The punch line we saved for Jimbo, who rendered it with gusto and hands over head: “Jesus saves!”
And every time, L. J. would sink against the side of the truck bed, push his brown plastic horn rims up his nose, and moan. It was our own little litany, that sign was, and it lifted us up and sometimes around through the fear that some days snagged at our hearts.
Late one afternoon, Farsanna and I lay side by side sunning ourselves after a swim. I disliked that, though not so much because I disliked her straight-out. She was smart, I had discovered—we all had. That didn’t take long. But unlike our L. J., she had a way of not pointing it out. She liked to ask questions—or maybe liked to make you think that she liked it. And off you’d go, spinning out dreams of your own, stitching together—out loud, even—a future you’d never heard yourself think. And only way out into your tangle of answer would you realize she’d never said much of herself, just coaxed the silk out of the spider.
“And how is it about you, Emerson?” she asked, for example, just out of the blue as we all sat one day on the bank, all of us sun-seared and still warming back up from a swim in the Hole. “When you have more years, what will you be?”
“Books,” he told her—before he thought not to. “I’ll find a way somehow for someone to pay me to read. Read all day every day.”
Bobby Welpler snorted. “I tell you what, you wanna spend your life with your nose in dusty old books when you could be making time with the ladies? I tell you what.” He held up the stick he’d been whittling, now in the form of a voluptuous woman.
“Stand up, Bobby.” Em rose to his feet.
“I was just kidding you, man. I don’t want to fight …”
“Not gonna punch you, Turd Face. Just stand up. Okay, now kneel.”
Welp did as he was told, still clutching his pocketknife and his stick. Em knelt beside him, then motioned Farsanna to rise and join them.
“Observe,” Emerson instructed. He took Farsanna’s hand in his and gazed up into her eyes and spoke softly:
“Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew …”
Gently, he brought her hand to his cheek, then slowly rose.
“And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with …”
He lifted her hair and ran one finger down her neck.
“Instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may
And now, like amorous birds of prey …”
His right arm slipped around her waist.
“Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.”
The other arm closed the circle.
“Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball …”
He drew her closer to him.
“And tear our pleasure …”
He brought his cheek to hers, almost, not quite touching.
“With rough strife
Through the iron gates of life
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still …”
His face turned into hers, his lips sweeping her cheek
“Yet we will make him run.”
We all sat staring. Except for Sanna, who stood—but I’m guessing just barely. Me, I could feel my cheeks set to broil. I leaned in toward Jimbo. And he leaned back in toward me. But he wasn’t looking at me.
“What,” said Bobby Welpler, who dropped his knife and stick, “was that?”
“Dusty old books,” Emerson said, and sat down.
It happened that way every time: Farsanna asking one of us a question about ourselves, something I’d have sworn we all knew, and then out would come some revelation, some peek into some part of a soul we hadn’t known we were living beside. Sanna would nod like she understood, like whatever it was you’d said made sense, and lots of it. She had that way about her. Those hard-edged eyes of hers probed like a screwdriver blade leveraging off a paint can lid, and out would come more and more and more, before you knew you’d begun to spill your insides. And you were grateful somehow to her, like she’d given you some kind of gift that was only yourself, but pictured from the best angle and held up in a frame.
“And what,” Sanna asked Jimbo when his turn came, “will you someday pursue?”
“Money,” he announced earnestly. “Cold, hard cash.”
And we all laughed, our legs dangling down into the Hole from our favorite finger of rock.
“The day you care a flying flip about money,” I said for us all, “is the day I wear a pink satin bow on the top of my head.”
Em shook his head. “Jimbo, man, why do you think I don’t let you collect for the Big Dog Lawn business? You’d let all our customers walk away without ever paying. Poor Miss Pittman’s had a hard week. Bless little ol’ Charlie Barker’s heart, he’s on a fixed income now and his kids don’t hardly ever come to see him. The Dooleys got eight kids and one on the way—don’t reckon they ought to have to worry about one more expense here lately … Lord, we’d have gone broke in a week!”
Jimbo nodded, clearly agreeing. “All the more reason to make money—so’s to have fun getting rid of it as fast as I can.”
“You could arrange it,” L. J. suggested, “in piles untended in the back of the truck. And you could drive in your typically pell-mell fashion down the Pike. That would disperse the wealth rapidly enough.”
Jimbo looked hurt. “Now what the Helsinki’d be the point in that? Why would you want it landing on folks already too loaded to stand up straight?”
I pulled his head toward me and ruffled his hair. “It’s why we all love you, dear Bo.”
“What Turtle means,” Welp snickered, “is her. She means she loves you, Bo.”
Once again, Bobby Welpler had come far too close to echoing what I hadn’t meant to be saying. But no one except Bobby caught how I turned pale and desperate just then.
L. J. leaned out over the Hole to address Farsanna at the end of our line of dangling legs. “Excuse me, Sri Lanka. But since you’re currently garnering information about America, take heed: The particular specimen you see before you,” he motioned to Bo, “would not personify the American Way.”
Farsanna’s small feet kicked a circle of froth. “This,” she asked L. J., but she was looking at Jimbo, “is not to you so attractive?” We all stared at her feet and the froth, then at Jimbo, who grinned at the ground.
We laughed at the blood that was rising from Bo’s neck into his cheeks.
Farsanna was speaking again. She’d shifted her focus to L. J. “You will make much money?”
“Most assuredly I will. And not by selling cow poop and pine bark to octogenarian gardeners.”
The new girl leaned forward to listen. “Tell to us how you will make it.” It was not a challenge but a question, a real one. And that was the thing about her: Like steam rising from her steady simmer of anger or worry—whatever it was—came this need to know—almost desperately—how the rest of us thought, how we saw the world and chose to handle what it might throw at us.
L. J. sneered. “If Emerson can find someone to pay him to live the life of a bibliophile, I’ll find someone to pay me to be unpleasant. It’s what I do best.”
“Well, friend,” Jimbo laughed with the rest of us, “you already got that goat good and roped.”
“You wait. The world shall reward my skill. Hey, what about Turtle? We’ve not yet been privy to her professional aspirations.”
Farsanna leaned past Emerson, sitting close beside her, to look me in the eye. “An American woman may do as she wishes, yes?”
Em tugged on the fringe of my cutoff shorts, then on my ponytail, wet and limp and weighted with Blue Hole silt. “Fashion mode
l, no doubt.”
I bounced up to my feet and pretended to walk a runway, pausing to show off an imaginary ensemble. “Note the lines,” I emceed myself, “the detail, the exquisite proportions of this one-of-a-kind creation.”
My brother, bless him, clapped for me.
Jimbo, better still, catcalled and whistled. “Wearing,” he announced into a microphone-hand, “designer duds from the exclusive Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers.”
Bobby Welpler hadn’t spoken to that point. But then: “I’m sayin’ Turtle here’s gonna be an erratic dancer.”
“Erotic,” L. J. corrected, laughing. “Or exotic.”
I felt my spine shrinking down into my heels.
“Yeah, right,” Welp roared, framing a marquee with his hands. “‘GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS—AND THEN THERE’S TURTLE!’”
It was a direct hit at my figure—my figure that wasn’t—my baggy T-shirts and ratty shorts, my big flop as a flirt: my not being a girl, as girls go.
Then “Can it, Welp,” came from Em and Jimbo together, but it arrived late and Bobby, smirking, knew he’d scored a hard hit, which was when Farsanna pulled herself to her feet, small-boned and yet somehow gianting just then over Bobby. “And when you have many years more,” she asked him, “what will you someday become?”
But Welp didn’t answer, focusing instead on his knife and his stick. Under the smolder of Sanna’s black eyes, Welp’s gloat shrank into a sulk.
Like her quiet gift for making us feel larger and grander, we witnessed that day Sanna’s talent for the opposite, for decimating anyone who failed to observe the bonds of loyalty or affection. I waited until the boys were back in the water, and I stood beside her.
“Hey, Sanna,” I said. “Thank you.”
She waved this away. “It is nothing. You would be protective of me, no?”
It wasn’t a question. And yet I wondered: Would I do the same for her?
8 Beauregard
I think that was the day I decided the new girl and I could be friends. For a girl, Farsanna Moulavi was not at all bad. But she was still a girl, and sometimes, even with her, I was reminded why I’d never much liked my own kind.
Her swimming in clothes quickly became impractical, so I gave her one of my old swimsuits, one I’d never much liked. The first time at the Blue Hole she lifted her blouse and her skirt to reveal my suit underneath, L. J. tripped over his feet and Welp ran smack into a tree and Emerson dropped the truck keys into the water when he was aiming them for his pants pocket. He even removed his Red Sox cap, and then returned it to his head backwards, bill forward.
Jimbo was the only one of them who said anything, and that was only to me.
“Well, remember me at Christmas,” he whispered, all hoarse.
I pretended I didn’t hear and dove off my finger of rock.
Farsanna was short and dark so you wouldn’t have guessed it, but the new girl looked good in my suit.
“Your daddy approve?” I asked her later. Reckon I was feeling a little vindictive.
“In America, girls who are good wear a bathing suit, no?”
“Even good girls, you mean, wear bathing suits. Sure,” I muttered, and wondered if maybe she might catch a cold soon and not be able to join us sometimes at the Hole—and wouldn’t that just be a shame. And I was trying to recall why I’d passed on my old suit to her. “He’s a real sucker for anything American, huh? Your dad, I mean.”
Emerson’s Big Dog snoozed on her side on my left, the Stray on my right.
I was feeling sleepy myself, a rock for my pillow, when Farsanna offered, “In my home … in Sri Lanka, some Muslim women even do wear bathing suits since the 1950s or so. The expectation for the hijab has been somewhat relaxed, although some women prefer to keep the hijab.”
“Like your mother.”
“Yes, like Mata. She says that women are responsible for not tempting men. American women do not believe that, no?”
I lay on my back thinking of the new girl in my suit, and of the boys’ reaction to her. I pretended not to hear her question and stroked Big Dog’s pudgy stomach. Here was a creature everyone loved, especially Em and Jimbo, and she was no picture of perfect proportions.
I turned my head toward Sanna. She probably didn’t deserve to be punished, I was trying to convince myself, for looking good in my suit.
“And Shelby … who does ... are you asleep, Shelby?”
“No …” It occurred to me then I might tell her to call me Turtle. But I didn’t. Not yet.
“Who does Jimbo …? Does he … prefer … someone?”
“You mean prefer, like, prefer?”
“Yes. Jimbo.”
Sanna’s tone sure sounded casual-like—that’s what I reckoned, lying stone still, my eyes closed. Maybe if I pretended to have drifted back off, the question would die right there where it had got itself born—breach, and not right in the head.
But she propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over me. I could smell curry.
I told myself that the metal tacks mamboing on my insides wasn’t fear for myself—only concern for her sake. For her mistake. I opened one eye. “You know,” I began slowly, “his momma named him after a Civil War hero, some great-great-great-something or other in the family. Beauregard. Which is how she got accepted into the Daughters of the Confederacy, real active member.” I shut that one eye and waited.
Farsanna did not budge.
I opened the other eye this time and tried another sail into the wind. “Jimbo’s never been one to go out much just for the sake of something to do.”
“Then he is … dating … no one?”
Now she was making me mad, her not understanding, not even trying. “Jimbo? Shoot. Who’d go out with Jimbo?” I lifted my head to see her looking at me, and returned my head to its rock. “He’d rather spend an evening reading Consumer Reports on fertilizer and pulling ticks off the Big Dog. Not,” I told the beast beside me, “that there’s anything the matter with that.”
I could feel the new girl’s eyes on me and the dog. “He is nice for looking.”
“Big Dog’s a girl.”
“No, I—”
“Who ...?” I shielded my eyes with my hand. “Jimbo?”
“Yes. You do not think—?”
“Shoot. No.”
It was partially true anyway. Jimbo Riggs was not handsome, not really. Dark hair stuck out over his ears in crow’s wings because he never could remember to keep it clipped. His two front teeth stuck out slightly and just barely crossed; his nose was a little too large; his eyebrows, a little too bushy. Like a koala bear cub, Jimbo Riggs was one of those irresistible creatures who meet not one single standard of beauty.
And then, too, Jimbo Riggs’ green eyes always looked up to mischief—mischief he himself probably knew nothing about. His way with language was the only form of rebellion he’d ever practiced: All the fathers on the mountain trusted Jimbo fully with their daughters, a reputation Jimbo preferred not be publicly known.
“Em,” I once asked my brother as we rocked on our front porch. “You and Jimbo are both still virgins, aren’t you?” I’d never used the word—outside singing “Silent Night” during the annual Methodist church pilgrimage my mother forced on our family. But I was feeling grown-up that day, and worldly.
Em’s fingers froze on the neck of his guitar. “Where’d my kid sister learn to talk that kind of smut?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
Jimbo was there on the porch too, sprawled deep in the hammock. “Now Turtle, my girl,” came from inside the hammock’s green folds, “what comes to make you think that?” His hands were dropping peanuts into the glass neck of a bottle—the way he liked his Cokes best.
“It’s what people say, is why.”
Jimbo sat up slow
ly. He and Emerson exchanged glances. “Well, sweet tea and Jesus,” Jimbo said.
Emerson thrummed a mangled chord. “Lord, Bo. It’s even worse than we thought.”
And then there were Jimbo’s dimples: Whether or not they’d got the consent of their owner, they said flattering things girls wanted to hear. Even a best friend’s little sister could see the attraction. Maybe especially a best friend’s little sister.
Though I chose not to say so to the new girl.
“I don’t know that Jimbo’s your type,” was what I managed instead.
Sanna propped herself up on one elbow. “And your brother?” she asked. “He is not either my type?”
I could feel her inspecting my face. I could feel the air between us, hot and humid, unstable, like summer had reached a rolling boil.
But she said no more of Jimbo Riggs that day. Or my brother Emerson, either. So I told myself there was no need for me to explain. Things happened around Jimbo, and at the Blue Hole, that didn’t make sense, not given how the rest of the world worked. I told myself she ought to know by now about lines, and about boundaries and walls. “‘Good fences make good neighbors,’” Em had quoted from one of his poets to me months ago. It was during a dispute over the bathroom we shared, but I thought now how that was true. Sanna surely understood about how things could go only so far and no farther.
A “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was all well and good in its place, and we all sang along on the front porch when Em or Jimbo thrummed out Simon and Garfunkel on the guitar. But some waters couldn’t be bridged overnight, or at all, and she ought to be able to see that.
9 In the Heat of the Night
Down in the Valley, police had yet to turn up a suspect in the Seventh Street shootings. One of the victims, whom the paper described as a fifty-year-old black female, was released from the hospital. The area of her shoulder that a bullet had grazed had become badly infected.
“Hey, L. J.,” I said as we slid down the final drop to the Blue Hole. Maybe it was the descent that reminded of me of our trip to the Valley, or maybe it was the eerie red of the twilight that was settling into the rim of the Hole that reminded me that darkness was coming, and how arson fires still burned most nights down in the city. “L. J., you read this morning’s paper?” Of course he had: He was L. J. I didn’t wait for his answer. “You know the article on the search for the perpetrators of the Seventh Street shooting, how it mentioned one of the victims was finally healing well?” Dusting himself off from the slide, he nodded and let me go on. “Well, how come we didn’t even know she was hurt in the first place? I mean, do you remember the paper’s ever mentioning a bullet actually made contact?”
Blue Hole Back Home Page 9