“Do they not sell to old tenants because the tenants don’t have the money, or something else?”
He drags the deck chair closer to her and sits. “I imagine that the two aren’t unrelated. I get the sense that black people don’t own much if anything in the Delta. I mean, of course they have gained some political footing since the Movement, but the upper echelon of the white population has mostly kept what money there is.”
“My uncle must know.”
“Do you think he would consider talking to me? We haven’t spoken in years. It turned out that he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of Cliff having a biography.”
“Maybe it’s better if I talk to him first. If he ever calls me back. I won’t mention that you’re here yet.” Billie is quiet for a moment, rubbing her fingers over the knuckles of her opposite hand.
He leans forward to wipe the dust from his loafer. “You mentioned a strange interaction at the police station?”
“Yeah, get this—the sheriff, who is the fucking son of the Oakes in the report, told me that he thought my father committed suicide. Why would he pull me aside to say that? So bizarre.” She moves to sit with her back against the wall. “I thought I was picking up the report from the front desk, but he came to get me and brought me to his office.”
“Although southerners do pride themselves on their friendliness, that does seem a bit unusual.” Melvin takes out a notepad.
“His excuse was that he was working at the department when it happened. Then he implied my father was an alcoholic.” She looks up at him. “You don’t think there’s any truth to that, do you?”
“That’s not the sense I’ve gotten. In that period of his life, I would say, I would call him a hard drinker rather than an alcoholic. I think it’s important that we talk to Mr. McGee. Let’s—”
“I know. But not yet. I need to talk to my uncle first.”
“Okay, let me make a copy of the report and at least make an appointment with Mr. McGee. In the meantime, why don’t you get out of the house for a while and do something utterly unrelated?”
“I guess that would be the healthy thing.” She stands, bending to roll up the sleeping bag. “But really, is there anything in this whole town that doesn’t touch it in some way?”
Billie
THERE ARE HIGH HEELS IN HER SUITCASE. AS IF SHE EVER WEARS them in Philly let alone out here in the Delta where she knows next to nobody. Her mother rarely wore makeup. Pia was compact, unapologetic. She walked and biked, wasn’t one to show a lot of skin. Angry when someone was surprised that Billie was her daughter. The double take at Pia’s blond hair, the long, slightly openmouthed stare at Billie’s skin: the You’re her mother? But Billie always knew they looked alike.
There is a knock at the door. Rufus looks over to where she sits on the mattress, still picking at one last nugget of possibly infected gravel in her hand. He trots into the living room, barking. Through the bedroom window she sees her uncle.
She runs to the door and, holding Rufus back by the collar, opens it. “Where have you been? I must’ve called you a hundred times—why haven’t you called me back? Rufus, hush.” She lets go of him so that he can sniff her uncle.
“That’s why I come by.” Her uncle looks like he has just woken up or never been to sleep.
“I got the police report,” she says.
He stares at her. “Why you do that? Why you want to go opening up old wounds?”
“I wanted to know what happened.”
He leans his shoulder against the screen door. “Nobody know what happened. It wasn’t ever investigated right. To the police it was just another black man who’s dead.”
“And so Mr. McGee, Jim McGee, was he one of the officers?”
A sigh passes through him. “He didn’t find my brother, but he was one of the ones there.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Ain’t unusual. Greendale is a small town. We all wrapped up in each other’s business. I knew the undertaker too. The way I see it, I ain’t know what happened now or then. But I’m at peace with it.” With his red eyes and drawn face, he doesn’t look like somebody at peace.
“What did Grandmomma Ruby think?”
“That she didn’t want more trouble.” He turns and walks down the porch. She steps out and pushes Rufus back in. The birds are shouting, ignoring the impending rain.
“But it was her son,” says Billie. “Didn’t she want to make sure it was an accident?”
Her uncle lights a cigarette. “You have to understand that back then you couldn’t look whites in the eye, couldn’t go through the front door, had to say yes Sir, yes Ma’am, and they call you boy no matter how old you were. When you pay for something at their store you had to put your money on the counter so your skin didn’t touch theirs. Anything could be done to you for looking at a white man in the wrong way. Anything. She seen it done to folks she knew. There’s no use being angry at her. You don’t know what it was to live your days like that.”
“But this happened in 1972.”
He throws his hands up. “Greendale was segregated all the way up till ’72! Till then there was nowhere in this town for a black person to eat.”
She ties back her hair. “It’s starting to rain. Let’s go in.”
“The porch got carpenter ants.” He points at large black ants marching down the front step.
“Is that bad?”
“I’ll mix you up some sugar water and boric acid, show you how to kill them.”
“Okay. Want to come in?”
“We ain’t got time for that. I come to take you to the bar.”
“What bar? I don’t have deodorant on.”
“Place I frequent on the east side. Somebody want to meet you.”
“Who?” she asks.
“You see,” he says.
ON THEIR WAY TO THE BAR, THEY PASS THROUGH THE MONEYED SECTION of town lined with stately oaks defending the sidewalks from the scorch of the sun. There is a surfeit of white porches, white joggers, and American flags. When they cross the train tracks, it is as if a bomb made out of soda cans, glass, and plastic wrappers has gone off, making the houses askew and the sidewalks buckle. There are no white people here except a man staggering ghoulishly down the middle of the street, his limp brown hair tucked into the collar of his plaid shirt. He is overdressed for the heat and wearing Coke-bottle glasses, a stray cast member from an eighties made-for-TV movie where he played the pedophile in a white van. He does not seem to see their car at first, or anything really. But finally he sees the bumper, then her with a blank delight like she is the leader of his cult. They swerve, missing him by inches.
The bar is made of baby-blue cinder blocks and sits next to a bail bonds/beauty salon/bridal boutique. The bar is oddly ventilated; it doesn’t have central air or windows, but a series of fans and units that keep it synthetically cool. Neo-soul plays softly under conversations coming from patrons that Billie can’t see. Her uncle leads her to the back of the room where a massive but sleekly leonine woman sits against the wall so that she faces the entrance, surveying everyone who comes in. Her large black earrings match the black pattern of her white silk shirt, exposing the tips of her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. The woman isn’t talking, her thumb and pointer finger wrapped around a dainty plastic cup. A man sits at her table wearing a red button-down shirt and diamond-studded cross, his attention moving back and forth between his phone and the bottle of orange-flavored vodka at the center of the table.
Her uncle stops before the woman’s chair. “This is Billie.”
“Hi,” Billie says.
The woman doesn’t meet her eyes. “Sit down and pull up a chair, but don’t bump the table and knock over the drinks because then it’s over.” She is speaking to Billie but looking at her uncle, as if holding him responsible for her behavior.
“Billie, this is Carlotta.” Her uncle sets her a chair at the table.
Billie sits, not sure if she is supposed to know who
that is.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful and get the girl something to drink,” Carlotta says.
Billie pulls a twenty from her back pocket. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”
“It’s been a long time,” Carlotta says.
“Has it? I’m sorry, but I don’t think I know who you are.” She looks up at her uncle.
“Carlotta was your daddy’s girlfriend,” he says.
Sometimes there were women at her father’s. No one whose name she remembers. All she remembers is that she didn’t like them.
“I told you she was too young,” her uncle says.
“My father had a lot of girlfriends,” she says.
Carlotta’s eyes flicker to her. Yes, touché.
Carlotta lifts up her cup, sipping slowly. “Dee tells me you been asking questions about your daddy’s death.”
Her uncle is still hovering. Her mother had a print of the Röttgen Pietà, a fourteenth-century German sculpture. In it, a mutilated Christ lies emaciated in Mary’s lap, ribs showing, mouth fallen open, tiny compared to the mass of his mother. But it is Mary’s stony expression that is so disturbing: the wooden, embittered agony.
“She got the police report,” her uncle says.
They all look at him, even the man in red stops texting.
“Why didn’t you tell me that?” Carlotta says.
He is looking down. “I ain’t know nothing about it till now.”
Carlotta sucks her teeth. “You shouldn’t have let her do that.”
“I said I didn’t know about it.”
“You still messing with that white girl?”
Her uncle rolls his eyes to the ceiling. The man in red chuckles.
“You ain’t ever learn. Go on and get her a drink. What you waiting for?”
He shakes his head but walks toward the bar.
Carlotta looks at Billie. “So now they know you digging around. I don’t know what they like in Philadelphia, but out here we got uncles whose bodies we still can’t find.” She puts the cup down, gesturing to the man in red. “This is my partner, Donut.” Donut nods without looking up from his phone. “We have an interior design company. Just got new business cards made.” There’s a stack next to her hand and she slides one toward Billie.
“It’s a good logo.” Billie makes a show of inspecting it. “What’s wrong with getting the report? It seems pretty logical to me if I want to know what happened.”
“But who wrote that report?” Carlotta holds her cup out to Donut, who tops it off. “And you’re advertising to them that you’re investigating.”
“I’m not investigating. I’m a grant writer.”
“What you call it then?”
“I’m finding out. As is my right.”
Carlotta waves this aside. “Listen, before you do any more finding out, I need you to agree that you won’t bring no trouble on Dee.”
They both look at her uncle as he reaches across the bar for two little cups of liquor. “I wouldn’t. What do you mean?”
“He’s a bad luck man as it is. I know Miss Ruby wouldn’t want him to suffer more than he has already.” Carlotta adjusts her neckline. “The police ain’t gonna help you none. Far as they concerned, it’s over and done with and they won’t like you not coming to that same conclusion. And men like Sheriff Oakes? The truth ain’t in them.”
“I know they didn’t do a thorough investigation. Maybe they didn’t care what happened, or maybe they just didn’t know. But I won’t be bothering them beyond getting the report.” Her uncle has been stopped by a woman going up to the bar. “Do you think it’s possible that my father could’ve committed suicide?”
“Never. He knew he was put on this earth for a reason.”
“So what do you think happened?”
“Baby, somebody killed him.”
Billie sits back. The music is squeezing the sides of her head.
“Always thought it, always will,” Carlotta says.
She knew this was coming. That someone would say it. She didn’t think it would come like this, but then she didn’t know Carlotta existed.
“Do you remember anything?” Carlotta says.
“No.” But now she can see him falling, his head dented open, grass rising all around him.
“But when I said it, didn’t you feel I was right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you remember who was there that night? Who came over?”
There were people there that night, of course there were.
Her uncle sets down the drinks. “I ain’t bring Billie here for this.”
Carlotta doesn’t appear to notice him. The bar goes quiet as it waits for the next song to play.
“I didn’t bring her here for you to mess with her mind,” he says.
“He was killed and you know it.”
“You the only one who thinks that.”
“It doesn’t matter to me if I’m one or a hundred,” Carlotta says.
“We leaving.” He takes Billie’s arm. “C’mon.”
“I knowed the police protecting somebody,” Carlotta says.
“Who?” Billie stands.
“One of they own.”
Carlotta
IT’S FUNNY BUT THEY GOT THE SAME WALK, BILLIE AND DEE, FORWARD on their feet like they can’t get away fast enough. Cliff never moved like that. He let the world see him. Maybe he picked it up living in New York. He told her so many times about meeting these two poets, serious poets he said, Henry and Tom, who each showed him that to be a true artist he must come into his blackness and make the collective experience seen and heard. Cliff wasn’t careful around white folks when he came back. Her daddy said that it would get him killed, no matter if they could vote now—because a black man in the South walked around with a target on his back for every angry white man who felt life hadn’t given him what he deserved.
“What you think?” Donut is watching them leave out of the corner of his eye.
“Dee hasn’t even invited her to a family barbeque. He might be her only uncle but the girl got cousins in the county.”
“Why you think he brought her?”
“Better than having me going over to the house and see her by myself. He wanted to see what I said and what I didn’t.”
“You’d go over there?”
It is true that she hasn’t been back to that house since the week after Cliff died. Miss Ruby let her in to collect her things. There was a child’s shirt sitting folded at the bottom of the bed next to a teddy bear. Miss Ruby said Billie’s momma had come and gone without a word. Even though Carlotta hated Pia, she had wanted her to come to the funeral so she could see for herself what Cliff’s white ex-wife looked like. But wasn’t that just like white folk not to give a black man respect even in death? So what if Jim McGee came and hugged Miss Ruby, that was like any good ole Boss man would do.
Carlotta could not remember how she got back to her sister’s house that day. Only how she walked and walked looking for a sign from Cliff to say why.
“I’d go there if I had to,” she tells Donut. “But I’m glad I don’t.”
Billie ain’t as good-looking as her daddy. Even with those big sad brown eyes that don’t know what they sad for. It’s a shame the way the kids today know nothing about their own history.
The bar door opens and Dee comes rushing up to the table. “What the hell you saying that shit for? You said all you wanted was to meet her and I gave you that. Why you go on with that conspiracy shit?”
Carlotta shrugs to get at him. “She asked.”
“She ain’t know nothing to ask.”
“She’s got a right to know, a right to ask.”
“It ain’t about right or wrong. We are way past all that. You ain’t ever understand. Not now and not then. Just let her be.” He thumps the table. “That’s what I’m asking.” Dee turns to go.
“Is that what Cliff would want?”
He stops but doesn’t turn. “You never knew wh
at my brother wanted. You just never did.” He walks out of the bar.
She hadn’t been close to Miss Ruby until after Cliff’s death. When they were first dating, Cliff’s mother didn’t approve. Thought Carlotta didn’t wear enough clothes and was wild, going to too many parties. But it was only that she was nineteen and loved to dance. Cliff was the best thing that had ever happened to her back then.
Donut itches the top of his lip with a fingernail. “I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Best let it be, Carlotta.”
“I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”
“Why not? Nothing good’s gonna come of it, and we got a business to run. I got us that potential client in Jackson. Let it rest.”
“I can’t.”
“Woman, why not?”
“It’s not what God wants me to do.”
“Oh Lord. Then don’t do nothing but pray on it.”
“Donut, ain’t you ever met somebody special?” Visionary that’s the word for what Cliff was.
Donut looks at her down his nose. “I have a wife and I think y’all are friends.”
“What I mean is someone like no one you ever met in your whole life. Cliff wanted to lift our people up, lift up the folk right here in Greendale, but they ain’t let him live long enough to do it.”
“How was he gonna do that? You ain’t ever say.”
Carlotta takes a sip of her drink. “It don’t matter now.”
Donut declines a call, then looks at her. “If he hadn’t gone and died young, it might not be so romantic. You never had the time to get acquainted with all his flaws.”
“I never said he was perfect.”
“All this mess gives me a strange feeling. Why you want to see that girl again? I can tell you ain’t like her.”
“I’m doing what I need to do for her daddy, for Cliff to finally get some justice.”
“I don’t need to tell you that you can’t trust that lowdown so-and-so.”
The Gone Dead Page 11