“It’s a brotherhood,” Hank Stillwell said, rubbing his thin red beard. “We do for each other. You know? I mean, like if you’re short of cash, we pass the hat. Someone has it out for you? They got it out for all of us.”

“All for one?”

“Yeah, man,” Stillwell said, blowing some joint smoke through his nose. “All that shit. This is our county, we run it. We make our own laws. Our own world. We are the true American badasses who answer to nobody.”

“Did you get some barbecue?” J.T. asked, turning off the welding torch, goggles now on top of his sweating head. “That’s some good shit. Folks brought that truck all the way down from Memphis.”

“You can’t turn down a patch, man,” Stillwell said. “You’d be the first I ever heard.”

Jason looked up from the floor. His chunky brother, Van, was over helping J.T. take the frame off a vise and set it on the ground. Van just shook his head, his gut about to bust his dirty T-shirt. Van being a helluva one to offer personal advice, as he was still living at home after turning twenty, supposedly running things for his dad, but really just not wanting to go out and get a job. He spent most of his day watching game shows and getting high. He wanted to go out west with Jason. But Van Colson in California would be a mistake.

“I would only turn down the offer because I’m leaving,” Jason said. “How can I be a part of something, part of y’all, if I’m not here?”

“Chains and Big Doug know that,” Stillwell said. “They understand that you’re in and out. But he dug the way you acted in Olive Branch. He liked that you’re a man with no fear. You get patched and you’re patched for life.”

Jason nodded. He ate some more barbecue and drank some more Coors. He crushed the can in his hand and tossed it toward the trash. “We must’ve drank five hundred cases of this when we were making Smokey. The whole movie is pretty much a commercial for Coors. Y’all seen it yet?”

J.T., Van, and Hank Stillwell shook their heads.

“It’s a good picture,” Jason said. “Can’t believe the way it turned out. They didn’t even have a script. Hal would just let everyone just let loose with their characters and say whatever came to mind. That Jackie Gleason was incredible. He just showed up, got in uniform, and became that SOB. They call him Buford T. Justice. Just the funniest things came out of him. He tells his son, who’s his deputy, that when they get back home from chasing the Bandit all over creation that he was gonna punch his momma right in the mouth. We all were on the set and just broke up on that. That’s Gleason. The man’s a genius.”

“Is making movies like a brotherhood?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Van said, walking to a galvanized bucket full of beer and getting a new one. “Y’all give it a rest.”

“Shut up,” Hank Stillwell said. “You ain’t a part of this.”

“He’s my brother, Red.”

“Nobody calls me Red no more,” Stillwell said, glaring at Van. “Call me Hank or Pig Pen.”

“You’re still Red to me,” Van said, belching. Stillwell’s dirty looks didn’t mean shit to him. “And y’all need to get it in y’all’s head that Jason is gone. He’s leaving. When? Next week?”

Jason shrugged. “Depends on J.T.”

J.T. lit up a joint with the end of his welding torch and then turned it off. He sucked in some smoke and nodded and nodded. “Yeah, man. A week. Two weeks. Got to get some paint. You got a nice job on them Stars and Bars.”

“The redneck Evel Knievel,” Van said. “That’s you, Jason.”

“So if you’re leaving, really leaving,” Stillwell said. “What about you and Jean Beckett? Y’all hadn’t been apart. What? She going with you to Hollywood?”

Jason got up off the garage floor, not wearing shoes. His boots sat on the leather seat of his other bike outside. He had on a black T-shirt and faded Levi’s, the beard and hair growing truly wild and black. He tossed the shell of the watermelon and came back to where the boys sat around J.T. as he worked, a regular Michelangelo of scooters.

“Shit,” Jason said. “She said she’ll go if we get married. I said, ‘Cool, let’s get married.’ But she said we got to get married here with her momma and her crazy-ass family. She wants a church and all that and, man, oh man, I’m more scared of that than having a full-time old lady.”

J.T. laughed the hardest. Stillwell snorted and Van just shook his head.

“You need to do for yourself,” Van said, putting a hand to his mouth as he burped. “You don’t need to do for Jean or me and Daddy and, least of all, this here motorcycle crew. What’s all that shit mean?”

Stillwell, as narrow and skinny as a board, walked up to Jason’s short little brother and poked him in the chest. “You don’t get it. You won’t get it for a million years. Some men are born different.”

“And who’s Chains LeDoux?” Van said. “Jesus Christ?”

“You better shut your fucking mouth,” Stillwell said, a little loose on his feet. He’d come into the garage twenty minutes earlier with nearly fifty dollars’ worth of fireworks that they were going to blow at the clubhouse tonight. He was acting more like a little kid than a man nearly thirty-five years old.

His attitude changed when a young girl walked into the wide-open bay door of the garage. She was real young, probably in her early teens but trying to dress older. She had on an orange-fringed top cut into ribbons, with beads hanging down over her skinny belly, wide-legged blue jeans and tall clogs, her hair pulled back under a kerchief. Stillwell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tried to stand tall and sober.

He just nodded at her.

“Can I borrow some money, Daddy?” the young girl asked. Her cheeks were brushed with pink rouge and her mouth was the color of bubble gum.

“If you take that shit off your face.”

The girl’s face colored beneath the makeup. She looked down to the stained asphalt as Stillwell walked to her, wobbly on those motorcycle boots, and clutched her chin. He turned her face this way and that and reached for an oil-stained rag hanging over J.T.’s Harley.

In front of the three other men, he wiped the makeup off her face with the filthy rag, staining her cheeks and mouth with oil. “Go home and dress proper,” he said. “You look like a goddamn streetwalker.”

The girl left, crying.

Stillwell walked over to the tub for another beer. None of the men spoke for a long time, Van catching his brother’s eye as he left J.T.’s garage, an unspoken warning to back the hell off from all this. Somewhere out on the town square some kids were blowing up a strand of firecrackers.

The temperature was dropping fast, and Quinn and Lillie caught Hank Stillwell outside his trailer, chopping wood. He had a neat trailer, a lime green Plymouth and a motorcycle parked nearby under a metal carport, as he collected wood in orderly piles, split and stacked for a billowing furnace attached to the single-wide.

“Mr. Stillwell?” Quinn said. He’d met Lillie up in Yellow Leaf and they both drove their own vehicles to Stillwell’s place.

He split the final piece of wood on a big round log with a thwack and looked up to them. He was out of breath, his worn-out jacket hanging loose and open with only an undershirt beneath. He nodded and set another piece of wood on the block but laid down the ax.