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Show Go Love/104 Renee's tired. "Joey," she says through the window "Call." How must O.W. have felt fifteen years ago when the dispatchers radioed that Mama was waiting at the terminal. That she was a wreck. That something awful had happened and he needed to skip his remaining drops, get home A.S.A P. Dead-heading across Tennessee through Nashville and Memphis, the glass pyramid at river bridge and that long stretch of earth between places. Then Mama said Jimmy was dead and he got that look on his face-half surprise, half something else. Jimmy, his blood son's name-how long did that word take to sink in? I call. Only instead of O.W., it's Mama, her voice on the answering machine, and I don't expect that, not for a second, her sweet words telling me in that way she can't make get to the phone right now, that if I'll leave my message at the sound of the beep, she'll get back to me soon as she can. Just to hear her, I try again. And again Until finally her voice is gone, just silence, empty space. A car drives up across the street and two girls order cones The vendor'd have enough ice for a zillion vodka tonics-enough to float a whale like the dead grey that lay over there in 1985. This was the Dixie circuit-it was nothing for a Peterbilt to pull off the interstate with a six-hundred pound rat, two-headed goats or Donkey Woman nursing horsey-faced twins. Leviathan's arrival coincided with our fistfight-mine and O.W.'s-the one we had just before Jimmy died We'd all been driving back from having a family photograph in Little Rock, Trace and Jimmy in the backseat of the blue Cougar, me up front with Mama-O.W. driving. I was twenty-four that summer, living home again from school, barhopping and fighting nights and finishing concrete days Mama's lupus had just kicked in, barely, just barely. Me and Jimmy'd gone out drinking the night before the scheduled sitting. In Jacksonville, we got pretty shit-faced at a cowboy bar- |