The Fifth Season (a novel-in-process) Linda Busby Parker

In The Fifth Season by Linda Busby Parker, a careless act by young Lowell Crockett results in the death of his father.  Lowell’s world, inextricably tied to that of his mother, younger sister, and neighbor, Estella Bodet, falls into ruin.  His hope: to salvage some fragments of his past life and move, at times falteringly, into an uncertain future. This lush and complex novel of youth, love, loss, and discovery unfolds in small town Alabama.

 

Excerpt:

 

April, 1975

Xavier, Alabama

The night Lowell’s orbit was knocked off course, he and Harley stood side-by-side in the kitchen of The Ritz, the bar and restaurant Lowell’s father owned in downtown Xavier, Alabama. An odd pair: Harley, well past forty, his complexion the color of deep walnut stain that looked even darker against his faded plaid shirt, the buttons straining to contain his ample belly; Lowell, a young white boy, eighteen years old, about to graduate from high school and go off to the University of Wyoming to study geology.

A week earlier the Xavier News ran an article about him complete with a photograph, his tongue out, licking a small rock. The reporter quoted Lowell: "By tasting, you can often determine a rock’s composition."

The headline read: Local Boy Going Far. Lowell’s father, Clifton Crockett, framed the piece and hung it behind the bar for his patrons to admire.

Harley also intended to go far—at least around town in the 1970 Mustang he spotted on the lot at Lou Lasaver’s Used Cars. Candy apple red the salesman called it. A black streak raced down the middle of the hood. The car looked like it clocked 60 while it rested stock-still. Harley had already decided not to toss another dime at his fifteen-year-old Valiant. The thin fins front and back lent the old thing a tiny margin of class, but the black paint had dimmed to chalky gray, and the tire-ring on the trunk—once a symbol of pride—now sported a dent on the left side. Every time he fixed one thing, something else wore out. The old Valiant was parked on the street by his sister’s house at Fish Alley; the right front tire had gone flat. He could see himself behind the wheel of the red Mustang—one more pay check and he was there.

Lowell and Harley labored in the kitchen of The Ritz with the dogged but erroneous understanding that life would go on much as it had. They worked oblivious to the cataclysm about to descend.

Lowell meticulously peeled potatoes, deliberately trying to annoy Harley with his precise cuts across the spud skins—more the studied maneuvers of a surgeon than a galley grunt. Every now and again Harley turned from the grill to study Lowell. He twisted his heavy lips, shook his head and said without any words at all, you candy-ass kid. The kitchen where the men worked was a small room with exposed wood beams. Six black electrical cords dangled from ceiling timbers, each with a bare light bulb attached to the terminus. The back door of the kitchen remained open while the men cooked, allowing some of the smoke to drift into the parking lot. The odor of frying meat and potatoes meandered through the tiny yards of shotgun houses nearby and through the fuzzy leaf clusters of ancient fig trees that grew against back porch screens.

The only extravagance in the kitchen of The Ritz was the red bubble-padding, front and back, on the double doors that led from the kitchen to the dining room—doors worthy of the tavern’s name. On the other side of the cherry-vinyl doors, the combination dining room and bar constituted one big room, low to the ground, with raw wood floors. No steps or porch offered entry from the outside of the building. Customers opened the front door and entered from the oyster-shell parking lot directly into the tavern. When rain came in torrential abundance, Clifton Crockett leaned sandbags against the outside wall to keep the water out. The one genteel feature in the place, an enormous Tiffany-style lamp, hung in the center of the saloon. Clifton had found the globe in an antique shop in Mobile where he had gone in search of old glass doorknobs. "Glass knobs will give this place a touch of class," he boasted to his son. But instead of doorknobs, he returned to Xavier with the domed shade.

The canopy, a solid three feet across, displayed boldly colored grapes, oranges, and apples set within Chinese yellow panels bordered in cobalt blue. Clifton never fully illuminated the lamp. He kept it in soft glow, which exaggerated the colors, making them so rich they appeared to be original hues straight from creation, unblemished by time. Lowell understood the Tiffany lamp represented his father’s desire to turn the place into something more than it was, something befitting the name he had given his saloon.

After Lowell turned twelve, and his little sister, Lexie, had turned six, Clifton put together enough money to purchase The Ritz. When he bought the tavern, the name above the door read Xavier Bar. Clifton, feeling good about moving his family into town and owning a business with improved prospects, had the audacity to christen his new establishment The Ritz—something between a joke and a statement, an irony even the dullest customers appreciated. He ordered red Neon tubes for the roof that spelled out the bar’s name—The Ritz. Men drove in from the country to drink in this place because it was more than itself, more than a shabby building set in the middle of an oyster-shell parking lot.

Lowell peeled potatoes on Friday and Saturday nights ever since his father purchased the saloon, but next year he would be gone so far away he could hardly imagine it—all the way to Wyoming. He saw himself as an explorer about to venture to a bold new world. When the time came, he would be ready to leave this sleepy little town. His mother would, no doubt, take his place stripping the skin off potatoes in front of the deep stainless steel sink.

Like the saloon he owned, Lowell was another of his father’s great hopes. To patrons in the bar—hard living, hard drinking men who wore blue jeans and billed-caps—he said, "this kid’s so smart, he’ll support me one day."

One of the customers, sitting on a rusted chrome stool with a cherry-red vinyl seat, the same plastic of the bubble doors, wiped the corners of his mouth with the skin-cracked knuckles of his left hand. "You take care of him now, he takes care of you later." He cocked his head so that Lowell and Clifton could see his eyes beneath the bill of his cap. "Sounds fair." He brought the narrow neck of the bottle to his lips and sucked.

This night—the night of Lowell’s apocalypse—Clifton charged into the kitchen with a heavy white apron over his chest, tied at the waist and hitched up above his knees. "Got ourselves a crowd," he shouted above the sounds coming from the dining room and bar.

"Sons of bitches," Harley said over his shoulder, his voice as heavy as a flatiron.

"Hungry sons of bitches." Clifton winked in Harley’s direction. He reached for the potato Lowell had placed in the blue-and-gray-speckled enamel bowl that rested beside the sink. On a wooden cutting board, Clifton wedged the potato into thick triangular fries. He tossed the splits into a wire mesh basket and lowered the basket into the hot oil bubbling on the front burner of the stove.

"Should have locked this place up tonight," Harley said with no expression on his face at all. "Some id-jit gone shoot another." With his spatula, Harley pushed the patties around on the grill, adjusting their position above the flames. His eyebrows raised and his lips puckered.

Lowell admired Harley. He wanted to learn how to speak Harley’s I-don’t-give-a-shit talk, to drop bombs and watch them explode without flinching.

Clifton glanced at Harley, but said nothing. He poked a fork into the hot oil to separate the potato slices.

Most of the men who drank beer in the bar were members of the Confederate Sons of the South. They waited for hot meat and French-fried potatoes. Tomorrow they would reenact a battle in the field by the Magnolia River. Car loads of Yankee soldiers had come to play their roles in the mock contest. They had traveled from Pennsylvania, and tonight they too drank whiskey and beer in The Ritz. The majority were in their uniforms. They had come from a meet-and-greet session where they reviewed the rules of engagement for tomorrow’s battle. The gray and blue-clad soldiers, drinking and laughing in the other room, set Harley’s nerves on edge. His simple declarative sentence about potential violence sent tiny caution flags sailing in Lowell’s mind too. But neither he nor Harley knew then that the night would be worse than either could imagine.

When the potatoes turned a light golden-brown in the boiling oil, Clifton removed the basket and pushed the pot toward the back of the stove, off the flame. He held the wire mesh over the sink, shook off the excess grease and sprinkled a palm-full of salt over the potatoes, followed by a touch of black pepper, and then a dash or three of cayenne. That was the secret to the excellent flavor of the steak fries at The Ritz—a little cayenne pepper.

Minuscule grease beads popped off the meat and landed on Harley’s khakis, staining them. Lowell rinsed his knife and gingerly slid the sharp blade under another row of thin brown peel. He watched Harley out of the corner of his eye to see if he could get a rise from the stolid man in the moleskin loafers, but Harley ignored him.

"May be the night I leave on the L & N. Roll on outta here." He huffed the words past his lips. He intended for Clifton to understand he was pissed about this particular crowd eating and drinking in the bar. With the spatula, he eased a patty off the grill and onto a bun, dressing the meat with lettuce, tomato, and dill pickle rounds.

On the far side of the sink, Clifton wedged fries out of another giant potato. An amused look curled up his face. He glanced at Harley. "I’d miss your sunshine personality if you was to catch the L & N."

"Sheee-it." Harley scowled and turned his back.

Lowell understood the difference between his Harley and his father. It was not that one was black and the other white. It was that Harley saw a situation and sized it up for what it was. On the other hand, Lowell had seen his father pick up a worm-ridden plum, fallen from a scrubby little tree in their backyard, polish it on his britches, eat around the infestation, and proclaim the plum sweet and mellow.

Clifton divided the fries among four plates and placed little packets of mustard and ketchup beside the buns. Balancing two plates on one arm and two on the other, he headed for the dining room without speaking again to Lowell or Harley.

Lowell squatted and dug in the gunny sack, searching for another giant specimen. Harley turned to study him. "Hell, boy, reach in there and hand-up a potato. You scrounging ’round like a ol’ roach." Harley turned back toward his patties.

The crowd in the bar was so loud Lowell didn’t try to answer Harley. Now and again he heard one voice above the others, but mostly what he heard was a loud drone, like the whir of rushing wind coming through an open car window.

Harley pulled a paring knife from the drawer under the stove. He squatted and reached his hand in the gunny-sack, lifting out the first potato his fingers landed on, not rooting around for a large specimen as Lowell did.

Lowell made room for him at the sink. Instead of the smooth vertical lines that marked Lowell’s potato, Harley gashed his spud with zigs and zags and oddly positioned rectangles. He rinsed his potato and tossed it into the speckled enamel bowl. With his giant hands, he dug in the sink and scooped up all the peels. Holding the rinds in the vessel of his cupped hands, he turned and dropped the peels into the battered metal trash can.

He turned back, stood in front of the sink and spoke directly to Lowell. "When you finish, you dig every one of those peels out of this sink. I had to go in this pipe last week to get that sink unstopped. Big ole mess of peels caught up in the elbow."

Clifton generally closed the grill at eleven, although the bar stayed open on Friday nights until one-thirty. It was nearly midnight, but Lowell and Harley continued to cook burgers and fries. Harley had already reminded Clifton it was well past eleven. When Clifton pushed the red padded doors open and pinned three more small papers to the string above the grill, Harley stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Last ones," Clifton said. He raised his palms in a defensive stance. He stepped to the sink, and Lowell handed the last potato to his father. Clifton put it on the wooden cutting board and began slicing it. When he had filled the mesh basket a little more than half full, he slipped the basket into the hot oil on the front burner.

Without any warning as far as Lowell could tell, he heard chairs overturn and boots thump across the floor in the bar. Just as suddenly, most of the noise ceased and several voices sounded above all the others.

"Sweeeeet Jeeeeeeus!" Harley hissed, and he placed his fists on the sides of his waist. His unstated message: I knew this would happen.

"I’ll settle it." Clifton raised his right hand in a little chin-level salute toward Harley. Lowell knew this was his father’s way of saying don’t worry. I’ll have everything under control in a few minutes. Clifton sprang in giant strides toward the door and slammed his open palm against the ruby vinyl. In his thigh-high apron, he carried himself into the darkness as if he had full backing of some enormous force behind him.

Above all the other noises, two voices snaked at each other. There had been some trouble at The Ritz before, but nothing Clifton Crockett couldn’t handle. Lowell knew his father would settle the rowdies and most likely find them a ride home. He was the drunk man’s best friend.

Harley pushed the patties to the back of the grill away from the flame, even though they were not yet done. He rested the spatula near the sink. "Watch that grease," he said to Lowell, and he pointed to the French fries. "Don’t catch that oil on fire."

Harley headed toward the dining room. He was big enough to lift almost any man at The Ritz, carry him outside, and drop him on the oyster shells of the parking lot.

Lowell heard the slurred profanity in the bar. Stupid drunks.

"What’s going on?" he heard his father shout.

If need be, he would go into the bar and help his father settle things down. He had begun lifting weights, straining his biceps on the bench set in the middle of the back porch of their house on Marguerite Street. He wouldn’t back away from a fight, but he didn’t want to get his teeth knocked out either.

He dug his hand in the sink, grabbed a palm-full of potato peels, lifted them, and tossed them into the metallic can. Just as he turned back to the sink, two loud explosions sounded in the bar. The noise ricocheted off the cabinets, bounced off the metal of the sink, and invaded Lowell’s eardrums, freezing him in place. It took him a split-second to understand what he heard.

Gunfire.

All kinds of noises broke loose—voices, running feet, and some woman screaming. Lowell didn’t weigh the danger, nor did he contemplate precautions. He sprinted toward the cushioned doors and hurled his fist against the red bubbles. He stood just inside the bar, his fist still balled in front of him, allowing a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness.

"He’s shot! He’s shot!" a woman’s voice drilled through the room.

The bar’s patrons shoved against each other, running toward the front door. The crowd packed together like some thick blue and gray mass streaming through the narrow tube of a funnel.

"Get the light, son," Clifton shouted.

He’s not been shot!

In three quick steps, Lowell was behind the bar where he slid his hand along the wall until he felt the light switch. He flipped the lever, and the bar filled with overhead light.

Clifton, Harley, and Sid Reese, the bartender, squatted over a man in a gray wool suit. Lowell saw blood on the floor under the Confederate’s left shoulder.

"Call the ambulance," Clifton commanded.

"We got an ambulance coming," his father said to the man on the floor before Lowell had even spoken with the dispatcher. But Lowell knew the ambulance would not be quick because it came from the regional hospital in the next county.

"What’s your name?" Clifton asked the Confederate.

"Gon’ di-eeeeeeee," the man squeezed out between tight lips. The last word continued with a long breath like a singer holding a tone. When Lowell walked closer and stood at the man’s feet, he saw the right side of his thick auburn beard glistened with sputum that seeped out of his lips and hung in his bushy whiskers.

"You ain’t gon’ die," Harley said with an equal blend of disgust and authority. "You drunk." He leaned over the Confederate, pressing a folded dishtowel under the top left part of the man’s back. With his open hand, he leaned against the front of the man’s shoulder.

Lowell knew what Harley was doing—staunching the flow of blood.

"Gon’ di-eeeeeeeee," the man wailed, his lower teeth chattering against his upper teeth.

Now blood showed on the edge of the dishtowel. Harley placed both hands on the man’s shoulder and pressed even harder.

Just as Lowell eased down next to his father and rested his weight on his heels, a sharp explosion sounded behind the red bubble doors.

"What in hell!" Clifton shouted. He jumped from a squat to full height. Smoke seeped out the tiny space between the two doors.

Like his father, Lowell also sprang to his feet. "It’s that oil," he told his father. He stood facing the cherry vinyl doors. He knew exactly what he had done. He hadn’t even thought of the boiling oil. He heard the shots and thought only of his father. But he couldn’t explain this now with smoke seeping out between the padded doors.

Clifton lunged toward the red doors. Another explosion sounded with a jagged snap—glass heated beyond its endurance with shards as deadly as bullets hitting the floor, cabinets, and walls.

"I’ll get that oil out!" Lowell shouted.

"Like hell you will," Clifton said. He kicked against the ruby cushioned doors. When the doors swung wide, thick smoke billowed into the bar.

Orange and blue flames roared near the stove, already engulfing the cabinets. Heat thrust out from the kitchen, a hot wall pushing hard against Lowell’s face and the lower parts of his arms.

"I’ll get it, Dad!"

"Better get this man outside," Harley said.

Clifton snatched a small fire extinguisher from behind the bar, a little fire-engine-red tube no more than fifteen inches long. He kicked the doors again. Smoke poured into the dining room—thick, black, throat-constricting smoke.

"Get him out!" Clifton ordered—all business now as he pointed at the Confederate.

"I’ll do it, Dad! Let me do it!" Lowell grabbed for the fire extinguisher.

His father turned on him. "Get out! You’ve done enough for one night." He said this in a hard voice as thick and flat as Harley’s.

"Don’t you go in there. Smoke’s thick as hairy moss." Harley raised the lower part of his left arm over his nose as if to protect himself from the noxious fumes. Then, he lowered his hand and caught the Confederate under his chest, blood soaking Harley’s rolled up shirt sleeve. "Lowell, you get his feet."

Lowell stood between his father and Harley, not knowing in which direction he should turn.

"Get his feet, Lowell!" Harley commanded again, his voice now full of gravel.

Lowell moved toward Harley. He took the man’s feet. Sid Reese moved ahead of them to open the front door.

Lowell turned to see his father kick the bubble doors. Clouds of thick, black smoke, and orange-leafed flames towered above the stove. Lowell was surprised to see how rapidly the fire had spread. He saw his father enter the kitchen through the red doors, the tiny fire extinguisher in his hands, spraying at the swath of black air in front of him. He remembered the opened back door and knew the flames whipped through the kitchen, pushed by the night’s breeze.

The year of his apocalypse had begun.