L. J. pushed his horn-rims up his nose and examined the water. “First, we weren’t fully cognizant because we didn’t go back to check.”
“You think we should’ve gone back?”
“What do you think?”
“I think our parents would’ve tanned our hides if they’d known we were there in the first place.”
“Beside the point. And secondly, we didn’t know because the paper only informed us of what we wanted to hear: that no one was seriously injured, no reason for concern.”
“But …” I felt contentious. Something about L. J. always made me take the other side of a subject. “But her shoulder was just grazed.”
My cousin let his glasses slide down the sweat on his nose so he could give me a look over the top of the rims. “If the group of women on the sidewalk had been you and Farsanna …” He stopped there, reconsidered. “If you’d been the one on the walk and a bullet brushed by your shoulder, and the guy firing might have been drunk and might have been black, do you think it likely that our legal system would have tracked down at least one suspect by now?”
I felt the wet red clay rise between my bare toes. I might have answered, eventually, but L. J. grew tired of waiting—if he even expected an answer—and rose, leaving his glasses folded alongside his towel. By the time I’d thought of a way to respond, L. J. was upside down on the rope swing, his legs flailing back over his head in a slow roll whose final flourish, a loud, full-belly flop, earned him applause and hoots from the boys lined up at the sweetgum.
_________
On the way home from the Hole that evening, after ice cream, we stopped first at Sanna’s, which was closest to the Dairy Queen. In the house, one light burned in the living room, unguarded by curtains. I thought I saw the top of a head, or perhaps the mound of a rounded back.
Farsanna must have noticed my squinting to see better.
“My father is making a prayer,” she offered. But only that. And even that, the word prayer, pronounced with a kind of a warning, told me that she would not willingly offer more.
I nodded, to let her know I’d no desire to go panning for more—which was true. Religious practices of the truly faithful have always made me nervous—maybe because I’ve lived my life outside the glass with my nose pressed against it. Those who water their beliefs down to weak broth I tolerate better, maybe because I can scorn them.
But a man with his face to the floor in that red box of a house was not something I needed to know more about. I wondered what he was praying about. If I’d been in his place, knowing what I knew about where he’d moved his family, I’d have prayed for safety from a whole band of heavenly hosts—anyone they could give me.
“I was under the impression,” L. J. mused, his arms crossed over folded knees, “that your family were not practicing Muslims.” It was a real request for information, and lacking several layers of his usual sneer.
Farsanna sat in the truck bed, apparently in no hurry to exit. “The parents of my parents follow more closely,” she returned. “My parents do not follow completely all …” She felt for the word.
“Are not devout,” L. J. corrected.
She nodded. “Yes. However—”
“Which is evidenced,” he continued like it was an additional mathematical fact required to solve this equation, “by your being allowed to run around virtually naked.”
We all scowled at L. J.
His face torched red underneath his glasses. “That is, scantily clad. At the Blue Hole, at least. Naked, I mean, only relative to female populations among devout followers of Islam.”
I’d never seen my cousin so rattled, and I was enjoying the show—though it occurred to me to be hurt that no one had ever accused me of looking practically naked when I’d worn that same suit.
L. J. was trying to dig himself out of his hole. “That is, naked not in any epistemological sense, but only in a comparative …” Wisely, he shifted direction. “I believe you mentioned Sri Lanka was Buddhist.”
Farsanna didn’t seem to be much offended. “In Sri Lanka, it is not most common to be Muslim. Nearly seventy percent Buddhist is the population. Fifteen percent Hindu. The Moors, my people, speak Tamil as our first language, but are not of the Tamil people. We support the Sinhalese government. However, we wish most to be left in peace.”
L. J. nodded, looking relieved to be back on the firm footing of world politics. “You’ve faced discrimination, then?”
Sanna glanced up at us. “Yes.” She shifted in her seat and played with Stray’s ear.
“So,” Bobby Welpler interjected from the corner of the truck bed where he’d been sulking in a tight, curled-up ball, “you folks just plain don’t belong, huh? Nowhere. Reckon your people would be just like old Stray here.”
I hurled a handful of loose mulch toward Welp’s corner. “Stray belongs with Sanna. Sanna belongs with us. You got a problem with that?”
Bo squeezed my leg in approval. But Sanna’s face didn’t register that she’d heard my heroic defense of her. She directed her response to Welp. “It,” she said slowly, “has been sometimes difficult.”
From his corner, Welp’s eyes were glowing like a cat in a closet. “So what do you people do? Worship rocks? Or trees, maybe? Line up behind your daddy and his fifty-nine wives and bow west?”
“East, idiot,” was L. J.’s contribution.
Jimbo motioned for Welp. “Bob, you got something on you. C’mere.”
Welp leaned over for Jimbo to see, while Jimbo wiped his own filthy thumb in two swipes, down and across, over Welp’s forehead.
“Ashes to ashes,” Bo said. And that was all.
After dropping off Sanna, we passed the Pump and Run, and Jimbo put his hand up in greeting. Mort Beckwith was there filling his tank, and, moving in his usual slow motion, his big head swung up from where he’d been staring at the gas nozzle and focused in on the back of our truck only once we’d passed by.
At the end of Fairview, where my cousin lived, L. J. swung himself out of the flatbed.
Welp stood too. “Reckon I’ll come spend the night again.”
L. J. never turned his head. “No,” he said, his Keds already crunching up the gravel drive. “Reckon you won’t.” With his hand held above his head in a quick wave—more of a chop—but his face never turning, he disappeared behind the screen door.
Bobby Welpler recoiled into his ball and did not speak until we reached his mother’s drive, two parallel dirt tracks between which knee-high weeds flourished. No lights glowed from the trailer, not even the faintest pulse of a television screen that, it occurs to me now, I’d always seen as its weak, flickering heart.
His eyes on the dark trailer, Welp paused for moment just before he lowered himself to the ground. There, too, he stood looking, his hands on his hips.
“Anybody home, you reckon?” Jimbo asked gently as Welp began his approach, not once turning to look back over his shoulder.
Bobby did not turn back, but only barked over his shoulder. “Beat it,” was Bobby Welpler’s benediction to us.
_________
On the next Saturday afternoon, punctured to useless by thundershowers and drizzle, Emerson and I stayed home to read. I’d just discovered a third Brontë sister, Anne—Emily and Charlotte had been my favorites the summer before—and I was busy helping the heroine escape with her son from the demon of a husband who’d just installed his mistress as the son’s governess.
Tucked inside the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, The Complete Poems of John Donne was open on Emerson’s chest. I knew better than to let out I knew it was there.
Emerson and Jimbo had just that week determined to look more official and paint their business’s name on the cab doors of the truck: Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers. Jimbo had phoned that morning.
I answered. “
Maynard residence. Shelby speak—”
“Hey, lady,” Jimbo said.
“Hey.”
“Tell that guy who claims to be your brother he ain’t half as good-looking as you, and that I got to paint the truck door with our name, so I can’t make it to the Hole today. Got to design the sign—design the sign this time in rhyme—”
“In rhyme?”
“Naw. Just got going and couldn’t stop.”
“But it’s supposed to rain, Bo.”
“Who the whom says?”
“Me. Look at the sky.”
“Then tell him I gotta de-lice my nose hairs and can’t make it.”
“I’ll tell him, but—”
“So we’ll go tomorrow, okay?”
“I’ll tell him. But, Bo—”
“You be good, Turtle.”
“Hey, Jimbo?”
“Yep?”
“You know, did I ever tell you I’m not real fond of that name.”
“Of Turtle?”
“Yeah. Turtle.”
“Me either. Corn-shuckin’ shame you got stuck with it.”
“But it was you who gave me it, Bo.”
“Poor Turtle-Girl. Didn’t your momma ever warn you ’bout hanging with the wrong crowd?”
L. J. called after that to say he and his brothers had to help their daddy at the Feed and Seed unloading bales of pine straw. “I have been unavoidably detained” was actually how he said it, but the few of us who liked L. J. even a little back then tried to help cover for his talking funny. So L. J. couldn’t go to the Hole either. Emerson made a point of calling Farsanna—we gotta at least let her know that nobody’s going today, he explained—but nobody was home.
I don’t recall if we thought to call Bobby Welpler.
It was nearly dinnertime when the sun came out and my novel’s husband-villain was finally killed off. I had decided along with Anne Brontë that they were all villains—all husbands, I mean, maybe all men—and I turned to Big Dog lying beside me for comfort. I stretched out full length in the hammock I’d been curled in for hours, and raised my head slightly toward Em. “You hungry? Wanna go out?”
Emerson lowered his Sports Illustrated, its tell-tale weight in the middle making it slip from his hands. Real hastily, he tucked John Donne back beneath a tanned, busty blonde in a chartreuse bikini—it was college before I learned how much John Donne would have liked that.
“Where?” It was a rhetorical question. Pisgah Ridge in those days had only two restaurants: Hog Wild and one other, a brown daisy linoleum kind of place called the Home Plate Special. But with its all-you-can-eat buffet of fried okra, broiled liver and onions, black-eyed peas, and cornbread, the Plate was the exclusive domain of folks who cut coupons and remembered the Great Depression firsthand. There was, okay, maybe a third place to eat, a concrete box fixed to the side of our one gas station—what Jimbo never called by its name, Pump and Run, favoring something close and a bit cruder—but their sandwiches stank of brake fluid.
Emerson and I borrowed our mother’s car, since Jimbo had kept Emerson’s truck to paint their new name on its door. We swung by the Riggs’ parsonage on Elm, twelve blocks away. At first, no one answered the door.
“Hey, Em,” I launched out, making a point of inspecting the brass dogwood door knocker, “does Bo prefer … I mean does Bo … you know … like … anyone?”
My brother stared at me. “Well, I know you’re not asking for yourself, since I know Bo’s like another brother to you, and only Alabamans get funny that way.”
I swallowed hard. “Don’t be weird. I meant, like, you know, anybody. Like maybe Neesa or Haley, that crowd. Like, does he think they’re … you know …”
“Like they’re what?”
“Like they’re … good-looking … or something.”
“Well, sure.”
“What?”
“Sure he does. You think the man hadn’t got eyes? And if he could make out with ’em and leave without having to try to actually talk with them, he’d do it, I reckon. But as it is, he’d just as soon spend his evenings with me. Or Big Dog. Or you.”
I didn’t have time to digest this before the door opened.
The Reverend Riggs was wearing his ill-fitted suit, the one he always wore. I wondered what he wore to bed. Or maybe, I thought, Baptist preachers never risked going to bed.
“I thought my boy was with you kids.” Jimbo’s daddy beamed at us—he also always beamed.
“No, sir.” Emerson shook his head. “You got any idea where he might be?”
“I sure thought he was with you kids.” He opened the screen door wider. “Can I help you children somehow?” I sometimes wondered back then if he saw us—in the flesh, I mean—or saw us only as more people he needed to try to please into God’s kingdom. So, around him, I always kept moving, even if slightly, for fear his big preacher-beam would one day hook and swallow me up.
“No, sir,” Em tried again. “He didn’t say anything about where he might go?”
It occurred to me then that I’d never heard the Reverend say the word no. It wasn’t in his constitution. Even now, when he so clearly had nothing to offer in the way of whereabouts information, he nodded. “I surely did think he’d gone out looking for you. Reckon he didn’t say exactly, now that I come to think of it. Would you two like to come in?”
We shook our heads, thanked him, and began backing down the stone stairs.
“I don’t know as I can think,” Jimbo’s daddy was saying, “of anyone else Jimbo’d be out fetching here around dinnertime.” But even as he said this, I thought I saw the opposite thought flicker across his pale globe of a face—that he’d just then latched onto something or someone specific. His smile flickering and now forced, he continued nodding at us.
“Children?” he began. “I’m wondering …” His lips formed into an “o” that seemed to have no other plans to form other shapes.
We waited, then backed up one step at a time. The circle of Reverend Riggs’ mouth, stuck in whatever it was he couldn’t find the words for, and the circle of his balding blond head and the circle of his corpulent self all reminded me of the Weebles we’d played with as children.
Em thanked him again, and we crawled back into the car.
“Hey, Em. You got any idea how come the good Reverend is Jimbo’s hero? I mean … you know what I mean. Sometimes he strikes me as sweet. Sometimes as silly. And sometimes I think maybe it’s more like … scary somehow. Like … Hello? Emerson?”
Em’s eyebrows had formed a dark line that dipped in the middle, like a preschooler’s pencil-drawn bird in flight.
“What is it? You know where Bo might be?”
Emerson nodded, but said nothing.
“Tell me.”
But Emerson drove on without looking at me.
Neither one of us spoke, though I knew exactly where we were going when we turned off the highway onto the old logging camp trail that led through raspberry thickets and pine woods down to the Blue Hole. The honeysuckle had blossomed, and even with the wheels churning dust into the air, its little white stars winked through a gritty dusk.
It was the honeysuckle, in fact, that I noticed first when we reached the Clearing up above the Blue Hole—honeysuckle strewn like confetti all over the seat of Emerson’s white truck, sitting empty. Em reached in one hand, swept it clean to the floor, and kept walking. This day, his truck was the only one there.
My brother and I paced through the clearing without speaking.
Not that I didn’t try: “I don’t get—”
But each time, Emerson held up his hand.
At the top of the steep path, where you went barefoot or not at all, two pair of shoes sat side by side: a pair of size 14 sneakers, muddy and worn, and a woman’s small brown sandals.
There went the tacks on my insides. My mouth hung wide open and I had no way to cover my looking kicked in the gut.
But Em wasn’t looking at me. He’d yanked off one sneaker before I grabbed hold of his T-shirt.
“Cut it out, Turtle. Come on.”
I’d no idea what I wanted to say. I only knew that there was no way, no way, I was going down there. When I came up with words, I surprised even myself with what I choked out: “It’s just a shame, is all.”
“What?” Emerson looked up.
“Just that it’s too bad we couldn’t ever find him.”
“Look, Turtle—”
“Too bad we couldn’t find Jimbo.”
Em stared at me.
I tried on a shrug. “Just a shame, is all I’m saying.”
Emerson stood there, one Converse in hand. Then he rammed it back on. We limped back to the clearing together and paused by the empty pickup. Then we folded ourselves into our mother’s sedan.
“You know how Bo is,” I said. “Always looking to be nice. Not leaving anyone lonely. Or scared. Maybe she let Mort’s games with his gun, or the shooting on Seventh, or the stares she gets around town—all that—start to connect in her head. Or—”
“It’s not like Bo to beg off hanging with us. You name me one time he’s ever done that. Ever. Till she came along.”
I was stuck on the You name me one time, because I couldn’t.
“Hey. Turtle.” Emerson slammed the car into gear and spun the radio dial. The Eagles were belting out “Heartache Tonight.” He smacked the radio into silence.
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