The Book of Lost Friends(17)

“You go on about your business,” he says as he settles on my porch swing with Sunshine at his feet. “If you don’t mind, we’ll wait here. We’re not bothered by the weather, us two. Into every life a little rain must fall.”

I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or Sunshine or himself, but I thank him for the information and leave him there in his coat and rain hat, his face turned toward the graveyard, his countenance undampened by the weather.

The rain does not seem to muck up the spirits at the Cluck and Oink, either. The tumbledown building, which sits on the highway at the far edge of town, looks like the result of an unholy mating between a cow barn and an old Texaco station, surrounded by their spawn of portable storage sheds of various sizes and vintages, some attached, some not.

The low-slung porch along the front is crowded with waiting customers, and the drive-through line, at 12:17 on a Sunday afternoon, stretches around the building and through the gravel parking lot, and blocks traffic on the right lane of the highway as people wait to turn in. Smoke belches from a screened area at the back of the building, where a crew scurries about like bees in a hive, tending a bevy of wood-fired cooking pits. Sausages, hunks of meat, and naked whole chickens turn on giant rotisseries. Flies dangle from the fascia boards in shifting black strings, climbing one over the other in hopes of gaining entry. I can’t blame them. The place smells delicious.

I park next door at the aging Ben Franklin five-and-dime, and slog across the wet strip of grass between the buildings.

“They’ll tow that car, if you leave it settin’ over there!” a teenage employee warns me as he rushes back from the dumpster.

“I’m not staying long. Thanks!” It registers that the other restaurant customers have steered clear of the Ben Franklin lot. Even in my short time in Augustine, I’ve heard kids at school regularly kibitzing about the police harassing them for hanging out around town, gathering for parties, and so forth. The perceived heavy-handedness of the local law, and who gets the worst of it, is a favorite topic of student conversation while they’re not listening to my lessons about Animal Farm. If they’d pay attention, they might spot parallels to the way this town operates in separate communities—black, white, haves, have-nots, backwoods kids, townies, and the landed gentry. The lines between them exist like an ancient but unseen network of walls, not to be crossed except through the necessary gates of commerce and employment.

Again, Animal Farm offers points for debate, lessons to teach. I plan to spend next week lobbying Principal Pevoto for some kind of classroom literature budget. I need books, resources that might have a hope of drawing in the kids. Maybe something more recent, like Where the Red Fern Grows or The Education of Little Tree. A story with hunting and fishing and outdoor motifs, since most of my students, no matter which group they hail from, can relate to putting food on the table via the forests, swamps, gardens, and backyard chicken coops. I’m searching for connecting points, anywhere I can find them.

The Cluck and Oink, I realize as soon as my eyes adjust to the murky interior, is a hub in this town. All the demographics of Augustine—black, white, male, female, young, old—seem at home here in this sea of fried-food smells and scurrying waitresses. Women in impossibly bright dresses and flamboyant Sunday hats tend smartly dressed children at tables crammed with multiple generations of family. Little girls with feet tucked into Mary Janes and legs circled by lace-cuffed socks sit like fluffy cake toppers on booster seats and in high chairs. Boys in bow ties and men in suits of various vintages dating all the way back to 1970s plaid tell stories and pass plates. Conversation, cordiality, and an air of jovial companionship mingle with grease smoke and cooks calling out “Order up!” or “Hot bread! Hot bread!”

Laughter rings the rafters like church bells, constant, musical, the sound amplified by the rusty tin roof and showered down again.

Boudin balls—whatever those might be—seem to be the order of the day. I check out the picture on the menu board, then wonder what’s inside the deep-fried nuggets as platefuls move past, carried by fleet-footed girls in blue polyester uniform tops and jeans.

I’d like to try some, but I hear the teenager at the hostess stand, whom I quickly recognize as one of my students, telling a potential customer that the kitchen is thirty minutes behind on orders. I hope Councilman Walker’s grandson scored some takeout before the post-church rush.

I’ll have to wait until another time for a sample. Even if the kitchen weren’t backed up, I shouldn’t spend the money. I’ve burned through twelve boxes of off-brand snack cakes in my classroom since the Lil’ Ray M&M’s incident. My students constantly claim hunger pangs. I don’t know who’s lying and who’s telling the truth, and I haven’t asked as many questions as I probably should. Maybe I’m hoping that if they can’t be won with books, chocolate sponge cake and fluffy filling might do the trick.

I make my way into the cash register line, studying the pies in the glass case while I advance, one satisfied customer at a time, toward the African American woman at the counter, whom I hear others addressing as Granny T. White-haired with hazel eyes and the stocky look of many of the people I’ve met in Augustine, she’s decked out in a pink church dress and hat. She cuts up with customers as she flies through tickets, adding totals in her head, doling out lollipops to kids, and commenting on who’s grown at least an inch since last week, I do declare.