From THE HIP SHOT, a mystery/crime novel

IT WAS NOTICEABLY WARMER when Mervin and Boot walked out of the police station and climbed into the Silverado. Mervin took off his fleece jacket and tossed it into the back of the king cab.

             Preston’s Main Street on Saturday morning wasn’t nearly as bustling as it had been forty or fifty years ago. But it had made a bit of a comeback in the past few years. There were a few boutiques and specialty shops, a diner, and a pizza place. Several cheap fashion joints had filled abandoned store fronts, and an Asian buffet called The China Palace was where the old S&S Cafeteria used to be. There was even a boutique hotel a block off Main, with a nice, semi-formal dining room that was a favorite among Preston’s more well-to-do citizens.

            Mervin and Boot rolled down Main Street from red light to red light, waiting at each one amidst cars and trucks filled with folks who’d come to town for some Saturday shopping. They didn’t say much to each other, both lost in their thoughts about what could have happened to Skeeter. Boot called Perch and told him about their trip to Skeeter’s and visit to the police station. They agreed to meet at Bill’s around five.

 Mervin pressed the gas pedal when they were clear of town, and ten minutes later he was circling in front of the two-story farmhouse Boot’s family had called home for generations.

 Boot climbed out of the truck and saw his two coonhounds, Jack and Joe, moseying around a corner of the house, ears flopping and tails wagging.

 “Where y’all been?” he hollered at the dogs. Mervin got out of the truck and got down on his knees to be at Jack and Joe’s level. The dogs were happy to see Mervin and went straight to him, slobbering on him for a minute or two while he scratched their bellies. They were good dogs, brothers, each deep orange and white. Mervin could tell them apart thanks to a strip of white fur that ran between Joe’s eyes down to his nose. Satisfied, they turned and trotted back toward the house.

 “Man, those dogs got it made,” Boot said. “All they do is eat, sleep, and come and go as they please.”

 “Kind of like their owner,” Mervin said with a grin.

 Boot ignored this. “Man, I’m worried about Skeeter. This doesn’t feel good. What should we do?”

 “I don’t know,” Mervin said. “Wait and see what the police say, I suppose.”

 Boot stood there for a few seconds, the truck idling with a low growl. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

 He shut the door to Mervin’s truck, careful not to slam it, turned and walked up the steps to his front porch, following Joe and Jack. Mervin watched Boot’s shoulders sag as he unlocked the front door and went inside. He took out his phone and called Becca.

 “Hey, you got any plans for lunch?”

 “No, I was just waiting to hear from you,” she said.

 “What if I was to stop at Jessie Mae’s and get us a couple of takeouts?”

 “That’s sounds great,” Becca said. “You know what vegetables I like. I don’t want chicken. Meatloaf if she has it. Otherwise, anything but chicken.”

 “I’ll see you in about half an hour,” Mervin said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

 “That doesn’t sound good,” Becca said.

 Mervin climbed back into his truck, pulled out onto the highway, and pointed the pickup toward town. He punched on the stereo, and there was a CD already in the player. A song called “A World of Hurt” by the Drive-By Truckers filled the cab. Mervin liked the Truckers, especially the songs written by Patterson Hood whose raspy voice and power-chord approach really hit home.

 Hood wrote some of the most courageously honest songs about the South Mervin had ever heard. He’d worn out the band’s 2012 record, “Southern Rock Opera,” which attempted to explain, as Hood put it, “the duality of the Southern thing.”

 Mervin knew exactly what Hood was talking about—the yin and yang, the evil and goodness in America’s most misunderstood region. The Deep South was filled with immense natural beauty, historical intrigue, and an omnipresent vibe of easygoing charm. There really was something to that old Southern hospitality claim.

 But percolating beneath all this virtue was a sense of anger, paranoia, and hatred that sometimes bubbled to the surface and resulted in confrontation, violence, even bloodshed.

 Mervin listened to the Truckers, marveled at the full-blown fall colors in the trees along the highway, and thought about Skeeter, remembering how he was the one who always encouraged others to be more tolerant and less judgmental. Skeeter, Mervin, Boot, Perch, and a few others floated through school in the 1960s and early ‘70s during a time of great social upheaval that never really reached Preston.

 The civil rights movement and school desegregation were things that were just happening, just changing times, something they hadn’t given much thought. They were just trying to pass chemistry or calculus and pick up girls on the weekend.

Of course, this couldn’t be said of all their classmates. Many kids came from homes where fathers viciously opposed integration, and they passed their racism down to their sons and daughters.

 And it keeps getting passed down, Mervin thought as he approached the outskirts of town. Maybe it always will be. Despite such misgivings, he appreciated the duality of the South, the fact that many Southerners held much more open-minded views for which they were seldom given credit. Were these free-thinking Southerners the majority? Probably not, Mervin thought, definitely not in Preston.

 But then again, take a closer look at the town of Preston and there it was, the old Deep South yin and the yang. Neighborhoods were segregated, churches were segregated, and the schools had been successfully resegregated with the creation of independent and Christian schools that operated outside the purview of government-run public education. No doubt that some of those stories Skeeter told them years ago of clandestine police brutality were true, and it was evident that a yearning for those old ways remained in some.

 But there was a ubiquitous sense of community in Preston. When you broke it down to feet-on-the-ground, interpersonal interactions between people of different ages, races, sexual orientations, or ethnic backgrounds, you found that folks cared for one another and would go out of their way to help you if they could. Mervin hadn’t been surprised at all when the ladies auxiliary from the First Baptist Church took boxes filled with socks, underwear, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and other necessities to the camps of Hispanic farm workers out in the country. It was the right thing to do, no matter if your neighbor or boss or colleagues at work were grumbling about illegals taking their jobs, filling up the emergency room, and not speaking English. The Southern thing, it was complex, like Patterson Hood said.

 Mervin’s thoughts were interrupted by one of those new, hot Mustangs that roared up behind him, pulled out and passed on the double yellow. “Go ahead on, son,” Mervin muttered, but he couldn’t help but smile. He’d been there, behind the wheel of a muscle car, and that warm memory carried him through town and into the dirt parking lot in front of Jessie Mae’s house of home cooking.

Before earning a master's degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina in 1984, Michael L. Miller was a construction worker, bellhop, surfer, shoe salesman, tennis bum, and record-store clerk, to name a few. He poured his life experiences into an eighteen-year career at The State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, and accumulated numerous awards from the South Carolina Press Association. His feature stories were syndicated nationally. He published Hootie: How the Blowfish put Pop back into Pop Rock in 1997 and was awarded a 2007 South Carolina Fiction prize for his short story The Lamp, leading to the publication of his first short-story collection, Lonesome Pines. He was instrumental in founding the arts advocacy group One Columbia in his hometown and launching a citywide reading initiative called One Book, One Community. The Hip Shot is his first novel.