June 2011. It was rumored that Waymon’s mother was a prostitute and that he was handed from one unwilling relative to another. All Billy and I really knew was that summers Waymon came to live with his grandfather, a shriveled old man in overalls and straw hat who lived alone in a shack at the edge of the woods above our subdivision. Waymon never talked about a mother or a father or brothers or sisters, but if Billy or I bore in Waymon would say he lived in Memphis, down near the river.

Barefooted and bare-chested, in ragged cutoffs, tanned and muscular, Waymon would put two fingers to his lips, spit through the gap in his front teeth.

“Me and Momma got a fine house. Me and Momma got a fine car, we got fine clothes. Me and Momma goes to the picture show anytime we want, don’t matter what it costs.”

Beyond our subdivision lay a forest of oaks and pines, creek bottoms, pasture, fields of cotton and corn and soybeans, a vast and untamed wilderness filled with wild Indians and snake-infested jungle as far as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone and Tarzan could venture on a summer’s day with Bobo and Spot trotting behind, tongues out.

“Aaaah-eeee-aaaaah-eeeee-aaaaaaaah!” Waymon yodeled from his perch high in a massive sweetgum, grapevine clasped in his hands. We had chopped the grapevine with an axe, stripped the vine of branches and tangles, made it free as a long, stout rope. Through the treetops Tarzan sailed, lord of all below.

“Come on up you chickens. Buck-buck-buck-ba-cuck.” Then the envious stream of saliva that shot fully twenty horizontal feet. Far below Billy and I stood on the solid earth, faces upturned. “Chicken shits. Buck-buck-buck-bu-cuck.”

“Don’t lip it, you always lip it. Here, gimme that cigrit.” Billy had snitched the Prince Albert and OCB’s from his old man when the old man was asleep. Billy’s daddy worked graveyard at the feedmill then drank himself to sleep about nine every morning. We stayed away from Billy’s house because of all the hollering and fighting.

My father was a barber with a one-chair shop next to a grocery store at the edge of town. He was a World War II veteran, a quiet, thin man who ate slowly and methodically, who avoided loud noises and commotion; he strived for simple things and a simple life: a manicured lawn and flowers (which involved slave labor, namely me) and most of all, fish.

He made his own jigs, grew red wigglers in a bed of cow manure at the shady end of the house. He held the lake record for the largest crappie and on the wall of his barbershop there were two mounted largemouths, one weighed eight pounds, the other ten and a half.

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