to live. Har! If the traffic didn’t kill you, the whores on Peachtree would pick you clean as a chicken! Look, you ain’t got family to speak of. You twenty-one, alone, no prospects of getting laid in Salisbury, business virgin, free as a bird. Un-a-ttached,” gesturing with his cigar. “Why shouldn’t you be our man in the Peach State?”
Why not indeed? Felix had now adjusted his mind to Galilee, Georgia. He saw it as a venture.
A mission.
A vocation.
An . . . assignment.
“Course, nobody wants to go to Georgia—cultural desert. Breeding ground for the dumbest politicians on God’s earth. Get on TV and announce the world is six thousand years old. Look like fools to people from Connecticut. So I guess damn Darwin never happened, huh?”
Quattlebaum threw his arms up in despair, exposing patches of underarm sweat, even though his office was excessively air-conditioned.
“But look at it this way, son—Trinity is giving you the chance to learn this business from the ground up. Your area is undeveloped. Untouched. Eden. You the first wave of a commun-i-ca-tion re-vo-lu-tion,” Quattlebaum said, punctuating the air with his chewed, unlit cigar on each syllable. Felix prized his boss’s penchant for the poetic, except for the profanity.
“The fields are white. Reap the harvest. There’s a bundle to be made down there from salt-of-the-earth country people. And you are just the guy to do it, I say, thou art the man. Your hour has come.” Quattlebaum slapped him hard on the arm, which Felix received as encouragement, though it may have been intended as threat.
“Our business plan is to swoop down into these jerkwater towns, tell them that the communication revolution has come near, and scoop up the business that’s ignored by the big boys. Sign them to eternal contracts as tough to break out of as for a pregnant bride to get into her wedding dress. Give it your forty days and nights and then we’ll see what’s next for you with Trinity.”
Felix wanted the spiritual depth to look at the project in just that way, though Trinity Communications at this point wasn’t as extensive as it appeared in Mr. Quattlebaum’s imagination. The company called Trinity was named for the North Carolina town of Quattlebaum’s nativity, inspired by the triune of cell phones, data delivery, and e-marketing. Nobody to whom Felix explained the name got it.
Felix’s wing of Trinity Communications assembled communications packages for businesses, particularly very small ones—a farmer, wife, and unmarried-adult-son-on-a-tractor sort of businesses.
On his way out of the office, Felix had tried to express to Mr. Quattlebaum his genuine resolve for the mission ahead, his disinterest in the paltry salary, and his eagerness to make exodus in Georgia. Quattlebaum glared and said, “Don’t play cute with me, son. I don’t take to smartasses. You go down there, do your work, show what you got. I say, show what you got. Do that, and Trinity is your oyster, I say Trinity is your oyster.”
Mr. Quattlebaum’s business aspirations exceeded Trinity’s achievements. Trinity Communications consisted of Quattlebaum, Felix, and three alleged salespersons rumored to be wandering in North Carolina and Virginia. Felix had yet to meet them.
* * *
Thus it was on the sixth day in the sixth month that Felix Goforth Luckie, Jr.—called Kicks among the Spiritual Trailblazers Discussion Group at State—at last came to the exit to Galilee (six barren miles after the exit to Hope, Georgia). Here he would establish a beachhead for Trinity Communications. On the left side of the highway he saw the first traces of Galilee—a weedy, defunct Esso gas station next to a former sock factory, both boarded up. Across the road was a one-time vegetable stand, padlocked. Two scrawny chickens free-ranged in the dust. The only functioning business between Hope and Galilee was a junkyard piled with rusting cars being consumed by kudzu. Just beyond was a peeling billboard: “Welcome to Galilee. Home of World Famous LAPUP All-Beef Dog Food. And Homer Wisencock, Too.”
His phone buzzed. He retrieved it and read the arcane text: ? THER? GIT SET CHK MON PUSH GOT. GEORGE HARRISON.
Though Felix had been in Quattlebaum’s employ a mere six days, he expertly decoded the message like a CIA cryptographer: Have you arrived in Galilee by now? Secure housing, unpack belongings, sort out and settle in. I will check with you on Monday. Be certain to push the new Gotcha line when you begin making sales calls.
Mr. Quattlebaum affected signing his text messages with improbable names from the sixties. Thus George Harrison.
When Felix saw in the twilight a sign reading, “Robert’s Drive-In One Mile Ahead,” he remembered that he hadn’t eaten since morning, having been preoccupied with his quest, unconcerned with his body, and robbed of appetite by the heat. Now that he was in range of his goal, his stomach was free to grumble. Home cooking, he thought. First time to break bread in Galilee.
The neon sign over the front door read, “ROBER D IVE-IN,” but at least the sign was blinking. Pulling into the graveled lot, as a cloud of gray, dry dust settled, he was relieved to see an ancient Chevrolet truck out back. ROBER D IVE-IN must be open. Can’t beat a small-town eatery.
As he opened the restaurant’s front door a couple of large flies seized the opportunity and buzzed in before him.
“No air-conditioning,” Felix said aloud, more in wonder than in scorn.
“Nope,” replied a man who wiped the counter with a brownish terry cloth rag. “Tore up. Decide if you wants to stay and eat. No use complainin’.”
“Oh, no complaints from me,” said Felix, smiling. “I’ve just driven all the way from North Carolina without AC, so I’m fine. I really like things kept natural.” The little café was even hotter than the world outside. So hot at 6:30 in the evening, what must it have been like at noon?
“‘Not to decide is to decide,’” mumbled the man. “John Paul Sawt. You sweatin’ almost much as me. And you ain’t even working. My girl says I sweat because I’m fat. Looking at you sweat so heavy, and you so scrawny, says to me she don’t know what she’s talking about. Sit up here to the counter. I won’t have to walk so far to hep you.”
“Sure,” said Felix cheerfully. “Just looking for home cooking. May I see a menu?”
“We got hot dogs, some meatloaf, and”—here he turned his ample torso slightly and with a minimum of motion opened the refrigerator behind him, peered in and pronounced—“a bunch of spaghetti from our last Eyetalion night . . . ‘Hell is other people.’”
Luckie played it safe with a couple of reliable American hot dogs and sat upon his stool in sweaty anticipation.
The cook waddled into the kitchen, where he disappeared for a longer period of time than is usually required to warm hot dogs. Should I have risked the meatloaf? Felix mused.
When the cook emerged with two hot dogs in buns indistinguishable under reddish brown chili, swiping the sweat from his forehead with his free hand, he looked beyond Felix and warned, “Better watch your stuff. ‘No exit.’” Felix was confused until the man wordlessly gestured with his rag toward the front parking lot. Wheeling around, Felix saw two guys busily pulling clothes out of his car, hauling plunder toward their old pickup.
Felix bolted off the stool. “Hey, hey! What are you doing?”
One of the thieves was holding a stack of Felix’s shirts, along with
