Seeing Red

by Kathryn Erskine

I squirmed on the inside but cleared my throat like Clint Eastwood. “I had some business to take care of.”

  Beau tilted his head like he was sloshing all his brains to one side. “Business?”

  “With Darrell and his gang – I mean, his buddies.”

  Beau’s mouth fell open like the hinge busted. “Darrell? Darrell Dunlop?”

  “Well, of course, Darrell Dunlop. What other Darrell is there?”

  Beau reached a hand up to tug his hair. “Darrell and his buddies was the ones who threw rocks at Miss Georgia’s house last winter, even broke two of her windows.”

  Oh, yeah. I’d forgotten about that. It was hard to keep up with everything Darrell did.

  “Just because Miss Georgia’s brown,” Beau said.

  “You mean black.”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t know why people say that because I ain’t seen anyone with black skin. There’s dark brown and medium brown, like Miss Georgia, and light brown and even lighter brown, and then there’s this darkish tan colour and—”

  “Okay, Beau. I get it. Anyway, sometimes Darrell can be useful.”

  “Yeah?” Beau stopped tugging his hair and looked at me like a little kid. “How?”

  “Never mind. We’d best be getting home, huh?”

  I kicked every stick and stone out of my path as I headed back. I was mad for a lot of reasons. I was mad at Beau for chasing me down at Kenny’s. And I didn’t like the way Glen seemed to have it in for Thomas. What had Thomas done except come by to play a little pool? But I was also mad at Thomas. It was like the first day I met him, when I realized he understood more about the store than I did because he could read, even though it was my store. Now did he understand more about Kenny’s, about Darrell’s gang, than I did, even though this was my own town?

  I felt bad for punching Thomas, but I didn’t like him saying what Daddy would think of me, either. What I hated most was that when I thought about what Thomas said, I saw Daddy’s face, the hurt-disappointed face that he hardly ever gave me because when he did I felt so bad I swore I’d never let him show it to me again. It only happened a few times in my whole entire life. But it was happening now. So I started getting mad at Darrell for talking me into going to a place that would make me see Daddy’s face that way. And on top of everything, he never even talked to his gang about how to destroy things just enough that no one would buy our place, so we could stay right here in Stony Gap.

  When I got home, that stupid For Sale sign was staring me in the face like it had won. I was so mad I kicked that dang sign and it tilted just a little, but enough to give me an idea. I decided to pull it clear out of the ground. Maybe next time old Poindexter drove by in his hot red Mustang he wouldn’t feel so hot.

  But it was harder than I thought. I had to go into the shop and get a shovel. Once I dug around it, though, the soil being pretty loose since Mr Harrison had put it in recently, I hauled it out of the earth and dragged that thing behind the shop. I dug a hole back there, which was also hard work, except the hole didn’t have to be very deep because I laid the sign down flat. I said a few words over it that weren’t exactly a prayer.

  Who would know that it could actually feel good to bury something?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Miss Georgia

  I must’ve been tired from my work of burying that sign because I slept later than usual. I woke up and Mama was on the phone to Mr Harrison, asking him for another For Sale sign. Shoot.

  I walked through the kitchen without stopping.

  “Good morning, Red,” Mama said. “I don’t suppose you know anything about—”

  “No, ma’am,” I said as I scurried out the door. I figured if I didn’t hear the whole question, then saying no wasn’t really a lie. Besides, I didn’t much feel like talking to Mama lately. All she wanted to do was explain why moving to Ohio was such a good idea. “You have cousins there,” she’d said, except none of them were my age, and the one who was closest was even more annoying than J. “You have two uncles there who care about you very much,” as if two uncles added up to one daddy. She wouldn’t listen to any of my reasons why we should stay, like how much Daddy loved this place and how our family heritage was here in Virginia. She’d put her hands on her hips and said, “Red, half of your ancestors come from Ohio.” But the ancestor I was named for came from right here. And so did Daddy. Everything the Porters stood for came from right here. Nothing Mama said about Ohio could make me want to leave this place. Ever.

  I wandered over to the shop, where I heard Beau talking, and looked inside.

  “…a new alternator. It’ll cost a couple hundred dollars, Miss Georgia, ma’am.”

  “I don’t have no two hundred dollars, Beau.” Miss Georgia was ricketier than her old car. I thought she might crumble on the spot. She always wore a navy blue sweater over her dress, even when it was hot out. Lately she was using a cane.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Beau said. “I’m afraid even one from a junkyard will cost at least a hundred by the time it’s pulled out and brought to the shop.”

  “Don’t have no one hundred dollars, neither. Not two hundred, not one hundred.”

  Poor Beau looked about to cry. He said he’d do the work for free, but just getting the part to the shop would cost more than Miss Georgia could pay. Daddy always did the work for Miss Georgia for free. Sometimes he’d pay for the parts, too, or at least most of it. But we couldn’t afford a hundred dollars any more than Miss Georgia could. Not now. Not with Mama thinking there was no way we could keep our businesses running. I backed away from the door and stood on the side of the shop in the shadows.

  Miss Georgia heaved a big sigh. “I need my car, Beau. I need my car.”

  Miss Georgia always said things twice, probably on account of her coming up back when folks didn’t listen to what a black person said. Not the first time, anyway. Maybe by the second time they might. And if they hadn’t by then, there wasn’t any use wasting her breath for a third time.

  She sighed and walked slowly out of the shop. I stayed in the shadows because it felt too bad to see her pain. Beau walked out of the shop looking as sad as she did, maybe sadder.

  I stared at the Rambler sitting inside. There had to be something we could do. Daddy said that Rambler was her freedom, even though she hardly ever drove it. He never would’ve let Miss Georgia walk away all hopeless like that. He said sometimes hope is the only thing that keeps us going.

  It was all that kept Daddy going as church deacon, trying to get Miss Georgia invited to our church. Daddy said the name itself – Open Doors Baptist Church – kind of begged to let everyone in, but the other deacons all agreed with Reverend Benson. I heard them talking after Easter service. “It’s time to do what’s right,” Daddy said. “In fact, it’s past time.”

  Reverend Benson had drawn himself up to his full six foot three and looked down on Daddy like he was just a little puppy who didn’t understand the world. “Now, Frank, you got to understand that they’re happier with their own kind and, besides, they got their own church to go to.”

  “Her own church is thirty-five miles away,” Daddy shot right back, “and I think she’d be the one to say where she’s comfortable, don’t you?”

  Mr Harrison, Sheriff Scott, and the other deacons all looked away like they didn’t want to be associated with Daddy.

  “Oh!” said Reverend Benson, like he’d just thought of something. “I meant to ask you all about paying for new music for the choir. My wife is bound and determined to do Handel’s Messiah, and she says, given the skill of this choir, they need to start practising now.”

  Daddy looked around at each one of the men, but they jumped right into the church-music conversation like it was as exciting as talking about the baseball players’ strike and what that might do to the World Series.

  Except for the sheriff, who was chewing on a toothpick and still staring into the distance. When Daddy finally caught his eye, Sheriff Scott made the tiniest bit of a grimace, lifted one sh
oulder into a shrug, pursed his lips around that toothpick, and gave the slow sucking sound he made when he wasn’t happy about something. Darrell called it the Kiss of Death. I guess it was, since that’s what happened to Daddy’s idea for Miss Georgia.

  I lay down on the creeper that Daddy used to roll under cars before he got the hydraulic jack, putting my feet off the edge onto the floor so I could roll myself back and forth. It felt kind of like being on a porch swing. I used to roll on the creeper a lot, helping him fix cars. He’d say, “Get me a filter for this F-250, would you, Boy Wonder?” Or, “Boy Wonder, what’s wrong with this here drive train?” This time I asked him, “So what’s wrong with Miss Georgia’s car? Come on, I know you want to help her. You said she was like a grandmother to you.” And to me, too, I thought.

  Me and Thomas used to go over to Miss Georgia’s all summer long. She froze Kool-Aid in ice-cube trays for us. When I was little she’d wrap the ice cube in a paper napkin so I could hold it and suck on it. The first time she gave me a whole ice cube to put in my mouth I thought I would die. It stuck to my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I didn’t want to open my mouth because I might rip the skin off. I didn’t know how you would stop bleeding in your mouth. Band-Aids wouldn’t stay stuck. I tried to keep my mouth shut and breathe through my nose while I waited for the ice cube to melt. The whole time, Miss Georgia was talking away and I was acting polite, nodding and trying hard not to look like a chipmunk, even though Thomas was laughing, so it was almost impossible not to laugh myself. I never knew it was so much work to melt an ice cube. Water came out of my eyes faster than it came off the ice cube. That made Miss Georgia stop and look at me hard. “You ain’t crying, is you?” I shook my head because I still couldn’t talk. “Speak up, Red.” It was like being at the dentist when his hand is in your mouth and he wants you to tell him all about school. Then she said, “Cat got your tongue?” “No, ma’am,” I finally managed to sputter, “ice coog got it.” She and Thomas laughed so hard they couldn’t talk.

  Then I heard it. Daddy’s voice. “Brushes.”

  It wasn’t like you see in the movies. He wasn’t standing there in the shop looking at me and talking like he was alive. I just heard his voice.

  “Brushes?” I said it out loud and, shoot, that chased his voice away. Brushes? What kind of an answer was that? I thought about toothbrushes and hairbrushes and bottlebrushes, but I still didn’t see how that could help me fix Miss Georgia’s car.

  Maybe I heard wrong. Maybe it wasn’t “brushes”. Rushes? Crushes? Those didn’t sound right, either. I shook my head. What did brushes have to do with Miss Georgia and her Rambler and the bum alternator – hey!

  I jumped up so fast the creeper wheeled across the shop and crashed into the door. I kicked it out of the way and ran over to the What-U-Want and yelled, “Brushes!”

  Beau looked at me as confused as I must have looked when Daddy first told me.

  “Miss Georgia’s car! Brushes!”

  Beau tilted his head and squinted at me. “You want I should wash her car, Red?”

  “No, I mean alternator brushes!”

  Beau’s grin crawled across his face like a possum crossing the road. “That’s why your daddy called you the Boy Wonder.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. “Actually, Daddy’s the one who told me.”

  He nodded like that made sense.

  We both ran over to the shop, found the page in the American Motors parts book that had alternator brushes and how much they cost, and grinned at each other.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Freedom’s Folly

  I hightailed it all the way to Miss Georgia’s. She was just climbing the steps to her porch, jerking herself up there like the hydraulic lift when it’s not working right.

  “Hey, Miss Georgia!” I caught my breath while she turned herself around. “You got ninety-five cents?” Then I winked.

  She leaned on the porch rail, raised one eyebrow, and smiled, while I explained that just replacing a tiny part of the alternator, the brushes, would fix the problem. “You is your daddy’s boy, Red, yes, you is. Just like him.”

  I grinned a big one.

  “You have a seat while I get you some of your favourite ice cream, all right?”

  I sat down on the top step of Miss Georgia’s front porch and started picking away at the peeling paint like I always did. And I ran my finger over the IMF, for “Impossible Missions Force”, that me and Thomas had carved into her porch railing years before. She wasn’t happy about it at first, but when we told her it was so she’d always have protection from us, Barney and Willy, the Mission: Impossible team, she didn’t seem to mind as much. It felt like old times. Except that everything was different. No Daddy. No Thomas. No home, if Mama got her way.

  Miss Georgia’s screen door creaked open, and she appeared with my bowl in one hand and her iced tea in the other. I jumped up to get the bowl from her because her hand was shaking the way some old people’s do.

  I took a bite of the mint chocolate chip ice cream and felt it go down the inside of my chest, the chill feeling like the creek running over hot swollen feet. I sat back down on the top step and leaned against the porch railing.

  Miss Georgia lowered herself into her green metal glider chair and squeaked slowly backwards and forwards. I remembered that sound from the time I was a little kid. Miss Georgia used to babysit me – and J, once he came along. We’d play on the porch and smell the sausages and eggs she’d fry up in the kitchen. I always liked the way she made breakfast for supper. More than once after supper I’d fallen asleep right there on the porch, listening to the squeaking of the glider and sometimes Miss Georgia talking to her dead husband, James, when she thought I was already asleep.

  I wasn’t sitting on her porch long before I blurted out what was on my mind. “Mama’s trying to sell our place and some stupid lawyer from Richmond is trying to buy it –” I put on a stuck-up voice – “for his cli-ent.”

  The squeak of the glider stopped. “I like me some of them white lawyers from Richmond.”

  “What?”

  “Uh-huh, even got one of their photographs up on my wall. You’ve seen it.”

  She was right. I’d seen it, but I’d never known who that guy was next to Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus. “He’s a lawyer?”

  “Uh-huh, Mr Howard Carwile. He got my land back for me.”

  “What land?”

  “The land you sittin’ on right now.”

  “What are you talking about, Miss Georgia?”

  She swept her hand that wasn’t holding the iced tea out towards the vegetable garden beyond her porch. “I’m talkin’ about this land. This house. This porch. This was my grandaddy’s homeplace, but after his church burned down and he died, my grandmother took my daddy and the other kids and moved away. Still, it was our land. Should’ve been our land. When my daddy moved us back and rebuilt the house, we weren’t here very long before the sheriff came and told us to get on out because the land wasn’t ours no more.”

  “That wasn’t right.”

  “Lot of things happened that weren’t right, Red, you know that. And seeing as how the sheriff back then was part of the Ku Klux Klan…” She shook her head. “So we moved way on out of here, clear to Atlanta, Georgia. I missed this place, though, I always did.” She smiled. “Then I met James, and Atlanta didn’t seem so bad.”

  I decided to make my point about how Mama shouldn’t think this place was so bad, either, since it was where she moved when she married Daddy. “Georgia was pretty good to you, wasn’t it? I mean, it even made you a beauty queen.”

  She stared at me like I hadn’t washed in two weeks. “How do you figure that?”

  “Well,” I said, starting to feel my face getting pink, “before you become Miss America, you have to be Miss Some-State-or-Other, like Miss Virginia. So if you’re Miss Georgia, weren’t you the beauty queen of Georgia?”

  She laughed so hard that every time she started talking she busted out laughin
g again. All I could make out was “imagine,” and “black woman,” and “oh, child!”

  Now my face was all the way red, and I wished I’d just kept my mouth shut. “Well, shoot, Miss Georgia, it’s not like your name is Georgia. It’s Fannie Mae Freeman Jones. I know because I heard my daddy say it lots of times. And you lived in Georgia when you were beauty-queen age, so what was I supposed to think?”

  She wiped her eyes and finally quit laughing. “I like your thinkin’, Red, I really do. But I wasn’t no beauty queen.”

  “Then how come you’re called Miss Georgia?”

  “My daddy’s name was George, and I followed him around and copied whatever he did from the time I was a toddler. Didn’t matter how tough or dirty the task was, I wanted to be right in there with him. Guess I was a tomboy, closest thing to a son he had, what with three daughters. So my nickname became Georgia, after my daddy, George. Nobody ever used my real name. I was always Georgia. Your mama and daddy brought you up right, which is why you call me Miss Georgia and ma’am.” She gave a little laugh. “No, sir, Georgia wouldn’t a seen fit to make me no beauty queen.”

  “Atlanta’s a big city, though. Wasn’t it better in a big city instead of the country?” I’d seen pictures on the news of big cities like Washington, DC, and there were a lot of black people there with jobs and houses and everything. I knew Thomas’s parents both worked and they had their own house.

  “You mean, better for my kind?”

  I kind of shrank down into the porch, because that was exactly what I meant but I hadn’t wanted to come right out and say it.

  Her voice went all grumbly, and I knew what that meant. She had stuff she wanted to say, but she figured people weren’t going to listen, so she kind of mumbled it. But she said it loud enough for you to hear in case you might be inclined. “Big cities. Huh. Big don’t mean smarter, and big don’t mean better. Big only means there’s more of it.”

  I tried to turn the subject back to Mama and the move. “But you stayed in Atlanta for a long time.”