One Mississippi (9 page)

I rolled him back to his room. “Go on to bed, Jacko. I ain’t putting up with your mess tonight.” I heaved the sliding door shut behind me.

I flopped on my bed. I stared at my Beatles poster, and
Hair
, and Roger Daltrey looking blind on the album cover of
Tommy.

I heard Jacko laughing in there.

I felt so lost, so alone. It was just me, and the memory of Arnita stretched on the ground with her head resting against the sidewalk.

5

B
Y THE TIME
I got up, Jacko was puttering in his tackle boxes and Janie and Mom were already off at church. The burnt-toast smell of the kitchen put me in a dark mood. I wandered into the family room, kicking the stupid ottoman, flinging myself onto the stupid sofa. I hated this half-empty house, the cheap furniture we’d picked up at garage sales, thrift shops, along the side of the road. Mississippi had brought us nothing but bad luck from the very first day.

We should have stayed in Indiana. Bud and I tried to tell them, but did they ever listen to us? Did any parents ever listen to their kids?

The phone jangled me out of my chair.

“Arnita’s alive,” Tim said.

Oh God, thank you God. I pressed the phone to my mouth. All morning I’d been staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring. Trying to pretend Prom Night was a bad dream.

“She’s at Baptist Hospital,” Tim said. “Intensive care, but they wouldn’t tell me her condition. You have to be a member of the family. . . . Dagwood? You there?”

My voice came out a croak. “How did you find her?”

“I called every hospital in town.”

“You didn’t tell them our names, did you? I mean — should we even be talking about this on the phone?” These were Watergate days. You never knew who might be listening.

“Wait, that’s not all I found out. They arrested Red Martin on a DWI. He spent the night in jail. His daddy bailed him out this morning.”

I turned to find Jacko in the doorway, watching me with his blue beady eyes. I stretched the phone cord into the living room, shut the door on the cord, and dropped my voice. “Look, we can’t just sit back and let Red get in all this trouble.”

“Since when are you concerned about Red? Are you forgetting he’s like the world’s biggest asshole?”

“So what? That’s no reason to let him take all the blame for this.”

“Sure it is. Name me a better reason.” Tim’s tone was precise. “I told you, I cannot be involved with this accident, Durwood. I’ve got too much at stake.”

“Look, what if we call the police,” I proposed. “Anonymously. We don’t give ’em our names. We just tell ’em we are certain Red didn’t do it. Tell ’em we can’t get involved, but he’s definitely innocent.” I knew it was a bad idea before I got through describing it.

Tim said, “Yeah, that is too brilliant.”

“Well? We have to do something.”

He made a skeptical grunt. “March down to the jailhouse and turn ourselves in?”

“Maybe so.”

“Well then do it! Go ahead! Fuck up your life — and my life too.”

I said, “We did a pretty good job fucking up
her
life, huh?”

“For the thousandth time, goddammit, it was an accident!”

“Not the part where you drove off and left her,” I whispered furiously. “That was you. Your decision. You were the one driving. Not me.” There, I said it. No more of this “we.” Lay it on the table, just who did what.

“Hey. What do you want me to say? I freaked out, so did you.”

“No, I was yelling at you to go back the whole time. And you didn’t freak out, Tim. That’s what was so weird. You were cool, you were just so cool.”

“In a situation like that you gotta think fast,” he said, “or you’re completely screwed.”

I thought, Yeah? And where has your fast thinking gotten us?

“Listen, Skippy, call me if you hear something. Otherwise, see you at school mañana
.
Okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Later —”

I hung up. I was not in the mood for the game.

I found Jacko in the family room watching our Sunday-morning favorite, Channel Four, the Reverend Alfred L. Poole live from the Faith Holiness Tabernacle Church in Vicksburg. Reverend Poole was a plump, shiny man, with pink skin and a lofty black pompadour. “Jaheezus, our Lowered, is looking down upawn us right now,” he intoned. “Those of you with crippuling injuries, place your hands atop your television consoles at home, and receive the holy healing power of the Lowered.”

Jacko liked the man’s curdly voice and the way he smote the cripples on the forehead to heal them. He said maybe someday I could drive him to Vicksburg and get Reverend Poole to heal his legs.

Janie came clacking through the door in church shoes, then Mom, overflowing with news of Arnita Beecham. The whole town was talking about the poor girl, skull fracture, brain injury, coma, hit-and-run, the Martin boy arrested on the spot.

I put on my most neutral expression. “Yeah, Tim called. It’s terrible. You heard she was elected Prom Queen last night? She was so happy.”

“Those poor people, her mama and daddy,” Mom said. “You know her, Daniel?”

“Oh sure, I even voted for her. She’s in the band, and two of my classes. She’s super smart. Pretty too.”

When I told her that Arnita’s father was the school janitor, I thought Mom might cry. “This is the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. We have to do something for them.”

“I’m not that good a friend, Mom. I just know her from school.”

“She needs all the friends she can get. I’ll bake a cake one day next week. We’ll take it over there, and you can cut their grass for them or something.”

I caught Jacko squinting at me with one blue eye. I stuck out my tongue.

Jacko went into a coughing fit. Mom reached down to hammer his back. “Okay now, honey, tell me everything. What did the girls wear? Did you dance?”

“Yeah, we danced. They wore these long dresses.” I eased up from the sofa. “I got grass to cut, Mom. I better get to it.” That’s how desperate I was — I would rather cut grass than sit there and be interrogated one more second. The next innocent question might lead me to break down and tell her everything. I couldn’t stand Jacko’s blue eye on me.

Next morning the school bus hummed with rumors. Arnita was in serious condition, possibly critical. Red Martin knocked her off her bike on purpose. Or by accident. He was drunk. Or maybe he had nothing to do with it, just happened to drive by with an open beer and the cops pulled him over.

The black kids huddled at the back of the bus, more silent than ever.

When we turned onto Barnett Street everybody hurried to the left side of the bus to see where it happened. Nobody could figure out which driveway exactly. I kept my eyes fixed on the jumble of equations in my algebra book.

Dianne Frillinger was waiting when I got off the bus. In the light of day, in her shapeless plaid jumper, she had resumed her old identity. I felt a little queasy at the memory of the Jitney Jungle parking lot.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, “it’s so awful about Arnita, did you hear?”

I nodded. “But she’s gonna be okay, right?”

“It sounds real bad. Oh Daniel, I just feel so guilty, you know? Like it’s all my fault!”

“Your fault?”

“Well — we were so horrible about her when she won! When I think of the things I said about her . . . of course I had no idea that was going to happen. Let me tell you, I almost wish I was a” — she dropped to a whisper — “a
Catholic
so I could go to confession. You were right, Daniel, I was just awful.”

“Listen, Dianne —”

“And Debbie feels terrible too. Please,
please
don’t think we meant anything about Arnita. I had the nicest time at the prom, truly I did, and I’d hate it if you thought I was prejudiced or anything. Especially after her accident.”

“Forget it.” I tried to escape, but she had my arm in a vise.

“But I did have the nicest time the other night,” she said.

“Yeah, except for that damn seat belt,” I said.

Her braces sparkled. “That made it memorable. Mama says thirty years from now that’s the part we’ll remember the most.”

“Great, I’m glad you told her all about it.” I made a subtle move to detach my arm from her grip. “You think Red ran over Arnita on purpose?”

“They say it was an accident, but who knows? We saw him leaving the Holiday Inn, remember? He was definitely intoxicated.”

“They must not think he’s too guilty, right? If they let him out of jail.”

“He plays football. He’ll be fine.” She made a face. “Anyway, a bunch of the girls are going to the hospital tonight to see Arnita. They’re working on a special song for her.”

I wanted a report on Arnita’s condition. “You going?”

“Oh I don’t think so . . . wouldn’t it be kind of hypocritical? After the things I said?”

“It might make you feel better,” I said.

“Our pastor offered a special prayer for her yesterday. They’ve never prayed for a black before. Not in our church. Oh Daniel, it’s just too unbelievable.”

The bell rang, thank you bell.

“Call me if you hear anything else,” I said. I hurried into homeroom.

Tim’s desk was right next to mine. It was still empty when Miss Anderson called roll.

“Cousins,” she said, and was met by silence. “Tim Cousins?” She made a mark and went on with the roll.

Chicken! Deserter! Playing hooky to keep from showing his face! I doodled an elaborate maze on the back of my notebook. Didn’t Tim know how guilty it looked for him to cut school, the Monday after what happened on Saturday night?

The loudspeaker squealed. Although Mr. Hamm had been principal at Minor since dinosaurs roamed the earth, he was still learning to use the PA system. He warmed up with a couple puffs of air, then set the speaker buzzing with his rotund syllables. “Good morning, boys and girls, few announcements here, first to say we’re all just real sorry to hear about the accident this weekend. I know we’ll all say a special prayer for the speedy recovery of Arlene Beecham.”

Arlene?

A hum of static. Click click went the microphone key. “Scuse me,” Mr. Hamm said, above the background whisper of the office secretary, Miss Pitts. “I seem to have misspoke.
Arnita
is her name, of course. We all know her, she’s the daughter of Mr. Beecham, our — maintenance engineer, and she’s a real special girl. So anyway let’s send a kind thought to her family, if we can. Sergeant Magill of the sheriff’s department is handling the case, and I’m sure they’ll find whoever injured the girl. Next, we’ve had a problem with people leaving their sweaty gym clothes all over the locker room, so from now on we’ll have a new policy. . . .”

That was it? That was all he had to say? If I got run over and almost killed, I would want Mr. Hamm to say a few more words about me before moving on to the sweaty gym clothes.

The bell rang. I shuffled into the noisy jam of slamming lockers. In high school it’s all about how you walk down the hall — whether you stroll through the flow or dart along the edges, whether you hold the stack of books on your hip with one hand (guys) or press them two-handed to your chest (sissies and girls). Notes are scribbled and passed, rumors fanned and blown down the hall. This morning, the word in the air was
Arnita.

I kept my head down, books propped on my hip, and plowed straight down the middle.

The bell shrilled, draining all this excitement into the classrooms, where it was swiftly killed off. Eight-thirty algebra, first class of the day. When she wasn’t crowning the Prom Queen, Mrs. Passworth could be found at her overhead projector, beaming a square of light onto a pull-down screen at the blackboard. She sat in the upward-thrown glare of the projector, lit up like the Bride of Frankenstein, drawing spidery equations on the acetate sheet with a wax pencil. The shadow of her hand swooped and fluttered batlike around the screen.

“Today we’re going to learn something new,” she said. “Who can tell me how to determine if a number is natural, integer, rational, irrational, or real?”

No one volunteered. We slumped in our seats. Dutifully I copied the squiggles and numbers into my notebook, but all I could think was Arnita — what would she remember when she woke up? What if she didn’t wake up? How does it feel in a coma — is it a massive wave of confusion, like algebra, or is it like being asleep, or lost in another world? Was her family gathered around her bed? A bouncing green dot keeping track of her heart?

“Can anyone tell me why we need to reverse the relative positions of these two factors?” said Mrs. Passworth. No one breathed, for fear she might call on them. At first algebra had appeared to be just a complicated form of arithmetic, dense but eventually understandable. After Christmas, though, Mrs. Passworth had wandered off into a fantasy world of linear relations and functions, polynomials and radical expressions. For weeks now, none of us had known what the hell she was talking about.

Normally Tim and I spent this period passing hilarious notes across the aisle. All our teachers were laughable in some way, but Passworth’s starchy exactitude, her prim posture at the projector, the upward sweep of her beehive, combined to give us a full fifty-five minutes of fun every day. She wore a plain white blouse and no-nonsense gray skirt, and so much mascara that you wondered how she could keep her eyes open.

“Class,” she said, “class. We’re not focusing. We need to focus our minds, or we’ll never catch on! These are important concepts!”

“Mrs. Passworth,” Sandie Williams said, “I just don’t get it. Why did you put that thing under that other thing?”

“What thing, Sandie?”

“The thing with the V on it. You know, the little checkmarky thing that goes across. Why did you move it down there?”

Mrs. Passworth snapped off the projector. The room fell into darkness, a hush. “My God, this is hopeless,” she said in a quiet, dangerous voice. “Do you people know or even care that I have a master’s degree? Do you realize I could be teaching on the college level instead of to a bunch of —” She left unsaid what we were. She stood abruptly and walked to the front of the room. “I don’t know why I even try. I sit there and explain it all perfectly clearly to you, and you’re not even listening!”

I shifted in my seat. Sandie Williams looked ready to cry. Passworth was just getting started. She marched back and forth railing about how, if you don’t know the names of the basic building blocks, how do you ever expect to learn the blah blah blah, year after year teaching these rooms full of small-town dullards without the least imagination, on and on for long minutes until it got a little weird, trapped in that dim room with her saying, “Doesn’t anyone care about anything? I can’t take much more of this. I tell you, I can’t!”