An excited voice was blurting out something about Russia. Alan sat up in bed, resting part of his weight on his elbows. “Daddy, what is it?” he asked, his mind flashing back to the atomic-bomb drills the students at Gaither had done every year for as far back as he could remember.
“Don’t know. Listen.”
“... scientists say the new moon will orbit the Earth about once every ninety minutes. They consider Sputnik proof that the Soviet Union has the capability of launching an intercontinental missile attack against the United States....”
John Kirby sat on the end of the bed so hard that the springs squeaked in response, his face gone gray with concern. Alan shivered without knowing why.
Through the haze of fever it sank in: the first artificial satellite had been launched, not from Cape Canaveral, as his Weekly Reader had assured him it would be as recently as last summer, but from somewhere in Russia, and it had nothing to do with the International Geophysical Year. His father, still looking worried, left the room. A minute later Alan heard the television, and it, too, was all about Sputnik.
Alan talked to his father that afternoon, questioned him. Did this mean that Russia could drop atomic bombs on New York, on Chicago, on Atlanta? Did it mean the Russians would be first into space, first to claim the moon? Did it mean... His father didn’t know.
For the rest of his life Alan Kirby would associate the space program with the Asian flu, with a stabbing ache in his shoulders and back and legs, with the dry-eyeball feeling of fever and the throb of headache. And with a despairing sense of helplessness and loss: despite the three silver knives concealed in his underwear drawer, he still had no real idea what to do about Athaniel Badon and the ShadowShow. As if to cap his misery, in the football game that weekend the Bulldogs went down to Michigan by a score of twenty-six to zero.
2
The intervals of rain ended at last. Karen Yates was glad to see the sun again: not that the rain bothered her very much, no bad weather could bother her as long as she was cooped up behind the reception counter of the Advocate, but it made her fat old boss, Jimmy Jenkins, a worse slave master than ever.
She had even said that to Elsie Poole, a nice old lady who came in once a week to do the wedding and engagements, when they ran into each other in the Belk’s lingerie department. Elsie, after the obligatory comment on the rain, had asked, “And how is everything down at the paper, dear?”
“Oh” — Karen had pouted — “don’t get me started. Mr. Jenkins treats us like we’re the field hands and him the overseer.” She had turned it into a joke right away, but the old biddy probably had gone straight to Mr. Jenkins about it. Anyway, that next day he had blessed her out for accidentally cutting off one measly little old phone call that wasn’t even important at all, just somebody trying to place a want ad to sell his old car.
But Sunday was fair and clear, and the new week started off well. Karen made a date on Monday to go with Roger Lynch to a country-music show in the New Haven Auditorium that coming Saturday night. Roger wasn’t a bit nice, really, but his daddy had given him a new Pontiac, and he did try to show a girl a good time before grabbing for her titties. Karen thought she and Roger had a sort of understanding now: he knew what she would stand for and what she wouldn’t, and he knew when to stop.
She hadn’t thought of Tom Davies for days and days when he called on Tuesday morning, just past ten. “Hey, sweet thing,” he had said. “You know who this is?” And she had known at once, though his voice was different, sort of faint and scratchy over what had to be long-distance lines. “You feel like steppin’ out a little tonight?” he had asked. “Or is old man Jenkins keeping your sweet little old nose to the grindstone, Kay-Kay?”
Karen twirled the phone cord. “He can’t tell me when to come and go,” she said in a low, provocative voice that she had practiced many times alone. “What d’you want to do tonight, anyhow?”
“Well, I’m supposed to take some pictures of the moon tonight.”
“The moon?”
“Uh-huh. See, the Gainesville paper’s gonna run this big series of articles on the Sputnik — ”
“Shoot, who wants to read about that?”
“Well, somebody must. Anyhow, they want me to run out tonight and take some pictures of the full moon comin’ up over the lake. It’s full tonight, you know.”
“I don’t notice stuff like that.” Mr. Jenkins came in, and she straightened behind the counter at once, but he went on into the newsroom without a glance at her. “Shoot, the lake isn’t even full-up yet.”
“I know that, but there’s places where I can get a good photo of the moon and the water. One of them’s Sullivan’s Cove.”
“Uh-huh,” Karen said. Sullivan’s Cove, off in the east part of the county, was a low, flat place, or had been before the building of Buford Dam. Now it was a wide expanse of shallow water, and the old lovers’ lane was well submerged. “Well, you take your old pictures by yourself.”
“Now wait. I ain’t told you all of it.”
“I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Not even about a boat?”
Karen looked toward the newsroom door, but it remained closed. “What about a boat?”
“Man who owns the studio here already has a cabin cruiser on the lake. Twenty-eight-footer. Got a little kitchen, little bedroom. Big old bed.”
“Lake’s not deep enough to have boats in it.”
“It is in the channel. And guess who’s borrowed it for tonight?”
“You’re kiddin’ me, Tom Davies.”
“Hope to die. Got the keys and everything. Gonna be nice out, nice cool night, big old moon comin’ up, old boat rockin’ on the water.”
“I haven’t ever done — been on a boat before.”
“How about it?”
“Well, I don’t know. I might come.”
“Meet me at the old Sullivan’s Mill Bridge?”
“Well...what time?”
“You’ll get off at five. You’ll want to go home, put on something real pretty and comfortable. Don’t worry about eating. Plenty of stuff on the boat. So drive on out to the bridge around eight o’clock, say. Be gettin’ dark then. You know where the old Mill Road turns off before the bridge?”
“Yes, but, shoot, it runs into the water now.”
“You can park before you get to the water. Use to be a gas station on the right, you’ll see the pavement. Park there. I’ll be waitin’ for you. You’ll probably see my car. If you don’t, it’ll mean I came over on the boat. But I’ll be watchin’ for you. Okay?”
“It better be a nice boat.”
“It’s a pretty boat, sweet thing. It’s a beautiful boat.”
“This old line is so bad I can hardly hear you.”
“Well, you’ll hear me better tonight, when I’m whisperin’ in your ear.”
She giggled. “You’re a horrible person, Tom Davies, and I hate you.”
“We’ll see about that tonight. ‘Bye.”
“’Bye.” She hung up, paused for a moment with her hand on the receiver. There was something about Tom’s voice, something unfamiliar almost, different from what she remembered. She couldn’t put her finger on it, whatever it was, and she went back to the typing she was supposed to be doing. But through it all she kept drifting off into daydreams, imagining a swollen moon over the water, a big bed on a cabin cruiser, and the gentle rocking of the waves.
3
“Now,” Andy McCory said to his apprentice, “when you see that little old flash in the upside right corner of the screen, you throw this switch here. See? That begins number two and a second later turns off the light on number one. Then you run the film on number one all the rest of the way through, rewind it like I showed you, and take the reel off. Then you put the next reel on and watch for the signal to change again. See? Real easy.”
Joey Fulham walked through the motions of changing reels and threaded the first machine. “How come you’re takin’ off?” he complained. “I got
hired to usher and to watch the concessions, not to do your job.”
“I’m takin’ off because Mr. Badon told me to take off,” Andy said. “Anyway, he’s gonna pay you some extra for this. It’s just for tonight. See, he needs somebody else that knows how to run the projectors, just in case I ever get sick or anything.”
“How much extra?” Joey asked. Joey, eighteen, was fighting the last stages of a war against acne, a war that had left his face a pitted and scarred battlefield. He scratched his cheek now, the nails rasping over scabbed pimples. “He say that? How much extra he was gonna pay me?”
“Five dollars,” Andy said, impatience sharp in his voice.
“Oh, okay. But you’re gonna be back tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah, tomorrow. Now, do it again.”
“Heck, Andy, you know I can — ”
“Start her up this time. Let’s see the cartoon and the beginnin’ of the movie.”
“Shit.” But Joey did it, showed the Looney Tunes and the titles of Nightmare Alley.
“Now tell me what you do to change the reels,” Andy said.
“Shit,” Joey said again, but he went through the whole routine.
“That’ll do,” Andy said. “Now you be here at a quarter to seven, you hear?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Okay. I don’t want to have to come lookin’ for you.”
“All right. God, you’d think this was a matter of life and death or somethin’.”
“Yeah,” Andy McCory said.
4
Early Tuesday afternoon, Odum Tate finally found Michael Estes.
The preacher hadn’t been looking for Michael, at least not by name, for he did not know him; but he had been asking some of the old men about the lynching, and one of them recalled that Ludie Estes had lived next door to the dead man, and that she had a grand-boy who drove a wrecker sometimes for the only black-owned garage in town. On Tuesday Tate saw the wrecker pulled up beside a rust-raddled old clunker of a pickup truck, jumper cables running from a battery in the bed of the wrecker under the propped-up hood of the truck. A neat young black man with horn-rimmed spectacles was just loosening the alligator grip of the cables when Tate came up.
“Be a dollar,” the black man said to an older white man who sat behind the wheel of the pickup.
The white man took out a change purse and counted out a fifty-cent piece, a quarter, three nickels, and a dime. “Close that hood, boy,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t lose my broom handle.”
“I’ll put it back.” The black man raised the hood, folded the broomstick down — it was wired at the bottom to the top of the grille — and wrapped a free end of wire around the handle to hold it in place. The hood dropped with a cough of rusted metal. The pickup, already running, eased back out into the street.
“Are you Michael Estes?” Tate asked.
The young black man started. His eyes grew wary behind the black-rimmed spectacles. “Yes, sir, that’s my name.”
“Your grandmother is Ludie Estes?”
Michael nodded.
“I want to talk to her,” Tate said. “Can you tell me how to get in touch with her?”
“Talk to her what about?” Michael said.
Tate shook his head. “Somethin’ that happened a long time back. You wouldn’t know about it.”
“You ain’t makin’ trouble for her?”
“No, son. No trouble.”
“I ain’t your son!” Michael frowned, his expression somewhere between fear and anger. “Don’t call me that.”
“I didn’t mean anything.”
Michael coiled the red and black cables over his shoulder, then slid them off and onto a pair of hooks in the back of the truck. “Tell me what you want to talk to her about. Then I’ll see if I want to tell you how to find her.”
Tate shook his head. “It’s about a man who died,” he said. “His name was Jim Bascom. It’s been a long time ago.”
Michael’s speculative brown eyes went from the huge Bible under Tate’s arm to the evangelist’s face. “You a preacher or somethin’?”
Tate nodded.
“Think I seen you before, preachin’ here on the Square.” Michael looked away. “Jim Bascom.”
“You wouldn’t know him.”
Michael laughed, showing white teeth riveted in places with silver fillings. “Preacher, you don’t know what you’re sayin’.” He looked around the Square. It was deserted in this early part of the afternoon. “Somethin’ bad happenin’,” he said.
Tate nodded again. “Somethin’ bad is. I’m tryin’ to find out what, and how to fight against it.”
“You be here later on this evenin’?”
“If you want me to.”
“What I’ll do, I’ll go see my granny. I’ll ask her if she wants to talk to you about Jim Bascom. If she don’t, she don’t, that’s all. If she wants to talk to you, I’ll be back here between five and five-thirty.”
“There’s a lady who might want to talk to her, too.”
“White woman?”
“She’s white.”
“You both be here, then. I’ll ask my granny. If I ain’t back by five-thirty, she don’t want to talk.”
“All right.”
Michael nodded, climbed into the driver’s seat of the wrecker, and started the engine. After he drove away, Tate walked south, down to the Big Apple grocery. It was a block off the Square, and it had a public telephone. He fished in his pocket for change, dropped it in the slot, and dialed the number of the school. Yes, they could call Miss Lewis on the speaker. He waited for two or three minutes before she came on the line.
Quickly, Tate told her about finding Michael, about the possibility of speaking to Ludie. “I’ll be there at five,” she said. “Alan’s still out sick.”
“Thank you,” he said.
She sounded genuinely surprised: “For what?”
“For goin’ through all this for him. For us.”
Silence on the line, then: “I guess I don’t have any real choice, do I? I’ll be there at five o’clock, Mr. Tate.”
He hung up, heard the coin drop. The Bible heavy under his arm, he turned to go back to the Square, to sit on the bench and read in the mild afternoon sun.
5
Sam Quarles didn’t need another headache. Ilona was on the phone long-distance every day now, wanting to know when he would let her come home; the prisoners in the jail adamantly refused to sleep on the top floor, preferring even to triple up in the other cells; telephone calls were still coming in demanding that he, Sheriff Sam Quarles of Frye County, Georgia, personally do something about that communist moon flying over the heads of good law-abiding Americans; and now Mrs. Woodley.
“He was on my porch last night,” the old lady said, her faded blue eyes snapping behind her spectacles. “Just ascratching and ascratching at my door.”
“Who was, Mrs. Woodley?” Quarles asked, rubbing his eyes.
“That little boy.”
“A little boy? Shoot, chase him away.”
“He’s dead.”
Quarles’s eyes snapped open. “Who’s dead?”
“The little Williams boy, from across the street.”
“Williams — oh, him. Well, what’s the trouble, ma’am?”
“Well, I don’t want him on my porch every night scratching at the screen door.”
The telephone rang. “Sheriff?” said Ort’s voice. “Somebody named Crane wants to talk to you — ”
“I’m busy. See if they can hold on or if they can’t, take a number.”
“All right.”
“I knew they shouldn’t ever have put that boy in the ground. And now he’s out on my porch at night.”
“Mrs. Woodley, I don’t know what you think you saw — ”
“The little Williams boy, plain as day, but his head was all sort of flopped down on his chest — ”
“ — but it wasn’t the Williams child, ma’am. He’s dead.�
�
The phone rang. “Sheriff, he says it can’t wait.”
“Excuse me, ma’am.” Into the receiver, Quarles said, “Sheriff here.”
“Reuben Crane, Sheriff. I been thinkin’ it over. Can you pay for me an airplane?”
“Reuben — ”
“He might ruin my screen doors,” Mrs. Woodley said.
“I figger we fly up in one of them Piper Cubs, and you take a thirty-aught-six and me with Pap’s twelve-gauge, and the next time that Sputnik comes over — ”
“It’s too high for that.”
“It certainly is not. He stood right on my porch and his fingernails went scratch, scratch, scratch, right over the screen — ”
“Yeah, but with a airplane, see — ”
“Forget it, Reuben, and stop drinkin’ that corn liquor.” Quarles hung up the phone.
“It could be a ghost,” Mrs. Woodley said.
Quarles looked at her, a tiny-boned, wrinkled, gray-haired woman, her hair done up in a bun, wearing a spotless dark blue dress. “Mrs. Woodley, I can’t do a thing in the world about ghosts.”
“My husband paid taxes in this county for upward of fifty years, Sam Quarles.”
“Yes, ma’am, but there’s nothin’ in the books that says I can do a blessed thing in the world about a ghost. There just ain’t, that’s all.”
“Well.” Mrs. Woodley’s mouth set in a firm thin line. “Then what do you think I ought to do the next time he comes?”
“Send him home, Mrs. Woodley. Probably it ain’t a ghost. Probably it’s just some boy tryin’ to scare you. Halloween’s comin’ up, you know.”
“Well. Maybe I’ll just bring that young man inside and give him a piece of my mind.”
The phone rang. Ort said, “Sorry, Sheriff, but I got the blamedest call on the line. Some woman with somethin’ about the cemetery.”
“The what?”
Mrs. Woodley stood up. “I’ll do that. I’ll teach that little A-rab to come around ascratching on my screen doors at night.”
Quarles nodded at her. “Put her on,” he said to Ort.
“Hello?” A woman’s weepy voice.
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