“Got in trouble.”
“Why?”
“Did an interview with NPR on my break and it went long.”
“Damn, Red, getting even more famous.”
“You too,” Delaney says with an impish smile.
“What?” I ask around a spoonful of Blizzard.
“I mentioned you.”
“Hell you did.” I look at her, aghast.
She smiles again.
I shake my head. “ ‘I couldn’t have made this discovery without Cash Pruitt.’ That what you said? ‘No one else on planet Earth could have paddled me out to a secret cave along the Pigeon River so I could find some bacteria—’ ”
“Mold.”
“Whatever.”
“Big difference biologically.”
“Fine. ‘Mold that kills the nastiest bacteria.’ ”
“Don’t forget driving me to Nashville to show my results to Dr. Srinavasan. Said that.”
“Oh, right. No one else could’ve done that.”
“No one else did do that. Anyway, yeah, that’s about what I said.”
I wipe my hand down my face. “Lord above.”
“Stop being dramatic.”
I raise my index finger. “What’s the one thing you know about me?”
“I know you asked me once if peanuts are a type of wood. No, they aren’t.”
“That I like to earn what I get.”
“Right. Cash Pruitt: famously a lover of earning.”
“So you’re out there telling people I did something without me earning it.”
“If it makes you happy, I still took credit for running the experiments and figuring out the mold’s antibiotic properties.”
I lower the visor against the sinking sun. A ray catches a crack in the windshield and illuminates it, a tiny comet. I’ve always loved when the light finds the broken spots in the world and makes them beautiful.
I glance over at Delaney. She’s turned inward, squinting her honey-colored eyes against the orange glare splashed across her pale skin, on the freckles that dot her nose and cheekbones like an atlas of stars. She brushes a stray piece of hair from her face.
“Seems like you could get a better job than DQ now that you’re in the news and doing interviews on the radio,” I say.
“It requires no mental energy, so I can think about other stuff and get paid for it.”
“Your life. Wanna ride around some, then go watch Longmire with Pep?”
“Can’t. Babysitting Braxton and Noah later,” Delaney says.
“He’ll be bummed.”
“Tell him I’m sorry and next time I come I’ll tell him about gympie gympie.”
“The hell is that?”
She always looks happiest right before she’s about to deliver some horrifying factoid about the natural world. She radiates pure joy now. “Australian shrub. Read about it last night. The leaves are covered in these little silica-tipped bristles—silica’s the stuff they make glass out of—and then these bristles deliver a neurotoxin that causes horrible pain for days, months, and even years. So if you brush up against it, the whiskers dig into your skin and the pain’ll be so intense it’ll make you puke.”
“Good Lord. That sounds like it came from outer space.”
“As long as the hairs stay in your skin, the pain continues. It feels like being burned alive. They’re hard to remove, too. Your whole lymphatic system swells up. Armpits. Throat. Groin. It’s a nightmare.”
“Why are you telling me about this?”
“You’re constantly waging war against the plant world. Thought you might like to know they have a revenge weapon.”
I point back over my shoulder at the lawn mower in my truck bed. “I mow lawns and trim shrubs. They grow the hell back. That’s like saying barbers are waging war on heads.”
“There’s an apocryphal story about someone wiping their ass with gympie gympie leaves and…it didn’t end well. Get it? End.”
“Please tell me apocryphal means ‘completely and entirely false.’ ”
She cackles. “The gympie gympie’s gonna find you,” she says in a singsong voice.
“Won’t.”
“It’s gonna crawl up your ass. Give you gympie butt.”
“I’ll sleep with my lawn mower in my bed. If it tries, I’ll fire that up and mow the shit out of it. Be like, ‘Who’s in pain now, gympie gympie? Warn your friends.’ ”
“I wanna be the one to tell Pep about it. Don’t spoil it,” Delaney says.
“You think his life will improve knowing about this plant?”
“He loves my facts.”
“Don’t know why. You got time for me to stop for gas?”
“I don’t have to be to Noah and Braxton’s for a while.”
I pull into the RiteQuik, park, and start filling up my truck. Cicadas thrum like a thought that won’t leave your mind. The turpentine scent of sun-warm pine tar and distant grill smoke hangs thick in the air, mixing with the smell of gas and oil leaking on hot engines. In front of the store, two girls in neon bikini tops and Daisy Dukes sit in the back of a Jeep with the top removed, talking and laughing raucously, primping and taking selfies. The radio blares Florida Georgia Line.
The night has started to breathe its first cool breaths. They feel like river water on my face. The summer days here end like a kid who’s been running as fast as he can, then comes inside and falls asleep in front of a fan.
I go inside to pay. When I come out, the pulsing bass from a car stereo rattles my lungs and diaphragm. A purple Dodge Challenger with ornate rims is parked behind me. It’s an unwelcome sight. Jason Cloud. I loathe his kind—a dealer of weed, meth, heroin, fentanyl, Oxys, Lortabs, Valium, gabapentin, and whatever else people will buy to wake themselves up or put themselves to sleep. He’s not the one who sold my mama the shit that killed her. But it was someone like him. Someone who will end lives for a purple Dodge Challenger with rims.
Cloud stands at the passenger window of my truck, talking with Delaney, pausing every couple of seconds to send a plume of vape smoke skyward. He’s wearing an oversized white T-shirt, a thick gold chain, huge black shorts that go past his knees, and Nike sandals with socks pulled up almost to his knees. His bleached-blond hair is in cornrows, and his mouth glitters with a gold grille.