by Don Noble
By the time Colesbery entered the restaurant, Lincoln was already in a corner booth with a pizza, a pitcher of beer, and two mugs. He filled them both as Colesbery slid into the booth across from him.
"Thought you might want a beer."
"I didn't come here to drink beer."
Lincoln took a sip from his mug. He bit a slice of pizza. Colesbery stared, not touching either.
"Did you call that number I texted you?"
"I don't need to talk to anybody."
They stared at one another. Colesbery waited, watched Lincoln's face until it fell away, the public one full of pleasantries and vague language, and then Colesbery saw the face of Lincoln that he knew, a brown angular face with a narrowed heaviness in the eyes that only truth could render.
"He's still here," said Lincoln. "He moved out of the house in Ensley Highlands." He plucked a piece of pineapple off the pizza and tossed it in his mouth. "But he still has that tire company down on Avenue F, and yes, he still walks around the block at lunchtime."
The information at first swirled around Colesbery's head, then he felt that twitch in his stomach that always came before a mission. The plan materialized in his brain—how he would do it, when he would do it, where he would do it. He rubbed his eyes and then stretched his fingers wide, balled them tight, stretched them again, and settled back into the moment.
"You sure about this?" Lincoln asked. "You don't have to do this, you know."
Colesbery focused his eyes, picked up a slice of pizza but didn't take a bite. There were too many ingredients, too much going on on the pizza. He put it on the plate. "Yes, I do," he said. He didn't say any more, just looked at Lincoln, his eyes steeling themselves as if seeing beyond his friend to a target.
"Well, I guess that's that." Lincoln refreshed his beer. "You don't drink anymore."
Colesbery took a gulp from his mug. The coolness felt calming on his throat, in his stomach. "How's your business?"
"You don't care about that, but I got a job for you when you're ready." Lincoln motioned for the waitress. "Remember Mrs. Gordon? She passed away last month."
Colesbery knew Lincoln was worried, was trying to get him to back down. But it got to him anyway. Mrs. Gordon had been one of those teachers attracted to strays. And there was no more a stray than Colesbery when he entered her sophomore literature class. Dead parents, a halfway-locked-up alcoholic uncle he lived with, clothes that were ill-fitted and seldom clean—Colesbery became her cause. She lived in Bush Hills too, a few blocks away on the boulevard, and she often gave him rides to school, even invited him over for dinner sometimes. But he didn't respond, didn't accept her attention, until she put a book on his desk one day in class and walked away. He left it on the desk when class was dismissed, but she placed it on his desk again the next day, so he took it. At that time he was a skinny kid who only wanted to avoid attention, and confrontation. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was the first book he ever really read. He read it and reread it, especially the chapter where Douglass fights Mr. Covey.
"What happened to her?" asked Colesbery.
"Old, as far as I know. I just figured you'd want to know." Then he asked, "What did you do with all those books she gave you?"
After he read the Douglass book, Colesbery had put it back on her desk one day before class. She'd asked if he'd read it, he'd answered yes, and that led to her bringing book after book after book. Every time he put one back on her desk, she reached into the top drawer and withdrew another one. He read them all.
"My uncle burned most of them when he set the apartment on fire."
"She was good people."
It was Mrs. Gordon who'd lost her copy of Invisible Man and told him to check it out of the library. He'd made the mistake in thinking she'd meant the Wells version (even though he also read it later). Mrs. Gordon had been a stout brown-skinned woman, widowed and childless, who always seemed so much taller when she stood in front of the class and peered over her glasses at each student, calling on them, cajoling them, encouraging them, correcting them, explaining things to them day after day through the semester.
"And Mr. Foster finally retired." Lincoln drank from his glass. "Remember when he caught us with that beer behind the school?"
Colesbery was glad not to keep talking about Mrs. Gordon, but he also knew Lincoln was working him, trying to get to the real reason for his plans. Lincoln had always had a knack for getting people comfortable, getting them talking, and then getting them to reveal more than they intended.
"I need to go," Colesbery said.
"Is it happening again?"
Lincoln had stopped by the apartment one day when things weren't going well. There had been a smell, an odor like fried onions mixed with stale mayonnaise, which had triggered something, transported Colesbery, made him see things: jagged faces, torn limbs, trails of blood. Colesbery had heard the knock, yanked open the door to the courtyard, and tried to hit Lincoln, but Lincoln was strong enough to grab and hold Colesbery till he calmed, till he convinced Colesbery that what he thought he was seeing was not real.
"I'm good," Colesbery said. "Thanks for the information."
* * *
That night Colesbery couldn't sleep. His bed always felt too big, too something, so he often couldn't sleep there. Around midnight, after staring at the ceiling for an hour, he got up and went into the den. He watched TV for a while, tried to sleep on the couch. No luck. Again he got up, and then went out into the tiny courtyard. He didn't have any chairs, but the courtyard made him feel more secure.
The square footprint of his apartment was evenly divided into four quadrants: the bedroom, the den, the courtyard, and the galley kitchen and bathroom split the last quadrant. Both the den and the bedroom had sliding glass doors that opened up onto the courtyard. The first week, Colesbery sat staring from the bedroom, then from the den, at the outside door in the far corner of the courtyard. He checked the lock five times a night.
Now he just leaned against the outer wall, peering into the apartment, thinking about what Lincoln had told him. He wouldn't find Chelsea. She was strung out, probably dead, but in the wind for certain. She was a year older than him, and light-years ahead in experience. Colesbery knew about cheap wine—Mad Dog, Red Dagger, Boone's Farm—but Chelsea drank vodka, tequila, and she knew about drugs and where to get them. White neighborhoods that Colesbery didn't feel comfortable in sometimes. Nobody's going to bother us, she would say as they rode past small one-story sixties and seventies houses, almost all of them with a small beat-up car and a pickup in the driveway. You think that because you white, Colesbery would say.
It was six months before she introduced him to her parents. Her father, slim and wiry with stringy black hair on its way to gray, owned a tire wholesale shop in downtown Ensley. They shook hands when Colesbery picked her up to go to Junior Achievement, but Colesbery sensed his displeasure at this black boy there to pick up his daughter. Colesbery picked her up every Tuesday for the meetings, which they did actually attend, but they also left early often, rode around and drank, and found dark, quiet, secluded spots to park. At school, Chelsea had taken to pushing Colesbery back into the side room between the shelves and giving him hand jobs. He'd stand between the two shelves, a hand on each to maintain his steadiness; she would unzip his pants and stroke Colesbery till he finished, and when he did, it was often in the pages of a book, which she would then fold closed and return to a shelf. But when they were in the car, Chelsea always pulled him hard inside of her, often grabbing his bare behind with a force that thrilled him. What always surprised him was her need to look him in the eyes when he came. Sometimes he would lower his head and she would place her hands on his cheeks and lift up his face. The first few times they used protection, but when she told him she was on the pill, that she wanted to feel him inside her, Colesbery complied. Sometimes she would cry afterward, tell Colesbery nothing was wrong, that she was just happy. And he wanted to believe her, even after he found out it wasn't a lie
, but wasn't the truth either.
When Junior Achievement ended, Colesbery started working at Rally's, and when he got off at night, he would sometimes bring Chelsea a burger and some fries and a strawberry soda. He always parked on the street at the end of the block and walked up the alley. From there he could slip in through the fence and make his way to her window. It was dark, shaded by trees and a fence, and her parents were usually in the den on the opposite end of the house. But one night they were on the porch when Colesbery got there. The grass was thick and usually soundless, but there were still a good number of leaves on the ground, so he had to be careful, move slower than usual. As he neared Chelsea's window, he heard her parents talking. Before he tapped on the window, her father said his name. Colesbery froze, but no one was coming at him around the front corner of the house. They were discussing him. Her mother, a woman with long and frizzy auburn hair and a penchant for cookbooks, was saying she didn't like it much better than her husband, but she thought it was a phase, that it would pass. Mr. Gradine then said that he just didn't want that nigger coming around his house into the next year, and his friends were starting to talk, saying that she was tainted now. He'd heard the word before, but hadn't expected it here, not after so many months of her parents being civil to him. He wanted to confront them, but just stood frozen, looking into the window of her bedroom. She was on the bed reading, but he couldn't knock, not then.
He'd left, run back to his car, but only drove around. Fuck that, he kept telling himself. He was going to have to say something. An hour later, near midnight, he was back. Chelsea's light was still on. When he got to her window, what he saw nearly made him throw up. Chelsea's nightgown was puffed up near her neck and just over the tops of her breasts, but she was naked from the waist down, her face turned toward the window where he stood. He thought she saw him, but her eyes were blank, absent. Her father was on top of her, then pushed himself up till he could turn and sit at the foot of the bed. He reached down and pulled up first his boxers and then a pair of dingy work pants. Colesbery looked from him to her and back to him. Mr. Gradine rose and left. Colesbery didn't knock, his anger from earlier now transformed into something that he didn't know how to handle.
Standing now in his small courtyard, Colesbery replayed those moments in his mind. He could have done something, should have done something. But he just turned and ran, from Chelsea, from everything. Didn't tell her what he saw either. When he did see her again, there was distance between them, which became less the sporadic interruption and more the norm. They argued more and more. He began not showing up when he said he would. Once, when he was high and stopped by, her father was on the porch smoking a cigarette. She ain't here, he'd said, but kept talking. Colesbery noticed the empty beer cans, the cigarette butts. That night Mr. Gradine had been the first to suggest Colesbery go to the service, and for once something made sense to him. He could remember it now just as clearly as when it happened. He'd wanted to tell the man to fuck himself, that he should leave, but getting away sounded like the best option. Getting as far away as possible from Birmingham, from his drunk uncle, from school, from Chelsea.
The next morning, after putting cereal into a Styrofoam bowl, Colesbery took several minutes to pour enough milk to nudge the cereal, the white just visible here and there, peeking out. Still, he couldn't look at the milk, kept seeing faces, boys halfway around the world, dead. He wasn't surprised, the milk thing had been happening since he got home. He left the milk sitting there, got dressed, and left.
His uncle lived in the same run-down apartment. Colesbery knocked, then walked through the unlocked door.
"What the hell you doing back? You must've come back to see 'bout that little white girl who was having your baby when you left." His uncle was sitting in a goldish-brown chair from another era. His hair was nearly gone now on the top, and his arthritis had turned his fingers into twisted roots and knots. "Go to the kitchen and get me a beer."
"Just came to see how you doing, Uncle." Colesbery went to the kitchen and grabbed a can from the refrigerator. "Got to go to the bathroom," he said as he handed it over. He bypassed the kitchen and went to his uncle's bedroom. In the same drawer, in the same box. Colesbery exhaled, surprised his uncle hadn't sold the .38 by now, and relieved at knowing he wouldn't have to find another one. He checked it over, then tucked it into the back of his pants.
"You coming back?" his uncle asked when Colesbery returned to the den and told him he had somewhere to be.
"I'll bring you a twelve-pack, Uncle," he said, and left.
* * *
Downtown Ensley hadn't changed. Shortly before noon, Colesbery parked his pickup in a lot near Carter's Barbershop and walked back the two blocks, past Hawkins Park. When he was in high school, he and his friends would sometimes gather there, call themselves the Junction Boys 'cause they had been a couple of times to the Function in the Junction, an annual festival that took place in that park and celebrated the musical history of Ensley. But they didn't know about the history then, just liked to call themselves the Junction Boys because it sounded like it carried weight, like there was something there to be respected. Didn't know it then, but now it seemed to Colesbery that everything in the world came down to respect. It was his uncle who had told him about how Erskine Hawkins had written and recorded that song as a B side, and about how a white dude recorded it later and had made a boatload of money, none of which went to Hawkins. "It's always respect," Colesbery said aloud.
He walked almost to the corner, near where they placed the historical marker on the Belcher-Nixon Building, and waited. He wondered what it was like back when the streetcars used to come through and all the black folks would unload. The housing projects were gone, replaced by some new Hope VI housing. It was clean and newish and modern. Maybe they got some hope now, he thought. Yet nothing felt much different, even though he'd driven by the sign of some smiling city councilman touting the changes that were happening.
When Mr. Gradine rounded the corner like he had at lunchtime for as many years as Colesbery could remember, he came face-to-face with Colesbery, almost walked into him, and stopped. He was shorter than Colesbery remembered, and his face was lined with age and his eyes looked tired.
"You remember me?" asked Colesbery.
"I don't know where she is."
"I don't care about her." He had the pistol now in the waistband in the front of his pants, and raised his shirt, then placed his hand on the handle. "I'm here for you."
Mr. Gradine looked around, over Colesbery's shoulder, then to the right toward the KFC. "What does that mean?" he asked.
"Need you to know when you made her get that abortion, the child you—"
"What are you talking—"
"—killed was mine."
Chelsea had tracked Colesbery down and told him. When he told her about what he saw that night outside her bedroom, she said that was the first time her daddy had done that in close to eight months, that she knew she was pregnant before that.
"I didn't kill any child." Mr. Gradine's face scowled into indignation. "Back then I thought you were just a ni—"
The shot was not loud. Mr. Gradine seemed more startled than injured. He put his hands on his chest, then wavered left till the bricks caught him, held him up for a moment. The stain spread down his white shirt from beneath his hands. He slid down the wall, the whole time staring with disbelief at Colesbery.
Colesbery stepped closer, and as he was looking down into Mr. Gradine's eyes, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a playing card. When he first thought of this moment, he envisioned leaving behind his dog tag, a spent cartridge from Afghanistan, and his Airborne shoulder patch, but he'd changed his mind; he would not end his life here. He'd decided this moment, if he got away, would be his beginning. The playing card was white, and it said JOKER in black in opposite corners. In the middle of the card hovered a jet-black figure, a dancing joker.
Colesbury pinched the card between his index and middle fingers,
then flicked it. The spinning card flew in an arc and landed on Mr. Gradine's chest, just above the growing bloodstain.
"What's that for?" asked Mr. Gradine through the blood and spittle gurgling out of the corner of his mouth.
"I'm playing my race card."
Colesbery waited till death claimed the eyes, then turned and walked away. He heard no sirens, no screams, nothing. Things would be different now, he told himself.
ALL THE DEAD IN OAKWOOD
by Marlin Barton
Montgomery
for Wayne Greenhaw
His name was Hiram. The moment she met him at the songwriters group she knew who he was named after. He'd right away told her no, he did not go by Hank as the man himself had done. If he looked his age, she put him at twenty-nine. When she asked, he nodded. She knew people thought of thirty-three, her age, as their Jesus year. "So is this your Hank year?" she asked. He only stared at her, and when he did, he looked way past twenty-nine, and she wondered, fleetingly, if that look was the only way he'd ever reach past the age Hank had lived, then dismissed this thought as the kind of dark notion she was prone to, dismissed it until later when she learned he'd done time for assault, twice, and after he told her the stories, she suspected the second time he'd meant to kill the man.
"Polly," she told him when he asked. It was a name she'd hated as a girl, thought too plain, simple, old-fashioned. But at eighteen, after she'd learned to play guitar so well that her parents bought her a Martin D-28, she first heard the song "Pretty Polly," and the beauty and tragedy of the hundreds-year-old murder ballad, its very intensity, made her hear her name in a new way that weighed heavy on her in a way she liked, felt connected to.