Page 29 of A Boy Called Lovesong

I picked up the bourbon and heard the sharp clink of the bottleneck against the rim of my glass as I poured another drink.

Somewhere a jukebox played Olivia Newton-John’s “Let Me Be There.”

Somewhere, someone took to the stage and sang a damn fine version of Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.”

Yet the one song that kept playing over and over in my head was a violin solo of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

CHAPTER 7

After Nashville,the landscape changed dramatically and so did the weather. From Tennessee we headed south into Mississippi. Rivers began to snake across the land, swamps appeared beneath the shadows of trees, dark and still like they had secrets to keep, and everything started to cling and sway and drip—

Like the humidity clinging to the air;

The braids of Spanish moss swaying in the trees;

The sweat dripping down the nape of my neck.

Occasionally Joan Collins rattled and gave a jolt, but for the most part she seemed to hold together pretty well, at least at first. Whatever the mechanic in Nashville had done—something to do with “oil filters” or “cooling systems” or “the timing belt”—it had been worth the four hundred and eighty dollars. How long the Dynasty would hold together though was anyone’s guess.

All I wanted was to get to Clara’s Crossing in one piece.

We crossed the border from Mississippi into Louisiana, and the crisp New York autumn we left behind seemed like a distant memory. It grew too hot to drive with the window down, much to Chet’s chagrin, and so we sealed up the cabin and drove as far as we could with cool air blowing on us from the conditioningunit. It was somewhere south of Baton Rouge when the air-con packed it in, blasting hot air from the vents that turned the interior of the car into an instant furnace. I shut it off and rolled down the windows again, letting the sticky air and a symphony of droning insects envelop us once more.

On the near horizon, black, densely packed storm clouds tried to split the sky with lightning and crack open the heat. But all it seemed to do was ratchet up the pressure, the rumbling thunder only adding to the mounting tension in the air.

Suddenly the navigation system on my phone was telling me to take the next right.

The next right was a dirt road running long and straight between two cotton fields, heading west.

The rear of the white Dynasty quickly turned brown from the cloud of dust that billowed in our wake. Joan Collins gave a splutter of disapproval.

In the cotton fields, a billion bugs thrummed in waves, as though warning of our disruption on this otherwise deathly still day. At times their chorus was low and soft, at other times ear-piercing, causing Chet to whimper.

The sky was low, as though pressing down upon the flat earth. A growl of thunder joined with the insects, seemingly opposing our presence that day.

It felt as though we traveled for miles in the claustrophobic heat before finally, we arrived at a dirt crossroad.

The road we had driven east to west on now intersected a road running north to south in a perfect X, both roads deserted and stretching long and straight as far as the eye could see.

I braked the car in the middle of the crossroads.

I mopped my brow with one palm, then wiped it on my shirt before clutching the wheel with both hands again. I noticed a handful of cotton pickers working in a field that stretched all the way to a cluster of skeletal trees gate-keeping a nearby bayou,and I muttered to myself, “Don’t they have machines to do that sort of thing these days?”

I looked around us.

There wasn’t a single other vehicle on either road, but there was an old sign posted on the edge of the intersection.

The sign was itself an X made from two planks of wood.

One read—Clara’s.

The other read—Crossing.

My phone promptly announced, “You have arrived at your destination.”

I cut the engine of the car, pushed open my door and stepped up to the sign. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand, looked up the length of one empty road, then down the length of the other. I breathed in the thick, hot air, then huffed it out with a confused and annoyed, “You’ve gotta be shitting me.”

The volume of the insects rose to a deafening crescendo, and when their warning song died down again, I heard another noise trying to cling to the hot autumn sky.

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