by Jeffrey Lent
The dogs circled the room, both inhaling deep at the snakeskin. They climbed onto the platform where he’d spread his bedroll and blankets. Where they could smell him. He undressed and folded his clothes over the valise parked beside the bed, a hand reach away. Then knelt naked to blow out the lantern. And when it was out wished he’d thought beforehand to check his pockets for matches. He had some. Somewhere. He felt along in the dark and got into the bedroll, pushing his feet and legs down past the crunched-in dogs who only shifted enough to let him in. Once in, he stretched and turned and the dogs turned with him.
“Hey. Hey!” The voice low, urgent, a whisper articulated into the night so it became a thing of the night itself. The words again repeated, calling out: “Hey in there. Hey!” A woman, a girl, the voice low in her throat but quick, breath filling the words, as if she spoke from some distance direct into his ear, as if she knew him and were calling him out as he turned waking, the dogs already alert, sitting up beside him, a low-throated growl rising from Lovey. Glow barked once and stopped when he placed his hand on her back. Then both dogs quiet. As if they did not know what to make of this new place. Foster sat up in the bedroll. The girl outside was rapping on the door as she called again, then rapping on the window, then back to the door. Silent he cursed himself for not having matches, for not knowing where they were, and writhed off the plank platform with the sleeping bag held up under his arms and hopped two-footed to the door. He leaned at the door, one hand sliding up the wall to find the wood latch. He didn’t lift it but kept his hand there and bent his head close to the door and matched her own whisper.
“Who is it?”
“Who is it? You don’t know who I am. I could tell you anything and it wouldn’t make a difference to you. Open the damn door.”
“What do you want?”
“Shoot. You going to play twenty questions or you going to open the door?”
He was silent, his hand on the latch. He felt he could feel her breathing, thought she must be leaned up against the door on the other side the same as he was.
“It’s Daphne. There. Does that help?”
“I don’t know any Daphne.”
“Of course you don’t. You don’t know anything. But you opened the door, you’d know something. That’d be a start, don’t you think?”
“I don’t have any clothes on.”
He heard her laughing. She said, “I don’t recall asking you to get naked.”
“I was asleep.”
“Well, get dressed.”
“It’s dark in here. Do you have any matches?”
“To see you with?”
“So I can find my clothes.”
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you open the door and for the two minutes it takes you to get dressed we can be grown up about it. How’s that sound to you, Foster Pelham?”
He rubbed his hand over his face. Tried to scrub through his hair to flatten it down into a single piece. He could feel the silent dogs behind him. He said, “How’d you know my name?”
It was quiet a moment and then when her voice came back it was still low but for a moment all the humor was gone from it. “What do you think? I just fell out of the sky?”
“I drove by three or four times this evening and that big fancy car I’d never seen before was parked out front and then when I came by again and it was finally gone he was gone too and I didn’t know what to think but it had caught my attention I can tell you that. So I rode around some more and went out to the house and had some supper and was on the porch and what did I see go by but that very car and I could see him setting up there beside you, him that never goes anywhere unless he’s dragged and then not very far or for very long. So there wasn’t anything for it but to come back over here and see what kind of business he was wrapped up in. I went up to the windows and watched the two of you eating one of his famous soup suppers, now that’s something you don’t want to get involved with more times than you have to, not if you value variety in your diet. Or meat. I’ve not yet seen that man eat a piece of meat. So I waited until he bundled you off out here to bed and let myself in and had a little talk with him. Uncle Lex, he can’t keep much from me I tell you that right up front. To most folks he’s a zipper-mouth but I can wheedle about anything out of him. I call him Uncle Lex but he’s my great-uncle which I’m not about to call him because it would swell his head and seeing how he’s already tilted off some little bit it would do neither one of us any good. He’s a regular squirrel I tell you, the same as me. The only difference is he’s a man and a old one too so people let him be instead of fussing after him like they do me, behind my back and to my face too, how I should be carted off I guess for a rest cure somewhere. Up to the mountains, to Asheville where there’s sanitariums thick as ticks although I don’t even like the sound of that word. Sanitarium. It sounds like I’m not clean enough. Or what they really want is to marry me off so I can get stuck out on some dirt farm somewhere and be as loopy as I want and only have a husband to inflict myself on but I don’t want any of that either. The only husbands I’ve seen so far I’d probably have to do in with a axe, that’s how tedious they seem to me, and the only other ones would probably take the same axe to me, which doesn’t strike me as much fun either. There’s boys that can be fun but they all turn into husbands sooner or later too. Not that I rule anything out. I can tell you this though, I’m not one of those brainless little girls who wants to run off to California and be in the pictures. There is some kind of evil in that notion, some pure evil is what I think. So what do you want to do?”
“Me? You’re the one woke me up.”
They were standing in the alley beside the Chrysler. As soon as he’d gotten dressed she’d taken him by the hand and led him silent out through the yard, her hand hot wrapped around his, he following her, still barefooted, following the white of her sleeveless dress through the dark, her bare arms darker than the cloth, long slender sweeps of arm down from her shoulderblades, the collar of the dress low enough behind to show her nape below the bob of thick soft blond hair white in the moonlight. As soon as they went through the gate into the alley she dropped his hand as if all she wanted was to get him away from the house, beyond earshot of sleepless old men. Foster looked back. The upstairs light was out. His hand she’d held was moist and cooling in the night.
“You want to waste a perfectly good night, is that what you’re telling me?”
“I’d thought I’d get some sleep is all. I been on the road some days.”
“God, I could just stand here and listen to you. That funny accent.”
“It’s you that talks funny.” Gawky and awkward immediately. She was not short but he felt himself a loose-limbed clamor just standing beside her. Facing her, her face tilted up, lips parted. She was older. Nineteen.
She tilted her head a little. “Don’t sleep. Let’s go ride around. The nighttime, the nighttime is the only time I can really stand being alive. Everything goes away and the world’s made just the way you want it to be. There’s this piece of time where even the hours are gone. You know what I mean?”
And he recalled those nights riding with his father and knew well what she meant and had even seen enough dawns murder those nights to know how they all ended. And he would not admit it but she was standing two feet away from him, crushing him.
“You should let me drive.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Because you’re barefoot and I know my way around and you don’t.”
“Well let’s take your car then. You didn’t walk here, did you?”
“I don’t want to take my car. It’s just a ruint wore-out old flivver that Daddy wouldn’t even let me drive except I told him if I couldn’t use the car I’d just walk out the road and thumb down a ride with the first criminal that came along. But I knew he wasn’t worried at all about criminals but that some neighbor would happen along and see that crazy Pettigrew girl out thumbing like some plain country hussy. I want to drive
this car. This car looks like fun.”
He stood silent, rubbing one bare foot against the hard clay of the alley. Wondering if he should go back and get his boots. Wondering if the dogs would howl if he left them. Wondering how far this girl would run circles around him and if she even knew.
“Well, Foster Pelham,” she said, “don’t you trust me?”
“No.”
She laughed then and he liked her laugh. Heard the sadness in it and liked that too. She said, “It’s not many boys are honest.” Her voice dropped down. “You just keep it like that.”
She drove through the downtown with a smoothness and precision that calmed him. The town was silent in the warm night but for the cicadas ringing off in the trees. Past the spare downtown blocks she turned off and they were in the night then, leaving the pale tangerine streetlamps behind. They crossed the river over a low bridge of heavy uneven planks with railroad tie railings, the whole bridge heaving piece by piece under the motion of the automobile. Then twisted up through tight uncobbled pitted streets past shack houses set tight one against the other, random with the uneven fall of land. Daphne twisting the wheel with an expert slide of open lank wrist. Some of the houses dark and others showing the glimmer of lantern light behind pulled shades. But people on the street. Children and adults, men and women both, all throwing tilted glances at the slow-moving churn of the automobile. All colored. The children in rag shirts and pull-over dresses. Long naked legs moving like shadows against shadows in the dark. The eclipse of headlight-caught eyes turning away. The men some in suits and some in overalls, some of each bareheaded and some in porkpies or even hats of a finer block. The women also some fine and some in everyday wear. But all tilted back along the side of the street as the car passed. Watching it pass by averting their heads. Looking away, off to the other side. But he could feel them. Not their eyes so much as their minds, tightly focused on the Chrysler as it came abreast of them and moved on.
“Fishtown,” she announced. “What we’re after is a man what will sell me some bottles of beer. A little liquor. It’s corn liquor clean as a whistle, I swear. Can you take a drink of liquor, Foster?”
“I can.” Thinking he could twist around in his seat and reach back under the backseat and lift out a bottle of bonded scotch probably better than anything she’d ever tasted and was proud of himself that he did not. The best he could hope for at this time, right now, was to let this blond self-declared crazy girl lead him through the night. The air washed over him warm as a bath and the people around him scared him and he did not want to be anyplace but right where he was.
She left the engine running and told him to stay and went in to buy the liquor. Parked alongside a house no different from the others around it, the same dim shades. But a handful of men squatting on their heels on the porch, all watching the car. This time no eyes turned away. Hats tilted back on their heads. In the headlamp light their eyes did not show white but red. Staring hard at him. He could not look back at them. He opened the glovebox and took out the box with the single last of his father’s cigarettes and smoked. The smoke dangling in soft ropes out the open window. He looked at his knee propped up on the dash and watched also for the flash of light that would be Daphne coming out of the house. He felt the men on the porch could ignore him or kill him and either way would take the same pleasure in it. But they did not move. He understood that they were in some ways more afraid of him than he was of them. Which, he guessed, would not stop them from killing him if he stepped from the car.
She had two quart bottles of beer in a paper sack already sweated through and a fruit jar with a screw-on lid of clear corn liquor. They’d gone on through the hill broken apart by the lanes and homes of Fishtown and then were up away from the river bottom and out onto the great rolling pine flats and swaled fields of the Piedmont countryside, Daphne driving faster now with the road ahead open and clear under the moon, a smooth pale swath in the dark land, the even darker hemmed woods.
“You got a opener in here?”
“A what?”
“A opener. For the beers. Someway to prize them open.”
“I can do them against the door handle.”
“Just open one. We’ll pass it back and forth. What you do is sip some of the liquor and swallow some beer to smooth it down. By the time the beers are gone they’ll be warm anyhow but we won’t care then and be happy with the liquor straight.”
Foster said nothing but opened one of the quarts and handed it over to her and unscrewed the fruit jar lid and took a swallow, holding it in his mouth a moment for it to bite against his teeth. It was good, smooth, lacking what his father would have described as “fumey” from being hurried. He took a little more and then passed it over to her and took the bottle she held out. He didn’t like beer and this beer was pretty bad, flat and oily, bitter, but he thought he’d do things her way, this time anyhow. She wanted the beer right back after the liquor and he was happy to let it go. She pressed her dress down between her thighs and nested the bottle in there. He thought it was pretty bad beer to be treated so well. He was glad to have the liquor back.
“Uncle Lex tells me we’re cousins, you and me, in a mighty slender nigger-in-the-woodpile kind of way,” she said, one hand lying flat on top of the wheel as she drove fast, not looking at him. “Don’t worry, he also told me to keep that quiet and you might not think so to listen to me but that is one thing I am real good at doing. And, it doesn’t make any difference to me.” She modulated her tone then, said, “It don’t make me no nevermind,” as if mocking something—herself, some unknown listener—and went on. “The truth is—you want the truth Foster? The truth is there’s most likely plenty ‘cousins’ out there that we don’t look at or think about or pay any attention to at all. Some of us even with brothers and sisters too. But they’re not. They’re colored. They’re Negroes. That’s what we say—what we say if we’re nice people like my Mama is, likes to think she is—but the truth is that we all, each and every one of us, we say those words and all the time what we hear in our heads is Nigger, Nigger. And those are the ones we like. The good ones. The others, we don’t talk about. But the men, the men can talk about them. Those others. Those bad niggers. And the women they hear that talk and their mouths get all tight like they’re biting down hard onto a sour apple and you know what, Foster? Part of it is because each and every one of those women knows or suspects—and you tell me which is worse, to know a thing or just suspect it—each of them knows there’s little Negro children running around that’s half brothers and sisters to their own precious little children. And more than that. Each one of us knows that anywhere within a two—three-mile circle of any one of our homes there is more than that; there’s aunts and uncles and some split-off piece and parcel of every type of relative you can think of. Pettigrews. But they’s colored Pettigrews. So what do you do, Foster? Why, you clamp those sweet little dried-up old lips together and you don’t think about it. So there. Just in case you were feeling unique. Just in case you thought you were some walking one-and-only. But people found out about you, that’s what they’d think you were. And you’d flat disappear. Standing right before them you would change and go away. Unless of course you were pushy about it. Then you’d become one of those bad ones. They’d all look twice at this big car then I can tell you. What happened to me was I was at the University and had a breakdown was what they liked to call it and so they brought me home. Mama took me down to Dorothea Dix hospital? In Raleigh? Where some doctors talked to me for days on end and then finally one of them told my mama I was suffering from neuroses. He had to tell her something. He had to give her some word to cling on to. What could he do? Tell her I was the sane one in a crazy world? That wouldn’t pay the bills, I don’t imagine. So. What happened to you?”
“Seems to me,” Foster said, wondering what Mebane had told her, wondering what he himself might choose to tell her, and not sure of either one, “you already know about me what you need to know.”
“You
can do that, baby,” she said, “if that’s what you want. But it’s not why I’m sitting here.”
“You’re the one driving the car.”
“But it’s your car, isn’t it?” She looked over at him. He did not know what that look was intended to convey. She said, “Give over that fruit jar.” She took it and drank and shuddered and handed it back and lifted up the beer from the incubator of her thighs and drank some of that and offered it and when he declined she made no argument but settled it back down. They were driving with the windows open and the night warm and comfortable flowing over them, the land all but lost in the headlights and the speed, just here and there openings, sometimes the white shabby dribble of cotton and othertimes the dense rank of woods and here and there would be a farmhouse or shed or shack and he could not always tell which was habitation and which was not. Once there was a vast looming shape twisting in the air above the road before them and she braked the car hard and they sat silent while a froth-mouthed, redeye mule turned to face the headlights, blowing from its nostrils before it smelled them or smelled the car or just came to some decision from mule-sense and bolted from the road. And she drove on then, hard, going up through the gears and when they were back up to speed she said, “All Uncle Lex told me about you was the parts important to him. You can figure out what those were. And I’m not saying that’s not of interest to me, it is. But it’s not why we’re out riding around. Now is it?”