by Peter Straub
“We gotta get out of here, he whispered. He was close enough so I could smell that electrical stink. I stepped to his side, and he grabbed my arm. I yanked my arm out of his grip and went forward a little ways and looked through the door of the shack.”
“A bed was shoved up against the far wall, and a woman lay naked on the bed. There was blood all over her legs, and blood all over the sheets, and big puddles of blood on the floor. A woman in a raggedy robe, hair stuck out all over her head, squatted beside the bed, holding the other woman’s hand. She was a colored woman—a Backs woman—but the other one, the one on the bed, was white. Probably she was pretty, when she was alive. All I could see was white skin and blood, and I near fainted.”
“This wasn’t some white-trash woman who lived out in The Backs—she was brought there, and the man who brought her had killed her. More trouble was coming down than I could imagine, trouble enough to kill lots of our people. And if Dee and I said a word about the white man we’d seen, the trouble would come right straight down on us.”
“I must have made some kind of noise, because the woman next to the bed turned half ways around and looked at me. There wasn’t any doubt about it—she saw me. All she saw of Dee was a dirty white sheet, but she saw my face, and she knew who I was. I knew her, too, and she wasn’t any Backs woman. She lived down the street from us. Her name was Mary Randolph, and she was the one who came up to Eddie Grimes after he got shot to death and brought him back to life. Mary Randolph followed my dad’s band, and when we played roadhouses or colored dance halls, she’d be likely to turn up. A couple of times she told me I played good drums—I was a drummer back then, you know, switched to saxophone when I turned twelve. Mary Randolph just looked at me, her hair stuck out straight all over her head like she was already inside a whirlwind of trouble. No expression on her face except that look you get when your mind is going a mile a minute and your body can’t move at all. She didn’t even look surprised. She almost looked like she wasn’t surprised, like she was expecting to see me. As bad as I’d felt that night, this was the worst of all. I liked to have died. I’d have disappeared down an anthill, if I could. I didn’t know what I had done—just be there, I guess—but I’d never be able to undo it.”
“I pulled at Dee’s sheet, and he tore off down the side of the shack like he’d been waiting for a signal. Mary Randolph stared into my eyes, and it felt like I had to pull myself away—I couldn’t just turn my head, I had to disconnect. And when I did, I could still feel her staring at me. Somehow I made myself go down past the side of the shack, but I could still see Mary Randolph inside there, looking out at the place where I’d been.”
“If Dee had said anything at all when I caught up with him, I’d have knocked his teeth down his throat, but he just moved fast and quiet through the trees, seeing the best way to go, and I followed after. I felt like I’d been kicked by a horse. When we got on the path, we didn’t bother trying to sneak down through the woods on the other side, we lit out and ran as hard as we could—like wild dogs were after us. And after we got onto Meridian Road, we ran toward town until we couldn’t run anymore.”
“Dee clamped his hand over his side and staggered forward a little bit. Then he stopped and ripped off his costume and lay down by the side of the road, breathing hard. I was leaning forward with my hands on my knees, as winded as he was. When I could breathe again, I started walking down the road. Dee picked himself up and got next to me and walked along, looking at my face and then looking away, and then looking back at my face again.”
“So? I said.”
“I know that lady, Dee said.”
“Hell, that was no news. Of course he knew Mary Randolph—she was his neighbor, too. I didn’t bother to answer, I just grunted at him. Then I reminded him that Mary hadn’t seen his face, only mine.”
“Not Mary, he said. The other one.”
“He knew the dead white woman’s name? That made everything worse. A lady like that shouldn’t be in Dee Sparks’s world, especially if she’s going to wind up dead in The Backs. I wondered who was going to get lynched, and how many.”
“Then Dee said that I knew her, too. I stopped walking and looked him straight in the face.”
“Miss Abbey Montgomery, he said. She brings clothes and food down to our church, Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“He was right—I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard her name, but I’d seen her once or twice, bringing baskets of ham and chicken and boxes of clothes to Dee’s father’s church. She was about twenty years old, I guess, so pretty she made you smile just to look at. From a rich family in a big house right at the top of Miller’s Hill. Some man didn’t think a girl like that should have any associations with colored people, I guess, and decided to express his opinion about as strong as possible. Which meant that we were going to take the blame for what happened to her, and the next time we saw white sheets, they wouldn’t be Halloween costumes.”
“He sure took a long time to kill her, I said.”
“And Dee said, She ain’t dead.”
“So I asked him, What the hell did he mean by that? I saw the girl. I saw the blood. Did he think she was going to get up and walk around? Or maybe Mary Randolph was going to tell her that magic word and bring her back to life?”
“You can think that if you want to, Dee said. But Abbey Montgomery ain’t dead.”
“I almost told him I’d seen her ghost, but he didn’t deserve to hear about it. The fool couldn’t even see what was right in front of his eyes. I couldn’t expect him to understand what happened to me when I saw that miserable . . . that thing. He was rushing on ahead of me anyhow, like I’d suddenly embarrassed him or something. That was fine with me. I felt the exact same way. I said, I guess you know neither one of us can ever talk about this, and he said, I guess you know it, too, and that was the last thing we said to each other that night. All the way down Meridian Road Dee Sparks kept his eyes straight ahead and his mouth shut. When we got to the field, he turned toward me like he had something to say, and I waited for it, but he faced forward again and ran away. Just ran. I watched him disappear past the general store, and then I walked home by myself.”
“My mom gave me hell for getting my clothes all wet and dirty, and my brothers laughed at me and wanted to know who beat me up and stole my candy. As soon as I could, I went to bed, pulled the covers up over my head, and closed my eyes. A little while later, my mom came in and asked if I was all right. Did I get into a fight with that Dee Sparks? Dee Sparks was born to hang, that was what she thought, and I ought to have a better class of friends. I’m tired of playing those drums, Momma, I said. I want to play the saxophone instead. She looked at me surprised, but said she’d talk about it with Daddy, and that it might work out.”
“For the next couple days, I waited for the bomb to go off. On that Friday, I went to school, but couldn’t concentrate for beans. Dee Sparks and I didn’t even nod at each other in the hallways—just walked by like the other guy was invisible. On the weekend I said I felt sick and stayed in bed, wondering when that whirlwind of trouble would come down. I wondered if Eddie Grimes would talk about seeing me—once they found the body, they’d get around to Eddie Grimes real quick.”
“But nothing happened that weekend, and nothing happened all the next week. I thought Mary Randolph must have hid the white girl in a grave out in The Backs. But how long could a girl from one of those rich families go missing without investigations and search parties? And, on top of that, what was Mary Randolph doing there in the first place? She liked to have a good time, but she wasn’t one of those wild girls with a razor under her skirt—she went to church every Sunday, was good to people, nice to kids. Maybe she went out to comfort that poor girl, but how did she know she’d be there in the first place? Misses Abbey Montgomerys from the hill didn’t share their plans with Mary Randolphs from Darktown. I couldn’t forget the way she looked at me, but I couldn’t understand it, either. The more I thought about that look, the more it
was like Mary Randolph was saying something to me, but what? Are you ready for this? Do you understand this? Do you know how careful you must be?”
“My father said I could start learning the C-melody sax, and when I was ready to play it in public, my little brother wanted to take over the drums. Seems he always wanted to play drums, and in fact, he’s been a drummer ever since, a good one. So I worked out how to play my little sax, I went to school and came straight home after, and everything went on like normal, except Dee Sparks and I weren’t friends anymore. If the police were searching for a missing rich girl, I didn’t hear anything about it.”
“Then one Saturday I was walking down our street to go to the general store, and Mary Randolph came through her front door just as I got to her house. When she saw me, she stopped moving real sudden, with one hand still on the side of the door. I was so surprised to see her that I was in a kind of slow motion, and I must have stared at her. She gave me a look like an X-ray, a look that searched around down inside me. I don’t know what she saw, but her face relaxed, and she took her hand off the door and let it close behind her, and she wasn’t looking inside me anymore. Miss Randolph, I said, and she told me she was looking forward to hearing our band play at a Beer garden dance in a couple of weeks. I told her I was going to be playing the saxophone at that dance, and she said something about that, and all the time it was like we were having two conversations, the top one about me and the band, and the one underneath about her and the murdered white girl in The Backs. It made me so nervous, my words got all mixed up. Finally she said, You make sure you say hello to your daddy from me, now, and I got away.”
“After I passed her house, Mary Randolph started walking down the street behind me. I could feel her watching me, and I started to sweat. Mary Randolph was a total mystery to me. She was a nice lady, but probably she buried that girl’s body. I didn’t know but that she was going to come and kill me, one day. And then I remembered her kneeling down beside Eddie Grimes at the roadhouse. She had been dancing with Eddie Grimes, who was in jail more often than he was out. I wondered if you could be a respectable lady and still know Eddie Grimes well enough to dance with him. And how did she bring him back to life? Or was that what happened at all? Hearing that lady walk along behind me made me so uptight, I crossed to the other side of the street.”
“A couple days after that, when I was beginning to think that the trouble was never going to happen after all, it came down. We heard police cars speeding down the street right when we were finishing dinner. I thought they were coming for me, and I almost lost my chicken and rice. The sirens went right past our house, and then more sirens came toward us from other directions—the old klaxons they had in those days. It sounded like every cop in the state was rushing into Darktown. This was bad, bad news. Someone was going to wind up dead, that was certain. No way all those police were going to come into our part of town, make all that commotion, and leave without killing at least one man. That’s the truth. You just had to pray that the man they killed wasn’t you or anyone in your family. My daddy turned off the lamps, and we went to the window to watch the cars go by. Two of them were state police. When it was safe, Daddy went outside to see where all the trouble was headed. After he came back in, he said it looked like the police were going toward Eddie Grimes’s place. We wanted to go out and look, but they wouldn’t let us, so we went to the back windows that faced toward Grimes’s house. Couldn’t see anything but a lot of cars and police standing all over the road back there. Sounded like they were knocking down Grimes’s house with sledgehammers. Then a whole bunch of cops took off running, and all I could see was the cars spread out across the road. About ten minutes later, we heard lots of gunfire coming from a couple of streets farther back. It like to have lasted forever. Like hearing the Battle of the Bulge. My momma started to cry, and so did my little brother. The shooting stopped. The police shouted to each other, and then they came back and got in their cars and went away.”
“On the radio the next morning, they said that a known criminal, a Negro man named Edward Grimes, had been killed while trying to escape arrest for the murder of a white woman. The body of Eleanore Monday, missing for three days, had been found in a shallow grave by Woodland police searching near an illegal distillery in the region called The Backs. Miss Monday, the daughter of grocer Albert Monday, had been in poor mental and physical health, and Grimes had apparently taken advantage of her weakness to either abduct or lure her to The Backs, where she had been savagely murdered. That’s what it said on the radio—I still remember the words. In poor mental and physical health. Savagely murdered.”
“When the paper finally came, there on the front page was a picture of Eleanore Monday, a girl with dark hair and a big nose. She didn’t look anything like the dead woman in the shack. She hadn’t even disappeared on the right day. Eddie Grimes was never going to be able to explain things, because the police had finally cornered him in the old jute warehouse just off Meridian Road next to the general store. I don’t suppose they even bothered trying to arrest him—they weren’t interested in arresting him. He killed a white girl. They wanted revenge, and they got it.”
“After I looked at the paper, I got out of the house and ran between the houses to get a look at the jute warehouse. Turned out a lot of folks had the same idea. A big crowd strung out in a long line in front of the warehouse, and cars were parked all along Meridian Road. Right up in front of the warehouse door was a police car, and a big cop stood in the middle of the big doorway, watching people file by. They were walking past the doorway one by one, acting like they were at some kind of exhibit. Nobody was talking. It was a sight I never saw before in that town, whites and colored all lined up together. On the other side of the warehouse, two groups of men stood alongside the road, one colored and one white, talking so quietly you couldn’t hear a word.”
“Now I was never one who liked standing in lines, so I figured I’d just dart up there, peek in, and save myself some time. I came around the end of the line and ambled toward the two bunches of men, like I’d already had my look and was just hanging around to enjoy the scene. After I got a little past the warehouse door, I sort of drifted up alongside it. I looked down the row of people, and there was Dee Sparks, just a few yards away from being able to see in. Dee was leaning forward, and when he saw me he almost jumped out of his skin. He looked away as fast as he could. His eyes turned as dead as stones. The cop at the door yelled at me to go to the end of the line. He never would have noticed me at all if Dee hadn’t jumped like someone just shot off a firecracker behind him.”
“About halfway down the line, Mary Randolph was standing behind some of the ladies from the neighborhood. She looked terrible. Her hair stuck out in raggedy clumps, and her skin was ashy, like she hadn’t slept in a long time. I sped up a little, hoping she wouldn’t notice me, but after I took one more step, Mary Randolph looked down and her eyes hooked into mine. I swear, what was in her eyes almost knocked me down. I couldn’t even tell what it was, unless it was pure hate. Hate and pain. With her eyes hooked into mine like that, I couldn’t look away. It was like I was seeing that miserable, terrible white smear twisting up between the trees on that night in The Backs. Mary let me go, and I almost fell down all over again.”
“I got to the end of the line and started moving along regular and slow with everybody else. Mary Randolph stayed in my mind and blanked out everything else. When I got up to the door, I barely took in what was inside the warehouse—a wall full of bullet holes and bloodstains all over the place, big slick ones and little drizzly ones. All I could think of was the shack and Mary Randolph sitting next to the dead girl, and I was back there all over again.”
“Mary Randolph didn’t show up at the Beer garden dance, so she didn’t hear me play saxophone in public for the first time. I didn’t expect her, either, not after the way she looked out at the warehouse. There’d been a lot of news about Eddie Grimes, who they made out to be less civilized than a gorilla, a c
razy man who’d murder anyone as long as he could kill all the white women first. The paper had a picture of what they called Grimes’s ’lair,’ with busted furniture all over the place and holes in the walls, but they never explained that it was the police tore it up and made it look that way.”
“The other thing people got suddenly all hot about was The Backs. Seems the place was even worse than everybody thought. Seems white girls besides Eleanore Monday had been taken out there—according to some, there was even white girls living out there, along with a lot of bad coloreds. The place was a nest of vice, Sodom and Gomorrah. Two days before the town council was supposed to discuss the problem, a gang of white men went out there with guns and clubs and torches and burned every shack in The Backs clear down to the ground. While they were there, they didn’t see a single soul, white, colored, male, female, damned or saved. Everybody who lived in The Backs had skedaddled. And the funny thing was, long as The Backs had existed right outside of Woodland, no one in Woodland could recollect the name of anyone who had ever lived there. They couldn’t even recall the name of anyone who had ever gone there, except for Eddie Grimes. In fact, after the place got burned down, it appeared that it must have been a sin just to say its name, because no one ever mentioned it. You’d think men so fine and moral as to burn down The Backs would be willing to take the credit, but none ever did.”
“You could think they must have wanted to get rid of some things out there. Or wanted real bad to forget about things out there. One thing I thought, Dr. Garland and the man I saw leaving that shack had been out there with torches.”