He covered the boy with his usher’s jacket, then pulled from his overalls the photo of Shirley Temple. Her smiling face was perfect. Perfectly asleep. Walt wished he’d never seen her as Philadelphia, kissing soldiers. He laid the photo beside Calvin’s cheek.
Sleep, child, he thought, and don’t never wake up.
Walt threw ball after ball, knocked the slats off a wooden bench, cracked veins in the market’s window, detonated a hubcap off the Chevy’s wheel. Glass shrapnel glinted on the sidewalks. Balls dotted the square like a town bombarded by cannon.
Soon the truck bed was empty. Without waking the boy, Lonnie eased the last ball from Calvin’s arms. It shone like black glass, a gold star etched around the finger holes.
“Hollywood special,” Lonnie said, offering it to Walt.
Walt sank his fingers through the star. He bolted forward and hurled, and shortly came the clatter of glass from the dress shop window in the rear of the square. Hep yawped like a cowboy. Lonnie tore down the hill, and Walt followed, howling, his arms swimming, and Lonnie was far ahead and plucked a ball from a gutter and heaved it through the barbershop’s door. Then the road flattened and Walt lost his feet and flopped into the flower beds at the base of the copper soldier.
Walt watched Georgette run by, hair loose in her face. She chucked a ball off her thigh and through the bakery’s window. Hep climbed onto the hood of a Buick, slammed a ball against its roof. The post office windows were laced with wire and Frances tossed the same ball, again and again, until the glass folded like a frozen blanket.
Walt took his feet. A copper face, bearded and stern, glowered above him. The soldier did not carry a rifle, but instead an enormous book lay open in its hands. Lonnie called for Walt from inside the dress shop. Walt stared up into the soldier’s face. Beneath a short-billed cap its eyes blazed, transfixed on the book. Walt grabbed an unbending arm and lifted himself. But the pages were unreadable, weathered smooth and corroded. He ran his fingers over the cool metal, musing how someday this statue would be gone, and all these buildings and all these roads.
The square was momentarily still. Then Lonnie hollered his name again, and Walt dropped to the ground and raced across the road and the sidewalk of shattered glass.
Inside the dress shop, Lonnie was nude but for a white bonnet, strutting with a hand on his hip and Frances on his arm in a pink fringed dress. Hep skipped ahead of them, tossing panties as a flower girl would petals. Georgette swayed naked before a trifold mirror, slow-dancing. Then Frances was beside Walt, laughing, saying she needed a bridesmaid, pulling a dress over his head. Her laughter was warm but Walt didn’t laugh and off came his fedora.
She tossed it to Lonnie and stretched a wig over Walt’s skull. Lonnie ran with the fedora, chasing Georgette. She shrieked, pale breasts bobbing, then Frances’s face was in front of Walt’s saying, “You’re so beautiful, Walt,” and Walt didn’t want Georgette to wear his hat and ran after Lonnie through the racks of dresses.
Clothes smacked Walt’s shoulders and face. He ran desperate but couldn’t catch his brother, on through the back and toward the front washed in milky moonlight. Glass crunched beneath Walt’s boots and he suddenly felt light-headed, as if he might be sick. He bent at the waist, gasping.
When he stood again he faced the mirror. Walt saw himself in triplicate, in this wig blond and curled in a popular style. He regarded his dirty face in the faintly reflected light, his furrowed brow. He looked older, looked like a film star.
Then Hep stood behind him. He lifted off the wig, slapped the fedora onto Walt’s head. Light flashed in the back and Hep looked away. Walt looked, too, to see Lonnie running, yelping, twirling a burning dress above his head. Its hem threw sparks, the flames brighter with each turn. Walt turned again to his reflection, saw Hep gazing solemnly at him. Their eyes held each other in the mirror.
Hep slugged Walt’s shoulder. “Wanna ring the bell?”
They ran whooping across the square, past the soldier and the bank and the ruined Chevy. Climbing the hill, Walt shed the frock and hurled it into the weeds. He followed Hep through a ditch and the funeral home’s yard to stand beneath a dark window. Palms on the pane, Hep pushed and the window lifted.
“Give me a boost,” he said.
Walt clasped his fingers, and Hep stepped into them and climbed through the window.
Walt grabbed the sill, pulled himself up. He tumbled inside and into Hep, knocking him down. Hep groaned and then was on Walt, and they rose laughing, knocking aside folding chairs, shoving, tackling each other.
They found stairs leading up and took them. Hep grabbed Walt in a headlock, and Walt laughed, trying to keep his feet. Then came another flight of stairs, narrow and lightless. They climbed blindly, Walt clutching the back of Hep’s belt. Then Hep was saying hold it, hold it. After some fumbling, a door swung open, and sterling light flooded the stairwell.
They scampered into the belfry, an octagonal room open to the night. In the middle hung an enormous glowing bell, its metal reflecting the moonlight. Hep was sweating. His smile had vanished, his eyes searching Walt’s face as he unbuttoned his shirt.
Hep’s chest was wormed with scars. Drawn above the palpitations of his actual heart was a blue ink tattoo of a heart—not a cartoon heart, but an organ twisted and muscular, arteries jutting like snakes strangling a stone. He grasped Walt’s arm and lurched to the sill and Walt thought they might jump, was relieved when Hep stopped short.
“Ain’t it like a movie?” Hep said, softly.
They were eye level with the moon, brightly haloed. A silver lacquer lay over the town’s many roofs.
“Ever feel like your mind’s set funny?” Hep said. “Like ain’t a person in the world could understand you? I think I’m crazy. I really think I must be.” Walt watched Hep’s face, flushed in mercurial light. “Sometimes I wish I was in the movies,” he said. “Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.”
Walt’s ears grew hot. “I’m gonna leave someday,” he said. “Goin’ out west. You could come with if you want.” His voice was eager, unsure. “We could look out for each other.”
Walt heard voices down in the road, Lonnie and the girls wildly calling for them to come on. Moonlight poured over Hep. “It don’t matter,” Hep said, tears collecting in his broken eye. “Stay or go, it’s all the same. Went overseas to kill boys who weren’t like me ’cause them boys hated others who weren’t like them, neither. What that change? Put a black boy in that lounge, or one of them Jews, and see how it goes. Don’t care what Lonnie says. Burn a thousand bowling alleys, burn up the whole goddamn world, ain’t nothing gonna change.”
Walt followed Hep’s gaze out beyond the square to a long row of headlights approaching from the highway. Lonnie and the girls stood half-dressed in the funeral home yard, hollering for them to come on, that they had to get the hell out of there.
Walt stared into Hep’s tearing eye. He wiped Hep’s cheek with his palm. “What’s it all for then?”
Hep shrank away, turned to slump against the gleaming bell.
Then Walt didn’t want to believe Hep, desperately wanted to go back to how they’d been. “We gonna ring the bell, Hep?” he asked, trying to sound cheerful.
Hep struck the soft of his fist against the bell.
“Maybe we should ring it?”
Hep lay his face in his hands.
“Should we, Hep?”
Hep’s head lolled from side to side.
“Won’t never get another chance.”
THE DAUGHTER
1
Miriam lifted her face from the tabletop. She squinted, the sun glaring through the kitchen window. Pastor Hamby pulled out a chair and sat across from her, his eyes turned to the wall. The wallpaper was dingy white, a pattern of roosters and tractors and shocks of wheat, once red, now faded brown. Behind the pastor stood the sh
eriff, Helen Farraley, a big woman dressed head to toe in tan.
“How many?” Miriam said.
“Witnesses?” the sheriff asked.
Miriam nodded. Her daughter, Evelyn, stood like a sentinel at her side, caressing her hand.
The sheriff leaned back against the cupboards, held her jacket closed at her throat. “Staties got accounts from thirteen.”
“And none helped?”
“It happened fast, Miriam.”
“Not a single one to help an old woman?”
The sheriff stared at the floor, rubbed the back of her neck.
The pastor reached across the table and squeezed Miriam’s wrist. “Birdie,” he said. “I been thinking about something that plagued me back when I was starting out. About Christ carrying that cross to Calvary.” His eyes set upon her. “I mean, he had these disciples and all these followers, right? Folks who loved him, who thought he was the Messiah? And not one of them took up for him. Nobody fought for him. Not really.” The pastor lifted a salt shaker shaped like a rooster, but the bottom was loose and salt trickled out and he set it back down. “For a long time I wondered what that said about people.” He brushed at the salt on the table. “But then I realized it was just meant that way, what with Jesus up on that cross alone. God put fear in brave hearts and froze ’em over.”
An arc of salt, where the pastor’s hand had passed, remained on the table. “She die fast?” Miriam asked to the room.
The sheriff made a noise in her throat. “Probably didn’t see him at all. She didn’t turn, we know that.”
“All for a shitty truck.”
The sheriff shut her eyes a moment. “He was trying to get away, went after the first car he saw.”
Miriam pressed her daughter’s fingers to her lips, then pushed out her chair and stood. “What’s to happen now?”
The sheriff stood away from the cupboards. “There’ll be a trial,” she said. “Waste of time, you ask me. Guy was high as a kite, been in and out of prison his whole life. A dozen witnesses, security cameras from the supermarket.” She hung her thumbs on her gun belt. “Let me have him, is what I say.”
Miriam crossed to the sink, stared out the window. Down the hill, in the valley beneath the house, the corn rows spread shin-high and green, the leaves gleaming sunlight.
“If I was there,” Miriam said, without turning, “I’d of fought for Jesus. They’d of had to kill me. I’d of been but teeth and nails once they got me turned off.”
2
High pale stalks drooped against the heat as Miriam strolled the maze she’d had cut in her corn. Blackbirds mewling, the air reeking of the field, she blotted her neck with a bandanna and wondered what her mother would’ve thought of this maze. Miriam knew she’d disapprove, but it’d been a rough year, and they had plenty of money from Mama’s insurance, so what did it matter, after all they’d been through, her mother three months deceased and the trial soon to start, if Miriam simply wanted to get lost for a while, to take long dawdling strolls away from the world?
A scuttling broke out in the corn. Miriam stopped her stroll, flinched as a small gray terrier and a shaggy mutt burst into the hall. The gray dog paused, eyeing her, panting, then ran off. Miriam wanted to catch them, to pet them. She walked faster, trying to keep them in sight, but the corridor curved and there was only so far she could see.
Miriam thought them gone, when again she heard a rustling. She stood rigid, listening. The movement in the stalks grew near, then they broke into the corridor, the terrier and the mutt, with two young boys grasping at their tails.
The dogs scrabbled into the opposing rows. Upon seeing Miriam, the boys stood as startled wildlife, their bare chests heaving, their hair tangled, faces filthy. The older was maybe twelve, the younger a half-sized twin of his brother.
These were the McGahees, who lived with their father, Seamus, a sharecropper who worked a spat of land just down the road. That past July, the boys had shot bottle rockets at cars, blew up mailboxes all along Old Saints Highway, Miriam’s included.
“You ain’t allowed here,” Miriam hollered, stalking toward them.
They fled, their skinny arms pumping. Instinct told Miriam to chase them down and put them straight, but her legs felt wooden as she plodded over the uneven ground. The boys’ boots blurred in the dust. Their bodies grew small. One path split into two, and when Miriam arrived at the fork they were gone. The right path ended in a blunt wall of crop. But the left ran a slender curve into the sunlit expanse of the maze’s center.
Miriam rushed toward the light. Each step licked fire up her shins. Huffing, she burst into the clearing. Here the crop lay open in a circle twenty yards wide, with corridors shooting off the center like spokes from a hub. Across the rotunda, in the mouth of a hall, she glimpsed the hunched outlines of boys.
Miriam took a hard step in their direction, but a hand yanked her arm. She shrieked, whirled.
It was Evelyn. “I was calling after you,” she said. “Didn’t you hear me?” The girl stared into her eyes as might a doctor. “What you running from? Why you running from me?”
Miriam struggled to catch her breath. She glanced past Evelyn to the far corridor. The boys were gone. She tried not to cry, tried to stay strong for her daughter.
“Oh, come now,” Evelyn pleaded, clutching Miriam’s hand. “Everything’s fine, Mama. Everything’ll be just fine.”
Miriam sat before the vanity, gazed into the mirror and up at Evelyn, who stood behind her and brushed her hair. Twenty-one and fresh as rain, Evelyn had gone a year to the nursing college, still had an apartment in the city. Miriam told her she was free to go back, and now wondered why she stayed. Duty, she guessed. Pity, more likely.
“Let’s not be sad, Mama,” Evelyn cooed.
Miriam’s spine was a kinked wire. She shrugged.
“Can’t let them boys get you down.” Evelyn lay the brush on the table and picked up the eyeliner. “Come on,” she urged, with a grin. “Close your eyes and look up at me.”
“How can I look at you with my eyes closed?”
Evelyn shook the pencil at her. “I’ll pinch you, I swear.”
Miriam gave a grunt, but shut her eyes and tilted her head.
“What we need is a monster for our maze,” Evelyn said, and Miriam felt the pencil marking her brows. “A monster to gobble up little boys.”
Soon the pencil stopped, and Miriam opened her eyes to her own reflection, a menacing angular brow, eyes darkly shaded.
Miriam groaned a laugh.
“There’s that smile.” Evelyn kissed her mother’s head. “Now let’s have us a nap, and I’ll plan something special. An evening for a thousand smiles.”
Miriam woke from a troublesome dream, a scene of being stuck in a tree’s high branches, some unseen menace approaching, the mutt and the terrier frantically barking from the ground below, but she was too weak, too scared, to climb down. She rubbed her eyes, sat upright. Late-afternoon light slanted over the bed. As the dream’s feeling lingered, Miriam considered she might still be asleep.
Slowly she rose and wandered downstairs and out onto the porch. This was no dream. The valley was a maze, five acres of spirals looping like swine tails out to where the field met the knobs, like a doily had been draped over the land.
The screen door bumped open and out stepped Evelyn. Her giggling face was painted with rouge, her nose black with mascara.
Miriam spat a laugh. “Good lord, child.”
Evelyn laughed, too, her teeth absurdly white against her brown lips. “Now we’re just a couple of monsters,” she said, and gave Miriam’s shoulder a squeeze. “Get your bearings, then get on your shoes. I’ve got such a surprise for you, Mama.”
They carried baskets filled with candles, the good china, a chicken roasted with rosemary, spinach and strawberry salad, and two bottles of red wine. They followed the trail of twine Evelyn had unfurled while Miriam slept, the string snaking through the stubble, around bends and swags, all the way to the ce
nter.
In the rotunda, beneath the open dusky sky, sat a table with a white linen cloth. Miriam whistled and applauded as Evelyn lit tall white candles. They laughed and sipped wine. They had forgotten utensils, so Miriam tore strips of chicken with her fingers, plucked strawberries, one by one, from the salad. Evening gathered in the valley. Evelyn’s painted face grew dark. When the meal was done, Miriam was full and giddy and more than a little drunk.
The crop whispered, the corn swaying. Evelyn blew out the candles, pulled a radio from the basket and played an old bouncy tune Miriam loved. The sky hung a black cloth sprinkled with luminous dust. Miriam felt as if filled with the gentle breeze. She pulled Evelyn from her chair and together they laughed and danced in the field.
Miriam woke on a pallet of blankets. Through the morning mist, she watched the terrier lick plates up on the table. The black mutt was curled at her feet, its snout tucked into its belly. Miriam nudged Evelyn beside her and together they smiled at the dogs.
With scraps of chicken, Miriam lured the dogs back through the maze. The happiness from the night before remained. The mist gave way to a sterling sun, and Miriam decided she’d always have a maze. Would keep the dogs.
She named the terrier Pip, the black dog Wooly. On the house’s shaded porch, Miriam set out bowls of water. They left the dogs while Evelyn went to shower, and Miriam packed a basket for a picnic. But when Miriam returned to the porch to toss the dogs some chunks of ham, they were gone.
Miriam whistled for them, searched all about the hillside, walked her little barn, calling. But they didn’t show themselves. She stared back up at the house, wondering if Evelyn had finished changing, then heard voices down in the corn, a dog yelping.
She followed the noise into the field, raced in a frenzy down a corridor, peeking down the halls she passed. Then she saw them, the littlest McGahee awkwardly trying to carry Pip, his older brother, a quiver on his back and a hunting bow slung across his chest, slashing at Wooly with a metal arrow.
Volt: Stories Page 11