Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  When I get upset about something, or get in a hurry, I still mess up. I won’t likely ever win any spelling bees, and I try to keep my notes short and sweet. I don’t send Christmas cards, now that Sara’s gone. And it took me a year to finish Huckleberry Finn, when I was forty-two. But in the summer of 1947, with me and Sara sitting in our new house and the baby on the way, there wasn’t nothing on God’s earth that I wanted for. I had it all.

  We lived in that little house for twenty-one years, until Momma and then Lex and Connie died and Georgia was a junior at Women’s College, which by now even had a few boys at it. I never wanted to move back into the old house, but Sara had some ideas that she’d been sitting on since she first saw the place, and she talked me into moving everything we owned fifty yards away, to Momma’s, and we rented out our place.

  We’d saved right much, between her salary and the farm, especially with the berry business doing better all the time, and it didn’t cost that much to send Georgia to a state school. Anyway, we had rent money coming in, too, from white-trash families, one of which eventually burnt the house down. So we were able to put in baseboard heat and a new kitchen, have the tile took up and the old oak floors stripped and redone so they probably looked better than they did when my granddaddy and them built the place. We put jacks under the floor in places where the termites had done the most damage, and it creaks something terrible, but we put on a new roof, good for twenty years, and it looks like me and it are going out together.

  Our little house burnt down in 1972. We had gone out to eat at the fish camp on a Friday night in late October.

  Coming back, we turned left at the store and had gone just a little ways when we saw all the commotion. There was four fire trucks from the Geddie Volunteer Fire Department, which meant that there had better not be a fire anywheres else, and about twenty cars, mostly belonging to the firemen that weren’t important enough to ride on the trucks. The Registers, that had been renting the place since June, had burnt it up trying to make a fire. They had to take the seal off the front of the fireplace to even get to where they could start a fire, and when they did, the chimney, full of about ten years of trash and bird nests, caught, which sparked the roof right quick, and by the time the fire trucks got there, it wasn’t nothing but a shell, all the windows out and everything all black around them.

  We took the insurance money and got out of the rental business. In the spring, we paid Godwin’s men to level what was left and haul it off. It’s field again now, rented out for hay the last six years, and you couldn’t ever tell our little house was there, except for one thing. Right after we moved in, when we was planting everything we could find to make it look less like a field, Sara put crepe myrtles in the front yard because they liked the sun so much. After the house burnt down and we had it leveled, we decided not to plow under the biggest and prettiest one, and when we rented the land for hay, we told the man not to hurt the crepe myrtle, even though it was in the middle of the field. They liked to of killed it twice coming too close with a tractor, so we finally got some landscape timbers and made a eight-foot square around it. That crepe myrtle comes out every summer all pink and beautiful, just when everything else is dying, and it helps me remember what a fine life we had, in spite of everything.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  July 19

  Sometimes, when Mom really gets pissed off, when she’s really had a bad day, she’ll say she has the Sadim touch, like Midas spelled backward. Like everything she touches turns to shit. I think it’s hereditary.

  Winfrey, Blue and I all passed summer school, and we’d been playing in the Port Campbell three-on-three basketball league for the last two weeks of classes. Winfrey has a car, sort of, a Vega with God knows how many miles on it. The odometer’s been cut off for a year, he said. We ride to the YMCA in town and play basketball on Monday, Wednesday and Friday nights. Or at least we did.

  Summer school ended last Friday, and Blue and Winfrey both got B’s. I got an A and actually kind of enjoyed old Lord Jim.

  We’d studied together about once a week, and we crammed for the final exam. I don’t think either of the Geddies is planning an extensive career in English literature, but they aren’t dummies, either.

  On the day of the final, I sat in front of Winfrey and beside Blue, to his right, so that either of them could do a little copying if they wanted to. They’re not very strict about that in summer school down here. I think they’re just happy for any excuse to push people up to the next grade. But the neat thing was, neither one of them had to cheat. On the test we had after three weeks, I could smell Winfrey’s breath, and I was afraid Blue was going to tip his desk over from leaning so far. This time, though, I could tell they were doing it on their own. Mrs. Sessoms would leave the room for fifteen minutes at a time, so they had plenty of opportunity, but they didn’t need it.

  So, last Friday we’re feeling pretty good, because we know we’re free at last. We have a six o’clock game against a bunch of mean rednecks from south of town, a place called Purcells. They’re what Winfrey calls river rats. We’d seen them play before and knew it would be tough. There’s this one gap-toothed, red-haired guy, about six two, must weigh 240 pounds, with the most unfortunate freckles I’ve ever seen. They’re dark and the size of dimes. “If that boy’s freckles get any bigger,” Blue says, “they’re going to connect and he can pass for a blood.”

  The other two players are a couple of squinty-eyed brothers or cousins or something. At least, they look alike. Black, oily hair, dark complexions, jaws like Cro-Magnon man. Their team name, on bright red T-shirts, is the En-Kays, except they spell it “En-Kay’s.” We’re the O’s, short for Oreos and less objectionable. I wonder out loud what the hell an En-Kay is. “You don’t want to know,” Winfrey mutters, and he’s looking about as serious as he ever gets, tying his Air Jordans so tight I’m afraid he’ll break a lace.

  These three-on-three half-court games are pretty informal. There’s an official, but you call your own fouls, and he’s only there in case of a disagreement. We’ve been holding our own, winning four and losing one. These river rats, who all play for a school out in the county, are tied with us for second place. The only team we’ve lost to is the one they’ve lost to, three guys—six eight, six six and six one—who are returning starters from the state 4-A runner-up at Port Campbell High. They beat us to death, about 120–80, and they probably beat the En-Kays worse.

  Winfrey warns me that these guys play dirty, to watch my ass. I’ve seen them before, and I don’t need any warning.

  One of the black-haired guys hears us talking and picks up on the fact that I’m from out of town.

  “Hey, Luther,” he calls to his cousin-brother, “we play-in’ a Yankee. A Yankee and two Tyrones.” Tyrones is what they call black people down here now that it’s hazardous to your health to call them niggers right to their faces.

  “Where you from, Yankee?” Freckles asks.

  I tell him I’m from Virginia, where they actually fought the Civil War instead of waiting for Sherman to come through and kick their butts, and I’m embarrassed that I’d stoop to using that as a comeback. One of Mom’s favorite ongoing bitches is what a crime it is for the South to take pride in the Civil War, when they were like fighting to preserve slavery. But Blue and Winfrey don’t seem to take offense, and the crackers we’re playing just pick up on the Virginia part.

  “Whoa!” says Freckles. “We got us a Cavalier.”

  So for the duration of the game, I’m “Cavalier” instead of “Yankee.” Except they say it with a “b” instead of a “v.”

  The game is pretty close. These guys shouldn’t be in our league. Blue and Winfrey are much better players than the guys they’re guarding, and even I’m pretty much on a par with the shorter of the look-alikes. But we get rattled, which is what they wanted, I guess. They’re slamming us into the walls about three feet beyond the in-bounds lines on drives to the basket, and they call fouls for stuff that’s just ridiculous. When w
e appeal to the official, he’s like looking somewhere else. At the half, we lead 42–40 because Winfrey slams one in old Freckles’s face just before time runs out. They almost get in a fight over that.

  There aren’t any locker rooms. We just run to the water cooler and sit on the three rows of bleachers for the fifteen-minute break. I try to calm Winfrey down, although I’m as pissed as he is. He isn’t having any of it, though, just sits there glaring across the court at the En-Kays, who are glaring right back. We have a little bit of a crowd by now, with word somehow out that there’s scattered unpleasantness with a 60 percent chance of open hostility. The crowd is mostly white, something I haven’t noticed before, although the teams in this league are like fifty-fifty.

  The Y gym is a little oppressive. It doesn’t have air-conditioning, and the heat and additional bodies have taken the smell of the place well beyond the pleasant aroma of sweat socks and Ben-Gay and old wood into the general area of odor. The only thing that saves us from asphyxiation on hot summer afternoons like this is the fact that one of the three doors behind the basket we’re using is left open with a piece of wood wedged under it to keep it that way. These are the kinds of doors that lock from the inside when they close, so the one that’s open is where most of the spectators come in. A couple of times in the three weeks we’ve been playing, a ball has bounced outside, gone down the three sets of steps, rolled across the little street out front and wound up in the creek. Winfrey swears that a few years back, a ball with PORT CAMPBELL YMCA stenciled on it washed up at Wilson Beach, down below Newport, and they figured it must have like bounced out of the gym, down the hill, into the creek, then to the river and finally into the ocean. Winfrey’s been known to bullshit a little, though.

  In the second half, we build up like a ten-point lead pretty fast, but then Blue gets undercut by Freckles going up for a rebound and twists his ankle. Some teams bring along a fourth player, just in case, but we’re not smart enough to do that, so Blue has to like limp around in a lot of pain while we let these crackers back in the game.

  The official on our half court calls out the time every minute, then every fifteen seconds in the final minute. We play twenty-minute halves. When he yells, “Two minutes,” we’re tied 78—all. Winfrey calls a time-out, and we sit down on the edge of the bleachers, the six other black guys in the gym standing behind us, either for support or protection. I don’t know which. Blue says he can’t stay with his man, which it doesn’t take Dick Vitale to figure out. I say these jerks can’t shoot, so let’s like drop back in a zone near the basket, which is what we do. Unfortunately, one of the black-haired guys gets unconscious and hits two fifteen-foot jumpers while Winfrey gets a stickback for us. When the guy gives the one-minute signal, we’re down 82–80 and the En-Kays have the ball. They probably could kill most or all of the last minute just holding the ball, because Blue’s ankle is getting worse in a hurry, but they think they can toy with us now.

  “Switch back to man to man,” Winfrey hisses at us, and we do, because he usually knows what he’s doing. He and Blue exchange a look I don’t understand, and just before the ref calls “forty-five seconds,” the guy Blue is guarding goes around him like he’s standing still, which he is, and drives for what he figures will be the clincher. At the last second, when it’s too late to pass off, Winfrey slides over and gives the boy the most subtle little hip action I’ve ever seen on a basketball court, transferring all that forward motion into a slant that leads him toward the only opening in the gym. The ball is just leaving his hand when Winfrey gives him the hip. The shot bounces off the side of the rim as the boy goes out the open door. Blue follows the play and kicks the doorstop out. As the door slams shut, Winfrey passes outside to me, I pass back in to him for the slam, and we can hear the missing En-Kay banging on the door from the outside, hollering, “Foul! Let me in, goddammit! The nigger fouled me!”

  With the score tied, the other black-haired boy takes the ball out of bounds. All three of us are pressing now, and he has only one player to pass to—Freckles. To make things worse, Freckles can’t decide what he wants to do. First, he bitches at the ref, who has been shielded from the hip action by Blue and me and just wants to get the hell home anyhow. He shrugs and tells Freckles they have five seconds to inbound the ball. Then he starts counting. Freckles starts for the door, where his other teammate is still banging and screaming, but by the time he gets there and opens it, the count is three, going on four. The boy in-bounding the ball throws it into the crowd to keep from losing possession on a five-second count, and I catch it and lay it in: 84–82, O’s. The guy Winfrey pushed out of bounds is too busy getting in his face to notice that the time has slipped under fifteen seconds. Freckles in-bounds to the other black-haired boy, and he throws it back to Freckles, who is Winfrey’s man. So Winfrey’s guarding Freckles, but the boy he pushed out of bounds is still giving him hell, so it looks like double-teaming in reverse, with Blue not having to guard anybody. Freckles tries to pass back to my man, but he’s distracted by the other guy trying to fight Winfrey. So when he does pass the ball, it’s pretty easy for me to step in front of the guy I’m guarding and pick it off. I dribble around for the last five seconds and throw up a ten-footer at the buzzer, just for grins, and it goes in, giving me about 10 of our 86 points. Designated white boy, they call me.

  All-out war is about to break out on the court, with me paired off against the shorter of the black-haired boys. We push and shove a little until this really big black guy, who turns out to be Blue’s older brother, grabs me and shoves me out the front door. He’s already picked up all our stuff, and the other five black guys there allow us to get out before people start putting on white sheets and burning crosses.

  “I was wonderin’ when you all were going to get around to using the open-door policy,” he tells Blue, giving him and us a smile that, combined with a nose that’s like pushed halfway into his skull, is meaner than a lot of frowns I’ve seen. Nobody, Winfrey tells me later, messes with Blue’s brother. His name’s Connie, and Winfrey says his friends like to get strangers in bars to ask him what he does. He says Connie puts down his beer bottle, smiles that I’d-be-pleased-to-rip-your-lungs-out smile and says, “I knock suckers out!” I’ll bet he does, too.

  The three of us stop at Hardee’s for burgers and fries, then go down to the park, where I get the joints out of my bag. I don’t think Winfrey and Blue smoked a lot of dope before I got here, because it really gets to them once they get the hang of inhaling. I brought enough down to get high a little every night for a couple of months, but now I cut back some on personal consumption to share with the Geddies. What are friends for?

  Anyhow, we smoke three joints among us, and we are pretty messed up. We’re like pumped up over what we did to the En-Kays, and Winfrey finally tells me what En-Kays stands for. Nigger-Killers. This strikes us as so funny that we fall down and start rolling around in the wet grass. Blue forgets he’s sprained his ankle until he stands up all of a sudden to go piss. He screams and falls in a heap, and this just makes us laugh that much harder. I almost roll into the river.

  We go back to Hardee’s for shakes, ’cause we’ve got the munchies worse than anything. Hardee’s, I should tell you, is where the black people hang out on the east side of Port Campbell. White people hang out at the Burger King up the street. Sometimes, somebody white who’s taken a turn off the interstate looking for food will turn into Hardee’s by mistake, and it’s funny to see how tight-assed they look when they loop around the parking lot and realize that they’re in what Winfrey calls the jungle. I just sit kind of low and quiet when we’re here. My out-of-town status kind of gives me diplomatic immunity, I guess.

  We head out of Hardee’s about ten o’clock. I’m thinking that Granddaddy might be worried. He locks up at eleven, and he can’t understand what there is to do that time of night that isn’t meanness, as he calls it. But he doesn’t ride me very hard. He makes me help around the house, and I’ve cut the grass and picked some peas
and beans, although I’m so slow that even he can outpick me. If you do a job bad enough, Trey always says, after a while they won’t make you do it anymore. I miss old Trey. I miss old Marcia even more. I sent her two letters; got one postcard that didn’t say much.

  We take the Old Geddie Road. It seems to me that even the roads are like segregated down here. Black people take the old narrow one that kind of slides down from the center line to the shoulders, which are like eight inches wide, while the whites use Highway 47, which is four-lane almost all the way to Geddie and straight as a string. Old Geddie is where the towns got started, Granddaddy told me. The church there, which looks like a strong wind would blow it over, is the one the white people built right after the Civil War. They sold it to the black congregation a long time ago and built a new one, which looks pretty old to me, nearer to East Geddie. Now, Old Geddie seems to be just about all black, except for this new white housing development called Geddie’s Branch that’s on a new road running back of the church. Winfrey says they’re building a gate at the entrance to it “to keep the natives out.”

  Winfrey stops at the 7-Eleven where the Old Geddie Road forks off Highway 47, and we all buy Cokes. Winfrey and Blue buy the kind in bottles, so they can hit road signs with them on the way home, which is like a major sport around here. It’s not hard when you’re sitting on the passenger side, but Winfrey can flip a bottle from the driver’s seat over the top of the car going 55 and whump! just knock hell out of a sign on the right-hand side.