James D. McCallister



Forever 27

Benj struggles with the ten-by-ten white lawn-tent while Marcy goes through the beads, box by box: Disco Ball Throw Beads, Tumblin' Dice Throw Beads, Heart Shaped Throw Beads, Oversize Mardi Gras Specials (they look like a necklace of round, green Christmas ornaments, and take up so much space that Marcy wants to scream), Peace Sign Throw Beads, Mystic Leaf Throw Beads (which are pot leaves, in about six colors, including bling-bling gold and silver), Spurting Penis Throw Beads (a new addition), Kiss Me I'm Irish Green Shamrock Throw Beads (leftover from the St. Pat's Festival in Savannah), and a giant blue tub of just ordinary old Throw Beads, which at two for a dollar are a big money generator in spite of their comparative simplicity. That tub is the one that both of them hate the most; seasoned festival vendors they might be, but it didn't make the boxes and storage bins of colorful, plastic junk any lighter—especially after all these years on the road.

     They'd gotten up at the crack of dawn and had a big breakfast at the Waffle House—or Awful House, as Benj calls it—next to the Highway Rest Express motel. Another lousy meal at another cruddy roadside diner, one of a thousand such breakfasts that all run together into a fatty stew of heavy omelets, greasy burgers, salty fries that taste of the old oil in which they've been scalded, Cobb salads of yellow, tasteless iceberg lettuce and mealy tomatoes, eggs on the side of steaks as tough as shoe leather, weak iced tea with a hair in it, burned, bitter restaurant coffee, half-thawed frozen meringue pie on a cracked plate, and then maybe a cig or two (even though they're both trying to cut back). They've lived this way so long it just seems natural, somehow.

     Benj finds himself belching his hashbrowns-smothered-with-onions as they make their way onto the festival grounds and all during the setup, but rushing through another crappy breakfast has paid off: With a double sawbuck, they grease the palm of the sleepy-eyed festival intern who is assigning the spots, and she pencils them into a prime corner location near the end of the food vendors, only forty yards from the main music stage. They'll be deaf by the end of the day, but that is the price you pay in their line for having prime real estate in a high foot-traffic area. If only his back didn't hurt so much; if only the indigestion deigns to succumb to the Zantac 150s that he will gobble off and on all day; if only her feet hold out; if only they can sell some stuff—not just cover the vendor fee, but make some money. If only, if only . . .