_________
When we picked up Farsanna, she appeared at her door wearing an outfit I’d not seen before—and I wondered where it’d come from. It wasn’t in style; the colors didn’t match; the skirt was too long and too full—even I could see that, and I’ve never been one for fashion.
And still the new girl looked good. Beautiful, even.
We all four rode in the cab, the back all full as always of mulch and manure, and now of a shovel with blood on it still. Sanna rode in the middle, her and Em and Jimbo, all three trying not to brush up against each other and all of us crammed in together, so as not to get our Sunday best dirty.
We rode the few miles to the church without speaking. Em and I stared out opposite windows.
As the four of us piled out from the truck in the church lot, Jimbo tilted his head towards my brother. “Man, take it easy. We ain’t nothing but four poor ol’ sinners paying a front porch visit to our Maker.” Jimbo crinkled his eyes at me.
Emerson rubbed a knuckle into each temple. “Meeting our Maker’s more like it.”
I was holding my stomach—like it might calm the churning. I muttered to Em, “You ever have that little heart-to-heart with your best friend, Big Brother?”
“We should’ve told Bo about seeing his daddy.”
“We should’ve done a lot of things before now,” I agreed.
Jimbo Riggs’ daddy’s church was Baptist, and the largest in town of any breed. And the ugliest, Baptists not having much of an eye for beauty in buildings—I reckoned it was part of their creed. The organ inside was wheezing out the most hideous chords. Even the stained glass inside was no help—chunky pinks and putrid greens that jigsawed a fish.
I plopped myself down on the brick wall just outside the foyer. “I can’t do it,” I whispered to Em. “Not even for Jimbo. I can’t.”
“Too late now. I’m not taking you home.”
“I can’t.”
“You pansy,” my brother encouraged me.
“Take that back!”
“Pansy.”
“I’m not scared. It’s the organ. I can’t take it.”
“Tough.” Em jerked me up by the elbow. “You don’t have to listen.”
I shook free of his grip, but walked by his side toward the door.
Sanna and Jimbo stood just outside the sanctuary doors, which were still propped open. The August sun was stabbing down through the maples that surrounded the church, and the concrete walks already putting out heat. But through the mouth of the church, I could see that its belly was dark, if not cool.
The four of us squared off there at the mouth and stood for a minute—just stood.
“L. J. might already be on inside,” Bo said lightly, “waitin’ on Jesus to come back and for us to come in.”
Farsanna glanced sideways at me. Fingers twisting each other, her hands gripped each other in front of her waist. “Shelby, I thought that you and your brother with churches did not—”
“We don’t,” I said. “We aren’t.” She’d called me Shelby again. Not Turtle. With no contractions.
She cocked her head. Then looked from me to Em to Jimbo.
Jimbo flashed his dimples. “They’re willing to come only on special occasions.”
The special was what made me stumble on the threshold, like in that one word Jimbo had nudged me—and his best friend—ever so gently to the side.
From the dark mouth of the church, a hand reached to catch me from falling, an usher who propped me back on the stilt-heeled sandals I never wore well. And he offered me a folded paper, the church’s picture on front. “You all right, little lady?” he asked.
I nearly told him the truth, that I’d have been a heap better if it weren’t for the organ, coughing and gasping and wailing like an old man with TB. But it sounded out in my head like something L. J. would say, so I didn’t.
And the usher wasn’t looking at me anyway, wasn’t waiting to hear what I said. His eyes were on Jimbo, and who Jimbo was standing beside.
The people inside the big belly were already on their feet singing, the organ wrestling the voices for a stranglehold. Couldn’t say I remember the hymn, except it talked about suffering and shame. Suffering and shame swelled up from a sea of bright, puffed-sleeve florals and avocado green sport coats and too-coiffed, too-happy hair—big hair on the men and the women. Suffering and shame, I remember they sang, Suffering and shame.
I looked around me for signs of either, or both. But a hot, sticky breeze blew from the open doors at the back of the sanctuary, and signs of sweat were all I could find, on myself or anyone else. I felt hollow inside just like this cavernous room—hollow and hot and likely to be sick any moment.
In Southern gentleman style, Jimbo had taken Farsanna’s elbow to guide her to a pew. The back of the belly was all clogged with bodies, the only loose spaces far up to the front.
Jimbo was nodding and grinning to the faces who turned—one by one they all did—heads whipping around like a giant fan had been flipped on from the front.
Regina Lee Riggs was there, on the third row, her headband matching her dress and her purse and her shoes. She had on the same face she’d worn on my mother’s front porch with the Garden Club ladies—except those caged-animal eyes of hers looked like something had got loose. They never left Jimbo, her eyes, and I wondered how he could still stand up straight, her skewering him like that.
The people in the pews reached another verse of the hymn, but as voice by voice faltered and fell, the organ marched on triumphant, alone.
An usher approached the front and bent to speak in the ear of the man up on the platform. Reverend Riggs sat on a stage in a chair that looked to me like a throne. His round jaw was moving in time with the organ, but his lips weren’t forming words. His eyebrows, bushy like Jimbo’s, had crawled high on his face. But whatever the usher whispered to him, Reverend Riggs made no sign of hearing. He was looking at Jimbo, and the girl who stood beside him.
The organ heaved into a victory lap.
The usher returned to the back of the belly—where we still stood. I took hold of Emerson’s shirt at the waist.
The usher who’d approached the throne at the front put his head next to the usher who’d kept me from falling. The two of them bookended Jimbo and smiled. One laid a hand on his shoulder and patted it once. One put his mouth to Bo’s ear.
Here’s what I saw on the faces that watched—they all did, of course. Like snowflakes, there were no two expressions alike. There were some hard looks, I reckon, but also the soft eyes on women who were already seeing the casserole they’d like to serve us for lunch. Mostly there were everywhere the expressions like children lost at the fair and panicked, searching for someone to show them the way home.
The good Reverend Riggs sat on his throne without moving, except for his jaw up and down like a hooked bass hauled into the air.
It was that face, his daddy’s, that Jimbo was watching.
28Thirty Pieces of Lead
A belly vomits what it can’t digest, and so we got spewed out the mouth into a searing sun.
Jimbo made eye contact only once with the ushers who escorted us out, and that happened only at the threshold of the back door. I couldn’t see Jimbo’s expression, his back to me, but I could tell by the way the ushers seemed to shrivel right there in their shoes what his face must have told them. Bo never gave them a word. And he never let go of the elbow he held.
We walked four in a line to the truck without speaking. And then stood there, leaning against the truck, taking it in.
There was no breeze, the heat already so fierce it about knocked you down, and I wondered if this hadn’t been Dante’s seventh circle of hell all along, and we’d just thought it was our mountain home.
We might’ve stood there for days, might nev
er have moved, but an old Chevy Impala screeched into the lot with a blat of the horn.
I jumped.
Hands flapped at us from out the car windows.
“So we’re not the only ones who’re late,” Matthew called, with Mark and Luke and L. J. emerging one by one behind him. The Waymon of Waymon’s Feed and Seed plunged out of the driver’s seat, then dove back in and resurfaced with a Bible in hand.
L. J.’s mother blew a kiss in our direction and called over her shoulder, her heels already tapping at the asphalt, “Good morning, dears. See you inside.” Maybe inside, at the end of her spindled sprint, maybe then it occurred to her she’d never before seen her nephew or niece at her church.
Maybe it hit her once she’d got inside the belly and felt it still heaving.
But five of the six of my mother’s kin were dashing headlong for the door and waving above their heads while they ran.
Only L. J. stood still.
“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well, well.”
We—most of us—looked at him.
“So,” it wasn’t his usual sneer—just a question, “what exactly transpired here? I’m conjecturing you’ve already been in?”
Jimbo was looking at no one, his eyes fixed on the ground. I wanted to touch his shoulder. But didn’t.
Sanna’s eyes had become again like I’d first seen them, that day by the school water fountain: deep and black, too dark to tell much about—but possibly dangerous. Like a pit that might be storing explosives.
Emerson looked to Jimbo for an answer, got none, so he took up the task: “What do you think happened here?”
L. J. sucked a deep breath and pushed at the bridge of his glasses that for once hadn’t budged out of place. “I take it they were not enamored of our new, improved mangy pack?” He nodded at Farsanna. “Or simply not too fond of the color black?”
Jimbo cursed and spit on the ground.
_________
We never discussed where we were going when we hauled ourselves into the truck—no need to.
Farsanna sat, her spine flagpole stiff, her eyes straight ahead.
We swung by only Em’s and my house for Big Dog and swimsuits—I snatched up two, one for Sanna and me, and Emerson grabbed a stack of shorts for the guys. Bo appeared in Em’s room long enough to snag his shoebox-sized eight-track tape player, the one we’d found banged up and cheap at a garage sale last spring. Music at the Blue Hole generally wasn’t the norm, partly because you couldn’t hold anything in your arms as you slid down or climbed back up out of the Hole, and less so because we valued the quiet. Today, though, we knew we didn’t want to hear ourselves think.
All of us back in the truck, Em swung by the Pump and Run for sandwiches.
“Who’ll have pimento cheese and petroleum oil?” Jimbo asked grimly, as he tossed us triangles of white bread with little strips of orange between them, suffocated in cellophane wrap. We passed round the Cokes he’d just bought, and the peanuts, but saved the white triangles for the Hole.
L. J. thumped on Emerson’s back window. “You going for Welp? I dropped him off at his momma’s place early this morning.”
Em eased up on the gas and waited for the decision.
L. J. raised one eyebrow at Jimbo.
“No Welp today,” I pleaded—directing this, of course, to Jimbo.
Jimbo pressed his big feet against the bed’s side like he might push it down. His voice came out only half alive: “Reckon we all of us might ought to get one more chance’n we deserve.”
We backtracked for Bobby.
Emerson yanked the truck off the paved road onto a dirt swath that trespassed into the field where Welp’s mother rented her trailer. Out behind it, Welp was changing the oil in her car. His face streaked in grease, he rocked to his feet, planted his fists on his hips and his feet in the dust.
Jimbo lay a hand on my shoulder. “Turtle, you go talk to the man.”
“And say what?”
“Reckon you’ll know when you get there.”
“But it’s been a long day,” I hedged, “and it’s not even noon.”
Jimbo nodded, his hand still on my shoulder. “You can do it, Turtle.” He leaned into my face. It was the first time he’d met anyone’s eye since the church. “Don’t reckon I much feel like talking.” His chin gone to stubble—he’d forgotten to shave, or maybe it still hurt the swelling too much—and his bushy eyebrows scrunched up in a question together that made his green eyes stand out from the bruised, broken lines of his face.
Seeing where we’d just been, I wasn’t much inclined to make peace with the world, and Welp was just standing there watching—just being Welp. But Jimbo was giving the orders that day, and I was—we all were—inclined to let him.
I slid out and down slowly, and barefooted my way through ragged grass and flowering weeds to the car. “Wanna come to the Hole, Bobby?”
Welp eyed me, first up and then down. “What’s with the dress?”
I saw our mistake. Too late. “Just church.”
“Who all here went to church?” he demanded.
I shrugged. “It was only church. And we didn’t stay.”
Welp dropped the oil pan. “Race you!” he called, already sprinting toward the truck. He was like that, a four-year-old boy all over again, his only chance at winning being to pick on Emerson’s kid sister.
Without shoes I wasn’t too fast, but I gained enough on Welp to lunge for his back and brought him down just even with the truck.
Welp shook me off.
I gave him a shove that was meant to be playful. “Beat by a girl,” I taunted.
He shoved back, hard. More like a punch. I hit the ground.
A whetted edge to his voice, Jimbo tore into Welp: “Listen, Welpster. You’ve had a tough crack at life, I’ll give you that. But you don’t got to let the bad thrown at you become the ugly you think you got to be.”
Bo held out a hand to me and I took it, just enough to get me to my feet, and saw Welp sulking.
He’d hauled himself up one side of the truck, and then froze.
His stare was on Sanna, his melon-seed eyes widened to what almost was normal. “You went?” He whirled on Jimbo. “She went with you, and you didn’t call me?”
“Take it easy there, Welpster. It was planned real last minute. And you never—”
Welp’s round face had gone red under the acne. “Y’all all went, all of you, even her, and you didn’t call me?”
I shrugged. “It was nothing but church. And we didn’t stay.”
He looked straight at me. “Hey, Turtle, how come you don’t got any friends of your own, huh? Nothing but nigger yonder. How come is that?” Welp nodded toward Sanna. “Reckon she thinks she’s coming to the Hole again too?”
I sat there, and, afraid to meet anyone’s eye, I looked at the weeds. But I slid a hand to Sanna’s back, which had gone straight and iron-stiff.
“Welp,” Jimbo’s shoulders were rising up towards his ears, like a tiger before it attacks, “I reckon I’ll give you one chance to tell me I heard wrong just now. There’s a chance I didn’t rightly hear right.”
Bobbly Welpler stretched to his full five foot six. “I reckon I can call a spade when I see one.” His hands went back to his hips. “Or a nigger-lover, too.”
Emerson had shot out of the cab by then and even L. J. had climbed up to his feet, one finger pushing up at the bridge of his horn-rims, again and again and again.
Jimbo’s hands went deep in his pockets, and then deeper, like he’d better keep them from swinging. His voice took on a rumble, a whole lot like thunder. “Welp, I tell you what, boy: If it weren’t for your momma right now, I’d lay you out flatter’n grass, and more green.”
But Em didn’t have his hands in his pockets, and maybe
didn’t have Bobby’s momma in mind. He had Welp by the throat and then on the ground, rolling. Em landed on top, hollering whole lines of things I couldn’t make out, and probably couldn’t repeat if I did, followed by, “You got that? You got that?”
Maybe because my brother was big, and little Bobby Welpler was not, or maybe because we all had some sort of dad, and Welp did not, or maybe because Welp’s face contorted with fear like he was gazing down the gullet of hell, Jimbo and L. J. hauled Emerson off.
Jimbo bent over him. “Welp, I got to tell you: You got some real noble rightness inside you—but I’ll be hanged if I know where sometimes.”
From the weeds, Welp looked from one to the other of us, and ended on L. J. “You too?”
L. J. looked back. “I share the sentiment.”
“That how it is? One of her sort got the whole pack of y’all turnin’ on your own kind?”
None of us moved. Except Bobby, who fell one step back.
“Yeah? Well, fine! Fine! The whole pack of y’all mix it on up! Go ahead! Just go ahead!” He followed this with a string of words, rabid and run together into a froth. Then he swung himself up to the crippled stoop of the trailer, yanked on the aluminum door, and slammed it—a pitiful tap.
Em leaned against the truck bed near Sanna. In silence, we all watched her face.
Her arms crossed over her chest just as they’d been that very first day she’d ridden with us, Sanna made sure she looked each one of us in the eye. “Perhaps,” she began, her voice low and bitter, “this means for me … it is time to go.”
I kept my hand on her back, and the three boys huddled in closer. I took a deep breath. “If you’re meaning us,” I began softly, “time for us to go, then we’re with you.”
Jimbo, Em, and L. J. nodded together. Then L. J., of all people, spoke up, his voice gone unfamiliarly soft: “Sanna, I wish we could explicate for you how a town full of charming people could also house—”
“Idiots,” Em said, rubbing his upper arm where Welp had slugged him.
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