of wet colors in his eyes divides out into separate stained glass windows again, and by then he feels Jenny’s arm, the lightest touch, around his waist.
“What am I doing wrong, Jen?” he asks, not looking around at her. “I’ve give it my whole life, and I’m forty fuckin’ years old, for Christ sake, and . . .”
“Liar,” she says.
“And I still hadn’t got a pot to piss in, and . . .”
“Liar.”
“Well, forty in a few months.”
“Seven months.”
“Well, I . . .”
“Listen, Trav. And I’m saying this with love, but don’t start any self-pity shit, okay? You’ve above that.”
“I’m just saying . . .”
“I said, you’re above that.” The arm around his waist gives him a hard squeeze. “We’re good. It’s gonna happen. We’re right on the edge of something breaking through. I can feel it.”
But the bitterness in Travis hasn’t run its course yet.
“Yeah,” he snorts, half pulling away from her. “Name me one person who’s broke through and made it at forty.”
“K. T. Oslin,” she says, without having to think. “Record of the Year, New Artist of the Year, her first album goes gold after just three . . .”
“Yeah, well name me a man that has,” Travis says. “A damn arc-welder, somebody looks like hell. Somebody I can identify with.”
Her arm on his waist falls away as if he’s burned it. When he looks up she’s right where he’s looking, straight in his face.
“You think it don’t hurt me?” she says. Her shoulders are shaking, and her cheeks are red even where there’s no blusher. “You think it don’t hurt me, when they do that shit like they just done? Huh? You think I don’t have feelings too?”
There’s nothing he can say to this, except to reach up and touch her shoulder, her arm, get the connection back again. But she won’t have it. She twists away.
“I wish I had a little door right here,” she says, slapping hard with her hand the place on the dress where her heart is. She’s shaking worse, and gritting her teeth to keep from shouting. “A little door, and I could open it up and show you how much it hur–” The sobs choke her voice off. “How much it . . .” When the tears start she covers her face with both hands. She hates the way she looks when she’s crying.
“Jen? Come here, Jen . . .” This time she doesn’t pull away, lets him hold her.
“I’m sorry,” Travis says. “I’m real sorry I started that.”
Her sobs start to even out, and she wipes at her eyes with her hands.
“I’ve just been real down in the dumps,” he says. “Stuff accumulates, and it gets to me.”
He feels her nod into his shoulder.
“I’ve been down, too,” she says. “It’s kind of rough at home right now.”
Home translating as the current shithead she’s going out with, Travis knows. The guy answers the phone a lot, and Travis is pretty sure he’s moved in.
“We don’t need to bring each other down,” she says, still talking into his shoulder. “We need to build each other up.”
“I know that. I just forget sometimes.”
Outside, in the cool sunshine, a line of tourists is starting to form at the front doors when they take the key to TeeBo.
Back at the van, Brenda rouses up a little from her nap when they get in. “How’d it go?” she asks them.
“They seemed to like us pretty good,” Travis says. Looking at the windshield, not at Jenny.
“Great,” Brenda says, turning over and straightening the spread across herself. “I knew you’d do good.”
“We left them a tape,” Jenny tells her, as Travis backs out of the parking lot and heads for the ramp to the interstate.
Old Crazy walked the roads most all the time, his back bowed by the bulk of a clanking-full towsack, a shaggy cocoon that rode on him across the county’s blacktops, held to his neck by a skeleton-fingered grasp.
He put his secrets in there, people said, and juices of his craziness. And any day now, any year, the chrysalis of roadside trash that grew inside might burst, transformed under the honeyed sun one morning—rending the sack with a whoop of torn burlap, a dream-sized lunatic butterfly of all colors, jigging crazily through the air to terrorize the town, leaving the little man discarded in the road-edge weeds to dry brown in the sun like the husk of a sprouted seed.
People doubted his mind because he wouldn’t give a body the time of day and wouldn’t take a ride if it was offered. He traveled on his own feet or not at all, and he walked his own path, ignoring everyone who drove the roads. He kept his own hours, and spent them equally in all seasons.
His name began in years past as “That Crazy Man.” But when he became as familiar to people as an old tree, they called him “That Old Crazy Man,” though he wasn’t quite yet old. And finally, dropping “That” because there was none other, and dropping “Man” because it was plain to see that the roadworn whiskered shape was a man, he became forever “Old Crazy.”
He had been seen in the worst of summer, at midday, walking the throbbing pavement. From far off, the genie waves of sun dancing on old tar wizened his body to a funhouse spirit, a carnival-mirror man with ever-walking legs.
He had been seen in prime autumn, on the Gristmill Road near evening, where cool winds spit red and orange flakes of fire into his path from a gaggle of sourwood and wax-maple trees by the millpond.
He had been seen in bare winter, on Blacktown redrock trails, his feet leaving shallow dents that the straight-falling silver rain filled to brimming, to be the next day’s ice.
He had been seen in the days of first greenness, in the meadow by the river under Mankiller Bridge, when waterfog sat cold like cream on the grass, nigh to his waist, and sunrise showed the legless top stump of him gliding on the surface while his lost feet, below him, squeak-harped the young weeds.
And he had been seen . . .
“Son of a bitch, lookit ’im eat that chicken!” Milton Cardwell whispered to the other boy as they crouched behind thick hedges of honeysuckle, watching the cabin.
“Thought he just et folks,” Leon Butler whispered back, with a beatific grin to show he’d invented the horrible tale, just then.
The old man was sitting on a rusted oil drum, his feet propped on the rotten porch bannister. His eyes were closed ecstatically tight, and his tiny white
