Gone South Read Free Page A

of A&A Construction. Being behind the two payments bothered him; Mr. Jarrett was a fair man, and Dan was not one to take advantage of fairness. He was going to have to find a way to scrape some cash together.
    He didn’t like looking at the man who wore the hand-lettered sign, but he couldn’t help it. He knew what trying to find a steady job was like. With all the layoffs and businesses going under, the help-wanted ads had dried up to nothing. Skilled laborers like Dan and the others who came to Death Valley were the first to feel the hurt. He didn’t like looking at the man with the desperate sign because he feared he might be seeing his own future.
    Death Valley was where men who wanted to work came to wait for a “ticket.” Getting a ticket meant being picked for a job by anyone who needed labor. The contractors who were still in business knew about Death Valley, and would go there to find help when a regular crewman was sick or they needed extra hands for a day or two. Regular homeowners sometimes drove by as well, to hire somebody to do such jobs as patching a roof or building a fence. The citizens of Death Valley worked cheap.
    And the hell of it, Dan had learned by talking to the others, was that places like Death Valley existed in every city. It had become clear to him that thousands of men and women lived clinging to the edge of poverty through no fault of their own but because of the times and the luck of the draw. The recession had been a beast with a cold eye, and it had wrenched families young and old from their homes and shattered their lives with equal dispassion.
    “Hey, Dan! How many’d ya kill?”
    Two shadows had fallen across him. He looked up and made out Steve Lynam and Curtis Nowell standing beside him with the sun at their backs. “What?” he asked.
    “How many’d ya kill?” Curtis had posed the question. He was in his early thirties, had curly dark brown hair, and wore a yellow T-shirt with NUKE THE WHALES stenciled on it. “How many chinks? More than twenty or less than twenty?”
    “Chinks?” Dan repeated, not quite grasping the point.
    “Yeah.” Curtis dug a pack of Winstons and a lighter from his jeans pocket. “Charlies. Gooks. Whatever you dudes called ’em back then. You kill more than twenty of ’em?”
    Joe pushed the brim of his cap up. “You fellas don’t have anythin’ better to do than invade a man’s privacy?”
    “No,” Curtis said as he lit up. “We ain’t hurtin’ anythin’ by askin’, are we, Dan? I mean, you’re proud to be a vet, ain’t you?”
    “Yes, I am.” Dan sipped his tea again. Most of the Death Valley regulars knew about his tour of duty, not because he particularly cared to crow about it but because Curtis had asked him where he’d gotten the tattoo. Curtis had a big mouth and he was on the dumb side: a bad combination. “I’m proud I served my country,” Dan said.
    “Yeah, you didn’t run to Canada like them draft-dodgin’ fuckers did, huh?” Steve asked. He was a few years older than Curtis, had keen blue eyes and a chest as big as a beer keg.
    “No,” Dan answered, “I did what I was told.”
    “So how many?” Curtis urged. “More than twenty?”
    Dan released a long, weary breath. The sun was beating down on his skull, even through the baseball cap. “Does it really matter?”
    “We want to know,” Curtis said, the cigarette clenched between his teeth and his mouth leaking smoke. “You kept a body count, didn’t you?”
    Dan stared straight ahead. He was looking at a chain-link fence. Beyond it was a wall of brown bricks. Sun and shadow lay worlds apart on that wall. In the air Dan could smell the burning.
    “Talked to this vet once in Mobile,” Curtis plowed on. “Fella was one-legged. He said he kept a body count. Said he knew how many chinks he’d killed right to the man.”
    “Jesus Christ!” Joe said. “Why don’t you two go on and pester the shit outta somebody else? Can’t you see Dan don’t want