“Shut up, Welp,” I said without looking at him.
Emerson pointed to the pick-up counter. “Go fetch us some Cokes, Turd Face.”
Welp was breathing hard, his arms flexed. “She ain’t,” he growled over his shoulder as he turned to obey, “answered my question.”
Jimbo rolled his eyes and went to call his mother next. When he returned, Welp following behind him with Cokes, he dropped down on the picnic bench next to Farsanna. “Ma said to tell the mangy pack howdy.”
Now this couldn’t have been true, not exactly. Regina Lee Riggs never said howdy—she was much too refined. She would’ve asked, in deep Virginian, to convey mah regahds to y’all’s mangy pack.
Jimbo stabbed his fork into barbecue. “And the good Reverend Riggs,” he tipped his head toward Farsanna, “that’d be my daddy—was receiving his weekly word from the Lord.” Bo reached for the hot sauce, the one marked with the flames, and raised it to Emerson and me like a toast. “He’s calling it ‘Rescue the Perishing and Yeah, That Means You.’”
“Bo’s referring to our father,” Emerson said to Farsanna, who sat beside him, between him and Bo. “Dad’s what you might call the village atheist.”
L. J. nodded. “Every village benefits from a modicum of intellectual dissent.”
Welp nodded too. Though he probably hadn’t heard what he was nodding about.
Emerson jerked his head in my direction. “Me and Shelby Lenoir take after the faith of our father, you might say.”
For a moment, L. J. stopped sneering. “Which reminds me,” he groaned, “have you all seen my daddy’s new sign?”
I leaned in to my brother. “What sign?”
“Outside his daddy’s Feed and Seed,” Emerson answered, laughing. “It’s a new marquee, three lines, a good five feet across and lit up so as the blind couldn’t miss it: “Fresh Bait—”
His head dropping to his chest, L. J. supplied the next line: “Cold Beer—”
Jimbo snagged the last line for himself: “Jesus Saves!” And Bo began the lines again, chanting with Em: Fresh Bait, Cold Beer, Jesus Saves! He gave L. J.’s shoulder a friendly shove. “Me and the good Reverend Riggs drove by it yesterday, and even he chuckled up some.”
L. J. shook his head. “Your daddy laughed?”
“Said he reckoned you’d be embarrassed as Kentucky Fried Cherubs.”
“Well he’s right. He said that?”
“‘Least that’s what he meant.”
That went without saying. The good Reverend Riggs, we all knew, never said what he meant, for fear of offending—but, now, that didn’t make the opposite true. Nobody doubted he meant what he said, his sermons all variations on being nice because God was so nice. But Truth was something the Good Reverend liked to hand out soft and slow and sweet-smelling—which, some people said, was why the Baptists had kept him so long, their having run off the preacher before who’d liked his iced tea and his gospel unsweetened.
Bobby Welpler leaned across the table to Farsanna. “What about you, Sri Lanka? Your daddy got himself forty wives and a girl god with snakes for hair?”
L. J. covered his face with both hands. “Good Lord, the ignorance one has to endure here.” He turned on Welp. “Sri Lanka primarily practices Buddhism, and secondarily Hinduism. Although,” he cocked his head at Farsanna, “although …”
“My father’s family,” she offered quietly, “are Muslim. And Moor. Although we do not regularly—”
Welp interrupted: “What do them Arabs call their Bible?”
“Sacred text,” L. J. corrected, one hand massaging his forehead. “And it’s called the Koran.”
“Yeah. Koran. Or maybe your daddy’s done some of that island voodoo, huh, Sri Lanka?”
The new girl received this without flinching. “This,” she told him, “is for us home now.”
Just like that. No explanation.
But Welp muttered, “That don’t make no sense,” and I’d no intention of agreeing with him in public.
Jimbo was gnawing his way through his third corn on the cob, this last one from off my plate. He shrugged cheerfully. “You got a God-given right not to make sense in the Home of the Brave—what makes this country so big-dirty-dog great. Don’t nothing got to make sense, and our Constitution protects it.”
Welp pouted. “She still ain’t answered my question.”
“You,” I said to Welp, “haven’t asked one worth answering yet.”
Emerson slapped two quarters on the table. “Welp, Big Dog here’s needing a drink.” She grinned and drooled beside him.
Sulking, Bobby Welpler slumped his way back to the screen mesh window.
But by the time he returned, the sulk had lost its hold on his face, sliding down to only his mouth, his eyes having cleared up out of their half-lidded glare. And a few baby back ribs later, the sauce basting his nose, the sulk had slipped from his face altogether—ribs’ll do that—and showed only in his shoulders.
We wiggled our bare toes in sawdust as we talked, with barbecued beans and butter from the corn greasing our noses, our cheeks, our chins. Our napkins untouched in a stack, we licked the sauce, heavy with maple syrup and brown sugar, from our fingers and lips. And we took turns letting Big Dog finish our sodas. Her teeth gripping the cans, she tottered on her hind legs to toss back the dregs. She preferred Dr Pepper but would settle for Coke, and because she turned her nose up at Tab, I kept the pink can to myself.
The new girl offered the last bits of her shredded pork to Big Dog, and Emerson turned his cap a full revolution in thanks, while Big Dog slept on Farsanna’s feet.
“The time that is the next,” Farsanna told them, “I will bring with me the dog at my house.”
Em scratched his golden retriever behind the ears. “That’d be nice,” he said to Big Dog, like he’d all of a sudden gone shy about lifting his head. Farsanna crouched down beside Em to stroke Big Dog’s broad, happy back.
It was the same touch Farsanna had used for readjusting her mother’s headscarf, small fingers deft and light now smoothing Big Dog’s ears. The new girl smiled up at my brother, who managed to return the smile.
Jimbo cut in. “It’s a little-known fact that Big Dog has always harbored a hairy fondness for,” he held up his palm, and placed his other fist down and to the right, “Sri Lanka.”
Farsanna considered this for a moment. Then, rising, she lay one hand lightly, quickly, on Emerson’s arm, and one on Jimbo’s. “Then it is Big Dog I have for the kindness to thank. Please tell her for me that I am most grateful.”
My brother and his best friend looked not at the new girl and not at Big Dog, but at each other.
“Well,” I said, changing the subject, “seemed pretty clear to me that Buddy made the best jump from the rope today.” And just as I’d hoped, the male egos present locked horns.
Em snorted. “Then you clearly missed my triple back.” He turned to the new girl. “Farsanna?”
“I saw it,” she smiled at him. “It was indeed splendid.”
Em turned back to us with a self-satisfied smirk. “What did I tell you? Splendid.”
“But,” Sanna added, with the first sly glint I’d seen in her, “the long spin of L. J. was also most impressive.”
My cousin readjusted his horn-rims and pretended to snap suspenders on the John Deere T-shirt that served as uniform in his daddy’s Feed and Seed. “I call that my Cyclotron Extraordinaire. And I thank you for observing the perfection with which it was executed.”
I waved this away. “I still think Buddy’s drops showed more guts.”
“Turtlest, Sweetheart,” Jimbo put his hand over his heart, “you wound me! Did you not witness the full Dirty Harry with a half twist I delivered, just for your viewing pleasure?”
“Was that the time you slipped off the branc
h and fell headfirst?”
“Ah, I see you were fooled by my clever display of wit and athleticism.”
“I was worried you’d bust your fool head open on one of those lower branches.”
He leaned in toward me. “But tell us the truth: You’d miss my fool head, if it was to bust open.”
“I would miss,” I said sweetly, reaching my fork to his plate, “your sharing your fried okra with me.”
We dug our toes deeper in sawdust.
I leaned in against Jimbo; he leaned against me. I could feel his landscaping muscles still taut from the day. I lay a head on his shoulder, he draped an arm over my back, and all was right with the world.
Even Welp settled in to something that crept past civil and almost to warm.
After dinner, we began to stagger our way toward Emerson’s truck, arms draped around each other’s shoulders. I turned my head back to Hog Wild, satisfied, and glimpsed Mort’s truck in the corner of the dirt lot. Wiping the last of barbecue sauce from his mouth with his forearm, he must’ve been there at Steinberger’s some time already and we’d just not seen him and they must not have seen us. He and Buddy, their bulky backs to us, were walking away from the picnic tables and toward Mort’s truck. They were sauntering first, and then Mort lifted Buddy’s wrist for a look at his watch. They both broke into a run.
I nudged Jimbo, who was beside me, his right arm over my shoulders, his left over Welp’s.
“What do you suppose,” I whispered to Bo, “the two of them are off to this time of night?”
Bo shrugged. He could be irritating that way, his not getting worked up when worry seemed rooted in nothing but air.
By the time we stopped by Dairy Queen for chocolate-dipped cones on the way to drop Farsanna off, the fireflies had already begun damping their lights for darkness to tuck the town into sleep.
Sleepy and no longer hungry, we curled up next to each other like kittens, and Em’s engine purred for us. My head resting against Bo, I idly pedaled the warm air with bare feet.
“What could I grow up and do for a living,” I murmured into his shoulder, “and never wear shoes?”
His eyebrows crumpled together in one long, shaggy line. “Well, lemme cogitate now. There’s surfing. And pearl-diving. And there’s professions I can’t pronounce in the presence of ladies.”
I nuzzled in closer. “Hmm. What else?”
He ran a hand down my hair. “Or we could keep doing this.”
“You think,” Bobby Welpler wanted to know, “that we could?” He looked, I thought, about four years old just then, his mouth gone all round and hopeful.
Bo closed his eyes, nodding. “Day in, day out. Day up, day down. Day good, bad, and ugly.”
“How ’bout,” I whispered, “we just skip all the ugly?”
He rested his chin on the top of my head. “All right, then. We’ll skip all the ugly.”
“Hey … Bo?” I whispered.
“Hmm?”
“You don’t reckon …”
“Don’t reckon what, Turtlest?”
“You don’t reckon Mort’s gonna do anything with that gun, do you? I mean, anything besides cart it around like he’s always done?”
Bo tightened his arm around me. “Shoot.”
“You … don’t think he will, do you?”
He chuckled into my hair. “Shoot no’s what I meant. His kind’s all blam and no bullet.”
I thought about this. “But … Bo?”
“You plan on ever letting a man sleep?”
“Bo, you may be right about Mort all by himself. But what about as a group?”
“Mort’s big enough to be his own group.”
“I meant … you know how wild dogs, by themselves, wouldn’t do much harm but eat trash, but once you let them start running in a pack—”
“And then you got trouble.” His chin still on the top of my head, I could feel him nodding. That was all the reassurance he offered just then. But just then, it was enough.
Jimbo was right, I had decided. Mort was mostly a loner, except when he ran with Buddy. And Buddy only followed whatever Mort did. Mort himself, Jimbo had said and I was believing, was all swagger and snarl. Him and his gun for a security blanket.
Everyone’s eyes were closed by that time except mine, and I’d like to think Emerson’s because he was driving—and maybe also the new girl’s, whose head was turned toward the white wake of taillights behind us that sometimes washed red. We rode in silence down the Pike, Em pulling his truck onto back roads that led to the Look. Slowing, he followed the two-lane road without guardrails that traced the edge of our mountain. Far below, the lights of the valley below winked back at us—those of us who opened our eyes to see them. L. J. was snoring by now against Welp’s shoulder, and I made a mental note to abuse L. J. tomorrow for that. Welp himself came to long enough to see where we were and then squeeze his eyes shut, like Emerson might be on the verge of missing a turn and sending us all plunging over.
I watched the lights in the Valley and felt Jimbo’s chin on the top of my head and tried to feel safe. Although without guardrails and at night, the point where our mountain ended and the Valley began was not clear to me.
The whole day, in fact, had been unclear to me: just where the point was when someone goes plummeting over the edge, and whether you get to see that coming before it happens, or whether sometimes the edge is under your wheels before you find there’s no reverse gear.
Em’s truck eased off the side of the road on the thin strip of grass before the Look dropped off into air. He parked, startling us, and we all sat up, L. J. snorting awake and rubbing his eyes.
Emerson unfolded himself from the cab and joined us back in the truck’s bed. “Pretty, isn’t it?” He said this to the new girl.
She nodded, pointing. “What is there?”
“Nothing but valley,” I dismissed it. You can’t be raised on a mountain without growing a good, healthy disdain for the pitiful souls who live on flatland and closer to sea level.
Farsanna’s head was cocked toward the Valley, the clusters of white lights, and the lines of red and blue glowing pinpoints way out toward the airport. She waved a hand across the clusters of white. “And ...?” she said.
Innocent as this hand gesture and one word might’ve seemed, I knew it for the challenge it was. The new girl wasn’t accepting that so many clusters of lights could be only nothing.
“Nothing worth seeing,” I persisted, a little peeved now. “And it’s dangerous at night anyhow.”
The new girl waited for me to explain.
“Nobody goes downtown at night, and it’s late.” I reached for the Mickey Mouse watch on Bo’s wrist. I’d hoped it would announce we were nearing eleven, our summer curfew, but it was still only nine-thirty. “And anyway, it’s rough and dirty, not at all safe this time of night and it’s crowded.…” I stopped myself there, irritated that crowded and nobody might seem to contradict each other, when in fact we all knew why they didn’t.
My own cousin didn’t help matters any. “There are some splendid examples of Victorian architecture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on several streets. They’re desperately in need of rehabilitation now, but someday perhaps someone will have the foresight to fix them back up. And the lights down by the river aren’t half bad. It’s predominantly warehouses now, but someday …”
Welp spit off the side of the truck. “What Turtle here was trying to say was the Valley ain’t safe at night, not in town anyhow, because there’s a certain kind of nobody lives there.”
It was, in a way, exactly what I’d been saying. And hearing it bounced back to me, all crawling with ugly from Welp’s mouth, meant I had to switch sides. “It’s worth seeing,” I contradicted myself, quickly and loudly. Which I meant not one bit, but it h
ad to be said.
The truck radio, fuzzed in static but on Em’s favorite station, introduced the next band, Kool and the Gang. Emerson cranked up the volume.
Then he and Jimbo, the two tallest of us, looked at each other over the tops of our heads and had clearly reached some kind of agreement without speaking.
“Hang on, then,” Em called as he slammed the cab door behind him and U-turned onto the two-lane road that looped down our mountain. Welp clutched the side of the truck as if he’d been loaded into a carnival ride with the safety bar gone. “What? Where we going?”
5 The Way of the World
Bo leaned back against a six-bag pile of mulch and manure and laced his hands behind his head. “Wherever the spirit leads and the road rolls is where we’re going, Welp.”
Welp crouched as if he would leap. “No. Not to that part of town, we’re not.”
Bo looked at him and grinned. “You driving from back here?”
“I ain’t going down there tonight. You hear?” Welp stood up straight then, not seeming to care that the truck was already moving at near full speed.
Bo dove for Bobby’s legs and buckled him down into the truck bed. “Are you nuts?” Jimbo banged on the back of the cab. “Em, man, swing Bobby by his house.” To Farsanna, Bo added, “He lives close by. Won’t take but a clip of a minute.”
She nodded, looking more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. And more relaxed than I felt, or she should have been, had she known where she was headed.
Welp sat sulking as the truck tunneled into the dark of a back road that connected the Look with the Pike, a road so obscure that no one but Bobby and his mother lived there, so far as I knew, and no zoning laws could apply.
At the foot of Welp’s drive, L. J. roused himself for a moment. “Anyone home at the Taj?” The Taj was Jimbo’s name for Welp’s mobile home, which even for an ancient single-wide trailer was in sorry condition. But L. J. had said it out of kindness, even if it was L. J. We were grown up, almost, but still of an age that our mommas liked us not to be home all alone for too long, and we looked out for each other.
Blue Hole Back Home Page 6