by Laird Hunt
Set now and feeling firm to my purpose I went inside and got my ankles and feet cleaned up and changed dresses and repinned my hat and changed out my good shoes for my sturdy ones and put them on and went with the basket to the shed in back of the house. The old flatbed usually sat in front of it was gone. Aunt V wouldn’t drive, Hortensia couldn’t, and Uncle D had bad eyes from the war. So now I knew and no question to it they really had decided to leave. I could see Uncle D hunched up over the steering wheel, hear Aunt V calling out the obstacles. Sometimes he said his glass eyeball saw better than he did. Wasn’t for nothing I was the one did all our driving. It was a joke I didn’t think too much of in their house that they’d taken me in because I’d been taught how to drive. Aunt V told the joke kind of hard and Uncle D kind of soft but either way I didn’t like it. Upshot anyway was they were gone with the truck. Unless I wanted to walk some more and probably die this time in the heat, I was going to have to requisition the Dictator.
The shed wasn’t much like the whole neighborhood wasn’t much, but it was painted neat brown and had a green tile roof that looked fair pretty in the autumn time when it got itself feathered up all orange with hickory leaves. The shed had a window on each side that had been blacked over and there was a last year’s wasp nest under its house-side eave with the back half of a dead citizen still clinging on. I tugged open the big double doors, thought a second maybe I’d find them all in there waiting for me and ready to holler out, “Surprise!” But it was just cobwebs and oil cans and Uncle D’s tools and some of Aunt V’s hatboxes and a stack of magazines and the smell of stale heat and, in the light pouring over my shoulders and onto the Dictator, whole swirling galaxies of seed tufts and paint flecks and skin chips and powdery orange rust.
The Dictator had never been out in daylight since Uncle D had won the bidding for her at an estate-shutdown auction in Indianapolis. He paid cash on the barrel and we drove it away on out of there and brought it home. We here is me. I’ve already said that. I asked Aunt V once after we were back if she wanted to take a turn at the wheel and that’s when she coughed out for the first time, “You’re the driver, Calla Destry. That’s what we took you in for!”
The Dictator sat there always waiting for us under a soft cloth in the dim, dead air of the shed. It was canary yellow where it wasn’t brown leather or chrome. Canary slick yellow everywhere, even its roof. We all of us went along when it was Dictator-driving time. We drove after dark and deep into the night up and down the dark roads with the stars and moon streaming their light in everywhere because everyone knew what stood a hell of a good chance of happening to those sweet wheels if the cornsilks found out about it. Found out we had it living there in the shed. At our disposal is the phrase. Aunt V’s cousin Merle had bought a nice car and found it two weeks later burned to a devil’s dessert in the bottom of a gravel pit. Everyone else we knew had nice cars drove nervous. Looked over their shoulders. Kept their feet close to the gas. Now I was going to drive the Dictator out into the daylight. Which I won’t say even then and there with sweat on my face and a gun in my basket didn’t make me smile. You can smile anytime. I had smiled down there at the river as I had waited. Waited for my Leander. Many was the time I had said at the supper table that we ought to drive out into the daylight. Drive proud. Proud and goddamn, I had said one time, wouldn’t it be nice for once to see long into the world we were driving through.
“Watch that language of yours, Calla Destry, you’re not in the orphan house anymore,” Aunt V had said. And I had said straight back to her that I would fight anyone who tried to take a torch to the Dictator. I had learned to do plenty besides swear and drive in the orphan house.
Pull off that cloth, let me look at my big yellow baby! said Uncle D.
I gave a jump because I thought Uncle D had come back to me and said this, but when I turned, it was just the lane that led down to the alley that fed out into the street and the houses and the yards and the lanes and buildings of Marvel. I pulled off the cloth. I already had the keys in my hand. As I stepped up close to Uncle D’s yellow baby that he wasn’t there to admire—and so to hell with him—I could see from my reflection in the window glass that I should have done a little more tugging at my hair before I repinned my hat. The heat had had its way. It had gotten flatter than I felt good about. The Dictator’s soft leather seats gave a creak as I climbed in.
The street was empty. Nobody out but old Turner Jenkins trickling false hope onto his doomed geraniums with a beat-up watering can. I kept my eyes good and peeled as I rolled past the heat-burned yards and quiet wooden houses on the way to the courthouse. I had told Uncle D as soon as we heard what was coming that morning that I wanted to see what it looked like and he had told me it wouldn’t be anything but ugly and Aunt V had said, “You don’t need to go looking for a lynching mob in this country. Lynching mob always finds its way to your doorstep or down the street. Anyway, you got your picnic to get to!”
“I made a promise,” I said back to her.
“A promise!” She snorted.
“I said I would be there!”
“The things you say!”
“You say you’re going to do something you have to do it.”
“That’s true, that is,” Uncle D said.
I repeated what he had said out loud. It was good into the afternoon but the sun felt like it wasn’t much more along than the middle of the sky. Like it had down by the river. Like the angels had left the fiery door to heaven open up there in the blue beyond.
Leander liked to talk about the sun and its doings. He had a theory for every minute of the night and day. He had about half the whole world in his head and he would blow gusts of it out into my ear when we took a walk. He would say, “Stop, now, listen, do you hear that? You think that’s the wind in the maples, but it’s not the wind. It’s the universe twitching.”
Which is what the universe was doing down at the courthouse square, and before I knew much more than half of what was happening, I turned onto Lincoln and got snarled up in the middle of it. Why that turn? I don’t know. No Leander, but cornsilks by the hundreds and more cornsilks stepping their way in. Like they had decided to hold the county fair at the courthouse but kill people instead of showing cows and pigs. None of it was what I had expected. None of it was what I had thought, which was Klan hats and Klan robes and Klan torches and maybe a few ugly cornsilk men with bleeding, chaw-filled mouths. No, this was cornsilks drinking out of bottles in the bright sunshine. Cornsilk families reclining in the shade of the killing trees. There were women and babies and little boys juggling apples and bulldogs slobbering and biting at their own tails. This wasn’t something away on over there, like a picture show—this was all around, this was right next to me.
I drove slow because that’s all I could do and went past a little girl in a green dress who was draped like limp lettuce over her father’s shoulder. She gave me a sleepy smile, lifted her little hand, and said, “Hi,” in a soft voice as I went by and I rolled up my window. There was a mailman standing next to her father holding a picture of the governor, and a tall gal in a fancy blue dress next to him. I saw people I recognized everywhere I looked: a man from the hardware store where Uncle D bought supplies; a teenage girl who sold papers at the interurban station; a boy who was always on his bright orange bicycle and who was on it today.
“This is about to get ugly,” I said. And about when I said it somewhere deep in the crowd someone started to yell about something and I looked over behind me and there was a woman standing on the hood of a parked black Ford and she was dancing and spinning around and beating at the air with her arms. She danced with her mouth open and her eyes raised heavenward like she had a direct line to the lord of lynchings and whippings and beatings and burnings and then she toppled over and fell and pretty soon after she fell, the yelling she’d got started stopped.
But I kept hearing it in my head. Keep hearing it. Down the years and always banging at my door. And when it comes, when I’m think
ing back, the devil-hot, blister-bright afternoon sky I am driving through turns to black and the air grows scorching ever hotter and the cornsilks’ heads glow red with the heat of it and they cackle and roar and move in their glowing thousands for the jail. The earth starts to shake when they go. The Dictator commences to rise up into the air and slam down. Up and slam down and I can barely get the door open but I leave the Dictator and go with them. I am in the crowd and above it and the sheriff steps aside and they take their sledgehammers to the walls and beat their way in. Then they are pouring across the tile floors and past the iron doors and through the hallways of the big jail and there I go pouring with them and as we pour there are shouts about God and about country and about honor and about truth and about death and death and death and we pour up the stairs and find where they are holding the boys. I’m not dreaming, it’s something I’m seeing, I’m there and I tell them to stop and I’m not alone in telling them. There are hundreds of us, thousands, many thousands, millions even, and the earth joins us and the sky and the moon and the stars and we say stop but they do not stop. The first boy is beat to death right there, then dragged around, then hung from the bars on the cell window. Then one by one they take the others. They drag them dead and about-to-be dead through the night and the heat and the roaring crowd and the universe twitching to the killing trees.
If it’s yelling brings it all to black, it’s a scream restores that day to its earlier sunlit evil self. It came out of the mouth of an old lady. I hear it in my head and the sun rips straight through the black overlay. She was a soft-looking thing and round and bent over plenty and on the short side to start with but she had a tornado in her throat. She screamed and this time instead of still rolling, I stopped the Dictator sharp. She had her hand up in the air and was pointing at the jail. So I turned and looked that way this time and a bloody shirt now hung long and limp from a top-floor window. An ensign of what hadn’t yet happened but was about to. It looked from where I was like a cut of pork or a side of beef. The old lady screamed again and a younger woman yelled out that it was the killed cornsilk boy’s shirt, the one he had been wearing when the cornflowers had shot him and then had their fun on the ground with his girl. That bloody shirt snapped those cornsilks out of whatever spell had been keeping them from looking my way. Like a fresh and hard wind was blowing through them, they all turned their heads from the jail toward me.
“That’s a goddamn cornflower in that car,” said someone right close.
“Got to go.” I said this well and loud to myself but it took me longer than I liked to see it happen. My arms had turned to stone or got gooped up in a dream. It had dropped quiet outside the car after that “goddamn cornflower.” But it was a rumbling quiet, quiet had lightning for a tail. Boy named Roscoe I had started running with when I still lived at the orphan house was like that. He would get real quiet, like it was a well to China had opened up in front of him, and he would smile slow down into that well and then look up fast and hit whoever or whatever was closest to him if whoever or whatever was closest to him was too stupid to get out of his way.
Some of the cornsilks in the crowd were smiling. Just the way Roscoe smiled when he was making a fist. I couldn’t get myself to drive but I did get a hand off the steering wheel and started for the basket. If they wanted lightning they could add some of mine to their storm. And gooped up or not, I would have fuck sure helped them make it, that lightning, if that little girl I had seen on her father’s shoulder a minute before hadn’t stepped out just then from between some long legs. I saw her and I swallowed hard and took my hand away from the basket and put it back on the Dictator’s wheel. Because she still looked sweet, this little girl, sleepy too. I sometimes babysat for cornsilk folk that Aunt V worked for cleaning houses and stores around town, as bad matched for the job as I was, and I had held more than one sleepy cornsilk child just like her after a nap. As I watched, though, that pretty little girl spit on the ground and scrunched up her face. Then she reared back and I saw she was holding a rock.
She threw hard for such a young thing. Her rock hit the Dictator on the driver’s-side door. There was some fat silence after the rock hit, then shouts of approval popcorned up from the oil and you could tell quick by the number of heads scanning the ground that those good folks were about to start raining rocks on me.
“Drive away now, Calla,” I said. There was a calm in my voice this time and command too. I put the car in gear and opened up the throttle. Few ugly cornsilk boys kicked the front fender, and the Dictator got hit by a hot dog and whacked with a stick as I tire-spun it away, but no more rocks, they hadn’t gotten their hands on them in time. On the subject of hands, mine started to shake as soon as I was clear of the crowd and away from the square. I saw a picture show once where a woman slapped a man had got the shakes and I wished someone would slap me but there wasn’t any someone there. Shaking, I let my free hand kind of butterfly-flap itself away from the wheel over to the glove box. Uncle D kept his silver war flask in there. He kept it full of good, sharp whiskey and liked to take a drink while we drove. Said it helped him warm his throat and cool his head and collect his thoughts. It didn’t do any of those things for me but I drank anyway and coughed hard when I caught some of the burn. Water started coming out of my eyes and I wiped at it with the back of my hand and then drank and coughed again, then said, “Now get yourself the fuck on away from here.”
Instead, after I had driven fast away a few blocks and was shut of all but a few cornsilk stragglers heading toward the show, I took one more drink, put the flask down, and pulled over in front of a little red house just about swallowed up in ivy. I turned off the Dictator, then I shut my eyes and counted out loud into the empty car until I felt my eyes stop watering and my hands stop shaking. When they had stopped I lifted the flask back up and took another sip, swallowed different, poured it slow down the trough of my tongue this time. Slipping over my tongue and down my throat, it didn’t burn as much.
I didn’t give the little girl’s ugly dent in the yellow door more than a glance as I opened one of the basket flaps just to be ready and, sixteen-year-old fool that I was, went walking back the way I had just come. There must have been something new going on down by the jail besides the bloody shirt flag because there was some shouts and cheers but I didn’t pay them any mind. I get an idea in my head, I get focused. I stand tall and walk straight. Always been like that. I walked straight down the street back toward the square with my head down and my chin set and ready to reach into my open basket if anyone stepped in my way. I went across the backside of the square, where there wasn’t hardly anybody milling and no blankets spread and no dogs or juggling or ice cream or nasty little girls, and down some steps, under a heat-shriveled grape arbor, and into the courthouse through the east-side door. Any other afternoon, the courthouse would have been full and maybe a fat guard to get past on top of it, but this wasn’t any afternoon, and as I climbed up the back stairs with my basket, up and up, I saw not a soul, only a mop and its bucket on one of the landings near the top floor.
I had been to the courthouse many a time that past year with Uncle D, who lettered office glass and did touch-up painting of all kinds after closing. I could have peeked out onto any floor I climbed past and seen his handiwork. It was all over the building. All over town. He could see better than fine right up in front of him and had let me and Hortensia too make some brushstrokes over his shoulders, but mostly we had haunted the courthouse nooks and crannies, hollered in its attics, whispered loud in its corridors and basements and stairwells. It was like being inside the brain of the county and we were its thoughts. Or its dreams. Maybe its nightmares. Meaning, anyway, I knew where I was going: up and up to a big storage room on the north side that Hortensia and I called the flag room because there wasn’t anything else in there but flags.
State flags. They were all on sturdy floor stands leaning this way and that. Had spearheads on their tops. Like a forest and field of bright flowers both and many was th
e time we had played a game of walking quiet through the heavy cloth and pole trunks with our eyes closed. It could take a while to find each other in the big room. Even if you cheated and cracked your eyes open a little, which we both sometimes did. Sometimes we would stop a minute and say what colors we saw or what things. There were blues and yellows and whites and greens and reds. There were animals and buildings and torches and crosses and spires. There were stars everywhere on those flags. Hortensia’s favorite was from the state of New Mexico. It was bright, bright yellow with just a knobbed circle on it, piece of fire painted red. Mine was the one from South Carolina. Darkest blue and just had on it a palmy white tree and a sharp-curved white moon. All you need. One tree and the moon.
Sometimes when Hortensia had stayed down with Uncle D or was wandering off elsewhere I’d go and sit by it. Or wave it back and forth, pull it out away from its stand. Tried to imagine what it might be like to step into it, get myself down to South Carolina, sit quiet under a palm tree in the night. It came up close, when I stretched it, to the Indiana flag. They were both blue but the Indiana flag was lighter-colored and had a torch looked hot to the touch on it and some more of those stars. Like it was all about what you would do if you strayed in the night. South Carolina was about sitting quiet and not closing your eyes but still dreaming, and Indiana was about being lost. Uncle D had come up with us one time and said they weren’t either one about what I’d said and I didn’t want to go down to South Carolina anyhow under any circumstances and not to mess with them—they had been for a display and might be used again. As soon as he’d left I went back into the middle of the forest. If I leaned the South Carolina stand a little I could make it and Indiana touch.