Solemn (25 page)

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Solemn, you burnin a candle…'bout to burn this house down? Mama asked.

Those things do kinda smell like sumthin burnin…, Daddy noticed.

What I really wanted to know wasn't in books or the DigiCate anyway. I mostly found what I already knew: Oprah was in there but not Kosciusko. Mississippi was. Underground Railroad, too. President Bush, Iraq, and Twin Towers. New York City and Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey and hip hop, but not Outkast. I needed to write the DigiCate people, tell 'em to include Pearletta Hassle too. Then I punched
M
on the machine. I kept goin down these clunky, worrisome, and even fuzzy lists, down to “Magic: a form of creation outside of natural circumstances and normal human consequences.”

But it all seem so natural to me. Now the consequences another matter. I just kept on readin, 'bout the rabbits in hats, black wands, sorcery, cauldrons, potions, spells, and cults. But I knew all this already, too. It was basic. Maybe necromancy was the one thing new. I was just tryin to figure myself out. I ain't see myself as powerful as all that. If so, I would've carried away on a broom to all the places I wondered about but the Malibu ain't have gas to get to. Past Houdini and doves, I read 'bout special powers to disappear, fly, control, move, shake, strike people dead and raise them, too, see the future and make it, too. This was nothin worse than movies at Halloween time. On and on, deeper into it, till my appetite lost and my supper cold on the stove and my folks gone to the store without me and Dandy's water bowl run dry, it was the future I was most interested in. I kept on clicking through DigiCate, wantin to know how the future talked.

“White Magic” and “Superstition” sounded good, helpful even—the type of stuff me and Mama sometimes say “This a lie,” to on the talk shows, when a serious person play like they can hypnotize a stranger or tell an audience member they mother not really dead. And they was gods who gave the rain and crinkled women who sold dirty teas to make everything better. Workin under covers in my bedroom, with Dandy twistin round the catnip at foot of the bed, I tapped on the Good Witch of the North and the Wicked Witch of the West. Dorothy's story I knew. It was most fun I had had since Desi.

Why you keep clickin your feet like that, Solemn? I paid my folks no mind.

I just opened another groove of excitement: “Salem Witches.” Hah.

“Several young girls became afflicted in fits and convulsions throughout Salem, Massachusetts, disturbing their homes and interrupting the sermons. Not too long after pinpointing several women in the parish and throughout Salem who told people tales of horoscopes, fortune, and alternative spiritual beliefs, the citizens began to inflict a series of harsh interrogation and punishments among the collected women they deemed evil spirits. The women were not represented by formal counsel, nor did many of them receive appropriate and fully conducted trials. Twenty people, mostly women, were executed.”

When the screen went black, I realized I forgot to charge the battery long enough. It went off right in the middle of the several pages about it. Only 'bout an hour I had without the charge, even on a brand-new one I snuck out its box. When I went to fuss with it Mama said “I don't think we supposed to mess with those, Solemn.” But I kept on. I ain't understand why she wasn't happy I was least at home. With these maniacs 'round Singer's. And really, 'sides the Longwoods, ain't neither one of us had no real friends. Them church folks was too funny. I smelled the liquor on they breath. And where was Pearletta at? She just slip off like time? Least Solemn wasn't gonna slip away inside the DigiCate. Or let some boy slip inside me. No matter what you do some folks ain't never gone be satisfied. I knew one thing. If I was really a witch we'd all be rich up in here. What's the point of making crazy stuff if you can do anything at all? I'd make money.

“Sometimes, you gotta wonder if there are witches for real,” I told my mother. “That's what I think. Gotsta be. Specially according to this. Twenty witches got killed in America, long time ago.”

“Out all the things you could be reading and thinking about with that thing,” Bev told her, “you gotta wander off into something scary.”

“This what I'm interested in,” I said, and went back to my screen.

Little girls started it. Nine and eleven, I read, my fingers runnin across words. Close to me and Desi a few years ago, sound like. And, like I also had just a few years ago, right 'round time I first had blood between my legs and my face in the mirror started to look incorrect to my own eyes and I met The Man at the Well and I put my lips on Desiree's and we all blasphemed Easter with the Festival, I recognized myself in them girls: sweaty, fitting, in contempt of grown folks around them, overprotected, chased in the woods, and shook back to attention lest the preacher get mad.

Seem a high price to pay for misbehavior. And no matter what side of misbehavin I'm on—the one interruptin or the one called “strange” for touchin those interrupted—I think I saw to make sure nobody never paid any more attention to me for nothin out the ordinary beyond that already said and done. If I really was a witch, and that's what all this tellin me, I wasn't tellin nobody. And if I wasn't, well … either way, I was stuck.

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Meanwhile, future came into hurry and worry and commitment to spread the DigiCates. The boxes took over whatever floor space there had been in Bev and Redvine's bedroom. His family laughed him off. At least they were good practice. The DigiCate was not assembled into one piece as it had been at the Days Inn and when ‘Walter' brought the show-off one to the trailer. It had a wide screen with a long neck to attach to a broad keyboard, covers to put on here and there, and several CDs to download depending on the desired subjects. So, Redvine knew he had bought one just to keep assembled for folks to see it wasn't hard. He gave up on making extra off a sample.

“Why you starting with the church I don't know,” Bev told him. “If the collection plate empty when it's your turn, what you think that mean?”

Very day Redvine brought a few DigiCates to church, the preacher tired out the flock, finger licking and flipping pages faster while he rolled through Revelation: lashed out at electronics for 666 stamped on their foreheads and injected into the arms, with robots reading the numbers for a special Devil club. Solemn made sure she read along and looked interested, and smiled at the new visitors. After this, the tried-and-true members turned their noses down to the wristwatches they checked all through Redvine's pitch. Besides, they had just sprinkled the collection plate with their lasts. When Redvine set a DigiCate on top of a few trucks or the bench in the churchyard, not even Solemn's enthusiasm could wiggle attention. Once, his batteries died mid-sentence.

Singer's was no use. Many trailers didn't have a phone yet.

“TV just fine for me,” the few people Redvine brought it up to said.

Security was too tight at Montfort Jones, and other places. Redvine spent many days halted, tongue-twisting: “I don't have an appointment.” But this was 'cause of the phone. If he could only get one, he could make appointments in advance.

Redvine used some of what Landon sent him to slip a grand into Alice Taylor's hands for send-off to the boys in Jackson, as he promised her he would in a month.

No use with the electrical plant boys and men. It wasn't that there wasn't work. More electronics than ever. But Redvine heard it was all ordered on the computer now—not in the stores like the electronics plants shipped it all off to. The boys knew. But the older men weren't buying it. So they stood and they stood and they stood and they stood in lines for less pick lines to pick from, culminated.

School was out, nothing but the government-working teenagers chiseling gum off school desks and scrubbing chalkboards and waxing floors and repainting letters on the buildings. Any parents or kids or teachers left behind in summer school were not looking to stay ahead of the curve, hence there would be none. The few he talked to just didn't know what he was talking about.

But there was a dazzling import from a college in the Catskills, as she explained, with spirit. Redvine met her when he was looking around a junior high school at tip of the county, where the import was for the next two years via a special program to teach in underserved areas. She was an olive one, sprite linen jacket, and caked red lipstick run past her lip line. She saw Redvine wandering the hallways, equally as inappropriately dressed for the weather. But the jacket helped him fit in better than just a good shirt all by itself. Outside Singer's and Bledsoe and the black part of town, Redvine was still sultry. He had courage. Down a hallway neglecting to mention it was still broad daylight, the brand-new teacher led him into her old classroom and proceeded to pitch herself.

“I didn't want to just live off my parents' money all my life,” she told him. Two brown boys wrung out mops in the back of her classroom. One shoved textbooks back into a steel cabinet newly Lysoled. “Antoine, make sure all the books in the whole cabinet are in order by the numbers on the spines, sweetheart, so we can keep up with them when we let them out.”

Antoine started all over.

“They almost sent me to the border of Texas. I speak Spanish. But I wanted to be here. People love this place, because of Oprah Winfrey. Who wants to go to Texas? I mean, after all, the Bush dynasty? Works for my parents, I guess. How do you vote, sir?”

“I don't. What you teaching?”

“Geography.”

Luck.

“May I show you our specially priced
Geography Catalog
?” he asked her.

“Wow … that sounds wonderful.”

While he got settled with it, the teacher went back to pull the industrial fan closer to them, as well as to fill two Dixie cups at the water fountain in the hall. By now, she had kicked off her heels and slid around in her stockings. When she came back, Redvine clicked through the buttons and keyboard and screens, surprising himself with each maneuver. Before long, the boys stood in the back of the classroom cracking jokes. Redvine and the teacher kicked their legs back and forth underneath the round table while they played with the DigiCate. Under “Countries of the World,” Redvine started with Afghanistan to impulse the teacher into a way to teach about the war. Then he skipped up to Zaire, which he'd never heard of, but the teacher was most excited. She could teach them aaaaaaaaalll about their people. Starved for reprimand, the brown boys came to the front of the room to be with Redvine and the teacher.

“What do y'all think of this?” the teacher asked her charges for the next week.

“What is it?” said one of the brown boys. He drank a grape pop and had replaced his red bandana on his head into a skeptical arrangement.

“It's a digital encyclopedia, almost like a computer with its own World Wide Web,” Redvine told them.

“We ain't got that Internet round here,” Antoine said.

“We are working on it, Antoine,” the teacher told him. “This seem like something you-all would see as essential to reinforce what you're learning?”

“I thought it was a Xbox,” the brown boy said.

“No, son,” Redvine told him. “No games here. Learn something though, help with your schoolwork. It's portable, too. Seem like something y'all like?”

“Long as I ain't gotta read the whole book,” the other brown boy said.

The teacher was pleased and explained to Redvine she had a special budget aside from the other teachers, endowment from her program. Once she filled out the forms …

“How long that's gonna take?” Redvine asked. He thought back to what ‘Walter' told him to tell everybody: “I only have a few left, ma'am.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” the teacher said. She would be the first one she knew to have one of these and certainly able to talk about it in the next staff meeting as well as the teacher program's upcoming powwow to get set for the year of changing lives. Had she not been so prudent from the “community relations” trainings she would have written Redvine a check on the spot. He didn't look bad. Not at all. Few of them did. But she was hesitant to give out her home address, just meeting him brand-new and being in a small-town apartment alone. She asked him for time to get a money order. In just a few days, Redvine walked a one-thousand-dollar and a two-hundred-dollar money order into the post office of Koscuisko. The one clerk sent him out to come back later in the day. At top of the doors opening, he would have taken all her change. So he knew this was the way. He wanted to stay a man who took all the change.

With just five more sales (three in full, no layaway wait)—to a farmer outside Kosciusko, the two bank tellers in town who knew him well enough to cash his checks without a balance on hand, one retired secretary working the Farmers Market at Catherine Street, and Hall Carter in credit to their income tax refund later—DigiCate afforded the Redvines a real Bell South line straight into the trailer. Finally. DigiCate afforded more and better food in the Redvine refrigerator. Redvine dumped the Everclear and Bacardi 151 diluted with water for bottles of industry wine and brand-name six-packs in the fridge. Once Solemn's new optician and even her old principal came along in atonement, DigiCate afforded Bev the showy perfume bottles she had once collected. Redvine went to a black family-owned office store on Veterans Memorial Parkway, going-out-of-business sign in the door. Fine-cut business cards the owner's son made him, dirt cheap.

But it took nearly a month for all this to come true.

When the Malibu sailed past the electronics plant early in the mornings, it only pretended to have somewhere more to go than just not there. Same for the usual spots the men collected to wash down cars, set stone, break up concrete, forage junk parts. Anybody racing past it all gotta have a little something-something, they thought. When Redvine celebrated without bragging, he wound up footing one more round or dropping more people off without nary an offer for gas money or trouble. He made offers, sure. To come by for a demonstration or give him a few bucks for a catalog was too much for most. One night, Redvine looked out the windows while he got drunk on what was left of some of the wedding whiskey. He saw Singer's, Bledsoe, the well, friends who no longer spoke. Everything and all in between was like a beer can turned up with only the tail end of a craving left. He had never figured himself for a traveling salesman, but if he was going to be like ‘Walter' and buy himself a gold pen something had to change. Fast.