Welp shot me a look. “Ask Turtle. She’d be real glad to tell you: Is there ever anyone here?” He’d swung out of the truck before Emerson’s back wheels had followed his front into the drive.
Emerson let the truck idle there at the head of the drive till we saw a light go on in the trailer. “You’d think,” I said then, “that I made a habit of slamming his momma. Or that she didn’t do nothing to earn it.”
As Em drove off, I could feel the truck engine and the bumps of the old road beneath us. I closed my own eyes and let the last few miles of our Ridge disappear under the tires without my having to watch. Then the road that left the backside of our mountain pitched downward and switched back on itself again and again in a long, slithering snake whose tail petered out in the Valley.
We reached the snake’s tail in a few windblown minutes: Our record down was fifteen, but that was by daylight. Farsanna was rubbing her ears from the rapid descent. And I was nauseous from the dozen switchbacks and getting swung side to side in the truck bed. But it had been my suggestion, these lights down here in the Valley being worth seeing after all—my suggestion that I didn’t even remotely agree with. So I wasn’t saying a word.
Em steered the truck toward downtown, and then exited onto Seventh Street. I pounded on the cab window, but he ignored me.
Seventh Street was the border of the neighborhood of Victorian homes L. J. described. And while I’d never thought twice about them before, I could admit if I squinted and imagined fresh paint and new front porches and turrets that weren’t collapsing into bare yards, maybe there was something attractive about them—like the black-and-white sketches in children’s versions of Dickens’ novels, his young ladies of good family who’d fallen on hard times and were hungry.
But Seventh Street also housed a number of bars and lounges and long lines of shanty houses whose roofs slumped in tired, halfhearted attempts at protection. The bars throbbed with music, their walls seeming to pulse and push those inside out into the street. Unlike our Ridge, where after nine at night, most house lights flipped off so inhabitants could retire to bed respectably early, Seventh Street blazed with light. The bars pulsed with neon carnival color, bold red block letters and yellow floodlights and green cursive words, “Appearing Nightly” and “Live Music.” But the houses, too, spilled out bright yellow light from every window and door, flung open to the night air, and from cracks between planks, as if their being so small meant their flimsy walls couldn’t contain all the life pent up inside.
On a corner where our truck pulled to a stop at a red light, a group of young men huddled just outside one of the buildings, metal bars over the neon of its windows. Their arms around one another and their heads tipped toward the inside of the circle they’d formed, they looked like they were waiting for a quarterback to shout them their plays. I shrunk tighter into my corner, watched the new girl’s face for signs of abject terror at being stuck at a stoplight in this part of town, where white people, we’d been told all our lives, were not welcome and, God knew, not safe. Sanna’s face registered, so far, that she didn’t understand the danger we were in, a truck bed full of white teenagers, and one new girl from someplace we’d only recently learned to find on a map, all of us with no doors we could lock.
But she was leaning out over the side of the truck. And so was Bo. Trying to listen.
I suddenly realized what she was trying to hear. The young men—at least ten of them circled there on the Seventh Street sidewalk—were singing. One of them bent first forward and then back, lifting a fully extended trombone toward the sky. A saxophone flashed, red neon reflecting off its brass, and a trumpet flared high and clear about the melody.
“One would surmise,” L. J. said into my ear, “they were too hot inside. With which one can sympathize.” He nodded toward the low-slung building where bodies pressed into each other as they squeezed through the door and emerged, swaying, hands on each others’ waists, following the band into the night.
The red traffic light was just turning green, but Emerson kept the truck where it was. The musicians ignored us, each of them finding his part, breaking into harmonies and half-harmonies, falsettos and rhythms I’d heard nothing quite like. Not in person at least. Their knees bent and straightened in time to the beat so that the whole huddle sank and rose to their tune.
I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there.
Another road, where maybe I could see another kind of mind there …
I waited for the young men to notice us staring at them from the truck, until I realized their eyes were closed, most of them, and the ones that were open were not watching us. They’d been swept into their own music and swam there still, feeling the rapids and steering together. We were nothing but far-off spectators on shore, irrelevant.
Jimbo snatched up a shovel and put its handle to his mouth as a mike. He leaned forward over the edge of the truck bed in time to supply the Ooohs of the next lines.
I leaned in toward L. J. “Beatles,” I whispered, recognizing the song and savoring a moment of superior knowledge. “This is their song.”
L. J. cut his eyes at me. “Earth, Wind and Fire’s covering of this song is the far superior version, as demonstrated by this group’s rendition. Complete,” he nodded toward the band, “with homemade kalimba.” He pointed toward the wooden box someone had nailed metal spoons to, and now strummed with his thumbs.
A group of five women slipped out onto the sidewalk from another one of the shacks. They looked middle-aged, one of them heavy, another one of them tall and stalk-slender, and she tucked her own arm under the heavy one’s for support. They were well dressed, the tall one in heels and the heavy one in a floral print dress with a wide scoop of lace at her collar. At least three of the ladies carried books under their arms that maybe were Bibles. I’d noticed once the way Jimbo cradled his own; there’s a certain way people carry them, gingerly, like there was something inside they were a little scared of, something that might go off if you treated it roughly or ignored it too long.
For a moment, I expected the ladies to charge through the huddle of young men and into the bar and clear it of all iniquity. Or maybe to turn to us in the truck and tell us how much we didn’t belong here. But they stopped there on the walk just beside us in the truck, just beside the singers, and listened.
The heavy one nodded and kept time with one hand patting her purse. The slender one turned to smile at us.
Joining the brass that had gathered us all in to them, several of the band’s listeners added their own instruments. One grabbed a metal pipe from the ground to tap on the concrete. Another drew the long neck of a bottle over the crenellated top of chain-link fencing. Another cupped his hands into a horn.
The heat of the day still clung to the pavement, trapped in canyons of concrete and brick. The white lights of the streetlamps, the red and green neon of the bars, the yellow lights of the houses all throbbed through the heat, making the human forms on the sidewalk seem almost transparent, unreal, like a mirage that would soon flicker back into unbroken night.
I felt at that moment like a medical student who’d just seen inside a living body for the very first time, and realized he’d only ever thought he’d seen a person before—the lips and the eyelashes, the painted nails—till now, seeing the heart swelling each beat. The Valley I thought I knew, the department stores on Market and Main where our mothers dragged us for school clothes, the steak place we went to on birthdays down by the river, the city we made sure to leave before dark, the smokestacks and back alleys and shanties that lay far beneath our mountain, beat all along with a life I’d known nothing about. But now I felt drawn to it, the lights and the music and the sway of the forms on the sidewalk, the deep, throaty laugh of the tall singer, all tugging us in like a tether.
The band had modulated to another key, and the brass turned toward one another and cut swaths in th
e dark. Me, I couldn’t take my eyes off the guy with the trumpet, his long fingers rolling over the keys, his wide shoulders hunching then broadening back with the effort of a high trill, his arms keeping the instrument’s mouth pitched above his head and rocking right to left in perfect time with the trombone. I’d hardly noticed there were words to the next song until it was well begun.
… looking back we’ve touched on sorrowful days
Future pass, they disappear
The stoplight turned red, and then back to green, Seventh Street empty of cars, and our truck had not moved. We sat and listened. And the young men sang on.
A child is born with a heart of gold
The way of the world makes his heart grow cold
The women walked on toward us, all of them staring at us but not hostilely, just amused, maybe, and curious, our Pack lolled in the back of an old pickup and all of us turned audience. Big Dog and Em with their heads out the passenger window, both with their mouths open and smiling, Em with his Sox cap, Jimbo and the new girl leaning out over the side, Bo drumming the beat now on the metal side of the truck. Even L. J.’s head ticked side to side with the sway of the brass.
Then Jimbo pulled Farsanna to her feet and spun her around. The Baptists on our Ridge frowned on dancing, but never quite managed to frown on Jimbo, and even with the size of his feet, he danced well. From the dip he dropped her into, Sanna laughed up at him. L. J., severely lacking for partners, pulled me to my feet. He was clumsy at dancing, but so was I, and bags of manure and mulch in the way served as excuses. Emerson opened the cab door like he might join us, and Big Dog strained at the passenger door. One of the young men in the band offered a hand to the tall lady in heels, and she took it, twirling in toward him and laughing.
A car from far down the road was approaching. But Seventh Street was four lanes at this point; the car could sweep past our truck idling there at the light, so we ignored it.
The car, though, was approaching too fast. It shot through the intersection a block north of us without so much as a tap of the brake at the red. Swerving, it came on.
Someone was shouting. It might have been someone on the sidewalk, or the shouts might have come from the car. Maybe both. And something long and thin jutted out the passenger window.
I remember thinking the car was a Gremlin, orange and awkward and already sounding like its transmission was grinding its last. The car’s design was distinctive—in the way of the memorably shoddy. And I recall wondering why a big stick poked from its windows.
Until it was clear it wasn’t a stick.
Gunfire shattered the night into jagged pieces of screams and flying glass. The music of a few moments ago had become the screech of rubber melted on asphalt and more shots through the dark and a streetlamp hailing its white light and glass onto our heads, and more screams. Stomping on the accelerator, Em sent the whole truck bed of us slamming back toward the tailgate, its latch faulty and held with nothing but thin-gauge wire.
The truck swerving, its tires screeching, we tore through one red light, then two, fleeing from the direction of the shots and from the streetlight raining white light and glass down on our heads, and from the bedlam as those on the sidewalk dove for cover and the front windows of Seventh Street shanties dissolved into shards.
The Gremlin came tearing behind us, its occupants hooting and throwing bottles. The lights of Seventh Street blurred like a spun pinwheel as the pickup’s engine roared over the sharp report of the rifles. As Em threw the truck to the right and the pickup took a turn on two wheels, I groped frantically for the side of the truck to keep from being thrown clear out of the bed. My hands met with nothing but air. I felt my body lift off the metal floor, and I knew I was flying over the side.
But Sanna, her legs pinned underneath fallen bags of mulch, snagged the hem of my T-shirt, yanking me back to the floor just as Em threw the truck into a sharp left. The pickup winged into another curve.
All of us in the truck bed plowed against its right side, as the wheels screamed—our bodies flailed. As if in slow-motion replay, I can still see the lights whirl all around me, still see the blood that had pooled underneath me on the truck bed. Then my head slammed onto the white metal floor, and the spin of lights snuffed out.
6 Blood on the Truck Bed
“Is she bad hurt?!” I heard a voice say.
I had clearly fallen in the truck and passed out, and the world was just taking form again over my face. I assumed he meant me, if I was okay. The voice was my brother’s.
Followed by Jimbo’s voice: “There’s blood enough here coming from her head to float Dracula’s castle.”
“Typically,” L. J. spoke now, quickly, “the cranium does bleed excessively.”
I felt my head for the gash that they must be speaking about, and could find nothing. Except for a large bump on my forehead.
I could see their faces now. And they were not looking down onto mine.
Jimbo and Emerson and L. J. all knelt over the new girl. Fine, I thought. Well that’s just fine. I’m here with no doubt a concussion and internal bleeding, and they’re not even watching me die.
My head throbbing, I sulked on my back for a moment, alone. I let my head roll to the side and felt my hair stick, warm and wet, to my cheek.
Alarmed, I sat up, pulling back the wet hair from my face. It was blood. And lots of it. Apparently not mine or the boys’.
Farsanna lay flat on her back, her eyes open, her face entirely red and blood still pouring from the right side of her head.
“You’re sure,” Emerson pressed L. J., “it’s not grazed from a bullet? You’re sure it’s just where her head hit the side of the truck?”
L. J. shook his head in disdain. “You’ve watched far too much Big Valley. This, my friends, is nothing but a flesh wound.” He chuckled at his own Monty Python allusion and adopted a bad English accent: “Only a flesh wound.” None of us laughed. “Look, she’s fine, all right? We can take her to a doctor for stitches, but he’ll only tell us she doesn’t need them. Look closer.”
I saw then he was using someone’s T-shirt to dab at her head and stanch the wound, and that Jimbo was shirtless.
My brother leaned down closer still to the wound. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
Farsanna shook her head slightly. “You are not the one at fault, no?”
“I slammed on the accelerator when I saw the idiots swerving and heard the first shot,” Em moaned.
Bo lay a hand on Em’s shoulder. “So you, good man, get credit for saving all our lives.” He tousled Em’s hair. “I, on the other hand, failed miserably. Despicably. Unforgivably.” He, too, leaned further in. “I failed to protect the ladies among us. I dove for them, like a good human shield, but only knocked Turtle upside the head.” The boys shifted their joint gaze toward me.
“Don’t y’all worry ’bout me none,” I snipped at them. “I’m just fine over here with a knot on my head the size of … of my head.” That sounded a bit selfish, even to me, given the amount of blood, not mine, in my own hair. But I was annoyed with the boys. So I crawled the three feet to Farsanna. “How are you?”
“Only a flesh wound,” she mimicked in her own island accent. And she smiled up at us, weakly, and gave a fleeting thumbs-up.
“You need to see a doctor,” Em persisted.
“No.” Farsanna’s jaw squared and her eyes went black, liable to smolder.
My brother wouldn’t let it alone. “You need to—?”
“My head is fine. L. J. has said.”
“But—”
“And the doctor visit means for me that my father will know what happened tonight. And my father will fear.”
“Well,” L. J. mumbled to me, “maybe your father has reason to fear.”
“And,” she continued, “I prefer for him not knowing that we w
ere here.”
Bo drew his long legs up to his bare chest and scooted closer beside her. “Your momma gave you permission to go riding with us. So they’d not be so hop-along happy to hear you’d been cruising the streets of the city.”
Farsanna nodded.
Bo nodded back, then looked up at us. “Well, then, that settles it. We say nothing to nobody about this.”
L. J. raised an eyebrow. “And when the civic authorities pursue their inquiry into what happened tonight on Seventh Street?”
Farsanna rose to her elbows. “Tonight, what did happen?”
It was then I heard sirens. Emerson must have driven us blocks from that corner of Seventh, but we were still in the city, and the city’s concrete and asphalt echoed with their wail.
Emerson spoke first. “I only saw in the rearview mirror everyone diving for cover, and screaming like us. I think, though I’m not sure, I think the guy driving was too drunk or too nuts to give a straight aim to whomever was shooting.”
“Whomever?” I said. Even in the face of near-certain death, my brother couldn’t let go of grammar.
My brother ignored me. “At least it’s possible no one was hurt terribly badly. As far as I could tell, the shots, most of them, were going high and wide.”
“So,” L. J. pulled a hand over his chin’s growth of peach fuzz as if it were a full beard, “so perhaps that little display was primarily for the purpose of show. Let’s conjecture a moment: What if it were only a tactic of intimidation?”
“Directed at … us?” I asked.
My cousin shrugged. “Perhaps. Or perhaps blacks in general, just a little reminder of who calls the shots.”
“Or fires them,” I muttered.
Jimbo’s arms were crossed over his chest, a sure sign he was paying attention. “Or both.”
L. J. nodded. “Or both. Yes, one might conjecture that.”
Emerson pulled a quarter from his shorts pocket. “Let’s conjecture that somebody needs to call and report them at least. Like right now.”
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