Fancy put her hand over his. “Don’t you let the police catch you running around up there.”
“So many coloreds in that place, Fancy, nobody’s going to notice one more. Besides, it’ll give me some getaway time.”
Maybe he would get away for good. “When you aiming to go?”
“We can do it tonight if you want to.”
I glanced at Fancy. “You want to ride with us?”
“Yep. Don’t know the last time I went to Durham.”
We hopped in the truck and headed to town. Hayti wasn’t any problem to find, just drive through the center of Durham and turn left across the railroad tracks. It was like entering another world. It felt different; the smell of barbecue and fried fish floated along the street, and there was electricity in the air. Music blasted from open doors of juke joints, and the sidewalks were crowded with colored folks talking and laughing; everybody celebrated the week’s end. We rattled over the rough rails and stopped at a red light. “Let me off right here,” said Lightning. “Pick me up at this same spot Sunday about six.”
Fancy kissed his cheek. “Be careful.”
I eased the truck around the corner, catching a lot of stares, a cracker boy riding with a colored girl. On the way out of town we spotted a Dairy Queen and stopped for ice cream. There were just as many hard looks from the crowd of white folks. I got the cones to go.
The ice cream was melting so fast we stopped on the side of the road to finish it. “You want me to go ahead and drop you off?”
“Trying to get rid of me?”
“Thought since it was getting late, you might need to get home.”
She slid her hand up and down my thigh. “Not going home.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Daddy’s cousin picked them up this afternoon. They’re going to a wake for Aunt Emma down in Kinston, and won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“You mean, you can stay all night?”
“That’s what I mean, white boy.”
CHAPTER 29
Sunlight peeping through the window curtains woke me. Fancy was already awake. “Morning,” she said, eyes wide open.
I slid my arm beneath her head. “And top of the day to you. Did you sleep good?”
“I kept watching the ceiling, wondering if your grandma might visit.” She draped her leg over mine. The odor of sex floated up when the covers moved.
“Can I tell you something, Fancy?”
The sheet slipped down, exposing her breasts. She didn’t move to cover them. “As long as it’s not something bad.”
“When Grandma died at the hospital, I felt her spirit lift out.”
Fancy sat up straight, eyes wide. “What? What do you mean, you felt her spirit?”
“It was strange. I felt this stir of air, soft, like the brush of a bird’s wing, and I knew it was her. Granddaddy was there too. I’ve been thinking about it a long time, trying to make sure it wasn’t my imagination in that hospital room.”
She looked me hard in the eyes. “You ain’t messing with me, are you, Junebug?”
“I never would over something like that.”
Fancy lay back and pulled the sheet up to her neck. “What do you think it means?”
“I took it to mean that this ain’t the end, that maybe we float around in the air, invisible to folks still living.”
“I always thought you’d just close your eyes, then be in heaven.”
“Just didn’t want you to worry about Grandma visiting.”
“Let’s don’t talk about it no more, okay.” She moved the sheet and rolled to face me.
“I ain’t going to let nothing happen to you.” I lifted her leg over my hip, feeling myself getting excited.
Fancy put her nose to mine, staring me in the eyes, whispering. “You know, you’re right pretty for a white boy. Got them crazy blue eyes from your grandma.”
“How many white boys you been this close to?” I pulled our middles together.
She lifted and raked herself against me. “You’ll make one.” I could feel her wetness.
When I slipped into her, she sucked in a sharp breath. “Keep it like that.
“What about when you find a white girl?” We started to move slowly.
“Ain’t looking.”
Fancy closed her eyes, and began to flex her hips. “Don’t worry . . . they’ll come for you.” She stuttered between words. “That feels so good.”
I moved faster, enjoying feeling in control. “Mr. Wilson said you’d ruin me for any proper white woman.”
“Am I?” Her hips moved more urgently.
“I hope so.” I rolled Fancy to her back, gripped my hands underneath her butt, and forced harder. She came back at me with a fury. It became a battle, a war of passion, fighting and clawing and demanding, the slapping sound of the sex making me crazy. When she felt the end coming, Fancy pulled my face down, kissing and grabbing my bottom lip with her teeth. We slammed together like two trains crashing head-on.
Fancy lay back on the pillow, holding me in place. “Damn you, Junebug.”
“I know.”
* * *
After church Sunday morning, I loafed around the house most of the day. When five o’clock came and Fancy hadn’t showed, I got an uneasy feeling. I made myself get in the truck and ride to Durham, turning the radio loud, trying to drown out my worry.
Lightning waited in the same place we’d dropped him off. “Where’s Fancy?”
I shut off the country music. “She never showed up today.”
“Did you go by the house?”
“Hell no! Are you crazy? If she’s got in trouble over something, I wasn’t about to make it worse.”
“Damn it. I wish I could go home. Daddy can start sipping that shine once in a while and sometimes he’ll get mean.”
“You don’t think he’d hurt Fancy, do you?”
“He’s liable to slap her around some, like he does Momma. I don’t know what makes him get like that. Momma says to let it pass, says it’s the inside hurt of a black man always having to bow down to white folks. She said he ain’t got anywhere else to let it out.”
I’d never heard that about Roy before.
“We’ll find out soon enough. By Monday, Daddy has to have his self back right so he can go to work. Fancy will be around tomorrow.”
I picked up the street leading out of town. “Did you find anybody to buy the stuff?” A giant sign above the Wachovia Bank building blinked seven o’clock and eighty-three degrees.
“Oh yeah. I asked around until I got hold of this man called Twin. He used to have a twin brother, but some white policeman killed him a few years back. Now he’s meaner than a no-dick dog, generally don’t like white folks, and hates police. He’s the biggest dope dealer in Hayti, which means he’s got the money. I spoke to him, and he said he would look at a sample when we were finished.”
“You didn’t tell him where, did you?”
“Do I look stupid?” Lightning looped his arm across the back of the seat, sounding important. “All I told him is when we’re done this fall, I’d come to visit him.”
The highway got very dark as we pulled away from the city lights. “You talk price?”
“No use worrying about that until he gets a sample. He’s not going to pay much for rag, but he will for good stuff.”
“How will we know what ours is?”
He smacked the dashboard. “I told you I smoked some back in Georgia, Junebug.”
“Sure hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I got it under control.”
Lightning’s attitude wore on my nerves, acting all-important, like he was our savior. I’d give him his due for growing the crop, but it was on “my” land, with “my” equipment, and all the while I was hiding him in “my” house so those good old boys wouldn’t have a chance to make him an oak-tree necktie.
The next afternoon Fancy did show up. Her right eye was swollen almost shut.
I gripped he
r by the shoulders. “What happened to you?”
She tried to wave me off. “Ain’t nothing, Junebug, don’t worry yourself.” Fancy twisted away and went into the kitchen.
“Don’t tell me what to worry about.” I followed her.
Lightning walked in. “What the heck are y’all hollering about? I could hear you in the yard.”
Fancy turned her back so he couldn’t see. Lightning walked in front of her. He reached up to touch her eye. “Daddy do this to you?”
She stared at the floor.
“What for?” His voice was loud and demanding.
“Let it go, Lightning. I’m all right.”
I edged between them. “Was it anything to do with me?”
“He was drinking and I reckon he had you and me on his mind, so he made sure I understood I better not be messing around.” Fancy pulled out a kitchen chair, sat down, and put her head in her hands.
I headed to the bedroom. When I came back to the kitchen with the truck keys, Fancy got in front of me and grabbed my arm. “No, you ain’t! You are not leaving this house. I told you I’m all right.”
“Nobody is going to beat on you, Fancy, not for any reason, and for sure not because of me.”
Lightning came beside us. “Fancy’s speaking the truth. This is between a daddy and his child. You got no rights.”
I looked down, heat boiling up from my feet to my head. I let my finger trace the red checks in the tablecloth. The room got quiet. I looked him in the eyes. “Lightning, don’t ever again tell me what I can and can’t do.”
“Junebug, stop it!” Fancy shoved me backward.
I went into the bedroom, slamming the door. I could take my shotgun and solve this shit right now. Seemed like I was the odd man out lately. Nobody was going to push me around in my own house. There was a deep-down angry fire inside me I’d never felt before. I didn’t know if my hands shook because I was mad or if I was scared of how mad I was.
I could hear Fancy’s voice from the kitchen. “You best quit pushing Junebug; he’s got enough to deal with.”
“He needs to mind his own business.”
“I am his business, so you need to get over it or get gone.”
The porch door slammed. Fancy came in where I was and put her arms around me. “I appreciate you wanting to look after me, Junebug, but some things a person has to let pass. My daddy loves me. He doesn’t mean to hurt me or Momma, just sometimes he can’t take it no more.”
I pushed her to arm’s length. “I understand your daddy’s toted his burdens a lot of years. But Lightning is where he is by his own hand, and he ain’t going to run my life.”
“Hush. Enough about all that.” Fancy pushed me back on the bed. “Come here.” She started to undo my belt.
“What about Lightning?”
She laughed as she took off her dress. “Let him find his own woman.”
CHAPTER 30
High humidity made the scorching days of August suffocating. The tobacco stalks grew heavy and full, and the leaves ripened. I helped the Wilsons, and they helped me with the priming and barning. Mr. Wilson sounded a little too friendly whenever he was around Fancy, or maybe I noticed it more after what she told me. He was getting on my nerves worse and worse. I even looked at Roy differently, trying to imagine him so angry he would punch his own daughter. I didn’t feel the same respect for him. There were days I didn’t like my world very much. When you shucked the outside layer of people, a lot of the corn was rotten.
Lightning managed to stay out of sight. He sat up with me the first night minding the fire and curing the leaves. Since the incident in the kitchen, we had steered clear of each other as much as possible. “Lightning, I’m sorry if I got carried away. It seems since Grandma died, everybody wants to tell me this or that, like I’m stupid or something.”
“I understand, Junebug. If I thought Daddy was really trying to hurt Fancy, I’d go up there and face him.” He stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings.”
Fancy and Lightning helped me store the tobacco crop in the pack house so it could turn soft and color out. By the first of October, we’d had a frost and the brisk nights began to color the maples fire red and the oaks brownish yellow. I hauled loads to Durham and sold the tobacco. It turned out not to be a big season for price, but I made enough to pay off my bill at Salem’s Store and to Lawyer Stern. With what was left, I bought supplies for next year, kept some money in the house for gas and food, and added the rest to the jars buried in the pack house cellar. I made sure to do that when Lightning was in the marijuana field, but I did show the stash to Fancy.
“What are you going to do with all that money, Junebug?” She sat with me on the dirt floor, like two kids playing with toys.
I screwed the ring top on the last jar. “This is for when I need it or get old and can’t work. Don’t ever tell anybody what’s here, but if anything happens to me, you know where it is. Take the money and go visit some of them places you read about in your schoolbooks.”
Fancy leaned over and put two hands on my face. “Better not anything happen to you. Maybe one of these days we could visit those places together.”
We went to lay on our backs in the grass outside the pack house and talk while we watched the daylight fade and a quarter moon find its place in the night sky. “I used to go sit in the woods at night after Grandma died. Somehow, it seemed to make me feel closer to her.”
“Church didn’t help? Or praying?”
“Not much. Something about the dark makes me feel better.”
* * *
Lightning came into the house late one afternoon a couple of weeks later. “Can you come with me in the morning? Them plants are ready for pulling and I want you to see how to tell when it’s time.”
“I can do that.” I hadn’t been to the field in a couple of months.
We went out early. It was obvious Lightning had done a right smart amount of work. The plants had reached head high and looked healthy.
Lightning pushed out his chest a little. “This crop looks better than that old farmer’s in Georgia. Let me show you what I was talking about.” He took a magnifying glass and pointed out the brownish hairs on the buds. “That’s when it’s ready.”
I was impressed he had stuck it out to the end. His name hadn’t always fit his ambition. “So what do we do now?”
“Saturday night, we’ll move the wagon over here, pull ’em up, and take them to the barn.” Lightning did a dance in the soft dirt. “Boy, we’re getting near to making some serious money.”
“How soon?”
“Soon as I can get a sample to take to that guy Twin. Then we’ll know what’s coming.”
“And you’re sure you got all this under control?”
“All we got to do is keep our mouths shut and take care of business.”
It was beginning to feel real, making me have even more doubts this kind of money could be so easy. “You reckon you can trust this man?”
“No further than I could throw him. But he needs us as bad as we need him, especially if we got good stuff. That would let him charge more.”
I didn’t figure I could throw Lightning very far either. “I’m trusting you.”
He chatted away as we walked back to the house. “Don’t worry, son, I got this.” Two nights later, we pulled the plants and strung them up in the barn.
On Wednesday morning, Sheriff Bull Jones made another visit. He stepped out of his car and walked around the yard to stretch his legs. I wasn’t surprised to see him since Mr. Wilson said they were still looking for Lightning, but at that moment all I could think about was that marijuana hanging in the tobacco barn, a two-minute walk from the house. If he headed that way, I had no idea what I would do. But he only stayed a few minutes.
Lightning showed me how to break down the buds, and then we rolled and smoked some. “Suck it in your chest good, hold it for a few seconds, then blow it out.” I hacked and coughed like a sick person before getting the hang of it. After that, I
could understand why folks would buy it. The next time Fancy came, we took her to the barn and let her try. We sat around laughing like three idiots, then went to the house and ate everything in sight.
I had to make one run to Apex and another to Durham in order to get enough mason jars and not cause suspicion buying too many in one place. The next few days we spent a lot of time cutting off the buds. We filled up a hundred small jars and fifty half-gallon sizes.
“How much you going to charge for these, Lightning?” We were sitting at the kitchen table while Fancy cooked chicken stew.
“I figure seventy-five dollars each for the little jars and three hundred for the big ones. We might could get more, but I don’t want to push too hard.”
After quick multiplying on a piece of paper, I looked at Lightning. “You know that’s twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars?”
He couldn’t quit grinning. “I told you, Junebug.”
I’d never heard of anybody having that much money. “This one man is going to come up with that much cash?”
“That’s why I picked him; takes somebody big-time to afford it.”
The time was here when the wheat and the chaff were going to get separated. With that kind of money, there was no telling what we might do. I kept envisioning a stack of green hundred-dollar bills on the kitchen table. Fancy was watching me from the stove. When we caught each other’s eye, both of us broke out laughing.
That Friday afternoon, Lightning was ready to go meet with the guy, Twin. “Time for us to get paid,” he said.
We dropped Lightning at the same place. When we got home, Fancy and me lay on the bed talking. “Junebug, you think this is going to work?”
“I’ll wait until I see the money. But it seems Lightning might have finally got something right.”
We lay with our noses touching. “I can’t help thinking about all that money. What are we going to do if we get it?”
I grinned. “I might buy me a new truck. Heck, I might buy you and me a new truck.”
She started giggling, stuck her arms in the air, and wiggled her butt. “I want some fancy dresses, be Miss Somebody, be such a fine lady I might not even talk to a hick like you.” Fancy got somber for a minute, that logic mind of hers working. “If we go to buying stuff, folks are going to wonder where all the money came from. I guess we better hide it and just spend a little along, keep the rest.”
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