Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (23 page)

33
A Kiss and Careening

When my brother and Jimbo and I reached Emerson’s truck, my father was still standing with his bathrobe flapping around his knees and the hose water, reflecting off the front porch light, was an arc of silver from his hand. I recall thinking that now that the danger was past—our house clearly not about to burn down, my mother safely inside, the trucks summarily fled—my father looked … almost proud. Can’t think of how else to put it.

Maybe a cross smoldering on his front lawn was some kind of delayed crowning achievement, whether or not he’d directly earned it himself. And it would make great newspaper copy. I could see he was already typesetting the headline in his mind.

“We should’ve told him,” I said—to myself mostly. “We should’ve told
someone
.”

Jimbo nodded to show he’d heard, and heaved Big Dog in the cab and himself in the truck bed and caught my hand just in time to lift me clear off the ground as the truck rolled out. He didn’t let go my hand once I was in good, and I didn’t go out of my way to remind him he had it.

My father whirled from the puddle that was forming at the base of the cross. The truck’s engine seemed to have startled him out of his reverie and into paternal duty. He gestured for us to come back, and yelled something I couldn’t make out but included the words “not safe.” But when we pretended not to see him or hear him, he only stood there, watching us go, with his garden hose and the charred, towering wood.

“At least,” Jimbo said, “your daddy didn’t run off scared.”

I shook my head. “Bo, your daddy’s not …”

Jimbo banged on the truck cab. “Em, you going straight there or stopping at L. J.’s?”

I threw my voice up and over the roar of the engine, Emerson’s whipping its horsepower down the Pike. “I thought L. J.’s
was
where we were going!”

Neither of the boys answered me.

Em turned his head to the side to yell, “We’ll take L. J. with us, if his place is under control.”

“And if things ain’t okay at his house?” Jimbo yelled back.

“What are you wanting to hear?”

“That we’re gettng to her house as fast as we can.”

“That’s all I’m saying, Bo. That’s all I’m saying.”

Of course.

Of course they were right. I was an idiot not to have thought of it first. Of course the bedsheets would go to Farsanna’s. If they’d not been there first.

I didn’t need to ask about Welp. We wouldn’t be stopping for him, I knew. Even if he were home, he wouldn’t want to be with us tonight anyhow. And if he weren’t home, then he was part of what we were racing against.

“At least,” Jimbo was mumbling to himself, “the fire department might show up at L. J.’s.”

“What if,” I asked him—or maybe I was asking myself, “what if they’re just getting things in full swing when we get there?”

“What if why?”

“The bedsheets carry shotguns. You saw them.”

He nodded grimly. “I saw them.” He felt along the floor of the flatbed and lifted a shovel, which he handed to me, then a pickax. We clutched them, straight up, our shoulders touching.

“We look,” I whispered into his ear, “like American Gothic.”

And we both laughed, that sudden burst like air pressure released, and nothing to do with mirth. Hot air beat at us in the bed of the truck and churned my hair high above my head as Emerson hurtled us down the Pike. I turned my face into Jimbo’s warm chest.

That night was the first time I knew I was in love with James Beauregard Riggs. First time I’d admitted it to myself anyhow.

My face still into his chest, he slipped his arm around me. I could smell the pines we were passing, and peanuts, the salt-sweat of a sweltering August. From the bed of the truck came cedar mulch and manure, dried and mellowed, a kind, gentle, elderly smell, like leather or pipe smoke or wet leaves in the fall. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the Blue Hole, the boulders and hemlocks and layers of pink in late May. The rhythm of life of the pendulum swing. The sun on the cold of a mountain-fed spring.

“I wish,” I raised my face up to his, “we were back at the Blue Hole. You were the one called it sacred one time. You remember?”

He brushed the hair back from my face. “Sacred’s not the same thing as safe, though.”

He kept his face close into mine, our cheeks pressing hard together, my hand slipping to the back of his head, to his hair that flipped up at the back. I knew perfectly well how he meant it, his arm so tight around me. And I knew how I wanted him to mean it. I knew as he pulled me close that he would kiss me, and knew that I wanted him to. And knew just as surely that the kiss would be on my cheek, through my cyclone of hair.

But I knew that night that he loved me, loved me all the way through, in that same bone-marrow-deep and indelible way that he loved my brother—the way that until that moment I’d have sworn I’d loved him.

And I knew, too, that somehow our holding each other just then had less to do maybe with us, him and me, than with what we could feel and hear and see beating in the dark heart of the night, what was already there and waiting.

I held to Bo as we went careening toward rifles and red, toward fire and eyeholes bored into white cotton.

34
When the Sky Tumbled and Fell

Veering sharply, the truck’s back wheels flung dust and loose rock as we spun into the turn just past the Feed and Seed and onto Fairview. Though it was well past midnight, a small crowd had gathered in L. J.’s yard. Matthew, Mark, Luke, my aunt, and my uncle milled about with neighbors in the linking rings of light from the front of the house.

L. J. was in the truck bed before I’d even seen him in the yard. He’d been waiting for us. He turned with a hand up to his daddy, almost a salute, Uncle Waymon shaking his head and bellowing to us to stay right where we were, so help him God.

L. J. thumped on Emerson’s back window. “Let’s go!” He turned back to his father, who continued to shout.

“Things under control back there now?” Jimbo asked him as L. J. settled back—in between Jimbo and me.

Without Jimbo beside me just then, I felt cored out inside, and more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. I wrapped my arms around my knees to hold myself from flying apart.

“Yeah. Daddy’s responding moderately well. For a man who believes the viability of the family business has now been terminated. Although the neighbors, good Lord! Mr. Barker’s gone ballistic, back there demanding to know what precisely transpired to bring the old boys out of hibernation.”

“Fresh Bait, Cold Beer—” Jimbo said, but added before we could finish for him, “Glad
somebody’s
daddy came through.”

L. J. shook his head. “Those guys created so much disturbance setting the post in the ground—you’d think they’d been constructing a fence—before they lit the fire, they awakened Matthew. Conflagration barely had time to scorch the grass.”

“They drive off fast?”

“We’d barely emerged from the house.”

Bo nodded. “Reckon that might’ve been a good thing. Don’t know as they take kindly to crashing their dress-up tea parties.”

“Bo?” I asked then, not much liking the shimmy in my voice. And it wasn’t like my hands to shake, or my legs either one.

“You all right, Shelby?”

It was Jimbo who asked that. Jimbo, using my name.

Even L. J. stopped in the breath he’d just drawn to say what he was going to say. And he looked from me on his right to Bo on his left.

And me, I stared at the floor of the truck bed. I ignored L. J.’s eyes, the tips of two drills.

Jimbo’s using my name was the last shadow of what happened—or didn’t—between us that night, his way of letting me know he’d remember.

I was finally the one who passed us all into the next moment by managing to push sounds out my throat: “What are we headed into?”

They didn’t answer. Not that I expected them to. But it was the closest I could come just then to Farsanna, and what might have happened to her. Seeing Bo’s head come up, and his eyes close in a cringe, I knew I’d been noble, unselfish, and brave by mentioning her. I’ve never often been any of these—and the pain of that moment reminded me why.

_________

The Moulavis’ house was dark: no lights outside or in. No headlights raking the gravel drive—except ours.

Emerson eased all the way down and into the backyard, shining the truck lights into the woods. No sign of life.

And, for that matter, no sign of anything else. Relief came for a brief moment, but there was something in the air that unsettled us again, something watching and waiting. I knew, I
knew
there was something I could not name. Something closing in all around us.

I was finding it harder and harder to breathe.

Emerson pulled the truck to the back of the house.

A sole light flickered in the corner of the kitchen window. And even that got doused straight away.

Then a hand reached up to the window to close the blinds.

And in the last yellow of Emerson’s headlights before he cut them off, all four of us in the truck saw this, and gasped: The hand was a man’s, large and heavily veined, but here was the thing—it was not Farsanna’s father’s dark skin.

35
When the Mountains Crumbled

L. J. was the first to speak: “So, gentlemen, given what we just witnessed, who might that be in there … with them?”

Jimbo leapt over the side of the truck. “Reckon we’ll find out right about now.”

I ducked down lower in the truck bed, though I peered up over the side, as he tapped on the kitchen window.

“It’s me. Sanna, it’s me.”

She must have recognized the voice, the “me,” and didn’t need a name. Fumbling with a bolt lock, she opened the kitchen door. Jimbo met her there, looking through the opening for the owner of that white hand.

“Who else is there?” Sanna whispered into the dark.

“Emerson, Turtle, L. J.”

There was a pause—maybe she was processing who was missing. “This is not for you a safe place.”

But we were following Jimbo, and he didn’t pause to ask us for a vote.

We all slipped into the kitchen and stood huddled together, unable to see as our eyes adjusted to the darkness after the headlights. Then I heard—and smelled—a match drawn across its box’s rough strip. Farsanna’s face swam unsteadily above a sputtering candle.

Behind her, soundlessly, her father and mother stood, staring—not quite at us—just into the dark.

And behind them came Reverend Riggs.

I opened my mouth in a scream, and would’ve, except for Emerson’s hand smacking it closed.

“Children! Brave children. I need to tell you … I want to explain …” the Reverend Riggs began, his voice hoarse and tired, snagging on something, maybe, that he couldn’t say. He lay a hand on Emerson’s and L. J.’s shoulders, gently patted my cheek. Then he turned to face his son.

Jimbo did not move. “Why are
you
here?”

“I was afraid—”

Jimbo’s eyes had gone hard and cold as two bits of ice, their glittering green frosted over. “Afraid! Yeah, well, that was your problem this morning too, Preacher.”

Reverend Riggs received this without flinching—like maybe he’d been waiting for that. He let the words stand for a moment just as they were: ugly and naked and cold. Then he said quietly, “That’s right. I was scared, son. For you, for your momma, for—”

“Yourself,” Jimbo spewed. “Yourself and your job, your precious image you got to maintain in this town: the saintly, the
good
!”

Reverend Riggs nodded slowly. “Reckon I was. Scared. For myself. For what people think about me. You said it true, son. You said it true. But also, son, also for these folks here.” He nodded toward the Moulavis. “You got to believe that part too. Growing up in these hills, I seen what these old boys can do when they’re riled. I was scared bad. And—you’re right—I acted like it.” He waited for Jimbo to say something, but nothing came. “I been owing apologies to Jesus and to Farsanna here. Reckon now I’m owing you one.”

Farsanna stepped with her candle close to Jimbo’s face, but her eyes stayed full on his father. “Tonight he came because he was for us afraid. My family and me.” She held the candle close to his face, like she was looking for something, about to try something out: “And he has come other nights before this.”

Here the Reverend’s jaw came undone. “You
knew
about that, child?”

Exchanging a glance with my brother, I stepped into Farsanna’s line of sight. “Sanna,
you
knew about that?”

“What?” Jimbo demanded to know. “Know about what?”

The Reverend’s look shifted to me. “I suspected you knew, Shelby Lenoir. You and Emerson here.”

I stared at him. “You knew we knew?”

From behind me, Jimbo stepped to Farsanna. “
Knew
about
WHAT
?”

I looked from Bo to the Reverend and back. “About your daddy’s creeping around here one night.”

Farsanna’s head cocked sideways at me, like she’d not understood the language too well, then turned back towards Bo. Her thumb and forefinger plucked at the blouse sleeve of her other arm. “This blouse.” Then she pointed at the burgundy towel she’d taken last to the Hole, now folded neatly on a kitchen chair. “That towel. Several towels.”

“Towels?” I was confused.

The Reverend was nodding sadly at Emerson and me. “Reckon you children must’ve seen all them stacks of towels. And, Lord, curtains. Toaster was in pretty good shape. Wasn’t that the same night you two were here? I was guessing you saw me.”

“Sir?” It came out as a squeak from my nearly grown older brother, but in the South
sir
gets said even to villains.

I could barely see Emerson’s expression there in the dim Moulavi kitchen, but I knew he was glaring at me. I was glad we weren’t alone.

“Many sheets,” Farsanna continued, “Boxes of clothes. Things for use in the kitchen. Twice by the back door they were left. In the mornings we found them. It was our mystery, how they came this way. But one night,” she turned now to the Reverend, “one night I thought that I saw your face before you left a large box.”

Still ignoring his father, Jimbo turned to Emerson and me. “And you two knew about this?”

We both shook our heads no, which, given what had just got stripped down for the truth, had turned out to be true.

“Not … exactly,” I said.

Jimbo faced his daddy. “So you think you ought to get credit for carting some charity to these people, that it? Kind of bought your right to keep your mouth shut later? That how you reckoned it out?”

“Tonight, Jimbo,” Farsanna said, though her eyes remained on the Reverend, “your father came to my home, to my family, because he was afraid that we were afraid.” All our eyes followed her to the Reverend, who was fixed on the face of his son, still too hard to read. Even I couldn’t tell what Jimbo was thinking and he wore my second skin, Emerson’s and mine.

Sanna motioned for us to follow. “Come.”

We trailed in the wake of her candle the few feet across the kitchen to the doorway of her living room. She held the light out at arm’s length.

The carpet caught and reflected the flickering, inconstant light, like a sea whose ripples flirt with the moonlight. But this was supposed to be carpet, not water, not waves. The entire floor—what I could see by the candle’s halfhearted glow—sparkled and gleamed.

“Glass,” L. J. pronounced it.

Emerson stepped toward the shattered window, but stopped when Farsanna laid a hand on his arm.

“Don’t,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

“How bad is the damage?”

She held up a rock the size of a softball. “These. Several. After your father arrived.”

Farsanna’s father raised his arm above his head, his hand clutching a crumpled paper. “And this to one was attached.”

L. J. reached for the paper. “Court’s evidence. Exhibit number one.”

“What’s it say?” I asked.

Reverend Riggs shook his head, like it wouldn’t bear repeating.

But Mr. Moulavi shook his fistful of paper. “It says from here we must move. It threatens the lives of my family. It threatens our home.”

Jimbo looked at his father. “You think they mean it? You know these guys. They came to you, right? They came to you to try to smooth over everything, to make sure nobody, including your son, got too out of line. Am I right? Because we saw them, and I told myself that you were helping the situation. Only it never occurred to me you might be helping
them
by keeping your mouth shut when you should’ve told them—”

“Son, please.” Reverend Riggs reached for Bo’s shoulder, but Jimbo stepped away with a cringe.

Reverend Riggs shook his head and looked at his feet. “I did try to help, son. In my own way. And I did try to make peace by … well, by suggesting they simmer on down.”

Bo snorted in disgust.

His daddy raised his own eyes to meet his son’s. “And it’s also true I could not have handled it worse—”

“You got that right,” Bo said, biting the words.

“Thinking if I kept quiet, it would all go away, or work itself out.”

“So
now
what?” Bo demanded. “So now that you’ve had close, personal contact with these idiots, you tell us what they’re likely to do.”

Reverend Riggs shook his head. “I reckon they’re used to being took seriously, son. Though I couldn’t rightly say what that says we should do.”

“
We
?”

“I’m not leaving anytime soon, Bo. I’d like to try not to do twice in one day the most cowardly thing I ever done in my life.”

Jimbo did not speak, but the two of them looked at each other across Sanna’s candle. And then the good Reverend Riggs reached again for Bo’s shoulder.

Bo backed away. “You think this makes up for this morning? For what got done—and didn’t—in front of all those people? So you helped these folks when they needed stuff. By cover of night, you played delivery boy. But when the time came to stand up and be shot at, you
ducked
, Daddy. The good Reverend Riggs
tucked tail and run
.”

Jimbo’s daddy took this with only a flinch, like he’d been slapped and it stung. He put a hand to his cheek. And slowly, he nodded. “Reckon what happened this morning has got us both ashamed as two people ever were of one. No, it don’t make up, son. I can’t make up for keeping my mouth shut when I shouldn’t oughta been quiet. There’s things you can’t go back and retread like a tire.”

Jimbo gripped the back of a chair and his words came between gritted teeth. “So then you do what, then? Just say
oops
and go on?”

“So you pray for the guts you hadn’t got natural. And hope you strap the bull’s halter on different next time.”

Bo looked steadily at his father, but offered no words.

Farsanna’s candle led us back to the kitchen. Jimbo dropped himself in front of the stove.

“So,” I whispered to Emerson, “you think the bedsheets might never come back? Ever?”

“Maybe. And they might come back in three minutes. Who knows?”

We waited, huddled on the floor of the kitchen, the candle blown out. Reverend Riggs stationed himself at the doorway to the living room, where through the jagged remains of plate glass he could at least see if headlights were coming.

An hour ticked by—this I knew by periodically wrenching around L. J.’s wrist to see his watch, with green glow-in-the-dark hands.

“It’s like being inside the Alamo,” I said to him. “Travis. Crockett. Bowie.” L. J. wasn’t the only one who knew something of history.

L. J. rolled his eyes at me. That is, I couldn’t see him do it there in the dark, but knew perfectly well when he did—the misfortune of knowing someone all your life long. “Turtle,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Every one of them died.”

Jimbo patted my hand. “Let’s us just put Turtle here in charge of something besides cheering us up. Turtle, how ’bout you lead the band in ‘A Hundred Bottles of Beer’?”

The chumminess in his voice was back, and whatever else had been there with me—us alone in the back of the truck an eternity or so earlier that evening—was gone, and I wondered if someday, a much later someday way far away, I’d be able to say that was just like things ought to be.

Bo raked fingers through his hair, and I could see his big hands trembling.

Sanna’s parents sat silent, stiff as cadavers. She sat beside them, and though her gaze sometimes rested on one of us, she seemed not to be listening to anyone. She relit the candle and watched its white wax spill onto the floor.

At one point, Jimbo crawled on all fours to her side, drew his big feet up and under himself, and touched her forearm lightly. That was all. No words exchanged. No touch other than that.

And Farsanna looked back into his face. I’ve no idea what she said to him with her eyes. I understood enough only to know that I wished I hadn’t seen. And to see that her mother saw too.

“East!” said Jimbo’s daddy, retreating to the kitchen. “I must be for certain. For certain, which way is east?”

Jimbo pointed. And L. J., who liked to think he knew the world, adjusted Jimbo’s hand slightly—for accuracy.

Jimbo’s daddy knelt on the linoleum floor and held out his hand to Mr. Moulavi, who looked doubtfully at him, but then took his hand and joined him. Mr. Moulavi hunched down over the stone that had shattered far more than just his window. Reverend Riggs hunched there beside him.

And me, I sat wondering what to do. Momma would’ve served sweet tea and brownies and asked everyone how they, bless their hearts, were feeling. And Jesus, maybe, would’ve faced Mecca and prayed along with the rumple-suited Baptist and the Sri Lankan invader—though I wouldn’t know.

But I just sat there, feeling stupid and rattled and very much in the way.

Without warning, Reverend Riggs stood, then gripped the back of a chair for balance. He seemed to have heard or seen something somehow that we didn’t.

“Well, children,” he said, a good half-octave higher than usual. “It looks like company’s coming.”