One Mississippi (11 page)

Mrs. Beecham stepped outside as I mowed the last slice of grass. She had changed from her maid uniform to a blue flowered housedress and flip-flops.

She held a beautiful glass of lemonade with sweat-beads rolling down the side. I wondered if this might be evidence that she was softening to my presence. I killed the engine.

“Hot day,” she said. She put her lips to the glass and drank deeply.

“Yes ma’am.”

“If you’re thirsty, there’s a hose out there by the shed. I’d offer you some lemonade, but this is the last of it.” She eased herself to the porch swing.

“Thanks. I’m not thirsty.” I started raking. The cut grass was quickly whitening in the afternoon heat. I thought I might die of thirst watching Mrs. Beecham sip from her tall, frosty glass, but I refused to drink a drop from the garden hose while she sat there with her lemonade.

It took a long time to fill a dozen large bags with cut grass and stack them at the curb.

A beat-up orange taxi pulled up. Mrs. Beecham stepped back in the house for her purse and keys. “I’m going to spell Beecham at the hospital,” she said, locking the door. “He’s been there since last night. Is your mother coming back for you?”

“I hope so.”

“All right then, I’ll see you tomorrow at four-thirty.”

“Ma’am?”

“You get out of band practice at four, correct? So you can be here by four-thirty. Don’t be late. Do you have a ladder at your house?”

“Yes, but —”

“Bring it. We’ve got work to do.” She climbed in the taxi and rode away.

She might have said thanks, Daniel, nice job, thank you for mowing the yard from the goodness of your heart — but no! Come back tomorrow! Bring a ladder!

I carried the last rakeful of grass clippings to the garbage can by the back door. I lifted the lid to find my mother’s lemon pound cake, still in its plastic wrapping, sitting atop the smelly garbage.

I put the lid back on the can and dumped the clippings on the ground beside the can.

Mom and Janie drove up soon after. “Oh look how nice it looks!” Mom said. “You did a good job, sweetie. I bet Miz Beecham was thrilled.”

“Not exactly. She says I’m supposed to come back tomorrow.”

“Get in, Danny,” said Janie. “We’re gonna go buy the stuff to make a volcano.”

I hoisted the mower onto the tailgate. “Mom, I cut her whole yard for free. Do I really have to come back and do more tomorrow?”

“She must really need you,” she said. “I think it would be very sweet of you to do that.”

“For free?”

“Of course for free,” Mom said. “Look at their house, you think she can afford to pay you? Imagine their hospital bills, that child has already been in there a long time.”

“But Mom —”

“Did she say anything about the cake?”

I looked out the window. “She said she loved it.”

“I knew she would. Everybody loves that cake.”

The next day after band I trudged across the Yatchee bridge, past the usual gang of boys throwing rocks into the river, up the long hill to the stoop where Mrs. Beecham sat waiting for me. “Hullo, Musgrove.”

“How’s Arnita today?”

“Better. They’ve got her using a walker. Beecham said she made it down the hall and back by herself this morning.”

“Mrs. Beecham, how bad is she hurt? I mean, is she getting better?”

“Sure she is. She’s not exactly her old self yet, but every day a little more. Hey now, didn’t I tell you to bring a ladder?”

“Yeah, but how am I supposed to carry a ladder? I take the bus to school, then I have to walk all the way over here.”

“Well, we’ll just have to borrow you one,” she said. “How you expect to paint the house without a ladder?”

“I’m not painting the house,” I said.

“Sure you are! Look at that house! Don’t you think it needs painting? Who do you think is gonna do it?”

“You expect me to paint this whole house by myself? I’ve never painted anything.”

“Let me tell you, the best painter who ever lived had to start somewhere. And I bought you the good kind of paint too, look here. Not the kind that comes flaking off in the first rain. Got you a big scrub brush and some Clorox so you can get off all that mildew before you go putting good paint on there.”

“Mrs. Beecham, listen.”

She folded her arms. “What?”

“I’ve got homework, you know. And I’m in the band . . . and we have this huge yard I have to cut by myself since my brother went off to — Vietnam.” With my luck Bud would now be sent to Vietnam and that would be my fault too. “I don’t have time to paint your house.”

“I don’t expect you to finish it this week,” she said. “You just work on it nice and steady, couple hours a day. You’ll be done before you know it.”

“Mrs. Beecham. We live eleven miles out in the country. I ride the bus to school. How am I supposed to get home from here?”

“You got a bike?” she said.

I nodded.

“Ride it. You could stand to lose a few. That’s how Arnita stays so slender, she rides that bike of hers everywhere. Or she did, before this happened.”

I heard the message: Arnita is not riding her bike now.

I believed that I understood what she was offering me: a chance to work off my guilt without having to confess. Instead of trying to explain anything, I could come here every afternoon and pay down the balance of what I owed.

Tim got mad on the phone. “Why are you getting mixed up with those people? Are you trying to get us caught?”

It was my mom’s big idea, I explained. I was trapped. “This Beecham woman has got our number, Timmy. She had us all figured out before I even got there.”

“That’s impossible,” Tim said. “I think you just look naturally guilty. You go around
radiating
guilt. To me, what looks the most suspicious is you showing up wanting to do favors for her, while Arnita’s still in the hospital.”

“Tim. The woman knows.”

“Oh come on. You’re so paranoid you’re gonna get us caught. Cut it out, Skippy. Quit thinking about it.”

“I can’t, Tim. I’m not like you. I can’t just forget what we did.”

“You could at least try,” he said.

Every morning I got up an hour early to ride my bike to town, so I could spend the afternoons painting the Beecham house a soft minty green with white trim. At first it was hard waking up to my lonely bowl of Rice Krispies, pedaling off down the road at dawn, but actually I began to enjoy it. Dad was around the house more these days, with his smaller territory, so it was good to be out of there before he got up. The open road was better than the smelly old school bus anyway — bugs humming in the weeds, the whir of my skinny tires on pavement. I learned every wrinkle in the road between our house and town. I whizzed along fast enough to startle quail from the weeds.

But once I got to school, I was the quarry. Each day began with homeroom torture from Red and his gang. Somehow Tim and I had become the answer to the bully’s prayers. He used all the time-honored methods — a fart sound when I sat at my desk, an elbow to topple my books to the floor, a chorus of boys chirping “Five Spot!” in cartoon falsetto. Red was a genius at slow torture of the drip, drip, drip variety. Once you made it onto his list, you could never feel safe. Two days or a week might pass without incident, you’d begin to breathe a little easier — then a foot shoots out to trip you, a hand slams open your bathroom stall, an elbow sends your lunch tray flying.

It went on week after week. I wished to God I could be an anonymous brain/loser again. I hadn’t realized how good I’d had it when nobody knew me at all. Now everyone in the whole school was either torturing me or feeling sorry for me — poor Five Spot, the object of Red’s relentless attention. Now and then some kid shot me a furtive glance of sympathy, but once you’re singled out for the full bully treatment, no one sticks his neck out to help you.

I had pitied and avoided other kids in this fix, like Rachel Bostick, the obese girl with hair on her arms, and poor Cissy Chappell, whose nose and receding chin provoked whinnies wherever she went. Never had I imagined myself as one of them: a pariah, an object of pity and contempt.

It bothered Tim even more than me. He got a little quieter and madder each day. Something had spilled over inside him, some kind of corrosive liquid.

Every morning, a new round of public humiliation. The other kids watched it happening and looked away; it was only one of many such campaigns under way in our school at all times. Torture was a time-honored Minor High tradition, along with gossip, flirtation, school spirit, and seniors cutting class on Friday afternoons in the spring.

Red Martin was an excellent linebacker. No one would stop him from doing anything he wanted to do. The only way it would ever stop was if Red got tired of us and moved on.

In the meantime I refused to let him ruin my life. I did my best to ignore him.

Tim wasn’t able to do that. He took every sideways glance from Red as a frontal assault. I could never convince him that his furious reaction only encouraged the bully. He fumed, he seethed. His face flushed every time Red came within forty feet of us.

We talked about it at night on the phone. Tim wanted only one thing: revenge. He wanted to do something awful to Red. Blow his car up. Burn down his house. Fill his locker with dead animals. Tie him up, shoot him in the eyes. Drag his body down a dirt road. “County Road 43 is real long and bumpy,” he said. “I think that would do fine.”

We moved through school like a pair of shadows, trying to be invisible. The worst day was Thursday, mandatory assembly in the auditorium. With no seating chart, Red and his friends were free to sit where they wanted, which meant they sat directly behind us.

We started sitting up front under the watchful eye of Mr. Hamm.

Tim hunched over his sketch pad, shading in the bricks of a turreted castle. I studied the shapely legs of the Red Cross lady onstage as she stood before the easel with the half-red thermometer showing how much blood they’d collected so far. Something wet touched my ear —

I turned. That was Red’s spitty finger. His pals started up snorting.

“Cut it out, Red,” I said, loud enough to draw a look from Mr. Hamm.

A minute went by, then I felt Red’s fingertips touching the bare spots on the back of my head.

“A perfect fit,” he whispered. “Oh, honey, come home with me after school!”

His gang tittered.

I knocked his hand away. “Stop it, Red!”

“Boys!” Mr. Hamm said. “Can we try to act like adults, please? Even if we’re just little children? Miz Prentice, please continue.”

Something poked me in the butt.

I reached back to wrest it away. A rolled-up newspaper. A tee-hee from Red’s gang of Munchkins.

Tim stared straight ahead, his mouth set in a grim line. If Red wanted to poke at me like a fourth-grade bully, I could slap his hand away and go on with my life. Tim couldn’t do that.

“County Road 43,” he said softly.

Mr. Hamm aimed a quizzical expression over my head. I turned to see a man in a Smokey hat and uniform, and another man in civilian clothes, strolling down the aisle of the auditorium toward us.

Cold sweat sprang from my pores.

Red said, “What’s the matter, Five Spot, see a ghost?” Then he turned in his seat and saw something worse than a ghost: a Hinds County sheriff’s deputy.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Hamm,” said the man in shirtsleeves. “We’ve got a warrant for a Dudley Ronald Martin. Is he here? Dudley Martin?”

Oh my God. Dudley was Red. Red was Dudley. Dudley! Ol’ Five Spot could make good use of this information.
Oh well hello, Dudley, lookin’ swell, Dudley. . . .

Currently Dudley looked terrified. He rose halfway out of his seat. For a second I thought he was going to try to dash out of there, but his shoulders slumped. He sank back down in his seat.

“Come on, son,” said the tall cop.

“What’s the charge?” Red said.

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” said the cop, “leaving the scene of an accident with injuries . . . you want to hear the rest?”

“I didn’t assault nobody,” Red said. “This is fucked up.”

“
Don’t
use that language with me!” The cop jerked Red’s arm behind his back.

“Red,” Mr. Hamm said, “go with these men. I’ll call your daddy. Go on, son. We’ll get this straightened out.”

Red’s friends shrank back to let them by. He tried to wave off the handcuffs. “You don’t need those, man! I said I’ll go with you.”

“Procedure,” the cop said. “Turn around, put your hands behind your back.” He snapped Red’s wrists together and walked him up the aisle.

“I didn’t hit her,” Red said, loud, so everyone could hear. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Tim was the first one to put his hands together. He began clapping slowly, deliberately. Others joined in. A swell of applause rose as the cops led Red out of the auditorium.

Mr. Hamm said, “Stop! Boys and girls, everyone be quiet!” The clapping broke into pockets of derisive laughter. “I just want to say, Red is a fine young man as well as an excellent football player, and I’m sure this is all a mistake. He didn’t hurt anyone.”

“Bullshit!” came a shout from the back. One of the black boys.

Now it was the white kids’ turn to grow quiet.

“Mr. Hamm, why you stick up for him?” That was J. T. Lewis, a black stringbean basketball player. “I didn’t hear you sticking up for Arnita Beecham when he run her over!”

“Yeah!”

“Red’s been walking around free all this time,” said Leon Barber. “Arnita still in the hospital! You think he’d be walking around free if she was white?”

“Wait a minute,” said Mr. Hamm. “This is not the place to have that kind of discussion.”

J.T. cried, “You say Red didn’t hurt nobody. How you know that? Was you there?”

“Sit down and be quiet, J.T.,” said Hamm. “Miss Prentice has come all the way from Vicksburg to share her important information with us.”

The Red Cross lady looked terrified, what with cops and handcuffs and shouting, but she tried plowing ahead with her presentation. She didn’t get far. The muttering grew to a chant:
Arnita. Arnita.
Shoes tapped the floor in time to her name.