I was just turning to go when I noticed the crack in Jimbo’s door—through it, dim yellow light from the breakfast room glowed. I could see only a shoe and a knee, both unmoving. The pants leg looked like the blue pinstripe of Reverend Riggs’ only suit.
Softly, I stepped to the door and peered through.
Jimbo’s daddy was sitting alone, a book with tiny type spread-eagled on the breakfast room table. Rocking forward and back, he held his head in his hands, just as I’d seen Jimbo do in the back of the truck. Only the Reverend bent over his book and rocked forward and back, forward and back, and he sobbed.
31The Red that Danced on the Lawn
I slithered back through the window pretty smoothly until—once again—the sill hit my hips. Jimbo grabbed my wrists and hauled the upper half of me over his shoulder, the other half still stuck between sill and sash.
“Hey, how ‘bout being careful!”
“Too hard?”
“I might wanna bear children one day. Jeez, you’re killing me.”
I got unstuck all at once, which sent Jimbo and me tumbling to the grass.
“Turtle, you still got everything attached to what oughta be?” He bent to help me up.
I dusted myself off, but didn’t bother to check out the scrapes I could feel down my shins where they’d dragged against the sash. I began softly, “Bo, there’s something you got to know.” We dashed from shadow to shadow across the parsonage lawn to the neighboring yard where we huddled behind an old oak. Emerson’s truck hadn’t returned yet.
“What? You don’t like the way I keep house?”
“No, it’s …” I’d intended maybe to say then that I thought Mort and the rest of the boys—the ones who were grown men—might be stirring up some kind of trouble, real trouble, during the night. That maybe the Moulavi family might ought to be warned.
But this is what I chose instead—and it needed to be said sometime too: “You oughta know your daddy was inside. And Bo, he was—”
Jimbo looked past the parsonage, into the trees. Then: “Turtle, I don’t reckon there’s nothing you can tell I wanna hear tonight about the good gutless Reverend Riggs.”
“He looked awful upset.” Tortured was the word I’d had in my mind when I’d seen him, but upset was the watered-down version I handed to Bo.
Jimbo wasn’t much moved.
“Bo, maybe he’s sorry.”
“You think? For looking like a two-karat coward in front of God and everybody in town?”
“Maybe he was just … confused. I mean, he didn’t exactly have warning to think over what he’d do.”
“Think what over? What’s there to think over?” We were standing underneath the old post oak in the parsonage front yard. Jimbo’s arms shot up over his head. “The man sits up there and says nothing, NOTHING—as good as broadcasting to this whole bloody town—”
I’d loathed Reverend Riggs, and not even seeing Jimbo so pained at the spinelessness of his daddy made me want to defend him—but now for Bo’s sake, I offered: “Maybe he didn’t know what to say—you know, what to do. Maybe he got all kinds of pressure.”
“Yeah, well, he made that real abundantly clear, didn’t he? That, and how he’s got the backbone of Gumby. Wasn’t that brother of yours supposed to be back by now?”
“Look.” I pointed to the parsonage porch, its one light on. Jimbo’s daddy had let the screen door whap behind him, and was pacing now across the front porch, pacing with his arms first behind him, then in front and above him. Back and forth and forth and back he strode, pivoting on the heel of a bare foot. He still wore the suit, but the unbuttoned shirt had come all untucked and the tie flapped loose, one end to his thigh.
I tapped Jimbo on the arm. “Don’t you think maybe he might just want to know where you are?”
“You know what, Turtle? He can reckon it out.” Jimbo turned away from the porch.
I motioned with my head toward approaching headlights. “Here comes Em now.” I was just stepping from the post oak shadows into a white pool of streetlight when Jimbo snatched at my arm, tugged me back.
The lights were, I had to admit, closer together than they should’ve been, and too low to the ground. Then it swung into the parsonage drive.
A chill swept up my back and I shivered, there in the hottest of summers. “Bo, that car!”
He nodded, moving closer to me. “A Gremlin. An orange Gremlin. Like we needed more pleasant surprises today.”
“The car from the Seventh Street shooting.”
We watched three men unfold themselves from the car and regiment themselves in a line up to the parsonage porch.
Reverend Riggs continued to pace.
“C’mon, Turtle. There’s our ticket out.” Jimbo pointed far up the street to headlights. Emerson was standing on the hood of his truck, one hand on his hip, the other motioning to us.
I thought about Reverend Riggs’ skulking behind the Moulavis’ house. Which fit with these guys. But they were wagging fingers and fists in his face, seemed to be angry with him. “Bo, wait … You don’t suppose your dad’s in trouble with them?”
Jimbo was already walking away, his face and his back set against the parsonage steps. “Piddlin’ little ol’ pawns don’t get in trouble with the chess king, Turtle—didn’t you know? Not so long’s they’re scooting along all quiet and nice in their place. Turns out my daddy’s a pawn, Turtle. And not making so much as a move to be anything else.”
_________
I lay awake that night for hours trying to make out what Emerson and Jimbo were saying just on the other side of the wall. Now and then, one voice or the other would swell above a whisper, then crash on the undertow of the other’s response.
Maybe it was midnight or later when the phone rang. I wasn’t asleep and could still hear the tide of the boys’ talking in Emerson’s room.
I could hear my father’s foot-thuds falling in the dark, hear his whispered curses as he stubbed his toe on a door frame and fell into Big Dog. Then he was pounding on Emerson’s door.
“Son, Jimbo: Get up.”
I heard Em open the door. “Yes, sir?”
“It’s Mrs. Riggs on the phone.”
“Sir?”
“Wanting to know if we’ve seen Jimbo. He never came home last night, they said, and they’re worried sick.”
Then Em must’ve opened the door still wider.
Or maybe Jimbo spoke up first. “Howdy, Mr. Maynard.”
“On the phone?” Emerson asked—he sounded stupid even to me, and I was on the same side of the thing.
“Yes. The phone. The instrument we civilized people use to let others know where we are. What do you mean not letting the Riggs know where Jimbo was?”
“It was my fault, Mr. Maynard,” Jimbo began. “I reckon I reckoned wrong. Figured they’d know where I was.”
“Bo, you ought to know by now, you don’t assume, you confirm these things.”
“Yes, sir,” the boys said together.
My father sledgehammered his words. “Let me suggest, Jimbo, that you march downstairs to the kitchen and dial that phone and explain yourself to your mother. If I were she, I might not let you come home, but maybe she is kinder than I. Meanwhile, Mrs. Maynard and I are going back to sleep.”
“Yes, sir. Goodnight,” the boys muttered.
I waited until my father’s door slammed before poking my head out of mine. The boys looked like they were expecting to see me.
But when the door to my parents’ room flew open again, all three of us jumped. Momma was standing there in her robe.
“Sugar,” she said, reaching to smooth my hair where it stuck out from my ponytail, “I’m real worried about you all.”
The boys looked to me. “Worried, Momma?” I began. “Big Dog Landsc
aping’s booming now. Right, Emerson? Jimbo?”
“Huh? Yeah,” Bo said. “Uh-huh.” Then, remembering Momma, he added, “Yes, ma’am.”
Momma eyed him like a squash that might have gone bad. “Did all y’all have a nice day today?” she asked in the tone that said she meant far more than that.
“Today?” Emerson asked, his eyes on the green and gold shag. “What’d we do today, gang? Oh, that’s right. Went swimming.”
“The water wasn’t so cold,” I offered, “now that it’s end of summer. And it’s being so awful hot all these—”
“Mmm,” Momma mused, pulling the ponytail holder from my head and letting the coarse sheaf drop on my shoulder. “Because when you left here this morning, your daddy and me still in our bed with the paper, you’ll recall you said you all were headed to church.”
We looked at each other with our eyebrows gathered, like we were straining to scrape up the distant past.
“I recall quite clearly,” Momma continued, “because when you, Emerson, sugar, shouted upstairs you were headed out to the Baptist church with Jimbo, your father spilled his coffee all over the sheets. A wonder he didn’t fall clear out of bed and scald himself senseless.”
“She’s right,” I said to the boys. “Momma’s right. We did swing by the church on the way.” I turned back to my mother. “We were there only real briefly.”
“Real short,” Emerson jumped in.
But Momma was staring at Jimbo, who managed, “Yes’m. Not hardly time for Jesus to weep.”
“I see. Well, then, you kids might not have been there for the disturbance. I did hear, though, that there was one.”
“We weren’t even there,” I offered carefully, “long enough to sit. We did, though, Momma—did we tell you?—see Uncle Waymon and Aunt Jean-Anne and the boys in the parking lot. They sent their love. Aunt Jean-Anne had on that dress we saw in the window of Miller’s …”
But for once Momma would not be swept into that current. “Shelby Lenoir,” she said quietly.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Emerson, Jimbo, there’s no need to slip down those stairs just quite yet.”
Our backs against the stairwell wall, we waited for her to fire.
“I just wanted to say,” she took the time to look each of us in the eye, “you all have made the stranger in town feel welcome.”
“Yes, ma’am,” we said in unison, and waited for more. Of course there was more.
“And far be it from me, the one always having to beg and plead with my own family to go just that little old once a year to my church, far be it from me to complain that you all would ask to be in the house of the Lord.”
We nodded together, and waited.
“My concern, though, is that you all might think you’re pulling some kind of prank. I would surely hate to think of my children—and you know, Jimbo, I’ve always thought of you as my own—would use a whole church full of innocent people just to see what kind of a ruckus you could cause. I would surely hate to think that—like some people might.”
“Oh no, ma’am, no, oh, ma’am, no,” we said in a scattershot.
Momma held up her hand. “Now, I’ve said my piece. You boys go on down to talk with Regina Riggs, bless her poor worried heart. Shelby Lenoir, if you’re going downstairs, you’d best change those raggedy shorts.”
“But Momma, it’s just the phone—”
She raised one perfectly plucked eyebrow at me.
“Yes, ma’am.”
With clean shorts on, I followed the boys down the stairs to the phone.
Jimbo stared at the dial. “How the cow hock do I say I didn’t call ’cause I didn’t want to call?” He gingerly lifted the receiver and made a face at us. “Howdy there, Ma.”
We watched him as he paced back and forth across the kitchen floor in his bare feet and trunks, and scowling as he paced. He raked his hand through his hair, standing it on end. “Didn’t reckon I had to explain,” he said. “Reckon you all could figure on why, after what happened this morning.” That was how he started, and from his tone, he wasn’t headed down any friendlier road. I couldn’t see an apology peeking out anywhere on his face. A hard-edged “No, ma’am” was as close as he came.
But then, just as he paced past the arch that led to our dining room clear through to the front of the house, he froze on one bare foot, the spiraled phone cord stretched almost to straight. The phone clattered out of Bo’s hand, his eyes round and wide under those dark, bushy brows.
Emerson looked up from the bowl of ice cream he’d just scooped himself. “What’s wrong?”
Em and I exchanged glances. Jimbo didn’t move, not even to reach for the receiver, limp on the floor, Regina Lee Riggs’ Virginian blue-blooded voice waltzing out into nowhere, unheeded.
We followed his stare—him already crossing himself. And for a moment the three of us stood side by side, mesmerized, charmed by the red snake that danced on the lawn.
32Klan’s Calling Cards
The cross in flames on our front lawn stood as tall as a man. This I knew for certain because Jimbo flew out the door at it like it was alive and on the attack. And it was only because both Em and I dove for him that Jimbo did not run headlong into the writhing yellow and red. Tackling him to the ground, Em held his waist while I grabbed an ankle, then wrapped both my arms around the leg I’d secured and lay my whole self on top of the leg, even while Jimbo thrashed to shake us.
As the headlights of the trucks bored into the night, one of the horns let fly with “Dixie,” its notes hovering on the hot summer night air for a moment, suspended.
From flailing against my grip on his calf, Jimbo suddenly lay quiet there on the grass, and watched white sparks shower the green just inches from where the tips of his fingers reached out toward the flame. He swiveled to a sitting position and reached for my hand to let himself up.
Emerson touched both our shoulders. “I’m going for—” he was yelling as he ran towards the house, his voice disappearing with him around the garage.
My father was already there in the doorway, Momma behind him, a pink satin bathrobe neatly tied in a bow. Her hair lay smooth and tidy, even recently brushed, and her lipstick was bright coral pink.
“A lady, Shelby Lenoir,” she had told me so many times, “never appears in public without her face on.”
I looked down at my nightclothes—nothing but Emerson’s old jersey, really, and the shorts I’d changed into at Momma’s demand. My front was a brown stripe of dirt where I’d been dragged several feet by Jimbo’s lunge for the fire. And my hair—Lord only knew.
Emerson had raced to the back for the garden hose, and my father, with Jimbo’s help, was now training the spray at the base of the flame, which sizzled and spit—and died, waterlogged wood collapsing on grass.
Somewhere behind us, deep in the house, the telephone rang. Momma must have gotten it, her face appearing at the dining room window, whose screens fell forward onto the porch in her haste to call to us out on the lawn.
“Waymon! It’s Waymon!” she shouted, her mellifluous voice going shrill.
Momma and her brother spoke often, making a point of meeting at the Home Plate at least every Tuesday for lunch—but rarely did they phone each other.
My father shifted his arc of water to soak a circle around the base of the smoldering wood. He shouted back over his shoulder, “What does he want this time of night?”
Momma’s answer stepped out slowly, sound by sound, from inside the house and across our front porch. “He says there’s something on fire on his front lawn.”
33A Kiss and Careening
When my brother and Jimbo and I reached Emerson’s truck, my father was still standing with his bathrobe flapping around his knees and the hose water, reflecting off the front porch light, was an a
rc of silver from his hand. I recall thinking that now that the danger was past—our house clearly not about to burn down, my mother safely inside, the trucks summarily fled—my father looked … almost proud. Can’t think of how else to put it.
Maybe a cross smoldering on his front lawn was some kind of delayed crowning achievement, whether or not he’d directly earned it himself. And it would make great newspaper copy. I could see he was already typesetting the headline in his mind.
“We should’ve told him,” I said—to myself mostly. “We should’ve told someone.”
Jimbo nodded to show he’d heard, and heaved Big Dog in the cab and himself in the truck bed and caught my hand just in time to lift me clear off the ground as the truck rolled out. He didn’t let go my hand once I was in good, and I didn’t go out of my way to remind him he had it.
My father whirled from the puddle that was forming at the base of the cross. The truck’s engine seemed to have startled him out of his reverie and into paternal duty. He gestured for us to come back, and yelled something I couldn’t make out but included the words “not safe.” But when we pretended not to see him or hear him, he only stood there, watching us go, with his garden hose and the charred, towering wood.
“At least,” Jimbo said, “your daddy didn’t run off scared.”
I shook my head. “Bo, your daddy’s not …”
Jimbo banged on the truck cab. “Em, you going straight there or stopping at L. J.’s?”
I threw my voice up and over the roar of the engine, Emerson’s whipping its horsepower down the Pike. “I thought L. J.’s was where we were going!”
Neither of the boys answered me.
Em turned his head to the side to yell, “We’ll take L. J. with us, if his place is under control.”
“And if things ain’t okay at his house?” Jimbo yelled back.
“What are you wanting to hear?”
“That we’re gettng to her house as fast as we can.”
“That’s all I’m saying, Bo. That’s all I’m saying.”
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