Beluthahatchie and Other Stories by Andy Duncan

Author:Andy Duncan [Duncan, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

—For Sam Doyle (1906-1985) of St. Helena, who painted

the speech of Lincoln at Frogmore

The Map to the Homes

of the Stars

LAST NIGHT, I HEARD IT AGAIN. ABOUT ELEVEN, I stood at the kitchen counter, slathered peanut butter onto a stale, cool slice of refrigerated raisin bread, and scanned months-old letters to the editor in an A section pulled at random from the overflow around the recycling bin. “Reader decries tobacco evils.”

“Economy sound, says N.C. banker.” The little headlines give the otherwise routine letters such urgency, like telegraphed messages from some war-torn front where issues are being decided, where news is happening. “Arts funding called necessary.” As I chewed my sandwich, I turned one-handed to the movie listings, just to reassure myself that everything I had skipped in the spring wasn’t worth the trouble anyway, and then I heard a slowly approaching car.

We don’t get much traffic on my street, a residential loop in a quiet neighborhood, and so even we single guys who don’t have kids in the yard unconsciously register the sounds of each passing vehicle. But this was the fifth night in a row, and so I set down my sandwich and listened.

* * *

Tom used to identify each passing car, just for practice. “Fairlane.”

“Crown Victoria.”

“Super Beetle?”

This was back home, when we were as bored as two 17-year-olds could be.

“Even I can tell a Super Beetle,” I said. I slugged my Mountain Dew and lowered the bottle to look with admiration at the neon-green foam.

Tom frowned, picked up his feet, and rotated on the bench of the picnic table so that his back was to Highway 1.

Without thinking, I said, “Mind, you’ll get splinters.” I heard my mother speaking, and winced.

Now Tom looked straight ahead at the middle-school basketball court, where Cathy and her friends, but mostly Cathy (who barely knew us, but whose house was fourth on our daily route), were playing a pick-up game, laughing and sweating and raking their long hair back from their foreheads. As each car passed behind him, he continued the litany.

“Jeep.”

“Ford pickup.”

“Charger.”

I didn’t know enough to catch him in an error, of course, but I have no doubt that he was right on the money, every time. I never learned cars; I learned other things, that year and the next fifteen years, to my surprise and exhilaration and shame, but I never learned cars, and so I am ill-equipped to stand in my kitchen and identify a car driving slowly past at eleven o’clock at night.

Not even when, about five minutes later, it gives me another chance, drives past again in the other direction, as if it had gotten as far as the next cul-de-sac, and turned around.

It passes so slowly that I am sure it is about to turn into someone’s driveway, someone’s, mine, but it hasn’t, for five nights now it hasn’t. I couldn’t tell you if I had to precisely what make of car it is.

I could guess, though.

Maybe tonight, if, when, it passes by, I’ll go to the

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