Josh Russell

Truck Tire Outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1936

A retread’s lost reptilian hide fooled him.  In the dark Walker took it for a road-killed gator and pulled the Ford over to investigate.  Forehead against the cool curve of the steering wheel he realized what a double fool he was.  No alligator lived 30 miles south of Nashville, and the girl he’d told to meet him in Georgia did not deserve jilting.  He considered the tire, illuminated by the headlamps, so he would not have to consider the girl.  Its tail curled off into the ditch.  Beyond it the serrated edge of the pavement stretched into the dark.  He rubbed his nose and smelled her; he had not washed his hands since those fingers had been inside her, and even the perfume of breakfast’s bacon could not cover that smell.  He closed his eyes and saw the picture he’d taken of her while she sat on a bench in Coliseum Park, plaid school skirt hiding her knees.  A week later that same skirt was folded neatly on a chair when he took a picture of her naked and smiling on his bed; he saw that one too.  There had been idle talk on the subject of the institution of marriage.  His face white with Burma Shave, her father had chased him down Royal Street brandishing a pair of barber’s scissors and yelling “Evans!  Goddamnit I’ll stick you!”  Walker had written the address of a rooming house in Valdosta on the back of a postcard and told her he’d see her there.  The address was a fiction; he had no idea if Valdosta held an Oleander Street.

The tire, he reminded himself, the tire that looks like an alligator, and when he glanced up he saw the last light drain from the headlamps.  Dark silence when he turned the key.  Cicadas ratcheted mockingly.  The coffee he’d sipped from a vacuum bottle to fight off sleep failed him suddenly.  He lit a match to check his watch and the reflection of the small flame in the side mirror spooked him.  It was past midnight, hours until any filling station would open, and he had no idea how long the walk to the nearest would be.  The blanket he wrapped himself in smelled like New Orleans—mildew and whiskey and gasoline.  Walker shifted on the seat and could not find comfort.  The darkness was the same with his eyes open or closed, and pictures he’d made of the girl appeared either way.  He saw her in a line of girls in plaid skirts waiting at the window of a snowball stand; saw her asleep in a chair, feet on the windowsill; saw her cooking eggs at his narrow two-burner stove wearing only his undershirt.

A tire that looks like an alligator, he told himself.  The edge of the road like a saw blade.  The pines skinny and at their bases bound to one another with blackberry-bush barbed wire.  The ditch calico with wild flowers.  A filling station with a Nehi sign nailed over a broken window.