Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  I looked at the men on the porch. they were looking at me like I’d never seen before.

  “You want me to shoot your ass right here, or give you to Mr. Ness so he can drag you downtown and they can cut your balls off and put an Alabama necklace on you and light it ’n’ haul you up the schoolhouse flagpole, or what?”

  I never saw this coming. I started feeling all cold in my gut.

  “Mr. Eustis. All I know’s is what I told Mr. Ness. I ran into Miz Rio on the Indian Trail comin’ back from taking them preserves out to Hankin’s place for Miz Eustis. Miz Rio was all upset about something, but it wasn’t my place to ask. She told me to take her horse over to Mr. Ness’s stables and to tell them she didn’t want to ride any more. That’s what she said. That’s what I done, honest to God, Mr. Eustis. What you think I done?”

  “She ain’t come back, I.O. People’s upset. They liable to think all kinds of things, even though you’re only a boy, you’re a Negro boy and that’s reason enough sometimes.”

  “Boss, if I’da done something bad you think I’d take her horse back where she lives after I done it? I ain’t smart, but I’m smarter than that.”

  “Dammit, I.O., I ain’t never had one of my ni-groes lynched, and I don’t aim to start now. I’ll take care of you myself if you’re lyin’.”

  “I ain’t lyin’ Mr. Eustis.”

  “Why the hell would you take a white woman’s horse back with a story like that in the first place, I.O.?”

  “’Cause she told me to, Boss Eustis. That was what she told me to do! Have you ever known me to do anything without somebody telling me to?”

  The Boss looked at me a minute. “Normally, that would make me believe you, ’cause it’s true. That would be the clincher. But I got this feelin’, I.O., that you’re holding something back. You skatin’ on thin ice.”

  I sighed. “She gave me a dollar to do it,” I said.

  I fished around in my pocket and pulled out a big greenback dollar. “You know I ain’t never had more than a dime on me by this time o’ the month, Boss.”

  “Now we have come to the crux of the matter, ain’t we, I.O. If you’da said that and showed me that dollar first off, you’d still have it. Give it to JimBob—I’m finin’ you for causing all this grief ’cause you ain’t forthcoming with the Pure-D truth. You can think about all the ice cream cones you could be buying with it right this minute.”

  He turned to Ness. “There you have it,” he said. “She told him to do it and gave him a dollar, and that’s what he did.”

  Ness nodded his head toward the back of the house.

  “Where was your big friend Mr. Houlka while all this palaver was going on?”

  “He’d done done cut off toward town by then,” I said. “He said he had to go pick up that crowbar at the hardware store that we need if you want us to move that second outhouse like you said you wanted.”

  “They’s a new crowbar in the tool shed,” said JimBob.

  The Boss turned his head sharply toward JimBob. “Since when does a ex-con get to sign for my tools at the store?”

  “Well, hell, Boss,” said JimBob. “Him and I.O. does three-quarters of the work gets done around here, I put him on the list.”

  “Well be damn sure about everything on the account, you hear?” said Mr. Eustis.

  “Sure thing, Boss.”

  Mr. Eustis turned to me. “I.O., I want you to tell me one more time, and Mr. Ness here, too, exactly what happened from the time you two left here yesterday. Don’t add nothing, and don’t leave nothing out.”

  I told them again.

  “You heard him, Mr. Ness. I got no choice but to believe him. I’m sorry one of my boys was involved in this in any fashion, but he won’t do anything like that again, not for no amount of greenback dollars, he’ll do some thinking first. You can go to the sheriffs if you want to from here, but I’m satisfied. You can send the law out, or you can look somewhere else.”

  Ness looked at me, then cut his eyes toward the back, where Houlka was piling brushwood. Then he turned, and he and the others rode out the driveway.

  * * *

  I was shaking so hard all over I had to sit down on my porch. I’d never thought when I took that horse back it wouldn’t be the end of it. Me and Houlka’d gone over the story last night, and he’d given me the folding dollar. While I had been standing there this morning I remembered what had happened that night last month with Houlka, and what if it had happened to Miz Rio? Oh god, if something had happened to her.

  Houlka walked over to me.

  “Soon’s you quit shaking, we got us an outhouse to move,” he said.

  * * *

  I don’t know how he did it, but he did all his work, kept Miz Rio hidden out somewhere, and didn’t let anyone find her. Some nights he must not have slept more than an hour—he’d get away after dark and not come back till just before sunup.

  One night I thought I heard hooves outside. The next morning I got up early and went outside. There was a torn envelope stuck to Houlka’s porch post with a banana knife. I took it down.

  It was a letter postmarked Starkville, with no return address but the envelope addressed to Mr. Ness. It was short. It told him she was drying out and that she was okay, not to bother her, and that she was sending another letter to the sheriffs so no one would worry about her.

  Houlka came out while I was reading it. I handed it to him, indicating the banana knife in the post. I pointed to the hoofprints outside.

  Houlka was looking down. There was a package beside the post.

  It was full of little cellophane envelopes full of white powder.

  Houlka looked at them a minute. He sighed. Then he picked them up, went inside and threw them into his cook stove fire.

  * * *

  A week later, Miz Rio went back to the Ness place and picked up her stuff and moved to a boarding house. A couple of days after that, I was out front at just dark. The Riding Club came by, on the way back from a fishing trip. The others went on, but Mr. Ness turned into the drive. He rode up to where Houlka was leaning on the pruning bill he’d been using on the willow tree. He stopped in front of him. He just looked at him for a minute, then nodded, turned his horse around and rode off to catch back up with the others.

  * * *

  Two nights after that, around midnight, I hear Miz Rio sneaking into Houlka’s shack. After awhile there was such a rattling and shaking as you ever heard. I was sure it was gonna wake up everyone in the big house, but it didn’t.

  Just great. I thought. I’m gonna have to lay here all night and listen to them porking. My glands was already raging anyway.

  Then I heard steps outside my porch. My first thought was that it was Mr. Ness or some of them, or the Boss or Mr. JimBob, and Houlka’s on his way back to Parchman two months before his time’s up, on the charge of fornication.

  I went toward my door. It was a pitch-black night.

  There was a little knock.

  “Who’s there?”

  “I.O. It’s me. Emzee.”

  “Emzee?” My head was swimming.

  She came in the door. I could smell vanilla. “I been dying to tell you but I couldn’t till now. Mr. Houlka done had Miz Rio hid out at our place. That’s where she was all the time, before she moved to the boarding house. I don’t never want to see a body go through that again.”

  “Emzee,” I said. A moan came from next door.

  “I knew Miz Rio was coming out here tonight,” she said. “I thought you’d be lonely having to listen to all that.”

  Then she was on me like a snake and put her tongue in my mouth.

  X

  The Spunt County Glee Chorus sat on the front porch. It was ten in the morning and finally already hot.

  Boss Eustis leaned
forward in his chair, holding his fan still. “I got a piece of paper here signed by the sheriffs,” he said, taking it out of JimBob’s pocket and holding it out to Houlka. “It says here you can be out of the county for me on business for three days, starting tomorrow morning. I want you to go see a man about a dog.” He laughed at his own joke. “It’s down in the Delta way back in what little woods they is there. This here other piece of paper,” he said, giving him another one, “got his name and address on it. I want you and the boy,” he sniggered and the others joined in, nudging each other in the ribs, “to go down there and bring the dog back for me. I’m interested in a little sporting action this fall.”

  We left the front yard.

  I looked at the papers, the sheriffs’ forms. Then I looked at the address.

  “Oh, Mr. Houlka,” I said. “Boss Eustis done signed our death warrants!”

  “What you mean?”

  I read the address. “Mr. Pluto Dees. Rural Route 3, Box 293, Avernus, Mississippi.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Mr. Dees. Pluto Dees. Royal Kleagle of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “What you know about him?”

  “He’s the kleagle, that’s all any black person has to know.”

  “Who knows something about him?”

  “Mr. Blind Bill. He’s the one had so much trouble with him so long ago. He’s one of the few black men that ever laid eyes on him. But he won’t talk about it, I can tell you that.”

  “How does he know it was him, if he’s Mr. Blind Bill?”

  “He wasn’t blind before he met him,” I said.

  * * *

  Blind Bill was playing a quiet little tune to himself with his guitar when we came up his walk. He stopped.

  “I ain’t studying you, I.O. Lace! I been mad at you ever since you didn’t come back to read me that column. I had a hell of a time finding out how that game came out. Get the hell outta my yard!”

  “I’m sorry Mr. Blind Bill, I really couldn’t and I knew you’d pester somebody and get them to read to you.”

  “I still ain’t studying you or your friend there.”

  “Mr. Blind Bill, this is Mr. Houlka Lee.”

  “You the one I heard about. Let me feel that cougarskin.”

  Houlka stepped close. Bill reached up and felt the headskin and the shoulders. “I used to know a tame one,” said Blind Bill. “I used to play and he’d come up and lay down beside me. That was a long time ago. Thanks.”

  “Mr. Blind Bill. We’re in trouble,” I said. “We gonna have to go down to the Delta. Boss Eustis sending us to see Mr. Pluto.”

  Bill stiffened. He put down his guitar, reached up to his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We just gonna need all the help we can get. We supposed to go pick up a fighting dog from him.”

  “Oh, God,” said Blind Bill Orff. “I hoped never to hear that name again as long as I lived. I swore I’d kill the first person ever brought his name up.”

  “It ain’t us. Boss Eustis must think it’s some kind of joke.

  “You don’t joke using Mr. Dees,” he said. “Oh, lordy lordy. Boss knows he’ll probably just shoot you on sight, I.O. He’ll take his time with your white friend here for bringing a Negro to him. He don’t let black people live within thirty miles in any direction.”

  “They must not get much cotton picked down around there,” said Houlka.

  Blind Bill laughed. “You bet your ass on that, Mr. Lee. I never thought about it quite that way. Hee-hee-hee!”

  Then Bill sobered up. “Ain’t no laughing matter. Mr. Dees don’t care whether cotton get picked or not. People always dying. He owns just about every tombstone company in this state, and everybody buys from him, too.” Bill leaned back in his rocker, making short little jerky rocking motions.

  “There’s one person in the world got Mr. Dee’s respect. It’s the only way you gonna be alive after you get there. Mr. Dees had a cruel upbringing, not that I care, but one person treated him fair. That was his fourth grade teacher. She was as rough on him as everybody else, but she was fair, and she the one who set him on his way being a mortuary tycoon. He never forgot her, and when she was ready to retire, he sent her a golden rule, a real golden ruler, twenty-four carat, and a lot of money, but it was the ruler that meant the most to her. It paid her back for all those years teaching peckerwoods and rednecks, told her she’d touched someone’s life.

  “Trouble was, she was in a car wreck the next year and went sort of crazy in the head. Claimed she could tell things that was gonna happen.”

  “You mean she could see the future?” asked Houlka.

  “Naw. Naw. She had been a history teacher. Claimed she could see into the past, see what was gonna happen in the past.”

  Houlka didn’t laugh. I did. “You talking about that crazy old bat, Miz Commer?” I asked.

  “That’s it. That’s her new name.”

  “New? Bill, she done been retired and married twenty years. I been hearing about her since I was a baby.”

  “You go out where she is. You ask about that ruler. All she can say is no, then you’re dead men soon as you get down to the Delta.”

  “What about the dog?” asked Houlka.

  “Won’t be the same ones. Be their great-great-grandpups. Mean, real mean. I seen one tear a bobcat to pieces. Big old heads and jaws, almost no hind legs at all. Mr. Dees breeds ’em for dogfights and for sickin’ on black people for fun about twice a year. White people that cross him, too.”

  “Boss Eustis wants me to bring it back.”

  “Then you’re dead. You might kill it, but you ain’t gonna catch hold of it. Sorry I told you about Miz Coomer. I thought you just had to kill the dog.”

  “I got to try,” said Houlka.

  “Well, I suppose so. Go out to Two Gates Farm. I wish you luck. It’d be worth my eyes again see somebody get something over on that sombitch Mr. Dees.”

  “Thank you, Blind Bill,” I said.

  “How many times I got to tell you it’s Mister Blind Bill to you?”

  “Sorry.”

  As we left, he started singing, soft and slow, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

  * * *

  There were two gates, about fifty yards apart.

  One of them was covered with steer horns of all kinds, longhorn, shorthorn, goat horns, rams’s horns and deer antlers. The other one was made out of elephant tusks.

  “Mr. Coomer was a safari guide in Africa,” I said. What he did coming back to Mississippi and marrying a schoolteacher from Spunt County’s more than I can figure.”

  You could see the drive curve in from both gates, all overgrown, and beyond, the corner of a big house. Tall trees arced over the place.

  We opened the righthand fence gate with the elephant tusks all over it, stepped in and closed it behind us. I looked around. I musta been wrong, I couldn’t see the house from here. Houlka took a few steps, then he stopped. He looked behind us. We couldn’t have taken more than a few steps, but the road curved back behind us out of sight, and we couldn’t see the gate.

  “Wait,” said Houlka, looking back up the road. “Back up. Don’t turn around.” I backed up into the gate hard. The loose ivory rattled like elephants was fighting behind me.

  I reached around and opened the gate chain and backed out with Houlka. That’s when we saw the sign that had fallen down, saying, “USE OTHER GATE.” Houlka pounded it back onto its bent nail.

  We didn’t say anything, went to the antlered gate on the left, went in and got to the house in about a minute. I didn’t look the other way up the drive, I didn’t want to. Things was spooky enough already.

  * * *

  There was a man sitting on the wide verandah, drinking. He had on a white jacket and was
wearing a pith helmet. He wore a walrus mustache. “Hello,” he said, standing. “I’m Jock Coomer. And you?”

  “Houlka Lee.” They shook hands.

  “Admirable bow,” he said to Houlka. “Might I see it?” Houlka handed his bow over to him. He flexed it. “Forty-to-forty-five pound pull. Quite sufficient. I’ve seen pygmies drop a Kudo on the run with one that only pulls twenty.”

  “This is I.O.”

  “Oh, I know this chap.” He came down and shook hands with me. “One of Mr. Eustis’s boy-of-all-work, isn’t it? How are you?”

  “Not so good,” I said.

  “Oh, beastly. Can I do anything?”

  “We actually came to talk to Mrs. Coomer,” said Houlka.

  “That will be quite hard. This isn’t one of her good days. I believe she’s finally gotten to sleep.” There was a noise in the back of the house.

  “I could be wrong, of course. Cybil?” he called. “Cybil? We have company.”

  The screen door opened. I wasn’t ready for what I saw. She was maybe sixty years old, had on an old wrap. Her hair looked like a brush heap a crazy man piled. Her eyes were wild and round—the bottoms showed like that white woman’s at the house I got drunk at that night. She was holding her arms over her head, looking off into the porch ceiling.

  “These men wish to talk to you, darling. I’ll just find some little chore to do.”

  “You might nail your gate sign back up,” said Houlka.