Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  I think it irked Baer that I was pissing a little bit on his A1 parade, but at least he got to have the whole byline. Sarah Good-night and I “contributed,” it said at the end of the story.

  By the time I got back from covering the latest drug deal gone bad over by Gilpin Court, the first edition was rolling off the presses. We used to be able to hear and feel the presses, and some guy in a hat made from a newspaper would slam a bunch of them down on the copydesk. Now, the presses are fifteen miles away, and we get to look at page proofs. If we’re lucky, they’ll remember to send some actual papers to us from the printing plant, although they like to keep those to a minimum, so as to save paper. The way circulation and advertising are going, we’re saving a lot of paper these days.

  The headline said, “How did this happen?” just like we told people it would in the Saturday paper.

  “Tell me,” I muttered.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sunday

  Growing up in Oregon Hill, this was my favorite time of the week. It was as quiet as it ever was, for one thing. It was a day you could ease into like an old pair of slippers. Whoever Peggy was with got up late and slow. Sunday was comics and cinnamon toast. At least, that’s the way I remember it.

  There’s the GTO, sitting right where it might have been in the fall of 1977, our senior year. Goat is standing next to it, a Blue Ribbon in his hand. McGonnigal is there, too, walking around this ghost from our past, touching it gently like it might bolt away. Goat sees us and waves. The glass from the bottle reflects the morning sun. It seems, for a second or two, like old times.

  “How do you like this shit?” he says, maybe a little too loud. “Is this the spitting image, or what?”

  Yeah, I say, it is. It is a dead ringer for the 1967 GTO that Goat and his dad were able to somehow buy off one of the older guys whose wife was tired of a work of art that wouldn’t start half the time. Same powder blue, same interior.

  “Found it sitting in somebody’s backyard, outside Canton. I’ve been working on it for a year. Three hundred and thirty-five horsepower, just like the old one. It runs like a scalded cat now, most of the time.”

  He recites all the rest of the specifics, losing me fast in the argot of Hurst shifters and Quadrajets. Apparently, he’s driven it all the way down here from Ohio.

  It is a testament to the Hill’s car culture that two of us have automotive references embedded in our names. R.P. is Richard Petty McGonnigal, because his father was a big NASCAR fan and thought it’d be funny to name the kid after the King. R.P. might have forgiven him for that addled idea, but I don’t think he’s forgiven his mother for actually going along with it.

  Goat, against all odds, is president of a small liberal arts college in Ohio that must not check résumés very carefully, and he’s managed to wangle a trip back home around the fact that his school has a dozen or so living alumni in the area who might die and leave something to their alma mater.

  He’s Goat because he worshipped GTOs long before he had one. In high school, he was way more interested in girls and cars than studies. I’m pretty sure R.P. and I both had better grades. But then he went into the Army, and then to Tech, and something happened—either the unalloyed joys of learning or a strong aversion to work. We have our suspicions.

  Anyhow, he stayed, and stayed, and stayed. His mother and father and half the Hill thought he was sandbagging. Eight years of college seemed excessive.

  He emerged with not one degree but three, and he was Dr. Francis Xavier Johnson, although his father complained that he couldn’t even write out a prescription for him. Goat always was a natural leader. He got Sammy Samms to enlist with him upon graduation, and almost got me and Andy to join, too. And here he is, gray and respectable. They’ll no doubt name a hall or a gym or something after him someday.

  Andy Peroni shows up, and we’re ready to go. The five of us can squeeze into the GTO. It was always a problem in high school, because six definitely did not fit. We tried. There were, on occasion, hurt feelings.

  “Sammy shoulda seen this,” R.P. says, and we all nod.

  John Wesley Samms, the one who has enabled us all to fit into one cruising land shark of a car. While Goat used the G.I. Bill to featherbed his future, Sammy, who always liked to party, came back to the Hill and was dead in five years of a cocaine overdose.

  “Well,” Goat says, “it’s a miracle there’s five of us left.”

  “How’s Peggy?” Andy asks.

  I tell him she’s the same, relating the basics of what’s going on with Les.

  “Well,” he says, “she’s a scrapper. She’ll be there for him.”

  I nod. He’s right. Even if sometimes you wish she was somewhere else, or at least straight and sober and in possession of a better asshole-detector, Peggy has had a habit of being there, if you really mattered.

  Growing up in Oregon Hill wasn’t easy for anyone. If your father was an African-American, current address unknown, the shit got exponentially deeper.

  Back then, the Hill was as white as a virgin’s wedding gown. It had been a working-class community, kind of a mill town hidden away inside a city, full of German and Irish and Italian ironworkers. By the time I came along, it was boxed in by Hollywood Cemetery on one side and Route 1 on the other, with the river behind us. When they built the Downtown Expressway, it became a little more isolated, which probably didn’t bother the rest of Richmond much.

  We fought. A few decent boxers made it out and then stumbled back, minus a portion of their teeth and brains. No challenge, no matter how trivial or baseless—no matter how big the challenger—could be ignored without serious loss of face. I’ve seen fathers pit their kids, some as young as five, against each other the way you’d pair off a couple of pit bulls, and you’d better not lose, because Dad had some money riding on you.

  One of my “uncles” did that to me when I was eight, and Peggy threw his ass out when she heard about it. What I wanted to know was, what the hell was he doing “in” in the first place?

  But that was Peggy, putting out the fires she started herself.

  In the picture Aunt Celia gave me, Peggy is a pretty blonde girl of about sixteen, squinting into the sun, her face a combination of innocence and mischief.

  She was something of a rounder, all agreed, and when she became pregnant before she finished high school, no one knew what to do. She named a boy as the father, but it was pretty much proved that he couldn’t have been the one, having been in jail at the time on an assault charge. She named a second one, and he was prepared to marry her (not knowing that he wasn’t first choice). This one at least had apparently had sex with Peggy somewhere around nine months before the blessed event.

  That fell apart at the hospital, soon after I was born. As Peggy told me one night when I was fifteen and she was drunk enough to think I was old enough to hear the story, her soon-to-be husband and his mother and older sister were in the hospital room where Peggy was recuperating, back when hospitals actually allowed such luxuries. Things were fine, Peggy said, until the boy’s aunt came in. She took one look at me and then called the mother out into the hall. And then the mother called the would-be father and husband out. And when they all came back in, Peggy was back to Square One.

  It seems that I was a little too tan for my future father and his family. Maybe they were trying not to see what was right in front of their faces, but when the veil was lifted, the bubonic plague couldn’t have gotten them out of that room and our lives any faster.

  “I knew all along,” she told me, “that it—you—must be Artie’s.”

  Artie Lee was a light-skinned black man, not much darker than I am, really. He was a saxophone player, and Peggy had a thing for musicians. At the time, she wouldn’t tell her parents exactly which African-American knocked her up, probably for fear that her father would kill him. It was 1960, and Highland Springs was old Dixie.

  By the time she finally told them who their grandson’s father was, it had become a moot point, because
drugs did the job for them. Artie Lee missed a curve and ended his life splattered against a sycamore tree while I was still crawling. I saw a picture of him once.

  By then, my grandparents had kicked Peggy out. She said they wanted her to give me up, and she refused, so I owe her that much. Celia owned a rental property and was the only one in the family willing to help her, so Peggy moved us to town. I don’t guess it mattered much that the house was in Oregon Hill. It was a house, period, and the rent was on the basis of “pay what you can,” which would have been nothing, at least at the start.

  Peggy has seldom been without adult male companionship. Les is really the first one she’s had who didn’t seem dedicated to drinking up all her money (what she hadn’t already drunk up herself, of course). He’s also the only one, in my memory, who thinks it’s the slightest bit unmanly to strike women and kids.

  Peggy named me Willie Mays Black. He’d been Artie Lee’s favorite ballplayer, and I think Peggy was trying to make her parents a little more crazy than they already were. She probably didn’t think it all the way through, to the point where I’d be carrying that name through Oregon Hill for my so-called formative years. (As if the last name wasn’t enough. We were known as the only “Blacks” on Oregon Hill by the local comedians.) Peggy wasn’t much, back then, on long-range planning.

  You look at me now, and you might call me olive-skinned. Big nose, not much hair left. Lips that are thick enough to be what a couple of women have been kind enough to call sensual. According to Peggy, Artie Lee was only about half African-American, and I seem to be less than half of that half. People in Oregon Hill who didn’t know better might have thought the new baby in their midst was of Mediterranean descent, which would have been much better in their eyes.

  But we made the best of it. There were neighbors who shunned Peggy, who sometimes told them to kiss her ass. There were parents who didn’t want their kids to play with me. There were words. There were fights.

  It could have been worse. I could have been darker. I could have been born ten years earlier: By the time I started school, it was actually legal in the great state of Virginia for blacks and whites to go to school together. I could have been not very bright or not very athletic. Or ugly. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I was a rather fetching lad, once upon a time.

  I don’t remember when Abe Custalow and I became friends, but it wasn’t long after I started first grade. A few boys who’d heard from their redneck parents that there was a “half-nigger” in their class and had already been taught how bad that was decided to make their mommas and daddies proud. Chasing me around the school yard became the favorite recess sport. Then Abe, who always was bigger than the other kids, stepped in, and nobody wanted to fight Abe, even in first grade.

  Maybe it was because he was an Indian. We did kind of stand out. Abe was my best friend, maybe my only friend, at the beginning.

  I think we kind of joined forces with Goat, R.P., Andy and Sammy in the fourth grade. They were forming their own basketball team, to play against other boys at recess and on weekends at the playground, and they knew who the best athletes in the fourth grade were.

  “Are you really an Indian?” Goat, who was still Frances at that time, asked Abe, who just stared at him but then nodded his head. They didn’t ask me what I was.

  And eventually, if you live in a place long enough, they forget what the hell you are and just settle for who you are.

  There was always somebody who didn’t know who I was, though. Other little gangs of dead-end kids roamed the Hill. Sometimes I had to fight, and I got pretty good at it. Sometimes we’d all fight some other bunch of delinquents. Sometimes, we started it.

  There were parents who didn’t want their daughters going out with me, but by high school, that wasn’t such a big damn deal anymore. Kids from all over, all colors.

  Peggy never really forgave her parents. And yet, in the last year of my grandmother’s life, with her husband dead and her body ravaged by breast cancer, it was Peggy who took her in.

  Days on the Hill weren’t bad. I still see a lot of people I went to school with around town, and we always wind up talking about the old days. Nostalgia is a sneaky bastard, slipping in and robbing you of your old grudges and only letting you remember the good stuff.

  A few years ago, I came to realize that the paper was counting me as a minority, so they’d look less prejudiced in the latest industry scorecard. Even with me, they had about eleven percent “minority” in a city where the minority has been white people for some time. I went to the managing editor at the time and told her to cut out that bullshit or I would embarrass the paper.

  Now, when they ask for race on a form, I tend to write in NOYFB and let them figure it out.

  We have the same kind of artery-clogging brunch we’ve always had at Joe’s, pancakes and sausage and eggs and toast, lots of Bloody Marys. Only Goat backs off a little, and is mercilessly ragged for it. It’s no wonder guys on the Hill don’t tend to live that long. It’s not the knife fights and hard manual labor. It’s the pork and alcohol diet, although there’s only enough vodka in my drinks to make me thirsty for more.

  “That was awful about that girl,” Goat says, and the others agree that public hangings ought to be brought back for this one.

  “What’s it mean, ‘contributed’?” McGonnigal asks, and everyone looks a little confused.

  “You know, at the end of the story this morning, it said, ‘Willie Black contributed to this story.’ Did you get the coffee while he was writing, maybe fan him, wipe his brow? Give him a blow job?”

  I tell them some of the stuff Wheelie didn’t allow to be printed.

  “So he might not have done it?” Andy Peroni asks.

  I say yeah, that it’s a possibility.

  “Well, he’s a scumbag anyhow,” Peroni says, and I point out that just being a scumbag isn’t enough to warrant an execution, else he’d never have made it to thirty.

  “But you’re going to write more about it?” Goat says, and I tell him I’m not sure there’s much else that can be written.

  “But what if he didn’t do it?”

  I tell Goat and the others that I’ll do my best.

  We wind up back on the Hill and say our goodbyes. Goat’s driving back this evening, and R.P. and Andy have things to do.

  “Man,” Goat says, “this place has changed.” He hasn’t been back in a while, and he acts as if he still expects to look across Belvidere and see the long-gone state prison, where they said bad boys from Oregon Hill could look over and see their mommas’ wash on the line in the distance.

  “It’s different,” R.P. says, “but there’s still a lot of the same families up here, mixed in with all the VCU crowd.”

  “And the professor shall lie down with the redneck,” Goat says.

  Peroni observes that sometimes the professor and the redneck are the same person. Custalow laughs.

  We man-hug and lie about being better at staying in touch. In about five minutes, everyone’s gone except me and Abe Custalow.

  We walk over to Laurel Street and say a quick hello to Peggy and Les, who apparently hasn’t had to be talked down off the roof again since the last time.

  We’re headed back to the Prestwould when my cell phone rings. It’s Kate.

  “I got him put into solitary,” she says. “But, Jesus, is that the best you could do in terms of telling his side of the story?”

  I explain to her that, as always, I am neither the publisher nor the editor, and that those decisions come from higher up.

  “Well,” she says, “try harder,” and she hangs up.

  As I’m putting the phone back in my pocket, a city cop car slides up beside us and stops. David Junior Shiflett rolls his window down.

  “Y’all don’t believe that bullshit, do you?” he says.

  I play dumb and tell him I hear bullshit all day long, and which particular piece of excrement is he referring to.

  “Fell and his momma. Claiming
he didn’t do it.”

  I tell him I don’t believe it or disbelieve it right now, and I wonder if he knows which part of the article my “contribution” was, and who told him.

  “Well,” Shiflett says, “I was there, in the room with him. And I’m telling you, he did it.”

  He points his finger at me when he says it, and I’m transported back to what must have been eighth grade. David Shiflett was one of the toughest guys on the Hill, and somebody, out of mischief, told him I’d said something unflattering about his character. Shiflett, who would have been a junior, caught me when we were messing around by the Big Ditch. They were making a hole in the ground for the Downtown Expressway. Peggy called the hole the Oregon Hill quarantine. The air was smoky, the way it usually was in those days, from burning all the kindling-wood houses that got in the way of progress. David Junior called me over to where he was standing by himself, looking down at the hole. He did that same finger-pointing thing as he threatened to rip my head off and shit down my neck. I ran away.

  I fight the urge to regress to junior high, telling myself that we’re both grown men now, although Shiflett still looks as if he could do the head-ripping-and-defecating thing.

  I tell him that I’ll take that under advisement, but that I’ll make my own decisions. It makes me more bold, maybe, that Abe Custalow, one of the few men around who looks capable of going a few rounds with David Shiflett, has my back.

  “You newspaper guys,” Shiflett says, shaking his head. He asks Custalow, with what looks like a smirk, if he’s watching himself, then slowly drives off before Abe can say or do anything. Just as well.

  When we get back to the Prestwould, Feldman is in the lobby, talking to the guard and Marcia the manager. When he sees me, he motions me over with one hand while he lets Custalow know with the other that this conversation doesn’t involve him. Abe gives me a look and pushes the elevator button.