The Evening Road

by Laird Hunt

  I got up there that afternoon and the flag forest was looking some the worse for wear since I’d last seen it. California with its yellow bear was on the floor. So was the big red star of Texas and the yellow eagle of Oregon. Alabama was twisted up and leaning against a wall. It looked like a football team had run through the room. I walked the forest sideways, trying not to touch anything, then went to the window, gave it a good push, couldn’t budge it, tried again, got it open, and leaned my head out.

  The crowd was like ants on spilled sugar. The treetops above them were dull and green. The roofs stretched out brown and gray and black and there was the smokestack from Fuller’s off in the distance made the whole municipality look, if you tilted your head, like it had a burning cigar stuck in its mouth. There was some honking and I saw someone else had had the bad idea to try and drive through the crowd, but it must have been a cornsilk because all the ants did was wave their antennas and step out of the way as the rectangle of the car roof came forward. At the orphan house we poured cups of water on swarming ants whenever we could. We asked them if they had their ark ready. I thought then of pouring water down from above. Onto those ants had lynching on their little minds. As I leaned out the window, one of them, might have been the father of the little girl had dented Uncle D’s Dictator, reared skyward on its back legs and waved up at me.

  My idea—if you can call it that when you are sixteen and storm-bent on something you haven’t thought halfway through—in making that climb had been a small one, maybe throw something out the window and see what it hit, but it grew bigger as I cast my eyes down. Saw how many of them there were. Every last one of them ready to break down the jailhouse door. Do a dance under that bloody shirt, get quick as they could to the killing to come. I’d give them something else they could do their devil-dancing to. It didn’t take a minute to retrieve the frizzle-head mop I’d seen on the stairs and find some rope. It was harder than I liked getting the great state flag of Indiana off its floor stand, though, and I wished more than once as I yanked and tugged that I had a good pair of scissors or a knife. Still, I did get it off more or less intact and then fixed it tight around the mop handle so that it looked like a robe or dress around a dead creature. Creature of the state-flag forest. I got the rope snug around her neck and hung the whole thing out the window. Then I took a deep breath, called out, banged hard on the window frame, and laughed good and loud and long at what I had done.

  The Dictator could fly if you held it open, which is what I wanted to do once I had gotten down out of the courthouse and back safe to it, hold it wide open and get myself a hundred miles out into the countryside, maybe five hundred, a thousand, head for South Carolina, but a funny thing happened when I got the machine going again. Out in the broad daylight and in the heat, and with my hands holding the wheel steady but my heart pounding fierce from the stairs to the street, my focus left me. Worse, some of that rearranging that I’d felt hit me as I came up from the river earlier returned and it wasn’t just one house I didn’t recognize, it was the streets I’d known all that last year in Marvel didn’t seem the same. And this isn’t me thinking back on a piece of the past and covering it over with its about-to-be. This was happening right then. The streets came up curved, like I was looking at them through water, or if they were curved already they came up straight. They were most of them empty, hardly a soul to be seen, and I lost my bearings. I passed the signs for streets I felt sure I knew well, only when I got onto them they seemed too wide or too narrow. There was a big gray house on a corner with handsome scalloped wood and a blue roof I knew belonged to a cornsilk lady had been nice to Aunt V and even sent her a card at Christmas, only when I got up on it I saw the wood scallop was rotting and the roof was covered in moss and someone had thrown a kitchen stool up onto it. A ways down the road from this wreck and right in the middle of town was a deep woods I’d never laid eyes on before.

  “You need to get yourself a good deep breath, Calla Destry,” I said, which is what Aunt V would have had me do and had done fifty times if it was a dozen since I left the orphan house to live with her and Uncle D and take their charity, but what I did instead of her deep-breathing trick was reach again for Uncle D’s flask. Draining it, I crossed the river, which seemed darker and wider than ever it had before, and still didn’t get any sense of where I was until I saw Fuller’s smokestack rising big-ugly out of the ground almost right up on top of me and knew where I was and that I had to double back. Soon as I was over the bridge again, I yanked hard on the steering wheel and took off down a dirt road, then turned again and found myself heading into a dead end. There was a little dog sitting in some Queen Anne’s lace where the gravel stopped. It was working a bone or stick or God knows what, I couldn’t tell, and when the Dictator came too close it jumped up, barked considerable more than necessary, and took a bite, I expect, at one of its tires.

  “All right, now,” I said. For as soon as she started barking I knew that little snaggletoothed dog. She belonged to Big Bob Franklin, and Big Bob Franklin was Uncle D’s friend. And just like that, everything snapped back into place. I didn’t see any woods. That house wasn’t rotting. The river wasn’t any wider than it ever was. I put the Dictator in reverse and backed it out of that dead end and retraced my road a ways and got myself over to Bob’s and parked the car where it couldn’t be seen too easy from the road. His bait store hadn’t looked like much the last time I had been by it and now it looked worse. Simple, busted, and shabby.

  There was a scrub plum tree growing up one side of it and black moss didn’t look any too happy to be alive on its roof shingles. A sign over the door read BOB FRANKLIN'S BAIT SHOP, NIGHT CRAWLERS AND SPECIALTIES. The sign was neatly painted but it had been shot a time or two or a woodpecker had gotten after it or both. I could smell the old river curling slow and green nearby. I cleared my throat. I left my basket in the car. The little dog came up friendly now and gave my shoe a sniff. She had short legs and a long nose and blue eyes. I cleared my throat again and gave her a scratch and went across some crispy grass to a door at the side of the house.

  Bait shop. I haven’t set my foot in a one since practically that day, but I suspect they still have them. Full of bric-a-brac. Old coffee cans stacked to the ceiling and spit jars and dirt spill and that old lunch and a pair of shoes and some boxing gloves and a row of Bob’s friendly bottles. Strips of flypaper, clumpy and black, done their job too well and more old lunch and a model boat never got its mast and mainsail. Some seed catalogs and a box of bullets and worm smell and bell jars everywhere for the whiskey everyone knew Bob made on the side and some pretty-lady pictures probably hadn’t been looked at in many a season. A royal-size icebox off in the shadows and a stack of county-fair pamphlets and a pile of yardsticks and a faded picture of old president Theodore Roosevelt. There was a big door that still had its handle set on some sawhorses for a desk. It had its own piles of bric-a-brac but most of it was covered up by a kind of a hand-drawn map or picture painting, it looked like, and a bowl full of something wet. By the desk stood a couple rusted outside chairs on the seats of which now sat smashed some old grandmother’s once-favorite pillows. I’d just climbed out of the Dictator but I sank straight down into one of these chairs like I had been standing up for a week with a weight on my head. The chair probably hadn’t ever been comfortable but I had about got settled and had even shut my eyes a few seconds when the door to the rest of the house swung open and there was Big Bob. He stood in the doorway a minute looking in my direction before he spoke.

  “You by yourself, Calla Destry?” he said. The way you say something everyone present knows the answer to. I nodded, sucked in at my cheeks, shrugged. Bob had a drafting pencil behind one of his ears and as he stood there looking at me he fetched it and started in to tapping with it on the doorjamb.

  “That makes two of us,” he said. He had a high-pitched voice that skittered and warbled around the edges. I nodded again. If there was an aspect that was big about him you couldn’t much se
e it. There could have been a little something strong in his shoulders or some extra yardage to his eyebrows, but for the rest of it he might have been a wrinkle-faced child playing grown-up.

  “You all right, girl?” he said.

  I started to ask him why he was asking, the way you do, but my voice fell down in my throat like someone had stuck out a leg and tripped it up. I’d had my hands on the arms of the uncomfortable chair but now I gathered them into my lap and looked down.

  “I was sleeping,” he said. “Trying to sleep away this day, wasn’t getting too far on the project. Got somewhere into some sleep but not anywhere near far enough. There’s dreams in that kind of sleep but they’re as like to smack you in the mouth as tell you you’re special, so I try to avoid them. You ever have dreams like that?”

  I nodded. He gave the doorjamb another whack with his pencil then put it behind his ear again and came in and leaned over his map picture.

  “This bad boy is wearing me out,” he said. “It’s not the idea, it’s the getting it right. I’m going to put pictures of us around its edges. Found them in the illustrated pages. I’ve got a stack somewhere around here I already cut small. Going to make a frame of our faces.”

  He gave a show of looking for the stack of pictures, lifting up the edge of the paper and looking under it and pulling at the desk drawer. When he didn’t find anything except a little pot of silver paint like the ones Uncle D used in his lettering work, he took a seat at his desk and put his pinkie finger in the bowl.

  “Some of my shine in here,” he said. “I took a sliver and we’ll see if the shine helps her find her way out. You ever try shine for a sliver?” He lifted his wet pinkie out of the whiskey when he said this. It dripped twice and I realized I had been smelling whiskey since I walked in. I hadn’t particularly noticed it since it was the same smell I had on my lips. I could see even from my chair that Bob’s pinkie was bad swollen. On the world side. That was what Uncle D called any part of you that faced outward. The you side was just yours; the you side looked in. Bob put the pinkie back in the whiskey, then before I had answered his question, he asked me what had brought me to his bait shop by myself. He said he thought it wasn’t for the worms and could smell even far away as I was that I had already had some of his shine. I found my voice and told him I had been late coming home and was out now looking for Uncle D and Aunt V and Hortensia. I don’t know why I told him I was looking for them. I wasn’t. They had left me behind.

  “Trouble again?” he said.

  I shrugged. Of course there had been trouble. I was nothing but trouble. From one end of me to the other.

  “Well, I haven’t seen them,” he said.

  I told him I hadn’t thought he would have, that I had just been out riding and looking for them and decided to stop by.

  “Out riding?” he said.

  “I got lost. Turned around. I think it was the heat.”

  Bob leaned back in his own chair, lifted his hands, the right one dripping from the pinkie, put his index fingers together, touched them to the angel mark under his nose.

  “It wasn’t the heat,” he said.

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “You know that, don’t you? It’s important that you know it.”

  “What was it, then?”

  “You’ve been hot before, I reckon?”

  “Yes, sir.” And when I said it I thought straightaway of nights at the orphan house at Indianapolis in my room in the attic with Hortensia already set in to kicking at me and there was just the one little window and no water so we wouldn’t wet and we weren’t allowed to leave our room and how I thought we might die in our beds by morning from the heat.

  “We all been hot before. I once spent sixteen hours chained up in Georgia in a tin shed. It’s hot out there today, sure, but, honey, it wasn’t the heat roiled up your head.”

  He let his ailing finger ease back down into the whiskey bowl but kept his left hand where it was against his lips. Then he looked at me, long and quiet. So I told him where I had been and what I had seen and what I had done. I told him about the old lady and the blue house and the little girl with her rock and about the flags and even about the mop and the rope. He nodded his head like it was every day the world had lynchings and nasty little girls and flag forests in it, and when he nodded, the pencil behind his ear joggled loose a little and he lifted his hand out of the whiskey and pulled it across his body, pinkie dripping onto the floor as it went, and pushed the pencil back and then put his finger back in the whiskey, never moving the other hand from his angel mark.

  “You went down to the courthouse square on a lynching day looking for them?” he said. “Even light-colored as you are, that’s crazy.”

  Bob let the tip of his tongue poke out a minute and lick a little at his upper lip.

  “Not for them,” I said.

  Bob nodded.

  “If I was you and had keys to a vehicle and had just hung a mop with the state flag on it out for all to see and maybe had a fresh quarrel with your foster parents and were looking for others you needed to see bad enough to be deep-foolish, I’d leave town and quick, Calla Destry,” he said. He shrugged. There wasn’t anything I don’t care about his shrug. It was a shrug said It’s your life and your home troubles and your lynching day and it’s up to you.

  “You think they’ll lynch them for sure and true?” I said.

  “Sure as I’m sitting here in my junk shop,” he said. “Sure as the crawlers I got over there in the icebox. Sure as this house and that yard and that river.”

  He held his finger up out of the whiskey, and wet trickle lines went down his wrist.

  “What I’m saying is you’re lucky, girl, they didn’t catch you and take you and hurt you and then string you up too.”

  I nodded. Imagine having your arms broke and your head beat and being lifted up by your neck into the air. Or imagine them doing other things to you. They’d burned a boy alive down in Mississippi just the January before. It had been in the paper all the way up here. Aunt V had read the story to us aloud. She had had to stop four times while she read it. They had called him an “arch fiend” and a “cornflower devil.” The paper said it was over two thousand cornsilks at the party.

  I asked Bob what he was going to do, if he was going to try to go back to sleep, and he didn’t answer and I thought maybe he was thinking about getting neck-tied or about the boy down in Jackson, that we were both sitting there in his bait shop seeing ourselves getting burned or hauled up into the sky. Instead he said, “You ever eat an orange, Calla Destry?”

  “A what?” It came so fresh out of the bait-shop blue that I thought a second it wasn’t true what Uncle D said that Bob never took a drop of his own whiskey. But there wasn’t an inch of him looked drunk.

  “You never have, have you?”

  I shook my head, slow. Bob slapped the desk with his dry hand, made the little pot of silver paint topple over, righted it, stood, went over to the icebox where he kept his worms, dug around in it, pulled something out, then stepped over to me and held it out. I was sixteen years old and had never seen an orange up close before. He put it in my hand and I started to say something but didn’t know what it would be so I just looked at it. Felt its strange, skin-snug weight. Ran a finger pad over all its little bumps. Squeezed. Pushed my nail at its flowery navel, there where the skin turns hard, sharp even, rough. I might even have started into trying to open it, but Bob shook his head and took the orange back.

  He went over behind his desk and swept off a corner and set it down. There was some light coming in through the window behind me and the orange rolled a little and the light caught some of its curve and set it to burn. While I watched, Bob pulled a paring knife out of a drawer and cut straight through the light. The back of his hand glowed sharp a second then he set the two sides he had made next to each other on the desk, pulled his chair up close to the corner, and sat down.

  “I used to eat a fresh orange every day,” he said, and after the minute o
f quiet his warbler voice seemed like it flew out of his mouth and went flitting around the room. It flitted and he worked with his knife on the orange. I couldn’t see everything he was doing to it because of a stack of maroon-color ledger books and a busted-handle coffee cup. He worked and talked. I couldn’t take my eyes off what I could see of the orange, of the knife, of his graceful movements. It came over me how tired I already was, like the long day was into its evening instead of just its afternoon.

  “While back, this was,” Bob said. “Deep down south. I did fishing work on the Florida coast. You know where Florida is? I ate many an orange down there on that coast. You could pick them straight off the tree if they weren’t falling down into your hand. But it wasn’t until I had had one of old Mr. Chan’s oranges that I truly acquired the taste. Mr. Chan was a corntassel had a noodle restaurant I frequented.”

  I looked at him. Frequented wasn’t a word you heard every five minutes. Roscoe had liked to use words like that. Sometimes I wrote down the words he used at night after I had made it home. I had kept some of that list and shown it to Leander, who said it was a fine list and indicated a fine mind. I told him that Roscoe’s occupation had been punching people in the face who didn’t fall in line with him around the streets of the city. Leander said that while that was certainly regrettable (which was also one of the words on the list), it didn’t change the principle (which was another), as many a fine mind lay behind punishing fists. Leander had then complimented me on my own fine mind, had said he was a great admirer of my “sparkling wits and talents.”

  “Noodle restaurant?” I said.

  “Everything came with noodles. Even the noodles came with noodles. You didn’t like noodles, you were out of luck.”

  “So this Mr. Chan served oranges with his spaghetti?”