A.J. watched as Eugene drew a right-handed bead on the hackberry tree and fired. Ambidexterity with firearms was not one of his strengths, and a hole appeared in the windshield of his Jeep.

  “Shit,” he said. He switched hands and put the other five rounds into the tree.

  “You never told me why you’re shooting the tree,” A.J. said, changing subjects to allow himself time to assimilate.

  “It was Doc’s idea. He told me that I should have a hobby to take my mind off my troubles.”

  “I bet he had something like stamp collecting in mind,” A.J. said, eyeing yet another cigarette that had slipped in close to the gunpowder. He picked up the can and placed it once again out of harm’s way. He thought it was a mercy that Eugene had not decided upon doctor shooting as an alternative pastime. He envisioned the scene. Eugene would walk into the lobby down at Emory with the big Colt stuck in his belt, right up in front like Billy the Kid used to wear his. He would saunter up to the Pink Lady at the information counter. “Oncology, please,” he would say, and then all hell would break loose.

  “Stamp collecting?” Eugene said, sounding slightly appalled. He shook his head. “No, I’ve got a good hobby.” He dumped his spent cartridges and began looking around for the gunpowder.

  “Your hobby is going to get you blown up,” A.J. said.

  “I can think of worse ways to go,” Eugene replied with certainty, as if he had given the matter considerable thought. A.J. wondered if Eugene was entertaining the notion of getting it over with, just a boom and a flash, quick and clean.

  Eugene arose and left the porch. He moved unsteadily across the clearing toward his violated Jeep. A.J. followed. Eugene stood by the Jeep and looked at the hole in the windshield.

  “I can’t believe I shot my own damn Jeep,” he said softly. He looked at A.J. with a slight smile. “If anyone asks, we’ll tell them that Slim did it.”

  “Well, they’d believe that,” A.J. said as his own smile appeared.

  They were referring to the time Slim Neal had shot the front and back windshields out of John Robert’s pickup truck. Eugene and A.J. had been boys of sixteen, and they were riding around one summer night drinking hot beer because they didn’t have any ice and hoping the six cans they had would be enough to get the job done. They had just finished a short pit stop up a dirt side road when the misunderstanding occurred. As they were pulling back onto the highway, the back glass exploded in a hail of gunfire and several holes appeared in the front windshield. A.J. slumped down and floored it, heading for town and the protection of Slim. Eugene was hunkered in the right floorboard, cursing and bleeding from a small wound in his left earlobe. It seemed that the pale rider was upon them. Then they heard a siren, and a blue light began to flash. The car chasing them was Slim’s cruiser. A.J. pulled over, and Slim was all over them.

  “Freeze!” he hollered, approaching the truck slowly behind the barrels of the largest shotgun A.J. had ever seen. Slim eased up to the truck and jerked open the door. Confusion replaced his fierce expression when he realized who occupied the truck.

  “What the hell were you boys doing up that road back there?” he demanded, keeping the shotgun aimed in their direction.

  “We were taking a leak,” Eugene growled from the floorboard. “I can’t believe you just shot me for pissing on a dirt road.”

  “You weren’t stealing pigs?” Slim asked, lowering the ten-gauge a little.

  “Do you see any pigs?” A.J. asked. He had a lot of fairly un-explainable truck damage to explain when he got home and was becoming cranky now that another sunrise seemed to be in his future. “Eugene, you got any pigs down there with you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Goddamn,” Slim said quietly. He lowered the shotgun all the way. “A.J., take Eugene down to Doc Miller’s and get his ear fixed. I’ll go talk to your folks.”

  It turned out there had been a rash of hog thefts in the area, and Slim had received an anonymous pork tip earlier in the day. He was a man who would not tolerate pig theft, and even suspected pig theft would be dealt with harshly. When A.J. and Eugene pulled up the side road that led to Rabbit Brown’s barn, they had no idea they were under Slim’s zealous scrutiny. When they stopped to relieve themselves, he had vaulted into action. The real swine thief was busy at the time stealing fifteen hogs from Slim.

  When Slim attempted to explain the mishap to Eugene’s father, Johnny Mack spoke no word. He simply stepped into the house for a moment and returned with his twelve-gauge and a box of shells. Slim executed a quick retreat as Johnny Mack stood on the porch, slowly loading the pump shotgun. The luckless constable fared no better when he talked to A.J.’s father. John Robert Longstreet was a man of few syllables and spent only one on Slim Neal.

  “Git,” he said, pointing to the road. Slim got.

  Slim was fired over the incident, but he was reinstated two months later when no one else could be found to take the job for what it paid. The town council extracted his solemn promise to only shoot at confirmed perpetrators in the future. Then they returned his badge after knocking from his wage the price of the new glass in John Robert’s truck. Johnny Mack attempted to whip Eugene over the incident, because the boy should have been home reading the Bible and not out peeing on Rabbit Brown’s pigs. The whipping didn’t go well, however, due to Eugene’s objections over being punished for getting shot while urinating on a dirt road. John Robert didn’t try to whip A.J., but the incident indicated to him that the boy had way too much spare time on his hands. Thus A.J. spent all his free time during the following several weeks replacing rotten fence posts around the back field at the farm.

  “If you get to needing to pee while you’re out there, just drag her out and let her rip,” John Robert said, chuckling at his merry joke. “Just make sure your granmama’s not around.”

  But those were the old times, long gone and mostly forgotten. Eugene and A.J. stood by the Jeep in the clearing and admired Eugene’s handiwork. Rufus trotted up and flopped down, panting. He seemed tired, and A.J. supposed he had been killing something large. The dog eyed A.J. for a moment, dismissed him, and laid his head on his paws. In the distance they could hear th
e thrum of a freight train. The haunting sound of shave-and-a-haircut echoed as the engines approached a crossing.

  “I guess you need to be going,” Eugene said.

  “Yeah,” A.J. affirmed, “I don’t want to get caught in the woods after dark by your dog.” A.J. was feeling an overwhelming urge to place distance between himself and the general vicinity of doom. The clearing held too many problems for him to handle at present. He required time to absorb and consider.

  “I need for you to do me a couple of favors,” Eugene said, his halting cadence indicating the difficulty he had asking A.J. for help.

  “Sure,” A.J. said. “Anything you need.” It was uncharacteristic of Eugene to request an indulgence. A small dread settled on A.J., a premonition of crisis.

  “I would like for you would come back next week,” Eugene said. “I don’t get much company up here, and it gets a little quiet. You can take the Jeep so it won’t be so much trouble getting back up the road.”

  A.J. felt bad for Eugene.

  “Now, that’s odd,” he said. “I was just about to tell you that I might come up next week and check on you.” He was shaking his head as if he could not believe the coincidence. Eugene couldn’t believe it, either.

  “When it comes to lying,” Eugene said, “you really suck.”

  “You mentioned two favors.”

  “The other one is kind of large.”

  “The first one was kind of large,” A.J. pointed out. “What is it?”

  “When it’s time, I want you to kill me.” A.J.’s head snapped around as if he had been slapped.

  “Run that one by me again.” Maybe it was Eugene’s idea of a joke.

  “You heard me,” Eugene said. His tone was so flat A.J. knew it was no jest. They stared at one another momentarily. Then they both looked away. A.J. felt slightly nauseous, as if he had been hit hard in the solar plexus.

  “How the hell can you ask me to do that?” he asked.

  “I’m asking.”

  “You must be crazy. If you want to shoot yourself or blow yourself up, go ahead. But leave me out of it.” A.J. felt like he was breathing mud. “I know ten or fifteen people who would be happy to accommodate you. Hell, Diane’s daddy would pay you to let him do it.”

  “I’d do it for you,” Eugene said quietly.

  “I’d never ask you to,” A.J. said with certainty.

  “Never say never,” Eugene said with a small sigh. “You don’t know what might come up.”

  “I’ve got to go,” A.J. said abruptly. He had heard enough. He walked across the clearing to retrieve his bat from the porch. Eugene meandered toward the cabin and met A.J. when he returned. They stood like Lee and Grant at Appomattox. Eugene swayed. His pupils were dilated.

  “Are you coming back?” he asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll come back, but I won’t kill you.”

  “Well, I’m batting.500 at least.” Eugene said. “Take the Jeep. I’m high all the time, now, and I can’t drive it. If I wasn’t dying, I’d be having one hell of a good time.”

  “No, you keep the Jeep. You might run out of something to shoot. I’m going to borrow a bulldozer and clean up that road. Winter is coming, and it’s already a mess.” A.J. had decided on the spur of the moment that fixing the road was his best alternative to a series of long walks in the Georgia mountains.

  “I assume you’ll be borrowing the dozer from Jesus Junior,” Eugene said, referring to Johnny Mack.

  “He’s the only one I know who has one,” A.J. replied. Eugene seemed to consider this for a moment. Then a smile crossed his face.

  “Good luck with that,” he said as he walked back onto the porch. A.J. headed on across the clearing and down the trail. As he neared the Lover, he heard six shots ring out, and he knew that Eugene’s faithful Jeep, like its owner, had entered its final days.

  CHAPTER 3

  I got the bus.

  – Excerpt of posthumous letter from Eugene Purdue to Slim Neal

  A.J. MADE QUICK WORK OF THE WALK DOWN THE mountain. He was unsettled. The afternoon had been like a trip into the Twilight Zone. So much so, in fact, he wouldn’t have been much surprised to find Rod Serling standing in the road, wearing a black sport coat with narrow lapels, chain smoking and eyeing him with intensity. He decided to stop at Billy’s Chevron for a Coke and some non-apocalyptic conversation. A dose of normalcy would do him good after the recent festivities up on the mountain. The establishment sat at the crossroads right outside of town.

  “You’ll be needin’ some tires soon, Will,” Billy said, peering at the rubber on A.J.’s truck. Billy called his male patrons Will and his female customers Missus. He was ancient and grizzled. At the moment he was shaking his head, as if he found it hard to believe that a grown man would run around on such a pitiful set of tires.

  “You sold me that set last month,” A.J. said, sipping his cold drink. Billy was an old country boy who had done extremely well for himself by adhering to the simple belief that every vehicle had some problem that should be repaired by Billy.

  “Well, they’re wore some,” Billy said stubbornly. “Maybe we need to line her up and rotate these front tires while there’s a little life left in them.”

  A.J. was now fully alert.

  “We ‘lined her up’ when we put the tires on,” A.J. noted. “Maybe your alignment machine was out of whack.” Billy was squatted down, looking at the tires. He scratched his head and lit a slightly bent cigarette. Confusion was etched on his grainy features. As A.J. watched, he saw Billy nod his head twice and look up with certainty in his eye. A resolution had been reached.

  “Here’s what we need to do, Will,” Billy said, standing and dusting his hands on his pants. “Bring her in next week and I’ll line her up and rotate those tires. You must’ve run over a pothole or something and knocked her out.”

  Actually, it had been a curb. A.J. had vaulted it while avoiding one of Estelle Chastain’s more erratic driving maneuvers. But he wasn’t telling Billy that.

  “Don’t you worry,” Billy continued. “I’ll fix her up good as new.”

  Ironically, at that moment, A.J. saw Estelle’s aged Ford motoring up the highway, running astraddle the broken white line in the middle of the road. All that could be seen of Estelle were two white gloves clenched on the steering wheel and the top of her head, complete with pillbox hat. She peered with myopic eyes in A.J.’s general direction, and he knew it was time to go. He exited after pointing out the danger to Billy, who was no fool and took cover. When Miss Estelle came to town it was every man for himself, vehicular Darwinism based on survival of the quickest.

  In his rearview mirror, A.J. saw Estelle swing into the Chevron in a long, slow arc that left her parked with her right front tire up on the pump island. Billy came out from hiding and squatted in front of Estelle’s car-elevated for convenience-and when the venerable mechanic began to slowly shake his head, A.J. knew the game was again afoot.

  It was dusk when A.J. arrived home, exhausted. He sat for a moment and gazed at Maggie’s Folly, his name for the family manor. He and his wife, Maggie, had bought it thirteen years ago, an abandoned Victorian dwelling that had seen better times. It was built during the days when the wealthy kept summer homes in cool mountain valleys to escape the heat of the city. This particular structure was built by a carpetbagging entrepreneur who had traveled to Georgia in 1866 with the intention of stealing a fortune and living the good life, both of which he managed to do before being shot fatally in a bawdy house by the estranged husband of one of the employees of the establishment. As A.J. sat, he remembered the first time he and Maggie had seen the house.

  “I want it,” Maggie had said as they walked through the creaking, moldering foyer. “Look at that stained glass! Look at that stairway!” She turned and looked at A.J. “We have to buy it.” A.J. thought that ten or fifteen skilled craftsmen could have it whipped into shape in a couple of decades or so, if their luck held and it didn’t rain too much.

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sp; “Who are you going to get to fix this dump up?” he had asked, but it was token resistance. The deal was done from the moment they walked through the door, and he knew it.

  “I didn’t marry you for your good looks,” Maggie replied, folding her cruel arms around his poor, doomed neck. The house continued its decline momentarily as she kissed A.J. Then they drove down to the bank and arranged to buy it.

  They found the bankers to be motivated sellers; they had been in possession of the property for several years and had pretty much given up on ever finding buyers. Then in had walked A.J. and Maggie. The Longstreets signed a promissory note stating they would pay the bank some money every year if they could manage, and that the house should be paid for in twenty years, if that was convenient.

  Now a sense of calm descended upon A.J. as looked at the old place. The anxiety brought about by his reunion with Eugene drifted away. He was in his element. He got out of the truck and walked slowly to the house, which had shaped up well. Maggie had been a stern taskmaster while bringing the Folly back from the brink of ruin, and they both had put in many long hours on the project. She stood double duty as construction superintendent and general laborer, and A.J. did everything in between.

  A.J. walked past the porch and patted one of the columns. He rounded the corner and saw Maggie and their five-year-old son, J.J., planting chrysanthemums in the side yard. Gardening wasn’t coming naturally to the boy, and Maggie was down on her hands and knees trying to help him. Several of the unsuccessful attempts lay scattered about.

  It was a Longstreet family tradition to butcher fifty or sixty dollars’ worth of flowers each fall and again each spring. These ritual sacrifices were not a pagan rite marking the passage of the seasons. Maggie just wanted a pretty yard. Unfortunately, the ground in the vicinity of the Folly stubbornly refused to support any plant that might possibly bloom. A.J. was the son of a farmer and took personally the fact that he could not get anything worthwhile to grow around his house. He had fertilized, aerated, rotated, watered, and chopped, and still no flowers. Finally, he gave up.