by Trey Holt
“No. I’m just gonna stay here awhile and study on this river some more. Don’t tell Dillard you saw me.”
“Yeah, fine. I won’t,”I reassured him.
He pulled at his britches until they were three inches over his ankles and pushed at the hair in his face for it only to fall there again.
“He’s one crazy son of a bitch,”Van said as Percy began to walk away.
There was nothing I could say. What he had said was true.
+ + +
The first time I heard the knock at the door, I had opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling, watching the silver flecks dance there in the darkness. I thought it was probably Tully, who often climbed on the roof of the side porch of the house and wrapped on my window. But momentarily Irealized that the knock had in fact not been at the window but at the door at the top of the stairs that opened into the room where I slept.
“Boy,”I heard the voice say.“Boy, are you in there?”
“Where the fuck else would I be?” I said under my breath.
“Can I come in there?” the voice said.
“Yeah, I guess,”I said.
I heard the door come open and close. The radiator heater clanked a couple of times in the silence that came with Lucky’s heavy breathing from climbing the stairs. Even though I didn’t pray much, I prayed that I’d hear his footsteps move in the other direction as I heard his footsteps moving toward my side of the attic.
“Hey,”he said.
“Hey,”I answered him.
“I’m gonna sleep over there.”
“All right,”I told him.
I heard the friction between match and flint as he lit a cigarette, then watched its orange head glow as he sucked the fumes in. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to be able to see Lucky’s silhouette as he stood there in the doorway. It looked to me like he had shrunk two or three inches in the last year. Or perhaps it was simply the fact that his shoulders were hunched now. He looked like a frog. Like a frog smoking a Lucky Strike in the darkness becoming gray from the moonlight filtering through the window across from him. A frog who had stripped down to his tee shirt and underwear.
“I figured there wasn’t any reason to wake your mother up, seein’how I’m gonna have to get up in a couple of hours.” He drew on his Lucky, hacked a little.“Started to go on down there now. But I decided against it. I thought if things weren’t all right, I’d know it.”
No, you thought that your goddam jailer would think you’re drunk, which you are. You thought that everybody else would take up your slack…like they do. You thought you’d rather stay here and drink and hide yourself from the reality of what your life has become, rather than go down to the jail and face the fact you might have arrested an innocent man.
“Yeah, they’d call,”I said.
“He don’t have a car,”he said.
I could see that his outline had moved to the end of the bed on which I lay, feel that his weight had been deposited there.
“Sir?”
“That Jackson Mosby, he don’t have a car.”
“Yeah?”
“You know where he lives, don’t ya?”
“Yessir. Down off Strahl Street.” I almost winced as soon as I spoke the street name. One of the half dozen or so that was named after generals who died in the Battle of Franklin, as November turned to December, 1864.
“Could he have carried a woman that far? Or even if there was another nigger involved, could two of‘em, even if they was strong, carry a woman that far? Especially without being seen.”
He was becoming more readily visible at the end of my bed. The shiny patches of skin showed through his hair where it was cut so short and he was losing the rest. His shoulders hunched where his chest was starting to bow outward from all the coughing. The orange head of his cigarette moved slowly to and away from his mouth. His tee shirt was becoming whiter as the darkness in my eyes dissipated, beginning to show the effort of my mother’s regular bleaching.
“No sir,”I said.
He moved his head up and down at my response.
“I’ll never forget it,”he said.“When I was a boy, my daddy thought I broke a window out of the old house I grew up in.” Lucky stopped for a few seconds, turning to study me in what now had become a grayish light with a yellow tone from the moon. I think he was checking to see if I was listening. If anybody was.
“I knew when Daddy came home he was gonna believe that I done it. He’d know that his little boy, the one that’s kind’a strange, can’t throw no rock through a window that high. And who the hell does that leave? Wanda Jean and Nelly wasn’t home yet. They didn’t throw no rocks no way. And Ine—anyway, an hour later Daddy was home rantin’and ravin’that there was all kind’a glass in the floor upstairs. Course he tells me this when he’s already on top of me in the yard and he’s got a stick in his hand. He beat me with that stick all the way across the acre between where he found me and the house, and then all the way through the front door and up the stairs. He didn’t never even ask Percy if he done it.”
He looked into the darkness of the other side of the attic like he was looking back into time passed. From where I lay I could smell him. Sometimes it seemed like the bourbon was working its way out his pores, leaving its stink to waft across the room to remind me he was there. Bourbon mixed with the stale smell of smoked cigarettes.
Chapter Six
From nine years old I had run that paper route, from Breezy Hill to the big curve on Lewisburg Pike, to Main Street as far east as the Harpeth River. Most of the houses had been built in the late thirties, early forties, had come on the heels of the economic rise after the depression and the wartime economy. Further down Adams Street, left at the four-way stop after leaving our house was where the big, old houses started. The ones that had been built from the early eighteen hundreds to the eighteen-fifties, the“houses that had been there during that bloody, godforsaken battle,”my Uncle Percy had told me many times.
I threw their papers, too. The rich people’s. The Mayberry’s and the Croner’s and the Renoir’s and the Gist’s, direct descendants—or at least they so-claimed—of Gerneral Gist, one of the generals laid out on December 1, 1864, on the porch of the Carnton Mansion after most of the fighting stopped. These were the houses where you had to have quite an arm to get those to the porch, most of them so far from the street that when I was nine and ten, I had to ride my bicycle into the yards and drop the papers on the porch. I had learned quick that you better get the paper where the customer expects it. Or else they complain. Nobody wants to go digging through their shrubs and bushes one that went awry.
These houses backed up to the back of the paper office, where I’d go in the morning to get my bags filled. Over the years I had gotten good enough to fold most of them while I was on the road, on bicycle or motorcycle. Tri-fold and then tuck, that’s the best way. They stay tight, sail like a kite on almost any wind, and the folds don’t affect how the customer can read the paper. Of course, this can only be done with daily papers, the thinner ones—not the Sunday paper, a fat mother, which had to be wrapped with rubber bands.
When I’d first gotten my Indian, my mother had told me she was glad, that she could hear me wherever I went over the whole route. Made me feel both good and bad. It also made me wonder about the days before I had the Indian, when I was peddling that son of a bitch of a bicycle up and down all those streets and hills, what she did then.
“I don’t think he ought to have to work at eight,”I remember her telling Lucky, when he had worked it out with Jack Charles down at the paper office for me to come to work for him.“I mean, I know Franklin is a good town, that nothing ever happens here. I mean, that good people live here. But he’s just eight years old.”
“He’ll be nine”Lucky had responded. By the time he works, he’ll be nine.” And that was all he said.“And besides, a little work ain’t gonna hurt’im,”Lucky told my mother, staring at the old tile on the kitchen floor that they would eventua
lly replace with the linoleum.“Hell, my daddy put me to work in the fields when I was seven.”
If there is hell when you’re nine years old, it’s having to learn how to fold and throw newspapers and where the five hundred people live you have to throw them to. The guy who had trained me, a senior at Franklin High School at the time, had done more talking about his“girl”than he had trained. By the time I finished riding the two weeks of mornings I was supposed to ride with him, I knew little more than I had known to start with. I did know, though, his girlfriend’s hair color, her height, her weight, and supposedly what she like to do to him. He described that in graphic detail as we knocked all around Franklin in a Chevrolet truck I was certain wouldn’t go one more mile.
“I was gonna go to college,”he told me,“but Barbara’s done changed my mind. I got a full ride to go up to Knoxville and play for the Volunteers, but I’d rather stay here with her. She’s got two years left in high school but man, she screws my brains out. Do you get what I mean?”
Of course, at eight almost nine, I didn’t.
“I was the star fuckin’fullback at Franklin last year. Ran for more yards than anybody that ever went through the place. I guess I really ought to go to Knoxville. But she can’t go. So, what do ya do? Do you think I’d leave that pussy that’s better than anything in the world?”
Every so often, mixed with his words and their emphasis, he’d check his reflection in the mirror. He’d check his hair, check his eyebrows, see how good he’d shaved, all while he was driving down the road throwing papers.
“My father says I ought to got to college,”he told me.“Says that goddam FDR’ll be dragging my ass over to fight the Japs if I don’t. He says the only chance I got to stay out’a the war is that it’ll either end or I take my white ass to college. A’course I can’t tell him what a piece a’ass Barbara is…so he just thinks that I’m stupid as shit.”
Mostly I nodded at what he said.
“You gonna do this whole route on bicycle?” he asked me.
“I guess,”I answered.
“It’s gotta be ten miles.”
“Daddy says it’s only six or seven.”
“You keep thinkin’that way, little fella’. That’ll help ya when you’re ridin’along in the morning, shivering your ass off, just hopin’that you get through. Hell, I don’t know if I know of anybody that’s done a route like this on bicycle.”
“Daddy says I can do it,”I said. This is when I still called him that.
“Ain’t your daddy that Assistant Police Chief?” he asked.
“Yeah, Lucky Hall,”I said.
“Don’t he run that craps game down at the fillin’station?”
“He plays in it,”I said.“I never thought about him runnin’it.”
“I’ve always heard that,”Ronnie Langford said. He pushed at his hair in the rearview mirror and lit a cigarette.“Damn things are supposed to be bad for ya. That’s what they say—that they take your wind. But I guess if I ain’t gonna play football no more then it don’t matter much.”
“You sure you’re not goin’to Knoxville?” I asked him. I’d been telling Lucky about him the night before. He’d informed me what a“dumbass”he was for deciding something like that.
“Nah, it’s too late now anyways. That’s why I’m quittin’the paper route,‘cause I gotta get a full-time job. Daddy says if I’m not goin’to college then out’a the house it is for me. I figure I’m gonna ask Barbara if she wants to run off and get married. I figure if I gotta leave home and work at the goddam mill, then I might as well have her to go home to at night. That way, too, we’d have somewhere to screw besides the back of the car.”
We were quiet for a few minutes, the only sounds when he pulled papers from the stack between us, did the tri-fold and flung them out the window. Depending on the particular noises the old Chevy truck was making at the time, I could hear some of the papers hit the ground and slide to their final resting place.
+ + +
“Daddy and me got in a big argument,”he told me in front of the picture show on Main Street after he had stopped his truck when he saw me almost a week later.“He tried to make me go to Knoxville and play football. He told me he’d always been a fan of the big fuckin’orange and I didn’t have a choice but to go there. I told him I did to have a fuckin’choice and I didn’t want to play football no more.”
“What happened then?” I asked him. I had gotten better at the way we conversed. I knew he wanted me to ask questions so he could talk about himself.
He looked at himself admiringly in the picture window across the front of the theater. Puffed out his chest a little.“He took a swipe at me and I pinned his ass down to the ground. They had to send your daddy over there to pull me off him. I swear I would’a killed his ass if they hadn’t pulled me off him.”
Van, standing there with me, said ,“You didn’t hear about that? It was in the paper and everything. He almost beat his daddy to death. They said if Lucky hadn’t got there when he did, he prob’ly would’a.”
He looked at Van after he spoke, as if asking who the little shit was who knew so much about him.
Van watched him admire himself in the window again.“You’re Ronnie Langford, ain’t you?”
He broke his gaze on himself, nodded. Watched himself while he lit a cigarette.
“I told you he’d been teachin’me my route,”I said.“Well, he was.”
“You must be a better football player than paper-throwin’teacher,”Van said.
I drew my finger across my throat, motioned for Van to shut up. Laughed like a I thought it was funny, too.
“Yeah, I saw ole Jack Charles,”Ronnie said.“He told me you didn’t have a’easy time with it the first few days. It takes a little while to learn it. I ain’t missed it though. Been able to spend a lot more time with Barbara…you know.”
I don’t recall him ever looking at us a time between his inquiring stare at Van and when he told us that maybe Barbara was in the lobby of the picture show, not meeting him outside like he thought. He tussled my hair as he told us he was going to look inside. Afer his first two or three steps away, though, he stopped and stared at us from the edge of the street, where he’d stepped off the sidewalk.
“I’m leavin’in a few days,”he said, in a voice loud enough to hear over the few cars that crept by.“I prob’ly won’t see y’all again before I come back. I’ll prob’ly be a hero by then.”
“You goin’off to fight?” Van asked.
“Yessir,”Ronnie told him, giving a mock salute just after he’d spotted Barbara a few paces down the street.“Goin’off to the end the war. The boys in Washington need a little help.”
After he’d crossed the street and held Barbara’s hand in his, he turned and waved at us again, as if he knew we were still watching him. He held the door after she’d passed through and hollered back to us, why, I’ll never know.
“Hey, Little Shit,”which is what he had called me from time to time when, I suspected, he couldn’t recall my name,“We’re gonna go over on the tracks down below your house tonight, to have some fun…celebrate goin’off. You ought’a come if you can get away with it.”
I nodded, knowing I’d never go.
Van nodded and elbowed me in the ribs.
+ + +
By the time that the first morning had come to throw the papers by myself, I had no idea where half of them went. The Nashville Tennessean, the paper I threw, was never a huge paper, just big enough to cover most of the national and local news, weather and sports. The paper we got in Franklin itself, The Review Appeal, came only three times a week and covered really no more than local stuff. Ronnie had told me that this made it a whole other world of newspapers. On the last day he trained me, he was telling me as straight as he could, he said.“People don’t fuck around with their news. They wanna know what’s happenin’to‘em, when it happened and who did it. I guess maybe it gives‘em some kind’a idea about what’s goin’on around‘em. I think it’s es
pecially been that way since Pearl Harbor. Who might the goddam Japs bomb next? Hell, I forgot people’s papers a coupl’a times and they called and raised holy hell at the paper office. Ole Jack Charles about put his foot up my ass.
The next night when Lucky got the phone call, I knew what it was about.”We’ll take care of it in the mornin’,”I heard him say as he hung up. I glanced into the kitchen, where the only phone was, and saw him looking at my mother dumfounded. I tried to get head back around the corner before he saw me.
“Henry?” he half-hollered.
“Yessir,”I said.
“Would you come outside with me a minute?”
“Yessir,”I said again.
“That was Jack Charles,”he told me when were outside underneath the oaks and elms in the backyard.
“Yessir?” I said.
He scuffed his feet at something in the grass and fished for his cigarettes in his pocket. They had yet to take their heavy toll on him, to leave a loose heaviness in his lungs.“He said that eighty-four people didn’t get their paper this morning.”
I figured playing dumb had to be better than anything else I could try.“Really?” I offered.
“Really,”he said.“He said not only did eighty-four people not get their paper, but they found almost a hundred papers dumped out in the alley behind the paper office. Do you know anything about that?”
I wanted to blame it on Ronnie Langford, that he had wanted to talk about his girlfriend more than he wanted to teach me where the papers went. I wanted to blame it on Jack Charles because he had sent me out that morning not having any idea of whether I could do the job or not. I wanted to blame it on Lucky for making me try to do this when I was turning nine.
“I got robbed,”I told him.“A man stuck me up behind the paper office and told me if I didn’t give him my papers then he’d shoot me.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he said. He wouldn’t look at me, but cut his eyes to the floor.