Moonlight Water by Win Blevins Read Free Book Online Page A

to music on the radio or CD player. He gabbed with truckers at truck stops on interstates and heard, sometimes, the inner emotions of their lives. He sat in barbershops and pretended to read magazines while listening to the chat of ordinary folk and sketching profiles, holding his pad inside a Field & Stream magazine. He lounged on park benches in small towns and talked to anyone who stopped. Gradually, he picked up bits and pieces of something else, a sense of people that didn’t yet add up to anything but felt good. He expected the yearning to write music to rush into his blood and muscles and start dancing. That didn’t happen, not yet.
    In the van, alone, it was harder. He was quiet, or he carried on long conversations with Georgia or his grandfather. He and Grandpa just talked, and if Grandpa had any wisdom about what Red should do with his life, he never passed it along. The conversations made Red think of one of Grandpa’s favorite songs, “Tain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It).” At night sometimes, sitting at a park picnic table, Red blew tunes on his harmonica and remembered how Grandpa’s raspy voice brought a full feeling to it. When Red was a kid, he’d asked Grandpa what it meant, “the way that you do it.” Grandpa just said, “The way that feels right to you.” He was a grandpa, not an oracle.
    While he watched the miles and towns and cars crammed with families roll by, Red’s mind ran along the tracks and sometimes clear off the tracks. Uneasy, afraid, itchy as an ingrown hair, crazy as a bedbug, forlorn, and wildly exuberant—he’d felt it all. He’d spent days fighting off tears, because he had—quote-unquote—lost everything. ( Buck up, he told himself. You haven’t lost it. You left it. By bold choice. Except the marriage. That helped him some.) He’d surrendered to tears because the world was graceful, beautiful, and sublime. Some days Red was so grumpy that waitresses skirted around him to avoid pouring a second cup of coffee. On bad days he was haunted by Georgia, and their inner talks didn’t go so well. She and her lover and the guys in the band would all appear until he shouted at them, “Beat it!”
    Lighthearted and giddy, my ass. Most of the time he was scared and pretending not to be.
    Was Georgia right that he’d lost his connection to himself? He said out loud, “Red, know thyself.” How can I know someone fresh-born?
    Seeking wisdom, he made the first of two signs that he taped to his dashboard:
    AN ADVENTURE
    IS A CATASTROPHE
    RIGHTLY CONSTRUED
    Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, rolling headlong through the Bible Belt, billboards preached at him. A couple of those signs he liked:
    â€œDON’T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE!”
    â€”SIGNED GOD
    And fifty miles farther on:
    â€œTHAT PART ABOUT LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR?
    I MEANT IT.”
    â€”again the divine signature.
    Then he saw a bumper sticker that summed up his response to the Bible Belt:
    â€œLORD, PROTECT ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS.”
    That became his second hand-printed dashboard sign.
    In Nacogdoches, Texas, he read this enticement on a marquee:
    MUD-WRESTLING
    GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS
    ALL NUDE ALL THE TIME
    NONE UNDER TWO HUNDRED POUNDS
    He felt a twinge of temptation, gave in to a big grin, and drove on.
    Looking at the word Lord day after day on his dashboard started to wear on him. When he was a kid, they’d gone to Mass every Sunday, but by the time he was sixteen, he’d found the whole thing hard to swallow. He decided from now on to give Him or Her a new name. Red changed his dashboard sign to:
    ANONYMOUS SOURCE, PROTECT ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS.
    That felt good, even though he wasn’t a praying man unless he was feeling very desperate.
    But today would feel good. Very. Moonlight Water. Gianni. An adventure!
    Ahead Red could see the desert country, red and buff-colored, rippled into