Solemn (19 page)

She wouldn't force her daughter. No. Solemn was getting to be
that age
—when the funny ways and moods and pimples showed up. Boys. For a girl who should have been smelling herself long time ago (by the new standards), Solemn was doing good. Bev also had to keep in mind Landon was gone. Akila around, but not Solemn's age.

So, when Desi Longwood got front page of
The Star-Herald
(in a pink blouse and with her hair straightened), Bev didn't mind Solemn slumping over burnt toast. And now, their friends (no one ever officially broke it) were on Channel 48 with
Mississippi News Now:
to talk of “The Miracle,” to praise God for good luck, to become local celebrities.

Alice Taylor had told Red it was coming on. Red told Bev. Bev told Solemn. None of them had ever known anybody who made it onto television, the joke of living under blue sky of the place most folks only heard of because of its Oprah Winfrey. The interview was live, so the Imperial was gone. It would drive in soon. Bev sat with chilled morning coffee, in her robe, Red out looking for work, Solemn slumped in bed.

“You have no memory of it?” the bouncy-bounce yellow-haired Barbie lady chirped.

“No,” Solemn heard her friend's voice say. “I was just walking, all by myself, back to my family. Then, I woke up in the hospital. My mother was there with me.”

Solemn knew Mrs. Longwood's voice: “We're so blessed somebody helped her.”

Somebody? Somebody?
Her part cut out, her role erased, her stardom stolen.

Somebody was mad.

*   *   *

Solemn moved her mind elsewhere. She invented enough alarms to skip out on school—“sick,” “the cat's lost,” “my time of the month,” “cicadas kept me up all night”—to consult herself at the well on the matter the woman from the television expressed. The mission of a gone daughter kept her seated under the big top of soapboxes risen up that spring as vocally as the cicadas unbridled for the first time in thirteen years. Corkboard notices and barbershop speeches and flyers of Landon's vocabulary, all by people who still carpooled and hitchhiked to town and Main and Catherine and Washington streets in hopes of government job postings after all:
The Klan is the Taliban, Bush the Devil, I am hungry and I am homeless … can somebody please buy me some chicken?, Buy Black, Acupuncture and Reiki Specialist Got the Key, Black Boy Beat in Bledsoe.

The cicadas, indicted for every flat hairdo or stubbed toe or sudden layoff or sparse milking or stumbling hen, were Solemn's cover to whisk away and reflect on the fading “Have You Seen Pearletta?” movement … going, going, gone. She wanted to see Pearletta again, tried to, in every black woman coming her way or going her own. She felt empowered to make her materialize. Yet Viola Weathers slipped off of the television the way her daughter seemed to slip off the face of the earth, with only a few flyers spotted around. The world had yet to invent a way to find a Pearletta Hassle, even if it wanted to.

Solemn had a mind to make an offering, to the well. She was a teenager now, too old for the Barbies. She wished everybody would stop wrapping them up for her. Didn't they know she knew the size of the box by now? Three months to the day after the Festival, Solemn marched past the steep and the Longwoods' with a whole satchel of them—naked they were. She even decided to sacrifice all the change she had; the grown folks always declined her offer to trade the matching bills for it. She trained herself not to look in the direction of the Longwoods. She could smell the peaches already. The well was replenished, somehow. She looked into the pit of it, but it was too far down inside and too gray outside for her to see her face. Solemn plopped the dolls down one by one. Seven in total. Then, she tossed the coins in with one dump. She breathed her wish on top of the melody the coins made, for her to solve a crime and help the woman on TV and to sit on television herself now to talk about how she did it. A savior, on top of a singer. Mighty fine. If the doll's miniature noses and toes pointed up to the top in time, then her wishes had been heard. She would think about it, all of it, from now, so the clues would arise. In time, somebody else caught up to her. Or she to them. No matter.

 

SIXTEEN

Akila flicked the
Herald-Star
newspaper cutout back and forth in her left hand, newly decorated with a tiny discount stone Landon produced two hundred fifty dollars for at Walmart. Akila mailed off three bills—now to Fort Campbell in Kentucky—sealed in an envelope with the ultimatum scribbled inside. Too mouthy and inexperienced to be deployed, Landon would be home again for a few days in summer. Her window of opportunity was tight. Akila tapped her feet at the cement driveway under her and Solemn at the small picnic stand, with a few covered park benches for Mississippi visitors and travelers. They were at the logged Holly Hill rest stop, milepost 154 down Natchez Trace Parkway, at least an hour from where she was supposed to be. This late morning, Akila was supposed to run around in her mother's borrowed car only to shop for a wedding dress—white lace, though the family preacher who agreed to officiate faintly warned cream silk was least offensive for her circumstance. Solemn negotiated a price for her assistance: a nifty five dollars for half a day or ten dollars for an entire. This would bring her moving fund to three hundred dollars, Solemn confided to Akila. “To where?” Akila asked, and then said, “Never mind.”

Viola and Edward Weathers took out ads in the major local newspapers, to plead to the public for information concerning Pearletta's disappearance. A more thorough portrait of her to leave behind than a crazed husband, baby in a well, and cheap motels. As it came clearer Pearletta Hassle really was a good girl set up a little better than the rest, there was rejuvenated interest in answers. This repositioning struck Akila as funny: no acceptance of fate or bad luck. These people expected a better image than that. They were discontent to sit down.

Akila thought, perhaps she could have something to offer to the mystery and debate. She did not quite understand Landon's enemies. They were so vague and bland. Nothing new about whites. She was unsure how the drying or dried oil fields scattered up the Mississippi related to a war she was told her country was in, or even where Afghanistan and any of the other sand-dusty places were on a map of the world. But here she could understand the need for answers to a daughter's disappearance. Perhaps murder. She would not remain silent. She would open her mouth. She would declare total anonymity for any information she provided, though a reward would be nice. It could start them on their own house. Maybe even sweepstake a real honeymoon. She wanted all that but could not afford it; maybe her help could be a way closer to it all.

A few weeks after the Festival on Easter Sunday, a patient night librarian at Warsaw Community Public Library let Akila into the microfilm space on a Monday it stayed open until eight. Akila wasn't keen on computers and the Web. She would do it how she had done things in school. There, she searched for the last name “Singer” with “trailer park” in the local papers, public records, county phone books, and genealogy maps. A speck of hope skid across Vicksburg. There, a Richard Singer oversaw a real estate operation of local apartments and storefronts. His main office was in the town's square, according to the address and the maps. A sweating glass bottle of pop was paperweight for a map Akila had only learned to read the week before. Then, she picked up the newspaper to read aloud: “‘Pearletta Hassle is the daughter of Viola and Edward Weathers of Jackson, Mississippi. She attended Oakwood Academy in Huntsville, Alabama, for her business degree. She is twenty-eight years old. She has an older brother, Edward, and his wife, Shelia. And her nephew, Edward the Third. And a younger sister, Patricia, a freshman at Oakwood. Here is a family picture of them all together. If you have any information, you may call—”

“Can I see it?” Solemn asked Akila, thinking she alone had conjured the trip.

“No,” Akila told her. “You don't need to look at this.”

“When we going to look at dresses?” Solemn asked.

They both talked about the thing they really didn't want to talk about. To them this felt like best behavior when it fact it was just maturity. Akila's heart begged to know:
Your daddy know Pearletta Hassle?
She had flip-flopped how to put it to Solemn many times, Bev even. Any practice left her tongue belly-up. The Redvines were good to her. They never judged her. Maybe even respected her. The churches and public aid offices felt like salt in the wound, but the Redvine place put her in cool waters. Solemn wanted to know if Pearletta Hassle was one of the nasty ladies: money on the dresser, mad woman at the door, curly panties on the floor, necklace between the teeth. She wanted to know if their babies should die and nobody should look for either one of them. She wanted to know if Akila would ever throw Landon's baby down into wells.

“Soon,” Akila answered. Having Solemn with her certainly helped in case she got lost. It could explain away any delays (
I took her to a restaurant and arcade…)
and calm suspicions from people who weren't used to seeing young black girls just driving around their avenues. She was fairly confident they were on the right track, going south down the Trace and west at some point to glide into Vicksburg, so she went with her instincts. Akila drove with no driver's license. In Bledsoe, no one cared.

Akila's nerves primarily tingled with wonder at what exactly she was going to find when she came to Vicksburg and why it mattered. She had not known Pearletta for more than twenty minutes and an afternoon. She never went back to the motel, her job. She pretended to be sick for a few days. She told her family to hang up on any employee who called for her. She saw, like everyone in Bledsoe did (
“Mmm-mmm-mmm … such a shame…”
), the bland announcement of a gal last seen in Home-Away-from-Home: black, female, drugs and drug paraphernalia found in the room, dishevel, outstanding tab. There was nothing printed about Pearletta herself: who she was and what she could have been.

There was an hour to go to Vicksburg, with Akila lost in thought and Solemn thoroughly asleep, content to be with her imaginations of an older sister, satisfied to see a stretch of life beyond her part of the world, eager to know what awaited them in a different place, totally unaware how she was being used as a cover for those who might ask questions back home and out there. And Akila enjoyed her company as well.

Solemn awoke to an Outkast song on the radio. Akila's abrupt careen off the Trace headed into Vicksburg. The greenery stood high along the road. Akila seemed focused and urgent. She pulled into the first gas station of Warren County, to fiddle with her map. She tuned out Solemn to see if the gas station had a lottery.

We should play it,
Solemn thought. She grabbed up quarters from the car's console. The lottery was something she had heard everyone talk about, watch the TV news for, laugh about while they guarded liquor and ate birthday cake, make faint mumblings while on their knees at church. She knew the folklore of her home at Singer's began with Redvine's lucky hit at the lotto. He couldn't have bought the trailer otherwise. At the very least, maybe some winnings could be her chance to stick out on the road a little longer with Akila. The lottery line was far too long. On top of it, the automatic crane in the better toy machine was jammed. The little dime-slot red horse outside was out of order. Solemn came back to the car with three pink gumballs and a spider ring encased in a plastic cylinder, from the cheaper game machine inside.

“Well, we gotta make a little bit of a stop before we go shopping for dresses.”

“Where we gotta go?”

Akila pulled off.

“Well, Solemn, you probably too young for anybody to talk to you about all this kind of stuff. But there was a woman I met. Had a lot of problems and issues and just, well, stuff going on. She's that girl everyone's been talking about, Pearletta Hassle…”

Solemn rolled the gumballs round her tongue and thought about Pearletta Hassle, hurt bad—her mama said. And, yes, she had helped. She never told. She watched cows in pasture appear to flurry by, but she was really the one moving. Then, she pictured Desiree: retreated into something unfamiliar and unfriendly. Leaving her alone and absent of reflection and affection, once again dependent upon her mental enterprise alone, left to imagine discarnate beings waving at her in the clouds and sky.

“… and, well, there are just people in this world who sometimes do bad things. Or, even if they didn't do a bad thing, they have their hands in the bad thing. And they don't have to pay for it. Or worse, no one even knows they did it. But, sometimes, you can do something about things. You can stand up, or at least you can do your part. Like now.”

Akila pointed a finger past Solemn, onto the far-up road at Solemn's left. Two girls sat up ahead: one balanced on side of a square gray suitcase and the other leaned atop a lumpy gray potato sack. No more than fifteen, sixteen, for sure, they could not have been. One black. One white. Solemn cringed, just getting around to enjoy the breeze along her cheek and unsure if she was capable of an apposite demeanor for new folks. At sight of a slowed-down vehicle, the hitcher girls leaped and pulled their belongings up. Akila parked and stared. Yes, female they were, yellow and brown and pigtailed and pimple faced. A number of vehicles whooshed past and rocked the little car a bit. One girl quickly squeezed in behind the passenger side; Solemn's door was unlocked. The other appeared at Akila's window and reached her long arm for the door handle, to find it locked. Akila lifted the knob for her.

They looked a bit younger than Akila and a bit older than Solemn, like right in between, perfectly. They brought smells of dank denim and cigarette smoke with them. They explained how far they had come (“so far”), what led to their circumstance of sitting on side a lazy road (“families left us”), what led to the opportunity to jump in here (“I can offer you a pack of cigarettes for gas money,” before “We don't smoke”). One girl sat atop her suitcase. The other held her potato sack between her legs, behind Solemn, pushing into the back of her seat. Their sandwiches seemed pulled from a magician's hat, so quickly they appeared. Tuna, sweet relish, mayonnaise, onions, pungent, sloppy. The hitchers—Shana and Law Anne—offered Akila and Solemn torn-off portions. They asked for water. There was none. Akila did not ask the girls where they wanted to go but other things: “You ever jumped out a window?” “You know how to choke a chicken?” “Can you drill a hole in concrete?” “Can you run five miles without stopping?” “Je, wewe ni bikira?” “No,” Shana and Law Anne answered. “Too bad,” Akila said. They drove on. Solemn thought they went further than they needed to.