She went to the University of Alabama. So did I.

She wrote for the Rammer Jammer campus humor publication. Been there, done that. Almost kicked out of school for it.

She addressed racism and unabashedly wrote about it often. Ditto.

She won a Pulitzer Prize writing about the most famous trial since Jesus was questioned by Pontius Pilate. Using Monroeville as the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, she wrote the great American novel. Not happening here.

A Pulitzer will never sit next to my iMac. But I have done one thing in Monroeville that I’m pretty sure Ms. Lee has never done: drive a Coca-Cola truck, loading Coke machines until my back hurt in the unsubtle humidity of a town that was no different than my own. I did not exactly stir up the same interest from the locals, to be sure, unless you were thirsty, in which case they were pretty glad to see me.

Those fifty miles between Monroeville and Andalusia have now turned into fifty years. In July, “To Kill A Mockingbird” will have been an American classic for half a century, almost my entire life.

Despite black character references that offend some, her sentences helped shape my Southern attitudes as a child because the bigger story is about intolerance and prejudice in the South I knew all too well. According to Wikipedia, British librarians recently ranked it above the Bible as a book “everyone should read before they die.” You will not find it on your Kindle, however.

Dear Jeff Bezos, if you are reading this (and I doubt it), please put “To Kill A Mockingbird” in Kindle format.

All these years later, I do not know how Harper Lee will celebrate this occasion since she has never been a public person and is hardly inclined to talk about herself, preferring instead, to make her presence known by quietly helping others. Perhaps she would like for us to be farther along in race relations in this country in 2010. I cannot say.

Her language came to mind last week as I listened to two men in a café discussing President Obama in terms that would have fit nicely into a conversation about Tom Robinson in the book’s 1936 setting.

Like it or not, her characters are as real today as ever. Scout is still out there, in a small Alabama town, using her powerful words. What we need these days, however, is another Atticus Finch.

Mikal Ritko traveled alone. Things had gotten out of hand. Bren was abducted and killed by Fussell Duware. Ritko should have killed him years earlier.

Gus had jumped the hospital and fled with Jimmy. They likely drove west toward a story that would end badly for someone, maybe even them.

Agent James was dead in the door of the ER in Andalusia. Duware was good at his job and willing to do anything to get the job done. Anything.

In this case, dressing like a woman and shooting Agent James in the unpleasant daylight. It piled up in his head, ugly and unorganized.

Lemuel Zapata was still alive, probably. He had a talent for it. His son, Zeke, however, had not been so fortunate. Duware was culling.

Zeke lay cooked in cooling wreckage under a pecan tree towards Mississippi. Zapata had lost Bren and Zeke to the same piece of business.

Fussell Duware was still working, a murderer with intentions to kill everyone involved in his perceived slight. Ritko was on that list.

Jolene was out in Texas or Louisiana somewhere, probably killing people who deserved it. Ritko’s office called so much he tossed his phone.

He did not need it anymore. Silence would serve him better than the complication of communication. He stripped his life part by part.

Ritko had been trained to become invisible. Thousands of government dollars went into educating him on the skill of vanishing.

Going off the grid is not an easy thing. There must be a body. There must be a dead end. I.D.s, service weapon, badge, everything.

Fire was good; hard to run a trace on charcoal. CSI was sophisticated, but not like on TV. Cooked bones and a badge would work down here.

He made sure everything that could I.D. him was in the wreck. The men who died, like so many others, deserved it. Perhaps Ritko as well.

He was no longer Mikal Ritko. He was no one when he hot wired the farmer’s truck next to the carport and drove to the end of the highway.

Ritko’s life had been a geometric equation of people, events and evidence. He worked the calculations until he found his result. Not now.

The ordeal before him was blood and loose ends. For the first time in his life, after all of the violent things he had done, he was afraid.

He was not afraid of dying. He expected that. Felt it was overdue. He was afraid of failing. Dying was easy. Failing was unacceptable.

Ritko owed Jimmy Gantt. Jimmy had saved his life once – by not killing him when he had the change. Ironic mercy is enough sometimes.

So he owed the man for that one. More importantly, Jimmy had given Ritko the inside track on cases that made his career in the service.

Ritko came from a poor family. His parents spoke no English. Ritko’s job from childhood on was to succeed. He had done his job – and more.

He had done the worst jobs available because the odds of glory and promotion were quicker. Of course, the odds of failure were inherent.

Ritko did not fail often. And when he did, he was good enough to cover it up. Now he was covering up his entire life by going off the grid.

“No one expects a dead person to do anything,” Jimmy had told him years ago. “So dead people can do everything.”

He was officially dead as society measures life. He was neatly cinched up, freed of the daily mendacity that defines human existence.

For the first time in years, he felt alive. The trees were greener. The leaves had textures he had never noticed. Water tasted better.

Breathing was enjoyable. He had never noticed it before. His lungs felt sweet with each intake. The smell of freedom made him smile.

Popping sounds came from relaxing metal under the pecan tree. Jimmy and Gus found no more drivers licenses. Gasoline soaked the earth.

“You’ll want to walk back to the truck,” said Jimmy. “I’m going to roast some pecans.”

Gus walked back to the truck knowing what he meant. Jimmy did not smoke, but he always carried matches in case he needed to start a fire. He walked to the edge of the gas-soaked grass. Gus saw the match ignite in Jimmy’s cupped hands, then he dropped it. An orange swoosh raced across the ground towards the wreck. When it reached the twisted gas tank, a ball of flame plumed into the pecan limbs, crackling and hissing as it cooked the tree and the car. Jimmy shielded his face and studied the roiling fire, then turned and walked back to the truck where Gus stood.

A car came over the hill. The vehicle slowed. The driver’s face gaped, wide-eyed, through the windshield at the fire. Another explosion heaved the roiling wreckage. Gus held up a hand to staunch the heat and watched the approaching car through a squint. Blood from his wounds stained his wrinkled shirt. Acrid air burned his nostrils in a stench of combusting gasoline, burning leaves, roasting rubber and melting plastic. Gus rubbed his face. His features felt alien in his hand. His brain tightened around his dread. How had things turned so wrong so quickly?

Jimmy walked into the road, waving his arms. The driver – a wary salesman – pulled to the side and rolled down his window reluctantly.

“What the hell happened here?” he yelled at Jimmy. “Anybody make it?”

“We just got here ourselves,” said Jimmy. “You got a cell phone? Somebody should call 911. We would if we had one. It’s a bad accident.”

“I’d say so.” He squinted at the burning tree. “My cell just died after a two hour sales call. That whole tree is on fire over there. Damn.”

“Looks like they were flying when they left the road. The curve got them,” said Jimmy. “If it didn’t the explosion did.”

“I’d say they’re roasted,” said the salesman. “A fire that would roast a whole tree of pecans would sizzle a man pretty fast.”

“If you’ll stay here, we’ll drive up the road to a friend’s house,” said Jimmy. “We’ll call 911.”

The man looked at Jimmy and nodded. Jimmy walked back and got into the truck with Gus and left. He never looked back.

—-

The man dressed like a woman with a red snake tattooed on his wrist walked into the room sniffing the air as if the smell was an answer. He pulled off the wig and tossed it on the floor next to Bren. She felt a dread in his presence. It was thick and salty and soulless.

“Where is your father?” said Fussell Duware. Bren did not answer. “I’ll ask again, politely. If you don’t answer, the polite part ends.”

“I don’t know what you’re –” he cut her off.

“You’re stubborn like your brother,” said Duware. “Let’s see if you are as tough as he is.”

He hit her in the face. Her lip split against her teeth. Another hit followed. Then another. Then a kick to her ribs. She tried to breathe. Duware wasn’t much for drama. His training was strictly business. He pulled Bren up by her hair. Blood sprayed from her mouth as she heaved.

“Remember?” he said. “Clearly your brother is tougher. But you’re a woman, so I’ll cut you some slack. Or maybe just start cutting.”

Duware opened the blade of a box cutter, leaning in close to her bleeding ear. Blood gurgled in her throat as she heaved for breath.

“Gus won’t like the way you look when I’m done. And your daddy won’t like me any more than he does already. But Gus is out of commission.”

He waited for a reaction from her. None.

“Who knows where daddy is,” he said. “But he ain’t here.” He waited again. Nothing.

Outside a garbage truck was lifting a trash bin in metallic moans. Inside, trash lay on the floor around Bren’s broken jaw. Duware smiled.

“I’m dressed like a woman for practical reasons,” he said. “But I’m not a patient man.”

He acted like the two conditions were connected. Bren wanted to tell him to go to hell, but her voice was gone from the last kick. The pain was so intense that it was almost no pain at all.

“One last time, Miss Zapata,” said Duware. “Where is your father?”

Pinching her thoughts into a tiny, focused knot was the only way she could think through the descending darkness. Metal scraped and clicked. She heard Duware exhale and smelled his soured breath. Her father was not the one he should be worried about. Images of Gus smiling after they had made love filled her head. It gave her peace in the middle of what was about to be just the opposite. Bren was fighting to stay conscious. Lacking oxygen to clear her head, Duware’s words were abstract. She mumbled only one word, “Jimmy.”

As Duware made the first cut, Bren was falling into another world far from the dank room where she lay. She was beyond pain now.

Down on Highway 29 headed south out of Andalusia, Alabama towards Florala and the Florida line, a single, tall evergreen tree leaned achingly toward the road. It had been bent over a little to the east by the winds of a hurricane years earlier – probably Camille.

The old man who lived in the house behind it decided to string up a few lights that Christmas. His plan included aluminum pie plates as well. His wife was gone, either dead or just unexplained gone. She left him with quite a collection of shiny plates.

The light stringing and plate hanging was a struggle seen by many passersby. His ambitious project started with a ladder; then a longer ladder; then no ladder, as he climbed up in the tree and distributed the bulbs and plates around the limbs. His decoration came together foot by foot. It took him about a week of solid work before he finished it. It was impressive in a sadly rural way.

He invited several people down and plugged it in and everyone took a shot of burbon and tried to sing a tune that one observer said resembled a Christmas hymn from the Baptist church. Many of those who attended were not sure. The tree was lit and christened and holiday travelers marveled at the lone tree so colorful in the cold dark of an Alabama winter – until a rainy night about a week before Christmas.

A carload of teenagers on a beer run to the state line drove past the tree. On the way back, they stopped and traded shots at the tree with a 16-gauge. The old man’s decoration was wounded as badly as his spirits. He had a week to fix it. He pretty much had to start from scratch with the wired frayed in the buckshot. He finished on Christmas Eve.

I had heard so much about this thing that I wanted to see it for myself, so a few of us loaded into my 1962 Ford Galaxie 500 and headed down 29. In the distance just outside of town, past the drive-in, the tree glowed in multicolored splendor against the dying day. We slowed down to get a better look. That’s when we saw him.

The old man sat in a metal yard chair at the base of the tree. He wore denim overalls, a plaid coat and a wilted, red Massey Ferguson gimme cap with a cotton ball glued to the top to give him an angry Santa visage. In his arms nestled a 12-gauge semi-automatic. He rose as we slowed and he eased back down as we accelerated and drove past. To my knowledge, no one opened fire on his tree anymore. The next year, his tree was bare and his house empty. I have often wondered what happened to him.

Last Christmas, I drove down Highway 29 to see if I could find the place, but the house was gone. Only part of a chimney jutted from the garbage bushes. The tree was gone too. Not even a stump remained.

I pulled over and got out and stood beside the windy road, gazing across the scrubby hill. As I turned to leave, a sound crunched under my foot – a weathered, deteriorated spent 12-guage shell. I laughed to myself. Perhaps he had gotten off a few shots after all.

Opening to car door to leave, the wind howled around the corners like a badly sung Christmas song from a Baptist hymnal.

Orange and yellow leaves can fall through a biting new breeze below a porcelain sky after a torrid summer, and that simple change can make me feel human and warm and good, no matter what evil I have done. Watching 93,000 crimson clad people circling turf  and chanting “Rammer Jammer, Yellowhammer, give ‘em hell, Alabama!” can cure shingles, cold sores, lockjaw and athlete’s foot, but it is not a good remedy for high blood pressure.

Watching Game Day and wondering which mascot head Lee Corso will don sets the stage for a season of perfect ulcers. The subsequent fall foliage weaves us together into the false hope of being better people for just a few months. It feels that way when your team is winning. If your team loses, it feels like you stepped on a nail. It hurts for a while.

Perhaps this manufactured, emotional illness is all we need until basketball season begins after the glee and excitement and curses and declarations of wronged heroism and ignored success in the face of blatant commercialism during a 60-minute football game stretched over 4 hours of advertising.

At the end of the fourth quarter, 2nd and 2 on the 3 yard line, in the red zone, going in for the winning score on a play that hasn’t worked four times already, we faintly hear the sweet chaaching of dollars falling through our pockets into the coffers of the gods that rule the fall in helmets and pads and shoes with cleats as they beat each other into lifelong injuries inside a constructed bowl of fanaticism. Damn, I love it.

As we drove along I-85, within ten or so miles of the event that I had described in my fiction story, a real 18-wheeler had nose-dived into a clump of trees in eastern Alabama beside I-85, going up in a fireball, destroying the vehicle, the cab, the trailer and vegetation. I don’t want to think what happened to the driver.

Traffic was backed up for miles. My wife looked at the wreckage and said, “That is Nostradamusly creepy. It happened just like in your Twitter novel.”

“Except I wrote that two or three weeks ago,” I said. “I doubt some hit man popped the driver. Also, the odds of that truck being loaded with heroin like in my story is slim to none. What I wrote is fiction. This is just a horribly unfortunate accident.”

“No, it’s creepy,” she said. “What are the odds of such a thing happening so close to exactly where it happened in your story?”

“Long odds,” I said. “Okay, yes, it’s weird as hell, but we haven’t seen a possum with a long, naked tail on the interstate yet. That’s also in my story.”

Fifty miles later, a possum with a long, naked tail waddled across the highway in front of us. I barely missed it. I swear to the Crimson Tide and hope to die if this are not the Cronkite truth.

“Creepy enough for you now?” she said.

After these two odd events, I am concerned that I will find a one-armed, dead pimp in my backyard.

On June 19th, I started doing something crazy: writing a novel on Twitter. Not about Twitter, on it, line by line, chunk by chunk.

Watching people in Iran tweeting news out of their country when the press was shut out inspired me. So I just started writing a Southern crime story, not that those two are remotely related.

I’ve spent my life in a no-collar world where my friends are blue-collar or white-collar. In Mr. Crawford’s book, blue-collar people keep the other two collars in business. I’m not sure where my old shop class buddy, Dewayne, ended up, but when he got there, he had two less fingers than the rest of us.

One assignment was to make the obligatory slanted bookshelf, which consisted of two pieces of perpendicular wood, the bottom part at an angle so gravity shoved the books together and held them in place. It was a fairly simple piece of furniture. Dewayne saw it differently. He wanted a band-sawed, curled, curvy, arsty-fartsy bookshelf. He had no real artistic ability or Norm Abrams-ish skills; he just wanted to use the band saw.

The skills he had didn’t mix well with shop. It takes a hardcore Southerner to show up for an 8am class drunk. He was suspended. It did not deter his passion. Somewhere he found a band saw and carved his digits into nubs. It was not artsy-fartsy.

When I saw him several days later, his hand was bandaged and he was raving about his ornately mangled bookshelf. He didn’t mention his mangled hand. He didn’t have to. I never actually saw his creation, but his description was worth at least two fingers and perhaps a thumb.

Not too much later, the shop class teacher – a dry-witted fellow who wore a pocket protector, but carried nothing in it that would have caused his pocket to require protection – also showed up drunk and was summarily suspended as well. This shop class thing was proving to be a lot like rock and roll, except there were no girls because they were forced to take Home Ec.

The new shop teacher didn’t wear a pocket protector but did protect the equipment from us, which seemed odd since the whole idea was to learn how to make things in shop. We drew pictures of the things we wanted to make on graph paper, however, and then he made us do some type of complicated mathematical equation that I am pretty sure no professional who owns a power sander has ever considered doing.

This guy ironed the fun out of shop. All that was left was the smell of untouchable wood. We longed for the drunk. Day after day, we sat in the fluorescent brutality of the classroom, looking through the windows that separated us from the machinery, and lusted after the dusty equipment. All I ever got to make was that pitiful bookshelf, under the tutelage of the drunk. Once he left, I gained no more knowledge of blue-collar magic, but I did learn to hate shop class.

Today, on my garage wall hangs a drill, a jigsaw and a hammer. I have a toolbox filled with bent screwdrivers, a socket wrench, a pair of pliers and a collection of nails, none of which are remotely alike. Of this motley collection, I use the hammer now and then, mainly to chase the squirrel that sneaks into the garage to chew a bag of fertilize. I have never hit him, but I’m sure he is afraid. I keep a little manly duct tape in case I render that little bastard unconscious so I can tie his squirrelly arms behind his back and make him do the perp-walk back to the woods. I have also never even opened the jigsaw box (having bought it at Sears 10 years ago because it was $12 and that was just too good a bargain to pass up).

In the end, my shop class days were wasted, as were those Algebra classes. Now and then, though, I go to Sears and roam amongst the Craftsman tools and think of what could have been if that drunken teacher had stayed sober. Then I look at my crooked bookshelf and realize I sucked at shop. But at least I have all of my fingers.

People think farming is romantic; Mr. Douglas-types getting back to the land, feeling dirt under their nails and smelling the fecund aroma of the earth being tilled by mechanical means while plants sprout for your amusement. Farmers in TV commercials and movies seem more American than the rest of us – driving their $48,000 F-150’s and Silverados through muddy splendor; Kevin Costner carving a perfect major league baseball diamond out of a cornfield. A cursory flip through Southern Living or Garden & Gun brings perfect rural people, the porchy home in the distance, the Rockwell-ian barn. If you have money, a farm can be a wonderful, idyllic, pastoral experience. It is not so romantic when you are the mule.

Go to a farm. Don’t just visit, stay a while. Help the farmer do everything he or she has to do – sun-up until sunset, or later. It’s hard to be stoic when you are shoveling manure, fighting bugs, weather, bankers, and a tractor that won’t crank. That’s why I was the mule for a summer. Our tractor died.

Southern Living never showed up to photograph our tiny Jim Walter, two-bedroomer, or the ramshackle chicken house, or our 1949 Chevy truck with the floorboard rusted through so you could litter without ever rolling down your window or the dead tractor or the lazy hounds sleeping around the yard, looking like the dead at Antietam.

Thankfully, I only had to be the mule on fifteen acres of our farm, although my grandmother’s garden might qualify for a full-fledged organic farm in many places today. When the tractor went down, the push plow came out and my memory of mules was rekindled on the wrong side of the arrangement.

After breaking ground, hoisting cow manure and turning it into the soil, it is still hard to imagine having the time on a farm to build it so they will come. My grandmother planted pretty much everything you see in the produce section of the grocery store or in the bins at a farmer’s market. She knew the farmer’s almanac like I know ESPN. Being a boy with a strong back and no paying job, it was up to me to plow the fifteen acres. This was no Mr. Ed job. This was a Mr. Wolf (from Pulp Fiction) job. It hurt, involved blood and probably contributed to why my back feels like it does today.

I know why a mule is not the most likable character on the farm. It sucks to be a mule. Terrible job. You know the little calendar program on your computer that keeps track of your responsibilities and daily obligations? This is the calendar for a mule:

Pull.  Push. Pull. Push.

Stare at the ground.

Break wind.

Pull harder. Pull deeper.

Sweat.

Pull.  Push. Pull. Push.

When you hear that a mule is stubborn and ornery, well, hell yeah. Walk a mile in the mule’s hooves for a summer and you’ll be the most cantankerous son-of-a-b this side of Hades.

Mules are cynical too. They look wearily at everything, even good things. Bring food to a mule, and you will get distain in return. Bring the mule flowers and chocolates and watch the mulish lip-curl. Try to give a mule a massage (I knew a man who tried this) and prepare to take a kick in the groin. A mule’s eyes are like the windows to a joyless, jackass existence. I’ve seen the view. 

Plowing is not exactly fun, either, unless you are perched atop an air-conditioned cab, listening to music while the humidity goes by outside. Of course, a tractor is the mule’s best friend. You may say the tractor put the mule out of business, but that is making the wholly untrue assumption that the mule wanted to be in the plowing trade to begin with. Nope. The only time I ever saw a mule smile was when it’s ears picked up the sound of a tractor cranking. Our misguided impressions of the mule’s work ethic needs to change. A mule is really just an angry, Southern donkey.

I gained a new respect for mules during my summer being one. When I see a mule now, I know exactly how it feels. Pissed.