Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [58]
Bud said, The hell?
Lit braked and got out. Off in the distance, men whooped like greyboys before Pickett’s Charge and other epic misjudgments.
Lit looked at the slumped animal. An escapee from a slaughtering. Had to be. No longer hog, but not yet transformed into pork.
Bud opened his door to get out, but Lit said, Sit still. This won’t take but a minute.
Lit reached through the open door and cut the lights to the black-and-white but left the engine idling. Set his beer on the roof and rattled in a box of rusty tools in the trunk and drew out a hand axe. He went to the hog and prodded it with his foot. Nothing but dead flab.
Drunks off in the woods hollered nearer, saying, They damn, and other expressions of utter amazement.
Lit worked with the axe like limbing a felled tree to section and split. But only so far as to free the hams. Fuck that other peasant food. Tripe, ears, fatback, and snout. And all that headcheese mess. He carried the hams by their two feet and swung them and the dripping maniac axe into the trunk and drove on with the lights out, leaving the hillbillies to sort out the mystery for themselves when they arrived momentarily to claim their runaway hog.
Around the first curve, Lit hit the gas, and the forgotten half-full bottle fell back across the trunk and to the pavement, shattering with spewing concussion. Bud held his empty out the window and lofted it back over the car to join its fellow in festive breakage.
NIGHT DRIVING. THIS NIGHT, like so many lately, drinking long-necks and listening to the radio, sharing their dope and their hopes and dreams. The dashboard lights casting green shadows on their faces and Luckies drooping from their lips, except when they flicked ash out the windows.
They rode a long way from town. Way out. Not a light to be seen in the indigo night but their own yellow headlights and the tiny white orbs of the heavens, which, because of a fortunate mixture of pills, took on a slight pinwheel effect when they looked up through the windshield for longer than a glance. Lit drove quick, steering with the wrist of his right hand over the wheel and his left elbow resting on the windowsill. Chill damp mountain air streaming in, but balanced by the blast of heat from the firewall. The first fallen yellow poplar leaves resting like upturned hands on the dark pavement.
The narrow road climbed alongside a white-water creek toward a gap, twisting in correspondence with the path of the water. One turn coming hard after the other in a rhythm of shifting car weight, the performance springs and shocks of the cruiser crouching only slightly on the inside and hardly lifting on the outside. No more than a shoulder shrug one way or the other. They crossed narrow one-lane wooden bridges, the timbers painted metallic silver to give the reassuring impression of steel girders. Passed through tunnels of trees vaulting overhead, and the road so slim that two cars meeting would have to scoot over with their right wheels into the grass. But at this time of night, that was mostly theoretical.
Two turns more, and what they had been driving toward stretched in front of them out of the twisty mountain roads. An anomalous straight, longer than the reach of the headlights. Some philanthropist with a paintbrush had measured a quarter mile and swiped a messy slash of white across the pavement at beginning and end. Barely enough space left over at the end for braking before the next hard left-hand curve.
Lit stopped at the line, downshifted, and floored it. The cruiser squatted on its hind wheels and howled, laying two long trails of rubber in first and again at the upshift to second. Even chirping going into fourth, at which point the red speedometer needle quivered past a hundred. Neither of the men said anything during the run.
When they passed the second stripe, Bud said, I counted thirteen. Lit said, It was twelve.
FOGGY AND CHILLY, midnight, they discovered a dozen high school kids drinking beer and dancing to music from a car radio, warming themselves with a roaring fire of