Free Father and Son by Larry Brown Page B

onebound, a long flow of bunched muscles sailing over in a gray flash. Woodrow had made to touch the brake but said Damn softly and kept going. They both looked after where the deer had penetrated the solid wall of leaves without a sign but for one single quaking frond.
    â€œI wish I knew what to tell you,” said Woodrow. The car rocked and swayed a little on its bad shocks as he sped up and shifted into third. “Maybe after he stays home for a while he’ll appreciate it. You think it did him any good?”
    â€œI doubt it.”
    The trees began thinning a little as they went on and in places it looked as if a bomb had been dropped except for the lack of any craters, the land open and catching full sun and dotted with stumps and shattered tree trunks, the tracks of dozers that like some gargantuan beast had devoured the shade. Then the woods closed around them again.
    They drove into a deep hollow with a sharp curve and met a pickup right in the bottom of it. Woodrow steered carefully on the very edge of the road, gravel rattling against the underside of the car, rocks flying into the ditches. Virgil looked out and saw a six-foot pit alongside them. It was bone dry and coated with dust, littered with scrubby weeds and pebbles. Up on the banks the remnants of old fences hung on some of the trees. The road was washboarded in places and the car bucked hard when they ran over it, the windows jarring as if they would break in their frames. Virgil looked over his shoulder but it wasn’t bothering the sleeping hound.
    â€œHow’s your puppy?” Woodrow said.
    â€œHe’s all right. I need to worm him sometime.”
    â€œI got some over at the house I can let you have. If we catch old Nimrod we’ll take him and Naman back over to the house and put em up and feed em and I’ll let you have some of it.”
    â€œI appreciate it, Woodrow.”
    â€œYou in a hurry to get to the store? It ain’t much further over here to Miss Hattie’s place.”
    â€œI ain’t in no hurry.”
    They came down out of the hills and rattled along a steep cut that had been graded with mule-drawn equipment back in the thirties and they leveled out in a small creek bottom where cotton was planted. Big patches of it stretched away to stands of trees and the sky opened before them boundless but for those trees, a deep blue where hawks feathered the thermal drifts or rode low over the fence rows or perched on posts holding lengths of barbed wire along the road. They went over a shallow branch by a shoddy bridge floored with timbers that rumbled loosely under the tires of the car.
    â€œAin’t you glad you don’t have to pick that cotton?” Woodrow said.
    Virgil nodded, watching it, the sun warm on his arm where he rested it on the window frame.
    â€œYep,” he said.
    â€œDid Glen have to pick any?”
    â€œHe ain’t said. I guess he had to do whatever they told him. Said he couldn’t sleep at night for all the noise.”
    They were on a pretty good road now and Woodrow sped up a little, raising a dust cloud behind them. They went a long way across the bottom and Virgil pulled his makings out and rolled another smoke.
    â€œYou been up all night?” he said.
    â€œI slept a little right before daylight. I had a fire built to keep the mosquitoes off me and I curled up next to it for a while.”
    They started slowing down just before the crossroads and Woodrow came nearly to a stop, glancing both ways before he turned to the right and went on along another short straightaway and climbed a hill. Virgil lit his smoke with the wind flaring the flame. At the top of the hill Woodrow slowed the car, shifted down, and turned onto a side road pastplanted pines and a few old abandoned houses. They went across a wooden bridge and through a cattle gap and out into a pasture full of wildflowers that brushed at the sides of the car. He stopped near a line of sweet gums