by Pete Dexter
He moved behind her while she looked at his clothes, and when he spoke, it was close to her ear. “This here is what you ’posed to maid,” he said.
She looked around the room, wondering what was in his head.
“You got to keep it right,” he said.
She nodded her head, more afraid of him inside than outside. He seemed bigger here in the room. “I ain’t brought no broom,” she said.
“My, my,” he said, “then what good is you to me?”
The girl looked at the ceiling. The slats had warped, and she could see pieces of blue sky where the tar paper had torn. She did not think the man had lived here long. She took a step farther in, and the floor creaked and seemed to move.
“You like it here?” he said. He was still behind her, and he was still holding the strap.
“No sir.”
She saw that she’d given him the wrong answer. “Your momma said you was a smarty,” he said. He took her arm then—the first time he’d touched her—just above the elbow. He twisted it, and she bent the way he twisted. He slapped at her legs with the strap, and she yelled.
She turned her head to the side and saw him looking at her. She was afraid he would take her clothes off now, but it wasn’t what he wanted. He brought the strap across her legs again, and then her bottom.
And she yelled for real, to be with someone who liked to hurt her. He stopped, still holding her arm. The blood buzzed in her head and her vision blurred. The back of her legs felt burned. She tried to be good to him. “Oh, please,” she said.
He seemed to like that, but he came down with the strap again anyway. She held the yell inside this time, hoping it would make him stop. Her eyes began to tear. And he hit her again, lower, across the back of the knees. Her legs buckled, and she cried out without meaning to.
She looked at him one more time and saw no mercy. “Yell all you care to,” he said, “ain’t nobody gone come in this house ’less I tell them they invited.”
He held the strap where she could see it. “This is my house,” he said. “I bought it.”
And those words were still as real as the strap when a figure appeared in the door. A woman twice as big as Rosie Sayers’s mother walked into Alvin Crooms’s house. He heard the noise behind him and spun to see who it was.
The girl lost her balance and fell. The woman stepped across the room, and the floorboards sagged under her feet. Alvin Crooms’s posture changed, but he stood his ground. “A person might get cut comin’ into a man’s house,” he said.
The woman was next to him now, breathing hard, sweating. She folded her arms and he gave her room. “I heard you was in here with a child,” she said.
“Her mother give her to me,” he said, stepping back now. The girl noticed that when Alvin Crooms moved backwards, the woman took the space for herself. She was a head taller than he was, and her arms were huge and shook when she moved them. He said, “She been took over by the devil, her momma don’t want her under the roof.”
The woman looked at her carefully, but only for a second. “They ain’t no such thing, a child took by the devil,” the woman said.
“And she been bit by a fox,” he said. “Poisoned her, lookit yourself.”
The woman looked again. The girl drew her knees up under her chin and averted her eyes. The woman stepped nearer, until the girl could feel the heat of her body. “Let Miss Mary see, baby,” she said.
The girl moved herself in a way that exposed the bandage. The woman touched her. Her fingers were thick and white-tipped, and she pushed gently into the swollen skin around the bites. It set off a deep ache in the girl’s leg. Alvin Crooms watched, over the woman’s shoulder.
“See there?” he said.
“The child been bit,” she said, straightening up. “It don’t make her poisoned.”
“It was a fox,” he said.
The woman looked into Rosie’s eyes and saw it was so. “It don’t make her poisoned,” she said again. “Now git out the way, ’less I take that strap to your neck.”
THE WOMAN TOOK THE girl into her care.
Mary McNutt worked as a maid in the homes of two white families and needed someone to help clean her own. Her house stood in the far corner of Indian Heights, at the bottom of Spine Road, where it curved and crossed the other road, which had no name.
The house had two front doors and a center wall running front to back, dividing it into two apartments. The woman lived on one side with her husband—a grounds keeper at the asylum named Lyle McNutt, Jr.—and her two daughters, Linda and Jane Ray.
Linda was eleven and Jane Ray was nine.
The sons had the other side of the house. Thomas was nineteen, Henry Ray was twenty-one and had just started work at the asylum. Henry Ray didn’t cut grass like his stepfather, though. He worked inside.
Mary McNutt’s previous husband, Mr. James Boxer, had left them five years before, on Easter Sunday. The children all kept the last name.
Mary McNutt walked the girl through both sides of the house, showing her where to clean. “Mr. Boxer was a Christian man,” she said, “but he had boilin’ blood in him, could not let go of an unkindness done him by nobody.” She was standing in the boys’ side of the house then. She said the oldest boy, Henry Ray, was just like him.
“His daddy cut a man owned a farm up in Gray,” she said.
“A white man?”
Mary McNutt nodded. “Done him in his own house over a two-dollar ham.”
Rosie tried to imagine that, but it wouldn’t come. The things that frightened her worst never came to her in a way she could see them. “Lord have mercy,” she said.
The woman put her hand on the girl’s shoulder; it was as heavy and shapeless as the dead man in the story. “Don’t worry ’bout that now,” she said. “That’s all past times.” The woman was still thinking of it, though.
“Mr. McNutt ain’t nothing like Mr. Boxer,” she said a little later. “Mr. McNutt don’t take offense at nothin’.”
And the girl could not see if that made her happy or sad.
ALTHOUGH THE TOWN OF Cotton Point, Georgia, claimed more than six thousand residents, not counting the asylum—which they didn’t—there was only one person there that a twenty-one-year-old colored man could see to borrow enough money to buy a car. Paris Trout.
Trout ran a bank for colored people out of his store on North Main Street, and Henry Ray went to see him Friday morning, over his mother’s objections. She saw the boy’s father in him and did not like him doing business with whites.
He had started work at the asylum on the second Tuesday in June, though—cleaning crazy people’s shit off the walls and ceiling and sometimes out of their own hair—and by Wednesday he knew he needed a car to keep his dignity.
“I got to work at the state,” he said to his mother. “Ain’t got no time now to be foolin’ around walking.”
And a day later he walked into town, and into the front door of the half-lit store on Main Street, and waited there until Paris Trout appeared from the back.
Trout looked at him, cold and tired. “You need twenty dollars, Henry Ray?” he said. That was what he usually borrowed.
“I need a car.”
“You can’t pay for no car.”
“I got took on at the state,” he said. “Begun this Tuesday.”
“What doing?” Trout didn’t believe him, and in one way it made Henry Ray angry, and in another way it scared him.
“Work,” he said. “I do general work.”
Trout nodded, looking him over. “All right,” he said.
They walked through the store, past some canned vegetables and then a row of work gloves and then five safes sitting in a line against the wall. Henry Ray expected the money for the car was in the safes and moved slower, thinking Trout would stop and open one of them up.
He didn’t, though. He went past them and then out the back. There was an alley there, and three cars were parked against the side of the building.
“Whi
ch one you like?” he said.
Henry Ray stood still, staring at them. He hadn’t expected Mr. Trout to have cars for sale. Trout walked ahead of him and looked in the window of an old Plymouth. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t buy no car from the steps.”
Henry Ray walked around the cars once. Two of them were banged up one way or another—cracked glass and missing lights. He pictured himself driving them and it made him ashamed.
The third one was a black two-door 1949 Chevrolet, he saw his face in the shine. “That one there is more than the others,” Trout said. “Onaccount it’s in showroom shape.”
Henry Ray touched the door handle, stopping himself before he got in. “Go on ahead,” Mr. Trout said. “See how it feels.”
Henry Ray sat down behind the wheel. The dashboard was as shiny as the paint outside, and he saw his face in the glass that covered the speedometer. A hundred miles an hour, it said. He pictured himself riding a hundred miles an hour in a car, smiling at his own face in the speedometer.
When he looked up, Mr. Trout was leaning against the window near him, looking in too. “Now that I look at this here,” he said, “I ain’t sure I can sell it after all.”
Henry Ray looked up, panicked.
Mr. Trout shook his head. “Might be too nice to let it go,” he said. “I ought keep it for myself.” Henry Ray let his hand touch the steering wheel. “Besides,” Trout said, “I ain’t sure you make enough money to afford it. A car like this ain’t cheap.”
“I got a job,” he said.
“How much you make?”
Henry Ray stared at the dashboard. “Thirty dollars,” he said. He hadn’t been paid yet, but that was what his stepfather got.
Mr. Trout hit the roof of the car with his hand, right over Henry Ray’s head. It caused him to jump and shamed him. “I didn’t know you made that,” Mr. Trout said. He paused, as if he were figuring something out. “Yessir,” he said a moment later, “you make enough, and you seen it first out here. I guess it’s rightfully yours.…”
They walked back into the store, and Mr. Trout held the office door open while Henry Ray walked in. They signed the papers. The car was $800. Mr. Trout charged $227 more for insurance. Then he added some and subtracted some, and when he came out with the real number, it was $17.50 a week.
“You sure you want to do this, boy?” Trout said. “Onct you made a deal with me, I get my money.”
Henry Ray was standing up over the desk, and from there he could see the car out the open door. He pictured himself again, his face in the speedometer.
“Onct you made a deal with me, you get your money too,” he said.
ROSIE SAYERS HAD BEEN living with Mary McNutt three days when Henry Ray came home with the car. She had not spoken to him yet, waiting to be spoken to first. It was in the morning, and she had just made the beds in Miss Mary’s side of the house. All the beds but Mr. McNutt’s. Miss Mary made that herself.
Rosie’s own bed was in that part of the house, against the wall in the first room. She was fourteen years old, and it was the first bed she’d ever had—at least the first one that sleeping in it didn’t depend on getting to it before her brothers and sisters.
She made her own bed last, tearing it up twice to get the sheets to lie even, the way Miss Mary had shown her, and then walked out on the porch to rest before she began on the floors. Miss Mary told her to rest whenever she wanted. She’d said, “Take your time, child. The faster you go, the less you gain.”
Rosie did everything Miss Mary told her, the way Miss Mary said to do it. She had just settled into a porch chair when she saw the car. It was black and shiny, and a trail of dust followed it as it came up the road. It reminded her of a snake. She sat up and watched it come, and before long it was close enough that she could hear the engine.
She saw Henry Ray behind the wheel then. There and leaning half out of the window. Henry Ray was coal black and evil-looking even sitting still. She wished it was Thomas coming home instead. Thomas was lighter-colored and quieter, like herself.
Henry Ray pulled the Chevrolet into the yard and chased off the neighbor children before they could touch it. Then he walked around to the back, wiping at little spots of dirt with the leg of his pants. Once or twice he glanced in the direction of the porch. Rosie sat still and watched, and when he looked up again, he smiled.
“You like young Henry Ray better now, doesn’t you?”
She folded her hands in her lap and studied her knuckles. “I like everybody the same,” she said.
She heard him laugh; she did not look up. “You can’t like nobody you ain’t spoke to yet,” he said.
“I like Jesus,” she said quietly.
“What’s that?”
She couldn’t think with him watching her. She felt him looking and was afraid to look back. “You want a ride, Rosie Sayers?” he said. She shook her head no.
“Ain’t got time for no rides,” she said.
He said, “I see you busy.”
“I be busy soon as I stand up.”
He left the car and climbed the steps to the porch. He sat on the railing and stared at her, up and down. “I ain’t gone to hurt you,” he said in a minute.
She looked at her knuckles.
“You think young Henry means to hurt your pretty self?” She shook her head again. “What then?”
“They is some people that gets hurt by accident,” she said.
He seemed to think that over. “I bet you ain’t never been in no car,” he said. “That’s what you scared of.”
She brought her eyes up then and looked at the automobile. Henry Ray squatted next to her and put his hand on her leg. It looked like a spider. She saw herself connected to the car in that spider web way too. Every time she pushed away, she was caught that much tighter.
He moved his hand up until it could touch both her legs at once, and she felt the heat of it through her dress. “You ain’t never been with no man either,” he said. “I see that for myself.”
She looked at the car, looking for a way out. “How long you going to ride me?” she said.
That made him laugh out loud, and he moved his hand off her and stood up. She felt her lap cool and crossed her legs, so he couldn’t get back to that place even if he changed his mind. “I bring you right back, as soon as you want,” he said.
She followed him down the steps to the car. He opened the door for her and held it, smiling. She ducked under his arm, moving between Henry Ray and the door without touching either one, and then sat down in the seat. It was softer than the seat in the police car. He slammed the door hard, as if he were mad, but when he walked around the front he smiled at her through the windshield, and then he was next to her in the seat.
He turned the key and touched the starter button. The engine took, and the car began to shake in a regular way.
He pushed the clutch to the floor and studied the gearshift and finally pulled it toward himself and then up. Two different movements, two different thoughts. He turned in his seat to back out into the road.
They drove slowly out of Indian Heights. Henry Ray winced as he steered the car through the place in the road where the trees from either side grew almost together, as if he could feel the branches on his own skin. It already seemed to the girl that a car was more worry than it was worth.
In a few minutes, though, Henry Ray turned out onto Route 27, going south, and she saw his troubles were all behind. They crossed the bridge over the Indian River and then headed away from town. Henry Ray’s expression relaxed when they were on the highway, relaxed until he looked like he’d gone simple. His foot pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and she counted the telephone poles as they went past, it seemed like there was hardly enough time to count one before the next was there.
“Lookit here,” he said a little later. “Spring is sprung … Grass is riz …”
It took her a moment to realize he was reading the words off the signs along the road.
“Where last year’s
… Careless drivers is … Burma Shave.”
He laughed out loud, she stared at him. “How come you know how to read?” she said.
And that made him laugh too. “All Momma’s children got to read,” he said. “She wouldn’t let none of us out the house unless we could. You see them little babies, Linda and Jane Ray? They already learnt too.” He was shouting over the wind and the engine. “Sometimes I think that woman’s crazy.”
Saying that seemed to change Henry Ray’s driving. He slowed down, and she watched the needle of the speedometer drop back into the middle of the numbers. “She ain’t crazy,” he said suddenly.
“I never said she was.”
“Well,” he said, “I never said it neither.”
She looked out the window. The prettiest thing she saw was a mare in foal, which wasn’t anything special. “How far you going to drive us?” she said.
“Where you want to go?”
“Home.”
He slowed down, looking for a place. The more they slowed, the more she realized how fast they’d been going. He pulled into a field, following some tire tracks through the weeds until they ended. He turned off the engine, and in the absence of its sound she heard the noises of the field. It felt peaceful to be stopped, and she wished she was alone.
He slid across the car seat for her. She sat still. He put his hands on her legs and then on her chest; she did not move. He lay back in the seat, pulling her after him. She didn’t fight him, she didn’t help him. He touched the waist of her dress and then followed the line of her legs on both sides until he got to the hem. Then he came back up, and the dress came up with him. Her underpants were fastened with a safety pin.
“Well, well,” he said.
She did not move or answer. He unfastened his own trousers then, and she saw what he intended to put inside her. “I never done nothing before,” she said.
“That’s all right,” he said.
She said, “Nobody told me so.”