Lukas Flippo

The dog sniffed him clear to the creek. The water trickles from the quiet teacher’s neighborhood to the high school. At midnight, thirty students jump from rock to rock, their converses scratching against the graphite surface all the way up to the school to break in for a senior prank.The bridge over the stream means you’re close. Close to where you’ve once been, where you’ll never be again.

Remember that night? The spring breeze pushed all the cars away from the baseball field to the boulevard. It’s a sleepy town after last strike.

Shouldn’t you kiss her? The moon cut through the branches, highlighting the right side of her face, the blushing cheek to the emerald green eye. She’s looking at you.

But you keep walking, off the bridge’s wooden planks into the gravel parking lot of the pee-wee baseball fields, heading home.

Don’t go to the East side. One good wind and the whole town grabs for a jacket. A standoff, cops are rushing the creekbed. No more water left. They found the gun. Evacuations, everybody’s out.

The bridge is lonely. Everyone lied. Gracie’s asleep, but you don’t know that. You drive home, zig-zagging through downtown to lose the headlights tailing you. Where could he have gone? The dog lost his scent at the creek.

Once you hit 60 miles per hour, they start to feel like a rain that somehow can’t sneak its way in through the rushing wind flowing past the open windows.

Splat. Splat. Splat. Splat. Yellow, brown, red. A kaleidoscope of lives lost on a cool Mississippi two lane.

You go faster. 70 miles per hour. The pace quickens, the rhythm line of Charley Crockett moves faster.

“I just want better, and I’m about to break on through. Baby I’m working. Baby I’m - ”

The sound won’t penetrate those trees, that dark vanguard of everything you need to know and everything you wish you never had to know.

“I DON’T HATE IT! I DON’T HATE IT!” You shout. But this isn’t Harvard, this isn’t Faulkner.

Can you fix it? Can you outrun the headlights? Or are you just another passerby, a set of headlights who will never see, disappearing as the navy turns black turns into gold. The bugs stop flying into the windshield. The cell tower is out of reach, only the midnight preachings of a long-dead southern preacher boom over the local station. If you don’t hate it, run fast.

There are four teenagers sitting by the lifeguard chair. Dog days, I think as I wait for my order at the Bumper’s Drive-In down the road. A loud road, a quiet road, it all depends on what you’re listening for. The crows circling the dead possum at the yellow line? The motorcycle club on their Sunday evening ride? The black exhaust smoke hazes the American flags waving from the back of their seats.

A car full of three teenage girls pulls into the stall next to me, a cacophony of Olivia Rodrigo slipping through the cracked driver’s side window. We make eye contact before a shout cuts through the air to rival the waiter’s crackling voice coming through the intercom asking for their order, and I’m pulled in reverse back onto the highway pavement, the falling sun attached to my wheels like a string to a lightbulb in the back corner of a shotgun home.

“Gotta get ‘em before he gets older and starts beating me,” dad tells me as he takes a shot over his son’s extending arm. I watch them dance while the sun falls below the rim. The lifeguards are gone now, their things packed into their cars and transported across the gravel parking lot. Two of them left alone, two of them left together. How did they manage that? I would see them later parked behind the high school, her blonde hair mixing with his curly brown locks over the console. A skunk wandered out from the cornfield and surveyed the dugout of the baseball field.

The young boy steps back, runs to his left to escape his dad’s wingspan, finds an opening and slides his feet together before launching from the ground to levitate for a second he could never forget. I see the ball fly through the air across my rearview mirror, but I close my eyes. And by the time I’m back to my senses my headlights are feeling for the forest in the distance. Where the darkness of the trees stops us from seeing far ahead. To grow up.

The hills will rock you to sleep if you aren’t careful. It’s one last scream of the red clay region before the smooth farmland of the Delta basin takes over. Up and down, up and down, cars ride the rollercoaster in the haze of the summer sun between Jackson and Yazoo City. They fly past the highway memorials, a cross hidden in the shade of oak trees, a panda bear wrapped around a speed limit sign, its face turned away from the passing cars.

Our roads take lives, and they take on lives. What’s true and what’s false? There was a curve near my home, an almost 90 degree hairpin turn on a two lane outside of town.

“Be careful on Callie’s Curve,” my mom would constantly tell me. I knew the story. Callie had a wreck on the curve. Drove straight. Fast. In the rain. Didn’t see the curve. Didn’t move the wheel. Hit the tree.

But that was never true. “I don’t know where you heard that from,” mom recently told me when I questioned the veracity of the story, “I think the people who owned that land were the Callies. Like that was their last name.”

Last call, Last call - the sun shouted as the first tree limbs began to pull it down from the fading orange clouds. The Main Street of Utica was no opposition for the blanket of darkness rolling west across the Mississippi River. The water turns from brown to orange to black, disguising its next twist, a slight maneuver around one town to cut off another, all under the watchful nose of Samuel Clemmon’s ghastly turn at the wheel of the barge in a hazy memory. Towns like Utica hide under that dark water, our very own Atlantis only frequented by the dead eyes of De Soto.

But that’s hundreds of miles away from the two cars parked on Main Street. There is a lone wind, an answered prayer for a segregation academy football practice several miles away. It whistles through the street, making the blinking red light sway as if a rush of vehicles is zooming beneath it, as if it’s the 1970s and this is American Graffiti and John will saunter by with his arm out the window looking for a race. As if that wasn’t just a movie and as if we don’t drive plastic cars. As if the car factory 81 miles away wasn’t Nissan.

“You ever heard of Eudora Welty?” Kevin Horne smiled as he asked. “She did the same thing you’re doing. Went around Mississippi and took pictures. She took a picture of my home over there.” He said as stepped out of his sun-basked wood workshop and pointed to a white antebellum home. If only the walls could talk, he lamented. If only the wooden floor creaked poetry to our ears. 

As I walked up the hill to Main Street,. A yellow truck sped through the red-light. A plume of exhaust staining the white walls of the home to my eye. The whirring of a buzzsaw faded as I approached the door.

Oh but how do we describe the loneliness of the last out, the heat of the sun making your back glow as you leave that town behind. Will your name go on the fence? Will the dirt scattered in the dugout fall in the soil turned into mud by cleats in a rain henceforth?

“Fickle, fickle fickle. The mind is a fickle thing,” The street preacher muttered into a bedazzled, pink microphone. A dirt-stained, white towel reached over his right shoulder, flowing all the way past the frayed tips of his red “Jesus Saves” t-shirt. As he paced, left right left right as though the train tracks overgrown 50 yards away had some ghost train running back and forth over its track, its conductor head out the window with blue eyes staring out at the main street intersection gesturing toward the man with a finger and the rattle of the soldiers in the train making that finger roll up and down and left and right soon to sway to the cadence of a phrase lost to the wind. The towel caught the edge of the volume knob of the speaker, turning the volume up and down like the bursting blows of the bebop tunes remembered in the closed-down bar around the corner.

“YOUR mind is a FICKLE,” he shouted at me, the volume cutting out before he could finish. Out of our, your, their mind.

A line of cars bounced over the metal tracks down the hill, a blur of painted windows reading “Ole Miss ‘27” or “Senior Year.” High school seniors in their fading glory. While the red light lingered, I focused on the darkening shadow of an oak tree on the fading white paint of a wooden barn behind the closed Sonic Drive-In Restaurant, parallel to the three-story antebellum makeover it belonged to, its third floor painted an orange bathing in the final hour of sunset before the blue clouds of dusk take over.

An eye poked out from behind a brown window curtain, curious about me, curious about the shadow.

“They know you’re coming,” the preacher snorted. “They know you’ve come,” The preacher whispered. “They know you’ve gone,” the preacher smiled.

He walked away muttering god, God, god, God, god, God. Giggling in the scrawl of the Mississippi field of mind, a field of mine.