Chapter 1: Jim Frank's Place

Jim Frank had what it took to be a junk man—he saw value in everything. He collected things other people threw away in the hope that someone else would come around to wanting them again. Things that no one wanted again just became part of Jim Frank’s place.

Everybody in Davis Corners had made a trip to Jim Frank’s place, just off State Road Forty-one, at least once. Most went to drop something off, usually grateful just to be rid of it, but some would haggle for a fair trade or money in return for what they had brought. Others went to find an old part, spare lamp, or some odd what-have-you, so that Jim Frank was able to scratch out a living. Over the years, though, more items had been left than had been taken away, so his place had become a sprawling junk-reef of rusting cars and machinery, spotted enameled appliances, old furniture, and racks of used clothing put out on sunny days.

Jim Frank negotiated most of his deals from the sagging gray porch attached to the front of his house. He would sit in an old caned chair, alternately stroking his pointed, grizzled chin and pulling at the soiled, white tee shirt under his faded overalls. His reedy voice would whine in a sharp twang as he artfully avoided showing disdain for the offer while at the same time showing no interest in it either. Anyone who had hauled an item out to his place would have no desire to lug it back. Likewise, anyone who was looking for something at Jim Frank’s place was already at desperation’s end. There were no competitive bids or comparative shopping if circumstances had landed you at Jim Frank’s place.

The porch on which these transactions took place was covered with over a hundred unmatched hubcaps, as if their chrome was the precious metal that backed the vague currency in which Jim Frank did his commerce—this exchange of other people’s discards. Jim Frank had never sold or traded one of these hubcaps to anyone. Nonetheless, every time he caught a glimpse of glittering metal in a weedy ditch or at the edge of a sandy field, he would stop his dilapidated pick-up, search out the hubcap, and take it home to be nailed up on his porch. Other people wouldn’t waste their time by stopping on one of those old farm roads to pick up a dented hubcap. Jim Frank, however, knew that time was lost no matter what you did. A hubcap, on the other hand, was something that lasted.

But something else was lurking among the debris than just the cast-off possessions of Davis Corners. There was the secret about how Wes Tillman had died and how that death would reach out to his grandson, Nate Williams, now four decades later.

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On Saturday afternoons, Henry Givens would pick up his wife’s nephew, Nate, and the two of them would head for Jim Frank’s place. They would cruise down State Road Forty-one in Henry’s 1957 Cadillac, pulling into Thompson’s Gas Station and Grocery Store along the way for provisions. Thompson’s was a whitewashed general store with a crushed oyster-shell driveway and two gas pumps in front. It had a screen door with a worn-out spring so that it swung open too easily and too wide, making a slow, raspy sound before it hit against the outside wall. Then it wouldn’t slap shut until ten seconds later, just long enough to forget about it, so that it would startle you when it finally did. Hank Thompson would let Nate fill up the Cadillac’s weekly tank of gas while Henry went inside and bought a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. When they’d get back in the car, Henry would let Nate open up the cigarettes and light one for him. Nate would use the Cadillac’s lighter and always left a smoldering hunk of tobacco on the red-hot coil. Then they’d roll down State Road Forty-one with the uncle pulling on a Pall Mall and flying the Caddy and the nephew savoring the combined smell and taste of gasoline and tobacco.

This particular Saturday was in May of 1963, and Nate was thirteen years old. The school year was just about over. Nate looked out the window and watched the edge of the road zip by, allowing himself to be pleasantly hypnotized by its blurred shoulder and the sound of the Caddy’s tires on the blacktop.

“Every man needs a dis-sanctuary,” Henry said, rousing Nate from his trance. He let out the smoke from a long drag off a Pall Mall. “And Jim Frank’s place is mine.”

Dis-sanctuary was a word Henry had made up. He felt that if a sanctuary was a holy place where a man could go to be protected from the wicked, a dis-sanctuary was a wicked place where a man could go to be protected from the righteous. In Henry’s case, righteous meant his wife, Hattie, and being wicked largely meant smoking Pall Mall cigarettes and drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer on Saturday afternoons.

In Davis Corners, wicked also included Miss Edna, the flirtatious waitress who worked at Cole’s truck stop. Henry’s only enjoyment other than visiting Jim Frank’s place was occasionally sitting at the counter at Coles bantering with Miss Edna and glancing furtively at the cleavage she so artfully deployed.

Nate was still confused about sex. He had a notion that something went on below the waist between married people, but the details were vague. Even so, he could tell that whatever sex was, Miss Edna must somehow be close to the heart of it. She wore a tight, pink uniform with a flash of a red slip showing through the slit at the bottom. Sometimes, if she leaned over just right to lay down a cup of coffee, the gap between the top buttons on her uniform would part just enough to show the lacy edge of a bra of the same color and enough cleavage to make a man miss his mouth with his fork and hurt himself. There wasn’t a trucker in the Southeast who hadn’t wished for that top button to pop—Henry, too, for that matter.

“One of these days,” he said, “that top button’s going pop right off and put my eye out.” He squinted one eye shut. “It’ll be worth it, though. I’ll still have one good eye left to catch that fleeting glimpse of heaven in red lace.” He looked at Nate for a reaction.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to be looking at that stuff,” Nate said.

Talking about sex with a grown-up embarrassed Nate, even if it was just his Uncle Henry, who just barely met the criteria for grown-up in spite of his thinning gray hair and spotted hands.

“If the woman didn’t want us looking at her underwear, she’d wear white undies like everybody else. There’s no reason for a woman to wear colored underwear if she doesn’t mean to be seen in it.”

Nate could see no reasonable counter to his uncle’s argument and went back to staring at the rolling north Alabama farm country passing evenly by his open window. Henry and Nate talked about a lot more on these trips than just Miss Edna. During these drives, Henry had taught Nate how steam engines worked, laid out in vivid detail all of the major battles of the Civil War, and introduced him to Aristotle’s Poetics. Henry had quit school when he was just a little older than Nate in order to help support his family. He had tried to make up for what he had missed by educating himself, and in fact, had probably acquired more knowledge dropping out of school than he would have by staying in. He read constantly and was in the habit of picking up a volume of the encyclopedia at random and reading wherever he opened it. He would process this new information by lecturing Nate at the end of the week in the Caddy. It made sense, then, that most of their Saturday conversations had alphabetical themes. One week the topics would all start with the letter “t” and another week they all began with “b.” Today, however, Henry was stuck on “e” for Edna.

“Miss Edna’s different from the normal breed of women,” he finally said.

She was certainly different from the women Nate knew, namely, his mother, Aunt Hattie, and Grandmother Tillman. He couldn’t imagine any of them wanting to be seen in their underwear—be it red, white, or blue.

“Most women want to take what’s free and fun-loving in a man and domesticate it right out of him, the way they’d housebreak a dog.” While the great feminist minds of Nate’s generation were growing up, he was visiting junkyards with his Uncle Henry. It would take Nate the next thirty years to repair his relationships with women.

“Miss Edna likes men the way they are. She laughs at their jokes, listens to their stories, and you know, wears red underwear.” Henry winked to suggest something by his last comment.

“If Miss Edna likes men, how come she’s not married,” Nate asked.

Henry laughed and smoke came out his nose. “Miss Edna’s not the kind of girl you marry.”

What Henry wasn’t saying outright was that Miss Edna seemed like she enjoyed “doing it.” Not that anyone was known to have actually “done it” with her or knew about her doing it, it’s just that she had an air about her of one who “did it” and liked it. Everybody in Davis Corners just assumed she did. Henry enjoyed believing she did. In fact, it was an important belief in his life—the way accounting clerks read cowboy novels out of a need to believe there are adventurous lives, even if those lives are not their own. In addition to being confused about the biological mechanics of sex, Nate was equally befuddled by this duplicity about sex and marriage: If married people did it—in fact were supposed to do it—why would a man be against marrying a woman who liked to do it?

They came up to Jim Frank’s place and the topic of Miss Edna and Nate’s adolescent fog about sex were put away for a while. Henry pulled off the highway and slowly drove up the rutted, dirt driveway, being careful not to spring the Caddy’s wheel alignment. Jim Frank mysteriously appeared from somewhere in the junk-reef and waved them in.

“You old junk dog,” Henry said. “How’s it going?”

“Got any better, I couldn’t stand it,” Jim Frank said with a slight grin and shake of his head.

Jim Frank gave Nate a quick nod and mumbled his name. That pleased Nate and he blushed noticeably. If he’d been with his parents, he’d have just been the kid-in-tow and would’ve been ignored. Being with his Uncle Henry, though, gave him a status more approaching adulthood, and therefore, he warranted a nod and a mumbled acknowledgment. Nate gave a nod and a mumbled “sir” in return. Jim Frank had no last name that anyone knew of. No one called him just “Jim” or “Mr. Frank.” It was always “Jim Frank” if you were a grown-up or “sir” if you were a kid.

Henry pulled two cans of beer from the six-pack’s cardboard carton and opened them with a church-key Jim Frank kept tied to the porch rail. It was the kind that had a triangular can opener on one end and a bottle opener on the other. There was the crisp sound of cutting metal followed by a whoosh and a small rush of foam as the point dug into each can top and opened the first hole. The second hole only made the cutting sound of the sharp church key tearing the thin metal top of the can. He passed one of the cans to Jim Frank, and both men drew hard on the first sip then softly let out the mandatory exclamations that accompanied the first cold beer of the week. Henry tapped the pack of Pall Malls until two or three fanned out, and he offered a smoke to Jim Frank. The men each took one, and the way Jim Frank ran his fingers appreciatively up and down the tightly packed cylinder of the cigarette belied that he was more accustomed to roll-your-owns. Jim Frank lit both of them with an old, burnished Zippo he pulled out of the bib pocket of his overalls. For a moment the air was heavy with the smell of tobacco smoke and lighter fluid reminding Nate of the smell and taste of lighting his uncle’s cigarette at the gas station. Henry laid the red pack of cigarettes on top of the unopened beers, now sitting between the two men on the porch floor. This gesture established that the beer and cigarettes were common property and dispensed with the embarrassing need to say “please” and “thank-you” every time.

“Any business this week?” Henry said. He wasn’t being personal and Jim Frank knew not to take it as such. Henry loved to look at Jim Frank’s new acquisitions and hear the stories that usually accompanied them, and Jim Frank enjoyed showing and telling.

“Picked up a washer/dryer set from Mabel Adams this week,” Jim Frank said with a nod pointing to the west side of the junk reef.

They walked off in the direction of where the appliances could be viewed.

“You gonna to be able to salvage anything useful off them,” Henry asked.

Bud Adams, Mabel’s husband, owned the Davis Corners hardware store, and Henry couldn’t imagine he’d let go of machinery if there were anything still useful to it.

“No need to salvage anything,” Jim Frank said. “Bud says they both work fine. Mabel just wanted new.” Jim Frank pulled back a tarp that he had spread over them. “Bud wanted twenty-five dollars for the pair, but I could tell he needed them out of there, so I hedged.”

“Oh yeah?” Henry smiled. “What’d you haggle him down to?”

Jim Frank cocked his jaw and rubbed his chin. “Didn’t give him nothing, and Miss Mabel tipped me a dollar after I put them on my truck.” After a second he grinned widely. “Bud helped, but she didn’t give him nothing.”

Henry laughed. “Old Bud’s not much of a negotiator, is he? It’s a wonder his hardware store’s still in business.”

Jim Frank looked serious for a moment, then his face relaxed. “Well, Bud and Miss Mabel like ‘new.’ Maybe that’s why he does okay with the store—everything’s new in a store.” He seemed genuinely relieved by having found an explanation.

“How come you put the washer and dryer here?” Henry was always fascinated about Jim Frank’s way of sorting things in the junkyard. “What’s the ‘toonickle’ to it?”

Toonickle was a private word between Henry and Jim Frank. Henry had once asked him what the paradigm was that determined where things went. Henry liked important-sounding words like “paradigm.” Jim Frank thought he’d said “pair of dimes” and had allowed it was only a “two-nickel” system at best. Henry had been delighted by the response and decided that “toonickle” was a fine word, meaning an informal model not defined enough to be a paradigm.

“Easy enough toonickle to this one,” Jim Frank said. “I already had this other old washing machine here, so I put these two next to it.”

“How come not way over there next to that other washing machine?” Henry pointed to another washer twenty-five yards away. Every Saturday these two men played this game with each other.

“That washer needs a motor,” Jim Frank answered matter-of-factly. “So I put that washer next to that old Rambler, where I took out a motor—the one I sold to Skip Edwards for that old jalopy he was working on.”

“This other washer need a motor,” Henry asked.

“Don’t know, it don’t work.” Jim Frank shrugged. “Probably does.”

“Why don’t you put it with the other broken one?”

“This one was here first,” Jim Frank said.

“Well, when the other one came in, why didn’t you put it here? That way all your washers and dryers would be in the same place.” Henry needed things to be structured.

“The other one needed a motor, so I put it next to the Rambler,” Jim Frank said patiently.

“The problem is you’ve got two themes going at once. You’ve got some stuff arranged by what they are and some stuff arranged by what they need. How’s a person going to find anything?”

“They just have to ask me.”

Henry was beaten at today’s game. The only possible comeback would be to ask what would happen if Jim Frank wasn’t there, but Jim Frank was always there. Jim Frank’s place was just an extension of the man himself.

Jim Frank, Henry, and Nate went back to the porch and the men opened two more beers and lit up another couple of Pall Malls. As usual, Henry started picking on Jim Frank about his statue.

“When you going to give that poor boy a decent pond to fish in?”

Henry was referring to the old, ceramic statue of a black boy fishing. Jim Frank had set the statue on a stump in front of his porch and had put an old hat on its head and a cane pole in its hand. Someday he planned to dig a goldfish pond in front of the statue, but for now, all he had gotten around to was laying out stones where the edge of the pond would be. The statue had bright, wide eyes and a broad grin. It made a sadly comical sight, this boy so happy to be fishing in a dust pond. The statue had been there and that way as long as folks in Davis Corners could remember.

“He’s doing all right for now.”

The men finished their beer and a couple more cigarettes. Henry grabbed the back of Nate’s neck and said, “Better be getting this one back to his folks before they think I’ve sold him to the Gypsies.” Everyone said good-bye and Henry nodded over to the cigarettes and beer. “Hattie’ll kill me if I bring that stuff home. Get rid of it for me would you?”

Jim Frank made a mock conspiratorial glance around and waved okay.

Henry and Nate didn’t talk much on the ride back. Nate thought about the Pabst Blue Ribbons and the Pall Malls left back on Jim Frank’s porch and appreciated how delicately a charity had been given and taken without embarrassment.

When they got to Nate’s house, Henry simply said, “Tell your folks I said ‘hi’ and I’ll see everybody tomorrow at your grandmother’s.” Nate thanked his uncle for the afternoon and told him he hoped he’d tell a story at Grandmother Tillman’s the next day. Henry was a funny storyteller, but all he said was that Hattie wouldn’t have any of that. Nate waved and watched him fly off in the Caddy, and he wondered which story his uncle would pick.

Chapter 2

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Copyright (C) 2009 Michael A. Hughes