Page 60 of A Boy Called Lovesong

“What the hell does the Landry family need with the cotton from Clara’s Crossing?”

I asked the question to Chet, who sat with me in the pickup while Cybil had gone to fill out some paperwork in one of the small office buildings. When she reappeared, a Landry employee signaled to a nearby truck then pointed to Cybil’s pickup.

Cybil oversaw the transfer of the brown cotton into the back of the Landry truck, then closed up the back of her pickup, waved to the driver of the Landry truck, then climbed behind the wheel of her pickup.

I looked from her to the industrial-scale factories surrounding us, then back at Cybil. “I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“I don’t get why the Landry company even bothers with what Clara’s Crossing has to offer. Don’t get me wrong, working in that field looks like the hardest job on earth. I’m not mocking the work that Lovesong or you or the other cotton pickers do. It’s just… is it worth it? When you look at this gigantic corporate machine, churning out cotton by the ton… why keep one plantation operating like it’s 1929?”

“Because this is the Deep South.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Which means there are some things you don’t mess with.”

She started the pickup and we chugged off the premises of the Landry Cotton Corporation.

We made two more stops before leaving Baton Rouge, or at least the outskirts of it which was as far as we needed to go, since that’s where the Landry factory was, as well as the spare parts mechanic and the car rental office that Earl had found in a Yellow Pages so old the pages were actually brown.

At the mechanics, Cybil gave a cigar-chomping man a list of parts that Earl had given her. The guy told her he could get them by tomorrow.

After that, we stopped in at the car rental office.

“Sedan or SUV?” said the woman behind the counter.

“I don’t care, so long as it can get me back to New York.” I was distracted by the fan in the corner that was set to high speed and positioned too close to an indoor plant, shredding its leaves with atatatatatatatatatatatat.

I kept glancing at it, desperate to move the plant an inch one way or the other, or switch the fan off altogether.

But the woman didn’t even seem to notice. She was too busy peering over the counter and looking down at my feet where Chet sat. “That your dog?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Pets are not allowed in any of our vehicles. Do you intend to take the dog with you?”

“Of course I intend to take the dog with me,” I fumed in the pickup on the way back to Clara’s Crossing. “He’s my fucking dog. He’s all I’ve got!”

“That a boy, get it out,” Cybil encouraged, taking one hand off the wheel for a moment to shake her fist in solidarity.

My anger turned quickly to a frustrated sigh. “Only thing now is, how the hell am I ever gonna get outta here?”

We were on the road back to Clara’s Crossing. Chet was sitting on my lap, panting and twitching his nose at the hot air blowing in through the open window, while dark clouds rolled across the sky, threatening to unleash another late afternoon storm just like the one the day before.

“Relax,” Cybil said. “Earl’s got you covered. He may be kinda slow. He may stand there lookin’ at your busted ass engine and scratchin’ his butt for longer than he needs to. But beneath that lazy-lookin’ exterior of his is one helluva mechanic. Have faith. Till then, you just gonna have to—”

Cybil suddenly winced in pain.

She jerked one arm off the wheel and clutched it bent to her chest.

“Cybil? You okay?”

She grunted and the pickup began to swerve across the road.

I grabbed for the wheel and turned it.

Cybil doubled over in her seat.

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