Bo cocked his head, his green eyes big and innocent. “Trouble? No, sir. Hadn’t never heard the word.”
The three of us waved to him as we drove off. It looked to me like the Reverend might’ve had more on his mind, like he might be just starting to speak, but Emerson had the pickup out of the drive and onto the road, so the good Reverend Riggs only waved. Big Dog stood in her passenger seat and wagged.
Emerson waited until our lunch break to open the flap of what I could tell had got camped out in his brain.
“So we saw a movie last night. Me and Turtle.”
Jimbo’s mouth bulged with jelly and banana on white bread, his favorite, which he washed down with the usual: Coke studded in peanuts. He ignored Emerson’s tone, less like a here’s-what-we-did than a right hook to the jaw. “Yeah? What flick?”
I made a face. “The Deer Hunter. I just insisted.”
Jimbo patted my leg. “You’re a good man, Turtle.”
Emerson grunted, but Bo ignored him.
_________
By late afternoon, we were drenched with sweat. I was wet straight through till my skin didn’t know itself from my shirt. Momma would’ve insisted that as a young lady, I was only glowing. Reckon it looked and smelled like more than glow to me. We’d sprayed each other and Big Dog down with the hose any number of times, and still the sun broiled us on down to the bone. Big Dog, bless her heart, didn’t budge from under her dogwood tree, where her tongue spilled out of her mouth and puddled on dirt. The pickup’s eight-track player sang to us all day, but Diana Ross and James Brown together in person that day couldn’t have lifted us up out of that heat.
At one point, Jimbo leapt up onto a bound of mulch bags in the truck bed, the shovel in his hand serving as microphone. Ain’t no mountain high enough, he lip-synched down to us, to keep me from you.
I lifted my trowel to croon back to him: Ain’t no river wide enough …
And the two of us twirled and swanked and grooved among bags of mulch and manure and partially weeded flower beds and half-mown lawn, both of us turning to point and address Em on the chorus’s punch, To keep me from you!
Emerson waited until the song finished. Then only this, sullenly: “When you’re through messing around, we got work to finish.”
“You know, Turtle, this is why Diana ditched the Supremes,” Jimbo said, winking at me as he jumped from the truck bed. “You people ready,” he asked, leaning on his shovel, “to make like hounds for the Hole?”
“Any reason you got to quit early?” Emerson snarled. But he switched off the mower.
“It’s after five, old man. And over five hundred Fahrenheit. What’s been eating your gizzard all day anyway?”
“Nothing.”
“Uh-huh. So it’s nothing.”
“You heard me.”
One bushy eyebrow raised, Jimbo looked my way.
“Don’t ask me, Bo. I just got born into the same family.”
“Hard luck. Tell you what, Turtle, we’ll dip him seven times in the Hole and see if he ain’t some better then.”
“And then what?”
“If he ain’t all good-as-better by then, we’ll just hold him under the last time.”
Emerson circled the tools on the ground three times, then paced to the pickup and snatched up a saw. I watched him scramble up an old pear tree and begin to trim out dead branches, working the saw with gusto.
Bo returned to change his shovel for trowel, and he slung a bag of manure up onto his shoulder. “Em, man, you plan on leaving a trunk on that tree? The way you’re hacking—”
Em climbed back down the tree and hurled his saw to the ground. “Oh, I’m the one hacking, am I? I’m the dangerous one here, that it?”
“Whoa. Haul back on them reins, man. Who slipped a burr under your strap?”
Emerson stood up on his limb. “You ever stop to think about what you’re doing? You ever stop to think about somebody else besides yourself? Last night, what you went and—”
“I been meaning to talk to you about last night. ’Cause we talked.”
“Yeah, well, what you … Who’s we?”
“Them,” I said, supplying what was not very helpful.
Jimbo stepped toward the half-massacred pear tree. “Me and Farsanna. About us. About all of us.”
I was stuck on the Farsanna. Funny how her name could still sound so strange to me. But there it was, pronounced all careful and particular by the guy who’d flunked a straight flush of our high school’s foreign language classes.
Sadness sloshed around inside me like rainwater that kept rising, rising.
“No nickname for the new girl?” I asked, instead of crying.
“Give me time,” Jimbo said, and he smiled, one of those smiles with whispers behind it. Which was why, maybe, Emerson leapt at him from the tree, knocked him flat.
Bo lay there, sprawled like just-shot wild game in the grass. “Did I … miss … something?” He went to stand, when Emerson hauled back and slugged him.
Jimbo was back flat in the grass. He hiked one of his feet in the air right as Emerson dove for him, and my brother took a size 14 in the gut.
But even before Em had leveraged himself upright, he was lunging again for Jimbo.
“Em!” Bo blocked a blow to the head. “Man, talk to me. What—” he rolled right, just missing another lunge for his head, “is wrong with you?”
Emerson pulled back his right arm again. Jimbo’s gaze, just ever so briefly, shifted over to me, running to them. He looked back at Em’s fist, colliding then with Bo’s face.
It was my fault, I figured right then, Bo’s not relocating his face in time, the distraction of me running at them. I dove for Emerson’s wrists, clawed into the one I caught, and pinioned it around to his back.
“How dare you,” Emerson bellowed at Bo, “put her in danger for nothing but your own—your own—” My brother’s free arm flailed, and I held tight to the other one, in hopes of preventing another swing.
The free arm drew back and aimed, then dropped to his side, hung useless, unhinged. Big Dog had risen from her place in the shade and whined by my side.
They stood, the two of them, staring at each other, both of them panting and filthy, both of them bruised, Jimbo bleeding.
Bo nodded, like they’d just completed a whole conversation I couldn’t hear. “It’s okay,” he said.
His shoulders hunched, Emerson was shaking his head at the grass. “Don’t do this to her.”
Bo reached a hand and lowered it to Em’s shoulder, lightly, like it might topple off. “To her?” he asked. “Or to you?”
There it was, out where we could see it: My brother was in love with the new girl too. Too. My brother and his best friend were in love with the new girl.
The one fruit of its kind in a whole garden of showy, available Neesas, and they both had to want the forbidden.
“No.” It was all I could manage from my seat on the grass.
So they were in love, both of them at the same time, with the same girl. Two boys who’d always shared everything: their landscaping business, their peanuts, their Cokes, Bo’s tape collection, the truck, and Big Dog.
Until the new girl and the map we’d all learned to make with our hands.
The little boat they’d paddled, Jimbo and Em, for so many years—and with me in the hull—had run up on a rock, and I could feel us all rocking there, the keel bending, misshapen. We’d hit trouble head-on, crashed straight up on top of it.
Em’s hands twitched at his sides, his face spasmed up like the mad might break loose from under the skin. “Don’t you care a thing about her safety?”
“What?”
“It’s one thing for all of us to run together, be seen like that. But just her and—” he choked on the next word, �
�you! Why do you think I’ve left her alone? Huh? Why do you think? You JERK!”
“Maybe,” Jimbo said, just hardly above a whisper, “I don’t think less of her than you do, cowboy. Maybe I think a little more of this Ridge.”
“This place? Are you nuts?”
“You sound like L. J.”
“Well, maybe he’s right.”
“Well, maybe I got faith.”
“Faith in what? You got faith in Mort? Seventh Street? What?”
“In change, maybe. In maybe … redemption, you know?”
Em blew air through his nose and looked as if he might take another swing. “Right. And I got faith in sunshine and daisies. You got any evidence anything’s changed so much here?”
“Nope. Just scraps of the holy hoped for, that’s all.”
I must’ve moaned then, or somehow made myself known. For the first time since he’d leapt at Bo, Em looked over at me. I felt like crying—though I ducked my head fast so maybe they couldn’t see my face crinkle. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Me? Oh, I don’t know. Just enjoying a ringside seat at the fights.”
“Well, pull yourself together, Turtle.”
“Right. You’re obviously the emotionally stable one in the family.”
Jimbo grabbed his watch, the plastic Mickey Mouse band he’d won at Six Flags. “Hey, we got to git! It’s quitting time and the Hole’s waiting on us to fill it.” He brushed away what Emerson was about to say. “Look, you might wanna know what the fair lady said about us.”
Em snorted again. “Oh, yeah. I been dying to hear what she said about you and her—”
“Not me and her, Spud-Head. Me and you. And … her.”
Emerson turned slowly to face his best friend.
Bo shook his head, his dimples beginning to show. “I thought that might get your attention. Look, you wanna hear the whole putrid truth?”
Em folded his arms over his chest. “Maybe.”
I lay back on the grass and wished I could cover my ears.
Bo walked up to inches from Emerson’s face. “Goes something like this. Her Ladyship Fair likes us.”
“Who’s us?”
Bo shrugged. “Us whole mangy pack. And, romantically speaking, the lady finds herself asundered.”
“Asundered?”
“Ripped clear to shreds by the pain of competing passions. For us.”
“Who’s us?”
“Me and you. She likes us both. Although …” Jimbo’s dimples deepened. “She does find me a particularly irresistible specimen of manhood.”
“She said that?”
“Didn’t have to. I could see it in her eyes. She could barely keep her hands off me.”
Emerson brightened a bit. “But she managed, didn’t she?”
The approach of Mollybird’s ancient Buick, thunderous, with the occasional ping, announced her return. The roses on her straw hat bobbed as her head jerked side to side, forward and back, surveying our work. The Buick rolled to a stop, thundered and pinged for several long moments, then proceeded on to the back of the house. We exchanged relieved glances: At least for today, our work had been approved and Mollybird would fetch her sweet tea to the screen porch rather than charge into the yard to list which of her wishes we’d carried out inadequately.
Jimbo turned to me and pointed to the grass stains across his chest. “How d’I look? These match my eyes, Turtle?”
The grass stains did, in fact, match his eyes, and I suddenly, desperately needed to tell him just that, at that moment the most urgent fact in the world.
But Jimbo didn’t stand still to hear me say so.
12 Ropes and Threads
As we pulled up to the Feed and Seed, Bobby and L. J. were unloading a shipment of mulch and had just finished helping out for the day. Uncle Waymon waved to us from the office and turned back to the cash register. The boys swung into the flatbed.
“We stopping for that new girl?” Welp, all edgy and frowning, was wanting to know. He was wearing his jeans with unfrayed slits in the knees.
Jimbo eyed him up and down. “Reckon we stopped off for you, Wonder Welp.”
Because I wanted one—needed one—myself, I handed the boys Cokes from the cooler. L. J. produced a bag of peanuts from his pocket and we passed it around, each of us popping into the bottles our required number. I always preferred five, and no more. Jimbo, on the other hand, liked to get the bag last so he could baptize all those remaining.
_________
The new girl was waiting at the plate-glass window, her long, red cotton skirt hanging a little lower—and maybe more ragged at the hem than it used to. Behind in the dark sat her mother, only an oval of face-flesh showing out of a swaddling of scarf. I watched Jimbo as our new passenger boarded. He greeted her warmly, as usual—but nothing out-of-the-way warmly for Jimbo.
I raised my Coke to her, my greeting, and fished through the ice for another. L. J. passed her the peanuts—what few Jimbo’d left.
Bobby Welpler, I noticed, sat still and sullen. But then he’d always been given to fits. “We can’t be stopping here,” he spit out as Em pulled us into the drive.
“How’s your momma?” I asked him. I was feeling malicious.
If he heard me, he didn’t let on, just stared past my ponytail into the woods.
And I remember wondering then, at that moment, if Bobby Welpler— pimply, tagalong Welp—were capable, ever, of any real harm.
Neither Farsanna nor Jimbo showed any signs that day of anything having changed between them, or with any of us.
There was one time when we were all stomping our shoes off at the top of the footpath’s slide down: They bumped against one another. But even then they sprang apart, like they’d both just brushed a wall of broken glass.
Jimbo was in rare form on the rope swing, performing flips with full twists so close to the sweetgum tree, I closed my eyes more than once. Each time he narrowly missed hitting the tree—but the closer he came, the harder he laughed.
Emerson’s mood required not seven, as Jimbo had threatened, but a single good headfirst plunge into the icy waters.
Jimbo nodded cheerfully from beside Emerson’s water-crater. “That ought to knock the puke out of him good.”
Next to where I’d planned to sun myself in silence for the remainder—and there wasn’t much—of the afternoon, Farsanna spread a towel: the same threadbare scrap of white terry cloth she brought every trip to the Blue Hole. It looked like the one my father took from a one-star motel whose hot water was broken—took it to even things out, he said—then bequeathed it to Big Dog for baths. The new girl’s towel was like that but thinner.
I’d grown sleepy, and though I could hear Farsanna shifting restlessly beside me, I was content to listen to the splash and thrash, and then the steady lap, lap, lap of the Blue Hole and its everyday business. Warm, well-fed for the moment on peanuts and Coke, fully and completely content, I wished only to be left alone just then. Perhaps, I thought, if I kept my eyes closed …
“Shelby?”
I opened one eye. Wearing, as she always did these days at the Hole, my old suit, Farsanna was sitting up straight, her usual ramrod posture, and studying intently the boys on the rope swing—but not, so far as I could tell, any particular boy.
“Yeah?”
“Why is it only … them?”
“Where?” I raised my head groggily.
She pointed to the pendulum swing of the rope.
I shook my head. “What … them?”
“Girls are not open to it?”
“It’s not open to girls,” I corrected. “But it is. ‘Course it is.”
“Why do you not fly on the rope, then?”
I sat up, shading my eyes. “Me? Shoot. Why would I wan
t to do that?” I shrugged and would have lain back down had I not gotten a good look at her eyes. I should have known better by then. She was prodding with them, as surely as if she’d poked me in the chest with a sweetgum branch. I watched the rope swing, where Buddy Buncombe and his sizable self were hurtling down toward brown water, a sizable hole when he hit. “Why would I want to do that?”
She said nothing, but I knew without looking she was still staring at me.
I wrapped my arms around my knees—though my thighs looked fat in that position. I frowned at the brown water—though the frown was intended for her. “I do what I do because I want to. Not because of any bunch of any boys. There’s some things they can just have.” I lay back down.
“Mata, my mother,” she said flatly, “expresses similar views to that of yours.”
I sat back up. All I’d ever seen of her mother was a dark circle of face deep in the shadows of a hideous house. A woman draped in cloth from head to toe. A woman I imagined bowing to her husband as she sprinkled curry over rice, and over the table and chairs, the floor…. I was not pleased with the comparison. “What?”
“Yes.”
I heard myself snipping the ends off my words: “I’m like your mother?” The rock beneath my towel had become harder, sharper, and I shifted position.
“In this one way: There is for men a realm, as well as for women one. A good woman does not wish for what belongs to men.”
“Oh, come on. That’s not what I meant at all.”
Her stiff, licorice hair moved as one piece when she turned her head back toward the brown water. “It may be that I did not understand you,” she said.
Farsanna stood up without pushing off with her hands. “You are coming?” she asked, not taking her eyes from the sweetgum.
“Oh, come on. So what if they’ve got one little ol’ rope to themselves? So what?”
She stood where she was.
I threw my hands up. “Look, girls just don’t go off it, all right?”
“Then it is not to girls open … it is not open to girls.” Her eyes were on the rope.
“No, it’s just …”
She turned to look at me.
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