Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (20 page)

The organ heaved into a victory lap.

The usher returned to the back of the belly—where we still stood. I took hold of Emerson’s shirt at the waist.

The usher who’d approached the throne at the front put his head next to the usher who’d kept me from falling. The two of them bookended Jimbo and smiled. One laid a hand on his shoulder and patted it once. One put his mouth to Bo’s ear.

Here’s what I saw on the faces that watched—they all did, of course. Like snowflakes, there were no two expressions alike. There were some hard looks, I reckon, but also the soft eyes on women who were already seeing the casserole they’d like to serve us for lunch. Mostly there were everywhere the expressions like children lost at the fair and panicked, searching for someone to show them the way home.

The good Reverend Riggs sat on his throne without moving, except for his jaw up and down like a hooked bass hauled into the air.

It was
that
face, his daddy’s, that Jimbo was watching.

28
Thirty Pieces of Lead

A belly vomits what it can’t digest, and so we got spewed out the mouth into a searing sun.

Jimbo made eye contact only once with the ushers who escorted us out, and that happened only at the threshold of the back door. I couldn’t see Jimbo’s expression, his back to me, but I could tell by the way the ushers seemed to shrivel right there in their shoes what his face must have told them. Bo never gave them a word. And he never let go of the elbow he held.

We walked four in a line to the truck without speaking. And then stood there, leaning against the truck, taking it in.

There was no breeze, the heat already so fierce it about knocked you down, and I wondered if this hadn’t been Dante’s seventh circle of hell all along, and we’d just thought it was our mountain home.

We might’ve stood there for days, might never have moved, but an old Chevy Impala screeched into the lot with a blat of the horn.

I jumped.

Hands flapped at us from out the car windows.

“So we’re not the only ones who’re late,” Matthew called, with Mark and Luke and L. J. emerging one by one behind him.
The
Waymon of Waymon’s Feed and Seed plunged out of the driver’s seat, then dove back in and resurfaced with a Bible in hand.

L. J.’s mother blew a kiss in our direction and called over her shoulder, her heels already tapping at the asphalt, “Good morning, dears. See you inside.” Maybe inside, at the end of her spindled sprint, maybe then it occurred to her she’d never before seen her nephew or niece at her church.

Maybe it hit her once she’d got inside the belly and felt it still heaving.

But five of the six of my mother’s kin were dashing headlong for the door and waving above their heads while they ran.

Only L. J. stood still.

“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well.”

We—most of us—looked at him.

“So,” it wasn’t his usual sneer—just a question, “what exactly transpired here? I’m conjecturing you’ve already been in?”

Jimbo was looking at no one, his eyes fixed on the ground. I wanted to touch his shoulder. But didn’t.

Sanna’s eyes had become again like I’d first seen them, that day by the school water fountain: deep and black, too dark to tell much about—but possibly dangerous. Like a pit that might be storing explosives.

Emerson looked to Jimbo for an answer, got none, so he took up the task: “What do
you
think happened here?”

L. J. sucked a deep breath and pushed at the bridge of his glasses that for once hadn’t budged out of place. “I take it they were not enamored of our new, improved mangy pack?” He nodded at Farsanna. “Or simply not too fond of the color black?”

Jimbo cursed and spit on the ground.

_________

We never discussed where we were going when we hauled ourselves into the truck—no need to.

Farsanna sat, her spine flagpole stiff, her eyes straight ahead.

We swung by only Em’s and my house for Big Dog and swimsuits—I snatched up two, one for Sanna and me, and Emerson grabbed a stack of shorts for the guys. Bo appeared in Em’s room long enough to snag his shoebox-sized eight-track tape player, the one we’d found banged up and cheap at a garage sale last spring. Music at the Blue Hole generally wasn’t the norm, partly because you couldn’t hold anything in your arms as you slid down or climbed back up out of the Hole, and less so because we valued the quiet. Today, though, we knew we didn’t want to hear ourselves think.

All of us back in the truck, Em swung by the Pump and Run for sandwiches.

“Who’ll have pimento cheese and petroleum oil?” Jimbo asked grimly, as he tossed us triangles of white bread with little strips of orange between them, suffocated in cellophane wrap. We passed round the Cokes he’d just bought, and the peanuts, but saved the white triangles for the Hole.

L. J. thumped on Emerson’s back window. “You going for Welp? I dropped him off at his momma’s place early this morning.”

Em eased up on the gas and waited for the decision.

L. J. raised one eyebrow at Jimbo.

“No Welp today,” I pleaded—directing this, of course, to Jimbo.

Jimbo pressed his big feet against the bed’s side like he might push it down. His voice came out only half alive: “Reckon we all of us might ought to get one more chance’n we deserve.”

We backtracked for Bobby.

Emerson yanked the truck off the paved road onto a dirt swath that trespassed into the field where Welp’s mother rented her trailer. Out behind it, Welp was changing the oil in her car. His face streaked in grease, he rocked to his feet, planted his fists on his hips and his feet in the dust.

Jimbo lay a hand on my shoulder. “Turtle, you go talk to the man.”

“And say what?”

“Reckon you’ll know when you get there.”

“But it’s been a long day,” I hedged, “and it’s not even noon.”

Jimbo nodded, his hand still on my shoulder. “You can do it, Turtle.” He leaned into my face. It was the first time he’d met anyone’s eye since the church. “Don’t reckon I much feel like talking.” His chin gone to stubble—he’d forgotten to shave, or maybe it still hurt the swelling too much—and his bushy eyebrows scrunched up in a question together that made his green eyes stand out from the bruised, broken lines of his face.

Seeing where we’d just been, I wasn’t much inclined to make peace with the world, and Welp was just standing there watching—just being Welp. But Jimbo was giving the orders that day, and I was—we all were—inclined to let him.

I slid out and down slowly, and barefooted my way through ragged grass and flowering weeds to the car. “Wanna come to the Hole, Bobby?”

Welp eyed me, first up and then down. “What’s with the dress?”

I saw our mistake. Too late. “Just church.”

“Who all here went to
church
?” he demanded.

I shrugged. “It was only church. And we didn’t stay.”

Welp dropped the oil pan. “Race you!” he called, already sprinting toward the truck. He was like that, a four-year-old boy all over again, his only chance at winning being to pick on Emerson’s kid sister.

Without shoes I wasn’t too fast, but I gained enough on Welp to lunge for his back and brought him down just even with the truck.

Welp shook me off.

I gave him a shove that was meant to be playful. “Beat by a girl,” I taunted.

He shoved back, hard. More like a punch. I hit the ground.

A whetted edge to his voice, Jimbo tore into Welp: “Listen, Welpster. You’ve had a tough crack at life, I’ll give you that. But you don’t got to let the bad thrown at you become the ugly you think you got to be.”

Bo held out a hand to me and I took it, just enough to get me to my feet, and saw Welp sulking.

He’d hauled himself up one side of the truck, and then froze.

His stare was on Sanna, his melon-seed eyes widened to what almost was normal. “
You
went?” He whirled on Jimbo. “
She
went with you, and you didn’t call me?”

“Take it easy there, Welpster. It was planned real last minute. And you never—”

Welp’s round face had gone red under the acne. “Y’all
all
went, all of you, even
her
, and you didn’t call me?”

I shrugged. “It was nothing but church. And we didn’t stay.”

He looked straight at me. “Hey, Turtle, how come you don’t got any friends of your own, huh? Nothing but
nigger
yonder. How come is that?” Welp nodded toward Sanna. “Reckon she thinks she’s coming to the Hole again too?”

I sat there, and, afraid to meet anyone’s eye, I looked at the weeds. But I slid a hand to Sanna’s back, which had gone straight and iron-stiff.

“Welp,” Jimbo’s shoulders were rising up towards his ears, like a tiger before it attacks, “I reckon I’ll give you one chance to tell me I heard wrong just now. There’s a chance I didn’t rightly hear right.”

Bobbly Welpler stretched to his full five foot six. “I reckon I can call a spade when I see one.” His hands went back to his hips. “Or a nigger-lover, too.”

Emerson had shot out of the cab by then and even L. J. had climbed up to his feet, one finger pushing up at the bridge of his horn-rims, again and again and again.

Jimbo’s hands went deep in his pockets, and then deeper, like he’d better keep them from swinging. His voice took on a rumble, a whole lot like thunder. “Welp, I tell you what, boy: If it weren’t for your momma right now, I’d lay you out flatter’n grass, and more green.”

But Em didn’t have his hands in his pockets, and maybe didn’t have Bobby’s momma in mind. He had Welp by the throat and then on the ground, rolling. Em landed on top, hollering whole lines of things I couldn’t make out, and probably couldn’t repeat if I did, followed by, “You got that?
You got that?
”

Maybe because my brother was big, and little Bobby Welpler was not, or maybe because we all had some sort of dad, and Welp did not, or maybe because Welp’s face contorted with fear like he was gazing down the gullet of hell, Jimbo and L. J. hauled Emerson off.

Jimbo bent over him. “Welp, I got to tell you: You got some real noble rightness inside you—but I’ll be hanged if I know where sometimes.”

From the weeds, Welp looked from one to the other of us, and ended on L. J. “You too?”

L. J. looked back. “I share the sentiment.”

“That how it is? One of
her
sort got the whole pack of y’all turnin’ on your own kind?”

None of us moved. Except Bobby, who fell one step back.

“Yeah? Well,
fine
!
Fine
! The whole pack of y’all mix it on up! Go ahead! Just go ahead!” He followed this with a string of words, rabid and run together into a froth. Then he swung himself up to the crippled stoop of the trailer, yanked on the aluminum door, and slammed it—a pitiful
tap
.

Em leaned against the truck bed near Sanna. In silence, we all watched her face.

Her arms crossed over her chest just as they’d been that very first day she’d ridden with us, Sanna made sure she looked each one of us in the eye. “Perhaps,” she began, her voice low and bitter, “this means for me … it is time to go.”

I kept my hand on her back, and the three boys huddled in closer. I took a deep breath. “If you’re meaning
us
,” I began softly, “time for us to go, then we’re with you.”

Jimbo, Em, and L. J. nodded together. Then L. J., of all people, spoke up, his voice gone unfamiliarly soft: “Sanna, I wish we could explicate for you how a town full of charming people could also house—”

“
Idiots
,” Em said, rubbing his upper arm where Welp had slugged him.

“
Cowards
,” Jimbo put in, his gaze shifting back up the road in the direction of his daddy’s church.

L. J. nodded, “Those who are less than charming.”

Jimbo’s hand brushed Sanna’s arm. “You’re still coming to swim, aren’t you? We can’t Blue Hole without you.”

She looked straight ahead, her words clipped down almost to nothing. “I would like to go home.”

For the flicker of a moment, I thought she meant Sri Lanka, the Pearl of the Indian Ocean. And almost like she’d read my mind she looked at me and tacked on, “To my house.”

I tried to look back at her steady, and tried to benchpress my voice into something like reassuring when I said, “Your
home
.”

Jimbo shifted forward, right into her face, and whispered, “Come back to the Blue Hole, just this
one last time
.”

We heard the one last time, our heads snapping up in surprise. But not one of us gainsayed him that day. Maybe because it was Jimbo speaking. Or maybe because it seemed to us all at that moment that it might turn out to be true.

Sanna nodded finally—and even then not much of a nod. Em nodded back and climbed into the truck cab. In the rearview mirror, I could see his mouth had gone taut.