The Gone Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  She waves him away. “Dee ain’t all bad. I knowed him a long time. He’s just scared.” It has taken thirty years, but something is happening.

  Billie

  IT COULD BE THE POLICE. HISTORICALLY SPEAKING THAT WOULD BE an obvious possibility in the Deep South. Billie pushes back into the soft leather of the seat. There must be some reason, legitimate or convoluted, that Carlotta thinks so. Her uncle brakes at the stoplight, still ranting about Carlotta’s damn conspiracy nonsense, only stopping for three seconds for a “how you doing” to a guy hauling scrap metal in a beat-up truck.

  One of the deputies is dead: Oakes. One definitely alive: McGee. But Roberts? He could be alive and even live in town; it could be that she has passed him in the joyless factory lighting of Walmart and not even known it. She could have stood in line, staring at the back of his head, tracing his receding hairline, judging his items moving along the black sticky belt, not knowing that the Little Debbies, white bread, chocolate chip cookies, Mountain Dew, and rib eye steaks belonged to the man who murdered her father. Though Carlotta didn’t exactly say that those deputies did it, but that they knew who did.

  “You hear me, girl?” The car slows as it approaches the driveway. “Folks like to believe all kinds of crazy shit out here in the Delta.”

  The sun is going down and the temperature dropping. She rolls up the window. “Why does she think he was murdered?”

  “Carlotta think she knows more than everybody else.”

  “How serious were they? Her and my daddy.”

  “That was between them. I was just a kid.”

  When they pull up to the house, her uncle goes straight back to the trunk. As she steps out, he comes round and hands her a box. “These are some of Cliff’s things. I thought you might want to have them.”

  She meets his eyes. But nothing in them says he knows about the chapter. “Thanks. Do you want to come in?”

  “I gotta get back,” he says.

  A frenzied dog greets her at the front door. Inside, she opens the box and finds a few T-shirts, turtlenecks, a pair of corduroy pants, an old silver radio, and a few photographs of her father.

  Under the rain tapping the trees, there are footsteps. Her uncle is walking the porch with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, listing like a boat with a bent sail. She comes out, hunched in a jacket, her neck hidden in her hair. “Hand it over,” she says. She calls to Rufus and props herself up against the front of the house, trying to find raindrops in the dark.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  He sits nearby, leaning his head back against the wood, watching the empty road made of dark mist. “Why you sorry?”

  “I’m bringing up bad times for you.”

  “Worst time of my life. But you done nothing wrong.”

  He might not think so if he knew everything. She’ll keep quiet about the chapter just a little longer. “Why were you named DeHart? You’re the only person I’ve met named that.”

  “My daddy name me after DeHart Hubbard, the first African American to win a gold medal for the long jump in Paris, France.”

  “Really?” She passes the bottle back to her uncle. “What year was that?”

  “All I know is it was before Jesse Owens.” A small lizard climbs up one of the porch beams to the roof. “When I was young, we went to church twice a week. The Wednesday night prayer meetings were my favorite. Sundays were too long. I felt like God was with me and it felt good. When Cliff died, I couldn’t go no more. Momma begged me. And I thought I would after some time passed, but I never did. I couldn’t sit still.” He exhales. “He cared about people. He mattered.”

  “I know he did, I know.” She stands. “You’ve been drinking too much to drive tonight. Come inside. I might not have a couch, but I have an extra sleeping bag.”

  The rain echoes through the house, getting louder as Billie walks to the bathroom for a towel for Rufus. “Shit.” Glass is all over the wet floor of her old bedroom. The window has shattered as if someone has taken a hammer to it.

  Her uncle comes up behind her. “What happened?” He’s in his socks.

  “Stand back. Can you go around and get me the broom and a couple trash bags from the kitchen? I can tape it over for now.”

  She waits, but when he doesn’t come back, she finds him on the back porch peering into the night.

  “Did you hear it break?” His eyes are enormous.

  “No, but it was already cracked.”

  “You seen anybody out here since that first night?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s okay, Uncle Dee, it was about to break. It’s okay. Come inside, you’re getting soaked.” She leads him back by the arm. She locks the door behind him, then grabs the broom.

  That night she sleeps with the sock next to her head. Nothing bad must happen to him. Not because of her.

  Dr. Melvin Hurley

  HE NEVER FEELS EXACTLY HIS AGE. TODAY, IN PARTICULAR, HE IS NOT fifty-two. His years and quite possibly their collective wisdom go fluttering out of his rental car window as he drives past the downtown drugstore, which he has begun to frequent after lunch along with an elderly white man in a sweat suit and camo hat. They both prefer the register of a shimmering young black woman rife with blue eye shadow and God’s love. But he’s skipping the drugstore today and instead pulling next to a sedan in the dirt parking lot of an aluminum shed church, his thoughts on another woman. A woman he has not spoken to in over twenty years.

  He folds his gum into a napkin then walks up to the church and knocks. There’s no answer. He tests the knob. It opens and the shadowed air feels good. A woman hunched in the last pew turns to him.

  She straightens. “Dr. Melvin?” Her short hair is side parted into loose curls above the purple silk of her blouse.

  They shake hands. “I appreciate your meeting with me.”

  “This isn’t my church,” she says.

  He nods as if he understands.

  “I know the pastor. I’ve known him since we were kids. I’m a very private person, Dr. Melvin. I didn’t used to be, but I learned.” She turns to the front of the church, contemplating the bare wooden altar.

  “Do you mind if I record our conversation?”

  “No, no that’s fine.” Carlotta sits again, smoothing the ruffles along the front of her shirt. “Are you a Christian, Dr. Melvin?”

  He takes out his tape recorder, setting it between them. “I was raised as one.”

  “He never leaves you, even if you’ve gone away from Him. I believe that. Before you came, I was sitting here praying you would be a good man.” She purses her lips. “Until now, nobody has been interested in Cliff’s death, in knowing what really happened. There were some of his artist friends who came down here when he first died and wanted to know what had gone on, but they didn’t like to stay down here to find out. I guess it would have been different if it happened in a place like New York. But nobody, not even my own mother, would listen to me. I couldn’t be here after that. I left the Delta for a little while. Then I came back like it seems all black folk do eventually and tried to let it go. But now she’s here.”

  “I assume you’re speaking of Billie?” Melvin moves forward on the pew, taking out his notepad. “As I said on the phone, she is helping me with the biography of her father’s life.”

  “You never met him, did you?”

  “Unfortunately not. I would love to hear you describe him?”

  “He was so many things wrapped into one person. Handsome, so handsome. Full of charm. When he was with you, you felt like you was the only person in the world.” She smiles. “My family moved to Greendale from Tchula when I was thirteen so I never met him till he moved back. Cause he’d lived in New York, I reckon folks thought he was slick. But this was his home, and he was at home here.”

  “Some people have described him as mysterious.”

  “He was a poet, ain’t that what they supposed to be? He could be mischievous. That’s for sure. Especially when he and Dee got together. They c
ould make each other just about die laughing.” She touches the thick gold bracelet on her wrist. “There are times when I wonder if it hadn’t happened, would we still be together? But then I thank the Lord for my husband, who keeps me from doing things I shouldn’t.”

  He can’t resist. “And what does your husband think of your being here?”

  “Like my mother used to tell me, husbands don’t need to know every little thing.”

  Melvin smiles, hoping she doesn’t hear his stomach rumble. He got her call just as he was ordering gumbo. “I’m thrilled you’ve decided to speak with me. In terms of the biography, I see your perspective as absolutely essential.”

  “She ain’t safe here. I’m going ahead and say that on your recording. You seen the police report she got? I didn’t need to. You know why? Because I already know who was there that night. I know who the suspects are. I don’t know why I didn’t do more at the time. I really couldn’t tell you why. I suppose with the grief everything was too much to make sense of . . . there wasn’t really any investigation. They was so quick to call it an accident and Miss Ruby was so scared she didn’t want nobody saying nothing. She was from an older generation. She didn’t believe in real justice for black folk. Not in this world.” Carlotta presses her hands to her eyes. “See, here’s that old place in me coming back.” She fans her eyes. “I don’t know for certain what happened that night. But I do know Cliff didn’t fall over, hit his damn head, and die. And I knew the undertaker’s wife. She said he had all kinds of bruises on him. His eye was swollen all the way shut.”

  Melvin’s pen stops. “As if he’d been in a fight?”

  She nods. “And it wasn’t with no tree root.”

  “You believe that those three officers were responsible?”

  “It could have been one of them, three of them, or five of their friends. All I know is it wasn’t an accident. And you know what is messed up? Jim McGee was Cliff’s best friend when they was kids. That’s some kind of friend to do you like that.”

  ON THE DRIVE BACK TO HIS MOTEL, THE SUN IS A BAPTISM OF PINK. He left the church before Carlotta, who insisted that they leave separately. It remains to be seen who she imagines could be effectively watching. There’s virtually nothing to hide behind here barring a smattering of thin trees across the field. The road itself is deserted except for one battered red and white Chevy that turns right at the crossroad. There Melvin puts the car in park and accordingly pulls out a CD of Robert Johnson. Was there violence done to Cliff’s body? Are the perpetrators at large and circling Billie? Carlotta certainly seems to think so. When he interviewed her so many years ago, she said that it was not an accident, that Cliff wasn’t depressed. But if this is the case, then why on earth would Dee allow his niece to occupy such a potentially dangerous position? He must talk with Dee to get a better sense of the current situation. He doesn’t necessarily need to gain Dee’s approval any longer, though it would be nice. But having Billie’s cooperation makes the biography respectable, possible. There needs to be at least one family member on board, and now there is.

  Perhaps the biography should open with a brief meditation on 1972. Something along the lines of . . . 1972, the year that Shirley Chisholm, Ms. Unbought and Unbossed, the first black woman elected to Congress, announced her candidacy for president despite death threats, rampant sexism, and outrage . . . (then some allusion to her practically biblical visit to George Wallace’s deathbed); the year that the boundless provocateur Ishmael Reed published his parodic Mumbo Jumbo and his radical “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto”; the year that the cosmically sanctified Sun Ra and the Arkestra filmed the Afrofuturist Space Is the Place; the year that the tireless activist-icon Angela Davis was found not guilty of murder; and the year that the largest Confederate (Lost Cause) memorial with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson’s visages was completed at Stone Mountain in Georgia . . . though these are all American references. Perhaps he needs to be more global in his scope? But in a sense these do point to the crucial tensions informing and disrupting Cliff’s process. He could mention that it’s also the year Jimmy Baldwin published No Name in the Street, but to have another book may imply that black cultural liberation extends primarily into literature . . .

  Billie

  IN MEDIEVAL FAIRY TALES, THERE IS OFTEN A CHILD LOST IN THE wood. A monster lurks, perhaps an ogre or a witch, like the old woman who eats children in Hansel and Gretel, a story left over from the Great Famine of the early fourteenth century when the rains never stopped and summer lost its heat, a consequence of Europe’s Little Ice Age.

  As a little girl, whenever her mother spoke of it, Billie would picture Philadelphia covered with a layer of ice, a mountainous glacier where city hall stood, its citizens abandoning cars and umbrellas for spears and woolly mammoths, worshipping icicles because they were made by the sun, a star that ate the cold. Years later, her mother told her that the drop in temperature during the Little Ice Age simply meant disastrous rains, drowned cows, and ruined crops—not nearly as exciting. It meant that God was unhappy and you could not trust your starving fellow man, not alone in the woods.

  At the bottom of the McGees’ driveway, the hot grass tickles the skin above her sneakers, ghosts of past floods. She stands there until her bra strap cuts into a shoulder that’s starting to burn. She walked here, wanting to rise out of the simmer of the afternoon, like a heat that makes the air ripple and blur.

  She knocks. There is a black sedan and a blue truck in the drive. The doorknob turns and a man with a close-shaven silver beard opens the door, his thin hair light and sifted with gray. He must have been blond as a child, honey haired like Harlan. His blue eyes are made bluer by the red in his irises, the sharp cheekbones under his beard almost pitted.

  “Hi, I’m Billie James.” Her mouth tastes like hot pennies. “I’m looking for Jim McGee.”

  “Hi there, Billie, I’m him.”

  He’s him. She feels for his face somewhere in her mind. It is not the one she would cast in the role of potential murderer. There’s a weariness to the squint around the eyes, but not a smallness.

  “Would you care to come in?”

  She doesn’t move. It’s easy not to in this heat. “Do you remember me?” The words barely make it out of her mouth.

  “Of course, though it’s been a good long while and you look a little different. A little taller maybe.” He smiles. “Miss Ruby used to bring you over all the time. She was real proud of you—you were her first grandbaby.”

  “Jim?” A woman’s voice calls from deep within the house.

  He turns. “I got it, Marlene.”

  Her scalp is itching with sweat, but it is important to be still, to miss nothing. “Can I talk to you about my father?”

  “Of course. I’m not sure if I can tell you what you want to know, but come on in.” He steps back, opening the door wider, the sun catching on his huge square belt buckle.

  “Jim? Who is it?” The woman’s voice again. Marlene? That name doesn’t ring a bell.

  “It’s all right,” he calls back as he leads Billie into the living room.

  The woman comes up behind them. “Oh, I thought it was the mailman,” she says, manicured hands on the hips of her white capris, expert highlights in her brown hair.

  “Have a seat.” Mr. McGee moves a newspaper folded on the armchair and sits. Billie takes the couch to the left of him. “Marlene, this is Billie James. Her daddy used to live in one of the places on the plantation. She’s come to visit with me.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Billie says.

  Marlene smiles with no teeth, only thin fuchsia lips. “Nice to meet you too. You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got something in the oven. Jim, I could use your help.”

  He nods. “I’ll be back there in a minute. Billie, you want something to drink? Coke or water? Though I warn you we only do diet these days.” He glances at his wife as she retreats back into the kitchen.

  “I’m fine, thank you. I hope I’m not in the way.”<
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  “Not at all. Not a whole lot going on now I’m retired. Though somehow she manages to keep me busy.”

  “I’ve been busier than I imagined trying to fix up the house.”

  “I’ll bet. You need the name of a good exterminator? I know a guy you can trust. I’ll tell him to give you a call if you like. If you mention my name, he should give you a good deal.”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  “How’s the roof? I remember some of those old tenant houses had issues.”

  “I haven’t noticed any leaks. But I’m not very observant in that way.”

  “Well, if you’re planning to make a long stay you should get it looked at the way it rains here.”

  “I don’t know that I’ll be here much longer.” She scoots forward on the couch, her elbows leaning on her knees. “So you and my father were friends.”

  “As boys, we were pretty much inseparable. But then as we grew older of course we sorta grew apart, and then he left Mississippi for college. And I was real proud of his accomplishments. Not that I’m any judge of poetry, but of what I read I thought they were something. But when he moved back here, life had taken us in different directions by then. I was married, starting to have kids, farming and working as a deputy. I’d see him around but I was real busy.”

  “And when he was found, you were there?”

  “They called me out there.” He rubs his hands together slowly, massaging his big knuckles. On one finger he wears a large turquoise ring. “Oakes and Roberts were there when I arrived. They were the first ones.” He notices her looking at the ring. “My sister found out some years ago that apparently we have Choctaw blood in the family. She got me this. I don’t know if I believe it, but she passed last year, so I figured I’d start wearing it.”

  “It’s pretty.” Hard to find a question that will tell her something she doesn’t already know. “I met Sheriff Oakes.”

  “Bobby Oakes?” He scratches his beard. “That boy like to tell you more than me. I’m sure he heard about it from his daddy.”