ST HI WAY

Please do not desecrate this sacred spot

What’s going on out back, I ask the clerk at the museum. Are y’all having a concert? Naw, she says, Tiffin Motorhomes is throwing a carnival. I ask what kind of a carnival, and she stares back, then smiles, trying to be polite to a tourist. With bumper cars and Ferris wheels and stuff. You know, a carnival.

The town of Spectre, Alabama (imaginary), Jackson Lake Island, Polaroid SX-70 (2026)

Just north of Montgomery there is an beautiful outcropping of land that juts into the Alabama River, populated only by a growing tribe of friendly goats and dozens of live oaks and magnolias, their branches heavy with Spanish moss. A quarter century ago they filmed a movie there, and if you squint just right, it looks like there is an old town, a few houses and a general store and a church. But you have to squint to see it, unless the sun is going down, and then it shimmers into reality.

As my tires crunch over the gravel on the way to the island, I see a little wooden cross, down by the edge of the water across from the boat ramp. The cross is handmade and painted white. There are two bright golden helium balloons tied to the cross with shiny ribbon, fluttering in the hot breeze. Whoever attached the balloons had taken scissors and zipped them down the side of the ribbon to make it curl up. One balloon is in the shape of the number 1 and the other is in the shape of the number 7.

The ledger stone of Hiram King Williams, Montgomery, Alabama (2026)

On the way to see the Biscuits play the Barons I stop at the graveyard. It is just me, and it is quiet, the air thick and heavy, as it always is in late July. I pay my respects and make some photos, and as I get back into the car and crank the air conditioner as it begins to rain.

I walked by a cofeeshop with some half-busted chairs outside, and even though it was Feels Like 97°, there was a group of kids sitting around a table and not far from them a guy wearing a longsleeve RealTree shirt intently typing away at a MacBook. A lifted white Jeep was parked out front; stuffed in between the dash and the windshield was a battered New Testament and a sun-faded John Grisham novel.

The coffeeshop was blaring Hootie & the Blowfish and I was wondering how the kids could even hear each other, but they were extremely invested in something that had happened last night and there hands were waving back and forth. I figured there was some kind of cheating going on or maybe a car wreck. Let her cry, Hootie wailed. “I mean, some weeks, the question is whether I get my eyelashes done or I buy groceries,” one of the girls said. If the tears fall down like rain, let her sing. “So this week I got my eyelashes done.”

As I wandered off I heard a string of letters and numbers from one of the kids. They weren’t gossiping about anything good, they were just talking about their peptides.

An entreaty, in Montgomery (2026)

It was Princess Night and the home team was wearing a kind of pink or purple uniform with the numbers in a fancy cursive, and a DJ was playing remixes of Taylor Swift songs. As the away team was being introduced a freight train screeched by, tracing the curve of left field. The opening batter was shown in the wrong uniform and I figured he had just been traded but I didn’t get his name to look it up. The woman next to me told her friend on the phone that the Biscuits were wearing lavender, and I realized I didn’t have a word for what fell between pink and purple. A group of little kids in princess outfits were being introduced on the field. Lavender, was that word.

I left early so I could write down some of the things I had heard or seen and it was about twenty minutes back to the island from the stadium. I had pitched my tent facing exactly 180 degrees, high up on a bank towards the River, and there was a little bit of a breeze but the air was still close and heavy. I couldn’t fall asleep all the way and played a game on my phone where you fight zombies and try to level up your guy to get better armor. I am normally a side sleeper but when I camp you really have to lay on your back, well with my sleep setup you do, and at some point I guess I fell asleep in some contortionist’s pose with my left arm in a weird position.

The moon was high and waxing gibbous and I suppose my arm fell and it was like it was daytime though the frogs were hollering and it yanked me awake. I was dreaming that I was at a house party out in the woods, down on the bayou. My shoulder hurt and I was up so I unzipped the tent and figured I’d stretch my legs.

I stared into the moon’s echo on the ripples of the water and in the dream there were dozens of people there, and I was following a girl who was wearing overalls into the mix up front by the band. The party was lit by torches out by the trees and the stage lined with milk bottles with candles set down in them. Her hair was done up like she was going to prom and she was wearing makeup even though she was in overalls. They had built a little riser for the band to play, and they were blowing up this huge ruckus. The band was all in red, a bright strawberry red with musical notes embroidered up and down the sides of their legs and over their hearts.

The girl in the overalls began to whirl in a circle as folks paired off and began doing some kind of a waltz, or what looked like a waltz to me, even though the song was a fast song, the giant stand-up bass thrumming, flanked by two boys with acoustic guitars. For a life of sin, I have paid the cost, the song went. There was a fiddle player but no drummer, which would have drowned out everything anyway, and a fellow dressed in a white suit with a big old crazy hat who was skinny as a string bean, hollering away, sounding his own self like a pedal steel guitar. To the left of him was one odd man with a guitar painted dark blue with orange streaks. He wasn’t dressed like the rest of the band, but in blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up high over black work boots. He right eye was a shining brown but the left one was cloudy and gray.

Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you, the singer hollered. The guitarist stared right at me with that good right eye as the dancers began to spin faster, and the thrum of the bass clashed with the squeal of the fiddle.

On the island, staring into the woods, at the witching hour

In real life, or rather the world where you and I live, my shoulder crunched and popped. I could all but hear that fiddle. And I turned because they would have been playing round about behind me, and I turned to see them, and in the faraway pulsed a dim phosphorescence.

I stood and listened to the frogs croak. The moon was at my back. I watched the shape; it did not move, if even it could. When the frogs stopped their song it was quiet, the all-enveloping quiet when one is alone in the woods, standing beside a river in the middle of the night.

I waved, then turned away, and knelt and got back into my tent, where I quickly, and finally, fell asleep.

What they called that old singer, and still do (2026)

This has been a true story from the banks of the Alabama River, on an island populated solely by a tribe of goats and an imaginary town, near or about dawn, at the end of July.

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GORJUS is a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. If you have ever awakened from a dream and realized you were still there, or that perhaps the dream was as real as anything else, then this is for you. Consider forwarding this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.