Inside, she wanders the tilted linoleum aisles where something is leaking and draining toward the front door. She steps over the thin brown stream and opens the refrigerator, taking out a two-liter of Coke. Behind the register is a framed photograph taken during a Mardi Gras parade, a black queen at the center, all tiara and white teeth. Bet she had braces and bleach, maybe even headgear. Or maybe that was just her.
It’s only teeth her girlfriends say, that and her man is dead sexy. A phrase Lola can’t stand. None of them grew up with a man pleaser like her mother. With a stepdaddy who would say this is my house and you are a guest in it. You eating off my plates, using up my hot water, everything in here you treat with respect or you will feel my hand. A mother who didn’t say a damn thing, but just stood by, keeping her mouth shut, then comforted her afterward, when Lola couldn’t sit down.
Whatever. What she needs to be focusing on is budgeting some kinda way. Yesterday she sent those evil-ass debt collectors a cease and desist letter to stop them from contacting her because they about to start threatening to break her legs. But the letter don’t do a thing about the debt. When they told her that they wanted five thousand, she almost laughed because they might as well have said five hundred thousand.
Q: What does it mean that she, her family’s first college graduate, is living off of pasta and (sometimes dry) cereal so she can afford gas and rent?
A: That she will pay interest for the rest of her life without ever touching the damn principal.
Back out in Greendale or Baghdad or wherever, Lola relights her cigarette. She ain’t thought about Billie in a long time. Years and years ago, in that picture of Billie they showed on the news, her black curly hair was pulled up tight into a high ponytail. She had on a pink shirt and pink striped shorts with white tube socks pulled above her ankles—that was the style then. She was drinking a glass of water, turned to the camera but looking up at someone else with big brown eyes. She was lost the news said, but even after she was found, Lola never saw her again.
Billie
HER FIRST NIGHT IN GREENDALE, SHE HAS A DREAM AND IN THIS dream she is alone in a small spartan room: bare floorboards, a single window. She is standing next to a gaunt man, pencil gray, sitting at a table looking down at his watch, then out of the window and up at the moon. The moon, in this dream, is small and silver blue; it is glowing a hole in the sky. The man keeps looking from his watch to the moon, saying: It’s time. Then the dream begins again and each time she feels sicker because she knows that in a few minutes the world will end.
There is a large moth battering the bedroom window. Rufus looks at her from where he lies on an old blanket.
“Bad dream,” she tells him.
Rolling off of the partially deflated air mattress, she shuffles into the closet-size bathroom, pulling on the light. The sink almost juts over the toilet and there is barely room for her knees when she sits.
Upon standing, she encounters a puckered reflection. Her cheek is creased and her eyes have shrunk. She rubs at the glass but it has gone dim as if the real mirror were waiting behind a fog.
In the bedroom, the orange-furred moth paces the screen. She unplugs the lamp, but the moth stays. There are no cars on the main road, no lights from distant shacks. “What does it want?” she asks Rufus.
He gets up, makes a circle, and lies back down. She nudges the gun sock closer to the bed with her foot, then lies down on her side so she can follow the moth’s shuddering path over the dark glass. Maybe the moth is trying to tell her something, like birds sensing an oncoming storm.
She sits up, feeling for the lamp, and plugs it in. Rufus flicks an eye open, spots her, then shuts it again. She drags the mattress into the corner, taking a book from her suitcase, and props her pillows against the wall. From somewhere across the fields, dogs howl. Rufus barks under his breath, then groans.
“It’s okay, boy,” she says. “Hopefully.”
When she had nightmares as a kid, she would go into her mother’s room, kneel by the side of the bed, and whisper: “I’m thinking bad thoughts.”
Her mother would roll to her without opening her eyes and say: “Think good ones.”
And just like that her mother interrupted the end of the world.
IN THE MORNING, BILLIE DRESSES STANDING ON HER SUITCASE BECAUSE the floor is fucking freezing. Not to mention the water heater is broken and she can’t warm up with a hot shower. She fills the tiny bathroom sink with cold water and spot washes like a scullery maid.
In the living room, the sun is pouring through cracks in the front door. Her neck is aching. She fell asleep tipped over her book with her mouth open. Outside the sky is fairy-tale blue and the sun glosses the trees. She walks with Rufus through the woods and into the jubilant screech of birds.
Leaving the dog behind, she cruises antique stores that double as bail bond companies and ends up at a Walmart on the outskirts of town where she buys an AC unit, minifridge, coffeemaker, and space heater. At the register, there is a flock of white women in pink camo. The cashier leans over the credit card machine to tell her that hunting season is over except for spring turkey (three per season), frog (up to twenty-five per night), and it won’t be squirrel until next month. In some godforsaken aisle, a toddler is shrieking.
Billie calls her uncle from the parking lot. They haven’t spoken that much, and Jude thinks she should try and reconnect. “So is there any family left in town? Like my cousins—Lola and Aleisha and Junior and everyone.”
That last summer, a bandanna round her head to hold back her mane, the strawberries filling her shirt stained her stomach. They all tried to make juice by stomping on them in a big plastic bowl like somebody saw on I Love Lucy. Grandmomma Ruby, Daddy’s momma, got mad at the mess so they went to live in the woods where they made slingshots and hunted squirrels and were trailed by bees.
“All those kids moved on with they own families.” Her uncle coughs. “You might not recall but their granddaddy was your great-uncle Floyd and he died a while back.”
“Are you driving?”
“We can talk. Helps me stay awake.”
In the parking spot in front of her, a mother with four kids gets out of a car from another era. The youngest three, near tears, all want to be picked up, the neon wax of whatever they’ve been eating burning around their mouths. The oldest one, already a little mother, picks up the baby and takes another by the hand.
“What about my father’s old friends? Would any of them still be around?” His poet friends still call her sometimes from New York to get her to agree to a reprinting, even though she’s not the literary executor, her uncle is.
“What, you writing a book?”
She smiles as the oldest kid catches her eye. “No, but I’m here so I might as well meet somebody.”
“He was close to Sheila. But she passed a little while ago. She was cool, though she married herself a hardheaded motherfucker—excuse my language—Jerry Hopsen. Naw, most everybody who knew Cliff is dead or gone.”
“Including you.” She flips on the AC.
“I’m never far enough from Greendale.”
“You only live an hour or two away. Why not move across the country, like to California or something?”
“Ain’t that the million-dollar question. I been all over this country. I been to France two times. But I always come back to Mississippi.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I always do.”
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN MOBILE HOMES AND WRAPAROUND PORCHES, there is a neighborhood of modest cottages where the streets are named after trees. Billie pulls over in front of a row of mismatched furniture set out on the lawn of a burnt umber house, the only one on the block whose screen door and windows have bars and a little security sign stabbed in the grass by cement porch steps. A dark gray Cadillac is brooding under a low wooden carport built over the driveway with a sign nailed to its front: POSTED KEEP OUT. Looks like hardheaded Jerry Hopsen is having a garage sale.
A goatee
d man in his sixties who is probably Jerry is wheeling a trash can crammed with weeds to the curb. He stops and wipes his hands down the sides of his khaki shorts. “How you doing?”
Rufus jumps down from the backseat and Billie shuts the door. “Good, thanks.” There is no shade on the street. The trees in the neighborhood are too thin, though his neatly trimmed grass is violently green.
“You looking for something in particular?”
“Not really. I just moved to town.”
“Well, welcome to Greendale.” He leaves the trash can and walks over. “Where you coming from?”
“Philadelphia.”
“Mississippi?”
“No.” She smiles. “The other one.”
“What brings you here?”
She wanders over to a velour floral armchair. “I inherited a house. Well, the remains of one.”
He checks the Victorian pedestal mailbox that matches his house, a Pony Express design on its front and HOPSEN glued on in black letters. “That there was my wife’s. She passed last year.”
Sheila’s chair. “I’m sorry.” Maybe her father sat in it. “How long have you lived in Greendale?”
He pulls out two letters and a grocery circular, thumbing through the mail. “All my days, child, all my days.”
“Do you think you’ll ever leave?”
“Nope. So whose mansion you inherit?”
“I think you know him: Clifton James?”
Hopsen looks up. “Cliff James? We were in school together.”
“I know. I’m his daughter, Billie.”
“Isn’t that something,” he says, walking up to her. “I see him in the eyes. But now you know who you look like is your mother.”
They shake hands. He is standing too close. Not so close that they might touch but so she can’t comfortably look into his face.
“I met your mother a time or two when she come out here. But she ain’t ever stay long. You know how it was. People weren’t comfortable about the races mixing. Some folks still ain’t.”
Her parents were married in Pennsylvania because in early 1967 their interracial marriage was a felony in Mississippi. It is hard for her to imagine their marriage being a crime, but sometimes it is hard to imagine having ever had parents.
“Cliff James.” He shakes his head. “I remember the day he won the school spelling bee. We was in fifth grade. He was real smart but that day he was just plain lucky. They were giving him words like oblong and lemon and he got himself a trophy big as he was.” He scratches his goatee. “I was real surprised that he came back. Because man, all I could remember was how when we was young he couldn’t wait to get out.”
“Maybe he missed it here.”
“I did say to him, I said Cliff, you should’ve stayed out east. And if he had, who knows. Might still be alive.”
There are mismatched glasses set out on one of the tables. She picks up a purple BLESSED mug. Of course, there are so many ways it might not have happened.
“Well,” says Hopsen, “ain’t nobody know what might have been but God. Hey there, dog.” He holds out a hand. Rufus sniffs then licks, thinks about jumping.
“Rufus, sit.” She snaps her fingers.
“Your mama come with you?”
Rufus licks her knee. “She died.”
Hopsen nods magisterially, as if the death of their women squares them in his mind. “I am sorry to hear that.” He folds his mail under his arm. “You plan on staying here in Greendale for good?”
“No, just another week or so. You wouldn’t know anything about the other tenant houses, would you? I thought there used to be others out there.”
“They ain’t none where you are no more. Those are all gone. Including the house my wife grew up in. Old John McGee, the father of the one who’s alive now, sold most of that land to an agricultural company.”
“So who would you say is my closest neighbor?”
“The McGees.”
She wipes off her knee. “Your wife was close to my father?”
“Who told you that?”
“My uncle.”
“Don’t know what Dee would know. He was nothing but a kid back then. We all grew up together. Me, Sheila, and Cliff. Sheila’s family lived next to his.”
“Do you remember the last time you saw my daddy?”
He shakes his head. “It was a long time ago. When you get old you realize that you never know that the last time is the last.” He looks at the table. “You see anything you like? I’ll give you half off.”
“Sheila’s chair.” She takes out her wallet. “And this mug.” She follows him over to a metal strongbox where he counts out her change.
“Your car ain’t big enough for this chair.”
“Can you hold on to it until my uncle comes?”
“Dee drives a truck, but he don’t own one. Tell you what, I’ll get my son to come by and drop it off tonight. He ain’t doing nothing.”
“Thanks. That’s really generous of you.” She wraps the end of Rufus’s leash around her wrist, her fingers feeling to where it has frayed. “This might sound a little strange . . .”
Hopsen looks at her as if he knows what she might say.
“But did you know me?”
There is a movement at one of the windows behind him, something bumping against the blinds, making them shudder in the heat.
“You remember what all happened back then?”
One summer night in 1972, when she was four years old, her father was walking in the woods when he fell and hit his head. He died while she was asleep in the house.
“Not really,” she says.
“Baby, that’s one of them things, either you do, or you don’t.” Hopsen picks a candy wrapper off the grass and walks back to the trash can, lifting up the lid and throwing it in. “I only know you from that picture of you that come on the news.”
“What do you mean on the news?”
“When you was missing.”
A white heat rolls up her back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He stares at her. “They couldn’t find you when they found your daddy, so they put a picture of you up on the news. Ain’t nobody tell you?”
“No, no one.” It’s hard to breathe because of her heartbeat. “Are you sure that was me?”
He knocks a few blades of grass from his pants. “That’s what I recall. But all that matters is they found you, didn’t they.”
Hopsen
AFTER ALL THIS TIME, HE CAN’T HARDLY BELIEVE IT, CLIFF’S CHILD come back. Coming all the way down here and for what? Nothing for her here but an old shack that ain’t worth the saving with the roof likely rotted and the insulation too. He wasn’t expecting Billie James to show up like that. All grown, asking questions. He closes the front door behind him, the dark of the house a relief.
He sits down on the couch in front of the TV, a red headline smearing along the bottom of the screen. Can’t read it without his glasses. He turns it up. It’s too quiet now without Sheila. Though there are times in the morning when he swears he hears her slippers across the floor. But those old beat-up slippers are still in her closet, waiting for her to put her little painted toes in them. His daughter wants to go through it all. Just tell me the day, she reminds him at least twenty-five times a week. But Sheila’s clothes are too nice to give away or junk to anybody but him. It was his daughter’s idea to have the garage sale, though he hasn’t told her yet that none of her mother’s clothes are out. He goes to the kitchen and wipes down the sink, rubbing at the grime around the tap, and starts the dishwasher. He’s been a neat freak ever since the army.
He leans over the clean sink and lathers his hands, running them under warm water. His son and daughter do come over and visit. His son too much. Boy don’t like to work, says he’s discriminated against because of his record. But what’s keeping him from borrowing the lawn mower and knocking on doors and getting some money in his pocket? It’s a struggle to understand where his head is at. The boy
can’t stick to one woman neither. He is a good-looking boy. His mother prayed on it. But the way he sees it, the only thing God has granted the boy is the sense not to have kids. At least there is that. But he drinks too much at the club, like his grandfather did, and the funny thing is that his son thinks he don’t know nothing about it.
He turns the water off. Maybe it’s time to get himself a dog. When Sheila was alive they appreciated having the freedom to travel. She loved cruises, especially that one they took to Jamaica. He always said he wanted to take one of them Alaskan ones and she would look at him funny. The woman hated to be cold. It’s real strange, even if it don’t make no sense, to think of her now in the cold cold ground. His baby, his little Scoop. A name from their youth when he could scoop her whole body up in his arms and go running off down the road.
He walks back into the living room and peeks out the window into the front yard. Got to make sure nobody goes off running with the garage sale. The child is still out there. What’s she waiting on? He ain’t wanna get mixed up in it all. He lets go of the curtain and sits. He has always made sure that he’s been around for his son. Basketball games, school concerts, and all that mess. How many hours of slow-as-molasses baseball games has he sat through? Never his sport. His own father died on the chain gang. A heart attack or sunstroke, he’ll never know because the prison never cared to figure out. It was enough that he was dead and couldn’t work no more. If his son would just keep himself busy, get a job, he wouldn’t drink. But he’s too damn pigheaded to know what’s good for him. He turns off the TV, puts on his glasses, and picks up the crossword he started in the morning’s paper.
The Gone Dead Page 2