Elmer looked around and pawed his foot in the dirt. The little boy picked up a black metal lid that was next to the fire and stood and placed it over the kettle.
“Well, thank you for the goobers. I best be getting on.”
The little boy didn’t say anything.
Elmer opened his truck door and set the peanuts down in the seat next to him and cranked up the engine and pulled off. He drove slowly, watching in his rearview mirror as the little boy sat down on the shoulder of the road and stared blankly at the edge of the new highway.
He drove further north and the road pressed slightly west. He put a few peanuts in his mouth and worked them around, spitting the softened salty shells out of the window and swallowing the slimy delicious meat. He was reaching into the sack for another handful when he saw a red Buick Roadmaster convertible with the top down parked off to the side. A man in a suit and tie was out of the car and talking to the man in the driver’s seat.
Elmer put more peanuts in his mouth and pressed the gas to pass but the man standing outside stepped to the edge of the highway and waved his arms at him to stop. Elmer slowed down and pulled over beyond them on the shoulder. He left the motor running and reached beneath his seat for his .38 and six bullets from the carton. He clicked open the cylinder and loaded the cartridges and snapped it shut. He placed the gun on the seat next to him behind the bag of the boiled peanuts.
“Hello,” the man yelled.
Elmer, working the nuts between his molars, watched in the side mirror as the man in the car got out and slammed the shiny red door. The men were dressed identically in dark suits and red ties, and walked together up to his truck.
“Thank you, sir, for stopping,” said the man who had waved and yelled. “We need some guidance.”
Elmer spat the shells out the window that landed near their polished black dress shoes. The men took a step back and looked at each other. They were about his age and their ties had snow-white Coca-Cola logos on them. The first man took off his suit coat and revealed red suspenders, these also emblazoned with the Coca-Cola script.
“Hello, sir, this is Stan and I’m Howell,” the first man said. He held his soft clean hand up as though to reach into the window to shake, but Elmer ignored it. His voice was like those Elmer had heard on newsreels. “We are down here today from Atlanta for the dam dedication.”
“You workin’ for the state?”
“Oh, no,” Howell said, and he looked at Stan and they laughed, “not quite. We are employees of the Coca-Cola Corporation.”
They glanced down at the logos on their ties as though Elmer had not seen. Elmer looked at the logos and then back at their faces.
“You must be doing it for the free clothing.”
Howell looked down at his tie and then at Stan’s. They laughed again.
“Well,” he said, “that’s a good one, I guess you could say that . . . Really, though, we are guests of the governor and he said we could hang signs along the way to the dam. There’s expected to be a big crowd out here this afternoon. Our maps, however—”
“Signs? What kind of signs?”
“Coca-Cola signs. Banners, really.”
“You got them in the trunk of your car?”
“Oh, no,” Howell laughed and again looked to Stan, whose smirk was heavy on his clean white chubby face. “A man in a truck hangs them. We just put up markers for the best placement.”
“You got to get permission from the sheriff to post anything in Achena County.”
“Well,” Howell’s voice took on a deeper tone and he raised his shoulders, “I do not believe that your sheriff would disagree with the gov-er-nor on this issue.”
“I reckon you’d just have to ask him to know for sure. You can hang monkeys from the trees out here for all I care. I don’t give a damn what you do. I got to get on down the road.”
Elmer shifted into first and the truck began to roll. He reached for more peanuts.
“Wait, please. We need directions. Can you help us?”
Elmer revved the gas but pressed the clutch in as the men walked along to move with him and the truck rolled to a slow halt. Their faces held perpetual grins.
“Could you please tell us if we are on the right road to the dam, and how to get there?”
Elmer pulled his hand out of the peanut sack, lifted his finger to point, and was about to describe the directions when Stan stepped up beside Howell and cut him off.
“And also tell us”—Stan’s voice was strong Yankee, guttural and fast—“if there’s a half-decent golf course out this way.”
Elmer grunted, a half-laugh. He spat out the window and started to reach for his gun, but instead put both hands on the wheel and popped the clutch. The tires growled and spewed pebbles back behind as he took off and left them there staring at his truck as he headed on up the road.
Elmer sped up the two-lane, passing a pulpwood truck carrying a load of cut pines down to the sawmill. He ate several handfuls of peanuts and spat the shells out the window and watched the side mirror as they trailed and flickered in the headwind. He passed the turnoff for the new road to the dam without even slowing down, pressing ahead to the northwest. He drove by the turnoff for Finley Shoals Road where he had been out this morning to see Mrs. McNulty and kept on until he got to the first turn off down toward Ridleyville and Fish Creek. The dirt road was dry and rutted from the heavy rains back in August, but still no road scraper had run over it. He put it in second gear and rolled it slowly along the dirt road that declined all the way down to Fish Creek, a tributary to the Oogasula.
He came to the bottom of a long crest and saw the rickety wooden bridge over the creek. The Washingtons were out with cane poles hanging off the railings and along the banks beneath it. Their smooth ebony faces looked up to him in surprise. The youngest man, Maurice, picked up a small bottle from near his feet and hid it in his overalls pocket. The three men all scrunched to the bridge railing to let his truck get by. Instead Elmer stopped the truck just shy of the bridge in the road and turned the motor off. He moved the sack of peanuts and slid his revolver under the seat with the box of bullets.
He got out and surveyed the Washingtons’ set up. The old man with the gray beard and two of his grown grandsons were on the bridge and down beneath it their sons—the old man’s great-grandchildren—were in the buttonbush along the river’s edge. All Elmer could see of the three boys were the tops of their dark heads and their hands holding onto the ten-foot poles protruding from the shrubby undergrowth along the creek’s edge.
“Y’all catching anything?”
“Not yet,” the senior Washington said. “But it’s early and that sun will soon be shining on this water.”
“That water’s gonna warm ’em up, huh, make ’em hungry?”
“Yes, sir, deputy. That’s what we’re hopin’.”
Elmer smiled at the old man but did not make eye contact with his two grandsons, Maurice and Lemon, nor did they look at him. Elmer figured they were still seeing him with that badge and gun on his belt, the scowl he put on whenever he had to go into the juke joint for a cutting or a shooting. Uncle Lloyd had put their daddy, the old man’s son, in Reidsville for life for stabbing a man about ten years back, the week Elmer had gotten home from the war, a month after it ended in mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Maurice and Lemon stared down the end of the cane poles resting on the wooden railing and the lines disappearing into the creek. Elmer had no plans to disabuse them of their notion he was still with the sheriff’s office.
Elmer took the pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and shook one loose and put it between his lips. He lit up and studied the old man in overalls and a tattered hunting jacket