Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (14 page)

15
Shadows in the Shape of a Coward

Farsanna had been asleep for maybe an hour, her breathing becoming a tide. The same almost-full moon we’d earlier used to guide our way down the Pike now taunted me outside Farsanna’s one small window, which faced the woods behind her house. I rose to look for some kind of blinds to yank down.

I stood at her window a moment, startled by the sheer size of the moon, impaled by a tall, dead pine trunk like in a ghost story. As I looked out, a shadow flitted across the bare strip of backyard. It didn’t at first strike me as strange. But no other shadows were moving. The shadow lengthened. And moved on two legs.

A breath logjammed in my chest. I ducked by the window, its sill even with my nose.

The shadow was approaching the house.

Dropping lower, I crawled on all fours to the kitchen. The only phone I’d seen in the house hung beside the stove.

But who could I call? I crouched beside the stove a moment—but only a moment—thinking. And felt the slam of my heart nearly rock me off balance.

I stood only long enough to find seven numbers, counting out their position in the dark and waiting for the everlasting spin-back of the dial. And then I squatted again, one hand cupping my mouth at the receiver’s mouthpiece.

The chances of Emerson’s being home, I knew, weren’t too good. There being Neesa involved. I was already wishing I’d dialed out Jimbo’s when the phone rang a first time.

I saw out the kitchen window the figure crossing the backyard again, moving from the far woods near the driveway towards the back kitchen door, not ten feet from where I crouched.

The phone rang again.

There was no jack in my parents’ bedroom, only the upstairs study and the kitchen downstairs. So only if Emerson were not still out with Neesa, and only if he were not already asleep in his room and only …

It rang a third time.

Of course he would still be with Neesa. I pictured her little white hot pants again, and the plunge of her halter.

I stretched my arm to hang up the phone but froze: Someone had bumped up against the Moulavis’ back kitchen door. He was on the back stoop behind the kitchen.

“Hello?” Em’s voice cracked through the receiver I was holding above my head. I jerked it down.

“Em!” I whispered.

“Turtle? What—?”

“Em, you gotta come.”

“
What
?”

“For real. You gotta come now!”

“If this is your way of making sure Neesa—”

“You gotta get here! Somebody’s outside.”

“Outside? Outside
Farsanna’s
?”

“And he’s acting like he wants to come in! Em, hurry!”

The line’s going dead told me my brother was already halfway out the screen door.

Creeping as silently as I could to the kitchen window, I watched the figure retreat again towards the woods by the drive. But he’d already slipped that way once before and come back. I crossed the living room to the front door, which was locked.

I’d no idea what to do. I slipped through the front door into the warm black of the night, my skin gone clammy and cold.

The figure was approaching again from the far woods by the drive. Keeping close to the block of a house whose warehouse brick I couldn’t see in the dark, I slipped along the front of the house to its side, then dropped to my stomach and slithered, like I’d seen men do in the army movies I watched with my brother. My elbows dragging the length of me across the dead grass and bare clay, I reached the edge of the drive closest to the house, then slunk quickly across its gravel arm to the opposite side, to where the weeds had grown long enough to help hide me.

Not only could I see better from this position—this struck me as real brave of myself—but also I was closer to where Emerson would pull in his truck—and maybe take me away. So if I was brave, it was still splintered with scared.

I lay still while the figure slipped back towards the woods.

In that instant he turned, and just before he ducked again into shadows, the pearl of a moon shone full on his face.

I heard myself gasp—maybe more of a gag, a scream that I muffled.

I knew the face, and knew I’d made no mistake, not even in the yellow of a carnival moon.

There was the round form and face of the good Reverend Riggs.

16
Overheard in the Dark

Its headlights off, Emerson’s truck crept to a stop on the gravel shoulder in front of the Moulavis’ house—as quietly as a Ford can growl across gravel, which isn’t very quiet at all. I leapt for the driver’s-side door, yanked it open, and dove across him into the passenger seat with Big Dog, who licked the back of my neck.

“Em!” I was panting myself. “You can’t believe … It’s not what—”

“First off, calm down.”

“Calm down! Em, I saw who it was! Who it is—he could be back any minute!”

“You saw who it was?”

I clutched my throat with my hand to keep my heart from slamming its way up through my neck. “It was …”

“Who?”

“It was the Jimbo’s, the reverend good daddy, the good Rev—!”

Emerson stared at me a moment before speaking. “What’d you have for dinner, Turtle?”

“Stop it, Em. I know what I saw.”

“Right.”

“Stop it! I saw his face!”

“In the dark.”

“By the moon. I know his face when I see it, ’bout as well as I do yours.”

“Come on, Turtle, why—?”

“Didn’t say I knew
why
. I said I saw
him
. That’s all.”

“All right, all right. Look, let’s get out of the truck. Which way’d you see him go?”

I pointed.

Em backed the truck several yards up the wide slash of the gravel shoulder so that it was parked well off the road, partly hidden by woods. We scrambled out and crept back through the front yard without speaking, skirted the side and knelt in the depths of the dark where the moon’s light didn’t reach, there near the back door’s kitchen stoop.

I tucked my hands in the fold of my legs to keep them from shaking.

When Emerson saw what I had, I could feel the air go dead around us and the stars batter down on our heads. Knowing my brother had now seen what I had made it more real than before, a key piece of evidence that perhaps after all the world was not a good and safe place, perhaps there were things—and people—you simply could not count on, despite what you’d been reassured, perhaps the sky would in fact fall. It was as if in one night, my childhood dropped away forever.

And then there were voices. We’d seen no one else—at least I hadn’t. But there must’ve been men, at least a couple of them, there further into the shadows of the scrub pine beyond the reach of the moon. I caught only snatches.

“
It’ll save more trouble in the long run’s what I’m saying…. You don’t want to see nothing bad happen to these folks, now do you? Or to that mighty fine boy of yours?
”

We couldn’t hear what Jimbo’s daddy said then, his back to us and his voice inclined to be soft. But whatever he said must have been short, or interrupted, since another voice picked up from there.

“
You know how the boys can get to having themselves some fun and get a little toe over the line now and then. I been able to hold the boys back so far. But I said to them, ‘Now … fellas, we don’t want no trouble…. A little more friendly pressure on these here folk—for their own good, you understand … help them find their own kind down in the Valley. Or back wherever it was they come from
.
’ ’At’s what I told them.”

At one point, Reverend Riggs’ arms went up over his head as if he were shouting, although we heard nothing. The gesture reminded me suddenly of Jimbo’s way of throwing his arms over his head when he delivered the last line of our litany, the words of L. J.’s daddy’s new sign.

But whatever the Reverend said or didn’t, the only voices we could hear in the dark were the others:

“…
Why, even tonight the boys was making a ruckus about wanting to just, you know, have themselves some innocent fun, not let nobody…. Just be making some points is all…. You just looking the other way is all I’m sayin’. To be keepin’ the peace, you understand…. People got to be brought along slowly…. Keepin’ the peace….
”

“That sounds,” I whispered, “like Mort’s daddy.”

Em elbowed me hard to be quiet. But then put a hand on my arm to let me know he agreed.

Whether Reverend Riggs responded at all, I don’t know—I couldn’t hear. What I saw was his walking away, his shoulders slumped forward, his round body sunk down into itself so that I’d have sworn someone had taken a shovel to the top of his head and pounded it into the round flesh of his body. And he staggered, like he’d been given a load too heavy to carry.

“Oh, Em,” I whispered, thankful my brother couldn’t see the water that spilled on my cheeks. “Jimbo will die. He’ll just die.”

“Yeah,” came his response, my brother’s voice ragged. “Yeah. He will.”

Emerson and I sat there together with ragweed and clay the color of blood the only thing left holding us up.

17
Yellow Sphere of a Man

Best we could tell, Reverend Riggs and the others left soon after Em arrived. But the two of us sat in the pickup for a good piece of the night and dozed in between keeping an eye on the Moulavi house. And when it looked like dawn might be trying to gnaw into the night, I crept back into the house.

I dozed off once more in the bed beside Farsanna, and woke up in a sweat—not a glow, but a sweat sure enough. The house was swollen with sound, with notes—were they notes?—that wriggled and chanted and shook themselves loose of language.

“What language is that?” I asked from inside my pillow.

Farsanna was sitting straight up in the bed. “Arabic.”

Turning my head, I squinted at her. “He’s praying?”

She nodded.

I sat up too, groggily.

“I thought he didn’t observe all the … you know … I thought it was his parents—who were devout.”

She looked at me. “This means he cannot then pray?”

I thought about this. “What’s he saying?”

“‘I testify there is no God but God.’”

I waited. “What else?” I could hear there had to be more.

“‘God is great.’” Here she turned and nearly smiled at me. “And ‘It is better to pray than to sleep.’”

“Oh,” I flopped backwards, “I could never convert.”

And then I remembered what I’d witnessed outside Sanna’s house in the night. And I lay there thinking that maybe I’d only dreamed it. And praying I had. And wishing I knew how to pray.

_________

I was home the next day by mid-morning—and would’ve been thankful to have left sooner. Farsanna’s mother had fixed “hopper” for breakfast—a cooked egg burrowed down in a pancake. And likely it wouldn’t have been bad if I could’ve eaten.

At nine, Emerson swung by—without Jimbo—to pick me up, and I was fidgeting by the front door, my
thank
yous
already said.

I was hardly through my front porch door before Momma was calling for my help with stuffed eggs.

“I’ll let you run these lunches out to the boys, sugar. Did you have a nice time?”

I gave her what she’d not wanted to hear, but still would expect: “Yes, ma’am.”

“I do believe Emerson said they’d be back at Miss Pittman’s again today. Bless her heart, she’s a little different, wouldn’t you say, hon? Shelby?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I was wading through my own weariness and confusion to get a clear thought. “They can’t come in and pick lunch up themselves? The boys, I mean.”

My mother turned, hands on hips. “Well, I swan. This is a first, your not just jumping at the chance to tag on after those boys—you and that ridiculous retriever of Emerson’s. Is something wrong, honey?”

I shrugged. “I’m … just tired, I reckon.”

“Well then, Shelby, hon,” Momma told me, “you can help me do three dozen more of these deviled eggs—hand me the paprika, sugar—and take them to the picnic supper over at the firehouse. And then you can get yourself some good beauty rest.”

I resolved right then that no matter how tired I felt, I’d be with the boys at Mollybird Pittman’s until the end of the day.

Mercifully, Miss Pittman appeared only once that day, marching out in her big straw hat just long enough to list our shortcomings—including the fact that Jimbo slouched sometimes when he walked—and then tooled away in her brown Oldsmobile for a trip to the doctor. We all three of us bent into our shovels and hoes and were careful not to meet her eye.

We worked hard and long that day. Though summer in the South is hardly the time to plant anything, there’ve always been those who think they can force the seasons to their own will—and Mollybird Pittman was one. Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers thrived on this type of person.

After the twelfth magnolia sat smugly settling into its hole, my back muscles were shredded.

Splayed on Mollybird’s fescue, I groaned for anyone who would hear me, “Got to get to the Hole.”

By four, we’d finished a six-pack of Coke and a full bag of peanuts. We packed up our tools and left to pick up the Pack.

We picked up L. J. first at the Feed and Seed, where he had just finished loading bales of pine straw into old Mrs. Barker’s trunk. We hauled new bags of cow manure, peat moss, lime, and cedar mulch into the back—then L. J. himself. He dropped to the floor of the truck bed. “So, Turtle … what’s new?” he asked, almost cheery. Heading toward the Blue Hole had that effect.

I felt Emerson listening through the window of the truck cab. He and I had agreed late last night to wait to say anything to anyone else about what we’d seen and overheard at the Moulavis’ until the two of us had a chance to talk and sort things out. It looked real bad for the good Reverend Riggs, and we knew we were dealing with Jimbo’s faith in his daddy, his dogged faith in his faith, and its power to change people and things, against all the evidence everyone else could see to the contrary.

I shrugged at my cousin. “Since yesterday, nothing.” A total lie. “What’s new with you?”

He shrugged, and we were done being nice. Which is the good thing about family: You don’t have to draw these things out.

We arrived at the Moulavis’ house, and through the plate-glass window, I could see Sanna’s mother limp toward the front door. Mrs. Moulavi held out her arms for her daughter.

It’s all she has here
, I was thinking, watching Sanna’s mother stroke my friend’s hair as if she were afraid to let go of her girl.

“Mm-hmm,” Jimbo said, nodding.

“Did I say that out loud?”

He squeezed my hand. “Reckon so. Leastwise, I heard you.”

_________

Having found no one at home at Welp’s trailer, we made our way to the Hole and swam hard and lingered that day. I’d no idea what we would be telling Jimbo, or how, about his daddy. But there at the Blue Hole, the granite palm warming my goose-pimpled skin back to smooth, the craters of water thrown toward the sky, the rhododendron in layers of green reaching up to the rim of the world, the waves of terror I had felt swelling all day over confronting Jimbo slipped back now to only a slow current of worry.

I scratched both dogs’ ears as they stretched on the rock.
All will be well,
I told them, not convincing myself.
And all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well
. They drooled their thanks on my hand.

_________

On the way back up to the Clearing, Bo asked to be the first to be dropped off.

“For some reason,” he’d shrugged, “the good Reverend requested my presence this evening. Who knows.”

“Look, Bo,” Em began, “Turtle and I need to tell you—”

I landed an elbow square in his ribs. “That you’re welcome to be the first to get home.” I mouthed to Em,
We said we’d tell him later. Not with anyone listening.

Em shook his head at me, but left it alone.

When we reached Jimbo’s house, Reverend Riggs was sitting on the porch.

“Hello there, children.” The Reverend approached the truck as Jimbo jumped out of the truck bed, with his hand held out, but without the usual beam. His suit was rumpled, his shoes off.

He offered his hand first inside the driver’s-side window. “One of these days you’ll have to join us again in church, Emerson, son. We’ve missed you and your sister. When was the last time?”

I knew then the good Reverend was thoroughly muzzied. He always invited us to church when he was at loss for something to say.

“Vacation Bible school,” Emerson said. “It’s been a few years. I was ten. Turtle might’ve been eight. We made Noah’s arks out of popsicle sticks. Turtle still has hers.”

“Too long,” Jimbo’s daddy was mumbling absently to Emerson, even as his hand offered itself to mine.

Against my will, I shook the Reverend’s hand. I was unsure about Jesus, but I knew it was what Momma would’ve done, and I could think of no other way to get his hand out of my face. I spoke too, but as coldly as I could manage: “Evening.”

He focused on me then for the first time, then turned—with a perceptible start of surprise—to Farsanna.

He looked from Bo to Sanna, then from me to Sanna, then Em to Sanna, his eyes always coming back to the new girl, and apparently startled each time she was still there. Slowly, the Reverend held out his right hand. “Reckon I’m not acting very neighborly.” With his left hand, he wiped the sweat that had sprung up on his forehead. “I’m Reverend Pete Riggs.”

Farsanna held out her hand in return. “I am Farsanna Moulavi.”

Reverend Riggs shook her hand, his pale eyes flickering up to hers, and then quickly away. His hand fell back by his side. “I been meaning,” he said, “to get by your house. Been meaning to pay y’all a howdy. You and your folks.”

The Reverend’s eyes, still lowered, shifted to the threadbare white towel Farsanna clutched about herself. “Well, now,” he said. I couldn’t read the expression on his round face. “Well, now, so here you are on Pisgah Ridge. You folks adjusting all right?”

The new girl tightened her scrap of a towel around her. She didn’t blink—though she didn’t immediately answer either. “My father’s work is not to him open now,” she said finally.

“You mean,” I asked, “he still can’t find anything in his field?”

She did not look at me. “The position that was open when we spoke of moving is now closed when my father arrived.”

Reverend Riggs studied the truck’s tailgate held shut with wire. “Well then,” he said. This seemed not to satisfy him as a pronouncement. “Well then, that’s not good news.” We all stared at him, waiting for more. He moved to the tailgate and idly tugged on the wire holding it up. “I’m real sorry to hear that,” he told the tailgate. He lifted his eyes just once more to us.

I loathed the man.

Reverend Riggs placed a hand on Jimbo’s arm. “Well then,” he said. “Reckon we ought to be saying goodnight.”

Bo kissed his father on the top of the head and followed him through the parsonage screen door. The Reverend turned back and reopened the door as if he might say something, but turned back again and walked inside.

I spit off the side of the truck like I could rid myself, rid us all, of whatever had happened so far, whatever was yet to come. Jimbo would have to be told, and so would the others. But for now, I contented myself in hating the yellow sphere of a man.