When Stretch did walk out that night, gray-faced as he’d ever been, they all nodded to him in a manner that belied their optimism. In their book, he’d passed some sort of test.
Willy was outside smoking. He’d lifted the keys to the Packard. “Need a ride home?” he asked Stretch.
ROBA QUESSENBERRY STOOD at the front window of his restaurant, his fat arms crossed and his hands fisted. He worked his jaw and ground his teeth on a toothpick. Spat the toothpick upon his own floor, where it lay next to the others he’d chewed. “Goddamned niggers,” he said. “Goddamn pinko commies.”
Outside the window, twenty picketers walked a calm line. Their signs read Boycott Smalley’s and Serve All or Serve None. Among those walking the line were Lizzie and Harold Wells, along with Ledford, Rachel, and Mary. They cut a small circle on the hot pavement, and they were joined by J. Carl Mitchum, his wife, and Effie. Ten members, white and black alike, of the Civic Interest Progressives also walked in stride, as did Bob Staples, their counsel in the injunction brought by Smalley’s to block such picketing. Don Staples brought up the rear. He watched his brother, proud that he’d come back to law from politics.
All were relatively cheerful. The sun beat their shoulders and squinted their eyes. Passersby ignored them for the most part, and the newspaper had again failed to send a reporter. But inside, Quessenberry’s face told them all they needed to know.
Orb sat cross-legged, his back against a concrete planter from which a sapling waved in the wind, half dead. He’d brought two cigar boxes with him, each filled with marbles fresh off the rollers. He turned one between two fingers. Sunlight exposed its inner workings, layers of red and orange and blue. It was an “end-of-days” marble, named for the glass that made it—leftovers from the factory floor at day’s end. These were his father’s new favorite to concoct, and Orb could see why. He stared at the thousands of flecks inside the glass. He saw in its swirl a hurricane. A butterfly. The teeth of a rabid dog. It seemed to Orb that he could see everything inside that marble.
He got up to show it to his father. On his way, the sole of his sneaker snagged on a wad of gum and he fell to his knees. Blood split the skin’s surface quick. Orb sat and stared at it, the welling pools, the running streams. Then he turned to look at what had tripped him. It was off-white, Wrigley’s, maybe Beeman’s, and in it was the pattern of his sneaker sole.
No one noticed Orb at first. They had their eyes on Don Staples, who, as he was known to do, had jumped up on his milk crate and started a “reinvigoration ceremony,” as he called it. The purpose was to remind picketers of their aim. He wore an old straw hat and had sweated through his shirt at the armpits. He said to them, “And so you can steal glances at Huntington’s version of Bull Connor over there,” he pointed to Quessenberry’s fat red face behind the glass, “but don’t forget that confrontation must always remain nonviolent. No matter how hot the sun, how long the hour, we must—” He’d spotted Orb, the bloody knee. He hopped down from his perch and pointed. “This boy needs attention,” he said.
Harold got to him first. He loved little Orb, had since the day they brought him home from the hospital, so small and fragile. Harold kneeled, his hands catching the fast drips of blood. “What happened?” he asked the boy, though he knew better than to expect an answer to a question.
Orb pointed behind him to the gum. “Trilobite,” he said.
Harold looked at the gum. The lines left by the sneaker sole did resemble a fossil. Sometimes he thought he could understand the way Orb’s brain worked.
Ledford bent next to Harold. “Damn if it isn’t comin faster this time than last,” he said. They all knew he was a bleeder. Had found out the hard way.
Harold stripped off his T-shirt and wrapped it tight around Orb’s knee.
“I believe we might need some tape,” Ledford said.
The picketers had gathered in a horseshoe behind him. “Maybe we should phone an ambulance Loyal,” Rachel said. “Last time we couldn’t get it stopped.” She winked to her boy, who stared past her at something no one else could see.
“I’ll get tape,” Harold said. “And I’ll get on the phone.” He jumped to his feet and ran for the front doors of Smalley’s Cafeteria.
Roba Quessenberry saw him coming, shirtless and streaked in sweat. He picked up his cattle prod on the way to the door.
Mary watched what was happening. “Daddy,” she said.
Ledford gripped the shirt tight on the boy’s bony knee. The thin cotton was turning white to red in a hurry. He looked over his shoulder at Mary, then at Harold, who’d made it to the cafeteria door. “Hold this,” Ledford told Rachel, and she did so.
The pavement radiated heat through her shoes as she tended to her boy. She hummed and applied pressure. She hoped to God that behind her Ledford would heed Don Staples’ words.
All the picketers stared at the entrance to Smalley’s. There was a feeling that something was about to happen there. Don Staples began to holler stop when the door flung open, nearly hitting Harold in the face. Quessenberry exploded forth and maneuvered his cattle prod fast and practiced, its twin electrodes finding their target in the center of Harold’s wide chest. There was a quiet, ugly sound, and Harold took two clumsy steps back and dropped to the pavement.
Mary rolled film, feet planted, breath caught in her throat.
Ledford was upon Quessenberry before the man could look up from his victim. He took the prod in both hands and shoved it lengthwise under Quessenberry’s jawbone. Now they both clung to the weapon, and Ledford used their shared inertia to swing the man against the doorjamb of his own establishment. He stuck him there and pressed the prod hard against all that fat, the Adam’s apple giving way beneath it.
It was like a dance for Ledford, one he’d choreographed through repetition twenty years prior in boot camp, one he’d mastered.
There were some steps a man never forgets.
He watched the eyes bug, listened to the esophagus panic and click. “You son of a bitch,” Ledford said. “I ain’t a preacher. I don’t have to turn the other cheek.”
Behind him, Don Staples was saying, “Hey now, hey hey. Ease off there son.” He patted Ledford’s shoulder gingerly.
Ledford stepped back and Quessenberry dropped to the concrete like the closing bellows of an accordion. He whistled and wheezed as the instrument might, split at the seams, lying in a heap.
His wife came out screaming. She looked down at her husband, then at Ledford and those behind him. “You nigger lovers,” she shouted. “Goddamn every one of you!” Her gray hair had come out of its bun in wild wisps, a spiderweb torn by the wind.
Below her, Quessenberry was beginning to move. He felt at his neck as if worried it had disappeared.
Ledford spat on the ground at their feet. He turned and saw the distraught faces of Don Staples and the CIP youngsters. Lizzie was nearly in tears, tending to Harold on the hot concrete. J. Carl Mitchum knelt beside her. His expression was unlike the rest. He nodded to Ledford. Had the cattle prod been in J. Carl’s hands, he likely would have killed Roba Quessenberry.
“I’m fine,” Harold was saying, pushing away the worried hands of his mother and getting to his feet.
They checked the prod marks on his chest. Ledford ran to his own boy.
“It stopped,” Rachel said. “Can you believe it? He clotted up this time.” She had gathered Orb in her arms. He stared at the end-of-days marble.
“I’m calling the police!” Mrs. Quessenberry yelled, pulling her husband to his feet.
Bob Staples looked around. A couple had stopped to gawk on Fifth Avenue. A teenager had laid down his bicycle to watch. “Go on and do it,” Bob said. “Got witnesses aplenty that saw your husband assault an unarmed man.”
Quessenberry slipped from his wife’s grip and dropped to the concrete again, this time on a sore tailbone. He made a whimpering sound, and his wife squawked, pulled helplessly at the neck of his shirt, then slapped him across the head.
L
edford felt alive. His blood coursed like it had as a younger man. Then he looked to his wife and youngest child. He began to realize how close he’d come to killing another man. The life in his blood shut down. He nearly vomited. The whir of Mary’s camera ran loud in his ears.
When her father turned to her, his face framed in a close-up through the viewfinder, Mary saw for the first time the desperation he possessed.
He said, “Shut it off.”
She did so.
He stepped closer to her and whispered, “I never want to see that film.” He helped Orb to his feet. The boy pointed to the gum. “Trilobite,” he said.
“That’s right Orb,” Ledford told him. He hugged him close. The boy’s arms dangled loose at his side, an end-of-days marble in each hand.
IN THE WOODS, Wimpy stood at the mouth of a small cave and pointed inside. The children clustered around him, squinting for a better look. “See there,” Wimpy said. “See them eyeballs?” The children wore searching looks. “Don’t nobody cough now. If you cough, it’ll come after you.”
A small girl, six years old, grabbed the hand of an older boy standing next to her. It was Hambone Maynard. He shot her a mean look and yanked loose. “Don’t you know he’s pullin your leg?” Hambone had chocolate around his mouth and a slingshot in his back pocket. His daddy had told him he’d tan his hide if he went to the nigger commune again.
“Am I pullin your leg? You sure about that?” Wimpy grinned at the boy.
“Sure as shit stinks,” Hambone answered.
Wimpy’s grin went straight. “You watch your mouth in front of these girls,” he said.
Orb walked toward the mouth of the cave. The ground cover was wet under his sneakers, and sunlight was scarce through the canopy above.
“Orb, I’d stop right there if I was you.” Wimpy swatted a mosquito on his neck. He watched the boy stop, then start walking again. Orb was only five paces from the cave mouth when Wimpy decided to cough.
At this, there arose a furious growl and the sound of shale kicking as some beast erupted from its rocky perch inside.
The children, with the exception of Orb, screamed like banshees and turned tail. Hambone Maynard ran headlong into a hickory tree.
The thing emerged fully from the cave, roaring. It had an oval-shaped open mouth, canine teeth like bleached daggers, jutting wide. A pink tongue and flared nostrils, black fur that carried a sheen. It was hunched, with dead eyes and empty, swinging arms. Its long nails drug the ground, lifeless.
Wimpy watched the children scatter and scream. He laughed so hard he bent double. Hambone stood at the base of the hickory tree and shook his head. He took to running again, this time with a left-bound tilt, fingers grabbing air. His balance was askew. Top-heavy and leaning hard, he fell again, and this sent Wimpy’s laughter to new heights.
Orb stared at the thing before him. He smiled. “Hey Uncle Dimp,” he said.
Dimple, on all fours, raised his head so that the bear’s face looked skyward. He regarded Orb. It was odd to see a smile on his face. Rare. Even rarer to be greeted, called by name. “Boy,” Dimple said, “if that’s what it takes to make you smile, I reckon I’ve got a full-time job on my hands.”
Orb stepped to him and ran his fingertips over the bear’s eyeballs. They stared back at him, black in the middle, brown at the edges. Like the eyes of his dogs, he thought. He wondered if his daddy could make marbles look like these.
Dimple stood. “Whew,” he said. “Hotter’n blue blazes under that thing.” He pulled the pelt off, tucked the bear’s head, and began rolling up the hide. “Tell you what, though, it’s cool in that cave.”
Orb watched him fold in the claws and tuck the flat arms carefully. He got the pelt to the size of a bedroll and shoved it under his arm. “Let’s go,” he said. “Your mother’ll be waitin on you.”
Wimpy had gone off down the hill after the children. “It ain’t real,” he hollered to them. “Just a mind trick.”
Friday Summer mornings had become Wimpy’s time to school whatever children were around. It had started with just him and Orb, woods-walking. Wimpy had shown the boy how to track. Orb liked to scan the ground for deer tracks especially. He’d plant two fingers beside the imprint and press. Wimpy always watched and said one of three things: big one, little one, or medium one. He’d pointed out which berries could be eaten, which could not. They’d pulled wild onions and dug ginseng. They’d picked purple horsemint and Wimpy had tied its leaves and flowers to the Ledford porch rafters, where Orb liked to sit and watch them curl and flutter in the wind, bunched husks wrapped with twine. When the time came, Wimpy would cut them down and grind them up with his old mortar and pestle. From this, he’d make tea.
Rachel stood behind the house, watching the children run from the woods. Their faces were stuck in expressions of horror. The Maynard boy cupped his head where it swelled.
Rachel took the last clothespin from its clench between her teeth. She hung the bedsheet’s corner and watched the line sag. There was no sign of Orb from the woods.
Inside, she made him a bologna sandwich and thought about the Bonecutter brothers. Their insistence on frightening the children both tickled and irritated her.
She heard a twig snap. Through the dirty kitchen window, she saw Orb’s white knee bandage bobbing through the trees. He emerged and ran for the wash on the line. Rachel knocked hard on the window and he stopped. She shook her finger at him. He’d intended to use the bedsheet as canvas, his dirty fingers as paint.
While he ate his sandwich, Rachel went to the pantry and taped two Band-Aids to the inside cover of Doctor Dan the Bandage Man, the only book Orb would try to read, and only if two fresh Band-Aids awaited him each time. The book had come with two originally, and Orb believed it should be eternally replenished so that he might be kept in Band-Aids at all times, anticipating his next bleeder.
He’d never been able to see letters and words like everybody else. They did not go together and form sounds of any meaning. For Orb, reading was not to be.
Still, his mother tried. “Eat your crust,” she said. “It’s got vitamins in it.”
He bit and tore and chewed. She pulled her chair next to his at the table and patted her lap. Orb climbed up. He’d not follow such a command from any other.
Her arms enclosed him as she held the book open before them, one-handed at the spine, like a hymnal. With her free hand, she pointed to the first word.
“Dan,” Orb said. Above the type, four boys had their six-shooters drawn. One was on his back.
Rachel pointed to the next word. “Fell down,” Orb said. “No Orb. Look at the word.” She tapped her finger under it—is. Orb sat and stared. Rachel told him to sound it out. This command had never made sense to him. “Is,” Rachel said.
“Is a busy fellow.” Orb spat the words out from memory. “He is always on the go but one day in a big backyard cowboy fight he fell and—”
“You’re not sounding them out.”
“You read it.” He swung his feet forward and back, kicking Rachel in the shins.
She resituated to avoid the blows, sighed, and gave up. “He fell and scratched his finger on his make-believe gun,” she read. She turned the page. “And what do you think the big cowboy did?” She waited for Orb to answer.
He’d gone still. Always, when read to, his tendons and muscles would relax, and Orb was finally still. “He cried,” Orb said.
“Right,” Rachel said. She went on reading. “Boo hoo hoo—”
“Why does he cry?” Orb stared at Dan’s sad face, his hand to his leaking eye, his mouth open in a wail.
“Because he hurt himself.” They’d had this exchange a hundred times.
“But why?”
“Because little boys and girls cry when they hurt themselves.”
Orb had never cried. Not since a newborn, on the night he came home from the hospital.
Rachel read onward, and Orb sat, his little fingers interlocked across his belly. His tailbone pres
sed into her thigh. His head was to her breast-bone. When she took a breath, she smelled dried sweat in his hair.
Rachel never contemplated the words she read aloud. Not anymore. While reading to Orb, she was able to ponder the laundry and the weather and the payroll balance. She planned her days and organized her thoughts while some other part of her brain took care of sighting and spouting words. On the last page, she read, “And he shook Dan’s hand. ‘I have a new name for you. We’ll call you Doctor Dan, the Bandage Man.’ And they do so to this day.” Rachel closed the book and set it on the table. She said, “So we will too.” She picked up a piece of breadcrust and ate it. With her other hand, she stroked the patch of skin behind Orb’s ear. “Sweet boy?” she said. “You going to finish your crust?”
There was no answer.
Rachel took Orb by the shoulders and turned him to face her. His body complied, but not his head. The eyes were wide and glazed over. Gaze fixed on the back of the stovetop—the mantel clock.
“Orb!” Rachel said. She snapped her fingers and pinched the end of his nose. She waved her hand in front of his face. “Orb!” she shouted.
He came out of it.
This happened once in a while. They called them his “episodes.”
“I don’t feel good,” Orb said. “I’m tired.”
“All right sweet boy,” she said. She pulled him to her and rocked. Rachel had always loved the moments just after an episode. They were the rare spaces in time where he would let her hold him.
She tucked him in bed and pulled down the window shade. He breathed through his mouth, dead asleep in seconds. The sun cut through the space between shade and sill. It illuminated his chin, his little mouth. The too-big front teeth stuck out like Chiclets, crooked and white. Rachel watched him sleep for a moment before pulling the door shut.
Downstairs, she washed and dried Orb’s plate and poured herself a whiskey. She drank it fast, rinsed the coffee mug, and stuck it back in the cabinet. The whiskey pint she tucked below the sink in a basket, under the Ajax can. There was a slow drip from the sink trap. Rachel leaned in for a closer look. Two Band-Aids wrapped around the pipe at the spot where the water drops sagged and fell. She smiled. Thought of Orb’s brain, the way it worked to right wrongs. She left the Band-Aids where they were and stood back up.
Glenn Taylor Page 19