VIRGIL
A handsome guy with a few telling scars, Virg is in his late twenties, just emerging from a checkered past.
He had cognitive problems as a boy, being somewhere or other along the autism spectrum, and dylexic to boot. He learned to manage these problems, tracing the alphabet out on sandpaper and reading carefully, usually aloud. He accordingly has something of a heroic notion of himself as someone who can overcome all odds, i.e. he is something of an errant white knight.
Often on the wrong side of the Law, Virg spent some time in the pen, where the experience of the sexual abuse he suffered, starting in the Boy Scouts, helped him move from bottom to top without imposing too much violence on others.
When he met Bea, he instantly felt her to be a soul-mate.
JOHNNY
Though Johnny didn’t do time with Virg, they had long been buddies, the former, several years older, taking a protective attitude to his “best friend” and sharing in some of his adventures, increasingly against his better judgement. In fact, the two of them had sworn that Sparks City caper would be their last illegal deal.
Both boys are fans of the music of Waldo HupCap Brown.
Johnny‘s a city boy who knows up from down, but he spent a lot of time in the Piney Woods as a boy, and is hoping to settle down with his share of the money they intend to make in Sparks City on a piece of land back from the road where he can go when he needs to.
Johnny is the narrator, the truck is his. Despite everything he ends up back with the keys, which he needs, because his only home will be the road.
BEA
Bea is an under-age runaway, her family life having been one of abuse by both her Father and her Brother. She is also known to the Law, who would like to question her on a number of matters.
She hit the road, but the road hit back. She fell into the clutches of the Pimps who, as the story opens, are taking her somewhere she will be placed on the open market, since she is a commodity of some value.
When she sees Virg at the bar in the Poker House Motel, she comes up with a plan to escape by seducing him into liberating her from the Pimps — which she does, having some intuition of how the male heart is connected to certain other parts of the male body. But the truck is Johnny’s, so all three go on the run together, Virg being Johnny’s truest friend.
Bea is one-quarter Coushatta Indian (her name in Mobilian Jargon is Hashi-Tayik “Moon Woman”). Her cousin, Chief El-bak-e-Show, becomes instrumental helping Johnny and Virg move the dope, once the Sparks City plan falls through.
What Bea wants, of course, is not to shack up with Virg or anyone else. She knows where that leads. She just wants to be free.
WALDO “HUBCAP” BROWN
HubCap Brown is the famous country singer and composer recently inducted into the Country Renegade Hall of Fame in Nashville, a town he loathed.
Many songs by HubCap are alluded to by Virg and Johnny and also sung by Homer Brown during the spell they and Bea hole up on Homer’s acreage back in the woods. Homer may or may not be HubCap’s brother, though they both have green eyes, but then Bea does too. Virg is convinced he met HubCap in prison.
The pre-eminent interpreter and scholar of HubCap Brown is Mr. John M. Young, currently a resident of San Clemente, California. Mr. Young has collected and commented on them in Three Chords and the Truth: A First Take on HubCap Brown.
Mr Young is pursuing further research into the life and loves of HubCap and hopes soon to visit the HubCap Archives, located in Paris, France. It is not exactly clear how this trove of Americana ended up there, nor how HubCap got his name.
HOMER
Homer is a hermit of unknown though advanced age. He lives on a plot of land way back in the woods, where he survives almost exclusively on his own means, making the rare trip to town for staples and other provisions.
He is first and foremost a musician, related in some indeterminate way to Waldo HubCap Brown. He left home at sixteen after a nasty fight with his old man, never, as far as we know, seeing the family again, but he is the subject of the HubCap Brown song which bears his name.
He raises pythons which he sells illegally to exotic pet shops in the big city, his main source of income.
CHIEF EL-BAK-E-SHOW
El-Bak-e-Show (“No Arm” in Mobilian Jargon) is a hereditary Chief of the few remaining Coushatta Indians who live on a reservation somewhere in the Piney Woods, though his authority has been contested, in particular because he does not respect certain tribal conventions.
His grandmother, Ok-e-alla (“Water Child”), is also Bea’s, so the two of them are cousins. After Bea’s mother passed away under suspicious circumstances, Bea spent much time on the reservation, something neither her Father nor Brother liked much. Almost every time Bea ran away, she would head back to the reservation, not too far away from Sparks City.
El-Bak-e-Show did his best to pass on to his cousin Bea courage in the face of adversity and the respect for others he felt to be true Indian values.
THE PARTNERS and THE PIMPS
The two gentlemen who initially partnered with Johnny and Virg on the dope deal are much more experienced in crime than the two, who are rank amateurs, comparatively speaking. It not at all clear if things would have worked out well for the boys once they got the dope to Sparks City. This is something Virg probably should have known, since he had met one of them in the big house.
In any event, Virg and Johnny bailed the first night, absconding with the stash and with Bea, for whom the Partners had just cut a side deal with the Pimps, about which we know little except that they are scum of the lowest order.
Only an hour or two after Johnny and Virg and Bea slip off at dawn in the old Chevy truck, the Partners and the Pimps wake to discover they have been betrayed. They immediately set out in hot pursuit with bloody vengeance in mind.