The year he learned to drive, he found Al, the shortstop, in a pine shack in the Okefenokee Wilderness. Huge, blind, and one-footed, Al believed it was 1989. “Living in the future, old man,” said Allen, to which Al croaked, “You’re living in the past.”
“Why didn’t you reach the majors?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Were you blackballed?”
“Are you the police?”
“I’m Davy Downey’s grandson.”
“I couldn’t hit for shit, but I was better than him.”
“Baseball was only his hobby,” Allen said, compelled to lie even to bedraggled strangers. “He gave it up once he won the welterweight championship.”
Six hours north, on a high heath bald near Rabun Gap, Allen knocked on the door of a square pine shack like Al’s, as if they’d helicoptered Al’s up while he was en route. Jack was supposed to be eighty, but the kid who answered was no more than twenty, rail-thin, bottle in hand, joint in his mouth.
“Who are you?” he said, and Allen said he’d come to shake hands with the pitcher he was named for.
“That’s me,” the skinny kid said, and Allen thought, You’re living in the past. Then the kid said, “Joke, he’s dead.”
“Since when?”
“Other day.”
“Is that gin?”
“Have a taste.”
The boy invited Allen into a room whose four windows faced down four slopes. Woods, woods, woods, town, and in the town window sat a girl whose green eyes Allen stared into until she was offering to give him head.
Her name was Eulalia, the boy’s cousin and Jack’s grandchild. Let them call bullshit on this, Allen thought, leaning against the pine wall. “I’m his grandkid too, in a way,” he said, stoned by then. They tripped together, hit after hit, day after day, until Jack’s acid was almost gone. He said he bought it by the sheet in Nashville once a month and sold hits for five bucks. “I could sell a sheet a week,” Allen said, knowing he couldn’t. Jack phoned in an order quintuple the usual size. In a grand finale they ate five hits apiece and hit the road. Allen drove. Whole cyclones of rain poured down, and mastodons roamed the highway, but what wrecked them and killed Jack was a broken axle.
“I’m a world-class driver,” he stood there telling Eulalia in the cold rain; “NASCAR’s recruiting me.”
For a little while, she quit blaming him. Holding hands on the shore of Lake Ocoee, they vowed never to part, but then she was asking if he would ever have an abortion. It was apropos of nothing. “I’m a dude,” he said, as rain flowed down the bank, or was she crying? She seemed to be sliding away with the water.
“Our mom wanted to get rid of us.”
“You were twins?” he asked, astonished.
“No, we were four years apart.”
As the sirens approached, Allen saw into her question and understood what she meant: because of his mind, combined with his driving, his search for some failed namesake, his mom should have gotten rid of him.
“I don’t even know your last name,” he called to Eulalia as they dragged him away, hoping his tears would make it to the river.
Every day of five years, Allen would look up to where Brushy Mountain loomed over the prison of that name. On it stood a stone cottage where a ravishing gypsy observed the prison yard through a silver spyglass. “She likes guys like you,” said Allen’s cellmate, who’d been with her on furlough.
“I’ve dropped in on the stone lady, too,” Allen replied. No matter what you claimed in prison, it was real. He said he’d had twenty-eight girls from twenty-five states. His fellows were so pleased in that brag that he decided to render it true.
“Where’s she from?” he asked one day in the yard, gesturing to the mountain. His cellmate gestured the same.
“But what state was she born in?”
“Is that the first thing you ask all your girls?”
“Sure,” Allen said, heart racing. How you got to be the best, you said something and then you did it. Every day the sun reflected off the stone lady’s window and he waved. In March 1993, when they set him free, he walked the main road to a gravel drive up the mountain. When he reached the summit clearing, the sun was sinking over the plateau. Ready to knock, he stopped in his tracks: the cottage wasn’t a house, only some sheets of propped-up plywood painted to look like stones.
He kicked them onto a pile of gaffing lights soaking in mud. It was almost dark. Counting blow jobs, he’d been with girls from only two states. He was done with that number, and rode an old bicycle downhill into Wartburg to take his first girl.
“You should feel glad to have a man like me,” he told Cheryl, who’d lived her whole life in Tennessee.
She drove him to Harriman, where every woman he talked to came from there. He hitched down 27 past Chattanooga and across the line, where he met Infinity. If Infinity had lived in Tennessee, he might have returned to a prison whose inmates knew him for a fool, but the inmates at Hays State didn’t know a thing. That was where he met Travis. “I’ve been with girls from thirty-six states,” he told Travis, who replied, “My goal’s to get with every pretty girl in one state.”
Upon parole they shared an apartment. He got a job selling cars. In 2006 a school opened across the road, and then the law passed in 2007. They made their way to an outdoor outfitters to shoplift some tents. Allen’s, a Marmot, may have saved his life. If he’d bought one instead of stealing it, he wouldn’t have been able to afford flame-retardant cloth — not that he’d been looking for that feature; he only chose the warmest one. He knew winters would be no joke. The night of the fire, the temperature dropped to eleven while they argued about what to do with the bodies of Garth and Patrick. Travis said it would need to be twenty below to keep them from putrefying. Gus countered that if eviction was coming tomorrow anyway, so what?
For once Allen didn’t take Travis’s side. Who cared? He’d stopped seeing the point of Georgia. As long as he lived in camp, his number would remain two. Georgia and Tennessee. Down at the car lot lately the guys were calling bullshit. He imagined the campers did too, at least in their heads. Looked up team rosters from the years he gave. “Screw it, they can smell or not smell,” he told Bruce, and went in his tent to think back on the stone lady. If she’d been up there where she was supposed to be, he might never have touched anyone else. Was she on Eulalia’s mountain, laughing at him out four windows through a silver spyglass? Fuck that bitch, he was thinking as he came. Then he unstaked his tent. Waiting for everyone else to fall asleep, he passed out too. He awoke to flames, closer than the campfire.
Two of the tents were burning.
Without a moment’s thought, Allen rolled down the bluff, tent and all, past strange voices. He landed inches from the lakeshore. He untangled himself and saw pickup trucks and a police cruiser parked near his car. They were empty; no one saw him drive away for good. Blasting the heat, hugging curves like a stock-car driver, he thought of a new story, I saved six men from a fire, but as it turned out, besides Jeremy — who’d vanished — he was the only one who hadn’t survived to hear the news.
“The men at those camps got a preview of hellfire,” said a state representative on the TV above Allen’s barstool at Waffle House.
There had been injuries, and some loud guys to the left were chuckling about it. “I had a cousin burn to death in Iraq,” the waitress told them. “Not what I’d call funny.”