by Odie Lindsey
JP never wanted to leave. He only agreed to do so on the condition that she first let him have a dance. She obliged.
The next morning, a Sunday, she shook him awake with particular vim. “Get your bony midwestern ass out of bed, babe!”
“Shh.” He turned away. “Just . . . shhh.”
“Nope. Now. We’re late for church!”
“Oh come on,” he whined. “Don’t tell me you get all churchy when you get home. I am not in.” He drew the blanket over his head.
“Now!” She laughed as she yanked it right back off of him.
Fifteen minutes later, their teeth half brushed and with water bottles in hand, they drove west. Warming late morning air rushed through the open car windows, and hanging boughs of hardwood shaded the ash-gray asphalt. The two-lane road both lifted and lolled over the ridges and hillocks of north Mississippi, past the strip malls alongside I-55, and into the Delta landmass of cotton and soy acreage, of wire-walled boll buggies, and here or there a teethy row-plow, rusted dead in a curve of alluvial dirt off the turnrow.
The road at Moon Lake ran the contour of the banks. Short docks and boat ramps broke up the cypress groves in the shallows. It was breezy out, so the greenish slate lake was dimpled by waves. JP and Dru at last drove up on a cleared embankment and to a string of parked cars. At lakeside, a congregation of twenty or so had gathered, in church suit and jogging suit, in fly-screen lace hat and ball cap alike.
Dru parked, and JP followed her down to the service. The congregation was wrapping up a verse of “New Burying Ground,” as was followed by a chorus of Amen and Hallelujah. Three pastors stood together in waist-high water, wearing black pulpit robes with gray stripes on the bell sleeves. Beside them were a handful of individuals in white baptismal gowns: the people who were waiting to be reborn.
The preachers took turns delivering brief, inspired sermons, buildups to the climactic, familiar phrase of, “In the name of the Father, the Son . . .” The novitiates were then ushered beneath the water in unison, “and the Holy Ghost” being the last words they heard before transition.
Those white robes of the new flock floated on the lake’s surface like lily blossoms. The bankside community launched back into song:
“Jesus on the mainline. Tell him what you want!”
The baptized emerged with slick faces, obvious wonderment. They wiped their eyes in anticipation of new clarity.
A soloist belted out a proposal to those who remained uninitiated: If you want your body healed . . .
Then tell him what you want! the congregation replied.
Dru sang along. She sang loud.
Standing beside her, JP could only smile and clap, as he didn’t yet know the words.
VERDICT
1
While on one outskirt of Pitchlynn, Mississippi, a young couple was bowled over by the presence of twin newborns, on another, distal side, an overdetermined man—an MDOC guard, grade Correctional Officer II, puller-down of $24,420 per annum, pre-tax—clipped his ID badge to his pocket and holstered his state-issued Glock.
Doc wasn’t on duty, but he was in uniform. Though not assigned to the security detail in Jackson, he told Jessica he was driving down there anyway. Period.
Her response was to argue with him from bedroom to kitchen to driveway, and to even step into the street as he drove around her and away. She lectured, then implored, and even cried out that Doc had given enough time and life to that old man. Besides, Christ, didn’t Doc understand? Hare Hobbs didn’t need any additional protection—let alone any that was provided without so much as a day’s pay.
“I will not forget this, Doc,” Jess stated, her eyes welling. “Last chance to stop and think. To make sense of yourself. Please.”
He couldn’t. Didn’t. Doc only mouthed an apology, then threw his truck into gear.
Besides, his mission had nothing to do with protection.
He gunned it over the north Mississippi blacktop, the breeze gushing through the open windows of his pickup. It remained hot, though the September air now seemed to yawn more than strike. The sunlight radiated on his midnight-blue polyester shirt, and that ID badge reflected on the windshield. Pulling onto I-55 at Grenada, he poked at the scan button on his factory radio in hopes of catching commentary about the trial. He rolled up those windows and hit the cabin AC.
A couple of hours later, Doc cruised into downtown Jackson. At a stoplight, a cluster of young White women stepped into the crosswalk with pink posterboard signs: WE SHALL STILL OVERCOME.
Doc drove amid state and federal buildings, taking in the media trucks, the tourists, the activists and gawkers. The cell phones in everyone’s hand, capturing every instant. He found a parking spot half a mile from the Hinds County Courthouse. Got out, straightened the tuck of his blouse, and grabbed his Glock 22 off the bench seat. He started marching, fast.
Doc reached the swarm on Pascagoula Street within seconds of the highly publicized perp walk. Television producers shouted, “This is it!” and “Shot on that van!” Microphones were thrust up on booms; video and still cameras mobbed the steps of the large deco building, wrenching into a phalanx on either side of the white passenger van. A double line of U.S. marshals in Kevlar vests and ballistic shades joined a Jackson PD detail to form an alleyway between the vehicle and courthouse entrance. Doc stepped in to join them.
Faces and lenses reflected in the tinted van windows, as did placards and fists. Shutter clicks flitted as its doors swung open. Two marshals climbed out, looked around, then removed Hare Hobbs. His blaze orange coveralls were at least two sizes too big, making the old man appear infantile, frail. His hair was gray and oily. His skin paled to near blue. His wrists and ankles were shackled, so the marshals helped him limp along.
Activists shoved against the officers. Hare’s face was dogged by fear, and he blinked like a bird as he staggered through the drift of stale breath and sweat. He took in strands of commentary over the live feed.
The old man felt in tune with every muscle and movement. His focus was to display great exhaustion. Brittleness. He was proud to have thought to shit himself earlier, elated to have been granted the clean, oversized jumpsuit, because he knew the on-camera image it provided. The world would now witness a weak, washed-up elder. A man all but swallowed by the coveralls while plodding in agony, his fetters scraping the sidewalk. He’d recast himself as the victim. This was their chance for redemption.
Hare wondered why none of the officers on call had noticed that they’d been infiltrated, that Doc wore a completely different uniform than all assigned. Gazing beyond the front lines, Hare caught a glimpse of his daughter and Ladybug, on camera with a reporter: some upscale Black female, surely in from somewhere else. He looked around for Derby, and, mostly, for his firstborn, for Sonny. Hare still had faith that Sonny would get there, would save him. Despite the mangled plane and ICU hospitalization, he scanned face after face for any glimpse of kinship, of empathy, still believing Sonny might show up to protest, to testify, to . . .
He flinched when a gob of spit hit his jaw. Biting back a tirade, Hare nestled his head against his shoulder, gentle as a lamb, and tried to wipe it away.
***
DOC THOUGHT of Jessica again, and of the loose but resilient tribe of family and friends who had shepherded her childhood. Detroit to Pitchlynn to Chicago to Clarksdale, to Memphis to Pitchlynn to Chicago to Pitchlynn to . . . to the outskirts of Pitchlynn, and to the fenced modular home, tidy, on a cinder-block slab, with him. Gabe’s murder had terrorized her people off of their land, unmooring both future and past.
***
DESPITE HIS efforts, no one saw Hare as anything but hate. His teeth ground as he accepted this old truth, and then he let go and let it roll through him like a spiritual, like gospel.
He wished to Christ he had a fistful of soap lye. He envisioned slinging a cloud of it into the eyes of protester, reporter, and cop. They would fall over each other, screaming, their fingernails clawing the meat of thei
r own faces, scraping eye socket and lip. He pictured the flailing cameramen, blind, shoving lenses in what they assumed to be his direction.
He shook off a chill of pleasure, bowed his head, and paused as if to topple. The marshals reached in to steady him, while the crowd held their breath. Shutter snaps filled the silence. Hare coughed hard and doubled over, his vision emblazoned with dancing white stars. A few of the onlookers gasped at his fragility.
***
CLUBHOUSES, DOC thought. He thought of the clubhouses in most Mississippi towns. The inns, the B&Bs. The clubs built on former plantation land, or in former plantation fashion. The old Wallis Farm, where his people, where his wife’s people, and where Gabe had spent so many years building a legacy. Their lives and backs and pennies invested—for nothing, no return whatsoever.
Doc was enraged by his desire to shower at the Pitchlynn Country Club (est. 1966). To sauna there, even, despite the Mississippi heat. To drink a beer you could sign for with your membership number. And the food, he thought now: a communion. And the Friday evening dances and Easter buffets? The weddings now and again? What if he had married Jessica there? What would the caliber of this ceremony have implied?
Doc wanted to tip well. He wanted a garage-parked golf cart in his home in the adjoined PCC gated community. He wanted the clubhouse, its high white columns and wide rocking porch, as was modeled, somewhat, on the original Wallis House, as was reconstructed on the same footprint of earth, after they’d trucked the haggard old mansion into town. Doc wanted to play a round of golf (he’d never even swung a club), and wanted afterward to join the guys at the clubhouse bar for a whatever the fuck a “Cutty Shark” was. He wanted the Egg Bowl on an overhead flat-screen, Ole Miss whipping Mississippi State; he wanted Jessica to show up an hour or so later, fresh off of her tennis lesson, or her aquatic aerobics lesson, or her yoga, or her whatever; he wanted the two of them to have a couple more drinks (would Jessica still drink her same wine in that type of place?), and to watch the other members come and go, in and out of the clubhouse dining room, or the add-on ballroom, or the small pro shop, all waving to each other, everyone saying, Hey, y’all, and cracking risqué jokes, all of them passing and greeting, all members; he wanted Jessica to be full, to be drunk, to nibble at club sandwich, to stab at crisp fries with a frilled toothpick pulled from the toast; he wanted at some point in the early evening, sunset lingering, for him and Jessica to get back in that golf cart and giggle at each other, and bellow a few more greetings at members while on the cart path home, Doc swerving now and again into the elaborate grass for kicks, into the Bermuda, the Zoysia, the bent grass, the rye, Jess swatting at him and being embarrassed about his buzz, and he thus swerving farther onto the fairway, to push things and poke a little fun; he wanted them to hit the automatic garage door opener and pull the cart in and kick off their shoes and walk through a utility room and into the foyer and through the kitchen and to the bar, to mix another drink, and finally to glide out onto the large back deck and patio pool area, to the banded lounge chairs beside the stainless-steel gas grill, where they’d watch the last light fade over the angular rooflines, the rooflines on houses so thoughtfully spaced by lawn; he wanted to watch the color bleed onto the decorative cotton field behind their house, its blossoms white as a blizzard, its antiquated prop combine forever parked and rusting, its turnrows manicured by crews of Mexican migrants in green rubber boots, before sometime later (an hour? two? Doc must’ve nodded off), standing up and all but floating into their California king-sized bed, the AC pounding through the vents in the cathedral ceiling. Doc wanted a benign but worthy gripe session about dealing with their kids’ college fund, and about how Jessica had had to pay off her own damned loans—and not just her associates’, either, but in this case her BSN, or her RN (or, my word, maybe even her MD?)—alongside a sidebar complaint about taxes and NASDAQ; he wanted a legit gripe session about insurance premiums and a primary care physician; he wanted to bask in eighteen-hundred-thread-count hemstitch sheets, and to joke about the country-ass ways of their parents and their grandparents—but with respect, and with longing, and while wishing so badly that their folks were still around to witness and to share; Your mama, in Detroit? he’d ask Jessica, or Auntie Jeanes and Gramma Mina, in Chicago?—right here on this Mississippi spot! Can you imagine it, Jess?; Can you imagine them coming back home to see us like this?—My god, they would have loved it . . . though they would have kicked our leisure asses into shape! Would’ve had a thing or two or three to say about this domesticated bland we’re rockin’!; Doc wanted to fall asleep next to his wife, his Jessica, both of them sated and spoiled and retired, having never once left the gates of the Pitchlynn Country Club Estates all weekend; he wanted Jessica to sleep, my god, to sleep like a rock so secure, for once, just to sleep through the night.
Or sometimes he wanted to hate all of that stuff. Or maybe just to roll his eyes at it, and dream of some wildly different version of purchase. Truth was, Doc didn’t really know if he wanted that crap or not. Having glimpsed it firsthand, he just wanted a shot at figuring it out.
“If we’d only been given our stake,” he muttered. “If Gabe’s land had been passed down, as was intended.”
Doc could breathe this other history. It seared his lungs like an asphyxiant. Now, however, at best, at the very best, he knew it would be their kids who might grasp at or refute such dreams. If their schooling went exceptionally well. If their kids grew strong enough to move out of state.
Stare into him, Doc thought, as Hare staggered close. He opened the thumb break on his holster. Stare into him, and make him know denial. And finish him.
***
FOLD AND FALL, Hare thought. He was within ten paces of Doc. I will collapse as I near him. Faint almost, onto myself. And they’ll all reach out to assist me. Gently, so gingerly. Of their own free will. Neither Doc nor they will be able to help themselves.
Hare knew this to be true. He gauged the gentle grasp of the marshals on his biceps, and knew that when the time came to collapse, to go slack and fold, he’d slip right through their fingers.
Hare refused to look at Doc. He did not know what the young man intended, and he did not care. He knew only that the long blade of his thumbnail would slice through artery, or gouge out eyes.
The lens shutters clacked at the speed of automatic weapons. The crowd screamed out for vengeance. And it began.
Hare let his body cascade forward. As anticipated, because of the troopers’ feather-light touch, the old man was let free to collapse onto the sidewalk. As expected, and despite Doc’s having released the thumb brake on his holster, he was first and foremost a victim of instinct: he darted out of the security line and dropped to his knees, to catch Hare.
The crowd lurched forward like a farrow of piglets on a sow. They looked on as the two men collided, and then met the pavement in a tangle.
While flailing to right himself, Doc felt something stab at his neck. It seared like a hornet sting, maybe worse. Though distracted, he pushed the inmate up and off, and then scrambled to get to his feet.
Hare was faster. Doc watched from one knee as the old man snatched his Glock, then fired off a clinic of rounds. The first shots leveled the guards who had held him, and the next volley kept all others at bay. As if on swivel, Hare ripped the pistol in perfect interval, at perimeter, the arc of bullets dropping men indiscriminately while clear-cutting the crowd.
Bystanders sprinted or froze, cowered and collapsed. They muttered, or screeched like crows. Insulated by shock, Doc stood bolt upright and wiped his palm on his neck, and considered the thick curtain of blood on his hand. He wondered what on earth . . .
It was Hare’s thumbnail, of course. Given the bleed-out, Doc understood that the old man had nicked an artery. He looked from his hand, and back to Hare. He felt his own pistol peck his chest.
“They just couldn’t let it lie,” Hare muttered. “They couldn’t see past what they wanted to see.”
Despite everyth
ing, Doc shrugged.
Hare’s eyes bulged with disbelief, with fury, yet Doc refused to look away. In protest, the old man fired four more quick rounds—two on either side of Doc’s ears—dropping another quartet of officers.
Doc’s eardrums split into tonal roar, and his body erupted with pain. Still, somehow, he focused only on Hare. Though the Glock muzzle again jabbed into his chest, Doc resisted the urge to look down. As the blood sopped his shirt belly, he began to consider the moment as a potential, well . . . end. He thought of Jessica, their children, and their welfare to come, and . . .
If only they had found any record of the transaction, Doc thought. Jessica’s family had sworn there was one, a title or financial note of some kind, in the bank right there on the square in downtown Pitchlynn. Gabe had spoken of it with his sisters, and with Jessica’s aunt, Jeanes. Yet after the trial, the first one back in ’65, just before the Wallises broke ground on the country club, no record was found: of the deposit box, or the quitclaim deed, let alone any evidence that the former slave Gabriel had been a customer.
Nobody had known anything, save what they were told by Mr. Wallis. In response to the formal inquiry made by Jessica’s family, both public and legal, Wallis had challenged anyone to question an upstanding woman like Miss Beverly. Fact was, he noted, Gabe’s family were only tenants, having been croppers before, and in bondage before that. While the farm’s history was rudimentary at times, Wallis admitted, a living experiment in historic preservation, a museum, really, its ownership was nonetheless clear: the land was and had always been in Miss Beverly’s family. She had kept it, and she had served it, and, most importantly, she had served the people who farmed it with kindness and consideration. More so, Wallis added, his wife had done this for far longer than any operator in the state, what given the farm’s unprofitable and, sadly, unsustainable status. He had explained to press, police, and clergy how, truth be told, Gabe’s family had benefitted more than most from her benevolence. It was such a shame, Wallis decried, that in the wake of the murder Gabe’s own clan would scramble to ruin his memory, and the memory of that place, and now Miss Beverly’s reputation. Ingrates and upstarts, he derided . . . though he said he still pitied them, scrambled as they were by childlike pain.