Littlejohn

by Howard Owen

  Tonight, though, Winfrey’s a little crazy. As we come up to the only curve on the Old Geddie Road, which has a creek just before it, Blue’s already smacked a 35-MPH sign pretty good with his empty, and Winfrey just keeps waving his bottle around and yelling. He almost throws it into a crowd of girls who look like they’re walking back from town. When we reach the bridge, which goes over this half-assed creek, it makes that rumbling, hollow sound these bridges make when you drive over them, and Winfrey flings the bottle toward the railing on the left side.

  I don’t know what happens, but what probably happens is that when Winfrey swings his arm left, he pulls the steering wheel of the Vega with his other arm. Just over the bridge, the road curves right to miss some farmer’s cornfield. We go left.

  When we leave the road, we clear the ditch in the air, and I guess we’d have been okay, but something’s wrong with Winfrey, because we’re bouncing along through this field at like 40 miles an hour, except it feels like 100, and he’s not stopping.

  “Stop, Winfrey! Stop, man!” Either I’m screaming or Blue’s screaming, but Winfrey’s hit his head on the side of the car or something, and his foot’s still on the accelerator. All this doesn’t take long, but it seems like forever. They have these big irrigation ditches around here, like Granddaddy’s crop ditch, and there’s one straight ahead. I’m in the backseat and Blue’s on the right up front, what they call the suicide seat, and just before we hit, I duck down, because I don’t know what else to do.

  The crash is like nothing I could have imagined. When we look at the ditch the next day, you can hardly tell where we hit, but the Vega is, as Granddaddy puts it, “tore all to pieces.”

  At first after we hit, it’s very quiet. I can’t figure out what’s happening, because I’m looking up at the stars, and my face is all wet. Then I taste the blood. And my nose is starting to ache. I hear voices that sound like they’re beneath me. Winfrey asks Blue if he’s all right, and Blue doesn’t answer. They’re under me, somehow, and I can smell this smell like when the hose burst on Dad’s car on the way from the beach that time.

  Finally, I hear Blue moan, like he’s in a world of pain. It feels wet underneath me, and every time I move, Blue moans like I’m hurting him. It takes me awhile to figure out that the front of the car is pointing down and to one side, and I’m looking backward, out the rear window. One back door is up in the air and the other is buried in the ground, so that I can’t get to one and the other one won’t open.

  “I’m sorry, Blue. I’m sorry,” Winfrey keeps saying, and Blue’s not saying much of anything. I can just barely see Winfrey’s face, and it’s a mess. He doesn’t even seem to see me, he’s so worried about Blue. What I finally do is roll the glass down on the low side of the car, the driver’s side, and crawl out. I can’t breathe through my nose and my head hurts, but it doesn’t seem like anything is really wrong. I get Winfrey out through the window, too, finally. He must have hit the windshield with his face, and he’s a little out of it. I get him to sit down in the field, right on a corn row by the ditch bank, then I go back to check on Blue. He’s all crumpled up on the high side of the front seat, and his leg’s bent back. I try to get him to move, but he says it hurts too much. I tell him not to move, that I’ll get help. It occurs to me that if the car catches fire, he’ll burn to death before anyone can get him out, but I don’t mention that and try not to think about it.

  I tell Winfrey I’m going for help and head for the road, except I have no idea which way it is. I run through corn taller than I am for what seems like at least five minutes before I get out of that field, and then I can’t get anybody to stop. Cars going by slow down, see my face and speed up. The first two houses I go to belong to black people who don’t even want to talk to a white boy who looks like he’s gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

  Finally, on the third try, I get lucky. It’s this black guy and his family in a mobile home with one of those black-tongued chows on a chain in front. The dog wants me so bad, he’s about to pull the metal stake he’s attached to right out of the ground. But the guy says, “Hush that fuss, Polly,” and the mutt calms down, probably out of embarrassment. I tell the guy what happened and he calls the fire department, which is also like the rescue squad out here. It takes them fifteen minutes to get there, and it takes us another half hour to find Winfrey and Blue because, idiot that I am, I forget to make any note of where we were in the state’s biggest cornfield.

  They follow the tracks of the car after I finally remember to tell them that we went off just past the bridge, and when we get there, Winfrey is like next to the car, talking to Blue, telling him not to worry and not to die. They get the farmer that owns the land to get out of bed and open his gate so they can move an ambulance near the wreck, and by the time they get Blue out, it must be like two in the morning. They put all three of us in the ambulance, and when we get to the hospital, Granddaddy is already there. He looks awful; I don’t guess he’s been up this late in his life. Cousin Jenny and Harold, her husband, are there. They’ve driven Granddaddy. He’s trying to be calm, but his hands are shaking and he looks like he’s about to cry.

  “I’m okay, Granddaddy, I’m fine,” I keep telling him, and he keeps asking me am I sure. All of the Geddies are there, and they’re huddled together on the other side of the emergency room. They take Blue right in, but it’s like another half hour before they take care of me and Winfrey, since we obviously aren’t going to die. But Jenny and Harold are after the admitting nurse on one side and Winfrey’s mother is after them on the other, and finally they take care of us.

  It turns out that Winfrey has a concussion and is cut up pretty badly around his lip and over one eye. I have a broken nose and a couple of little cuts. After we get stitched up, Blue’s brother pulls Winfrey aside and is talking to him pretty intensely, and Winfrey is just shrugging and shaking his head. Blue’s brother doesn’t speak to me, but he gives me a look that indicates I won’t be getting a Christmas card from him this year.

  It turns out that Blue has a compound fracture of his left leg, which got pretty mangled when the front of the car crunched into that ditch bank at forty miles an hour. The doctor says he’ll walk again, but that basketball is over. They haven’t told him yet.

  The next day, a state trooper comes by Granddaddy’s to get my statement as to what happened. I don’t know what Winfrey and Blue have said, so I try to be as general as I can. Then he gets down to it.

  “We found a butt from a marijuana cigarette in the ashtray, Justin,” he says. He’s called me Mr. Bowman up to this point. It’s like he’s changing gears, like now we can get cozy and talk about what really needs talking about. “To your knowledge, was either one of those colored boys using drugs?”

  I give him as emphatic a no as I can muster with a broken nose and six stitches. I tell him that I had never seen either one of them smoking dope. Damn, I’m thinking, I can’t believe we left roaches in the ashtray. But I stick to my story, because I’m sure Winfrey and Blue won’t waver on this part. Finally, the trooper leaves, but I’m like thinking he might be back. A roach probably won’t be enough to convict anybody of anything, but if he can get somebody to say that Winfrey was driving stoned, he could go to jail.

  It’s just starting to hit me what we’ve done to Blue. Granddaddy has been very quiet through all this, and especially the part about the roaches. He sees the trooper to the back screen door and watches the black-and-gray car make a dust trail up the rut road to the highway. Then he comes back in the living room.

  “Justin,” he says, without any beating around the bush, “what’s in that green tin box at the bottom of your backpack?”

  It never occurred to me to hide it any better than that. Granddaddy doesn’t seem like the snoopy kind. But now he’s got me, and he knows it. He can probably see guilt in big block letters all over my face.

  It turns out that he never opened it. He just saw it there when he was getting my clothes out to wash some of them the first we
ek I was here. I hid the dope box back behind some underwear, and he must have heard it clang when he was moving the backpack around. But I have never been able to lie well, and by the time I know he hasn’t opened it, I’ve already confessed.

  “So you got them boys messed up on drugs, and now one of them is ruined for life, is that about it?” Granddaddy sure gets to the point in a hurry, never raising his voice. I try to explain to him that marijuana is like something everybody my age does, and that it doesn’t hurt you, but that part kind of gets caught in my throat. I beg him not to tell the police, and he says he won’t, but not because of me. He says he’d like to see me spend a few days in jail. Might straighten me out. But he doesn’t want “the colored boys” to suffer anymore.

  “You’ve made them suffer enough, I reckon,” he says.

  So this is like Saturday. I just sit there and he just sits there, me in my room and him on the porch. By midafternoon, it’s broiling, but I just don’t want to be anywhere where anybody can see me, especially Granddaddy. He’s made me get rid of the dope, which I flush down the toilet. He looks at it, afraid to touch it, like he’s seeing the weed from hell. Jenny and Harold come by for a while, but they see that nobody feels much like talking.

  Mom’s back in Montclair, just flew in on Friday, and she’s coming down here for a couple of weeks before she has to get ready for fall semester. I’m wondering how this is going to go over with her. When Granddaddy asks me how I think my mother will feel about this, I swallow the urge to tell him the first people I ever saw smoke dope were Mom and Dad and their friends, when I was a little kid. They quit doing it when I got older, so that Mom’s and my dope-smoking days didn’t really overlap, at least as far as I know. But I’m not into coke or crack or anything like that, and I never felt like Mom would like slash her wrists if she knew I was getting high once in a while. Until Mark the Narc came along, she took pretty much a live-and-let-live attitude.

  Granddaddy says he isn’t going to tell her about any of this now, because he doesn’t want to upset her before she gets in the car to drive down here. But that doesn’t mean he won’t tell her later.

  I fall asleep on the cot back in my room, and about six o’clock, Granddaddy wakes me up. I’m sweating like a pig, and when I look at my watch, which somehow still works, I can’t believe that twenty-four hours ago, Winfrey and Blue and I were just taking the court against the En-Kays. I think again about what Winfrey told me that stood for, and I have to stifle a laugh in spite of everything. Then I think of Blue, and all of a sudden, I can’t stop crying. It’s the most embarrassing thing, but at least Granddaddy shows a little sympathy.

  It takes me a good fifteen minutes to stop, and when I do, he tells me, “You and me have got to talk. Let’s go down to the rock.”

  So I help him find the truck keys, which are never, ever where he thinks they are, and help him down the steps, which is silly, because he does this like a million times without me or anybody else to help him, and we get in his truck. He drives east down the dirt road and turns left on the trail Kenny took when we went to the cemetery that day. He stops the truck as close to the Rock of Ages as he can get and walks over toward it. I follow.

  “You have been careless, Justin,” he says when he finally gets his breath and gets settled, leaning back against the rock and looking east, out across the berry fields into the sandhills, which really do look blue this time of day. “This is a good place and a good time to tell somebody, finally, what carelessness can do. And you seem like the right person to tell.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  August 8

  Nobody knows where the Hittites come from.

  Some people claim they was what happened to the Lost Colony, when the white folks went off, or was carried off, and mixed with the Indians. Some say they are descended from Portuguese sailors that come up from Florida even before the English got here, and settled amongst the Indians. Some say they come from thieves and murderers that run off and hid in Kinlaw’s Hell and raised their families there. Some claim the first Hittites was Frenchmen that fled their revolution. And some say they come from hell.

  There ain’t many of them left anymore. Or at least, they have scattered and married outsiders so that you can’t hardly tell who they are now. I’ll read something in the Post ever now and then where some Formy-Duval has been arrested for breaking and entering, or a Boudrow has got married or a Devoe got hit by a car up in Eagle Grove. They seem to be all over the place now. I used to could pick them out walking up High Street when we’d go to town, but now everybody’s so mixed up that you can’t tell the whites from the coloreds from the Lumbees from the Hittites.

  Nobody even knows why they’re named that. Momma said they told her that it was because of the Hittites in the Old Testament that the Israelites had to fight to get back the Promised Land. Maybe the first folks from England or Scotland that come across the Hittites was reminded of that story. I’m right sure they had to fight them if they come anywhere close.

  We used to have this little song that the boys would sing at recess:

  A white man, he shoots with a gun,

  a nigger will cut you and run,

  a Lumbee will cut you if you look at him wrong,

  and a Hittite will cut you for fun.

  They was crazy people, and they lived in a crazy place.

  If you was to go east from Maxwell’s Millpond, you’d finally come to the East Branch, which runs into the Campbell just this side of Newport. Up this far, you can walk across the East Branch just about anywhere, and when you do, you’re on the outskirts of Kinlaw’s Hell.

  The swamp, which is just a part of the Blue Sandhills that’s lower than the rest, runs for twenty miles, near-bout halfway to the ocean. It’s got bogs and pocosins and about eight billion water moccasins. It got its name because a fella named Kinlaw is said to have walked in there one day to pick huckleberries. He got lost, and was gone for four days. On the fifth day, two boys on a farm clear down at Saraw come across him lying at the edge of the first cleared field on the other side of the swamp.

  “Boys,” he’s supposed to of said, “my name’s Kinlaw, and I just been through hell.” And when they looked at the back of his ankle, there was this big old cottonmouth that he must of drug for miles. He died right after that. At least, that’s the story they tell. It is a scary place. The moss hangs from the cypresses and bay trees, and briars seem like they come out of nowhere to smack you across the face. Daddy got lost in there one time when he was deer hunting, and when he finally got back after dark, one of his eyes was all bloody. It was about the only time I ever seen him scared.

  A couple of miles east of the East Branch is the Marsay Pond. There’s a paved road in there now from Cool Spring, but back then, a trail was all there was, and folks would get ambushed along that trail. They used to say that the Hittites was cannibals and would put you in a pot and eat you if you wandered over there, but that was just to scare the young-uns, I’m mostly sure.

  The Marsay Pond is right much bigger than Maxwell’s Millpond, about three miles across. Me and Lafe saw it one time when we was hunting over there, about a year before he died. We come through this clearing and there was the biggest lake we’d ever seen. We’d heard tell of it, but we couldn’t believe that this big old lake wasn’t but six or seven miles from home and we’d never seen it. And there was little houses, more like huts, built right over the water, so that you could of took a pole and fished right off the back porch. There must of been a hundred of them, all with unpainted boards and rusted-out tin roofs. The water, when we looked down at where it lapped over the white sand around our feet, was dark, like rust or blood, even darker than the millpond. We could see women and children in these little shacks, which was maybe two hundred yards away, but we didn’t see no men around. When one of the women that was looking our way started pointing and yelling over to the woman at the shack next to hers, we got on out of there. We didn’t want to be anybody’s dinner.

  The Hit
tites didn’t go to school, at least not back then. They was supposed to, I’m sure, but nobody in the state department of education was crazy enough to go back there and tell them that. They had a funny accent, and when one would come to work in East Geddie at the sawmill, folks would come around just to hear him talk.

  The first Scotsmen that come up the East Branch must of been dumbstruck to find all these folks with dark skin and black, straight hair, so black that it looks blue when the sunlight hits it. Some folks called them Blue Hairs. When I hear somebody call a old lady a blue hair, it always confuses me for a second. All the Hittite men I ever saw back then had lean, bony faces, beards and thick eyebrows that met in the middle. They was hairier than the Indians and looked more white, somehow. They said that the Hittites was good-natured folks so long as they wasn’t drunk or you didn’t upset them, in which case they would as soon kill you as spit.

  The women had the same dark complexion and straight, blue-black hair, the same long faces, but on them what was fearsome in the men was real pretty. And Angora was the prettiest one I ever saw.

  In November, Daddy would let us have Saturdays off to go hunting sometimes, which was a nice change from cutting ditch bank. That morning, Lafe said he had plans of his own. He had been acting right peculiar, slipping off when we had a free day, or sometimes in the evening, and not telling anybody, not even me, what he was up to. He had got real quiet.

  This time, though, I was bound and determined to go with him. I followed him down past Rennie’s, across Lock’s Branch and into the sandhills. He wasn’t too happy about it, but Lafe was too good-natured to stay mad for long.