Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (5 page)

“Right. But fatalities, not so much. Lately. So, there’s no problem. Right?”

He cut his eyes at me. “Oh
sure
, Turtle. Right.”

But I wasn’t letting go of my comfort so quickly. “Times have changed, L. J. Right? Even here.” I said this with confidence I had to concoct right there on the spot.

He grunted. “Sure, times have changed. Who’s there to lynch on the Ridge nowadays? Only a Yankee or two.”

I knew that was a jab at my father, of course, and at Mollybird Pittman, who spent twenty years in New York, then came home—but never was quite right after that. We knew all about her not being right, with all the trouble she gave us on a regular basis as we landscaped her yard. Seemed she brought back to the Ridge the kind of attitude New Yorkers were feared for, which she delivered now from under a straw hat encircled by phony red roses. She’d inherited the hat, as well as her house and acres of gardens, from an aunt who, like Mollybird, lived out her days alone on the Ridge.

“I’m just saying,” I said.

L. J. turned that sneer on me. “Okay, Turtle.” It was the voice he used for his baby brother, Luke. “I’m entirely certain you’re entirely correct.”

“Shut up, L. J.,” I told him. Because I agreed with him.

Determined to shake off my conversation with L. J., I hit the water at a dead run and, climbing out of the water, shifted my attention to the new girl.

“You can’t just wade in,” I said to her as I surfaced. “Even in this heat, the water’s too cold.”

But she had already begun edging in beside our hand-shaped boulder. She nodded toward the chicken fights, which happened regularly near the north beach of the hole. “I would drown, I believe.”

“What? Oh, them. That’s nothing—just a kind of … mating ritual here.”

She studied them. “If you wish to join them, please, I have no—”

“Me? Shoot, I’m not—” I could have put her mind at ease by admitting I’d never once been asked to join in. But I left it only at this: “Don’t worry about it.”

Farsanna toe-stepped her way into the water, so cold it sometimes felt like it filleted the flesh clean off your bones. I sat on the rock, watching her closely. She never complained, or gasped even—and I had to give her credit for that. She edged in more and more, and as she submerged, I saw red bubbled up to her ribs.

For several seconds, I thought she’d been shot. Then I realized it was only the red cotton skirt. But it shook me a little that my mind had slipped there so fast.

And apparently, I wasn’t the only one to notice her floating red skirt: The rubble of boys at the base of the sweetgum erupted. In the sweetgum that held up the rope swing, Mort Beckwith and Buddy Buncombe stopped trying to shoulder each other off their precarious perch. They both hung to a limb with one arm and stared.

“Hey, Turtle,” Mort thundered. He must’ve dropped down the trail just after us. He stood there, his shirt off now, his gut-flesh gleaming white, not as heavily muscled as his arms or chest, and rounded out from his waist. There was no rifle holstered from his swim trunks or crooked under his arm, but I reckon I checked anyhow. I flipped on my back, floating, examining the blue circle of heaven above my head. Maybe if I ignored Mort, he’d go away. The sun impaled itself on a hemlock above my head.

“Hey, Turtle!” This time he had my attention—and everyone else’s. “So, Turtle, what’s that you brung with you? A black dog in a skirt?”

Buddy convulsed in laughter that looked for all the world like seizures—he’d laughed like that since we were all little, and he’d scared the fifth-grade teacher Miss Buckshorn half into her grave.

All around the Blue Hole in ripples like a stone had been dropped at its center, I could sense bodies rolling up into sitting positions, everyone watching, waiting for me to respond. I could feel Jimbo’s eyes on me. And Em’s and L. J.’s. Not to mention Farsanna’s. Even Welp watched me, and I knew without seeing just how he looked: his acne mottling still darker red as he smirked.

In the blue circle of heaven above my head, a long line of civil rights heroes marched before my eyes: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks and Marian Wright Edelman, and my father’s voice describing the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter and my mother’s asking sweetly,
Now Shelby Lenoir, what do we think Jesus would do
? But so far as I could tell, there was no we here—no me and Jesus or me and Martin or me and Momma.

Only me, floating. And wanting to weep for being unworthy of Bo’s faith in me. I could feel him compelling me to speak:
Say something, Turtle. Say something.

But I was that terrified child behind the steering wheel all over again and a truck barreling down. I pretended that I’d heard nothing, and dove under the water.

By the time I’d resurfaced, Bo, at the base of the sweetgum, had crossed his arms over his chest and was shouting to the top of the tree. “You know, Mort, your white done bleached out your brain. And if you’d like to come down here so’s I can say that to your face, I’d be happy to wait.”

Balancing on his branch, Mort let his snarl crack open, just the tiniest bit. The Beckwiths were all as slow as they were surly, so Mort only changed expressions in jolts and jerks, like a car whose clutch has gone bad.

With a Tarzan yell, he swung by one arm from the rope, and was still whooping when the water swallowed him whole.

And then it was finished. The rope resumed its pendulum rhythm over our heads, and boys dropped into geysers of Blue Hole brown water. A chicken fight broke out near the mud beach’s north end. Sunbathers rolled like pork on spits. And some rules got unraveled that day, there by the ragged hem of a pond.

I beached myself and crawled up to the granite palm. And I watched the Blue Hole, now with the sun almost completely below the rim of treetops, grow dim. Jimbo joined me, but his eyes had drifted past me to the new girl, sitting off to the side. My chest ached with the clamor of too many words that wanted out now—
now
—when it was too late. I whispered into the deepening light, and not even to him, the only thing I knew for sure I believed: “I’m so sorry.”

Still not looking at me, he slipped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him, just long enough for me to smell peanuts, and reach my fingers to the curls at the back of his neck. And then he was standing again.

I caught his hand and had lots I was going to say, all of it eloquent and heartfelt and stirring, beginning perhaps with
Forgive me for my silence? And can you make the new girl forgive me?
But a blowfish had found a home in my throat and sealed off my voice and my air.

Looking down at me for the first time, Jimbo squeezed my hand, and I knew it was absolution he was trying to give me. But I couldn’t curl even one finger around it just then.

I sat still and alone and hardly able to breathe in my nearly airless vacuum of not-yet-forgiveness. The granite palm that had always been my favorite perch now felt cold and not sufficiently cupped, like I might be pitched headlong out into the dusk that had begun swelling around us.

Farsanna stayed in the water for longer than I would have guessed—seeing how cold the water always was, and its being her first time.

“Farsanna,” I began slowly. “I ought to say …”

She looked back at me with that lack of expression I’d seen before. “My friends,” she said, “call me Sanna.”

I stood, the breath knocked clear out me, not knowing if she’d just accused me of not being her friend, or invited me in. I reached for her hand to help her out of the water. She ignored it, but nodded at me. “Call me Sanna,” she said again, looking me in the eye.

She emerged from the water, her skirt all limp from her hips, and her blouse a good seven shades darker from the silt. She took the towel Emerson offered her and let him wrap it around her shoulders.

Em held his towel on the new girl’s shoulders like it might slide to the ground if he didn’t anchor it there with his own hands. I watched the Blue Hole watching Em, but my brother was focused on Farsanna’s wet shoulders and didn’t seem to notice or care.

He tipped his head close to hers, and then allowed Farsanna to hold the towel for herself.

I wanted to shake Em. To rattle some sense back into my brother. To tell him how he was looking just then, and what people might think if he kept standing like that with the new girl. At the far side of the Hole was Mort Beckwith, watching it all. The right side of Mort’s mouth was lifting back into a snarl.

I turned to Jimbo—he always knew what to say. Bo was watching the two of them too. But saying nothing. And not looking my way.

As we gathered our things to leave for the day, it seemed to me that murmurs rose from the banks of the hole in a tide all around us. But then it backwashed into flotsam, just a whisper or two, floating there, unmoored and harmless. So how bad could it have been? That’s what I told myself every few feet of the way back out of the Hole:
How bad, how bad, how bad could it …? Harmless, harmless, how bad?
I didn’t look back to see if Mort was still watching. But I knew that he was.

4
Hog Wild

Extracting yourself up from the Blue Hole’s hollow was always the trickiest part: Having finally been cool for the first time all day—maybe all week—you had to climb real slow, just below sweat-speed, back out of that bowl with the sides of slick clay and slate. Sanna examined us laboring up, hand on root over foot on rock, then swung herself into the steep. Once, maybe twice, but not more, she accepted the hands that Emerson and Jimbo both offered to help. Mostly, she climbed on her own, jerking that skirt out of the lift of each foot.

“That’s right,” I told her once, because she deserved some kind of praise, her climbing nearly as fast as I did and her in a long skirt. And her not taking the hands that the boys offered. I was liking her better.

At the top, I bent to retrieve my flip-flops, and still barefoot, I sprinted to the pickup, arriving first, beating L. J., who generally didn’t think too highly of girls—which made it worth breaking a sweat again. We piled into the truck bed, all of us flesh-heavy and quiet, this time not caring whether or not we rested our legs on mulch and manure.

Emerson’s truck bucked its way out of the woods and back onto paved roads.

Lifting his head a few inches from the metal floor, Jimbo was the first to trouble himself with talk. “Hot retching road kill, I can smell Steinberger’s from here. Who’s in?” He was our social chairman, in charge of judging when we might extend our play at the risk of missing the dinner our mothers had warned us to be home for.

L. J. cast his vote without stirring. “By all means, if you could refrain from unsavory allusions to maimed wild life, I’d say let’s attend to digestive demands. I’m utterly famished.” But his mother was out of town, and his father would work late at the Feed and Seed, so he was hardly popping up courage. I didn’t say this out loud, because he was family.

“We got to. I’m starved,” Bobby Welpler said. “All those gonna stick with the pack, raise their hands.” He looked straight at me, like it was me who might spoil things by reminding us all to get home. And then he stared straight at Farsanna, and that look spoke for itself too, reminding us all who wasn’t a part of the pack. Then his little melon-seed eyes, wide set and without much sign of intelligent life, settled on me. “All those got to get home to their mommas can hop off right here.”

“Yeah,” I came back, “but your momma wouldn’t notice one way or the—”

Jimbo was shaking his head real small at me. I stopped there. But I’d already treaded a little too far.
We were all thinking the same thing, even Welp
, I wanted to shout, defending myself.
He knows what his momma is. Everyone does
. And that was true. Only Jimbo mostly saw things out his own porthole, he liked to say, and you could count on his judging people a whale of a lot either better or worse than they looked to everyone else.

Welp turned his face to the woods and shot air through his teeth. Whatever he said, to me or to his mom or to himself, he finished his thought into the wind, still hot off the side of the bed.

Emerson swung his pickup off the highway at Stonewall Jackson Pike.

“A half mile down here’s Hog Wild,” I told Farsanna. I pointed to the sign ahead: a pink pig gone sassy in a miniskirt and cowboy boots.

“This is a …” Farsanna squinted down the road at the low-slung log cabin with an arrangement of picnic tables out front, “… a restaurant, no?”

“An establishment. A joint,” L. J. corrected. “‘No shirt, no shoes’ is entirely customary, if not entirely hygienic.” He swung himself out of the truck before it came to a stop. The rest of us scurried to follow, and even the Big Dog pawed open her passenger-side door before Emerson had properly parked.

Emerson pulled a quarter from his shorts pocket, and we flipped to see which one of us would call our mother.

“Tails, you call,” I said just before it spun to a halt, “heads, I do.”

We both bent over the coin.

He sighed. “I always call Momma.”

I patted my brother’s cheek. “She likes to know a man’s in charge, sugar.”

“She’ll be ticked, our missing dinner.”

“Not if you charm her.”

Even Emerson had to agree. Our momma believed in men. And our momma believed in charm. He stalked off, quarter in hand.

Sanna stood watching, maybe waiting for someone to explain. I stopped myself just short of pointing, and nodded to the man taking orders behind a screen mesh. “Steinberger owns it. Hyme Steinberger—that’s him there—Steinberger and daughters. They go to our school.”

Jimbo motioned us all to a table and bowed, like he was the maître d’. “Steinberger hickory-smokes his pigs for three squealing-free days. Don’t got no competition in all Carolina.” He bowed again and grinned at us all in a sweep. “Wet shells and welcome.”

Bobby Welpler lowered his voice and elbowed Farsanna. “Steinberger don’t eat the stuff himself; Steinberger’s a Jew.”

We all looked at Bobby.

“And,” Jimbo said, “he cooks one almighty mean pig.” He led the way to our favorite table—Steinburger himself called it our table.

Welp turned to the new girl. “What about you? You worship cows where you come from? What if there’s beef in this here barbecue? You afraid you’ll eat up one of your gods?” He snickered through lips he always kept closed when he laughed—Welp’s front teeth were brown at the gums and one incisor was missing.

“Shut up, Welp,” I said without looking at him.

Emerson pointed to the pick-up counter. “Go fetch us some Cokes, Turd Face.”

Welp was breathing hard, his arms flexed. “She ain’t,” he growled over his shoulder as he turned to obey, “answered my question.”

Jimbo rolled his eyes and went to call his mother next. When he returned, Welp following behind him with Cokes, he dropped down on the picnic bench next to Farsanna. “Ma said to tell the mangy pack howdy.”

Now this couldn’t have been true, not exactly. Regina Lee Riggs never said howdy—she was much too refined. She would’ve asked, in deep Virginian, to
convey mah regahds to y’all’s mangy pack.

Jimbo stabbed his fork into barbecue. “And the good Reverend Riggs,” he tipped his head toward Farsanna, “that’d be my daddy—was receiving his weekly word from the Lord.” Bo reached for the hot sauce, the one marked with the flames, and raised it to Emerson and me like a toast. “He’s calling it ‘Rescue the Perishing and Yeah, That Means You.’”

“Bo’s referring to our father,” Emerson said to Farsanna, who sat beside him, between him and Bo. “Dad’s what you might call the village atheist.”

L. J. nodded. “Every village benefits from a modicum of intellectual dissent.”

Welp nodded too. Though he probably hadn’t heard what he was nodding about.

Emerson jerked his head in my direction. “Me and Shelby Lenoir take after the faith of our father, you might say.”

For a moment, L. J. stopped sneering. “Which reminds me,” he groaned, “have you all seen my daddy’s new sign?”

I leaned in to my brother. “What sign?”

“Outside his daddy’s Feed and Seed,” Emerson answered, laughing. “It’s a new marquee, three lines, a good five feet across and lit up so as the blind couldn’t miss it: “Fresh Bait—”

His head dropping to his chest, L. J. supplied the next line: “Cold Beer—”

Jimbo snagged the last line for himself: “Jesus Saves!” And Bo began the lines again, chanting with Em:
Fresh Bait, Cold Beer, Jesus Saves!
He gave L. J.’s shoulder a friendly shove. “Me and the good Reverend Riggs drove by it yesterday, and even he chuckled up some.”

L. J. shook his head. “Your daddy laughed?”

“Said he reckoned you’d be embarrassed as Kentucky Fried Cherubs.”

“Well he’s right. He said that?”

“‘Least that’s what he
meant
.”

That went without saying. The good Reverend Riggs, we all knew, never said what he meant, for fear of offending—but, now, that didn’t make the opposite true. Nobody doubted he meant what he said, his sermons all variations on being nice because God was so nice. But Truth was something the Good Reverend liked to hand out soft and slow and sweet-smelling—which, some people said, was why the Baptists had kept him so long, their having run off the preacher before who’d liked his iced tea and his gospel unsweetened.

Bobby Welpler leaned across the table to Farsanna. “What about you, Sri Lanka? Your daddy got himself forty wives and a girl god with snakes for hair?”

L. J. covered his face with both hands. “Good Lord, the ignorance one has to endure here.” He turned on Welp. “Sri Lanka primarily practices Buddhism, and secondarily Hinduism. Although,” he cocked his head at Farsanna, “although …”

“My father’s family,” she offered quietly, “are Muslim. And Moor. Although we do not regularly—”

Welp interrupted: “What do them Arabs call their Bible?”

“Sacred text,” L. J. corrected, one hand massaging his forehead. “And it’s called the Koran.”

“Yeah. Koran. Or maybe your daddy’s done some of that island voodoo, huh, Sri Lanka?”

The new girl received this without flinching. “This,” she told him, “is for us home now.”

Just like that. No explanation.

But Welp muttered, “That don’t make no sense,” and I’d no intention of agreeing with him in public.

Jimbo was gnawing his way through his third corn on the cob, this last one from off my plate. He shrugged cheerfully. “You got a God-given right not to make sense in the Home of the Brave—what makes this country so big-dirty-dog great. Don’t nothing got to make sense, and our Constitution protects it.”

Welp pouted. “She still ain’t answered my question.”

“You,” I said to Welp, “haven’t asked one worth answering yet.”

Emerson slapped two quarters on the table. “Welp, Big Dog here’s needing a drink.” She grinned and drooled beside him.

Sulking, Bobby Welpler slumped his way back to the screen mesh window.

But by the time he returned, the sulk had lost its hold on his face, sliding down to only his mouth, his eyes having cleared up out of their half-lidded glare. And a few baby back ribs later, the sauce basting his nose, the sulk had slipped from his face altogether—ribs’ll do that—and showed only in his shoulders.

We wiggled our bare toes in sawdust as we talked, with barbecued beans and butter from the corn greasing our noses, our cheeks, our chins. Our napkins untouched in a stack, we licked the sauce, heavy with maple syrup and brown sugar, from our fingers and lips. And we took turns letting Big Dog finish our sodas. Her teeth gripping the cans, she tottered on her hind legs to toss back the dregs. She preferred Dr Pepper but would settle for Coke, and because she turned her nose up at Tab, I kept the pink can to myself.

The new girl offered the last bits of her shredded pork to Big Dog, and Emerson turned his cap a full revolution in thanks, while Big Dog slept on Farsanna’s feet.

“The time that is the next,” Farsanna told them, “I will bring with me the dog at my house.”

Em scratched his golden retriever behind the ears. “That’d be nice,” he said to Big Dog, like he’d all of a sudden gone shy about lifting his head. Farsanna crouched down beside Em to stroke Big Dog’s broad, happy back.

It was the same touch Farsanna had used for readjusting her mother’s headscarf, small fingers deft and light now smoothing Big Dog’s ears. The new girl smiled up at my brother, who managed to return the smile.

Jimbo cut in. “It’s a little-known fact that Big Dog has always harbored a hairy fondness for,” he held up his palm, and placed his other fist down and to the right, “Sri Lanka.”

Farsanna considered this for a moment. Then, rising, she lay one hand lightly, quickly, on Emerson’s arm, and one on Jimbo’s. “Then it is Big Dog I have for the kindness to thank. Please tell her for me that I am most grateful.”

My brother and his best friend looked not at the new girl and not at Big Dog, but at each other.

“Well,” I said, changing the subject, “seemed pretty clear to me that Buddy made the best jump from the rope today.” And just as I’d hoped, the male egos present locked horns.

Em snorted. “Then you clearly missed my triple back.” He turned to the new girl. “Farsanna?”

“I saw it,” she smiled at him. “It was indeed splendid.”

Em turned back to us with a self-satisfied smirk. “What did I tell you?
Splendid.
”

“But,” Sanna added, with the first sly glint I’d seen in her, “the long spin of L. J. was also most impressive.”

My cousin readjusted his horn-rims and pretended to snap suspenders on the John Deere T-shirt that served as uniform in his daddy’s Feed and Seed. “I call that my Cyclotron Extraordinaire. And I thank you for observing the perfection with which it was executed.”

I waved this away. “I still think Buddy’s drops showed more guts.”

“Turtlest, Sweetheart,” Jimbo put his hand over his heart, “you wound me! Did you not witness the full Dirty Harry with a half twist I delivered, just for your viewing pleasure?”

“Was that the time you slipped off the branch and fell headfirst?”