The Liquor Trailer
Just across the state line, that’s where you go to be a man.
Everybody knew about the liquor trailer over in Newport. Seems like everybody talked about having gone, but nobody was ever going. At least that’s how it seemed once Shane and me decided we wanted to go. We’d need a ride, being fifteen. I’d been driving for a couple years and had my farm license, but I wasn’t aiming to cross state lines with an out-of-date farm tag from a sold-off farm on a somewhat stolen truck.
I guess it wouldn’t be stolen if it was Daddy’s. And he wouldn’t notice. His old dependable Ranger would be parked at the paper mill by the time Shane and me would be pulling out of town. He hardly ever drove the old F-150 anymore. He’d been working nights this fall and that’s the big reason he hadn’t been to a single football game. That and he thought football was a waste of time. “Boy’s last dream and a man’s first loss,” he said as he was driving me to school one morning. It was homecoming and there were big banners all over town. I usually walked to school, but he’d wanted to drive me. I think he wanted to see all the fuss on campus, maybe. He’d never worn his championship ring, but I knew I’d see a lot of them on calloused hands that night at the stadium. He was at work that Friday night and he’d be at work this Friday night. It would be easy for me to get to Newport, I’d told Shane.
“What you boys getting into this weekend?” JR asked us on Wednesday after lunch. Shane just looked at me with his jaw clenched. I shrugged. JR punched Shane in the shoulder and said, too loud, like someone else needed to hear it, “You’re into something, I’ll tell you that.” He shook his head and walked down the hall. He carried his books in a leather strap like it was the 1950s or something. Somehow, he made that look like the right thing to do and made me feel self-conscious of my backpack.
JR was probably the first person I knew to get his cherry popped over in Newport. He talked about it like he’d been to Dollywood with his grandparents or something. Like it was a totally normal thing to brag about.
“They got a pot of chili,” he’d told us during a captain’s practice over the summer, “that’s been going for something like twenty years.” We were circled up at the fifty-yard line, stretching our hamstrings. “They just keep adding in cans of beans and seasoning. Never turn it off. It’s in this big crockpot that’s nasty as hell.”
He looked around to make sure we were all listening. We were.
“Tell you what’s the truth, though. That chili was divine.” He did an exaggerated chef’s kiss thing with his hands.
We didn’t want to hear about the chili. We wanted to hear about the sex. And maybe that’s what he really was talking about. No one was sure. No one would ask. Everyone nodded along and laughed like he was talking about a movie we were all pretending we’d seen. But he could tell us anyone was in that movie and that it took any kind of plot twist because none of us had seen this movie.
I couldn’t picture Kate Winslet in that trailer. It was like all her relaxed nakedness wouldn’t fit in that tiny room with a single bed.
The idea was that there was a trailer just across the North Carolina line into Tennessee where somebody sold moonshine. That was common enough and you didn’t have to drive through the gorge to get moonshine. But there was also a lady there who was for sex. I guess you’d call her a prostitute. You’d buy your liquor and have the option to go in the backroom.
And that was what Shane and me aimed to do. On Friday.
I’d tried picturing her, and I couldn’t get past movie stars that were in sex scenes. I had watched Titanic a bunch of times and kept picturing Kate Winslet laid out with her long hair all around her, reclined on the bed, waiting on me. My aunt lived in a trailer and I spent lots of weekends with her when Mama first left, and I couldn’t picture Kate Winslet in that trailer. It was like all her relaxed nakedness wouldn’t fit in that tiny room with a single bed. I tried to change my image and make the lady in the back into something more like a girl from my English class or one of the cheerleaders. It kept slipping back to Titanic, though.
“Why didn’t you tell JR?” I asked Shane as soon as he’d walked away.
“JR’s an asshole,” he said, rubbing his shoulder.
“Well, yeah. I know he’s an asshole.” I guess that’s when I realized I was thinking more about telling everybody I’d been to the liquor trailer than actually going to the liquor trailer. “Aren’t we gonna tell anybody, though?”
Shane stacked his books in his locker and got his notebook for fourth period. We had math together. We were both in the smart math class. The only two football players in there. Shane tried to act like he hated school, but you could tell that it came natural to him. With Coach Caldwell as a dad, he had to fuck something up or no one could stand him. He had to at least act like he didn’t care even if he always did the extra credit. He hated any teacher who treated him smart. He wanted to just be a jock. He wanted to be the kid who didn’t care and stayed in trouble. But his dad wouldn’t let that happen and Shane actually maybe couldn’t either.
“Don’t sweat it, man. You just worry about that bedroom. I hear she’s got these huge titties. Just massive. You can just get lost in there.”
I tried to picture Kate Winslet as a double-D porn star. In a trailer. With endless chili and oily moonshine.
“What time can you leave?” Shane asked me. “It’s about an hour there.”
“What time are you supposed to get there?” I asked.
Shane just laughed. “I’ll check with the concierge,” he said.
He was back in good humor, just thinking about Friday night. We walked into math class and I wondered what was wrong with me. I didn’t want to stay a virgin forever, and that’s why Shane and me started talking about this in the first place. “We want to be experienced lovers when it counts,” he had said. I chuckled but then realized he was serious. I turned my laugh into a cough and agreed with him. I needed to get serious about this if I wanted to be ready. And I figured the liquor trailer was as good a way to learn as any.
I didn’t have any cousins like Shane did to ask about the liquor trailer, but I knew a good bit about it already. Randy Sutton had been talking about how you have to take cash and it’s best to have a hundred-dollar bill.
Shane’s cousin Jeremy lived the next town over and said he’d drive us over on Friday. He was twenty-two and had a kid and a good job at the paper mill, so he was just planning to wait in the car. Jeremy was quiet and I never knew if that was a good thing with him. He had been a good football player but blew out his knee in 11th grade. They’d said he could have played ball in college and everybody was real disappointed. Except Jeremy. He seemed relieved to me when he got hurt. Like he had an excuse to do something else. He spent a lot of his senior year over in the welding shop, but making stuff that nobody could use. He was real artistic like that. He and his girlfriend had a trailer and had filled their little yard with weird iron sculptures that he’d made. He could get away with it, being who he was. But he didn’t ever seem to care if anyone thought he was a good linebacker or too quiet or whatever. Him and Daddy sometimes worked the same shift and Daddy didn’t like that Jeremy was higher up than him. Jeremy had taken a year or two at the community college and got into some kind of engineering job. Daddy said he’d got the job because he was a Caldwell. Maybe that quietness made him good at that job, but it unsettled people. And I guess I was one of them.
Jeremy would wake up around the time we’d get out of school. He was off on Friday, so he’d drive us over. We decided we’d leave around six. Seemed like the kind of place you don’t want to get to before dark.
I didn’t have any cousins like Shane did to ask about the liquor trailer, but I knew a good bit about it already. Randy Sutton had been talking about how you have to take cash and it’s best to have a hundred-dollar bill. He was telling Toad about it after school one day as we were walking home. Randy and Toad lived just past my house in one of the trailers that went up once Mama and Daddy sold off pasture. We sometimes walked home together and that was when Randy was telling Toad about it, even though Toad hadn’t asked.
“Don’t they take checks?” is what Toad said. I guess you’d figure that you needed cash, but I hadn’t heard the part about a hundred-dollar bill until Randy was talking about it.
On Friday, we had pizza at lunch but all I could eat was some saltines off the salad bar and a can of orange juice.
“Ready for them titties?” Shane whispered as he sat down across from me.
I pictured Kate Winslet.
“You good?” he asked, looking around the table. It was just us so far.
“Yeah, I’m good,” I said. I looked at him looking at me. This was finally happening. We’d been hearing about the liquor trailer since seventh grade. And now, tonight, we were finally going. “I’m good!” I said, finding the voice I knew I ought to be using. “It’s gonna be good,” I said.
In the showers after practice, everybody was talking about their Friday nights. It was a bye week for us, which is why we were going to Newport tonight. Shane’s parents were going into town to dinner and a movie is how he could get away. Most of the team was going over to Henderson County to scout the team we’d be playing in two weeks. They were undefeated and we hoped to break that streak. Shane’s grin finally got JR’s attention.
“Shane Caldwell is up to something, I’ll tell y’all that much,” JR said.
Everybody looked over at Shane, who looked straight at me.
Then everybody looked at me.
“What’s going on, boys?” one of the seniors said. Everyone looked back and forth between us as I waited for Shane to drop the news.
JR snatched the attention back and said, “Y’all hear about Allison and Caroline? They hooked up with some college boys last weekend and are headed back over there this weekend. Went to some big party with a keg, they said.”
As everybody shared what else they’d heard about the college party, JR caught my eye and gave me a quick wink. There was some kind of code I didn’t know yet.
The locker room thinned out and Shane seemed to be taking his time. He shaved at the sink after his shower, even though he didn’t need to shave much at all. He had that soft sort of hair and not much of it. His arms had hardly any hair at all, and it was real blond. I hadn’t brought a razor, but I washed my face again and put on some of his aftershave just for the smell. I had this one pair of Calvin Klein underwear that I had put on. They were shorter and tighter than the underwear I usually wore, and the seam of my jeans felt tight and wrong.
Mama and Daddy weren’t looking to buy cattle. They had already started selling off the farm by then and it wouldn’t be long before we just had the house and the one pasture and Daddy started at the paper mill.
We walked off campus toward the Gas-n-Go on the corner. Jeremy was planning to pick us up there around six. We had an hour. Shane thought we could get some chicken fingers for dinner. They had tables in the back where old timers hung out and drank coffee at all hours of the day.
When we walked in, the bell at the top of the door jingled, but nobody looked up. The woman at the cash register was reading a People magazine and smoking a long lady’s type of cigarette. Until we entered her radar, which was about a six-foot circumference, she just kept on reading.
“Y’all get what you need tonight?” she asked us as we put our food on the counter. I’d finally worked up an appetite, though my stomach still felt sour.
“We’re fixin’ to, ma’am,” Shane said, putting down a twenty with a smile and a nudge of my arm.
She looked up at that. She moved her eyes from Shane to me, then back to Shane.
“That’ll be $8.25,” she said, picking up his bill.
She handed back his change without counting it to him and sat back on her stool to read her magazine. We walked toward the back of the store with our little plaid paper baskets in our hands. I started to wonder when they’d dropped these chicken fingers and how long they’d been sitting under a warming lamp.
“You Wayne’s boy?” I heard, looking up from my chicken fingers.
“Yessir,” I said. I didn’t recognize the man who’d spoken, but he looked much older than my father. Closer to what would have been my grandparents’ age.
“Don’t remember me, do you, son?” he said.
“Can’t say that I do, sir.”
“Don’t matter. I used to see you’uns down at the cattle auction. Him and your mama was always showing you off down there. Remember that?”
“Yessir, I remember the auctions a little bit. Long time ago now.”
“Long time ago,” he said and turned back to his cup of coffee and newspaper.
Shane and I sat down and started into our chicken fingers. After a minute, Shane tilted his head toward the old man and rolled his eyes. We couldn’t really talk about anything here. Not with him nearby.
I did remember the cattle auctions. Those were some of my first memories. We’d go to this big barn somewhere. A fancy one with a poured concrete floor. Mama and Daddy weren’t looking to buy cattle. They had already started selling off the farm by then and it wouldn’t be long before we just had the house and the one pasture and Daddy started at the paper mill. Even though I guess it stunk, I think about that smell as a good smell. All those warm cows. Cattle always smell a little bit sweet up close. Packed in the big barn with a lot of cattle smelled like that. There’s a softness to their smell.
Mama and Daddy had met when he was in high school. She was a year older and had moved to town to stay with her older sister who’d married Joey Leavitt. Daddy was the big quarterback and I guess it didn’t take long for her to decide on him. She was the girl from out of town, and everybody looked twice when she came around. She was pregnant by summer, I reckon, since I was born that next May. Daddy was living in his parent’s house and she moved right in.
Daddy stayed working on the farm, but there wasn’t much money to make in it. His father owned the land and the cattle and they hadn’t worked out how he’d make a living. His parents said as long as they were living under their roof and eating their food, he didn’t need no salary. So Mama started working at K-Mart right after I was born, they say. Daddy’s mama watched over me, but it sounds like it wasn’t what she wanted to be doing. His daddy had a heart attack when I was too little to remember, and then his mama went to live with her sister in Tallahassee. Daddy and Mama all of a sudden had the farm, but I guess they didn’t know what to do with it since they parceled it off bit by bit. It was in there that we’d go to the cattle auctions.
“Jeremy’ll be here in a minute,” Shane said, quiet. I looked up at the clock on the wall. It said 5:53. They never changed that clock for daylight savings, so in a few weeks it would be off and you’d have to remember. It was right tonight, though.
After Mama left, I reckon Daddy didn’t know what to do with me. He hired this lady to watch me, but she mostly watched television. When I think about being little, it’s store-brand Fruit Loops and General Hospital that comes to mind. She let me watch. Even the dirty scenes. I remember her looking at me once, as I was watching this man and woman in bed. She just laughed and shook her head. Watching me instead of watching the television.
I felt the old man’s eyes on me, and I looked over at him. He held onto that paper cup of coffee. His hands looked like a giant’s hands holding that little cup.
I saw Shane look up at the clock. It said 5:57 now. He pulled out a piece of gum and handed me a piece. I folded it over in my mouth and started chewing. Little pieces of food that were stuck in my braces got stuck in my gum. I decided I didn’t want that gum and spit it back into the silver wrapper.
“Shane,” I said.
I wanted to tell him that I was scared, but also that I was worried that the lady would be more like that old babysitter than Kate Winslet, and that I didn’t even like chili and could get better moonshine, and that I wasn’t sure I wanted to put my thing somewhere that JR had put his thing.
I didn’t say any of that, though.
“I know,” he said, and looked at me like we’d just decided something important even though I hadn’t said anything. “I’ll tell you about it on Monday.” He smiled at me then, but it was a quiet smile. A real smile. He started piling his ketchup packets in his little tray and wadding up his napkins. He always used more napkins than I could understand.
He stood up and I stayed sitting there.
“I’ll see you on Monday, then,” he said.
“See you Monday,” I said back.
He patted me a couple times on the back, like he was my big brother or something, but I didn’t really mind feeling like a little brother right then.
I heard the bell jingle as he left.
I folded up my napkin and put my honey mustard container where my chicken fingers had been. They were dry, but I’d ate them all anyway. It wasn’t bad.
I felt the old man’s eyes on me, and I looked over at him. He held onto that paper cup of coffee. His hands looked like a giant’s hands holding that little cup. More sunspot than not, and with those bruises old people get just from bumping up against a table. I met his eyes then, and he just nodded at me.
I nodded back and stood to go. I walked past the lady who was still reading People magazine and told her “Thank you” as the bell tinkled.
It was getting cold nights, and I wished I had a warmer coat on. It wasn’t a long walk home. The sun was low in front of me, and I thought about Shane and Jeremy headed west toward Newport into that sun.
A transfer truck flew past me headed east, and I all of a sudden felt happy not going to or coming from anywhere. I shoved my hands deeper into my pockets and walked toward home.
About the author
Meredith McCarroll is a writer and editor who was born and raised in Western North Carolina. Her first book Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Filmlooks at cinematic representations of the region. Her co-edited collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, won the Weatherford Award and the American Book Award. Her essays have appeared in The Guardian, New Lines, Southern Cultures, and elsewhere. She writes, edits, and teaches writing in Portland, Maine.
- Meredith McCarrollhttps://www.salvationsouth.com/author/meredith-mccarroll/
Loved the story, loved the ending!