Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (8 page)

Her hair. I held my breath. Farsanna’s hair was dry now, blown in the wind off the truck. But there was the gash underneath. Even if her momma couldn’t see well, or at all, would she be able to feel what had happened? Would she ask questions?

Farsanna turned as she closed the door behind her and lifted a chain to lock it. I put up my hand in a wave, and so did the boys.

_________

We dropped off L. J. next, then rolled up to Jimbo’s just after midnight.

Em craned around from the driver’s-side window. “Bo, you want me to cut the lights before we pull in?”

“Yeah. And the horsepower, if you don’t mind, my good man. The good Reverend hadn’t lost his hearing as fast as his boyish figure.”

Bo had a policy of complete honesty with his parents. If they asked him what time he came in, he told them, right to the minute. But if he slipped in without waking them, and they never asked, he came and went sometimes in the wee hours without the slightest restraint.

Emerson and I walked Bo down his drive. We never walked Bo to the door, but this night we were in no hurry to let go of each other.

Em motioned with his head to the side of the drive. He mouthed, “Whose truck is that?’

I’d been lost in my own thoughts and intent on sticking close to the boys, and not noticed the green truck parked at the walk.

Bo shook his head, shrugging. He reached for the screen door, then yanked his hand back and waved us all down. We jumped behind the rhododendron and crouched there as the screen door swung open.

“Order,” a man’s voice was saying, “is what we’d be after, preacher. Just law and order. Reckoned you could help us with that. We don’t want to let nothing get too out of hand in this town, now do we? We reckoned you’d see it that way.”

Bo yanked on our T-shirts and we all ducked still lower just as the porch light flipped on.

“Well,” said the good Reverend Riggs, as he let the porch door swing shut, “good night then.”

Several pairs of legs lumbered down the stone steps from the screen porch. I raised my head just inches to look for a face, but Bo yanked me back down by the ponytail.

“But—!” I whispered.

Bo put his forefinger against my lips. I sat then, saying nothing, and let his finger stay where it was.

7
Like Amorous Birds of Prey

Frosted Flakes wilting in my bowl, I paced our kitchen floor, my brother reading the paper and trying hard to ignore me.

“Explain to me one more time why Jimbo wasn’t more bothered by those guys coming out of his house last night?”

Em talked out the side of his mouth, his cereal squirreled up in the other. “I told you already, Turtle. Number one, Bo said himself there were trillions of reasons they could’ve been there. Unconfessed sin, maybe.”

“Right.”

“Seriously, they could’ve been there to talk about anything. Anything besides what you thought.”

“And you don’t think what I do? You can sit there and tell me Bo’s daddy wasn’t being threatened by those guys? And worse, that the good Reverend didn’t seem to be telling them where to get off?”

“I told you: Bo just said his daddy doesn’t think like that, doesn’t agree with that sort. At any rate, Bo wasn’t much rattled by it, so maybe you and I shouldn’t be either.”

“Is that why your forehead’s scrunched up into a knot? Because you’re not bothered?”

My brother put a hand to his forehead to feel. “Okay, look. So, it bugs me a little. But you know how Bo practically worships his daddy.”

I toyed with my Frosted Flakes petulantly. “Well. I reckon there’s something on the front page about what happened last night in the city. What’s the front page say about it? Emerson?”

He lay down the paper. “I heard you.”

“So? What did it say?”

He frowned and shoved the paper to me across the Formica. “See for yourself.”

I scanned the page. “I don’t see it.”

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“What?”

“Try page seventeen.”

“Seventeen? A car full of drunk white boys goes on a shooting spree and …?”

“You only thought they were
probably
white.”

“… Goes careening through a city and shooting at people, and it’s buried underneath the state fair and somebody’s award-winning turnips?” I skimmed the four-paragraph piece on page seventeen. “This says the police have located no suspects. That some of the witnesses have reported they were white guys, and there’s some suggesting they’re
black!
”

“Read carefully. None of the witnesses said they could have been black. Apparently the police are just looking for black guys or white, either one. If they’re looking at all.”

I read the article again. “Nothing more than minor injuries. And property damage … It doesn’t say much about property damage. But that one streetlight shattered right on our heads, and—”

Our father walked in just then, still half asleep and groping for his second cup of coffee before the morning began. My brother and I exchanged glances, wondering what he’d heard of our conversation.

“Heads?” our father asked us.

“Would roll,” I said too quickly. “I was just telling Emerson here that it seems like heads would roll, you know, seeing as how some idiots went racing through town shooting at people.”

Our father shook his head, wearily. “No, they weren’t shooting at people. I was at the city editor’s desk last night when the report came in. Apparently, some unidentified guys in a car were just shooting out lights, having a bit too much to drink, causing a general disturbance. Not admirable behavior, I’ll grant you. But nothing murderous in its intent anyway.”

Em and I looked at each other.

“But,” my brother ventured, “it seems as if it might have been. I mean, shooting that close to where people …”

“And the property damage,” I added.

Our father glanced up from his coffee and narrowed his eyes, first at me, then at Em. “Well, aren’t you two the civic-minded pair this morning? The property damage was minimal. And in that part of town, the city might not even bother to fix the lights for a while. That’s the assumption. It’s generally viewed as a way of punishing a certain sector of the population for getting so far out of hand.”

“But they didn’t—!” I blurted.

“A regrettable attitude, I’ll grant you. But typical, and perhaps not just of the regressive South,” he said.

“But what if the damage was done by … by not the people who have to live with the damage?”

Our father looked up again from his coffee. “You’ll find, children, as you grow, that our justice system waits for facts until it proceeds. And lacking facts, or suspects in custody, this case of disturbing the peace and probably some sort of unlawful discharge of firearms will have to be dealt with by people more experienced with urban crime than you or I. But this part of downtown hasn’t exactly been known for its calm and quiet.”

Our father opened his briefcase and stuffed the newspaper into it. He would be out the door any moment.

“What if,” I began, “what if the guys shooting weren’t from there at all? What if they were white and what if—?”

Our father eyed me carefully as I’d seen him do his note cards when he was having trouble deciphering his own print. “Then this would be a racially motivated incident, possibly with intent to harm. And if not dealt with well, could escalate into more racial unrest.”

I stirred my drowned flakes.

“Shelby Lenoir?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do you and Emerson have anything you’d like to tell me?”

“No, sir,” my brother said, “except …”

“Except have a good day,” I finished for him. And we both manufactured big, perky smiles for our father, a skill we’d learned from our momma.

_________

Throughout those next several days, while the heat raged unabated, we combed the newspapers. We drove some nights after dark to the Look, where we could see another downtown block blazing, abandoned buildings set fire by what the paper called “angry black youth.” The police had found no one to blame for the shooting, and one officer’s quote implied the force had little interest in pursuing the case, given that no one was killed or permanently maimed and there’d been “minimal material damage.” With all these reports, our parents warned us vaguely about “disturbances” down in the city and forbade us to visit, no matter the time of day, until things settled down.

So that summer, whole blocks of the city burned in the night and bricks found their way through plate-glass windows downtown.

I watched Bobby Welpler for signs of involvement or at least knowledge beforehand of the shooting spree, but his eyes had always looked shifty to me, and his slumped posture, always guilty. So that was no proof at all.

We waited to see what—or who—would ignite up on our Ridge.

And meanwhile, we returned to the Blue Hole: my brother and me and my brother’s best friend, one cousin, one Welp, one remarkably chubby golden retriever, and the new girl on Pisgah. And sometimes her dog, which Jimbo named Stray, tagged along too. He was as sweet as he was homely, and Bo made it his new role in life, when not working or swimming or flying from the rope swing, to keep one of Stray’s long, silky ears flopped across his thigh.

Unlike in past summers when Emerson’s pickup played trolley, collecting random friends and kin as we went, we no longer stopped along the way except at each other’s houses, and at the Feed and Seed. Emerson made sure we always parked right under L. J.’s daddy’s new sign. And while L. J. climbed in, we always made sure to read it aloud, all three lines of it.

“Fresh Bait!” I would begin.

“Cold Beer!” Emerson and Welp and even the new girl would call out, and laugh.

The punch line we saved for Jimbo, who rendered it with gusto and hands over head: “Jesus saves!”

And every time, L. J. would sink against the side of the truck bed, push his brown plastic horn rims up his nose, and moan. It was our own little litany, that sign was, and it lifted us up and sometimes around through the fear that some days snagged at our hearts.

Late one afternoon, Farsanna and I lay side by side sunning ourselves after a swim. I disliked that, though not so much because I disliked her straight-out. She was smart, I had discovered—we all had. That didn’t take long. But unlike our L. J., she had a way of not pointing it out. She liked to ask questions—or maybe liked to make you think that she liked it. And off you’d go, spinning out dreams of your own, stitching together—out loud, even—a future you’d never heard yourself think. And only way out into your tangle of answer would you realize she’d never said much of herself, just coaxed the silk out of the spider.

“And how is it about you, Emerson?” she asked, for example, just out of the blue as we all sat one day on the bank, all of us sun-seared and still warming back up from a swim in the Hole. “When you have more years, what will you be?”

“Books,” he told her—before he thought not to. “I’ll find a way somehow for someone to pay me to read. Read all day every day.”

Bobby Welpler snorted. “I tell you what, you wanna spend your life with your nose in dusty old books when you could be making time with the ladies? I tell you what.” He held up the stick he’d been whittling, now in the form of a voluptuous woman.

“Stand up, Bobby.” Em rose to his feet.

“I was just kidding you, man. I don’t want to fight …”

“Not gonna punch you, Turd Face. Just stand up. Okay, now kneel.”

Welp did as he was told, still clutching his pocketknife and his stick. Em knelt beside him, then motioned Farsanna to rise and join them.

“Observe,” Emerson instructed. He took Farsanna’s hand in his and gazed up into her eyes and spoke softly:

“
Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew …”

Gently, he brought her hand to his cheek, then slowly rose.

“And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with …”

He lifted her hair and ran one finger down her neck.

“Instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may

And now, like amorous birds of prey …”

His right arm slipped around her waist.

“Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapped power.”

The other arm closed the circle.

“Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball …”

He drew her closer to him.

“And tear our pleasure …”

He brought his cheek to hers, almost, not quite touching.

“With rough strife

Through the iron gates of life

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still …”

His face turned into hers, his lips sweeping her cheek

“Yet we will make him run.”

We all sat staring. Except for Sanna, who stood—but I’m guessing just barely. Me, I could feel my cheeks set to broil. I leaned in toward Jimbo. And he leaned back in toward me. But he wasn’t looking at me.

“
What,
” said Bobby Welpler, who dropped his knife and stick, “was that?”

“Dusty old books,” Emerson said, and sat down.

It happened that way every time: Farsanna asking one of us a question about ourselves, something I’d have sworn we all knew, and then out would come some revelation, some peek into some part of a soul we hadn’t known we were living beside. Sanna would nod like she understood, like whatever it was you’d said made sense, and lots of it. She had that way about her. Those hard-edged eyes of hers probed like a screwdriver blade leveraging off a paint can lid, and out would come more and more and more, before you knew you’d begun to spill your insides. And you were grateful somehow to her, like she’d given you some kind of gift that was only yourself, but pictured from the best angle and held up in a frame.

“And what,” Sanna asked Jimbo when his turn came, “will you someday pursue?”

“Money,” he announced earnestly. “Cold, hard cash.”

And we all laughed, our legs dangling down into the Hole from our favorite finger of rock.

“The day you care a flying flip about money,” I said for us all, “is the day I wear a pink satin bow on the top of my head.”

Em shook his head. “Jimbo, man, why do you think I don’t let you collect for the Big Dog Lawn business? You’d let all our customers walk away without ever paying.
Poor Miss Pittman’s had a hard week. Bless little ol’ Charlie Barker’s heart, he’s on a fixed income now and his kids don’t hardly ever come to see him. The Dooleys got eight kids and one on the way—don’t reckon they ought to have to worry about one more expense here lately 
… Lord, we’d have gone broke in a week!”

Jimbo nodded, clearly agreeing. “All the more reason to make money—so’s to have fun getting rid of it as fast as I can.”