“I’m good,” Solemn answered.
Now she smacked gum when she talked to him. She wouldn’t watch a show with them together. She looked outside the window all the time and wound up gone for hours, to the well or around Singer’s or throughout the makeshift roads she walked alone on now, barefoot.
“Why y’all let me stay out of school?” Solemn suddenly asked, breaking into his mind. As he thought about it, she answered for him: “I wouldn’t have let me do that.”
“I thought it’s what you wanted,” Redvine said.
“Well, it wasn’t.”
“I did everything I could to get you in the Kosciusko high school, but you didn’t have the credits.” She sucked her teeth. He went on. “Minute I asked you to come on the road with me, you said, ‘Fine.’ Now, you treating me like I didn’t care or something?”
“You only care about Landon. It’s always been like that.”
“Where you get something like this from?”
“He’s your boy. Mama told me you didn’t want me at all. You wanted a boy. I was supposed to be named Solomon. I got this old cutoff name instead.”
“Now Solemn, your mama’s lying. I never said anything like that. You always been my adorable little girl.”
“You wouldn’t have let Landon leave school. That’s all I was saying.”
* * *
On Solemn’s birthday, the Redvines sat at their kitchen table before fifteen unlit candles on a chocolate sheet cake. The TV was off. And the radio was on Solemn’s favorite station. A prime rib smoked on a platter in front of them, devoured before anyone bothered to touch their scalloped potatoes, green beans, and biscuits. They planned to visit the movie theater after dinner. They voted between The Village and The Notebook. Even though she was outnumbered, Solemn won. They settled on The Village. It had been nearly two years since they had caught a show all together. Solemn had on a brand-new pair of jeans and sky-blue glitter flats. And finally, her glasses: clear rimmed, large, personal follow-up appointments with an optician.
Earlier that week, Redvine presented his wife with a choker string of pearls. Fake, but good enough for sale in a jewelry store alone, not the simple section at Walmart. He ran down the laid-off Greyhound driver who now lugged a suitcase of Avon across Singer’s. From her, he bought Night Magic and Emeraude for Bev. He told her to be sure to stop by with each new catalog. Delightful surprises. The occasion was none.
“Business is good,” he told Bev.
“You like your steak, Solemn?” Redvine asked.
“Yes, Daddy,” Solemn responded, lips greasy.
“Lemme show you how to hold your knife and fork, little girl,” Bev said. She put her hands around her daughter’s and the fork and pressed Solemn’s middle finger down the spine of the fork. “This the proper way to do it.”
“I don’t like it that way,” Solemn said. Bev all but took over her plate and started to cut the meat. Solemn slammed her fork down on her plate. She snatched her hands away. She balled her right fist and stuck it into her cheek.
“Solemn, what’s gotten into you?” Bev wondered.
“Nothing,” Solemn said. She turned away and crossed her arms.
“Apologize to your mother, Solemn, right now,” Redvine added.
“For what? I didn’t do anything.”
“I don’t like how you talked to her.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
“Lord…” Bev pushed back from the table.
“Oh, I can’t?” Redvine peered. Solemn jumped up from the table. Her parents stood with her. She pounded Redvine in his chest with her fists and kicked at his knees. He stood defenseless against Solemn. She was furious. He bent down to steady himself.
“Solemn!” Bev shouted.
“You can’t tell me what to do! You’re nothing! You’re nothing!”
Bev gripped Solemn and turned her around so fast the girl almost tripped. She shook her. Redvine came between them. Solemn ran to the door and out into the yard. With no shoes on and tiny rocks prickling her feet, Bev ran after her.
“Get in here, right now!”
“No!” Solemn shouted back.
“Lord … you gonna have the neighbors callin’ the law on us…”
She was about to sprint to Solemn and drag her inside by her back ponytail, if she had to. Redvine grabbed his wife’s shoulder.
“Just let her go,” Redvine said.
“I just don’t understand … Here we are having this nice supper for her birthday … ready to go to the show.”
“Just let it go. She’ll come back.”
“But we ain’t even gave her all her presents.”
“Bev, look, trust me on this. We gonna go on to the show by ourselves and leave her by herself tonight. You wanted to see The Notebook anyway.”
“No.” Bev pushed him loose. She didn’t care who thought she was a witch for it.
She wasn’t about to watch Solemn march on, that damned well. Had started that mess back up again. Was she gonna jump? Just normal growing pains. Hormones and loneliness. Aftershocks. Maybe even a boy. Landon gone. Redvine strange. Bev was just tired of it. Not sick yet. Just tired. The ungratefulness and self-absorption of them all. By God they were going to be normal for just one night, even if it killed them.
Redvine had no choice but to follow his wife and daughter on down there; stomping up dust Bev was. She didn’t care who saw. Let ’em talk. They gone talk about me anyway … Her younger child bent over rim of the well whose waters had gone rank. Her husband stormed behind her, unable to keep up. Tripping even, to fall without his wife there to catch him. By the time he grabbed his wife’s hands, slapping at Solemn leaned back onto the mouth of her little well, the guts of a secret spilled over.
“He talks to that poor, poor woman and threw her baby down the well!” Solemn yelled at her mother, feeling better each yell. “Pearletta. He talks to her while you’re gone and he’s why that baby died. He talks to her and drive her and he told me not to tell!”
“Solemn, what’re you talking about?” Bev cried, her face smashed by her two hands, head twisting from side to side, a set point at confusion, looking back and forth between them both, wondering what all this had to do with cutting a steak right.
“Solemn, now that’s enough,” Redvine said. He came between them.
“It’s never enough!” Solemn shouted.
“That woman is gone, Solemn,” Bev said. “Nobody even knows where she is!”
Stephanie, Theo, and Desiree Longwood were along with the rest who watched from indeterminable places thin trailer blinds allowed. Stephanie crossed her arms. Vindicated, in some ways, at her decision to part. Her husband wondered, feeling the least he could for the good word was stop good people from making fools of themselves. Stephanie was not happy to see the girl twist and turn ahead of her parents now turned against themselves, grabbing and catching and holding and unholding until Solemn seemed their last concern while they shouted about something. The last thing she liked to see was anybody out of their mind. The girl stormed in direction of their trees. And Desiree smiled, ready to unlatch the door and pick it up again, color life once more. But the Longwoods turned off all the lights and the TV, and they locked their door.
Solemn knew better than to knock there. She had no other friends. Crows guarded the edge of her well. They always were so a part of things, but so black as to soak up the light and oversimplify their existence, unlike a clear wind. Maybe she could leap inside the Longwood dory and hide for a night. Eventually, she’d have to go home. The trailer, not money emboweled in a music box or secrets locked in her mind or even somebody else to talk to, was the most concrete thing she had. She had to go back.
’Cross the way, near the woody frazzle she and Desiree once enjoyed for the mystery and privacy, she saw a woman strung between the hickory trees in a mint-green hammock of fabric, feet and hands hung over the bough. Girl was young, not quite like her but not too far above. She was ’sleep. Maybe she d
idn’t see the ruckus. Solemn didn’t remember her being anywhere near when she marched along the way first time. She was life passed by. And she was wearing the glasses, slid down her greasy and pimply nose. Had she known a gal was near, she would not have acted like that. How did she miss her?
“How much more I miss?” she said aloud. “Who I’m gonna tell?”
And to the ones being so nosy it looked like she was talking to herself, surefire sign all was lost. Funny-farm time, just a matter of time, knew it all the time.
To the center of her earth, Solemn forced herself to move. She didn’t dread punishment. She knew she had won, for now. The victory was bittersweet; along with the gut spilling was the illusion cracked: on the night of the lightning bugs and a fall and a hunt for that woman and a craving to see or hear That Baby, for maybe it was part of her, Solemn knew plain as day why The Man at the Well never went away from her no matter how far she tried to run. Redvine was not only near it all that night, but he was there. All Solemn could say to herself (nothing to nobody else, for days) was, Why?
TWENTY-FIVE
A promotion to detective augmented him above the trenches, at least directly. He could arrive when and if it was all cleaned up. His salary jumped. But it was no better.
Justin Bolden, married and “Detective” now, sat in Café on the Square, near the window. He had a black folder. A mug shot. A rap sheet. A few newspaper clippings an obit reporter scared up for him. The rest public record. An unsettling connection of the man whose name was spoken to the very trailer park he had narrowly escaped.
A waitress refilled the coffee on “Y’all ready to order?”
“The usual,” Nichols said.
“Two apple pies,” Bolden said. “One to go.” For his wife.
His boss turned to him: “Boy, you expect me to do what? Now, I can’t believe.”
“I’m just saying,” Bolden continued. “Well, I know these people. Good family.”
Nichols’ retirement party was already scheduled at the local Elks lodge—three months in advance. He had already pulled out the few cases of Old Crow bourbon from when he graduated from the police academy. And he had met with pension officials about his disbursements. Anything coming on top of his now was a nuisance, not a case.
Bolden, as well, was above being a desk boy who answered a department calling from South Sharpe Avenue in Cleveland. He was not one to pull into Singer’s Trailer Park with a warrant for Earl Redvine’s arrest, his pistol cocked and bullhorn alarming dreamers, who woke up to look between slits in blinds. He knew the women: Solemn and Bev hurled out of bed with hands up. He knew the man: Redvine jiggling off his wedding ring before he came out the door—while registered guns and other shit he bartered belonged to a magistrate in Cleveland. And the magistrate had complained. Very loudly.
“I don’t know what yas talking about,” Bev and Solemn heard Redvine say. Cops pushed his head down into a patrol car. He looked at the women, square in the face, with a smile. “This nothing,” he said, before the cops locked the door.
Solemn stood on the porch, looked back and forth inside and out, at her mother talking to the police and her father not crying about anything now. With flashlights and billy clubs, the three officers stomped in and out of the trailer with demands to Bev:
“Look heah, unlock every compartment and cubby, even the underneath…”
Earl’s duffel bag, once carriage of tools and food for a day, had about twelve thousand dollars cash in it.
“I … I don’t know.” Bev shook her hands and said, “I didn’t know.”
They drove Redvine away.
They had a phone now. When Earl called her, he told her all about it.
“I just found a bunch of stuff, trunk of my car,” the blithesome man offered, tired and chill. He had his own pack: Kools. He asked for water though. “My girl, my daughter. She ain’t say nothin’ to me about picking up no stuff. She come along with me sometimes. Keep me company. I just park and canvas, door-to-door. That’s what I do. I’m a salesman. Call my boss. I got his card at home. I think I got the number memorized though. Walter’s his name. He our regional manager. I work for a brand-new company. DigiCate. Wave of the future it is. I ain’t never know one of my customers was a judge. My girl, Solemn, she unpredictable. Like to wander, she do. Always have. Just get into stuff. Like money, too. I gotta pay her for everythang: wash the car, iron my pants, feed the cat. Now I found out why all that money was missing out the purse I keep from sales. Solemn like this. She strange. Now, I axed her. Several times I did. I wanted to know where that stuff come from. She told me she saw some folks sellin’ stuff in a backyard, gave ’em the money she took from me just so they could unload a bunch of it. I shouldn’t have believed her. My main concern was her takin’ the money from me. She apologized. But time it take me to trace back to all the houses I walk up to? And I thought about it. What if I go back to people who say the stuff theirs just so they can say it? That wouldn’t get it back where it belong. Look, my trailer small. We barely got room for our feet half the time. My wife and I … well. We gettin’ a house soon. And my son, he in the military. He a soldier. He gotta wife and they like to bring the babies to visit. So, yeah, we gettin’ a house soon. I’m not just gonna go sellin’ off folks’ stuff like that. I got in a little trouble back in the day. I was young, a hothead. I just went before a judge and that was it. I been law-abidin’ all my life. She ain’t mean no harm. She a good girl, gettin’ her GED. Now, I did call up to them police stations in the area, see if anybody was missin’ stuff. I did.”
“Bell South don’t show you calling no police precincts recently, Mr. Redvine. We got your phone records.”
“They got those?”
“They do.”
Nor did any of the Richardses’ nearby neighbors’ memories record a black fella showing up with machines to sell on a hot day in July. And the few Richards neighbors who were consulted didn’t remember a yard sale that day, either. Or that whole summer.
* * *
“This Redvine fella got arrested when he was sixteen,” Nichols reminded Bolden. “Caught up in a rattle against some officers out in Bledsoe. Slap on the wrist, then.”
“He was a boy,” Bolden said. “We all had them moments.”
“I didn’t.”
Bolden let that pass.
“Look, he got a son in the Army. You remember? We met ’em in the motel where that Hassle gal went missing.”
“So what?” Nichols shouted. “I meet a lot of people, Justin. I can’t go taking their words for it, just ’cause we interrupted some motel weekend? And we don’t know if she went missing from there. That’s just last time anybody seen her with ID. Kid thrown down a well and husband a druggie nut. Hell, I’d gone on and disappear, too.”
“Well, it all makes sense. None of Earl Redvine’s fingerprints were found in the Richards home. We ain’t took the girl’s yet.”
“And we won’t. You talking about a child, goddamn it. A child. What she gonna get for it? He needs to do time just for lacking common sense to know better. How the hell can a father sell shit he had to have known his gal stole?”
“Money,” Bolden answered. “I mean, I been out to the place a few times. Nichols, it ain’t much.” He was off that day and night. He would have handled things differently.
“Look,” Nichols interrupted, “if you wanna go ’round playing Robin Hood to your people, go right ahead. Couldn’t blame you. Might even be part of your job.”
Bolden tipped the glossy folder to the side. He threw a rap sheet across to Bolden. The name at top was Brett Singer.
“His father owns Singer’s Trailer Park and a little bit in between, to explain what he would have been doing there. This gal Akila Redvine was there last time anybody saw Pearletta Hassle. She worked there back in 2001, 2002. I verified that with the owner.”
“Yeah, but she never rented a room at the motel. At least not rightfully,” Nichols said. “So she’s either a liar or a thief or both.
”
“She’s not lying about having been in the motel same time as Pearletta. We met her there.” The piles of cocaine grains Bolden managed to sneak finger licks of had been enough to smear Pearletta. The strands of long, red white-folk hair left in the showers were considered the biggest accident—that one of them might actually run around with such a druggie whore who neglected her own child. Didn’t matter where the niggers came from. They were all druggies, crooks, whores, shufflers, looters. It didn’t matter what Viola and Edward Weathers said or how many times they showed up in Kosciusko with demands for an investigation. It didn’t matter how Viola used her husband’s fraternity to coax two black reporters into printing up her daughter’s story in Memphis and Jackson papers. Case on that black trailer-park gal—and her baby and crazy husband, too—was closed.
“I requested prints. I’m running them again.”
“That’s your call,” Nichols said.
“New suspects and information.”
“You expect me to crack open some black gals’ cases as trade-off for letting a Negro rob a judge’s estate?” Nichols asked Bolden. “Good hardworking folks go out to the movies, and come back to see their house been wrecked? This ain’t right.”
“I’m sure the Richards can afford to replace everything they lost.”
The waitress came over to throw a plate of chicken gizzards, gravy, biscuits, and two apple pie slices in front of the men. She left plastic containers along with the tab, then whistled off. Bolden sank into the booth and car-watched the parking lot.
When faced with the younger Redvines earlier that week, he had—again—remembered Landon’s face, the contempt in his eyes for the “POPOs.” Bolden was used to it from black men, but with a much higher octave behind them in Landon’s case. The Redvines were humble and didn’t seem to like mess. And he chalked up Redvine’s name on Pearletta’s paraphernalia as the type of crush any decent woman should have, with a man beating her ass in a trailer park and such better options scattered all around, not too far away. In every instant, the Redvines were brief and accommodating. This one was no different, with sincerity of the trade-off Akila Redvine offered for her father-in-law evident in the fact it lacked any threat behind it. If anything, what struck him was the timidity with which the wife spoke: “I shoulda said something earlier, ’bout that woman hanging out with those people own the land … I didn’t wanna go getting good people in trouble for nothing. The Redvines been good to me. I ain’t wanna bring them no glare.”
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