The road ran straight as a latitude line. The trailers clustered on either side, each partitioned from the other by its own stand of trees. Its own curtain of vines. Its own little heap of aging Works in Progress.
“Are you sure it’s not just because you know you’re in Alabama?” he said.
She looked out the window, waited a moment, and then pointed.
“Look,” she said. “That house right there. That’s plantation-era, right?”
“Yeah. I think so, anyway.”
She watched as it slid past them on their right.
She told him it felt like how Rome must feel, or Egypt, or Angkor Watt in Cambodia, all the sad and mighty antebellum monoliths hearkening back to a culture that was regal, almost imperial, and yet juxtaposed in the unscrupulous light of day with trailers and shacks and houses, “And that’s not all,” she said. “These mansions . . . they kind of contrast with themselves.”
She gestured toward a looming, multi-colored, partially marble structure on the edge of a pasture. The windows were broken and the painted portions of the surface had peeled, and for all appearances the place was abandoned, save for a pair of black kids playing jacks on the steps. A woman kept watch from a trailer nearby.
“There!” she said. “That’s what’s different about Alabama.”
Dig smiled.
“Abida,” he said, “are you turning into Faulkner on me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m still reading Twain.”
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