Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (11 page)

“Any reason you got to quit early?” Emerson snarled. But he switched off the mower.

“It’s after five, old man. And over five hundred Fahrenheit. What’s been eating your gizzard all day anyway?”

“Nothing.”

“Uh-huh. So it’s nothing.”

“You heard me.”

One bushy eyebrow raised, Jimbo looked my way.

“Don’t ask me, Bo. I just got born into the same family.”

“Hard luck. Tell you what, Turtle, we’ll dip him seven times in the Hole and see if he ain’t some better then.”

“And then what?”

“If he ain’t all good-as-better by then, we’ll just hold him under the last time.”

Emerson circled the tools on the ground three times, then paced to the pickup and snatched up a saw. I watched him scramble up an old pear tree and begin to trim out dead branches, working the saw with gusto.

Bo returned to change his shovel for trowel, and he slung a bag of manure up onto his shoulder. “Em, man, you plan on leaving a trunk on that tree? The way you’re hacking—”

Em climbed back down the tree and hurled his saw to the ground. “Oh,
I’m
the one hacking, am I?
I’m
the dangerous one here, that it?”

“Whoa. Haul back on them reins, man. Who slipped a burr under your strap?”

Emerson stood up on his limb. “You ever stop to think about what you’re doing? You ever stop to think about somebody else besides yourself? Last night, what you went and—”

“I been meaning to talk to you about last night. ’Cause we talked.”

“Yeah, well, what you … Who’s
we
?”

“Them,” I said, supplying what was not very helpful.

Jimbo stepped toward the half-massacred pear tree. “Me and Farsanna. About us. About all of us.”

I was stuck on the
Farsanna
. Funny how her name could still sound so strange to me. But there it was, pronounced all careful and particular by the guy who’d flunked a straight flush of our high school’s foreign language classes.

Sadness sloshed around inside me like rainwater that kept rising, rising.

“No nickname for the new girl?” I asked, instead of crying.

“Give me time,” Jimbo said, and he smiled, one of those smiles with whispers behind it. Which was why, maybe, Emerson leapt at him from the tree, knocked him flat.

Bo lay there, sprawled like just-shot wild game in the grass. “Did I … miss … something?” He went to stand, when Emerson hauled back and slugged him.

Jimbo was back flat in the grass. He hiked one of his feet in the air right as Emerson dove for him, and my brother took a size 14 in the gut.

But even before Em had leveraged himself upright, he was lunging again for Jimbo.

“
Em
!” Bo blocked a blow to the head. “Man,
talk
to me. What—” he rolled right, just missing another lunge for his head, “is
wrong
with you?”

Emerson pulled back his right arm again. Jimbo’s gaze, just ever so briefly, shifted over to me, running to them. He looked back at Em’s fist, colliding then with Bo’s face.

It was my fault, I figured right then, Bo’s not relocating his face in time, the distraction of me running at them. I dove for Emerson’s wrists, clawed into the one I caught, and pinioned it around to his back.

“How
dare
you,” Emerson bellowed at Bo, “put her in danger for nothing but your own—your own—” My brother’s free arm flailed, and I held tight to the other one, in hopes of preventing another swing.

The free arm drew back and aimed, then dropped to his side, hung useless, unhinged. Big Dog had risen from her place in the shade and whined by my side.

They stood, the two of them, staring at each other, both of them panting and filthy, both of them bruised, Jimbo bleeding.

Bo nodded, like they’d just completed a whole conversation I couldn’t hear. “It’s okay,” he said.

His shoulders hunched, Emerson was shaking his head at the grass. “Don’t do this to her.”

Bo reached a hand and lowered it to Em’s shoulder, lightly, like it might topple off. “To her?” he asked. “Or to you?”

There it was, out where we could see it: My brother was in love with the new girl too.
Too
. My brother
and
his best friend were in love with the new girl.

The one fruit of its kind in a whole garden of showy, available Neesas, and they both had to want the forbidden.

“No.” It was all I could manage from my seat on the grass.

So they were in love, both of them at the same time, with the same girl. Two boys who’d always shared everything: their landscaping business, their peanuts, their Cokes, Bo’s tape collection, the truck, and Big Dog.

Until the new girl and the map we’d all learned to make with our hands.

The little boat they’d paddled, Jimbo and Em, for so many years—and with me in the hull—had run up on a rock, and I could feel us all rocking there, the keel bending, misshapen. We’d hit trouble head-on, crashed straight up on top of it.

Em’s hands twitched at his sides, his face spasmed up like the mad might break loose from under the skin. “Don’t you care a thing about her safety?”

“
What
?”

“It’s one thing for all of us to run together, be seen like that. But just her and—” he choked on the next word, “
you
! Why do you think I’ve left her alone? Huh? Why do you think? You
JERK
!”

“Maybe,” Jimbo said, just hardly above a whisper, “I don’t think less of her than you do, cowboy. Maybe I think a little more of this Ridge.”

“
This
place? Are you nuts?”

“You sound like L. J.”

“Well, maybe he’s right.”

“Well, maybe I got faith.”

“Faith in what? You got faith in Mort? Seventh Street? What?”

“In change, maybe. In maybe … redemption, you know?”

Em blew air through his nose and looked as if he might take another swing. “Right. And I got faith in sunshine and daisies. You got any evidence anything’s changed so much here?”

“Nope. Just scraps of the holy hoped for, that’s all.”

I must’ve moaned then, or somehow made myself known. For the first time since he’d leapt at Bo, Em looked over at me. I felt like crying—though I ducked my head fast so maybe they couldn’t see my face crinkle. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Me? Oh, I don’t know. Just enjoying a ringside seat at the fights.”

“Well, pull yourself together, Turtle.”

“Right. You’re obviously the emotionally
stable
one in the family.”

Jimbo grabbed his watch, the plastic Mickey Mouse band he’d won at Six Flags. “Hey, we got to git! It’s quitting time and the Hole’s waiting on us to fill it.” He brushed away what Emerson was about to say. “Look, you might wanna know what the fair lady said about us.”

Em snorted again. “Oh, yeah. I been dying to hear what she said about you and her—”

“Not me and
her
, Spud-Head. Me and
you
. And … her.”

Emerson turned slowly to face his best friend.

Bo shook his head, his dimples beginning to show. “I thought that might get your attention. Look, you wanna hear the whole putrid truth?”

Em folded his arms over his chest. “Maybe.”

I lay back on the grass and wished I could cover my ears.

Bo walked up to inches from Emerson’s face. “Goes something like this. Her Ladyship Fair likes
us
.”

“Who’s
us
?”

Bo shrugged. “Us whole mangy pack. And, romantically speaking, the lady finds herself asundered.”

“Asundered?”

“Ripped clear to shreds by the pain of competing passions. For us.”

“Who’s us?”

“Me and you. She likes us both. Although …” Jimbo’s dimples deepened. “She does find me a particularly irresistible specimen of manhood.”

“She said that?”

“Didn’t have to. I could see it in her eyes. She could barely keep her hands off me.”

Emerson brightened a bit. “But she managed, didn’t she?”

The approach of Mollybird’s ancient Buick, thunderous, with the occasional ping, announced her return. The roses on her straw hat bobbed as her head jerked side to side, forward and back, surveying our work. The Buick rolled to a stop, thundered and pinged for several long moments, then proceeded on to the back of the house. We exchanged relieved glances: At least for today, our work had been approved and Mollybird would fetch her sweet tea to the screen porch rather than charge into the yard to list which of her wishes we’d carried out inadequately.

Jimbo turned to me and pointed to the grass stains across his chest. “How d’I look? These match my eyes, Turtle?”

The grass stains did, in fact, match his eyes, and I suddenly, desperately needed to tell him just that, at that moment the most urgent fact in the world.

But Jimbo didn’t stand still to hear me say so.

12
Ropes and Threads

As we pulled up to the Feed and Seed, Bobby and L. J. were unloading a shipment of mulch and had just finished helping out for the day. Uncle Waymon waved to us from the office and turned back to the cash register. The boys swung into the flatbed.

“We stopping for that new girl?” Welp, all edgy and frowning, was wanting to know. He was wearing his jeans with unfrayed slits in the knees.

Jimbo eyed him up and down. “Reckon we stopped off for you, Wonder Welp.”

Because I wanted one—needed one—myself, I handed the boys Cokes from the cooler. L. J. produced a bag of peanuts from his pocket and we passed it around, each of us popping into the bottles our required number. I always preferred five, and no more. Jimbo, on the other hand, liked to get the bag last so he could baptize all those remaining.

_________

The new girl was waiting at the plate-glass window, her long, red cotton skirt hanging a little lower—and maybe more ragged at the hem than it used to. Behind in the dark sat her mother, only an oval of face-flesh showing out of a swaddling of scarf. I watched Jimbo as our new passenger boarded. He greeted her warmly, as usual—but nothing out-of-the-way warmly for Jimbo.

I raised my Coke to her, my greeting, and fished through the ice for another. L. J. passed her the peanuts—what few Jimbo’d left.

Bobby Welpler, I noticed, sat still and sullen. But then he’d always been given to fits. “We can’t be stopping here,” he spit out as Em pulled us into the drive.

“How’s your momma?” I asked him. I was feeling malicious.

If he heard me, he didn’t let on, just stared past my ponytail into the woods.

And I remember wondering then, at that moment, if Bobby Welpler— pimply, tagalong Welp—were capable, ever, of any real harm.

Neither Farsanna nor Jimbo showed any signs that day of anything having changed between them, or with any of us.

There was one time when we were all stomping our shoes off at the top of the footpath’s slide down: They bumped against one another. But even then they sprang apart, like they’d both just brushed a wall of broken glass.

Jimbo was in rare form on the rope swing, performing flips with full twists so close to the sweetgum tree, I closed my eyes more than once. Each time he narrowly missed hitting the tree—but the closer he came, the harder he laughed.

Emerson’s mood required not seven, as Jimbo had threatened, but a single good headfirst plunge into the icy waters.

Jimbo nodded cheerfully from beside Emerson’s water-crater. “That ought to knock the puke out of him good.”

Next to where I’d planned to sun myself in silence for the remainder—and there wasn’t much—of the afternoon, Farsanna spread a towel: the same threadbare scrap of white terry cloth she brought every trip to the Blue Hole. It looked like the one my father took from a one-star motel whose hot water was broken—took it to even things out, he said—then bequeathed it to Big Dog for baths. The new girl’s towel was like that but thinner.

I’d grown sleepy, and though I could hear Farsanna shifting restlessly beside me, I was content to listen to the splash and thrash, and then the steady lap, lap, lap of the Blue Hole and its everyday business. Warm, well-fed for the moment on peanuts and Coke, fully and completely content, I wished only to be left alone just then. Perhaps, I thought, if I kept my eyes closed …

“Shelby?”

I opened one eye. Wearing, as she always did these days at the Hole, my old suit, Farsanna was sitting up straight, her usual ramrod posture, and studying intently the boys on the rope swing—but not, so far as I could tell, any particular boy.

“Yeah?”

“Why is it only … them?”

“Where?” I raised my head groggily.

She pointed to the pendulum swing of the rope.

I shook my head. “What … them?”

“Girls are not open to it?”

“It’s not open to girls,” I corrected. “But it is. ‘Course it is.”

“Why do you not fly on the rope, then?”

I sat up, shading my eyes. “Me? Shoot. Why would I want to do that?” I shrugged and would have lain back down had I not gotten a good look at her eyes. I should have known better by then. She was prodding with them, as surely as if she’d poked me in the chest with a sweetgum branch. I watched the rope swing, where Buddy Buncombe and his sizable self were hurtling down toward brown water, a sizable hole when he hit. “Why would I want to do that?”

She said nothing, but I knew without looking she was still staring at me.

I wrapped my arms around my knees—though my thighs looked fat in that position. I frowned at the brown water—though the frown was intended for her. “I do what I do because I want to. Not because of any bunch of any boys. There’s some things they can just have.” I lay back down.

“
Mata
, my mother,” she said flatly, “expresses similar views to that of yours.”

I sat back up. All I’d ever seen of her mother was a dark circle of face deep in the shadows of a hideous house. A woman draped in cloth from head to toe. A woman I imagined bowing to her husband as she sprinkled curry over rice, and over the table and chairs, the floor…. I was not pleased with the comparison. “
What
?”

“Yes.”

I heard myself snipping the ends off my words: “
I’m
like your mother?” The rock beneath my towel had become harder, sharper, and I shifted position.

“In this one way: There is for men a realm, as well as for women one. A good woman does not wish for what belongs to men.”

“Oh, come
on
. That’s not what I meant at all.”

Her stiff, licorice hair moved as one piece when she turned her head back toward the brown water. “It may be that I did not understand you,” she said.

Farsanna stood up without pushing off with her hands. “You are coming?” she asked, not taking her eyes from the sweetgum.

“Oh, come on. So what if they’ve got one little ol’ rope to themselves? So what?”

She stood where she was.

I threw my hands up. “Look, girls just don’t go off it, all right?”

“Then it is not to girls open … it is not open to girls.” Her eyes were on the rope.

“No, it’s just …”

She turned to look at me.

“Look, it’s—
Jeez
.” I dropped my head in my hands and groaned.

“You are coming?”

I rolled onto my knees and—clumsily—stood. “Yeah. I’m coming.”

We leapt from rock to rock, landing at last by the base of the sweetgum tree, already pretty high above the water. Sanna didn’t stop to look up. I, on the other hand, grabbed hold of the trunk of the sweetgum to steady my legs. Smirking, the boys stood in a loosely slip-stitched line, edging aside to let us pass.

“It
would
,” I moaned, my face to the bark, “have to be that high.”

One brown leg already on the first branch and the other on its way to a board nailed into the trunk as a step, Farsanna bowed her head down towards me. “Perhaps I should have let you proceed first?”

“No.” I’d only begun the climb up, and the ground was already starting into a spin. “No, it’s okay.”

When she reached the branch—a good twenty, maybe thirty feet up it seemed at the time—from which the boys snagged and mounted the rope swing, Farsanna waited for me to catch up. I did not look down.

I clutched the trunk with both arms. “So you came to America for this?”

She smiled—that smile with the splash in it—and for a moment I forgot I was standing more than two stories above the earth in a tree with a rope as my only means of escape. And then before I forgot to forget, I looked down and saw faces fixed on our branch: Emerson and Jimbo and L. J. and Welp. There they stood, all in a line, all on firm earth, all of them laughing at us—no, not quite. Not Jimbo.

Jimbo stood, I recall, a little off to the side, his hands on his hips.

Mort Beckwith was next in line for the rope. He stood, one hand on the branch above him, the other reaching far out to snatch the rope on its return. Rope in hand and resting on his gut, he turned to Farsanna.

“Reckon you think we’re gonna just move out of the way for you, do you?” He threw back his shoulders, sucked in his gut, and held his free arm well out to his side as if the swell of its muscles wouldn’t allow it closer. I had an image suddenly of Mort as a tank, a circle on top of his flat, crew-cut head opening and closing with a metallic clang.

Farsanna’s spine stiffened, I could see from behind. But if she said anything, I couldn’t hear it.

“You know,” Mort told her, moving a step closer, “I’ve eaten meals bigger’n you.”

Her whole body, not just her eyes, turned toward him slowly. “In Sri Lanka are trained elephants more clever than you.”

Some boys at the base of the tree snickered.

Mort Beckwith did not.

I could not watch. Could not look down. I turned my face back into bark.

Someone was yelling below. And only then did it hit me that the Blue Hole was silent. Silent, except for one voice. Jimbo was calling to us—saying what, I couldn’t tell, like my hearing had shut down when my heart rate took off.

“Wha—?” I tried to shout back, but stopped. Even projecting my voice threatened to throw me off balance. I clung to the tree.

Mort was looking at the new girl. “Ol’ Jimbo there says you can’t swim too good, huh?” He toyed with the rope. “Girl, you either got yourself a good-sized chaw of brave, or you ain’t just real bright.”

Sanna held out a hand.

Looking suddenly confused, Mort held out his own hand.

She shook her head. “Please, I would like the rope.”

“Let go too shallow,” he went on, embarrassed, “and you’ll put your feet out your ears.”

She waited.

Mort curled up one side of a lip at her—it wasn’t exactly a smile. “You’re gonna jump anyhow, ain’t you, just any old way come into your head.”

Again, Sanna held out her hand. As Mort gave her the rope, she let go of the branch above her head to grasp the rope with both hands.

Mort Beckwith arrested her swing by grabbing her arm, nearly throwing himself off the branch. “Listen. I’m tellin’ you, don’t be droppin’ any later than ’at finger of rock if you like walkin’ on legs.”

She nodded again, and this time he let go her arm and she threw her whole self into the air.

I turned my face from the bark to see her fly into red, the last of the sun just spilling off the rim of our world.
It will be dark in just moments
, I recall thinking as I watched Farsanna clutching the rope above her dark head, her hair all in place.

And then her hands were slipping, the pull of her body at war with her grip. Down several feet her hands slid, her body stiff as a pillar, arcing out over the Hole. Then her hands reached a knot in the rope and for a moment retained their grip.

And then I saw that she was trying now too hard to hang on. The instinct not to lose her hold had rattled her concentration of when to let go. She swung out over—far out over the finger of rock.

From the height of her swing, her toes pointed nearly to the tops of the trees that skirted the pond. And then she was falling back down.

From where I stood clutching the sweetgum trunk, I could see that her release was not perfectly at the finger. Farsanna had dropped way too close in to the shallow.

And then there were splashes, one after the other, one just below me.

I’ll never know, I don’t reckon, if Mort fell like he claimed or jumped off that branch. I did know, even with my eyes closed, that Jimbo and Emerson both dove in from the shore.

When Sanna emerged, she was already walking up toward the bank, her shoulders breaking above the water before anyone was within yards from her fall. Maybe it was her being so short and so little that saved her. Maybe it was just her being her.

Em was the first to think to hand her the tissue of towel as she calmly climbed up the bank. She seated herself on a rock, her back and legs a right angle.

Tentatively, Emerson squatted beside her. He lay one hand on her shoulder and leaned in to speak in her ear. She turned her head toward him—maybe she smiled—and he sat down beside her.

Which was when I went limp. In the midst of watching, I’d failed to catch the rope on its return. This I knew was the cardinal rule of the rope swing: You must catch the rope. And I didn’t.

My cousin was the first to break the Blue Hole’s silence. “Hey, Turtle,” L. J. called up to me. “Make the family proud.” And then he saw—like everyone else then—what I’d neglected to do, and he sneered.

He did, though, break off a long branch of a dogwood tree, then stand on the bank and swat at the rope until at last one of the boys who stepped past me in the sweetgum could finally snag it.

My legs gone to rubber and useless, I straddled the branch and eased myself out. Someone placed the rope in my hands. Perhaps someone else gave me a push.