The Do-Right

by Lisa Sandlin

  He parked in a doctor’s space in front of the red brick hospital by the port. Eau de Pinesol and polished tile. A nun gave him the room number.

  The face on the pillow was white-whiskered, toothless, and snoring. A pyramid of a woman in a red-flowered muumuu sat bedside. Phelan checked the room number. “Marvin Carter?”

  The woman sighed. “It’s Mar-tin. Cain’t y’all get nothing right?”

  Phelan loped back to the desk and stood in line behind a sturdy black woman and a teenage boy with a transistor radio tinnily broadcasting the day’s body count. The boy’s face was lopsided, the wide bottom out of kilter with a narrow forehead. He nudged the dial and a song blared out. “Superfly.” The woman slapped shut a checkbook, snatched the transistor, and dialed back to the tinny announcer spewing numbers and Asian place names.

  “Jus keep listenin’. Cause you keep runnin’ nights, thas where you gonna be, in that war don’t never end, you hear me, Marvin? What you lookin’ at?” She scowled at Phelan.

  The boy turned so that Phelan verified the lopsidedness as swelling. He ventured, “Marvin Carter?”

  The woman guided the boy behind her as she asked who Phelan was. He told her, emphasizing that he was not a policeman. He told her he was looking for Ricky Toups, kept his gaze on the boy.

  The boy’s eyebrows jumped. Bingo.

  “Les’ go.” The woman pushed the teenager toward the glass doors.

  Phelan dogged them. “Did that to you, Marvin, what’s he gonna do to Ricky, huh? Want that on your slate? Could be a lot worse than the dope.”

  The boy tried the deadeye on Phelan. Couldn’t hold it.

  “We talking dope now?” The woman’s voice dropped below freezing. “You done lied to me, Marvin Carter.” Her slapping hand stopped short of the swollen jaw.

  Marvin grunted something that was probably “Don’t, Mama,” enough so Phelan understood his jaw was wired.

  “Ricky got you there promising dope,” Phelan said, “but that wasn’t all you got, was it?”

  The boy squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Wasn’t white kids did this to you? Was some grown man?” Marvin’s mother took hold of his skinny waist.

  “Listen,” Phelan leaned in, “if he said he’d hurt your mama here, I’ll take care of that. It’s just a line. But Ricky’s real. You know him, and he’s wherever you were last night. Help me find him, Marvin.”

  “Eniss,” the boy said.

  “Ennis? The street near the municipal swimming pool?”

  Shake from Marvin.

  “That’s his name? Ennis?”

  Head-shake, cupping his wide jaw.

  “Dennis?”

  A shudder ran through the teenager. “’Sgot evertang dere. Air’s a vig ache, man.”

  Phelan didn’t press for a translation, he was scanning his list of parolees. One Dennis Deeterman. One D. Harold Holdrege. He squinted at his own handwriting. He’d jotted down an identifying mark for Deeterman. “Tattoo of a knife on his arm?”

  Marvin lifted up his shoulders and let them fall.

  “OK, OK. Concord Street? Lucas?”

  A hard-K sound indicated Concord. Marvin muttered directions, minus some consonants. The mother glowered Phelan away. Marvin bent down and shook against her neck.

  Phelan dashed back to the hospital’s two payphones, called Delpha Wade, told her where he was heading. If she didn’t hear from him within the hour, call E.E. Guidry down at the station. “That’s G-U-I—”

  “Know how to spell it,” she said. “Got time for one question, Mr. Phelan?”

  “Shoot.”

  Throat-clearing. “You think you might hire me?”

  “Miss Wade, you were hired when you called me Bubba.” He hung up the silent phone and jogged for the doors.

  3:15. The house with the orange mailbox painfully described by Marvin was a dingy white ranch. It was set deep in the lot, backed up to tall pines and oak and magnolia, pockets of brush. Rusty brown pine needles and dried magnolia leaves—big brown tongues—littered the ground. With oil shot up to twelve dollars a barrel, somebody’d be out here soon, hammering up martin-box apartments, but for now wildlife was renting this leftover patch of the Big Thicket.

  No car, but ruts in the grass where one had parked.

  Phelan knocked on the door. Waited. Tried the knob, no dice. He went around the back to a screen porch that looked to be an add-on. Or it had been a screen porch before plywood was nailed over its large windows. A two-by-four had been pounded across the door; the hammer lying there in the dirt suggested that Dennis Deeterman might be recently away from his desk. Maybe. Phelan could hear something. He beat on the door. “Ricky. Ricky Toups, you in there?”

  He put his ear to the door. Something. Phelan pounded again, louder. “I’m looking for Ricky Toups.”

  A low huffing, rhythmic. Intermittent creak. What was that sound? Like a rusted rocking chair.

  He jogged back to his car, shoved a flashlight from the glove compartment into his pocket and snagged a pry bar. Ripped off the two-by-four. Opened the door. Directly across the porch was the door that led into the house. Phelan stepped over there, .38 drawn, and rattled it: locked. Already he was smelling piss in the hot, dead air. Then herb and cigarettes and some kind of dead-fish bayou stink. That creaky noise came from the far left, high up. He found a switch by the locked door and flipped it. Not a gleam.

  He stuck the gun in his belt and strode into the dark room. His shin banged into something scuttling fast in the opposite direction. The thing slashed his calf shallowly and long, like a pissed-off girl keying her boyfriend’s car, and rushed over his foot. Phelan yielded right-of-way, then bent down to rub his leg and felt the tear in his trousers. He craned back in time to see his assailant’s ringed tail flee out the door.

  A raccoon.

  Irritable might not cover Dennis Deeterman. “Ricky Toups, that you in here?”

  He shined the white circle up and left, to the source of the creaking.

  Christ Almighty.

  Phelan’s jaw sagged. On the top of metal shelves was a half-naked gargoyle, perched there. No, clinging. Blue-jeaned haunches with a smooth, sheened back folded over them, fingers clawed around the metal, head cut sharply toward Phelan. Blinking eyes protruded from sunken holes. The down-turned mouth wheezed.

  “You got asthma, right.”

  Ricky Toups’ head bobbed loosely, flapping sweat-dark hair that had been dishwater blond in last year’s school photo.

  “What’s going on, Ricky?”

  “He got m-m-mad at—” The kid flung out a hand, pointing.

  Phelan heard a cat’s hiss.

  A cat, why not.

  He zigzagged the light downward over matted orange shag littered with marijuana debris, the arm of a bamboo couch, crushed beer cans.

  Behind came faintly from Ricky’s labored breathing.

  Phelan wheeled. His light fell on the toothy jaws flapped wide in another hiss. Damn thing wasn’t but two feet long, but it meant business.

  He flipped the flashlight to his left hand, his stump telegraphing a deep blue ache clear to his elbow as he fisted his hand around the flash’s barrel. The little gator paddled forward and clamped his shoe. Phelan grabbed the spiked tail. It flung his hand side to side as it flailed. He yanked, its jaws dug in like a trap’s. Phelan hopped for the door, dragging the foot with the gator. Once he was outside, he ripped the knot from his shoelace and kicked. Shoe and gator sailed off into the weeds.

  Cussing, Phelan jogged back through the door into the black oven and laid a hand hard on what turned out to be Ricky’s bicep. The boy slumped off the shelf into his arms. Phelan looped the boy’s arm around his neck. They were hobbling toward the door when Ricky’s ragged exhalation became a shriek.

  The shaft of light from the door revealed part of a black pile that blended into the darkness. Phelan squinted at it. What? Most of him failed to make sense of what he saw. But not his skin—it was crawling off his belly, his nuts sq
ueezing north of nutsack.

  The pile shifted until only a tip remained. Then the tip disappeared into blackness. That it was heading toward him told Phelan enough. Most snakes light out for the hills. Cottonmouths come at you. Phelan ranged the light till it hit the bamboo couch and dumped the boy on it. “Keep your feet off the floor.” He scanned with the flashlight. Where the fuck was it? Shag. Spilt ashtray. More shag.

  Then the beam caught a section of sinuous black. He moved the light. There it was. Pouring toward him, triangular head outthrust.

  Phelan fired.

  The black snake convulsed, kept coming, tongue darting.

  He fired again. Still the black form writhed on the orange carpet. He blew its head off with the third round. Phelan stepped wide of the quivering snake, wasn’t dead enough yet to keep the head from biting. Ears ringing, he tossed the flashlight, pulled the boy’s arm around his neck, dragged him out of that room into the daylight.

  Bruises on the kid’s arm, high up. Been grabbed, for sure. Held? Phelan draped him in his own jacket, stuffed him into the passenger seat, and peeled out onto Concord.

  “He rape you, Ricky?”

  Violent head shake. Negative.

  “Hurt anybody else you know of?”

  The side of the boy’s head hit the window. The wheeze sounded less like creaking now, more like a tiny person lurking behind Ricky’s teeth, whimpering.

  Phelan blasted around Concord’s tight curves, spun a right, a left, and gunned onto the straightaway of 11th Street. Delivered Ricky into the horseshoe entrance to St. Elizabeth’s and used a hospital pay phone to call Mrs. Toups. Then he left a message for Uncle E.E. about the wild kingdom on Concord.

  Mrs. Toups busted in the big glass doors, bony face lit up like stadium lights. She hurried off to her boy. Phelan limped to a chair in the waiting room, trying to remember when he last had a tetanus shot. He pulled off his sock. The front of his foot, tinged lavender with a garland of purple dents in it, drew two pig-tailed spectators.

  “Ooo, what happen a you, Mister?”

  “Look ug-lee.”

  Phelan shrugged. “Dragon bit me.”

  “No such thing,” said the big one.

  “Uh huh, look at his hand,” squealed the little one.

  He held up his nine fingers. The girls bickered while Phelan thought about half-naked Ricky Toups up on that shelf gasping his lungs out.

  “Mr. Phelan…”

  He looked up to see Mrs. Toups, petting his jacket.

  “You saved our life, and that’s the truth.”

  Phelan took his jacket, scrounged up a bent smile.

  He opened his door. Delpha Wade sat in the secretary’s chair behind an idle typewriter. She gave him a once-over, no doubt taking in the limp, the single shoe and the torn pants, the jacket wadded in his hand.

  “Boy safe?” was all she said.

  Phelan pressed his lips together, nodded. “Way past five. You didn’t need to stay.”

  She pushed over his change, five ones and silver, and leaned over to pick up a sack from the floor. The brown hair parted. On the nape of her neck, an inch of scar tissue disappeared into the white blouse. She straightened, tugging up her collar.

  “Didn’t have a key to lock up. I started files on the Toups and the Lloyd Elliott cases. The phone call from Mrs. Lloyd Elliot, ’member that? Ran out and bought paper, carbon paper, and some file folders.”

  Phelan drew his key ring from his pocket. He jiggled off the extra office key, slowed down by the gouges from the baby gator’s tail that were stinging his sweaty palm. He laid the key onto the desk.

  “You sure you want this job?”

  Her head lowered but not so far that he didn’t catch the tint spreading over the jailhouse-pale of Delpha Wade’s cheekbones.

  Or maybe that was just the sunset squeezing through the window.

  They settled the details of hours and salary. He listened to her departing footsteps, jingling the change in his pockets. He bent over and took off his lone shoe, chucked it in the wastebasket. He walked around his territory in his socks. After a while he leapt straight up and tagged the tin ceiling, locked his own door, and padded down the stairs.

  III

  TO CALINDA BLANCHARD, born the very last morning of the nineteenth century, Delpha Wade was a girl who had to toe the line. She showed back up in the kitchen after dinner, presented a Gatesville Women’s Prison release form for Miss Blanchard to acknowledge privately, then folded it away again. Stood there canvas suitcase in hand, leather purse tucked up under her arm, deep pile of nothing on her face—waiting to see if she’d be turned out or taken.

  An idea glimmering twenty-watt in her brain, Calinda took her.

  “OK, I can give you your room and board free in turn for taking care of my aunt evenings. Sundays off. You stay with her from six-thirty in the evening to ten or till she’s sleeping. Sleeps a lot. Telling you now it’s short-term. Jessie’s a hundred years old and when she passes, you got to start paying for your room.”

  Color rose in the girl’s pale cheeks. “I can pay. Found a day job today.”

  Calinda’s estimation of her hiked a notch. She explained to the girl that her aunt Jessie needed a dinner she could eat with five teeth. Needed dishes washed, kitchen swabbed, sheets changed, and personal hygiene care that meant muscle and fortitude. There was a nurse-aide, Moselle, until three in the afternoon. After that, her care fell to her granddaughter, Calinda’s cousin Ida Rae, who lived with the old woman when she wasn’t shacked up with some lizard. Calinda was stepping in now, given Ida’s personality deformities. Not to mention the gin.

  Miss Blanchard went on to say that her aunt had recently had a stroke, and a few days afterward began to cry and say she wanted to leave Calinda something that was in her room. Cousin Ida had interrupted to ask what it was.

  “Jessie said Tiffany something or ruther. Couldn’t hardly understand her, but Ida and me both made out that Tiffany name because Ida stared blue murder at me. Moselle heard too, she surely did, and Moselle’s got no use for Ida. Couple days later, Jessie had an even worse stroke than the first one.”

  Calinda paused, narrowed her gaze on Delpha. “You know what Tiffany is?”

  “No.”

  “Jewelry. Know what kinda box it comes in?”

  “Nice, I ’spose. Not cardboard.”

  “Just keep an eye open and tell me if Ida’s poking around and gets excited all of a sudden. Maybe I can catch her fore she sells it off. Don’t think about cutting a deal with her. It wouldn’t occur to Ida to keep a bargain. Besides that, I copied down your parole officer’s name. Steal from me, and I’ll put you on the bus back to Gatesville.”

  “I’d be glad for evening work, Miss Blanchard, and the free room, I sure would.” No tone to her voice.

  Studying the neutral, respectful face before her, Calinda felt medium perked-up about this tit for tat. She gave Delpha Wade a key and her aunt’s address on Ashley Avenue. Also gave her a key to Room 221 at the New Rosemont Hotel.

  The offer of a free room induced stillness in Delpha. She liked stillness, liked quiet, but she thought best when her body was in motion, busy, occupied so that her mind, left alone, could feed her the tricks that might lurk behind such a proposal. For now she just listened to Miss Blanchard talk.

  “Couple days later, she had an even worse stroke than the first one.”

  Aunt tells niece she has something in her room to give her. Tells her it’s some valuable piece of jewelry. Then she up and suffers a stroke. And not her first one either. Delpha saw that Calinda Blanchard wanted her to understand the connection between the stroke and cousin Ida. Yeah, Delpha understood night followed day. What she pondered was how the cousin had given a hundred year-old woman a stroke without killing her. Some miscalculation going on there.

  “Ida stays juiced up,” Miss Blanchard said next.

  Well, there you go.

  Then the threat, ever the same, evergreen as the middlemost pine in the pin
ey woods:

  if you _________

  if you _________

  if you _________

  or dare to ___________, you’re screwed, got it?

  Delpha expressed her interest carefully. Excitement would not suit. Gotta put on an act, do it, put one on. She accepted one key to Ashley Avenue, one to her room, and an invitation to fix herself a peanut butter sandwich.

  Oscar, the young cook, stopped her from uncapping the 32 oz. jar of Welch’s grape jelly from out of the industrial-size refrigerator. He ducked into the pantry and brought out a Mason jar.

  “Mayhaw,” he said, “my gran put it up last summer. This is the last one.”

  Her mother used to make jelly from mayhaw berries. The sweet-tea smell of the jelly rose. Tears sprang to her eyes. Dipping her head to blink them away, she murmured thanks.

  She carried her suitcase and a plate with the sandwich out of the kitchen. The residents turned her way. She nodded vaguely toward the old men and one old woman, drawn into a forward tilt by a pair of watermelon bosoms, a pink cardigan sweater tented around a humped back. “Hello,” called the woman, wiggling her fingers. Delpha managed a smile and climbed upstairs, where she found the bathroom mid-way down the hall. She lowered the suitcase sideways to the floor and set the plate on it, used the toilet, and scrubbed her hands and face. Then she retrieved the plate and the suitcase, sacrificing teeth brushing so that once she entered her room, she could stay there.

  She had thought this out many times.

  She opened the door to #221, put down the suitcase and plate as before. Swiveled and locked the door, set the key in clear view on a chest of drawers. Then she picked up the plate and looked around. Moss-green walls. Window facing an alley. Single bed with a chenille spread, dusky rose. Bedside table, lamp. Chest of drawers. Chair. Closet. That picture of two kids huddling on a bridge, wide-winged angel flared up behind, enough to scare the tar out of them. She’d count on a Gideon in the night table.

  Delpha unpacked her four pairs of white cotton panties, her extra brassiere, also white cotton, a sanitary belt and box of Kotex into the chest of drawers. Hung two skirts and blouses and a dress in the closet. Unzipped her navy blue skirt and hung it up too, shed her shirt, bra and panties, and kept on the white nylon slip. The old hotel had been refurbished with central air but a measly amount circulated. She raised the window for fresh air. Switched on the ceiling fan, but not the lamp. She took her sandwich to the side of the bed, where, sitting down, she ate it slowly, holding her head over the plate so as not to drop crumbs onto the swept wood floor. Fragrant, that mayhaw. She sopped up the crumbs with a damp finger. Then she pulled down the covers and lay down, stretched out her legs, her toes spread against cotton washed two hundred times, drew the sheet up to her shoulders. Laying her head on the flattened pillow, she felt, then savored how the door was locked and she was alone.