You’ve Got Some Nerve
Heather Bell Adams When Brandon comes back to Crescent Gap, he finds it changed, at least on the surface, and, in other more essential, heart of the matter ways, the same as it’s always been. Kudzu has eaten up more of the landscape so that the hand-painted signs advertising jellies and honey and pick-your-own apples are barely legible. Brandon takes it all in from the passenger seat of Russ’s Bronco, the same beat-up model his friend has had since high school, back when they ran cross country. Down by the turnoff for the lake, a new bed and breakfast has sprouted, and hanging baskets of ferns swing along the porch. A wooden cross is stuck in the ground by the worst of the switchbacks. Here a stand of bee boxes, there a Ford pickup on blocks, its open hood a hungry mouth. Brandon clears his throat. “Appreciate you heading down to get me.” This isn’t like the times when he came home from deployment. This time he had to get a doctor to sign off. A stack of typed forms in his backpack promises he is no longer a danger to himself or others, that he’s completed the program, that he understands if he screws up again, he can be sent to jail. They’re climbing the Saluda grade up from South Carolina, the road threaded haphazardly around its spool, no neat spiral, no careful containment, but instead a jagged route following the contours of laurel thickets and rhododendron and, of course, the