was a polite way of saying, “I prefer not to” or even, given a frosty enough inflection, “hell, no.” In East Tennessee, though—at least in the mountains—I’d noticed that it seemed to mean exactly the opposite. I wasn’t sure how much financial business Waylon could conduct on a Sunday, but I told him I didn’t care to stop.
We headed north on the river road for a few miles, then made a left onto an unmarked paved road that disappeared into a wooded valley. A small, meanspirited brick house hugged the road, centered in a small clearing fenced with chain-link; in the driveway sat a Cooke County sheriff’s cruiser. I pointed.
“Tom Kitchings live here?”
“Naw,” growled Waylon. “His damn brother, Orbin. Sorriest sumbitch in Cooke County.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, then clamped it shut. A quartermile up the blacktop, we turned left onto a broad swath of fresh gravel running up the mouth of a small valley. “Right up this holler here’s our first stop,” Waylon said. We’d barely left the pavement when he halted at a small, glass-doored booth, from which a thirtysomething blonde woman emerged. Clad in snug designer jeans and a short suede jacket, she could have passed for a stylish West Knoxville mom who had been suddenly plucked from a kid’s soccer game or the mall and beamed out here to the boonies. Waylon rolled down his window and handed her a laminated card of some sort. She scanned it with a portable bar-code reader, then gave it back and waved us in. High-tech indeed! As she turned to go back into the booth, Waylon nodded at her shrink-wrapped backside. “That there’s just about worth the trip, ain’t it, Doc?” I didn’t want to admit it, but the view was stunning. The gravel drive soon widened into a huge backwoods parking lot, measuring forty or fifty yards across and at least a football field in length, bulldozed into the floor of the hollow. The lot was crammed with three neat rows of diagonally parked cars and trucks. As we eased up one aisle and down the other in search of a vacant slot, I lost count at 150 vehicles, mostly pickups, bearing license plates from Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, even as far away as Oklahoma and Texas. As best I could tell, it was a wholesale auto auction—there was a similar auction lot beside Interstate 75 between Knoxville and Chattanooga—though why this one lay so far off the beaten track was a mystery to me.
At the upper end of the lot was a barn-sized metal building, surrounded by dozens of small garden sheds, battered travel trailers, and a new two-story structure that resembled a small, windowless motel, with dozens of doors giving onto the ground-floor sidewalk and the second-floor balcony. Waylon had finally circled back nearly to the entrance booth to park, so we hiked up the long gravel lot toward the big metal shed, which appeared to be the hub of the complex.
“This is quite an operation here,” I said as we trudged across the coarse gravel.
“Yeah, it’s been around ever since I can remember,” he said, “but it seems to be really expanding under this couple that bought the business a few years ago.”
“Are you bidding on one of these vehicles? I haven’t seen anything in the lot that holds a candle to that truck you’re driving.”
“Bidding?” Waylon chuckled. “Well, you might call it that, I reckon.”
The metal building seemed to pulse with a cacophony of yells and whoops. The auction must really be heating up, I thought. A door was set midway along the side. As we approached, I glimpsed a pair of eyes peering out through a narrow slit in the door. The eyes studied me for an uncomfortably long time, with an expression I took to be some combination of suspicion and hostility, then cut in Waylon’s direction. Waylon seemed to recognize the irises or pupils through the slit. “Hey, T-Ray, you gonna let us in, or do we hafta just listen from out here?”
A nasal voice slithered up through the slit. “Who’s that you got with you?”
“Friend of me and Jim’s from Knoxville. He’s all right.”
“He better be.”
Waylon nodded his immense head, though I wasn’t sure whether he was offering further assurance that I was, in fact, all right, or was simply acknowledging what seemed to be the other man’s unspoken “or else.” Maybe both. At any rate, T-Ray’s eyes vanished from view, a metal bolt slid back, and the door swung open. “Stay close,” Waylon rumbled in my ear, and we stepped inside.
It took my eyes a moment to adjust—not to the dimness I’d expected, but to the glare of fluorescent tubes, practically enough to light Neyland Stadium for a UT