Sheila wanted to send the boy away, get him out of Mississippi, send him to her family in Chicago. But they got their own nonsense going on up there. He didn’t want his son involved with no gangs. At least down here the boy’s around the fools he grew up with, the ones his father knows. One of them boys is bound to make something of themselves one day and influence him right. Now a real man, a real man can make something out of nothing. A black man in this world knows the battle’s uphill. The last czar of Russia, eight letters down. Didn’t he watch something at the hospital about the Russian Revolution? Might be Alexander but that would be nine.
Sheila thought he pushed Marcus too hard, but anybody can see it’s the opposite. Maybe he’s wrong, maybe it would be better if the boy had a family, someone to provide for.
He gets up and goes to the window, moving the curtain. Billie James is still standing with her dog at the bottom of the yard. He’ll go back out to the sale when she leaves. It’s not that he can’t talk to her, of course he can. He just did. He shouldn’t have said what he said about her missing. But it seems like she turned out fine. Don’t seem disturbed or nothing, not sick in the head. Does sound kinda white though. He didn’t know that she lost her mother. Now that’s a shame cause a girl needs her mother. No consolation for a loss like that.
Maybe he needs a little part-time job now that he’s retired. It’s too easy to end up walking from room to room all day like he crazy. All night for that matter. But it tires him out to talk to folks these days. It’s not that he don’t want to talk, but that he only wants to talk to Scoop.
He lets go of the curtain in case Billie looks back, wiping his damp hands down the front of his pants, and goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge. It’s not too early for a beer, almost noon. Saturday anyway. He didn’t mean to tell Billie all that, going on like an old man. Thought she already knew. Real strange they ain’t told her. But then it seemed like she didn’t remember nothing, which is the best thing for everybody.
If Sheila was here she would have invited the girl in, asked her to dinner. But he can hardly do that when he’ll be heating up some frozen mess in the microwave unless his daughter happens to come over and cook. He opens the beer and goes back to the living room window. Billie has started to walk down the street. He puts the beer on a coaster. It’s sad that the girl ain’t have either of her parents. Though what happened to Cliff he brought on his own damn self. He had nothing to do with it. He drinks, going back to the crossword on the coffee table, then puts the beer down and goes to the door to offer the girl the use of his lawn mower.
Billie
HOPSEN’S NEIGHBORHOOD IS MAINLY SMALL COTTAGES AND churches. Some neatly done up in American flags and shrubs, others bald and paint sore, windows badly patched with plywood. Down a dead-end street, there is a house with a homemade neon cross showcased in the front yard. The cross is taller than she is and the bulbs lining the wooden frame around the cross remind her of an open casket. Rufus won’t go near the house and she has to drag him to the chain-link fence to get a better look. The house still has its Christmas decorations up. A red and green wreath shriveled against the front door. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JESUS. FOREVER.
Billie calls Jude, but Jude knows nothing about it. Her mother never said anything about Billie having gone missing. But then her mother was selective with the stories she told. Hers were stories of extremes: cults and forgotten mystics, medieval heretics, abducted princelings. Billie phones her uncle but it goes straight to voice mail. At least she’s seeing him soon. Jerry Hopsen must be confused, mixing her up with someone else—it was thirty years ago. Missing missing missing. Where does that live in her body?
“What kind of dog is that?” A young boy with a hint of a lisp is coming down his driveway holding a pit bull on a too-thin leash.
“A Lab mix.” She steers Rufus off the road and onto a lawn, since there are no sidewalks.
“He a male or female?” The boy uses both hands to restrain his dog but his eyes are on her; his face eager, sweet. “Mine’s name is Red Boy.”
“Good name. This is Rufus.”
The dogs sniff each other until she starts walking again. The boy follows her as if he belongs to her. She can’t tell if he’s friendly or lonely. He won’t pet Rufus, too worried he’ll bite. Instead, he dances around whenever Rufus pants near. Together, they pass a small brick church with marble-size holes in its screens and milky blue stained glass across the tops of its windows.
“Listen,” says the boy, stopping.
Coming from the window is the swell and call of a Baptist choir. Something unbuckles in her chest. “Pretty,” she says.
“Do you live here?” He bends to scratch his dog’s neck.
“For a little while.”
The boy looks up at her. “Maybe we can walk our dogs together every day.”
“Maybe.” She smiles.
“My church is downtown. Where do you go to church?”
“I don’t.”
“Are you saved?” Above his head, a cloud of gnats desperately orbit one another in the sun.
She leans forward to look through a big tear in one of the screens. Not many in the pews. A few paper fans waving, the pastor leaning back in his robe and red chair, behind him a dark brown Jesus on the wall. That face. She looks back at the boy. That face. A man’s voice pressed tight to a microphone lets the agony of the faithful out.
“I guess not,” she says.
BACK IN THE CAR, BILLIE DRIVES THROUGH THE NEON GLARE OF GAS stations and fast-food chains and convicts in their orange vests cleaning the side of the road, past flea markets as quiet as the grave and trailers on stilts alternating with shacks sunk into the ground. She drives until there are only fields and homes that look so abandoned she can’t tell if anyone lives there, even with broken lawn mowers in the yard, or watered armchairs sagging on the porch, or the occasional kid’s bike lying on its side in the gravel like the skeleton of a candy-colored insect. Only the tiny white clapboard churches look recently inhabited, like someone has just finished arranging the slightly crooked black letters of the signs that advise her to TELL JESUS ABOUT IT, or warn DEATH IS COMING ARE YOU PREPARED? Today she feels like these places look, like she has been scattered in the rain, never to be picked up again.
Back at the house, she stocks the warped plywood cupboard above the kitchen counter with substandard groceries: plastic cheese and counterfeit jambalaya. She’s taken a detour into somebody else’s small town life of revival meetings and off-brand soda.
After hosing the cobwebs off of what screens the house has left, she finally takes a shower, since the plumber has been by to install a new water heater. Good thing she got that money from Gran. She turbans her hair in a towel and turns on the water. The harsh spray of the cheap showerhead plugs her ears. She steps in and closes her eyes, turning her aching shoulders to the hot water. Okay, think. She would be on her cot in the dark with the box fan churning. The night dark, sticky, gigantic. The door creaks, someone coming in. They pick her up and carry her out of the house. Did she know them and trust them or was it a stranger? How did they get to the next place? Drive? Walk? In her pajamas? This could be it as much as anything else she might imagine. She twists the hot-water knob. Okay, maybe think less about the event but of the feeling. Lonely. That feels true. But is that just what she expects she would feel? A little kid taken away from her daddy, a little kid whose daddy is taken away? This is useless. She turns off the shower.
As she steps out, a mouse darts out from behind the toilet. “Shit!” There’s a crack in the wall. She crouches down and, seeing no rodent paws, stuffs the hole with toilet paper. Might not do much since it’s only one-ply.
She unwinds the towel from her head and dries her body. “Shit.” She forgot to use soap.
Outside, dragonflies flicker above the yard. Rufus chews the grass until he finds a half-eaten lizard and chews on that. The house needs some kind of landscaping at the front, shrubs or hedges. She walks to the side of the p
orch and peers into the woods between the house and creek. Maybe somebody didn’t take her. Maybe that night she woke up and went looking for her father. Maybe she got lost or scared and hid, or had a mésaventure as her mother would say, an accident in Old French.
Headlights come up the dirt road, gravel stinging the wheels of a truck distinct against the flat fields of no crops. Billie waves. Rufus runs down the drive, barking. The truck rattles up to the porch and Mr. Hopsen and his son get out. She walks with them to the back of the truck where a lawn mower and a dead woman’s armchair sit.
MILES SOUTH OF THE WIDE BLOCKS THAT ARE GREENDALE’S HISTORIC downtown of Greek Revival law firms, of vacant buildings with old Coca-Cola ads tattooed to their sides, of ancient, craggy men on bicycles wearing shrunken baseball caps, is her uncle’s apartment in what used to be a motel.
It’s hot. A hint of the vacuum-sealed wet of a Mississippi summer in the air. She turns off the AC and rolls the windows down, letting in a warm wash of heat, then shakes the last of the potato chips into her mouth. What the hell. Where is her uncle? She’s been in this parking lot for an hour and he hasn’t returned any of her calls. They were supposed to meet here an hour ago.
Now it’s nine o’clock and the roads are overrun by boys in big-wheeled Cadillacs. C’mon, motherfucker, they whoop over a serrated beat. Friday night and the young gleam in the gas stations and drive-thrus of this tiny city where the level of poverty (she’s read) is almost 40 percent.
Billie gets out and tours the parking lot. Each tenant has distinguished their room by the way that they cover the long window beside their front door. Some are sealed tight with tinfoil, others with a printed sheet, but her uncle’s window on the second floor is bare. A few people are sitting outside of their doors on plastic chairs. Nothing moves except for a can or cigarette. The light from passing cars gives their faces the sheen of old master paintings. Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Melancholia. The contemplation and the shadows. Nothing is happening but a wanting something to happen.
A white woman wearing a long T-shirt covering her shorts is standing on the corner like she’s waiting for a bus, but there’s no bus stop sign. It doesn’t look like she’s been able to shower for the last week, and her expression says her ride is never going to come. She paces, the flip-flops askew on her bitterly dry feet.
Jude calls, but Billie doesn’t answer. She needs to be vigilant. She gets back in the car. She needs to let Rufus out soon and it’s almost a two-hour drive back. Maybe wait fifteen more minutes. She slides deeper into the driver’s seat, exhausted from mowing the yard, which she’s never done before, having never had a yard. A mosquito bounces off the windshield and sinks into the dark interior of the car. Then through the bug-smeared glass, an older black man followed by a white woman goes up the steps and toward her uncle’s apartment.
She hops out, slamming the car door and hurrying after them. “Uncle Dee?” she calls from the bottom of the stairs.
Her father’s little brother turns, a straw cowboy hat curling on his head. Above the white V-neck under his Hawaiian shirt, a scar over his collarbone moves, knotted and dark.
“It’s Billie!” she shouts, taking the steps two at a time.
The blond woman stays by the door, impatient to get inside, but her uncle meets her halfway down the balcony, hugging her and leaving a film of beer and Old Spice. He holds her out from him. “Lord, you look just the same as when you was a kid. Sorry I’m so late. I tend to get my days and nights mixed up on the road.”
“It’s okay.” She forgives him instantly.
“Man”—her uncle shakes his head—“I can’t believe how long it’s been.” He walks her to the apartment and the blond woman moves back as he unlocks the door. “Last time I seen you, I was a teenager babysitting you.”
Her uncle is close on fifty and missing two teeth, one on the bottom and one on the top. The blond woman looks at least fifteen years younger. But it is hard to read the old acne scars, thin platinum hair, spike-thick mascara, fake designer purse, and the crooked music note tattoo below her miniskirt and above her knee.
As they go in, Billie turns to her. “I’m Dee’s niece, Billie.”
“He told me. Lacey.” The woman walks in front of her.
“It ain’t much,” says her uncle, turning on a lamp, which illuminates an office chair, a cracked brown couch, and a tilting carpeted floor the color of grease. The room is crammed with furniture from a life he must have lived a few lives ago. On the phone, he called his place a step above prison. She thought he was being funny.
“I haven’t been home long enough to clean it up.”
“It’s nice,” she says, the lie too soft to be heard.
Billie sits on the couch by the front window while her uncle goes over to the kitchenette, waving away a few fruit flies and filling a glass of water from the tap. “Thirsty?” he asks. Billie shakes her head, but Lacey sits in an ancient wicker chair in the corner and puts out her hand. He sets Lacey a glass by a dead plant on top of the AC unit, then takes a tall boy from the minifridge.
“I can’t stand this humidity already. It’s different in Nebraska.” Her uncle takes off his Hawaiian shirt and throws it at the bed, not picking it up when it flutters to the floor. “This whole damn part of town is all concrete.”
“I guess the cold snap’s over,” Billie says. From where she is sitting, the air from the AC unit is wet and rubbery.
“Nebraska? When were you in Nebraska?” asks Lacey.
“Last year.” Uncle Dee wheels himself on the office chair to the middle of the room and opens his beer. “Back when I was full-time. Now I work on an as-needed basis. Any more trouble out there at the house?”
“No. I think I just got spooked,” Billie says, tracing the blister forming on her hand where she held the lawn mower too tight. “I did hear some wind chimes. Guess that would be coming from the McGees.”
“Naw, they too far off.”
“Well, I doubt a thief is stalking me holding wind chimes.”
“We got all kind of characters out in the Delta,” he says.
“What do you think about me renting out the house? I’d fix it up a little more of course.”
“Don’t care what you do with it.” He cocks his head back to drink, almost closing his eyes.
He’s been like this about the house since she first called him after Gran died. She wanted to see if he wanted to live there. He didn’t.
“I met Jerry Hopsen on Saturday.”
He opens his eyes. “How did that happen?”
“You said his wife, Sheila, was close to Daddy so I looked him up.”
He stares at her. “And what did that old so-and-so have to say about my brother?”
Her eyes flicker to Lacey, who is examining her cuticles in the wicker chair. “He said they all grew up together—him and Sheila and Daddy.”
“That it?”
“That and he didn’t know me.”
“What in the hell he mean by that?”
“That he never met me before. Is that true?”
“Might could be. Last time you were here was a long time ago, baby. I was still in high school.” Her uncle leans back in his chair. “Cliff didn’t like people who weren’t family coming over when you was in town. If he wanted to see folks he would go to Avalon.”
“Wait, Avalon? That’s a real place?”
“Old juke joint we used to go to off 61.”
“Just like in his poem.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that one.”
“Is it still open? Can we go there?”
He laughs. “Baby, it’s been closed down for years. Folks ain’t into jukes no more. They go to the club. You want to go to Avalon?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“I’ll take you this weekend. Be here at noon on Sunday. Sheila . . .” Her uncle shakes his head then grins. “Man, you never forget brown sugar sweet as that.”
Lacey swipes at him halfheartedly and collapses over her own thighs, su
ddenly seeming drunk, though Billie hasn’t noticed her drinking anything except water.
“What you do for work again?” he says.
“I’m a grant writer. It’s for a good nonprofit, but pretty boring, though I do get to work mostly from home.”
Her uncle is looking down into his beer as if he is trying to see something written on the bottom of the can. “I’d like to sit home doing my work.”
The chemical wail of a car alarm comes from the parking lot. Lacey doesn’t sit up, her forehead poured onto mottled knees.
Her uncle sets his sweating tall boy between his feet. “Be careful in them woods with all the snakes.”
“Wouldn’t my dog scare them off?”
“More like to get bit. The Delta can be rough on a dog.”
She glances over at the fallen Lacey. “Seems she’s no longer with us.” She looks at her uncle. “You know, when I saw Mr. Hopsen he told me something I’ve never heard before. It’s really crazy. He said that the night Daddy died, I went missing, and that my picture was on the news. Is that true?”
Her uncle shakes his head. “Why he tell you that? He’s representing it all wrong. Of course that fool would. He don’t know nothing about it.”
“Was I on the news?”
His dark eyes meet hers. “Your momma didn’t tell you nothing about it?”
“Not a thing.”
“It’s all right, honey, it ain’t that big a deal. The police were so dumb they couldn’t find you sleeping in some blankets in the closet. So they made you a missing person because you were so little and we all lost our minds.”
“The closet? Why was I there?”
“I don’t know. That’s where he kept your toys. Maybe you got scared. But they got Momma so riled up she had everybody looking for you and somebody sent your picture to the local news. Then a couple hours later, there you were.”
“I can’t believe my mom didn’t tell me about it.”
The Gone Dead Page 3