Purchase
Page 7
But even for all this, I couldn’t abide his idea for driving up on old John Hill’s ancestral home and shooting away at it. He’d been enamored with this design ever since crossing the Chesapeake. Then with us creeping down all the while on it, I could just smell the blood lust rising in him the more he thought on it, and his eyes sort of glazed over the closer we come as the fog I’d seen in him with Jessico was raised up again. Of course, it was mad, the idea, and I’d railed against it from the start and only determined to let him drive once we was far enough away and low enough on gas he couldn’t get anywheres anyways, forfeiting whatever plan he still had devised in him. So here we were. Outside Gum Spring, and I slid over finally to give him his chance.
Easy now, I said, as I kept my hand on the wheel while he steered sort of wobbly and all over the road for it was mainly just pocked dirt anyways and the wheels skidded ever which way as he was so undetermined in the path he meant to follow. Soon enough we were heartened to see the lights blazing from an Esso gas station still open at that late hour. (Now forgive me if I repose here a moment and mention it is awful difficult recalling what to tell straight and honest, especially with it being my Virginia we was driving into the heart of. I don’t want to overplay too much my reluctance in traveling this way in the least, nor undersell it neither, even if it pains me to paint a picture of the vagaries of my home state. But I know it must be done, and it’s not in the least a surprise to anyone now, surely. For I still loved her, my Virginia, and still called her home and knew all about her positives and negatives, and at first, we thought seeing that gas station so open and bright was about as positive as could be. But when we coasted up to the pump and stopped there with a sad little squeak of the brakes, not a soul was to be had, and I got another suspicion entire in my mind. And that’s the sad truth of it.)
As A.D. leaned out and listened to the engine tick, we noticed the road going off into blackness as the shadows from some vast brightness threw down its wavering shape from some great height beyond us, something swirling and free behind the stark white-washed walls of the station. It was just a shack really, raised up on red bricks as most stations were then, with one pump out front on one side and a bucket and metal spigot rusted over on the other. But as I stepped out of the car to implore the station master or serving boy or whoever might appear at that late hour, something come to me a sudden. It was as a wind. Or a great ripping strain. Something hovering high above the trees, and it shook me tolerable to hear it and to know I had to creep closer to see it. Just to know.
There was a clearing out back. A few picnic tables were scattered in the tall grass and just before the woods started in earnest sloping into the hills, there it was, as stark and undisguised as you could believe. It towered over everything, some thirty feet high, blazing as tall and clear as the polestar—the biggest and brightest burning cross I’d ever seen. Standing stock still and alone as if a sentry to the unrecovered night. The line of trees flared up, singed and smoking, as the flames rose and swirled and it looked as if all the spirits of the world were being summoned up together and consumed by it. A thousand million white thumbprints fluttered by in the air. They even brushed against my cheek the closer I crept, and were taken up into the howling swirl, into that white hot vortex of heat. As I seen them levitate and rise up before me, alighting and twisting and curling, I couldn’t help but take another step closer and then another to hear the snapping, sizzling, fizz of all them gathered in by the flames, as of the dead to their unimagined pyre.
Moths.
So many moths I’d never seen and they were being snatched up by the millions as the blaze sucked the very marrow from the mountains. A.D. stood beside me and touched his head and was sweating and I didn’t see another person for my eyes began to blur and blink and yet I felt the eyes of the hills upon me surely. It was as if they’d been on me my whole life, marking and tracking my kind as if we were nothing more than cattle or hogs. And as I gathered up my wits again, and hurried to the car, we filled her up as fast as we could and left a shiny new quarter on the pump as if to spell our efforts—as an appeasement perhaps, or settlement that I could not know—and I let him drive all the rest of that night as I lay in the back and just watched it all go by. O I watched it and felt it and interred it for what it was, and what a night it was to watch! To see how it all lurched past. Here is how it went:
In great chunks it rose up, the road. There would be nothing for stretches. Just landscape or an occasional barn sketched in silhouette, etched with its dark geometry of sides. Or a long skeletal fence would stretch off for miles. Cattle would then low way out in their lament as raw and mean as the echoing Earth. Then a mangy pack of dogs would slink away from the sound of the engine and all the gleaming green eyes would glint in the sweeping yellow lights as I alone slumped back in my seat and seemed to keep vigil on the world’s fevered passing, for I thought about all those moths rising up again and again. All the little moths spinning into the night, swirling into their infinite demise as A.D. spoke to me at first about the wheel and the gears and the route, but there were no words for me to reply with. Then he spoke to me not at all, as he’d finally acquired the rhythm of the road and the world raced by. Pale muddy sheets drifted in the open windows as he slowed on the main streets of Charlottesville and Lynchburg and Bedford before turning down. Maneuvering through the starkness of souls and towns and sleeping history to slow from the queasy blur of forty miles per to a creeping ten or even five as the eyes of vagrants and drunkards watched slack-jawed and astonished as a white one drove a black one along the ridge in the predawn light.
IX
Norfolk and Western Railway ~This grand elusive thing ~ Dangling in his stupor ~ The fog descends ~ So far down in Dixie already ~ A.D. has no idea of the situation ~ The flames of Hades ~ I was the Mabry he mentioned ~ My little Lucy girl ~ Mine
MAVIS GAVE US THE SONG STRAIGHT AWAY. It was easy. We found him after we stopped near an open market with the vendors just setting out their wares and all A.D. had to do was inquire to some of the folks gathering there if they’d seen Mavis or knew his kind. Sure enough they looked at one another and then dropped their heads in the naming of it before looking back up at him and directing him to the closest and most frequented colored saloon in town. We weren’t but three blocks from it. Tucked away as it was on the right side of Patterson Ave. between the Roanoke River and the Norfolk and Western Railway.
It weren’t nothing to me, he said, as we found him half-lit and still drinking even with the sunlight already cresting the Blue Ridge and the bartender himself half asleep but still pouring shots, still pouring ale to whoever wanted it or inquired. Old Mavis was broad in the belly and smiled all the while, with his eyes so swallowed up in that rich black face of his I can’t rightly say if he did or didn’t have eyes. But I sure never seen them. Almost at once he up and says old Jessico was half-crazed and mad and for all those rantings and ravings he’d made about his last will and testament and other such documents he didn’t have but one notebook of nonsense to give Mavis anyways. And a few scrawled on napkins with words and little pencil doodles of hens and chickens on them. So that when he laid it all out in front of A.D. all he had to do was buy Mavis another shot to take away the pages he found with the words Jessico had sung and that A.D. was in such a fever to get.
O it was a beautiful song, surely. A tale of the most unrequited love A.D. had ever read and so sweated over to compose but couldn’t. As it was probably his first ever love to begin with, so he didn’t have the words yet in him to know what it was nor what it meant. But there it all was for him in its entirety and A.D. held the pages to his breast and stood silent near the bar and mumbled something as he scanned all of it again. He had to wipe his eyes as he recited the lines and then hummed the tune he remembered Jessico had strung to it with his deep rich baritone.
I was so happy for him to finally see it, and to end this mad search for this grand elusive thing—which was nothing more than a paltry little
scrap of paper anyways with the inklings of that drunken lunatic on it—though I knew it was probably just the beginning of what it could mean for A.D., and for us, I guess you could say. For I’d never seen such a startling change in a man to hold a thing so meek—and so quick!
He practically set on the floor as I kept it up with Mavis to pump him for any information now that he’d been in Roanoke a spell and knew most the folks and had come and gone as much as half-a-dozen times the last few weeks traveling and delivering his wares as he called them. Though I knew rightly well what it was he delivered—Jessico’s crates of bootleg whiskey. I also sought to leach out any news he might have heard from Annapolis before he left. Anything about the Peabody in Baltimore and the fire there recently consumed. O I needed to get my bearings. I was already in the land of my birth, a land where I stood accused of murder and was just now returning with another murder hovering above me and arson to boot and needed to know if they’d sent out my name. If they’d broadsheeted it to the hills. If there were any pictures of me and A.D. and sworn affidavits from maybe old John Hill Carter, Mr. Vickers, and Dr. Alpionaire all typed out in brash, smudgy ink.
Lucky for me, the bartender stirred from his slumber just then because Mavis hadn’t heard a word I’d said. In fact, he’d slumped over after the last shot and was dangling from his stool and would probably fall to the floor in another minute. Well, of course, I seen Mavis had the Sun in his back pocket and that it was from only two days ago printed up in Baltimore and that it couldn’t help us none anyways to have the news from then. So I straightened him back up and put his brown derby over his eyes and took the Roanoke World News instead that the bartender was just then throwing out. With it, I followed A.D. into the fresh air of the new day as he was intent on moving us on into the heated direction of his needs.
Because wasn’t that just like him? Always on the go for his needs, always in a sweat. I hadn’t even spread out the front section along the dash before he was driving through the streets as if he’d lived in Roanoke his whole life. I looked on him and seen that sort of blaze in his eyes again. That fog falling down when he got so concentrated and charged in his pursuits, and knew he must have talked to someone in there even though I hadn’t seen him consort with none except maybe old Mavis. And even then he didn’t seem to have the occasion to do so or the ability to comport himself with any other in that respect. And yet, he seemed to know just where he wanted to go. The whole while he didn’t speak nor turn his head, but just hummed as if he had a tune he’d just learned and needed to repeat to the end of him so as not to lose it. The car responded beautifully now to his attentions for his hands were of the wheel and his feet of the pedals, and as I sat back and scanned the news I didn’t run across anything untoward, and certainly nothing concerning our names or general description, and rested easy to know it. That had me backing off considerable in my mania of being collared by the law so far down in Dixie already. Yet when we turned the next corner, and he brought the car up to the curb, I had to sweat again to consider our present predicament.
He’d parked right in front of the local police station. I don’t think he knew it nor cared in the least, he was in such a state. As he got out, he grabbed the rifle and was hefting it aloft when I leaned over from inside to grab at his belt loop to stop him. But he was already racing off without even looking back to hear me in my anguish. For sure enough here comes a police cruiser pulling up not three feet from where we sat and a tall man with dark sunglasses and a waxed mustache was leaning out with his mean white face.
The officer said something to A.D. I couldn’t hear. But as the man’s engine shut and his car door opened, I certainly heard his Chippewa boots grind the gravel as he sauntered all slow and steady as if reconnoitering our position. He was taller than A.D. by a spell, and that took some doing, and had the rifle from him in an instant because I suppose he’d asked for it and A.D. complied. All the while I wanted to slink down into the seat curling up on the floorboards into a little ink spot so he wouldn’t see me nor inquire as to our purposes. I didn’t rightly know what to say. Only A.D. knew that (if he ever did). But I guess he must have told him something because the officer laughed and lifted his dark sunglasses to his forehead and then sighted far off on a fencepost. He breathed then slow and steady for what seemed like ages before sure enough CRACK CRACK there goes the rifle and the fencepost blusters up into dust at the top and that old boy laughs again and pats A.D. on the back. Setting his sunglasses back down on his nose, he pointed to a shack then that A.D. hadn’t seen before. Well, I seen right away it was open because it had a bright little blue light out front and realized A.D. was only taking me to a pawn broker right next to the police station to trade something for the rifle.
To think, I bore all that anxiety over something as trivial as a pawn shop. I had a mind to tell A.D. about it when I stepped out of the car after he called me, but felt right away that good old boy watching me as sure as Sunday and just knew. Don’t they always? Don’t they? They get the scent of something suspicious as any bloodhound, and I guarantee he watched me, peering through them dark portals over his eyes the whole while I caught up to A.D. Because I could still feel that officer’s gaze penetrating the walls to watch a nigger in his own town chase after a white man with a rifle. I hadn’t missed that at all up in Baltimore, no sir. Not in the last seven years, and I wanted to tell A.D. about it, too, and ask him what they’d said to each other, carrying on as they had. But he was already hefting the rifle to the countertop where a potato-looking man was running his fingers over the stock, squinting his eyes up to smell the freshly-singed gunpowder.
Was that you just now shooting the fencepost? he said, and lifted the sight to see, aiming through the shack at a display of bicycles and baby prams all missing wheels or handlebars or gears.
No, sir, A.D. said. Officer just took it and wanted to see. Thought he might want to buy it his own self, but he just fired it and walked off.
Hmmpf, the man said and I wasn’t sure if that was a good hmmpf or a bad hmmpf, and neither did A.D. But already A.D. was checking out the instruments arranged along one side of the store. In particular, he eyed a red Martin guitar that had a beautiful rosewood fret board and ivory-tipped tuning pegs that I so wanted to touch and strum, but surely I didn’t do it. I didn’t move an inch so that old potato-looking man couldn’t question me nor ask nothing least he confers with that old officer out there about me and something truly untoward starts to gather around us. That was how it happened, for sure. That was how it always happened down here, and I knew it and stood stock-still and played dumb and would have only talked if talked to, even if I seen A.D. had no idea as to the situation.
He was touching that red guitar, and then moved on to a black shiny Stella that was dinged up a bit about the body, but serviceable. He strummed his hands along the strings and a sharp twang raised up in the air and the potato-looking man stopped his fiddling long enough to listen to the twangy tinny sound. It was so obviously off a half step, I had a notion to raise up my hand to go tune it but then here comes that old officer stomping in through the door as if he held the whole world in his hand. He still had on his sunglasses, and looked at me and just leveled his head and stared and I didn’t turn an inch to feel him interrogating me with that hidden gaze of his turned up like the flames of Hades. As he did, a soft pitiful. No, sir rose up in the center of me as clear as day. Even though I hadn’t said it. Even though I hadn’t spoken a word. It was just there, from time immemorial, and was something my body must have felt deep in its muscles and needed to express because it was all it knew how to do, and that made me flinch to feel it. To still feel so abused and low inside after all those years. Well, then the potato-looking man stopped for sure since he seen me flinch, and with the officer already so close, I thought he’d heard me, too, though it might have only been my heartbeat that alerted A.D. to any trouble. Even though I knew he couldn’t have possibly heard it though it nearly ruptured my ears.
Th
at’s okay, Mabry, A.D. said, not looking up. He was strumming another guitar, something I hadn’t seen before. Something almost like a steel body shining in the light like a beacon, and so I could see straight away how taken A.D. was with it. Though he must of seen my face in the reflection, for I was already sweating considerable and melting to be so inspected like that, so close to those two men. You can wait in the car, he said. This here won’t take but a minute.
I looked up at him then and seen the slightest smirk on his lips and knew that I was the Mabry he was speaking of and that he was meant to be in charge of me. Turning slow and solemn then, with my head bowed like a good nigger, I walked past that officer’s gaze not once turning nor looking up and it all dripped by like molasses, the time. For surely it felt like I was sliding my hand across a razor blade, the process was such a torture and wreck. That even when the walk to the car seemed to take another half-day at least, and the air was burdensome and syrupy, I still felt inspected by them old boys. But finally I made it to the driver’s side and breathed out my sorrow and torment. Even though I probably only set there another five minutes, it felt like five years till A.D. finally comes out smiling and laughing as if nothing untoward in the whole world had transpired, and lo, what is dangling from his hands—not one but two guitars in their worn leather cases.
I DROVE AFTER THAT. From then on A.D. sat in the back and was on his guitar (the red one) nonstop, and had that song beside him scribbling and working it, searching for a way to string a tune to it that he didn’t even notice when I left Roanoke behind. To never feel that officer’s gaze no more was all I wanted, it had unsettled me so, and so I started thinking of my old home. How I’d lived there free and unfettered with my family, at least before all that Hackett mess, and damned if I didn’t get a need to see it again, after all those years. For Bristol was my intention now. Bristol my home and torment, my loss and gain, for I figured even Bristol would have been better than that old Roanoke. In Bristol, I knew I was an outlaw, and wouldn’t have to wonder who else knew it or cared. And yet, in seeing how it was another 150 miles down the ridge, and I had nothing to occupy me, as A.D. might have only spoken one more word in all that time, he was so concentrated on that song, I got to thinking about Annie again. And my sweet Lucy.