Sweet Dream Baby (23 page)

Delia says, “My God, Kenny, what happened?”

Sullen, Griner says, “You know what happened.”

Delia is quiet. I reach up and put my hand on her back. When she gets it, I feel something in her break. “
Daddy
did that to you?”

Griner's boots scrape the old boards. The heavy flaps of the leather jacket crackle as he swings his arms out like a bird trying to take off. “Your daddy thinks I killed Bick Sifford. He stopped me out on the road near my house and put me in his car for an
interview
.” Griner's voice is louder, and Delia's skin tells my hand she can't take much more of this. Through my fingers I pass my thoughts to her:
Send him away. Get rid of him.

Griner says, “Your daddy heard from Ronny Bishop that me and Bick had words down at Dameron's ESSO that day we was all there. I told him the words was mostly between me and Ronny, and he says, ‘Don't you sass me, boy,' and he slaps me with that crime tool of his.”

Standing in the dark behind Delia, I see Griner reach up and touch his split-open head.

Delia says, “Kenny, we can't talk about this now.”

Griner says, “I didn't come to talk about it. I came to ask you to meet me somewhere.”

“But, what do you want?”

“You to get your daddy off me, that's what I want.”

Griner goes stock stiff and takes a step back. “Who's there?” he whispers.

Delia says, “Kenny, I…”

“It's that boy, ain't it? He's there with you, ain't he?”

Delia's shoulders fall, and I step up beside her. I don't say anything.

Griner steps forward again and peers at me. “You two,” he says, “always together. Bick said he wondered about you two.”

My knees are water, and I can still taste Delia's kisses sweet in my dry mouth. I can feel her fear swelling beside me. I can't touch her or he'll see.

She says, “
Bick
said?
What
did Bick say? When did you talk to him?”

Griner steps away again, his boot dragging loud. “Never mind that. Meet me tomorrow out at the river. There's a place where people go to swim. You can get close in your car if you take the Old Wilson Road. Just park and walk to the river and look for a big pile of driftwood. Come tomorrow at three o'clock.”

Delia says, “Kenny, I…”

But Griner's already gone. I see his black shape move past the grape arbor and make for the path into the woods that Eddie takes when he comes for Marvadell's money.

The next day at two-thirty we say we're going for a drive.

Grandma and Grandpa Hollister want us to stay home. Delia asks why, and they just say they think it's best. Delia says we've been cooped up all day, and we need to get out of the house. We can't sit around and mope about Bick forever. She says the whole town's like a cemetery. She says I'll be leaving soon, and we want to have some fun before I go. Finally, they let us go, but Grandpa Hollister comes out and stands on the porch to watch us drive away. He's never done that before.

We don't say much on the way. We don't plan, because we don't know what Griner wants. I remember him watching Delia dance with Bick, and how his eyes changed when she asked him to dance and he refused. First the hunger, then the pride. I remember him under the grease rack, his quick, sure hands moving the tools. That day I liked him, and he liked me. Delia liked him, too. She brought him a Coke, but even I knew the town would never let them be together. I wish Griner hadn't come to Delia's window last night. I wish he'd put what he wants and what he knows in that street rod of his and drive as fast as he can out of Widow Rock.

We park where we did the first time we went swimming. We walk to the river and sit on the driftwood with the big white bones of the beast clutching all around us. We don't even look back upstream at the white shelf of Widow Rock. Delia tells me about the flood six years ago. It raised the river two hundred yards beyond its banks and dragged this big tangle of pine stumps and branches here. I tell her it's not driftwood. It's the body of a monster that lived centuries ago, and the river is just slicing away earth and bringing the bones to the light. She laughs and says, “Travis, you've got some imagination.”

She winks at me, and for a second I see again the old, crazy, happy Delia. My Aunt Delia. The one I met the first day when she chased me with her knees bent like Groucho Marx and said she'd hug me whether I wanted to or not. I smile at her and then look up at the sky and get dizzy for a second thinking about how far we've come since that day, and whether I'd go back if I could.

Kenny Griner steps out of the woods above us. He stands there for a second like a big black and white bird, and then he slides in his heavy boots down the steep bank to the wet sand where we're sitting. Delia looks at him, and her eyes go small and tight taking in the plum-blue bruise above his eye.

Griner stands looking at the river with his hands on his hips. He's sweating from his walk, but he's got the leather jacket on. I see a paperback book in his hip pocket when he bends over to pick up a pebble. He skims the pebble across the brown water and says to Delia, “I wanted you to come alone.”

Delia closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I get in trouble when I go places without Travis.” She opens her eyes and looks up at the sky. She says, “Anyway, Mama and Daddy been keeping me home since the funeral.”

Griner looks down and stubs the sand with his boot. “Ole Bick's got the whole town in an uproar, don't he? Anything happened to a guy like me, nobody'd notice. You and your girlfriends'd still be riding around all hours looking for boys.”

“Is that what we do?” Delia's eyes fire up, and just as quickly cool.

Griner looks at her. “That's what you do, but that ain't all.” His eyes slide over to me, then up and down the riverbank. I can see he's scared of the place where this might take him.

Delia shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans. She's lost weight since Bick died. Her eyes are a darker, colder blue, and they hide a little now in the hollows above her perfect cheeks. She looks more beautiful than ever to me. She stands in front of Griner and says, “All right, Kenny, get to the point. What did Bick say to you?”

Griner's eyes get big, and his smile's a fake. He says, “Bick Sifford? Did he say something to me?”

Delia shoos away his words with a flip of her hand. She says it slowly. “Last night. On my back porch. You said Bick talked about Travis and me.”

She doesn't look at me, but Griner does. I try to make my eyes like Delia's—small and cold. I know what she's thinking.
We both heard it. Here in this river, we heard Kenny Griner's engine whining, then winding down with a Pop, Pop, Pop.

Griner's eyes go shy. He says, “I don't want to talk about that. I want your daddy off my ass.”

Delia says, “I don't tell my daddy what to do, Kenny Griner.”

“You can damn well tell him I didn't do anything to Bick Sifford. You can tell him he can't hang Bick on me just to get Mr. Sifford off his back.”

“How can I tell him that? I don't know what you did.”

“You know I didn't kill Bick.”

“How do I know that?”

Griner turns away to the river. He pushes his hands into the pockets of his jeans, pulls them out again. He bends and finds another pebble, then he drops it. “You know,” he says.

His voice is small. Delia and I wait. We don't look at each other. We know this is it, everything. Pictures of Griner spin across my mind, his car hidden in the trees at the park, him driving past the house late at night looking up at Delia's window. Maybe he followed her and Bick that night. Maybe he was watching when the wild boy climbed the bluff and ran at Bick with his hands out like hooves.

Griner's arms rise straight out from his sides. When he drops them, the leather makes a flapping sound. He says, “Because you know me.” His voice is almost too soft to hear. “You know I didn't do it, because you know me.”

He turns and looks at Delia, and I see his love in his eyes. It's like coming into a clearing in the woods and finding an animal dying on the ground. You watch to the end, and you know that nobody will ever know, but you know it's wrong that you watched.

Delia lifts her face to the sky and closes her eyes. “You're right. I know you didn't do anything to Bick.”

Griner's face is ugly now with the old scar and the new mark, but he looks so young when he says, “Will you tell your daddy?”

Delia looks down at the wet sand, then out across the living surface of the river. “I'll think of something,” is all she says.

Griner doesn't thank her, but he looks like he wants to. He reaches up and touches his new mark. He looks confused touching it. Delia walks a few yards down the bank. She stands with her white tenny pumps inches from the water. We could leave now, but I know she doesn't want to. I think about asking if we can go. I could say I'm not feeling good, the heat is getting to me. Something.

Before I can speak, she turns back to Griner and says, “You said you saw Bick. When did you see him?” She tries to make her voice just curious, but there's another sound in it.

Griner watches her, taking in what she's trying to hide—that she has to know, that she's trading what she'll say to Grandpa Hollister for this. He swallows and looks out over the water.

“Kenny?”

Griner shrugs, and the leather wings flap. He scratches the back of his neck, rubs his cheek with a rasp of whiskers. He shoves his hand back into his jeans. “Bick wudn't so bad when you got him away from Ronny. It's the difference between the town and the country, I guess. It wudn't so long ago that people of mine sharecropped for Ronny's granddaddy. A boy like Ronny can't forget that.”

Griner seems to lose his way. He smiles and says, “I guess ole Travis here'll be going back to school pretty soon.”

I can't help what happens in my eyes. I've tried not to think about going back. There's been too much trouble, too much happening too fast. But sometimes at night I try to figure a way to stay. I don't think my dad would mind if I stayed, but my mom needs me. And now I know more about how to help her. Griner sees what I'm thinking. He knows I want to stay.

He shrugs and turns back to the river. “S'matter of fact, I saw Bick right here.”

I can feel Delia seizing up where she stands with her white shoes inches from the brown water. Griner says, “I don't mean right here. It was back there where we left the cars. It was a couple days after we had our little whoop-tee-do at the gas station.”

“You said he mentioned me…” Delia looks down at her right toe making a row of little V-marks in the wet sand. “…and Travis?”

Griner looks up at the sky. The sun is white hot, and there's not a cloud floating in the channel at the top of the trees. The white light strikes back from the brown water so bright it makes your eyes sore, and the water moves on, throwing up cool vapors that touch our faces.

Griner says, “I was gonna swim. I felt like steam on a stove top that day, and I wanted to cool off. I figured I'd be alone. You don't see people out here very much.” Griner looks upstream at the white shelf of Widow Rock. “Most folks go up there when they come to the river, but I like it here.”

He makes a quick glance at Delia. She doesn't look up at Widow Rock. She's concentrating hard on the little row of V-marks in the sand. He says, “Anyway, that day I wanted to swim, and I was rolling in just as Bick came walking out of the woods. He was walking fast, and his face was red, and he looked real shook up. He was walking with his head down, and he got right up on me before he seen me. But he stopped and looked at me like he wudn't surprised, like he expected me. Then he gave this funny laugh and said, ‘She's all yours.'

“For a minute, I thought we were gonna have trouble like we did at the gas station, but then I could see Bick didn't want trouble. The trouble was all inside him. I ast him who he meant, who was all mine, but I known he meant you, Delia.”

When Griner says this, he looks at her, and a red blush creeps up from the collar of his white T-shirt. Delia doesn't look up from her rows of Vs.

“But I ast him anyway. ‘
Who
can I have, Bick?' He went on past me to his car, walking fast. ‘Her,' he said, and he pointed behind him at the river. Then he stopped and looked at me. I think it was the first time he ever really looked at me, and I guess it was the last time I ever seen him. I'll never forget what he said then. ‘You can have her if you can get her away from that kid.'

“He got in that red Olds of his and drove off fast, and it wudn't but a day or two after that when he…fell.”

Griner looks back upstream at the white shelf of Widow Rock. His eyes narrow and strain at the place as though they might see Bick Sifford up there, might see him falling. Griner turns and looks right at me. I look right back. I've never looked at a grown man before like I look at him now. We hold. His eyes break away first, and we both look at Delia.

She hugs herself and tries not to shiver. Her voice is small when she says, “What do you think he meant by that, Kenny?”

I remember the first day Delia took me up to Widow Rock. She told me the story of the Widow and how she jumped, and then we sat on the rock, and she tucked her blouse up into her bra and rolled down her jeans to get the sun, and Griner stepped out of the woods. He was drinking whiskey, and he caught Delia fixing her clothes, and he said, “How old you say that boy is?”

Griner says, “I don't know, Delia. I thought you might know.” He looks at me again. “You and Travis.”

I say, “Aunt Delia, it's time to go. We promised we'd be home at three-thirty, remember?”

Delia looks at me. She nods.

Griner says to her, “Was you here that day I met Bick? I didn't see your car anywhere. I walked in to the river, and I seen footprints and things, and maybe they was a boat way downstream just cutting around the bend toward Milton, but I didn't see anybody. Was you here? Did you come to meet Bick?” He wants to know, and he doesn't want it. I can see it in his eyes, and he wants Delia to stay here with him as long as he can keep her.

Delia says, “I don't know what Bick meant, Kenny. I don't suppose we'll ever know, do you?”

I say it again. “Aunt Delia, we've got to go.”

Griner says, “Don't forget to talk to your daddy about me. Don't forget your promise.”

Delia takes a last look at the rows of Vs she's made in the sand. She bends at the edge of the water and dips her hand in and scoops water out, then she washes them all away. It takes a while, but she gets rid of every trace, then she says, “I won't forget, Kenny.”

She holds out her hand to me. “Come on, Travis.”

I take her hand, and we start up the bank toward the woods. Griner watches us. He's watching our hands. How we touch.