In the Black Camaro

Through the orange glow of taillights, I crossed the dirt road, entered the half-mile of darkness and owl screech, tangled briar and fallen trunk, followed the yellow beam of Billy Parker's flashlight down the slick needle-hill, half crawling, half sliding and kicking for footholds, tearing up whole handfuls of scrub brush and leaf mold until I jumped the mud bank, walked the ankle-deep creek, the last patch of pine, the gully, and knelt at the highway stretching in front of Billy Parker's house, spotted the black Chevy Camaro parked under a maple not fifty feet from the window where Billy Parker rocked in and out of view, studying in the bad light of a table lamp the fine print of his Allstate policy. I cut the flashlight, checked up and down the highway. Behind me the screech growing distant, fading into woods, but coming on a network of tree frogs signaling along the creek. Only that, and the quiet of my heels coming down on asphalt as I crossed the two-lane and stood at the weedy edge of Billy Parker's yard, stood in the lamp glare of the living room where plans were being made to make me rich and thought of a boat and Johnson outboard, of all the lures on a K-Mart wall, of reels and graphite rods, coolers of beer, weedy banks of dark fishy rivers, and of Billy Parker rocking in his chair, studying his coverage, his bank account, his layoff at Lockheed, his wife laboring in the maternity ward of the Cobb General Hospital. For all of this, I crouched in the shadow of fender and maple, popped the door on the Camaro, and found in the faint house-light drifting through the passenger's window the stripped wires hanging below the dash. I took the driver's seat, kicked the clutch, then eased again as I remembered the glove box and the pint of Seagram's Billy Parker had not broken the seal on. Like an alarm the tree frogs went off in the woods. I drank until they hushed and I could hear through cricket chatter the rockers on Billy Parker's chair grinding ridges into his living room floor, worry working on him like hard time. Then a wind working in river grass, a red current slicing around stumps and river snags, a boat-drift pulling against an anchor as I swayed in the seat of the black Camaro, grappled for the wires hanging in darkness between my knees, saw through the tinted windshield by a sudden white moon rolling out of the clouds, a riverbank two counties away, a place to jump and roll on the soft shoulder of the gravel road, a truck in a thicket a half-mile downstream.