At an average of $10 per book downloaded, that’s $35,000. I’m pausing to wrap my head around that number.

(pause)

So it is possible to be carrying $35 grand worth of reading material in a 1/3 of an inch-thick digital device that snags books anytime from anywhere in the world. Just don’t drop it in the toilet.

If you extrapolate this math farther, reading an average of 12 books a year, that’s 2,916.6 years, or roughly 902 more years ago than when Jesus walked the earth. So yeah, that should be enough reading material.

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.

The recipes in these books are less Emeril than Aunt Emma. From making your own preserves to butchering your own meat to homemade everything, just like great-grandma used to do, these books tell the how’s and why’s of the forgotten skills of cooking. By the way, that’s one of the new book titles out there, “The Forgotten Skills of Cooking. The Time-Honored Ways Are Best: Over 700 Recipes Show You Why.” That’s a mouthful on the cover alone. It was enough words to get a review in the New York Times.

This $40 how-to-and-why textbook from Darina Allen tells how to kill and dress a chicken or made sausage – both skills I skills I practiced during my youth in Alabama, but not from overt chef-ery; we just needed to eat.

In this month’s issue of Oxford American, John T. Edge wrote about Southern community cookbooks.  He focuses on a particular tome called “When People Were Nice and Things Were Pretty – A Culinary History of Merigold, A Mississippi Delta Town.” Damn, another title that would gorge a tribe of hungry librarians.

In the Merigold book, Paula Deen calls cooking a chicken impaled on a beer can: “Beer in the rear.” Edge says the book skews a little white and doesn’t really acknowledge the contribution of African Americans and Native Americans in Southern Cuisine. And in my opinion, there would be no Southern Cuisine without those two groups.

Mr. Edge goes on to say that Africans brought us deep frying, honed the art of sweet potatoes and I’m pretty sure that greens and everything else I like to eat was not concocted by white women slaving in their kitchens, but by black women literally slaving in white people’s kitchens.

After reading about antique cooking methods, eating in the South is pretty simple: take away Soul Food and all you have left is empty cast iron skillets.

Shewl Gantt met her brother at the door of the rancher outside Lafayette. Dr. Barrow hugged his sister. Gerald Gantt stood at the door. Jolene waited beside the car, hesitantly. Shewl looked at Jolene and her face broke into a look somewhere between a smile and shock. Jolene was like a mirror to Shewl’s past; the eyes, the mouth, the mannerisms, the way Jolene stood in the freshly mowed grass.

“Baby doll!” said Shewl. “You are too beautiful to be beat up like that.”

Dr. Barrow hugged Shewl and shook hands with Gerald on the porch.

“My brother is on his way with Gus,” said Gerald. “This is going to end badly for some people back in Alabama. You know that don’t you?”

“It ends how it ends,” said Dr.Barrow. “The people who did this should pay. Jolene has a decent person hiding inside that rage.”

“I’ve been down this road before,” said Gerald “Y’all can stay a few days. But I know my brother, and if this girl has his blood –”

“She has his blood. And yours too. You forget your past?” said Dr. Barrow. “I remember treating a lot of people you had trouble with.”

“I didn’t kill nobody,” said Gerald. “I had my share of scrapes, but I didn’t put people in the ground.” He would not look at Dr. Barrow.

A distant ambulance whined down near Breaux Bridge. Both men listened to it for a few seconds before Dr. Barrow turned back to Gerald. The years showed in his face. Pain pulled on him more than gravity, made him shorter, more bent and wrinkled. We wore his scars like skin.

“You put a few in the hospital, though,” said Dr. Barrow. “Several of them never came out. One is in a home up in Shreveport now.”

“He deserved it,” said Gerald. “And don’t say he didn’t. If justice comes outside the law, then that’s how it gets delivered.”

“So don’t be so hard on Jolene, then,” said Dr. Barrow. “She’s delivered a little justice just like her grandpaw and uncle. Invite her in.”

Gerald watched Shewl and Jolene getting along loudly beside Dr. Barrow’s car. They could have been mother and daughter to an observer.

“Shewl’s doing a good job of that,” said Gerald. “I’ll make some coffee. You still like strong coffee as much as you used to?”

“Make a pot. I’ll pour some in me,” said Dr. Barrow. “By the way, when was the last time you saw Gus?”

Gerald, slowed his enthusiasm. “Been a while. He was a boy,” said Gerald. “I hear he got shot up by that lake. And I reckon he knows that Jolene’s his daughter by now.”

“He does. Took him a while to accept it,” said Dr. Barrow. “According to Jimmy, he’s wrapped his mind around it pretty tightly.”

Gerald pinched his nose and adjusted his glasses. His swallowing was constricted by a dislike for Gus that had always been hard to hide. Gerald’s pained expressions were not difficult to read, especially for a man like Barrow. He understood pained expressions like an alphabet.

“Don’t really matter if he does or not. Fact is fact,” said Gerald. “That girl is family. Might as well move on from there.”

“She acts like people in the family as well,” said Dr, Barrow, smiling. “Take it all or don’t take any of it. Just how it is.”

Gerald opened the door to let them all in. He paused, staring at the floor as Jolene passed. She looked at him and stopped. He turned away.

“You look just like a different version of Jimmy Gantt,” she said. “Same rigid features. Same wrinkles. Same demeanor. Same detachment.”

“Not the same,” he mumbled in his gravelly voice. “May look the same, but I ain’t. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say it again.”

Dr. Barrow grinned from the foyer. “Truth is a bitter pill to swallow, Jolene,” he said. “Your Uncle Gerald has changed though.”

“How’s that?” said Jolene.

Dr. Barrow waited for Gerald to answer her question. He did not. Shewl stepped into the awkwardness to offer food.

“Jolene is a guest and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t dig up old arguments before she even knows us.” She pulled Jolene into the kitchen. “I hope you like frog legs, because Gerald and me gigged a mess of them this morning at dawn,” said Shewl. “Woke them with a sharp poke.”

“I know that feeling,” laughed Jolene. The humor avoided Shewl as she pulled the frog legs from the fridge and began to prep the frying pan.

“I love frog legs,” said Dr. Barrow as they walked away. “Show Jolene how they dance in the pan.”

Shewl shook her head and opened the refrigerator. A large cellophane bag of frog legs sat on the second shelf. Jolene eyed them nervously.

“You’ll never want chicken again,” said Shewl. “Can’t beat free groceries, even though they do come attached on each side of a frog’s ass.”

Gerald stepped out onto the porch with a cigarette, but didn’t light it. Dr. Barrow followed. They had business to discuss. The worst kind.

“This Alabama business will get ugly,” said Gerald. “I’d like to avoid it myself. But I won’t leave my brother hanging in the wind.”

“You never did,” said Dr. Barrow. He wiped sweat from his neck with a handkerchief. “You know who’s behind all of this mess don’t you?”

“I have a few ideas,” said Gerald. “Ritko was supposed to cover it. He’s lost his touch.” he paused. “Some other things have happened too.”

“Like what?” said Dr. Barrow. He knew Gerald was more involved in Jimmy’s life than he would ever admit, even to family.

“You like to keep you diploma unstained and that’s a smart way to work it. The dirty work is coming though,” said Gerald. “It’s on the way.”

“Ritko’s partner? The crazy one?” said Dr. Barrow. “Duware?” He probed Gerald but there was no information coming, just a hard, Gantt stare.

Gerald lit a cigarette and pulled a lung full, burning a quarter-inch ash at the end. He eased the smoke out, savoring the cloud. “Yeah,” he said.

The two men stood, backs to the door, watching the first thumps of rain on the Louisiana mud. Large drops pinged the car. Gerald pushed a bit of lose tobacco out between pursed lips and flicked it, then took another drag.

“Duware. Still roaming the earth,”  said Gerald.

“It will change with Jimmy still roaming the earth as well,” said Dr. Barrow. “Surprised they are both still vertical.”

“I’m not,” said Gerald. “All the dinosaurs didn’t die at once. Some just petered out at the edges of the world.”

Sometimes men talk a lot and say nothing, thought Dr. Barrow. Gerald was just the opposite. He was just like Jimmy. His silence said a lot.

“It’s feels a little like the edge of the world here today,” said Dr. Barrow.

Gerald responded with only a nod, finishing the cigarette. Hamdog, Shewl and Gerald’s beagle, turned the corner of the house and ran into Gerald’s leg, rubbing his ear, eyes blind, cold and white.

“That blind dog has got to be pushing 15 years old,” said Dr. Barrow.

The dog leaned against Gerald, hopelessly blinking into the rain.

“Better roll up your windows,” said Gerald. “Going to be a hard one.” He held his hand out to feel the rain, but his mind was in Alabama.

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.

?

Duma Key is Stephen King’s first Deep South novel. A writer friend of mine said, “If you think he was prolific before, watch him now.” I reminded him that King had been in the South for years.

Why do people think if you move to the South, suddenly you’ll be winning Pulitzers?

Stephen King was capable of writing a novel about every six months when he lived in Maine full time. If he becomes more prolific after moving to the region where writers claim special privileges, then he’ll be releasing a new 600-page novel every Friday. Maybe it’s just me but I think writing has more to do with what is between your ears than what region you live in.

I know there have been a lot of great Southern writers. It’s become a cliché. King should, however, thrive down South, considering his penchant for odd characters. Flannery O’Conner said Southern writers have a soft spot for freaks because we know one when we see one.

Yes ma’am, Mr. King will be right at home.

If he wants to get into interesting character territory, Mr. King needs to gas up his car and drive north a bit, out of Sarasota and into Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. He needs to take a road trip to Louisiana and Arkansas and east Texas. There he will see the South that scarred the minds and fueled the imaginations of so many great Southern Gothic writers. There’s just something about brutal contradiction delivered under intense humidity that makes a person want to stack some sentences.

Stephen King knows the territory, he just needs a little more exposure to the locals in places where they don’t have bookstores, and the bestsellers are measured in calibers and fifths.

After a steady diet of fried food, country sausage, cathead biscuits, and redeye gravy, Stephen King just may write his great American novel. Some say he’s written a hundred of those already. Maybe. Then again, the Gulf Coast South he has moved to isn’t exactly the place that spawned William Faulkner, Eudory Welty, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, and Truman Capote. But King has sold ten times more books than all of those great writers combined. So even though he moved down to the Hurricane Coast in 1998, his new novel finally makes him a Southern Writer? Only in the press releases.

Granted, a few evenings with James Lee Burke on a po boy dock, smelling rotting shrimp in a 50-gallon drum, and watching the heat lightning dance over the Gulf might give Mr. King a deeper understanding of the place he now calls home. Then again, somehow, I think Mr. King knows about that already. He is pretty perceptive. Anyone who can write bestsellers as fast as he does has some talent and skills.

Here’s the truth. We want to believe that Southern writers are more special than other writers. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are not.

I have often said that it’s less the talent of Southern writers that makes them who they are than it is the reality of the people around them. When you don’t have to make up your stories because they are right in front of you, it makes the job a whole lot easier.

That strange South is slipping away with each generation. The odd characters are being homogenized into the mainstream. I lived in New York for a while and I found more odd characters there to write about than in Alabama. I just grew up with the ones in Alabama, so I know them better. Same with Mr. King in Florida.

In the next thirty days, he’ll probably crank out three new novels that 100 years from now will be seen as Southern. There will be people who ask, “Stephen King lived in Maine?” So it will happen.

The South will rise again. Just not where and how and through whom anyone expects. And that contradiction is the most Southern part of the story.

To industry giants back in the day, Wal-Mart seemed like a small, podunk retailer. Then it embraced cost-cutting technology with the passion of a rabid accountant so it could offer its customers the absolute lowest prices and gain a massive competitive advantage.

Granted and even admitted, Wal-Mart committed some serious judgment errors in management style and a few practices, and has been called on the carpet for those miscues. Generally, it has also addressed those miscues (as good businesses do) and moved forward. But those mistakes don’t change the revolutionary chain of sticky innovations that recreated how stores operate top to bottom. Wal-Mart blazed new trails in retail and most follow it now. Wal-Mart’s Glue is so sticky that the name has become a verb: “Let’s go Wal-Marting.” “That store got Wal-Marted.”

Wal-Mart pioneered supply-chaining in a way that laid low the old ways of retailing and made Mr. Sam and those near him richer than anyone outside of Bill Gates’ immediate family. This horizontal approach flattened the world of retail and flattened Wal-Mart’s competitors at the same time.

Wal-Mart succeeds in all those towns because of its commitment to processes that bring customers lower prices. That takes Glue at every link in the supply chain. Wal-Mart has shelves filled with Glue. Like it or hate it, Wal-Mart has Glued its brand to the ones who matter most: Customers. That one focused, bonding, business practice has allowed it to overcome dozens of mistakes.

Mr. Friedman’s flat worldview tells the historic and economic tale of how service and manufacturing and supply chain expansion into low-cost places like India and China have made the world smaller and made us all run faster just to stay in place. There are evidences of much Glue in his tale as well, and although he doesn’t specifically mention them as Glue (Glue is our definition), the evidence is everywhere.

India is using Glue when it turns its trained and skilled high-tech workers loose on industries that used to be American-based. Your income taxes are likely being done for your accountant in India via blind digital Internet sources. Lead-based toys and tainted food aside, China has Glued its economy into the flattening world manufacturing and supply chain scenario using the advantage it has: Motivated human capital. When China gets the kinks worked out, the Glue will flow.

More is at work here than just low prices and cost-cutting. To make both of those things a permanent fixture in their outsourcing revolution, India and China have found a million points of Glue to align this successful undertaking on a worldwide scale.

It is no accident that America and India and China and Korea (Hyundai) are getting along so well. It’s just Glue at work.

If you are a little more patient, next May in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, you can ride like a re-mastered Jimmy Page solo at 65 mph on “Led Zeppelin — the Ride” at the Hard Rock Park.

Jimmy named the ride himself and picked “Whole Lotta Love” to be played as you gyrate up and down the 155-foot-tall steel roller coaster that features six loops and rolls. I can hear old rockers screaming as they hurl down the first drop.

“Valhalla, I am coming!”

The 140-acre park will also feature “The Midnight Rider,” a Southern Rock -themed coaster that takes riders through a haunted sawmill like a ramblin’ man. Sorry, Duane.

Of course, there will be a “Pinball Wizard” arcade as well. Add this to the most recent Mayberry’s Finest line of vittles and Gladys Knights upcoming foray into food and you can see that old Boomers never die, we just package our memories and do what we’ve always done: Sell some merchandise.

Speaking of Boomer merchandise, check out Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Magic. On his latest grinding road, he has taken on the pop mantra a bit and written some nice hooks, and taken his everyday working-class-Joe ethic and added some chugging E-Street punch. You’ve probably heard the kicking “Radio Nowhere” or the lamenting “Long Walk Home.” Both sound like classic Springsteen.

He is still the king of loss and rejection and cranks out a serious dose of outrage with the best of them. He can turn a phrase and paste a tune on it as well as ever. Sometimes his voice sounds like it is dragging all the painful grit from a Jersey street through the amps, and maybe it is. You don’t listen to Springsteen as much for the music as you listen to feel the stories soaked in that music.

It is nice to see Little Steven (Van Zandt) back in his element and not sucking up to Tony Soprano. Even with a greased, ducktail do, he always knew who The Boss really was.