A Walk in the Country

We came out of Johnson City, Tennessee, three of us in the cab of a pickup truck with an enormously fat mountain girl who worked in a Frosty-Freeze ice-cream parlor. She had on her Frosty-Freeze uniform and a vague but insistent odor of sour milk floated out of the deep creases of her body. She lived in Erwin, Tennessee, which practically straddles the Appalachian Trail, and drove the pickup into Johnson City five times a week to the Frosty-Freeze, a distance of some 14 miles.

What we were doing 14 miles off the trail in Johnson City is boring and need not be related. Enough to say that Dog and I wanted to get drunk and more than that we wanted a decent-sized city to do it in. Dog and I were good and drunk. Charne was disgusted. She didn't mind the drinking particularly, even drank some herself, but she thought a 16-hour bout from one bar to the next was tacky and middle class, showed--she said--poor taste. We kept our packs on while we hiked around Johnson City, getting drunker and drunker. It's a God's wonder some Grit didn't kill us. Grits don't take to long-haired freaks wearing packs in their bars.

We were squeezed tight inside the cab of the pickup. The girl, whose name was Franny--it was stitched over the pocket of her Frosty-Freeze uniform--took up half the seat by herself. Charne had to sit in my lap. Dog sat squeezed in to Franny, his entire body imprinted and half-buried in her fat. He didn't seem to mind it.

He'd been licking the side of her neck. She didn't seem to mind it, or even notice it, for that matter. I wondered if maybe there was an old residue of Frosty-Freeze ice cream slathered up on the side of her neck. It was July and I was sweating pure vodka into the little space between our steaming bodies and the windshield. The smell of sweat, vodka and sour milk had made me incredibly thirsty. I was beginning to sober up and longed desperately for a beer.

"You reckon we could stop and get us a beer, Franny?" I said.

"I could use a beer myself," Charne said. "It stinks in here."

"I ain't familiar with beer joints," said Franny.

"Ah, come on, Fanny," Dog said, taking a long lick at her neck. He'd called her Fanny ever since we got into the truck. She didn't seem to mind. I noticed the place he'd been licking on her neck had changed colors. It was now considerably lighter than the rest of her neck. Dog's tongue, when he ran it out, was kind of pink. I thought he might have a little Pan-Cake make-up on it.

"We nearly to Erwin," she said.

Dog licked her again.

I said: "I don't want to go to Erwin. I don't care if I ever get to Erwin. I want a beer."

"It is one li'l ole place up here not far they say sells real cold draffs," she said.

"I believe that's the place we been looking for," I said.

"Fanny," Dog said, "damn if I don't think I'm in love with you."

She stared grimly through the windshield at the highway. "I been divorced oncet already and got two younguns."

"Hell," Dog said, "I don't mind. I don't give one shit."

"I could never care for a man that cussed," she said.

"I could quit," Dog said. "I got iron will power. I quit smoking before."

She turned to look at him, her face a mask, as if she were considering some grim alternative, as if maybe he was a doctor and had just told her she had cancer but that he could take care of it for her.

"All right," she said. "All right, then."

She looked back toward the highway and as she did she raised her huge arm and drew Dog in. His head disappeared between the wall of her arm and the massive lump of tittie.

With Dog's head clamped under her arm, Franny let the old Dodge pickup have the rest of the gas pedal and we shot down the highway for another couple of miles, where she swung into a red-dirt parking lot beside a wooden building. There were only two other cars parked there.

She slid to a stop and looked over at us. "It don't seem like much," she said, "but they got good cold draffs."

A cloud of red dust sifted over the truck and came to hang in the air between us. Dog fought his way from under her arm, a mashed look on his sweated face.

"We here?" he said. "This it?"

Charne was already out of the truck. I slid down behind her.

"Me 'n' him's gone talk a minute," said Franny.

"Go on and order us a beer," said Dog, "we'll be right in."

"Don't order us no beer," said Franny. "We'll be there torectly."

She looked like she was going in for that cancer operation and Dog looked like he wasn't real sure what the hell was going on. We left them sitting there, her arm still weighted around Dog's neck, and went on into the bar. After the bright sunlight, it was dark inside. Plain wooden floor, unpainted walls, about ten bare tables with chairs, a long unpainted bar with pickled pigs feet floating in jars and pickled eggs and potato chips on a dented rack.

One man sat at the bar, wearing a neatly pressed blue suit and a snap-brim hat with a red feather in it. He was slender and dark and gave the impression of tension, although I didn't know why, because he didn't move, didn't even glance at us. A bald man in a T-shirt read a newspaper behind the bar.

We went to a table by a window and sat down. I was watching the bartender. He looked up at us and then back at his paper. He didn't move off his stool. I had thought there might be some breeze by the window but there wasn't. Through the screen we could look directly into the cab of the truck, which sat baking in the hard sunlight no more than 15 feet away.

Charne glanced at the truck and said: "We ought to move away from this window."

"It's all right," I said. Only Franny's head was visible in the cab of the truck.

"It's embarrassing," she said.

"They're just talking," I said.

I wasn't about to take another table. I wanted to see. That's the way I am.

The bartender still had not moved, except occasionally to turn a page of his newspaper. The man in the blue suit had not moved at all and I realized that's what made him seem tight as sprung steel. He didn't turn his head, hadn't touched the full glass of beer in front of him, didn't seem even to be breathing.

"That's a strange one up there in the suit," I said.

"This Godforsaken place'd make anybody strange," said Charne. "I'll flip you to see who wakes up the bartender and gets us a beer."

I lost and went up for a big pitcher and four glasses. When I got back to the table, Charne said: "I told you it'd be embarrassing."

I poured myself a glass and looked through the screen. Damned if they hadn't rolled up the windows to the truck. The windshield had steamed over and that old Dodge truck was rocking like a cradle. While I watched, an enormous flat foot rose foggily into view and pressed itself slowly but with tremendous strength against the glass directly below the rearview mirror.

"This is better than a movie," I said.

"Pervert," Charne said.

"You from around here?"

We both jerked around at the same time to see the man in the blue suit sit down across from us. He placed his glass of beer carefully on the table. His movements were strangely angular and precise, as though his body moved through space proscribed and exactly calibrated. His eyes were the color and texture of the screen wire. He asked us again if we were from around there.

"No," I said.

He had plopped down at my table without being asked, and I didn't like his manner, but there was something about him made me feel I ought not to cross him. I didn't get this old by being a fool.

"What y'all watching out there?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said.

He leaned forward and stared through the screen wire, watching the truck endlessly rocking in the distorted air rising out of the clay parking lot.

"Somebody in that truck is it?" he asked. His voice was as careful as his movements. "What they doing in there?"

"What my friends do is their business," I said.

"Good way to be," he said.

We watched the Dodge truck. It seemed to rock with a life of its own. I emptied the pitcher and Charne went for another one.

Just as she sat down at the table again, (continued on page 128)A Walk in the Country(continued from page 120) he said: "This is where they hung Alice, you know."

I drank off a quick glass and didn't answer. I have quite enough craziness in my own head without borrowing any from somebody else.

"I usually drink vodka," I said, thinking to change the subject, whatever the subject was.

"I got some if you want it," he said.

"You have?" I said.

It seemed fate. Who would be foolish enough to contest with fate?

"It's in the car," he said. "I'll just get it."

He got up and cat-danced out of the bar. When he was gone, Charne said: "He scares me."

"I think he'll be all right," I said.

"You have to be crazy to mess with a crazy person," she said.

"I admit he's a little scary," I said. "But we'll just have a drink with him and go. People sometimes get freaky if you refuse to drink with them."

He suddenly appeared in the parking lot outside the window. He went right to the truck and stood looking in the window. The rhythm of the truck had grown erratic. After he'd had a good long look, he walked over to his car, a baby-blue Corvair.

"What was that about Alice being hung?" I said. "Did you hear that?"

"Of course I heard it," she said.

"I thought maybe I misunderstood," I said.

Directly he came back with the vodka. He had a hit out of the bottle and chased it with beer. I was relieved to have a drink. It settled me down and things didn't seem so melancholy.

"You know," he said, "we've got the Nolichucky River here."

"We crossed it," I said.

He considered that for a moment. "When?" he said.

"Three days ago, best I can make it," I said. I didn't know why I was answering these questions. Something about the man made it impossible to consider doing otherwise. He kept staring at me, so I said: "See, we're hiking."

"Hiking?" he said.

"With backpacks," I said. "You know, on The Appalachian Trail."

I thought he would know about the trail because Erwin wasn't two miles from where the trail crossed a mountain. But he didn't. Had never heard of it. There didn't seem to be anything to do but explain the whole thing: that I was a writer walking the trail, that the girl was a photographer I hired to come along and that the other guy walking with us was still out in the truck.

"And that's the other one out there in the truck?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

The three of us watched the truck baking in the sun for a moment. It wasn't rocking anymore. The windows had been rolled down. No heads were showing though. I tried to imagine how Franny and Dog could accomplish anything in so small and stifling a space.

"Hard by the Nolichucky River is the Clinchfield Railroad," he said.

"I remember seeing a trestle," I said, only because he seemed to be waiting for me to say something. "I always liked trestles when I was a boy."

"Hadn't been for that damn railroad, they couldn't have hung Alice."

Charne said: "Back to that, are we?"

"Ma'am?"

"Why don't you get us another pitcher, Charne?" I said. She was capable of saying anything. I was afraid it would make him mad. And I didn't want him mad. I just wanted to drink a couple of more beers, maybe another shot or two, and get back in the woods.

When Charne came with the beer, he said: "It's ruined my life."

"What ruined your life?" she asked.

"The hanging of Alice."

At that moment the door of the pickup opened and we watched Dog stagger into the sun. His thin corn-colored hair was plastered on his forehead. Then Franny came out the same door behind him. She looked kind of mean, like she might just want to slap the shit out of somebody. She did reach out and give Dog a cuff behind the head, but it was affectionate and full of good will, just the sort of lick, it seemed to me, one football player gives another when he's made an impossible score. She spent a minute or two twisting her Frosty-Freeze uniform, adjusting whatever was under it. They walked toward the bar holding hands.

"Perversity has ruined more than one man," he said. I think both Charne and I thought he was talking about Dog and Franny rocking in the truck. They came through the door behind where we sat at the table and I expected him to turn and say something to them, but instead he said: "It was my birthday, my fifth birthday, when it happened. That was a long time ago, but I never got over it."

"Never got over what?" said Dog. He stood beside the table holding Franny's hand.

He got up with great formality and removed his snap-brimmed blue hat. "You are the other member of the team," he said.

"Team?" said Dog.

"The wilderness team," he said.

Dog said, "Oh yeah, sure, walking with the packs. I'm with them. The other member of the team." He licked his lips. The words seemed to please him.

"I was speaking of Alice and I forgot myself. I often do when I remember her. I've not introduced myself. I'm Jake Leach, a lawyer by avocation."

"I'm Ronnie." He looked out the window. "They call me Dog 'cause when I drink I sometimes commence to howl. It's a little joke they got, Dog is."

"But it's really Donniger," said Franny, "Ronald Donniger."

"It is my great pleasure, Mr. Dog."

He held out his hand. I had not realized before how drunk Jake Leach was. He was carrying an enormous load, and for the first time I realized that was why his movements seemed so careful and deliberate. He was one of those drunks who would just go on and on, never slurring a word or staggering, until finally he closed his eyes and collapsed, his clothes as unwrinkled and carefully brushed as they had been that morning when he put them on.

I had always held such men in great admiration, being as I am one of the all-time sloppy, disgusting drunks, the kind mothers can point out to their children as an example of the final evil of alcohol. Not so with Jake Leach. He would never be pointed out as anything except everything a man ought to be, even when he was stunned with whiskey, which is what he was now.

After we had all introduced ourselves several times, managed to get everybody seated and Franny had knocked the dust off the session in the pickup by sucking down a glass of cold draft, Dog said, "Now, sir, I believe you was talking about Alice."

If a Grit meets another Grit who is formal and courteous in his speech, he immediately begins to trade formality for formality. They call it manners, and it's quite a lovely thing to see. Jake had fallen into the cadences that mark the gentleman (or so a Grit who uses them thinks) the moment he saw Ronnie Dog. He had not done so with me because I think he knew me for a bogus Southerner.

"The hanging of Alice marked me, sir, marked me."

Jake handed the bottle of vodka to Dog, who took a pull and passed it to Franny, who did not hesitate but daintily wiped the mouth of the bottle on her Frosty-Freeze uniform and sucked down some herself, careful not to make the bottle gurgle in an unseemly way.

"Well, now my daddy, sir," said Ronnie, "he seen a man hung oncet. A nigger. Rape is what it was he done, so they taken a pertater and pushed it in his mouth tight where he couldn't holler and hung him. It was some small children there and they didn't want his hollerin' scarin' 'm, you see."

Jake Leach was waving his hand, not discourteously but with some show of impatience, while Ronnie talked. "Alice was not a man, Mr. Dog."

While Jake paused for a controlled sip (continued on page 218)A Walk in the Country(continued from page 128) of vodka, Franny said: "Donniger. It's Donniger, not Dog."

Dog smiled at her: "It's all right, honey."

"I don't get in the pickup with nobody named Dog."

"All right," said Dog. "It ain't nothing but a joke."

"Alice was not a woman, either," said Jake Leach.

Charne had been over taking photographs of the bartender, who sat like a rock with his newspaper. She came back just in time to hear Jake.

"If it wasn't a man or a woman, what was it they hung?"

Jake made a little motion with his head indicating he meant to get to that in good time. "One is forced to the conclusion that hanging the nigger could have been justice."

Charne said something that made Jake Leach blush.

"Now wait, ma'am, hear me out. Not justice because it was legal. But what does justice care for legality? Very little it seems to me. If the nigger was truly guilty of rape and if the community decided to hang him, that can only be justice, or so it seems to me. Even to the potato in his mouth. It might have been emotionally detrimental to the children to hear him scream but morally instructive to see him hanged."

He had spoken all of this in an impartial voice. It was a problem, theoretical, academic, something that could never touch him, and therefore it was interesting for precisely the reason that it had nothing to do with him.

Then for the first time he became agitated, his fingers trembled. His face flushed scarlet. "But Alice was an elephant." He struck the table with his fist. "She was a goddamn elephant, Alice was, and they hung her!"

"They hung a elephant?" said Dog.

"Everybody knows that old story," said Franny.

Jake squinted at her. "You from Erwin?"

"Unaka Mountain," said Franny.

"That is not Erwin, Tennessee, lady," Jake said.

"It's still everybody heard that old story," she said. "Ma told me about hanging Alice when I weren't no more than a yearling girl."

Jake dropped his head back and his voice was a lament: "Yes, yes, dear God. It has become a favorite story with children." When he looked at me, he had tears in his eyes.

"Listen," Charne said, "listen. People do strange things. They think it's all so goddamn simple and funny."

She touched his arm and I could tell she was genuinely moved. Not by what he was telling but by how much pain it was giving him to tell it.

Jake grabbed the vodka bottle and leaped up from the table. "Come on," he said.

I sat where I was. "Where are we going?" I said.

"Come on, goddamn it," he shouted.

There was that jagged madness showing again, like the outcropping of a rock. I was drunk enough by now that he no longer seemed very strange and threatening. But I wasn't so drunk that I didn't hear the hysteria in his voice. In a calm, relaxed way I knew he was capable of killing me and I remember wondering vaguely if he might have a gun or knife.

"I don't want to go outside," I said, "it's hot."

There was an abrupt hitch in his throat and his voice came out soft, persuasive. "I know it's hot. It's very hot out there. But I want to show you something--to show--all of you this thing--I can't help it. It's just something I want to do. Christ, didn't I get the vodka for you?"

"Yes," I said, dispirited now by the way the conversation was going. "You got the vodka."

"You wanted vodka," he said, "and I got it." He was still standing and he carefully adjusted his smart snap-brim hat. "I'm going to get three six-packs of beer to take along in my car. See that little Corvair out there? That's mine. And it's air-conditioned." He stopped and looked at me, but I could tell he was prepared to go on if it looked like he needed to.

"You serious about them beers?" I said.

He turned his head and called: "Tommy, sack up eighteen of them beers. Good cold ones. No, make it twenty of them good cold ones."

Tommy, who had not moved since we had been there, was immediately off his ass and packing up the beer.

"We got some time," I said. "Let's go."

"I got to feed them younguns of mine sometime," Franny said.

Actually, I hadn't thought of her coming. I'd supposed she would roar away in the old Dodge. But she didn't. When we got to that air-conditioned baby-blue Corvair car, she was the first one in it. Dog was the second. She just reached out and took him like he'd been a doll and drew him in to her. I could hear his stifled breathing and she was making a sound like a dog eating raw meat. Charne and I got up front with Jake.

Jake didn't say a word. Nobody else seemed to feel like talking, either. We opened the beers. Jake's air conditioning was not worth much.

We went maybe three miles down the highway, when without any warning at all, Jake drove his incredible baby-blue Corvair right across a ditch. A deep ditch. I thought we were having an accident. I was screaming and clawing at everybody and it was embarrassing as hell when I realized that nobody else was screaming and Jake was driving (calmly and deliberately and competently as ever) right across a meadow. There were lots of jeeps in the world that could not have taken us where that Corvair took us. Finally, he stopped the car and we got out. Everybody except Franny and Dog.

"I just cain't bear weeds and scratchy things in this heat," Franny said.

There was no use to ask Dog if he was coming. Franny had him and it was clear he was about to be tested again right there in the back of the car Ralph Nader had grave doubts about. We got out of the car, Charne doing me a huge favor by carrying some of the beer that she didn't want to drink but that I didn't feel I could do without in that heat and jungle of weeds as we walked up toward the stony roadbed of a railroad.

Jake went straight along the railroad and stopped finally on the crossties. "Here is where it happened," he said.

"What happened?" I said, but I already knew.

"The hanging of Alice," he said.

"Yes," I said.

I sat down on one of the steel rails to watch him. It was too hot and finally I ended sitting on the side of the ditch with Charne beside me. She had opened a beer, too. Jake looked truly crazy, or I guess crazy is the wrong word, majestic rather.

He stood between the iron rails of the steaming roadbed with his arms outstretched. Who knows when the king is mad? And who is brave enough to say when a king's vision becomes a delusion?

And by God, Jake--since he'd gained the prominence of the roadbed--Jake was a king when he walked up there, spread his arms and looked up at the sun. Then he lay down on his back. Really, right on his back, still staring up at the sun. The blue suit was as pressed and as neat and clean and handsome as it had ever been. Charne and I were drinking beer with both hands and had broke out a couple of downers and eaten those because this was a performance you've waited all your life to see and now that it's here, you know you could have done without it.

"Alice was an elephant." Jake spoke not looking at us but still straight up into the sun. "And this is where they hung her. On this very spot. Here, nowhere else. I told you I watched it when I was five years old."

He lifted his head up off the stones of the railroad and looked at us briefly. "When I was a boy, circuses used to come through." He was staring again at the sun. "They came through in wagons. They brought Alice the year I was five. She had a wagon of her own. Such a beautiful ... beautiful. ... She was gentle and she smelled like something your mother had made for you. I remember that. She was gentle and she smelled like something your mother made for you.

"She killed a little girl. The little girl tried to feed her something in her pen. I don't remember. I wish I could remember. But it was something about feeding Alice and Alice took the child with her trunk and beat her on the ground like a bundle of weeds and walked on her and it was awful and I didn't see it but I heard it all, they told me all, everything and put out the little girl's body for everybody to see.

"That's not the horrible part. That's horrible, but that's not the horrible part. The town decided to kill Alice. Eye for an eye. Except by now, Alice was sweet and gentle and dust-smelling as she ever was, but there was nothing to do but to kill her.

"They didn't have a gun big enough to kill her. They thought and thought. Shoot her in the eye with a shotgun, they said. They said all kinds of things but they could never be sure it would kill the elephant and she might run crazy with the pain and mash the life out of somebody else. Poison of course came up. But that wouldn't do. It had to be quick. It had to hurt and be quick. It had to be an execution. Alice had to know.

"The Clinchfield Railroad had a derrick in those days. I don't know, maybe it's not called a derrick, a winch maybe, but anyway it was this huge thing that runs on the tracks and lifts a section of rail into place by drawing it up with steel cables.

"They brought it out. They put it where I'm lying. Right here. They put a logging chain around Alice's neck. The whole town watched. I was there. And they hitched Alice to the derrick by the logging chain around her neck. And started pulling her up. I was there.

"She didn't understand. She started shitting. She stood on her back legs and kept shitting when she saw what was going to happen and then it did. They pulled her right up in the air and then she stopped screaming, because she was screaming before, but she kept shitting until she was dead. I don't remember anybody cheering or saying it was good or wonderful or anything, they just stood there staring at Alice hanging off the derrick and then went home."

We sat in the ditch drinking the beer and trying to think that this was a madman and that if anything we ought to laugh because. ... But we didn't and Jake kept lying on his back between the steel rails. I wanted to say something but I didn't know what to say.

"I went to law school. You'd be amazed where I went to law school. But I don't practice law. Oh, I do something now and then. My brother has a law office. It was our daddy's office. I'm a partner. But I don't do anything much. Mostly I come out here and remember Alice straining on her back feet, shitting until she was dead, and my brother stays in town and keeps the law office going."

He stopped talking and turned to look at us again.

"Why do you suppose that is?" he asked. "My brother was at the hanging of Alice, too."

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know anything about that. We're out of beer."

He looked not at us but straight up into the sun. "You can go get some more back there."

We weren't really out of beer, but I wanted to leave, wanted to leave bad. "OK." I said. "I think we better do that."

He just lay where he was and didn't move. Finally he said, "I'm going to stay here awhile. Take the car and go back."

"You can't do that," I said. "It's hot and it's too far to walk."

"Tell Tommy to come git me after a while," he said. "He'll know where I am."

I stood up. "It's been good knowing you, Jake," I said. "You keep yourself together."

"It'll be all right," he said.

We started across the ditch alongside the Clinchfield Railroad.

"Hey," he called. We turned to look at him. "That little girl and Alice were the same age. I went to some trouble to find out, and they were the same age. That's what gets me."

Suddenly, bitterly, Charne said: "You ought to get out of this goddamn sun."

Jake said: "When I found out they were the same age that's what ruined my career." We walked on through the weeds toward the car. "It's what ruined my life!" he called after us. Later, as we were getting in the car, I thought I heard him yell something else. But I didn't wait. I didn't look back.

• • •

If anybody's interested in such things, Erwin, Tennessee, is in the Cherokee segment of The Appalachian Trail. That part of the trail goes through both the Cherokee National Forest and the Pisgah National Forest. We were headed for the top of Unaka (pronounced "Younake-a" with the accent on the nake by the folks thereabouts) Mountain, to a place called, unfortunately I think, Beauty Spot, which was supposed to have a great place to camp, water and, according to the guidebook, one of the longest, most open views on the entire trail.

When Franny found out which way we were going, she said: "When you git up on Unaka Mountain and it starts raining, why you just look and see which way the water is running on the ground. Run one way, you in Tennessee; run the other way, you in North Carolina."

Dog said: "Run one way? Which way, Fanny?"

"Which way?" she said.

"Which way to North Carolina and which way to Tennessee?"

"You can tell," she said. "Oh, you can always tell."

He watched her blankly. "You know you're a sweet thing?" he asked. "You know how sweet you are?"

"I still got to feed them younguns," she said. "Them two younguns of mine don't even know where I am." We were still at the Blue Pines Bar and Tommy had gone after Jake Leach and I didn't want to be around when they got back. "Y'all might as well come and sleep at my place, tonight." Franny was looking at Dog. "Might as well come on and git a early start in the morning."

Dog didn't hesitate. "Cain't. Got to go. We already been thrown behind by all this like it is."

Dog wouldn't even take a ride in her pickup and we walked down the highway with our packs and camped behind the Erwin City Dump because I figured that's the only place where we would be safe from the local police. If we could have made it to the mountains and the trail, we would have been safe there, but you start camping along the highway or sleeping under a bridge or in an open field and you're apt to wake up looking at a cop.

I have nothing against cops if they're home-grown. But if you're not from around there--no matter where there happens to be--and you run into a cop and you look like you're outside what is called the "economic and political mainstream" of the country, then you're just apt to get hurt. And hurt for nothing, hurt because you're not from around there. That's only a judgment and it's only based on five years on the road, not being from around there, and not looking as though I was in the "economic and political mainstream." Understand that I don't condemn cops for that, either. It's the job they're paid to do. They do it well. To condemn it would be to condemn the country.

So anyway, we spent the night at the dump and when we were getting our tents together the next morning, I stood watching Dog slam his stuff around in a particularly vicious way. We had hardly said a word the night before. We were sobering up and hungover but mainly thinking about Jake lying between the rails of the Clinchfield Railroad. But the next morning I was feeling better and I said to Dog: "Why the hell didn't we sleep at Franny's last night?"

He didn't even look at me when he spoke. "I'd a slept oncet at Miss Fanny's, I'd a never left." He saddled his pack and started slogging over the dump toward the mountains, leaving Charne and me standing there looking after him.

So I don't think any of us much gave a rat's ass that we were on the Cherokee segment of The Appalachian Trail when we left Erwin. It was probably the quietest day I remember on the trail. Charne carried the guidebook as she always did, telling us where water was--or where water was supposed to be--what the mileage was like, what the names of the shelters we passed were called, things like that. But mostly we were quiet.

We walked out of Erwin down to the Nolichucky River and along the north bank to a trestle of the Clinchfield Railroad. The Nolichucky's not much of a river at that point--I don't know what it may be elsewhere--but where we left it east of Erwin, it was maybe 200 yards wide, ten or twelve feet deep, or so it seemed to me, with a lot of rocks and easy rapids. It was also extremely yellow with what I hope were minerals but might have been your ordinary piss and shit from the local folk, most rivers being as they are these days worse than raw sewage.

I bent down once to drink from a stream high in the mountains on the trail and just as I was about to, as they say, slake my thirst, I saw a little sign put up by the Forestry Service or somebody that said: Do Not Drink. Contaminated with Untreated Waste. I always love that: untreated waste. As though I might enjoy--perhaps really like--to drink treated waste. But, alas, why dwell upon it? The planet is tired and dying. I understand, though, that even the most pessimistic predictions give us (or at least a few of us) another million years or so.

There was a crazy man who used to wander the roads of Bacon County, Georgia, sleeping where he could, living how he could, who used to say: "Them that shit can eat what they shit." He of course was speaking about ultimate alternatives. I have always thought it eminently fair.

I'll never forget that walk out of Erwin, Tennessee. We'd been on the trail so long and steadily we were lean and mean enough to eat rocks. I think because we were all melancholy and sad--Charne and I about old Jake Leach, and Dog about old Franny--we took it out on ourselves physically. Nobody said anything about it; there was no planning; that's just the way it happened. In paroxysms of guilt, my greatest workouts have consistently come after my greatest drunks.

Four miles up from the Clinchfield Railroad, we caught up with five members of a hiking club. Or the patches on their little green matching uniforms said they were a hiking club. They looked authentic enough, smelling vaguely of sweat, red of face, booted, bedrolled and canteened.

"If you like," one of them said, "we can hike along together. Where you from?"

Charne pointed to the direction we'd just come from. "Back there," she said, and then deliberately turned what they'd said around. "Sure, you can walk with us if you'd like. It could be fun."

The trail at that place was narrow and we were tandem behind the five boys, who all looked to be about 18 and very sturdy, soccer types. But the trail from the Nolichucky to the top of Unaka Mountain crosses fields and meadows, and the first field we got to, Charne swung out of the line and walked around the boys. Once in the lead, nobody was ever to head her.

In less than a mile, she was about 200 yards out front and Dog and I had passed the boys, too. Maybe the boys just thought we were unfriendly or they didn't like the pace, or any number of other things. But I think what happened is that Charne simply walked their young asses off. Later, we saw them once from a ridge, way back and still coming, their heads bent earnestly under their little green hiking caps. Then we never saw them again. At the pace we were holding, we were drinking a lot of water and the first place the guidebook said we'd find water, there was no water, which truly we had not expected there would be, since we had come to distrust the guidebook in almost every detail. It didn't worry us much because Franny had told us what a wonderful spring was at Beauty Spot on Unaka Mountain. She knew because there was a little mountain road that would take a truck and she had been up there often. She said a lot of people drove up there for picnics and--here her voice dropped--other things.

So we went more than seven hours dry. I discovered while hiking that summer that I need six quarts of water a day. That's just to drink and doesn't count what water I get in the reconstituted dehydrated food. I'm a nonstop sweater, one of the world's great sweaters, and consequently I have to drink water almost constantly. If I don't get the water, it ruins my disposition. I think it affects most people that way. Certainly, by the time we got to Beauty Spot--which incidentally is an incredible place; there must be 200 acres of open treeless meadow right on top of the mountain--but by the time we got there, we were pretty bitter about the whole trip, even the world. Our swelled, dry tongues made us talk like we had cleft palates.

We carefully followed the guidebook's instructions to find the spring, because they sounded just like the instructions Franny had given us. We followed the crest; we found the boulder shaped like a heart; we turned left down incline. No spring. We read more carefully. This wasn't funny. Then we did the whole thing over again. No spring.

"Listen," said Dog.

We were sitting on the heart-shaped rock. Charne and I had heard it, too.

"Somebody's whistling," I said.

It was the kind of whistle somebody whistles at you, so we stood up on the rock and there across the meadow was a car where, if we had been looking, we would have seen it already. It was a '58 Chevrolet, and even from this distance one could see it had mag wheels, about 30 coats of paint, and no doubt a supercharged engine. Three men were sitting on the hood. We could see somebody else inside. They were waving us over.

I said, as we neared them, "Are they drinking beer?"

"Christ," said Charne, "we'll never get out of Tennessee."

I thought to myself at that moment that we may not, but it wouldn't be because of drinking. I instantly recognized the guys on the hood of the modified Chevy as Good Old Drinking Boys who were capable of anything, including castration. It occurred to me that this was Friday--late Friday--and they'd come up here from some factory or construction site to sip a few cool ones and get a little meaner preparing for the last savage few hours at midnight down in town at some bar named The Wagon Wheel or The Dew Drop Inn. I also knew they would have some poor hapless and helpless girl in the back seat or on a comey blanket in the weeds behind the car, down on her back, rooting around in her.

They didn't smile at all as we walked up and when I looked at Dog. I saw that he had seen what I saw, knew what I knew. His face was tight and actually looked meaner than the guys sitting on the hood of the car, who were wearing pointed, hand-carved boots and some kind of fake cowboy shirts. There was another man--about the same age as the others. 25 or so--in the back seat and while I watched, a woman's sweaty head rose into view only to have the man clamp his hand on the back of her skull and push her back down again.

The one sitting straddle of the hood ornament waved his can of Bud at me and said: "Well, friend, damn if it don't look like you lost."

"We ain't lost," I said. "But we thirsty."

"Well," he said, showing us the mean smile he no doubt practiced in the mirror, "we didn't bring no water up here."

"It's supposed to be a spring," Dog said.

The guy whose boots looked to be outlined in aluminum paint studied Dog a minute and then said with an exaggerated Grit voice: "What you doing playing boy scout with a long-haired freak?" His smile as he looked at Dog seemed almost good-natured, but I knew better. "You almost look normal but this other'n here look like he'd suck a dick."

Two things leaped immediately to mind. One was Big Jim Dickey's novel Deliverance, and with that thought, a tightening of the asshole. The other was a scene out of Larry McMurtry's novel All of My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, in which two Texas Rangers catch a long-hair out at night on a highway and proceed to have a long humorless conversation with him, the basis of which was that since he had long hair he'd surely suck a dick. The Rangers ended by throwing the kid over a ditch by his hair.

It only took a second for all that to flash on me and while it did. Charne threw down her pack and said: "You gutless Grit sonofabitches, do you know where water is or not?"

Obviously, what Charne said scared the shit out of me but didn't seem to bother the guys sitting on the hood of the car at all. It reminded me a little of the time in the summer of 1972, when I was arrested at the Slipped Disk Discothèque in St. Augustine Beach, Florida. When the cop threw me in the back seat of his cruiser, one of the people I was with, who happened also to be a lady, turned and knocked the piss out of the cop and said: "You sonofabitch, you can't do that to him."

All the while I was yelling from the back seat: "Yes, he can. Yes, he can."

The cop threw her in with me. I expected at least a beating back at the station, but we got nothing. They even let us bail ourselves out. I here salute the police of St. Augustine, Florida, as among the fairest and finest of my experience.

But those weren't cops sitting on the hood of that car. Cops, among other things--unless you've done something very personal to them--almost always leave you living. I mean, after all, if they don't, they've got all those forms to fill out. But those cowboys on the Chevy didn't have any forms to fill out.

"Look," I said, "this has all gone off in the wrong direction. We just looking for some water."

One of the cowboys sitting on the hood of the car said: "I don't know what you looking for, and I don't give a shit. But I know what you found."

The door opened and the girl got out of the back seat. She came to lean on the fender. She wasn't an ugly girl, but she was terribly thin, with light-yellow skin and what looked to be cold sores on her mouth.

"What's gone happen?" the girl said.

The boy who had been in the back seat with her and was wearing cowboy clothes, too, came to stand beside her. "Shut up," he said. "When I want you to know something, I'll tell you."

Dog, who had stood without saying anything, slipped the straps on his pack and eased it to the ground. Almost nonchalantly he said: "Back home, we always figure people that keep on talking about sucking a dick--would."

I think it stunned them as much as it did me, and it stunned me a lot.

The girl leaning on the fender said: "You gone let that skinny fart talk to you like that, Edsel?"

Edsel, sitting straddle of the hood ornament, didn't even look at her but slapped her over sideways with the back of his hand.

"You prick," said Charne. "You dumb Grit prick."

"Now we just gone have us some goddamn fun," Edsel said, drawing his leg up to get over the hood ornament.

When he did, Dog shot the hood ornament off. Edsel froze with his leg in the air and turned yellower than the girl. My bowels felt very loose. Dog had a snub-nosed .38 Special in his hand. I knew it because my stepfather has one that he keeps in a drawer beside his bed. It is a very blue and blunt and nasty-looking little thing.

Dog spoke so softly and easily that we all unconsciously leaned to get the words. "I'm not really a good shot," he said. "I mighta shot your balls off, Edsel."

"Listen," said Edsel. "Listen, you don't under--"

Dog blew an empty beer can away where it sat on the hood beside another cowboy.

"You crazy?" asked the one who had got out of the back seat of the car. Then he made it a statement. "You a crazy man."

"I think I am," said Dog. "I think I just went crazy listenin' to you goddamn mouth." He watched the boy who leaned on the fender where the girl had been. "How'd you like me to shoot you right eye?"

"Please," said the one sitting beside Edsel. "Please--"

"You ain't fitten to live," said Dog.

"Ronnie, wait a minute," I said "You--"

Ronnie turned to look at me and his eyes seemed glazed and his mouth had a strange kind of droop to it. Or else I was so scared his face wasn't focusing.

"I think you better take Charne over yonder behind that rock," he said. "Just leave the packs here and go on over yonder behind that rock."

Edsel still had not put his leg down and he was crying. He was a huge man and he was crying soundlessly, his face twisted, tears running on his cheeks. He slowly and steadily shook his head.

"Ronnie," I said, "I'm not leaving you here with these guys."

"Yes, you are," he said. "This ain't none of your business."

"I'm not going to be part of this," I said. "We don't even know these guys."

"Don't let him hurt me," the girl said. She wasn't crying though. Edsel was still the only one crying.

"You better step over there behind the rock," Dog said. "This don't look to be none of your business. Charne, you take him on over there."

There didn't seem to be anything we could do. I didn't want the guys killed. But much more than that, I didn't want to get killed. We walked across the meadow, leaving them there in the late afternoon sunlight with Edsel still crying. Just as we stepped behind the rock, we heard two quick shots.

"Oh, Jesus, Jesus," said Charne, pressing her hands against her head. I don't know for sure, and I can't remember, but I think I was crying. I was probably crying, too.

There were two quick shots and then we heard the Chevrolet engine roar into life and saw the car leap into view around the rock, the rear end fishtailing, gravel and grass spewing from under the wheels. Ronnie came walking across the meadow toward us, carrying a six-pack in one hand and the .38 in the other. He was smiling. It was the same old Ronnie we'd known and he was smiling and there were no bodies lying in the meadow and I was so happy I stood right still and thanked God, prayed and made some promises I couldn't keep.

When he got to us, he lifted the six-pack to me. "Care for one of these Buds?"

I took the six-pack and held it in my hands, not taking one out of the package, but just standing there with it.

Ronnie waved the pistol off in the direction the car had gone. "I known we'd run into a sumbitch like that before this was over." He looked at the .38. "Probably should have shot him, too, if it weren't but just in the foot."

"But you didn't really--"

"Hell, no," he said. "I wouldn't shoot nobody."

"What if they come back?" said Charne.

"They ain't gone come back." Ronnie said. Looking at him, I believed him. He could say what he wanted to but I knew all of this hadn't been entirely an act. Those guys had seen his face, too. Ronnie'd kill you if things got just right.

"You know it's against the law to carry a firearm in a national forest," I stupidly said because it was the only thing I could think of and I thought I'd better say something before I screamed.

"I know," he said. "Listen, you want to make camp? I'm gone come over here and--" He put his arm around my shoulder and turned me. It was getting dark. Lights were coming on down in the valley. Far there to the left, we could see Erwin. "Well, I think I can see Fanny's house. I figured it out and see that little green-and-red light? That's the water tower. Now, if you look right up behind it and to the left, why, I think that's Fanny's house. I'm gone set over here and have me a beer and wonder what ole Fanny's doing in there with them younguns of hers. I mean, if you'll make the camp, I think I will."

"Sure," I said. "I'll get everything set up and start some food."

"The spring's off behind that rise of ground." He pointed. "Just where the bushes start there." He smiled. "Edsel swore on his mother it was and aye God I bet it's right where he said it is."

"Right," I said.

I was just turning to go when he vaguely waved that pistol he was still carrying. "By the way," he said.

"Yeah?"

"I don't think I like that name Dog no more," he said. "I think that joke's got old."

"Right," I said. "Right, Ronnie."

"Ronald," he said.

"OK, Ronald," I said.

Charne and I walked away together to get the packs.

"God, he's something, isn't he?" she said.

"He sure as hell is," I said.

Ronald didn't eat any supper that night. He sat in the grass watching that light behind the water tower until it went out.