Dark River Road

by Virginia Brown

  “Rainey likes his new truck, I guess.”

  “Yeah.” He dragged his arm over his face where his hair still dripped. She’d turned on the heater but he was wet to the bone and it didn’t help much.

  “Daddy said Rainey bought it with the money you’d saved to buy Shadow.”

  He didn’t want to think about that, and sure didn’t want to talk about it. The less he let himself think about the dog, the quicker he’d forget him.

  “How’s Dempsey’s arm?” he asked abruptly. “I heard he hurt it unloading some bags of manure for old man Quinton.”

  “Just sprained. He’s got it in a brace right now. He’ll be okay. He’s just bad-tempered.”

  “He’s not used to sitting around. Tell him I’ll help him out if he needs me.”

  “I think he’d like it if you just showed up to talk to him. He gets awful cranky lately. Says I stay out too late and too much.”

  “Yeah, I hear the same thing.”

  They shared a look. Before he got out of the car, she said, “Hey, come hear me sing next Saturday night, okay?”

  “Where you singing?”

  “It’s amateur night over at the Hideaway. There’s a thousand dollar prize for the winner and I got plans for that money.”

  “Sound pretty sure you’ll win.”

  “I’ll win.”

  He thought about Tansy as he went up to the house, skirting Rainey’s six year old Chevy sitting in the rain. He barely glanced at it. Just the sight of the truck made him feel tight inside, like he wanted to hit something. Preferably Rainey.

  Mama was in the kitchen when he went in the back door, and she turned to look at him. “I knew you’d get wet walking home in the rain. I have some hot soup ready for you.”

  He could smell it. His stomach growled as he went to change out of his wet clothes and get back to the kitchen before Rainey stirred from the living room. Mama set him a big bowl of homemade soup on the table, and put some hot cornbread with it and a glass of sweet tea.

  “I hope the afternoon with Reverend Hale went well, Chantry,” she said, and he pulled out his chair and sat down without looking at her.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Were you able to talk easily with him?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I think me and the reverend have come to an understanding now.”

  “The reverend and I,” Mama corrected, but she sounded pleased. “That is excellent. I am very pleased. I know things have been difficult for you lately. Even without . . .problems . . . a young man’s adolescence can be tumultuous. There are certain phases young people go through that you have probably already discussed with the reverend. It is so important that you remain focused on your school work, Chantry. Your grades have slipped drastically. If you ever hope to earn a decent scholarship—”

  “I’m not going to college.” He hadn’t meant to say it quite like that, but it had just come out before he could stop it. He looked up. “There’s no point in it. Sorry.”

  “No point?” She looked horrified. “We are talking about your future, Chantry.”

  When would he learn to keep his mouth shut? He put his head down and ate his soup and let Mama list all the advantages of a college education without interrupting. It was a familiar list. He’d heard it so many times he could recite it with her, good salary, prestige, knowledge, sense of satisfaction, benefits . . .he just never heard the one thing that’d make a difference to him. He didn’t know what that would be, but he never heard it. Maybe it was because he knew that sometimes a college education could lead straight to Cane Creek. It had for Mama.

  “What are you badgerin’ that boy about now?” Rainey asked, coming into the kitchen for another beer. “What’s he done this time?”

  Chantry kept his eyes down. Sometimes he thought if he just looked at Rainey he might not be able to keep from hitting him. So he kept his mouth shut and his head down and tried not to listen to anything Rainey said. It usually worked.

  “Chantry and I were just discussing college,” Mama said.

  Rainey snorted. “Waste of time. I can get him hired onto a construction crew this summer. He’ll make pretty good money if he can keep his ass out of trouble like my boys do.”

  Chantry figured if Beau and Rafe were good examples, he ought to do fine. They got in fights every week-end they were in town and usually ended up in jail for a night.

  Mama sounded tense. “I do not want my son working construction the rest of his life.”

  There was a beat of silence, then Rainey said, “He too good for that? It’s honest work, by God, and you thought it was good enough when you married me.”

  “Yes, and now you are on disability because you fell from the top of a building.”

  Chantry got up from the table and put his bowl in the sink, then walked around Mama and Rainey to go to his room. This argument was his fault. That didn’t mean he was going to hang around and listen to it.

  Rainey eyed him but didn’t say anything when he walked out. Ever since he’d gotten cold-cocked, Rainey had kept his hands to himself. Except for that one time in the garage. Chantry hadn’t even tried to stop him, he hadn’t put up a hand to block a blow; he’d just stood there and let Rainey whip him with that belt until he went to his knees. Mama had told the police sergeant that there would be consequences and she’d kept her word. Maybe he should be grateful. The pain had taken his mind off Shadow and eased the shock of Mama’s betrayal. But only until it stopped.

  After that, he resolved never to let Rainey hit him again. Now he knew he could take him. And he was pretty sure Rainey knew it, too.

  That next Saturday night, Chantry and Donny showed up at the Hideaway around nine. It was a long wooden building built right on the edge of a backwash of the river. A gravel parking lot curved out front, and a flashing neon sign advertised cold beer. There were so many cars in the lot they ended up parking along the road. There was a brisk wind, and being this close to the river made the air bone-cold and damp.

  Donny looked over at the building. Music rattled the windows, gushed out every time the door opened. A majority of the vehicles in the lot were trucks, some with company logos on the doors, many with winches attached to the front bumpers, almost all of them with gun racks in rear windows. Some of the men going inside dressed in slacks and shirts and had women with them, but most wore dirty jeans, work boots, and denim jackets. Construction workers, farm workers, men used to using their hands and muscles to make their way in life.

  “Rough crowd,” Donny said, and Chantry nodded.

  “Can be.”

  “You ever been here before?”

  “Once.” He didn’t mention that it’d been years ago when Rainey had still been working and brought him with him to meet a man about another business deal that hadn’t worked out. He didn’t remember now why he’d been with him, but he did remember that Mama had been furious when she learned Rainey took him inside. She’d said it was a dangerous place for adults, much less for children.

  This was a different kind of danger than the kind at the Hamburger Shack. Fights there were mostly between groups of kids from different counties. Here, grown men carried weapons like knives and guns, and a fight could quickly get out of hand. Even the law stayed away most of the time, and rumor had it a few bodies had been dumped in the backwash for turtles and catfish to feast on. Klan kill. That was probably just rumor.

  Most of Mississippi had changed since Civil Rights. Blacks and whites lived next door to each other, worked together, went to school together, and some even became friends. White boys dated black girls, black girls dated white boys, and babies were born that borrowed from both to blend the differences. It was accepted. But not everywhere. Not in Quinton County. It was a reminder of the Old South, the one that had existed after the Civil War and before Civil Rights and Martin Luther King and integration. Before the Federal government stepped in to make sure everything was fair and just and legal and no discrimination thrived. It wasn’t something that went down eas
y with a lot of folks. A war had been fought over states’ rights, over the right of local government to make its own rules and set its own ways. Down here, people still planted Confederate flags in their front yards and wore tee shirts and baseball caps that said Hell no, we ain’t forgotten. The War of Northern Aggression was still fresh in the minds of people almost a hundred and thirty years removed from it. And lingering sorrow lay underneath bitter acknowledgment of defeat, of what “might have been” if only the South had had more factories, more men, more guns. More miracles.

  Change didn’t come easy to people entrenched in old ways, even in big towns where there was a layer of sophistication and civilization to smooth over old resentments and hatreds. Some places, change didn’t come at all. Whites still had their own places to go, blacks had their places to go, and the two didn’t mix. If they did, it was like trying to mix oil and water. Fire and tinder. Combustible.

  “So what’s Tansy doing singing here?” Donny wanted to know when they walked in and stood off to one side, checking it out. No one had carded them when they came in, just took their money at the door. Waitresses in tight tops carried loaded trays of beer to the tables and the noise level was par with standing next to a working jackhammer. The crowd was instantly recognizable: Rough. Redneck. Ready for trouble.

  “Damned if I know. Some kind of contest.” He had to shout for Donny to hear him over the jukebox blaring out a country song.

  They moved up closer to the stage where a band was setting up and some microphones were being tested. The jukebox still played. Shrill whistles cut through a Loretta Lynn song. Some guy let out with a Rebel yell, that loud call that had sent shivers down Yankee spines and carried men from both sides to their deaths. Chantry got an uneasy feeling that had nothing to do with being underage. The Hideaway was worse than he’d remembered, worse than he’d heard.

  What the hell was Tansy thinking coming here? Reputation didn’t come close to the reality of it. This was no place for a fifteen year old girl, black or white, that was for sure. He had to find her and get her out of here. Quick.

  “Come on,” he said to Donny, who stuck close as a cocklebur to his back. They headed for the stage. He asked some guy in a battered cowboy hat where the contestants were waiting, and he jerked his thumb toward a heavy black curtain strung across the rear of the stage.

  “Back there.”

  Tansy stood nervously beside a huge black amplifier, sipping from a plastic cup and trying not to show how scared she was. Chantry saw it, though, in the way her eyes looked too big and bright and her chest rose and fell a little too quickly. He walked straight over to her.

  “Have you lost your mind? Girl, what are you thinking?”

  She glanced at Donny hanging back behind him and her face got tight. “Chantry—no one knows. Not here.”

  For a moment he just looked at her; then he understood. She was passing. He guessed it was possible. Anyone looking at her for the first time would only see a beautiful girl with thick dark hair shot through with red, big gold eyes and skin that only got a pretty tan in the summer sun. Winter time, like now, she was whiter than Cathy Chandler. No one would see a black girl.

  “I need that money,” she said. “Don’t fuck this up for me.”

  He blew out a sigh. “What if someone out there . . .”

  “They won’t,” she said when he paused. “Leon works here as a stock boy sometimes. He said he hasn’t ever seen anybody we know.”

  “So how does Leon feel about you being here?”

  She looked away, stared at Donny a minute, and then shrugged. “We disagreed on a lot of things. I do what I’ve got to do, he does what he’s got to do.” When Chantry didn’t say anything for a minute, she nodded toward Donny. “What about him?”

  “Donny’s cool.” He glanced over his shoulder and Donny jerked his chin in agreement. He looked back at her. “This still feels risky. What if someone recognizes your name?”

  She smiled. “They won’t. Trust me.”

  “Why do I suddenly feel really scared.” He shook his head. “Damn, girl. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “So do I.”

  “All right. Guess we’ll sit out front and listen to you sing. Knock ’em dead.”

  “I intend to.” Her smile was brave but he saw the slight quiver at the corners of her mouth and knew how scared she was. Her hands shook a little when she smoothed them over her short denim skirt, and the fringe on the front of her Western style shirt shivered with the quick rise of her chest. She’d opened the top buttons some to hint at what lay beneath, had a red handkerchief knotted around her neck and wore cowboy boots. All she needed was a big white Stetson to look like a rodeo queen.

  Chantry gave her a kiss on the cheek and squeezed her hands, then he and Donny went back out front to find a place to sit or stand. He wished this feeling of doom he had inside would go away. Not even a beer helped tamp it down. The waitress glanced at them when they ordered two Bud longnecks, but took their money and their tip without a word. She had big hair and a big chest, and looked like she’d been rode hard and put up wet and wasn’t about to take any shit from anyone. He guessed she didn’t care who the money came from as long as it ended up in her hand.

  When management pulled the plug on the jukebox and announced the contest, no one in the club seemed to care but kept on talking and laughing. The smell of frying burgers and pizza mixed with the squeal of a microphone, then the first riffs of a guitar chord. Some guy came out on stage to a smattering of applause, probably from friends and family, and sang a Charlie Daniels song about the devil going down to Georgia. He did pretty good with it, and the crowd got stirred up some at the rousing beat. The next contestant slowed them down with a country ballad that was slow and sad and sweet. She wore tight jeans and a tee shirt, and she had big yellow hair and one of those comfortable shapes that’d turn to fat one day but was easy on the eyes now. Several in the crowd seemed to know her.

  Then Tansy stepped onto the stage, looking nervous but determined, and the announcer said in his bored tone that it was her debut and they should welcome Rainbow. Someone laughed. Tansy flinched slightly, but stepped up to the mike and looked out into the crowded room where people were still laughing and talking and getting restless. A voice yelled to hurry up and get this over with so they could plug back in the jukebox.

  “Sure thing, boys,” she said into the mike, her voice low and sultry and sexy, and so unlike Chantry had ever heard her that he had to stare hard to be sure it was really Tansy. “I just want to sing you a little song first.” The back-up band launched into the first chords, and she grabbed the mike off the stand. She didn’t sing so much as tell a story in that powerful, haunting voice he’d heard her use before, dredging up memory and emotion even from this rough crowd as she belted out The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. It was an old folk tune from the sixties, a song that touched on suppressed wounds, old hurts, times long gone and best forgotten. It was a song that conjured up images of war and defeat and determined pride. Of a land and men and women beaten, but not conquered.

  And it brought rapt attention from the crowd that had gone quiet and still, and when she reached the part of the song that went, “and all the people were singing, la, na na na na na” they sang with her, lifting longneck bottles into the air and moaning sorrow for a life long since passed and probably not ever as good as its promise anyway. Chantry couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe this rowdy crowd of rednecks felt so deeply, that Tansy had touched them in an elemental part of their emotions with just her voice and someone else’s song.

  He looked over at Donny and saw something akin to admiration shining in his face and in his eyes as he stared at the stage and a fifteen year old girl who’d brought grown men to their feet with her song. No doubt about it. Tansy had won the contest like she’d said she would. How had she known? How had she known how this crowd would react? He’d never have guessed it. Not in a million years.

  Tansy’s eyes found h
im in the crowd, and she smiled as the band played the last notes and lingering echoes of the lyrics still hung above the smoke and brief stillness. He saluted her with his beer, and she put a foot back and bent from the waist with her arms outspread. Accepting the applause and stomping of feet and Rebel yells just like she’d been expecting it. It was her moment of triumph.

  Then, above the noise, Chantry heard someone shout, “Hey, that’s Chantry’s little nigrah gal.” He froze. His first thought was Rainey, but when he looked toward the source he saw Beau and Rafe standing only a few feet behind him, grinning like they’d said something funny.

  His anger sparked, but not many had heard Beau holler over the racket of stamping feet and yells. It wasn’t too late to save Tansy’s night. He started toward his stepbrothers.

  “Oh shit,” he heard Donny say, but he followed right behind him anyway.

  “What the hell you think you’re doing?” Chantry demanded when he was a foot from Beau. “Trying to start trouble?”

  “You mean with your little nigger gal? Hell, Chantry, if you want to stick your dick in her that’s up to you. Just don’t bring her ‘round here.” Beau looked off to his side, and Chantry saw a burly group of men sitting at a table and listening. Iron workers, from the looks of most of them. Other men sat there, too, dressed a lot better but still tough and narrow-eyed. “That right, boys?” Beau said louder, and jerked his head toward Chantry. “Is this the one you saw at the Hamburger Shack with that little yella gal? Sniffing her out like she’s a bitch in heat? Hell, he just needs to—”

  That was as far as Beau got before Chantry hit him. The blow snapped Beau’s head back and made him drop his beer, and then it was on. He drove him back against a stout wooden post. Beau went backward before he could get in a lick, then he lurched forward and punched back, quick hard jabs with a fist the size of a ham hock, catching Chantry so hard on the jaw he saw stars. He shook it off like he’d learned to do as a little kid, and put all his weight into the next punch. Beau went down with Chantry on top of him and in the dim light afforded by strings of cheap Christmas lights strung from pole to pole like bunting, he could see surprise reflected in his eyes.