Safe from the Neighbors (8 page)

“You know him?” I’d asked.

“I
met
him once,” Ellis said. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

“Still.” Handling the book gingerly, I put it back on the shelf.

“You’ve got them alphabetized, I see.”

“When you need something, you want to be able to lay your hands on it.”

“How come you don’t separate fiction and poetry from non-fiction?”

He smiled at my question, which he later told me he regarded as evidence of a naïve bent towards compartmentalization. “A good book,” he said that evening, “is a good book. They like to be together.”

He now returned from the kitchen carrying a glass of wine that he put in front of me, then sat down on the couch and gracefully crossed his legs. “That’s a pretty good Pinot Gris,” he said. “It’s entirely too hot to drink red.”

“I came to bother you,” I told him.

“Impossible. Unless you plan to devour every last bottle of wine in the house. Then, much as I value your company, I’d have to acknowledge feeling put-upon.”

I laughed. “Just the one glass. Actually, I got interested in what we were talking about the other night.”

“Joseph Brodsky?”

“No, the Calloway killing.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I told you about all I remember.”

“Yeah, but I’m sure you covered it.”

“Of course I did. It was big news locally. Elnora Napier actually wrote the articles, though.”

Mrs. Napier, who’d been dead for close to thirty years, wore a number of different hats, handling advertising for the paper and writing stories from time to time, and also hosting a radio show every Friday at noon, on which she read the names of everybody who’d been born, died or hospitalized in Loring during the past week. “Could I take a look at them?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “You know where the key is. But turn the window unit on or you’ll come back parboiled.”

In the kitchen, I took the key off the peg near the back door, then went outside. Ellis’s study is in a detached building that once served as his home office. He’d written most of his articles
and editorials out there, and it’s where he’s kept his archive since selling the paper.

Inside, it must have been a hundred and ten degrees. But I knew I wouldn’t be there long, so I didn’t bother to turn the air on.

The leather-bound volumes were shelved along the west wall, six months’ worth of papers in each one, the dates neatly labeled on the spine. I’d spent a lot of time going through them some years ago, looking most intently at Ellis’s coverage of Freedom Summer and the boycotts Charlie McGlothlan led later on. But it was probably fair to say that at one point or another, I’d had my hands on each volume—if the police ever needed to dust them for fingerprints, they’d find more of mine than anybody else’s, probably including Ellis himself.

I found the one for July–December 1962 and pulled it out, squatted beside the bookshelf and flipped through to the issue of October 4.

Anybody who’s spent time examining old newspapers is apt to develop a healthy respect for hindsight. Events now considered earthshaking often weren’t perceived as such in their immediate aftermath, whereas the most trivial happenings sometimes seemed riveting for those who lived through them. The lead article in the Loring
Weekly Times
on October 4, 1962, didn’t concern the recent invasion of north Mississippi by the United States military, the enrollment of the first black student at Ole Miss or the death of a local woman at the hands of her husband. Instead, it recounted how two members of the volunteer fire department had rescued a cat named Tom Collins that was trapped high up in a cypress tree on the bank of Choctaw Creek. Ellis wrote the article himself and also took a picture of the cat, cradled in the arms of its tearful owner. There was no mention of the Oxford crisis anywhere on page one, just a grossly inaccurate wire-service report at the top of page three.
Ellis’s lead editorial, moreover, called for the resurfacing of Loring Avenue, which was so full of potholes that three different motorists had suffered blowouts there in the last week alone.

Elnora Napier’s article was also on page three, directly beneath the one about Ole Miss. Miss Napier had her scruples, reporting only what was known and avoiding speculation.

There was nothing else on the incident in the October 4 issue, but I did discover that a can of Red Bird potted meat was going for eleven cents at Piggly Wiggly, whereas a pound of ground beef cost a quarter, that the Loring Leopards had lost to Leland 26–13 the previous Friday, for the fourteenth year in a row, and that Flannery’s Truckstop had just installed showers that drivers could use for free each time they filled up. A long time ago I had learned to respect information, in and of itself.
You can’t hope to make sense of what happened if you don’t understand the environment in which it happened, and you can’t do that if you’re too busy to care what a roll of toilet paper cost.

By October 11 the Calloway story had moved onto the front page, where it appeared beneath an article by Ellis that detailed the malfeasance of an alderman who’d treated himself to an all-expenses-paid weekend in Memphis—this piece took up the top half of the page and ran over onto page two. Ellis had another on the bottom of the page, about the phone company’s plan to replace its operators with a rotary dialing system over the next eighteen months. In the bottom corner, Miss Napier began by recapitulating the previous week’s account and then explained that on the afternoon of October 5, three days after being taken into custody, Arlan Calloway had been released.

That was it. I flipped through the rest of the issue—ground beef had gone up to twenty-seven cents and the Leopards had lost again—and then returned the volume to the shelf, locked the study and went back inside.

Ellis was still drinking wine and listening to music, though now the string quartet had given way to the “Moonlight
Sonata.” My shirt was wet with sweat from the study, and the refrigerated air inside the house made me shiver. I sat down at the end of the coffee table. My glass was standing right where I’d left it, so I lifted it and took a swallow.

Ellis looked at me. “Find what you were searching for?”

“I found Miss Napier’s articles.”

“Yes, but not what you were searching for.”

“A man shoots his wife with a shotgun he just happens to have handy sometime around four or five in the morning, and a few days later the sheriff turns him loose and announces it was self-defense? How’d he arrive at that conclusion?”

“You’d have to ask him. But of course you can’t, since he died the following year.”

“But word must’ve leaked out at the time, since it always does.”

“There
were
rumors.”

I waited.

“Somebody told Elnora they had a witness.”

“To the shooting?”

He nodded at me over his wire rims.

“Who was it?”

“Well, as you know, the Calloways did have two kids.”

That wet shirt began to feel like an ice jacket. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to watch your father aim a gun at your mother and pull the trigger, but a moment or two wasn’t long enough. A year or two wouldn’t have been long enough. “You’re saying one of them saw it?”

“No, I’m saying that was the rumor making the rounds.”

“Was it the boy or the girl?”

“Some said one, some said the other. Mack Caukins never said a word. When children were involved, he kept his mouth shut.”

I knew Ellis about as well as I knew anybody outside my immediate family, and also I could trust him to keep his own
mouth shut if I asked him the question that had lodged in my mind the previous evening. “Was my father ever questioned about Nadine’s death?”

“Your
father?”

“He and Arlan were good friends. But the other day I remembered that Mr. Calloway once entered a bid on our land, back when we were living on the sixteenth section.”

“That used to happen all the time.”

“Yeah, I know it did. But last night, when I mentioned Nadine Calloway to Dad, he looked like I’d just kicked him in the balls.”

Ellis leaned over and picked up his wineglass, took a sip and seemed to roll it around in his mouth for a moment before swallowing. Then he set the glass back down. “If I had to guess,” he said, “I’d say your father was just shocked to hear her name again. Maybe he’d thought he never would. Who knows? Or he might’ve forgotten she ever existed. Remember, he’s as old as I am. And I can tell you from personal experience that when the vast majority of people who once meant something to you are gone, day-to-day existence gets a little surreal. Maybe hearing her name popped him out of one zone and dropped him into another one that seemed far more vivid than the one he inhabits now.”

Then he changed the subject—something he’s always been good at—and asked how I’d spend my Wednesday evenings from now on, since that used to be the night I cooked for the girls. I told him I’d probably get myself some carryout at China Buffet, eat an early dinner and read for a couple of hours, then go over to Jackson Park and walk off my meal. He laughed and said if I got bored, I could always come by his place for the kind of stimulating conversation we were having right now. And if I chose to bring a bottle along, he’d have no choice but to help me empty it.

When I finally got up to leave, I noticed his copy of the
Memphis
Commercial Appeal
on the ledge in front of the fireplace, and that made me think of Andy Owens, who used to deliver the paper and, when we were lucky, cut my hair and Eugene Calloway’s. “You remember Andy Owens?” I said.

“Andy Owens?” He rose and laid his hand on my shoulder, and together we moved towards the door. “Seems like I recall the name but can’t quite place him. Somebody who used to live around here?”

F
RIDAY AFTERNOON
, the first week of classes finally over, I went home thinking maybe I’d take Jennifer over to Greenville and splurge on a big steak dinner at Mann’s Eatin’ Place. We’d done that from time to time back when the girls were younger, getting one of my students to babysit, then stuffing ourselves with a slab of beef before strolling down the levee and having a drink at one of the casinos. What I remembered most about those evenings was how often we made each other laugh. One night I tripped on a cobblestone and rolled halfway down the levee, and when I got up, with my jeans in shreds and my knees and elbows bloody, we both laughed so hard that somebody called the Greenville police, believing we were incredibly drunk and perhaps insane.

For a while now I hadn’t thought of myself as a guy who did things like that but as somebody who chained himself to the desk to review his lesson plans and then, to have a big time, sank into his armchair to read. Still, what happened between Jennifer and me the other morning proved there might be a few surprises left.

I walked through the kitchen and found her sitting in front of the computer, with her face bright red, her head in her hands, her cell phone in front of her on the desk. If this had been a
painting, the artist might have called it
Up-to-Date and Out-of-Sorts
.

“What’s the matter?” I reached for her, but she batted my palm aside.

“Two hundred and forty dollars,” she said, “for a bunch of fucking football tickets?”

“Oh, I guess you checked the bank account.”

“Yeah, I
checked
it. You know why? Because when I went to pay for the groceries at Piggly Wiggly, the transaction got denied.”

“There should’ve been enough in there to cover that.”

“You forgot to take off the car insurance. The automatic withdrawal went through this morning, so now we’ve got a grand total of twenty-two bucks in checking.”