South of Shiloh Read Online Free PDF Page B

his cousin Darl put it this way: “Hey, Mitch, I seen you and your trust-fund wife in Southern Living magazine.” The only reason Darl had occasion to read Southern Living was because the magazine was opened to the article about Mitch and Ellie’s remodeled antebellum Corinth house when Darl found it on the coffee table in the McMansion he was ripping off in a posh Memphis neighborhood.
    And so, finally it occurred to Mitch that if enough people tell you the same damn thing long enough, you just might wind up believing them. He probably did have bad blood like his father. Once he accepted that fact, the rest came easy.

    DRIVING EAST ON HIGHWAY 72, BACK TOWARD CORINTH, MITCH WAS a little pissed that Darl would call him during his group. They were supposed to be exercising a modicum of caution. Like the saying goes, you can’t choose your family. With a sigh, Mitch flipped open his cell and called Darl, who answered on the second ring.
    “Darl, man, I told you never call me during that meeting.”
    “Sorry. Got excited, I guess.”
    Darl thought AA was a hard sell in West Alcorn, where some folks were convinced the air was still part moonshine and part gunpowder. And there it was; the conflicted reluctance in his voice.
    “Keep a lid on it, okay? Where are you?” Mitch asked.
    “Coming back from my mom’s, I just dropped the kids off. I’m heading west on 72.”
    “I’m coming east. Keep coming past the farm and we’ll touch base at the 604 turnoff.”
    “See ya,” Darl said, ending the call.
    Mitch shook his head. Darl was getting cold feet, was trying to change his stripes and reinvent himself as a dad.
    It’s not that he had avoided Darl after he started riding the Kirby escalator. More like they existed in different circles; Mitch attended First Presbyterian, maintained a membership in the Shiloh Ridge Country Club, worked on his golf game, and got his picture in Southern Living . Darl struggled as an entry-level dope dealer in Memphis under his older brother Dwayne’s stern tutelage. Then he met and married an icy-hot confection of brains and glands named Marcy. Together they’d anticipated the crack boom, then doubled up and hit it big in meth. Smart enough to leave when the well-armed and very murderous Mexican gangs moved in, they took their bankroll to Alcorn County and laundered it in land speculation. Darl had a sentimental side, so, out of nostalgia, he’d bought and reopened an abandoned Tennessee honky-tonk just over the state line north of Corinth. Darl was living fairly straight, running XTC, his beer joint, and doing his land deals. On the side he provided a smattering of coke and designer drugs for the recreational use of the local gentry.
    Fairly straight, that is, until Mitch took him aside and made known his intention to migrate back to the outlaw side of the family. Mitch found it kinda exciting, rubbing up against his hoodlum kin.
    Especially Darl’s wife.
    He weighed the cell phone in his palm. What the hell. Go for it. He punched in Darl’s home number.
    “It’s you,” said Marcy Leets in her standard bored idle.
    “You’re free tonight,” Mitch said.
    “Just so happens,” she said.
    “I’m thinking of taking one of my walks. Say eleven thirty?”
    “Meet you at the end of the block. If I ain’t there, don’t wait.” She ended the call. That was Marcy for you. Always liked to keep you dangling.
    Mitch slowed, hit his turn indicator, wheeled right on County 604, then swung left in a U-turn, parked along the side of the road, and switched off his lights. He zipped down the window and fingered a Marlboro Light from the pack in his pocket. Flat fallow soybean fields stretched to either side. You could almost hear the dirt yawn, emerging from its winter rest. He flicked his lighter and thought: Land. Like they say, they ain’t making any more of it.
    A few drags into the cigarette, Darl’s gray Ram Charger with its distinctive vanity plate— OJDIDIT —turned off 72 and