Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [103]
Betty Raye was so glad when it was final. At last she could have her husband all to herself and they could get back to a normal life again.
Hamm and Rodney
THE PHONE RANG in the office of the Tillman and Reid used-car lot and Rodney Tillman picked it up. “Hello?”
A man’s voice said, “Hey, sport, what are you doing?”
It was his friend Hamm Sparks. Rodney said, “Right now I’m sitting here trying to figure out if I should kill my ex-brother-in-law or not.”
Hamm laughed. “What’s he done now?”
“We got the best-looking little forty-nine Chevy in here and he went out and started fooling around with the odometer after I told him not to and the damned idiot just put an extra two hundred miles on the thing.”
“Why don’t you just run it back the other way like you always do?”
“I would if I could, Hambo,” he said, glaring at his ex-brother-in-law, who’d just passed by, “but the damned thing’s stuck. What are you doing?”
“I’m gonna be working in your area today. Why don’t you come take a ride with me this afternoon, keep me company.”
Rodney looked through the glass window at the lot, full of dusty cars and empty of customers. “Might as well.”
As they rode out to the farms Hamm was checking on that day, Rodney pulled his pint out of his back pocket and took a swig. “I tell you, son, some days I wish I had just stayed and married that little Japanese gal; this alimony is about to kill me. You sure lucked out with Betty Raye. Now, that’s a sweet woman.”
“Yes, she is,” said Hamm.
While he stopped at the farms on his list, Rodney sat in the car scrunched up in the front seat and watched Hamm trudging out in the fields, walking around in barnyards and pigsties, talking to each farmer, patting them on the back, saying whatever agriculture people say to each other, and swigged from his pint. After about the fifth farm Rodney asked, “How many more places do you have to go to today?”
“Just six more.”
“Well, can we stop somewhere? I need to eat something.”
“Oh sure, there’s a place right up the road.”
Right up the road turned out to be twenty-three miles.
As they came out of the small roadside filling station and country store with sausage biscuits, cheese crackers, and Cokes, Hamm headed back to the car.
“Can we eat outside?” Rodney said. “I hate to say it, buddy, but you’re beginning to smell like a barnyard. God knows what you’ve been stepping in, and those hog-snout marks on your pants ain’t all that appetizing, either.”
Hamm looked down at his pants and laughed. “Yeah, I see what you mean. Sorry, it’s just part of the job.”
They walked over to a wooden bench set up beside a creek behind the store and sat down. Rodney handed Hamm his Coke. “Drink some of this for me, will you.” Hamm took a swig and handed it back and Rodney filled it back up to the top with whiskey, took a drink, and said, “Now, that’s a Coke. So, Hambo, is this what you do every day? Stomp around in barnyards?”
“Just about.”
Rodney examined the sausage biscuit in his hand with skepticism but bit into it anyway. “Why you ever wanted this job in the first place is a mystery to me. I know you aren’t making any money.”
Hamm agreed, “No, it’s sure not the money. But somebody has to give these folks a hand, trying to scratch out a living with nothing but these little piecrust roads between them and the market. Most of them are just hanging on by a thread as it is.” Hamm bit into a cheese cracker with peanut butter in the middle and said, “When it rains, they can’t get out and the government won’t fix the roads. They throw money