“The sirens …” I pointed out.
“I mean not just report there was trouble, but report what we saw. I’ll make an anonymous call from this pay phone. They do that sometimes now in cities, you know. I’ll report the car we all saw, and I’ll say we saw … that we saw…. Did any of us see the guys driving?”
Silence.
L. J. rolled his eyes. “Stupendous. At the very least, they’ll inquire whether the perpetrators were black or white. Or—” He stopped, glanced sideways at Farsanna, and left off there. “They’ll want a thorough description.”
Emerson looked from one to the other of us. “Did anyone see what they were?”
“White,” I offered at last.
“You’re sure of that, Turtle? Did you recognize faces? No need to be frightened now.”
“On the contrary,” L. J. put in, “there’s every reason to be frightened of thugs who roam city streets inebriated and armed.”
“No faces,” I told him. “And the Gremlin you and I saw, I didn’t recognize it as belonging to … well, to anyone whose car I know. But I think … I think the faces were white. Yeah, I’m sure of it. I think.”
L. J. put the hand back to his forehead. “Inebriated and armed and unidentified. Great. Just great. Not so much as an eyewitness to contribute to the cause of justice.”
And so we contributed nothing that night, nothing except to each other, to a sense of belonging, perhaps. And to a load of guilt we shouldered together for saying nothing to anyone else.
“We did,” Em reassured us, and himself, “hear the sirens. Which meant the police had been called. Which means they’re going after the guys. Which means they’ll catch them.”
I watched L. J.’s face as Em said this. “You just rolled your eyes, dear cousin. So what are you thinking?”
“That’s my default demeanor.” He shrugged. “Just contemplating whether anyone will actually try to catch them.”
In the one open gas station we found, I asked the man inside for the key to the ladies restroom, and Farsanna met me back in the shadows, her face still covered in blood. We washed her hair and her face, and staunched the wound with the remaining white of Jimbo’s T-shirt. We arranged her thick, heavy hair over the wound, which, once it stopped bleeding, lay nicely disguised.
“Good as new,” I pronounced her. “You feeling okay?”
“My wound is obvious, no?”
“No. Really. You’re looking gorgeous as ever. Just maybe a little … shaken, that’s all.”
“You do as well.” She smiled, and her dark eyes crinkled at me. “Gorgeous and shaken.”
We left the gas station and reached the summit of the road up the back side of our ridge well before midnight.
I scooted along the truck bed and settled in next to L. J. “Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to regardless of my giving consent.”
“Right. So, listen, I know I’m not always real fair to Welp, so Jimbo wouldn’t be happy with me if he heard this. But did it occur to you that he wasn’t with us? I mean, does it bother you any that he left before we went down, that he said he wouldn’t go down there tonight? You think he knew anything?”
L. J. raised an eyebrow at me. “You impress me, small cousin. I thought no one but I had caught what he said about tonight. Yes, it occurred to me. Though that’s circumstantial, at best. Wouldn’t hold up one moment in court.”
“Except that we know how he can be. And how Mort and his crowd could sweep Welp along into most anything. “
“We also know that wasn’t Mort’s car. And that none of us saw him, or Welp either. And that none of us witnessed anything substantial at all. That we have now agreed upon collective silence. And that we are in effect less than useless, if not actual aids and abettors of crimes committed tonight.”
“Right,” I said, and slumped so low my chin touched my chest. Then I sat up a bit straighter.
Emerson pulled the truck from asphalt, pocked as it was, into the trenched gravel of Farsanna’s driveway and stopped close to the carport. Its metal supports, I noticed, seemed weary of holding its roof. Or maybe that was only my own weariness, and now this new thing to carry, this secret of what we had seen, and hadn’t.
For no good reason, we all stood in the back of the truck. Emerson emerged from the cab. Farsanna ignored Jimbo’s hand to help her and swung down by herself. Bo and L. J. and I landed beside her. Her gaze gone into searchlight, she looked from one of our faces to the next.
In all times of crisis, we let Jimbo speak for us, as he did then. He held up his right hand, flat to the air, and placed his left in a fist beside the right thumb. Emerson did the same thing, and so did L. J. and then I did. Farsanna was last, and most slowly.
It then became our Pack’s secret handshake—though not a handshake at all. From then on that summer, in moments of tension or crisis, or when someone needed to laugh or loosen up from a fit of the grumps, or cheer up after a parental rebuking, we would form Sri Lanka with a palm and a fist, and define our own little culture. Years later in a college class called “Social Deviance,” I studied subcultures and gangs. Primary-source research told me what I’d learned long before in the back of a pickup: that subcultures gravitate toward ways of symbolizing belonging. And that summer, whether we liked it or not, we belonged to the Pack. And the Pack had its own sign, its own grasp at exotic and secret.
With the white dust of the new girl’s gravel still clouding around us, Jimbo raised the fist that he’d placed by his palm. “This would be Sri Lanka.”
Farsanna reached for his fist, covered her own hand around it, and pulled his down. “And this,” she told him, raising herself to full height and motioning to her house, to the truck, to the block of bare lawn, “would be home.” And maybe because this met with incredulous stares from us, she added, “Home is for us here now.” She looked from one to the other of us, her eyes somehow darker than even the night and her face set into its mask that said nothing of what she was thinking. I waited for the no? that should’ve ended that sentence, and for once it didn’t come.
It was so utterly absurd, her choosing this day, this night, this moment, to announce this place as her home. It flew in the face of what anyone could have expected, of what she ought to have done, and been afraid of.
“So …” I offered. And I almost met her eye—but not quite. “So, we’ll …” We’ll what? Nothing came to me then. I was hearing Earth, Wind, and Fire punctuated with gunshots, hearing the hail of shattered streetlights and shriek of truck tires. Just then even the sound of the “we’ll” sounded false to my ear.
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Em finished for me. “For the Blue Hole. We got to have you there with us. Okay?”
I never thanked Em for that, for saying what I never did. It struck me at the moment, though, that I liked him, my very own brother, liked who he was—not something I’d have said to his face.
Em snatched his towel from the cab and flung it over Farsanna’s shoulders. “You look cold,” he muttered.
She didn’t look cold to me. Or scared. Though she had to have been, seeing what we all had seen.
Jimbo and Em walked with her almost to the end of the drive, where she nodded to them, but that was all before walking away.
We watched Farsanna tenderfoot the rest of the way to her door, her feet bearing witness to her first time down the slope to the Hole. She turned once, knelt to pet the stray, who’d fallen asleep on the stoop but rose to lick her feet. She looked right and left, seemed to listen a moment. Then, clutching Em’s towel tightly around her, she opened the door and let the dog in. I pictured her momma inside, stiffening to hear the door creak open, limping to greet her daughter, both hands stroking Farsanna’s hair.
Her hair. I held my breath. Farsanna’s hair was dry now, blown in the wind off the truck. But
there was the gash underneath. Even if her momma couldn’t see well, or at all, would she be able to feel what had happened? Would she ask questions?
Farsanna turned as she closed the door behind her and lifted a chain to lock it. I put up my hand in a wave, and so did the boys.
_________
We dropped off L. J. next, then rolled up to Jimbo’s just after midnight.
Em craned around from the driver’s-side window. “Bo, you want me to cut the lights before we pull in?”
“Yeah. And the horsepower, if you don’t mind, my good man. The good Reverend hadn’t lost his hearing as fast as his boyish figure.”
Bo had a policy of complete honesty with his parents. If they asked him what time he came in, he told them, right to the minute. But if he slipped in without waking them, and they never asked, he came and went sometimes in the wee hours without the slightest restraint.
Emerson and I walked Bo down his drive. We never walked Bo to the door, but this night we were in no hurry to let go of each other.
Em motioned with his head to the side of the drive. He mouthed, “Whose truck is that?’
I’d been lost in my own thoughts and intent on sticking close to the boys, and not noticed the green truck parked at the walk.
Bo shook his head, shrugging. He reached for the screen door, then yanked his hand back and waved us all down. We jumped behind the rhododendron and crouched there as the screen door swung open.
“Order,” a man’s voice was saying, “is what we’d be after, preacher. Just law and order. Reckoned you could help us with that. We don’t want to let nothing get too out of hand in this town, now do we? We reckoned you’d see it that way.”
Bo yanked on our T-shirts and we all ducked still lower just as the porch light flipped on.
“Well,” said the good Reverend Riggs, as he let the porch door swing shut, “good night then.”
Several pairs of legs lumbered down the stone steps from the screen porch. I raised my head just inches to look for a face, but Bo yanked me back down by the ponytail.
“But—!” I whispered.
Bo put his forefinger against my lips. I sat then, saying nothing, and let his finger stay where it was.
7 Like Amorous Birds of Prey
Frosted Flakes wilting in my bowl, I paced our kitchen floor, my brother reading the paper and trying hard to ignore me.
“Explain to me one more time why Jimbo wasn’t more bothered by those guys coming out of his house last night?”
Em talked out the side of his mouth, his cereal squirreled up in the other. “I told you already, Turtle. Number one, Bo said himself there were trillions of reasons they could’ve been there. Unconfessed sin, maybe.”
“Right.”
“Seriously, they could’ve been there to talk about anything. Anything besides what you thought.”
“And you don’t think what I do? You can sit there and tell me Bo’s daddy wasn’t being threatened by those guys? And worse, that the good Reverend didn’t seem to be telling them where to get off?”
“I told you: Bo just said his daddy doesn’t think like that, doesn’t agree with that sort. At any rate, Bo wasn’t much rattled by it, so maybe you and I shouldn’t be either.”
“Is that why your forehead’s scrunched up into a knot? Because you’re not bothered?”
My brother put a hand to his forehead to feel. “Okay, look. So, it bugs me a little. But you know how Bo practically worships his daddy.”
I toyed with my Frosted Flakes petulantly. “Well. I reckon there’s something on the front page about what happened last night in the city. What’s the front page say about it? Emerson?”
He lay down the paper. “I heard you.”
“So? What did it say?”
He frowned and shoved the paper to me across the Formica. “See for yourself.”
I scanned the page. “I don’t see it.”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
“What?”
“Try page seventeen.”
“Seventeen? A car full of drunk white boys goes on a shooting spree and …?”
“You only thought they were probably white.”
“… Goes careening through a city and shooting at people, and it’s buried underneath the state fair and somebody’s award-winning turnips?” I skimmed the four-paragraph piece on page seventeen. “This says the police have located no suspects. That some of the witnesses have reported they were white guys, and there’s some suggesting they’re black!”
“Read carefully. None of the witnesses said they could have been black. Apparently the police are just looking for black guys or white, either one. If they’re looking at all.”
I read the article again. “Nothing more than minor injuries. And property damage … It doesn’t say much about property damage. But that one streetlight shattered right on our heads, and—”
Our father walked in just then, still half asleep and groping for his second cup of coffee before the morning began. My brother and I exchanged glances, wondering what he’d heard of our conversation.
“Heads?” our father asked us.
“Would roll,” I said too quickly. “I was just telling Emerson here that it seems like heads would roll, you know, seeing as how some idiots went racing through town shooting at people.”
Our father shook his head, wearily. “No, they weren’t shooting at people. I was at the city editor’s desk last night when the report came in. Apparently, some unidentified guys in a car were just shooting out lights, having a bit too much to drink, causing a general disturbance. Not admirable behavior, I’ll grant you. But nothing murderous in its intent anyway.”
Em and I looked at each other.
“But,” my brother ventured, “it seems as if it might have been. I mean, shooting that close to where people …”
“And the property damage,” I added.
Our father glanced up from his coffee and narrowed his eyes, first at me, then at Em. “Well, aren’t you two the civic-minded pair this morning? The property damage was minimal. And in that part of town, the city might not even bother to fix the lights for a while. That’s the assumption. It’s generally viewed as a way of punishing a certain sector of the population for getting so far out of hand.”
“But they didn’t—!” I blurted.
“A regrettable attitude, I’ll grant you. But typical, and perhaps not just of the regressive South,” he said.
“But what if the damage was done by … by not the people who have to live with the damage?”
Our father looked up again from his coffee. “You’ll find, children, as you grow, that our justice system waits for facts until it proceeds. And lacking facts, or suspects in custody, this case of disturbing the peace and probably some sort of unlawful discharge of firearms will have to be dealt with by people more experienced with urban crime than you or I. But this part of downtown hasn’t exactly been known for its calm and quiet.”
Our father opened his briefcase and stuffed the newspaper into it. He would be out the door any moment.
“What if,” I began, “what if the guys shooting weren’t from there at all? What if they were white and what if—?”
Our father eyed me carefully as I’d seen him do his note cards when he was having trouble deciphering his own print. “Then this would be a racially motivated incident, possibly with intent to harm. And if not dealt with well, could escalate into more racial unrest.”
I stirred my drowned flakes.
“Shelby Lenoir?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Do you and Emerson have anything you’d like to tell me?”
“No, sir,” my brother said, “except …”
“Except have a good day,” I finished for him. And we both manufactured big, perky
smiles for our father, a skill we’d learned from our momma.
_________
Throughout those next several days, while the heat raged unabated, we combed the newspapers. We drove some nights after dark to the Look, where we could see another downtown block blazing, abandoned buildings set fire by what the paper called “angry black youth.” The police had found no one to blame for the shooting, and one officer’s quote implied the force had little interest in pursuing the case, given that no one was killed or permanently maimed and there’d been “minimal material damage.” With all these reports, our parents warned us vaguely about “disturbances” down in the city and forbade us to visit, no matter the time of day, until things settled down.
So that summer, whole blocks of the city burned in the night and bricks found their way through plate-glass windows downtown.
I watched Bobby Welpler for signs of involvement or at least knowledge beforehand of the shooting spree, but his eyes had always looked shifty to me, and his slumped posture, always guilty. So that was no proof at all.
We waited to see what—or who—would ignite up on our Ridge.
And meanwhile, we returned to the Blue Hole: my brother and me and my brother’s best friend, one cousin, one Welp, one remarkably chubby golden retriever, and the new girl on Pisgah. And sometimes her dog, which Jimbo named Stray, tagged along too. He was as sweet as he was homely, and Bo made it his new role in life, when not working or swimming or flying from the rope swing, to keep one of Stray’s long, silky ears flopped across his thigh.
Unlike in past summers when Emerson’s pickup played trolley, collecting random friends and kin as we went, we no longer stopped along the way except at each other’s houses, and at the Feed and Seed. Emerson made sure we always parked right under L. J.’s daddy’s new sign. And while L. J. climbed in, we always made sure to read it aloud, all three lines of it.
“Fresh Bait!” I would begin.
“Cold Beer!” Emerson and Welp and even the new girl would call out, and laugh.
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