In the geographic sense, Greenwood was only a short walk from downtown. But for a boy like me, it may as well have been on the moon. Not that I hadn’t spent my fair share of time out and about on the streets; it’s just that Greenwood wasn’t a place I’d ever thought to visit. Greenwood was for Negroes.
But oh, it was a sight to behold. Twilight was settling in when we got there, softening the glow against brick buildings that were every bit as impressive as the ones downtown. Smoke and barbecue smells made my stomach growl. Men, women, and children strolled the sidewalks in clothes fine as any worn by white folks on Main Street. I must have looked a fool, staring out that window with my eyes big as doughnuts and my jaw hanging slack.
In the business district, electric lights flickered on over the Dreamland Theatre’s facade, and were already burning bright in the sweetshops, drugstores, diners, and hotels that lined the avenue. A few streets over, the north end of Detroit Avenue was lined with pretty, well-tended houses. Pop stopped the truck in front of a big one and told me to get out. I helped him slide the Victrola crate onto the hand truck as best I could with one arm in a plaster of Paris cast, steadying it as Pop grunted his way up the porch steps.
After he’d knocked, a little girl no taller than my belt pulled the curtain back from a side window and stared up at us. She was light brown and pigtailed, with mischief in her eyes.
Pop knocked again, and soon after that an elegant woman in a pale green dress stood in the open doorway while the little girl hid behind her skirt. “It’s so nice to see you, Mr. Tillman,” the woman said. “Please forgive Esther; she isn’t allowed to open the door for anyone she doesn’t recognize.”
Pop tipped his cap in greeting and told the lady that was a wise rule indeed. She smiled, her straight white teeth standing out like pearls on jewelers’ satin, and pointed us towards the parlor.
Pop pushed the cart. I followed, thinking Mama would have liked how the gold flowers on the thick rug under my feet stood out against the blue background. Pop asked if we should unpack the crate and set the Victrola up, and the woman replied no thank you, for her husband was looking forward to doing it himself when he got back from seeing patients. After which Pop cleared his throat and said then that just left the matter of payment. “Of course!” the woman murmured, and hurried off towards the back of the house, heels clicking against the polished wood floor.
I looked around, taking in the room’s fancy chandelier and furniture, trying to ignore Esther’s gaze. She sat in a velvet-padded chair, feet swinging back and forth a good six inches over the rug. “I got no brothers, only sisters,” she said. “You got a sister?”
Pop stared overhard at a painting of fruit, pretending he hadn’t heard. And a vision of my baby sister flashed through my mind, three years old, shrieking with glee as Pop tossed her into the air. “Again!” she’d cried as Mama feigned disapproval and Pop launched her higher and higher. Until he finally caught her up for good and covered her flushed cheeks with kisses.
“My sister’s an angel in heaven,” I told Esther in a tight-jawed voice, thinking how sometimes good memories hurt worse than bad.
Esther thought on that awhile, then looked at me square and said, “That’s sad. You want one of mine?”
Little as I cared to engage in further conversation with her, I couldn’t help replying, “One of your sisters?” And she eyed me like maybe I was slow in the head, and said, “Sure. I got two of ’em. Take your pick.”
I laughed in spite of myself.
“You can’t give away your sisters!” I said. “They’re family.” Which turned Esther’s face angry and set her feet to kicking harder, right up until she heard her mother’s footsteps coming back. Pop turned away from the painted bowl of fruit, smiling his best salesman’s smile. And when she arrived, he counted out the bills she handed him, one by one.
There should have been three hundred and fifteen dollars in all, plus five for delivery. The VE-300 was a pricey model; not the most expensive, far from the cheapest. But when Pop was done, he handed two dollars back, saying, “It’s three hundred and twenty even, Mrs. Butler.”
That flustered the lady badly. “Yes,” she stammered. “But I thought… for your time…”
“Delivery’s five dollars,” Pop said. “No tipping necessary.” Then Mrs. Butler did her best to compose herself as Pop thanked her for her business and wheeled the handcart across the fancy carpet and out the front door.
He never spoke a word the whole way home. But after he’d parked the truck behind the Model T under the porte cochere, he said, “A sale’s a sale, William. Things are hard now, what with crude oil prices so low. If a Negro comes to me with money in his pocket, I’ll hold my nose and sell him a Victrola, Jim Crow be damned. As for tonight, we had a late customer. That’s what you tell anyone who asks, your mama included. Do as I say, and I’ll teach you to drive this truck once your wrist’s healed.”
Then he tugged down the brim of his hat and got out. And though that certainly wasn’t the last delivery we ever made to Greenwood, it was the last time the matter was ever discussed.
I never hid from Addie. Not exactly. But Central High had enough students so that as long as you didn’t share classes with a person, you could pretty well stay away from them. You couldn’t avoid crossing paths completely, though, especially if they had a mind to hunt you down. And at lunchtime the day after my first trip to Greenwood, Addie did.
She found me in the cafeteria holding a cheese sandwich in my good hand and explaining yet again how my wrist got broke. Clete sat at my side, for though things had cooled between us after the Two-Knock, habit kept us from separating completely at school. We’d even settled into a kind of routine where I’d tell how I’d saved an unnamed but ever-so-lovely young lady from the savage advances of a Negro cad, and Clete would nod and utter exclamations of agreement every now and again. With each retelling, Clarence Banks grew an inch, gained ten pounds, and turned two shades darker. On top of that, my pitiful punch turned into something fierce, and a baseball bat assumed responsibility for breaking my wrist rather than my own drunken stumbling. Out of all the lies I’d worked up, my favorite was the one I used to finish the story: “He tried to bash my head in, boys. My poor arm here was all that stood between me and certain death.”
Addie put an end to all that.
She came at me sideways, inching up so quiet that I didn’t see her until a flash of blue gingham caught the corner of my eye. Fast as lightning, she slapped me hard enough that the sound of it silenced all the lunchtime chatter around us. I can still feel the sting today, and hear her thick words in my ear: “He might die. Did you know that? They beat him so bad he might die!”
My hand went to my cheek. Addie’s fury had coiled her up and washed her out, save for her red-rimmed eyes and two angry spots of color on her cheeks.
Being a dunce, I replied, “Who?”
The wrath in Addie’s eyes rendered down to fat, shiny tears.
“Clarence! Clarence might die! And all because of a stupid little boy with a stupid little crush and too much Choc in his belly. You can go to hell for all I care, Will Tillman, if hell will have you.”
Far as those harsh, hushed words knocked me back, they didn’t prevent me from seeing our mathematics teacher, Ms. Newlin, eyeing us from across the room. I dragged my hand from my cheek and the red mark Addie’s slap surely must have left there. Ms. Newlin made her way towards us, and the next thing I knew, Addie was clearing her throat, telling her everything was fine.
The teacher surveyed us with her little piggy eyes and asked about the noise she’d just heard. I held my chin sideways, angling my struck cheek away. One of the boys beside me, a wax-skinned trumpet player named Burt, held up a library book and said, “I dropped this, ma’am. Sorry ’bout the ruckus.”
Ms. Newlin looked both unconvinced and too tired to care. Word around school was that her preacher husband had run off to St. Louis with the church secretary two months prior, leaving the wo
man more dour than ever. Distracted, too. She glanced up at the big clock over the doorway, smoothed her skirt, and shooed us off to class. We yes’md her and gathered our things while she walked away. That’s when Addie put herself in front of me, so close I could have kissed her.
“They whipped him yesterday,” she whispered. “And beat him and left him in the street to die. Far as I’m concerned, you’re as much to blame as they are. And if he does die, that’s murder. Just you remember that, Will Tillman. Murder.”
Rowan
Police detectives are a lot less interesting in real life than on TV. The ones who showed up at our house weren’t quirky, they didn’t drop smartass one-liners, and their khakis and polo shirts made them look an awful lot like accountants with guns.
After spending maybe five minutes alone in the back house, they came out and told us someone from the medical examiner’s office was coming to assess the scene. Then Dad raised the umbrella on the table at the pool, and the six of us—Mom, Dad, James, the detectives, and I—sat around it. The detectives asked easy questions: What time did the construction crew show up? How long did they stay? When did I see the body for the first time? Stuff like that. They didn’t even seem upset that James and I had opened the tarp and touched the gun and the brick and the actual body. I mean, I knew it was a cold case, but the way they acted, the skeleton might as well have been a forgotten ice cube at the back of the freezer.
Really, the only time things got a little tense was when the woman detective asked Mom for the contractor’s contact info. Mom recited it from memory, but said that since the body looked as if it had been there a long time, and since the construction workers had taken off right after they found it, she hoped there wouldn’t be any need to track them down.
The detectives traded a look. They understood perfectly well that Mom was asking them to leave the workmen alone. Then the man said they had to investigate every potential homicide thoroughly. He seemed nervous about it, though, watching Dad to see his reaction. And Dad cleared his throat and said basically the same thing Mom had, but in his I-know-a-lot-of-important-people voice. The detectives looked at each other again, only longer, and the man cleared his throat and repeated his line about being thorough, adding: “Of course, we aren’t really interested in pursuing unrelated legal infractions, Mr. Chase. I can assure you of that.”
Which, roughly translated, meant that since Dad—the guy whose family name was on a building downtown—had asked them to lay off, they would.
Funny how that worked.
The rest of their questions went quickly. Mom kept her word and made sure James left for work on time. A stubby man from the medical examiner’s office showed up around eleven, smelling like Sonic onion rings and wearing what I sincerely hoped was a ketchup stain on his shirt. He snapped a few pictures, filled out some forms, and announced it was a case for the forensic anthropologist. “I’ll call Genny Roop,” he said. “This is right up her alley.”
After the ME guy left, Dad told the detectives he’d appreciate it if they’d keep things low-key and out of the local news. They made us promise not to mess with the skeleton. We promised we wouldn’t and that was pretty much the end of things.
So my very first interrogation by the police was basically a snoozefest. Or at least it would have been if James and I hadn’t lied our faces off about whether or not we’d taken anything from the body.
“Oh, no, sir,” I’d said when the detective asked, thinking all the while about the rectangle of leather I’d stolen from the skeleton’s pocket, and how glad I was that it wouldn’t end up forgotten at the bottom of a police evidence box.
“We put the gun and the brick back. Right where we found them.”
The thing was a wallet, cracked and covered in mildew, with rotted-out stitching on one side of its change pocket. I’d figured out that particular little detail earlier, when I’d run upstairs to get dressed, paused just long enough to see what my contraband actually was, and tossed it under my bed. Even before the wallet landed, loose coins clinked and rolled across the hardwood floor, giving me one of those oh shit moments, worrying Mom would hear the noise from the kitchen underneath me and use her powers of maternal omniscience to figure out I was up to something.
Lucky for me, either she didn’t hear or she’d tapped out her powers for the day catching James and me with the skeleton. Still, I waited until after the detectives were gone and Mom and Dad had left for work to gather up the coins.
Honestly, being bad felt kind of good. James and I could be obnoxious when we wanted to, but underneath our snarky outer shells we were basically rule followers. Good kids. Nerds. Enough so that guilt kept me from looking at the wallet closely. Until I got to Utica Square, at least.
Utica’s a shopping center—high-end, close to our house—where the flowerbeds are perfect and the luxury cars roam free. James made fun of me for liking it there, but he was at work, and I only had eighteen hours left before my summer of forced laboratory servitude started. I deserved a little treat.
The azaleas were in manic bloom in Woodward Park. I slowed down, watching a photographer snap pictures of a couple on the rocks above the pond. Everyone does their engagement shots at Woodward; it’s practically a city ordinance. Just past that, at the emergency room entrance to St. John’s, the usual cluster of worn-out hospital workers hunched over their cigarettes, sucking in tar and nicotine. I rolled up my window against the smoke, turned into Utica Square at the next light, and found a shaded parking space underneath a magnolia.
I snagged a spicy tuna roll at the grocery store where gray-haired ladies can still get their groceries carried out by bag boys, walked over to Starbucks, and sat down with an iced coffee at one of the shaded tables outside. It was a good day to watch people: tiny blond ex–sorority queens with perfect makeup, doctors in scrubs getting their afternoon caffeine, kids zoning out on iPads while their moms texted and sipped skinny iced lattes. Everyone was always so comfortable with themselves there. So confident.
Across the courtyard, two little girls chased each other around the fountain I fell into when I was three. Mom had taken me to sit on Santa’s lap in the warm little cottage they set up there every year, then walked me down to the fountain to make a wish. I remember eating the cookie Mrs. Claus had given me, and Mom digging around in her purse for pennies. Then the purse was on the ground, and business cards and stray sheets of folded paper danced away like one-winged butterflies on the chilly Oklahoma wind.
“Stay put,” Mom said, dashing after them. And I had, until the wind pushed a silver tube of her lipstick toward the flat edge of the fountain.
I loved that lipstick because Mom had dotted my lips with it once as I watched her get ready to go out. “Rub them together like this,” she’d said, showing me how. I’d done the exaggerated little-kid version, smearing deep red pigment all over my face. She’d told me I looked beautiful anyway, and made me feel special. There was no way I was going to let that tube roll into the fountain.
And I caught it, too—right before I tripped and went into the water headfirst. Mom caught the back of my sweatshirt, yanked me out, and rushed me to the car to get warm. My teeth chattered and my fingers went numb, but I could feel the thrum of her heartbeat and the panicked strength of her arms. That was the first time I’d ever seen my mother scared, and the memory of it has stuck with me in high-res living color ever since.
I laid two dollars and sixty-one cents in coins from the wallet out on the table. They were tarnished, and stamped with dates ranging from 1916 to 1921. Other than that, the wallet was empty. It wasn’t much to go on, but at least I knew the skeleton’s owner had been alive in 1921. Maybe a few years after that, too, but ’21 was a good baseline.
I sipped my coffee (two pumps of sweetener, room for cream) and caught the hipster at the next table staring at me over his laptop. My phone vibrated against the metal table.
Brady tonight?
Hipster dude smiled through his beard. I smiled—just a l
ittle—and texted James back.
ok but early. work tomorrow
I swept the coins into my hand, picked up my sushi, and crossed the courtyard to my car. Hipster dude gave me a curled-finger wave as I drove past. I waved back, knowing that even though James wasn’t into romance, I’d take hanging out with my best friend over flirting with a bearded lumberjack wannabe any day. And twice on Sunday.
WILLIAM
Vernon Fish had scared me from the day he parked a six-foot-tall wooden cigar store Indian outside his shop and stalked across the street to say hello. I happened to be dropping Pop’s lunch off at the time, and I’ll never forget the smell of hair tonic and fried onions that followed Vernon in. It had turned our familiar shop, with its scraped pine floors and fleur-de-lis-stamped tin ceiling, into someplace cold and foreign. Even the cozy glow from the Chinese lanterns Mama had hung over the ceiling bulbs couldn’t warm the place up when Vernon visited. I’d feared him from the moment we met, and he knew it.
So it was a bother and a misfortune that not three hours after Addie slapped me in the lunchroom, a storm front blew dark skies and cold rain into town, and Vernon Fish into our shop. For, miserable as it was outside, Victrolas and smokes were the last things on the minds of the few waterlogged souls sloshing their way along Main Street.
“Go stand by that window, Half-breed,” Vernon said, barely glancing my way as he stalked through the door. “And tell me if I get any customers.”
I came out from behind the mahogany Victrola cabinet I’d been polishing and did as I’d been told. Vernon may have been only a few years older than me, but he was not a man to be trifled with. Then Vernon went to the wooden counter that spanned nearly the whole length of the back wall and leaned his meaty forearms onto it, puffing on one of the foul Maduro Robustos he favored. Between the stink of that cigar and the way Addie’s words still sawed at my gut, I was halfway to losing what little lunch I’d eaten.
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