Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks

Author:Casey Parks [Parks, Casey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

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WE DROVE BACK TO Delhi a few hours later. It was sixty degrees, much warmer than Portland tended to be in mid-December. I took the highway so we could keep the windows down as we drove east.

Everything hurt. My head, my stomach, my chest. I tried to put Pamela out of my mind. In the morning, we’d drive to Shreveport, to the bus station and the airport, then I’d be back in Portland, probably stupidly wishing I were in Louisiana. I wanted to make the most of our last few hours, but I felt paralyzed. We’d toured Delhi a dozen times. We didn’t have any interviews lined up, and it wasn’t like our conversations were yielding anything good anyway. We passed cows and horses, and Christopher played funny songs about beer runs and Seattle grunge bands, but I steered in silence. How could I keep coming here if I had nothing left to find? And why did I want to?

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I drove downtown and told Aubree and Christopher we should shoot B-roll before the sun went down. I parked in front of the drugstore, and they grabbed their equipment, then darted across the road to film the abandoned swimming pool. I stood in the street, looking for something to capture. Finally, I noticed a sign for the Delhi Beautification Association. It was old and metal, missing an i and part of the f. Whoever had installed it had done so right in front of a gravel service road. I thought the juxtaposition was funny, so I set up my camera and was about to press record when a red pickup truck made a U-turn over the railroad tracks, then pulled next to me. The truck’s windows were tinted and cracked open just wide enough that I could hear someone with a husky voice yelling from the driver’s seat.

“People said you been asking about Roy. Is it for a personal reason?”

I froze. All week, people had been looking at me as if I didn’t belong in Louisiana, and I felt sure that’s what the pickup driver was suggesting, too. Anyone asking about Roy for a “personal reason” must be the same kind of misfit Roy believed himself to be. I could see a Buck Commander decal on the back window. The driver must be a hunter, I thought, someone with a gun. The window slid down, and I steeled myself. I thought of a verse from the book of Romans: “The wages of sin is death.”

I saw the tattoo on the driver’s upper left arm first. It looked like a seal for the local fire department, with an American flag and flames surrounding a portrait of a regal-seeming dalmatian. It was the kind of tattoo I assumed a tough guy would choose, but when the driver leaned out, I saw that she was a woman. Her brown hair was graying and buzzed short, and she was wearing a T-shirt with a howling wolf printed in the center.

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