One: Home

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, ain’t a bad place to be born for a teenage white boy, James would remind himself almost every hour of the damn day. There was an oily pizza place for drunk college kids that was actually pretty good, a franchise bowling alley for socializing in the Americana aesthetic, and a river where high schoolers could crack open cheap beers pickpocketed from their daddy’s gameday refrigerators. 

Oh, it’s also pretty safe in Tuscaloosa, except when you see Officer Frank Coffee, a good ol’ boy with the proportions of a bulldozer, choke someone out along the road at night. Coffee, the son of the preacher at the mall-sized First Baptist, thinks no one sees him, but James can see clearly from the top window at the back of the house. 

It’s also pretty safe unless you spy Skip Freedman, a fraternity boy, break a pledge’s arm with a baseball bat, as James once witnessed. Skip, the son of a Unitarian minister in Pennsylvania, drives a red Ford F-150 pickup with a confederate flag decal on the back window. Whenever James sees this truck with the Penn plates, he hears the crunch of that bat against the bone and winces. 

Unlike most of his tenth-grade classmates’ families, James’ parents weren’t originally from Tuscaloosa, although he was born there, in the small regional hospital. His mom was from a Jacksonville suburb and had gotten her doctorate in Greek from the university, where her teaching assistantship turned into a tenure-track gig. Stigmatized state schools that religionize football—to the mockery of the crème de la crème—look after their own. His father, from the Oregon coast, taught religious studies. They’d both arrived at the university as young, lanky academics. When Henry and Willa found out James was on the way, they married fast and dropped whatever scholarly ambitions they had to set up shop in T-Town, buying a proper house on a cul-de-sac. The little city and its chain of chain businesses created a neat web for their lives, it just so happened. James would wonder if there was some sort of Greek myth behind the place where you’re born. Certainly, there’s some sort of trickster god who picks a soul from his teeth like a grape seed and uncaringly places it in the world to enter and grow out like a grape vine. 

When he looked out the storm door, drying off the sweat of his September bike rides from school, James would think about all the places that weren’t Tuscaloosa. The only trips Willa and Henry ever took were for university-funded academic conferences. There was a moratorium on vacations in order to, they said, save money for James to go to whatever college he wanted. But James has a feeling he’ll end up down the street, at the state school with the Grecian architecture, the Greek clubs, and the Greek department. 

The longing for an odyssey hummed in his pelvic floor like a siren’s mantra. There ain’t no adventure in Tuscaloosa. 

 

Two: Go

James calculated that the farthest he wanted to go was four hours by car. Eight hours of driving roundtrip. After his parents left for their fall conferences, he could hit the road. With Labor Day off, he’d have three days before Willa and Henry returned. It could work. These are the sorts of thoughts that enter your head when you get to be sixteen. 

For a southern kid, the only place to go is north. Four hours north would be Tennessee. According to a blog, there’s a hostel on a farm in a mountain town called Candle. It was nice enough and cheap enough. With the money he’d been stashing from doing yard work, he booked a couple nights at the hostel. He’d always wanted to see the mountains—Greek gods live atop them. 

James texted Pye, a senior at school who’d gotten his first pick-up, a Chevy Colorado, when he turned eighteen. Pye was born in the same hospital as James, but his parents had come to the States from Brazil to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina. Once the work dried up there, they’d driven as far as they could in the junky sedan they’d purchased under the table. The old car got them to Tuscaloosa. Pye’s parents had saved up enough money to buy their son a better car so, when the time came, he could get farther than they did. 

The two boys had only been fast friends for about a month when Pye gave James a ride home after his bike tire busted from a shard of taillight in the road. Pye stopped for James because he’d always given Pye a nod in the hallway, which was unique compared to the fucking stupid fat-headed white boys who’d whisper “build the wall” in his ear. 

“Hey man,” James texted now. “Need a favor. Big favor. Want to have an odyssey?” 

I’m old enough to do this now, Pye thought, cherishing the freedom of being eighteen and having a car. “I’m in. Sounds fun.” 

They left the next day in the evening, an hour after James’s parents took off on a shuttle to the airport in Birmingham. 

 

Three: The Road

The roads in Tennessee are narrow and antigodlin after you pass through Chattanooga. Mountains were starting to stalk them and the air was getting colder. The heater in Pye’s car burned some dust because it hadn’t been used in so long. It’s funny how much the weather changes every hour you’re away, thought James. 

“It’s cool your parents just let you do this,” James chirped.

“Yeah,” responded Pye, “I think they’re just happy I have a friend.”

“You ever driven this far before?”

“Nah, not really. But I drive a lot. Whenever I can. Somewhere. Anywhere. Gives me something to do. But I never been this far north, no way. No one in my family’s been. They told me to take photos of the mountains.”

Pye scooped some sunflower seeds from a wax bag they’d picked up on their first rest stop and cracked the shells in his teeth. “It’s nuts your parents don’t know you’re doing this,” he said as he spat the shells into an empty energy drink bottle. 

“They’re at a conference. Those things take up all their time.” 

“They must really trust you.” 

“Your parents must really trust you for trusting me,” James said with a smirk. 

After a beat of silence, Pye connected his phone into a wire he’d jimmied to the truck’s sound system and played  “Boa Sorte.”

A red F-150 sped through the right-hand lane just in front of Pye’s Colorado. James winced at the sight, hearing the crunching of the bone in his mind. In one scary dance, the F-150 slipped diagonally across the lane onto the shoulder of the highway, out of control. Dust and mud spat into the sky as the truck popped from one side to the other before crashing mightily into a pine tree. The truck hit the tree so hard that its steaming motor popped from the hood like seed from a shell and twirled in the evening sky. 

Shit! Pye swerved the truck as the smoking engine flew up and thudded on the shoulder, right next to their truck, before bouncing a few more skips.

“Pull over,” barked James.

Punching the music off, Pye pulled onto some grass. The two got out and looked back at the red truck, Pye’s eyes settling on the motor steaming nearby on the shoulder. All he could imagine was that if it had fallen a foot or so more toward them, it would’ve shattered his windshield showering them in steam and glass, crushing them with hot metal. 

While people jumped out of their cars to rescue whoever was in that truck, the two boys stood stunned. A group of men heaved the driver’s door open. A fat white man spilled out of the seat, plopping onto the grass, his belly hanging out of his torn jacket, stunned into oblivion. Then, there was a cry—a little voice from within the pickup. 

“There’s a kid in there,” one man cried. “We need help!” 

James’s eyes watered and Pye’s breath got heavy. His breath turned into leaps toward the red truck. Pye envisioned joining in with the men to pry the child out. But, when he got to the truck, he stopped. As the cries of the little kid stuck in the truck got louder, the teen got scared and withdrew, like a retractable key chain, to where James stood. 

Traffic on the highway had come to a stop and other drivers bounced out of their cars to help the rescue. A sturdy woman with a radio headset fastened over her tight curly blonde hair stumbled out from the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. “What’s happening down there?” she asked. 

“There’s a kid. A kid’s in there,” Pye said pointing to the truck. 

“Fuck,” the truck driver said. “I saw that Ford from way back. That guy was drunk. And he had a kid in the car? I hope he goes to jail, the sonova bitch. I’m gonna be sure to tell the troopers.” 

“We need an ambulance!” a man called out from the truck. “We gotta get this kid out and stop the bleeding! He’s losing too much blood!”

“Let’s go,” Pye said, turning purposefully toward the Colorado. But James felt magnetically drawn to the scene.  If he couldn’t muster the courage to help, he’d at least hold a stoic vigil for the boy. 

“You aren’t gonna stay and tell the troopers whatcha saw?” the eighteen-wheeler woman asked.

Pye was already in the driver’s seat and called out sharply like a father, “James! Let’s go.” They pulled onto the highway, and with all the traffic still stopped at the crash site, the road remained totally empty until the next on-ramp. Overhead, a helicopter cut over the Persian carpet sky, zipping in the opposite direction.

“Why did you want to leave?” asked James.

“We were just in the way.”

“Why didn’t we do anything to help?”

“Cause, man, it was a close call. We nearly died. If that engine had landed one foot over—we’d be dead. In fucking Tennessee. What a stupid way for us to die.” 

For the rest of the ride, they only spoke once, when they needed to get gas and piss. At the service station, a sign read: thirty miles to Candle. 

 

Four: The Farm

By the time the moon had confidently settled into the sky, Pye and James arrived at the hostel on the farm nestled into a mountain they could feel but not see. 

“Well, this is it, I think,” James said. An abrupt shape of light came from a door being opened on an Airstream trailer with an uneven wooden porch. In the doorway was the silhouette of a short, stocky woman something like the truck driver they’d run into after the accident. They could see the woman putting on a big flannel coat and hobbling toward them with a flashlight. With a gimp in her left leg, she had the gait of a buoy in a harbor. 

James felt his feet crunch on the fallen leaves as he stepped from the truck and walked towards the trailer. The crunch made him think of the red F-150, the tree, the bat, the bone. He winced.

“You James?” the woman called out.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ma’am? I like that ma’am stuff. We’ve been expecting you.” The woman passed for hospitable but certainly wasn’t cheerful. “Should we be expecting another visitor?” 

“Oh no, this is my friend, Pye, he just drove me here as a favor.” 

“Where from?”

“Tuscaloosa.”

“Roll tide,” the woman said in a snap. “I’m from Boston, but it seems like everyone knows Tuscaloosa from the football team. I once went to the Gaza Strip on business and even they had a souvenir shop for your football team. You go to school there?” 

“Essentially,” James replied. 

“College football’s quite a business, ain’t it? Well, you got a good friend there, kid. That’s what college’s for—finding good friends. Pye. Pye, right? You need a place to rest your head tonight?” 

“No, m’am. It’s only four hours back, I think I can make it,” Pye replied, imagining pulling over at a rest stop, sleeping in his car, the seat fully reclined with the heat on. The thought made him feel safe, like a cocooned moth. 

“Well, your choice, I guess, you’re old enough to make your own decisions. It took me too long to figure that out. In the job I worked, it was a big, stressful thing—big business—and it brought me all over the world, but I never had any control over where I went. One day, I said fuck it, came to this place to escape, ended up liking it so much I never left. What brings you here, James?” 

“Adventure.”

“Alright, Mr. Adventure, well, it’s my bedtime, so let’s show you around so you can get all settled for bed. I’m Charlotte. Like Charlotte’s Web.”

“Charlotte. Like Charlotte’s Web,” James repeated under his breath, thinking it was corny. Does she think I’m a child? “I can’t thank you enough for this, man, I really owe you,” James said as he turned to Pye. 

“Think nothing of it, man.. I hope you find it.”

“Find what?”

“Your odyssey.” 

“Well, today was certainly an adventure—”

“—No.” Pye sighed, “It was a fucking trauma. After that, I just want to be home.” 

 

Five: The Hostel on the Farm

At the hostel on the farm, guest accommodations ranged from tents to trailers, but James was put in a little room in the loft of an old wooden barn nested into the incline of a hill not far from Charlotte’s Airstream. Charlotte led him up the shaky wooden stairs using her flashlight to spot each precarious step. Inside his room, there was a metal bed frame dented and lopsided as if it had been plucked from the side of the road. The sheets were a pale pink that reminded James of his grandmother’s house in Florida, which he’d visited when he was a kid before she died from a Thanksgiving-day stroke. A tiny television with weed-like bunny ears beside a DVD player sat atop an old dresser with sticky drawers. Inside the drawers were DVDs of movies over a decade old; each case had a Blockbuster sticker, making James think Charlotte must’ve grabbed them before the Candle branch shut down for good. There was a rocking chair where James put his backpack and a space heater to turn on for the night. 

The toilet and shower, Charlotte explained, were in a different building. The tour continued to a little white cinderblock rectangle with a two-toilet bathroom and a clunky washer and dryer. The building looked like Thomas Merton’s hermitage, depicted in a book James’s father kept on the coffee table. On one of the toilet seats, a daddy longlegs danced; “Watch out when ya squat,” said Charlotte, in the rotely way of a tour guide. “And keep in mind, I use this bathroom too, we all do, so make sure you don’t leave the seat up or anything.” James felt embarrassed by her frankness, which he chalked up to her being a northerner. Or maybe she was just a northerner who’d turned redneck. 

Next to the cinderblock building was an outdoor shower with wooden partitions. The showerhead was connected to a hose that snaked into the building, under the head was a cinnamon-colored rock to stand on as you bathed. Around the top of the partitions were white Christmas lights. When Charlotte plugged the lights in, spider webs twinkled around the ramshackle alfresco shower. Tea candles and a soggy matchbox lined the ledges, and a bar of soap was absorbed into a wooden shelf. The mountain air blew, casting a spell that made James want to be naked and under the hot water. He would never be able to do such a thing in Tuscaloosa.

“All right, now that you know your way around a bit, I’m going to call it a night. I can show you more in the morning,” Charlotte said as she made her way into the Airstream and turned off the glow of her TV set. James used the flashlight on his phone to wander up the barn steps. 

Settling into the old room, he saw the moon looking down at him like a god atop the mountain. He noticed a spiderweb in the window and found himself thinking about the little child in the car, trapped in a web of metal. Fuck. That really happened. He cranked up the space heater and turned out the light, wrapping himself in the pale pink sheets. 

 

Six: The Web

A buzzing from the window was so loud it woke James up just as the sun began to shine through the mountain mist. A horsefly with the bold shape of a marble was stuck in the spider’s web. The horsefly was so muscular and pronounced it had fluttered to the wooden sill of the window and begun to crawl from the trap. The spider made her way towards the fly, brawling with it, attacking it with her fangs. James was spellbound. The spider’s intensity was fast and fluid and, in its own scary way, beautiful, like a dance—just like the crash from the day before. He knelt down in vigil and watched the spider conquer the fly.

James turned the television on, and the bunny ears picked up an early morning mountain preacher. James reached for his shoes, so he could head to the bathroom for his morning leak, and get an adventure started. When he picked up his black tube socks he noticed a red dot—a ladybug who must’ve hitchhiked in last night. He fixated on the bug’s perfect roundness, like a holly berry. Then, gently, without any higher thought, he walked toward the window, and flicked the little ladybug into the spider’s web. Unlike the strong farm fly, the ladybug was gentle and weak. There was no battle. He watched the bug hang there helplessly as the preacher on the TV yammered about god’s will. 

What other things could go into the web? A grasshopper? A worm? A firefly? It’s just that the bugs were so stupid, he told himself. Bugs don’t cry or bleed. What’s the harm? And if it’s something that can put up a fight, the spider will put on such a show. 

The mountain wind blew and the window softly whistled a call: “sewee.” 

As James made his way down the stairs toward the bathrooms, he saw Charlotte sticking a key into the forest green jacket pocket of a rail-thin man with legs like a praying mantis. 

“Good morning, Mr. Adventure,” Charlotte called to James as she turned to the man in the green jacket. “Gunner, that’s James—like James and the Giant Peach. James, this is Gunner, one of my regulars.”

As James got closer, he noticed that the man had no hands inside the sleeves of his green jacket. At the ends of his arms were only two smooth stumps. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Adventure,” Gunner said in a bluegrass accent, readying to shake James’ hand with one of his nubs. 

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Gunner.”

“Mister Gunner? I like that mister stuff,” Charlotte guffawed. 

James nodded, snapped a picture of the mountain in the daylight—it was bigger than it seemed last night—texted it to Pye, and headed toward the outdoor shower. 

 

Seven: Slip

Naked and twiggy on the shower rock, James felt the hot water pour over his body and it felt as good as he imagined when he first saw the bizarre shower. This alone, showering outside in the cold, on a rock, naked as a Greek statue in the shadow of the mountain was worth it. This was adventure enough. With the bar of peppermint soap, James lathered his body and felt a mole on his ankle. But it wasn’t a mole. A silvery tick had latched onto his skin and inflated like a grape. After a counterclockwise pluck, just as he’d been taught in Boy Scouts, he held the fat tick in-between his boney fingers and placed the bug in the aluminum shell of a tea candle. This would be interesting on the web. 

James was back in his room in the barn. The wind blew “sewee.” This will be good. He dumped the tick onto the web, and its fat body bounced like a volleyball hitting a net. Queen spider made her way to investigate the offering, and when she latched her fangs into it, the tick popped, drenching her web in James’ blood. “Fuck,” James said. He immediately thought about the child, stuck. Bugs aren’t supposed to bleed. 

 

Eight: Mr. Adventure

James felt the cold mountain air swirling around his body, now wrapped in a towel, pale pink sheets, and a flannel jacket. His back was aligned along the cold metal bed of a pickup truck that grunted as it sped down a highway. He could make out the shape of a man sitting next to him in the bed of the truck. The man sounded like the mountain preacher James had heard on the TV. He could blearily see the stump of a wrist the man held over his head. It was Gunner, the handless mantis, praying over James, blessing him. 

“Lord, Jesus, please let this boy be okay, Lord. This boy ain’t done yet, Lord. He ain’t done nothing wrong, Lord. Please let this boy rise up, oh Lord. Heal this boy, Lord. Seal this boy, Lord. Keep the blood in the boy, Lord. There’s too much bleeding,” Gunner went on in a rhythmic twang and James could feel warm coppery blood sliding down his face like tears.  

James could hear Charlotte’s voice mixed with the wind and whistle of speed through a little window that slid open to the cab of her truck: “I’m coming down Highway 40. It’s Charlotte. Remember me from the volunteer fire department? Yeah, not since my injury in the Wiggins fire. Anyway, listen up, I got a kid in my truck, he’s a college kid, who cracked open his head real bad on a rock at my hostel. No wonder how much blood he’s lost. No, he ain’t my kid. He came here with a friend but now he’s alone. He’s unconscious but we’ve stabilized him and I got another person in the back with him but this kid’s gonna need some clean up. He was bucknaked in a shower when we found him, so he’ll likely have a pretty bad chill too. I should be there soon, I’m in my truck with the blinkers on. Get a stretcher ready.”

What Greek god plucked me  from their leg and plopped me into this web? I am a spider, James thought, stunned to oblivion. Bugs don’t bleed. I don’t bleed. I am the spider. 

“Some adventure for Mr. Adventure,” Charlotte said under her breath, praying the family wouldn’t be the litigious kind. 

Gunner prayed some more. 

In Tuscaloosa, Pye showed his parents the picture of the mountain that James had just texted to him. “What an adventure you had—you went so far,” they told him. “We’re glad you could do a favor for your friend who’s always been so nice to you at school. His parents are professors, right? That could come in handy for your application.” Pye never told his parents about the accident. 

A few hours later, Officer Frank Coffee got a call from a hospital in Tennessee. There’s an unconscious Tuscaloosa boy named James whose parents need to be identified. His only clue: a friend named Pye.