Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (4 page)

Me, I couldn’t help but like her a little—a
little
—for that, even if she was strange like they said, like I’d seen for myself.

A
kethunk, kethunk
behind me signaled Reverend Riggs making his way down from the bleachers one step at a time, his spherical body balanced, just barely, on each metal step. His head was bobbing in Bo’s direction, both arms already beginning to rise as if he could hug his son clear through the fencing that guarded home plate.

Farsanna had stopped walking just around the back of home plate which Jimbo had just crossed for our final run. She stood still, Jimbo turning toward her. He grinned.

“Good game,” he said to the new girl.

Her back to me, I couldn’t see her expression, only that her head cocked, unsure maybe what Jimbo meant, his words or his grin. I could see that she nodded, and walked on.

The
kethunk
behind me had ceased, Reverend Riggs’ round body motionless there on the third-to-last bleacher step. Perspiring from his balding blond head down into his yellow necktie, he was watching his son, who was watching the new girl walk away from the field. Reverend Riggs’ eyebrows crinkled together over the bridge of his nose.

_________

So there we sat in the back of Em’s truck, and there came that look of the new girl’s again, her eyes swinging to L. J., who never much liked repeating himself but was saying again, “Are you currently finding the Ridge at least marginally inhabitable?”

She stared at him hard, her eyes stick-pinning him onto the side of the truck till he squirmed, a stabbed bug with glasses.

When she finally responded, he got only this: “My father says it will be to us a hospitable place, no?”

Silence followed—jarring silence, like potholes in paved road.

“It’s, um,” I tried, thinking of Momma, “what we’re known for. Hospitality. That’s us. The South.”

Jimbo helped me from there. “Hospitality,” he assured the new girl, “and charm out the wazoo. And, as you can see for yourself,” the sweep of his arm included us all, as well as the landscaping mulch and manure we were hauling, “cleanliness-next-to-godliness and golly-gorgeous good looks.”

Farsanna cocked her head at him as if she were deciding whether Jimbo’s charm could be trusted. “We have,” she said at last, “for many years dreamt about America. Of coming here one day.”

“
Here
?” L. J. blurted out rudely. He’d always had trouble respecting anyone who tolerated our town. He was certain he’d been misplaced at birth, he’d once confided in me: Though raised in a green vinyl-sided split-level on Pisgah, he was surely conceived someplace else, by someone else, on the city wall of Jerusalem, maybe, by vacationing foreign diplomats, unmarried, stationed in Nepal. He kept gaping at the new girl. “Dreamt of coming
here
?”

“In America, it is everywhere the land of opportunity, my father says.” Farsanna looked around then, unsure of herself, unsure of us, like she’d covered herself in a coat she could tell didn’t fit.

L. J.’s sneer had sunk, if possible, deeper. “Yeah? ‘Bring me your tired, your poor, your naive, huddled masses …’ So, what else does your father say?”

Farsanna raised her chin, but her eyes tipped, unsteady. Her voice bunched into clumps. “‘It is the … end … of the rainbow,’ he likes to say,” she told L. J.—though she seemed not to like saying it herself.

Despite the blow of her saying she liked our town, L. J. granted the new girl another chance. She was after all someone who had seen the world, seen something beyond the too-warm, maternal arms of our mountain.

“Why don’t you relate pertinent facts about your home?” he suggested.

Rising from the floorboards of the pickup bed, Farsanna’s line of vision leveled out with his. “This now is home,” she said. And then tried it again, like she was convincing herself, or trying: “
This
now is home.”

L. J.’s sneer dug itself into a scowl. He sat back. I could always read L. J.’s face—most everyone could. It was a shame, he was thinking: He knew little about that part of the world, and he might’ve added it to his Places to Visit Real Soon. Just as Real Soon, our mangy pack knew, as he could break the news to his father,
the
owner of Waymon’s Feed and Seed (known in three counties), about not sticking around to inherit that millstone of a family business.

Then L. J. leaned forward, across Jimbo’s body-canoe, nearly in the new girl’s face. “Does anybody peruse, oh, I don’t know, any, say, American history books in Sri Lanka? Or the newspapers, perhaps? Anybody inform your family they were relocating to the
South
end of the rainbow?”

Little Bobby Welpler yipped in with “Pisgah Ridge, North Carolina: Pot of Gold, USA.”

“Sure,” L. J. shot back, “
White
Gold.”

With his left elbow, Jimbo rammed L. J.’s chest back against the pickup’s metal wall. “I hope …” he interjected, “we hope you like it here.” He reached over to pat Farsanna’s forearm, adding, “Welcome.” Then his arm stretched back over his head through the truck cab window to scratch the Big Dog on her remarkably chubby neck.

We rode for awhile without the social padding of chatter and none of us liked it, not a one of us able to find a comfortable place to set down our legs or our eyes. But the pickup’s bucking over the root-clogged trail down to the Hole gradually knocked loose our tongues. Or maybe it was just approaching the Blue Hole itself.

Little Bobby Welpler, of all people, saved us that day with his forgettable blather. We laughed with him and at him—and he laughed some too. Even Farsanna joined in once or twice, that iron spine of hers melting almost soft.

In the Clearing—our clever name for it—just before the logging trail funneled to a single-file path, Emerson pulled alongside a cluster of other pickups and Jeeps. He was blocking in at least three, and we’d soon be blocked in by others. But no matter: Everyone left their windows rolled down and their keys on the seat, and shuffled each other as needed.

We scrambled out from the truck bed, Bobby Welpler hitting the ground before Emerson put it in park. Propping Em’s guitar against bags of manure, Jimbo turned back to offer a hand to Farsanna, but she’d already lowered her skirt and herself to the ground.

Her eyes weren’t on Jimbo anyhow. She was watching the truck that had pulled in behind us.

From out of the driver’s side, Mort Beckwith unpacked his beefy self, sinewed and bunched tight at the shoulders and thighs. I sometimes wondered if, raw, Mort would look nice and marbled like Momma’d taught me to look for in meat.

Ducking his head, he reached back into his truck.

Jimbo had turned to watch him. “Howdy there, Morton. Top o’ the evening to you.”

Mort reversed himself slowly, a riverboat paddle wheeler changing direction. When he’d fully backed himself out of the front seat, he spit to one side, then: “Howdy, Bo.”

I followed the new girl’s eyes to the gun, a .22-caliber rifle which Mort twirled under one arm like a baton: the beefiest majorette ever to spin a stick.

“It’s okay,” I whispered fast to Farsanna. “He doesn’t mean anything by it. Mort carried a GI Joe doll till he was seven and his older brother—the Beckwiths are every one of them bullies—called him a pansy. Very next day, Mort was carting that gun, and every day since, like Linus’s blanket. For all we know he sleeps with the thing. He’d take it to school if it’d fit in his gym bag.”

Jimbo had pulled back from the path at the opposite side of the Clearing and was making his way closer to Morton.

“How ’bout you snuggle that gun there back in the saddlebags where she’ll be warm?”

“Her name’s Jemima.” Mort spit again, aiming to bull’s-eye the same circle of brown he’d made before.

“Look, Morton Man, it ain’t hunting season for deer, dove, or platypus, that I heard. So how ’bout you just put her on up.”

Mort hauled himself up on the hood of his truck. He fondled the gun. “Only wish I could do that there thing, Bo. But she’s been hankerin’ for a good cleaning. You don’t want to let things go getting too dirty on you.” Mort’s eyes might have been on Farsanna, or might have been just generally back on the woods.

“You just make sure for certain,” Jimbo said, trying to sound unconcerned, “that you recollect where they put the safety on those things, you hear?”

Mort ran his hand down the butt of the gun and he spit again to one side. I turned my back to him too and followed Jimbo toward the head of the path.

The late-afternoon heat had gone violet and soft—because of our day jobs, we almost always arrived at the Blue Hole at the tail end of the afternoon—and I watched the ends of Jimbo’s black hair flip at the back of his neck in curls that looked soft, like they needed someone to wrap her fingers inside them.

We started to maze our way among the parked Jeeps and trucks, toward the path that led toward the Blue Hole. No breeze granted relief, or at least the trees that circled the clearing had blocked it, and a Southern summer day settled like wet gauze on our skin.

Then the air around us split open, ripped by the sound of what Mort said with a flick of his trigger finger, our bodies knocked flat with a blast from behind.

3
Holy of Holes

Jimbo was the first to raise his head from the ground. “MORT! You
idiot
! You could have killed somebody with that little display!”

“Killed?” Mort chewed on that for awhile, along with his tobacco.

“Look, you got something to say, you say it! With your own big mouth and not some long-barreled excuse for a brain.”

Mort ratcheted the safety into place. “Reckon ever’body slips up sometime or another. I didn’t scare nobody, did I? Grace of God I didn’t shoot none of y’all.”

Jimbo climbed to his feet and offered his hand to Farsanna. “Grace of God’s got some kind of kick to it.”

I could see Farsanna was trembling.

But then, we all were.

Mort was still propped where he’d arranged himself on the hood of his truck, and had flipped his .22 to peer down into the barrel, like he might find inside it what he wanted to say.

The boys, all except Welp, approached Mort and the upturned mouth of his gun. Welp slumped off to the side.

“Beckwith, you
jerk
—” I could hear Emerson start in, but Jimbo motioned for him to lower his voice.

That left Farsanna to me. “Well,” I said, “I reckon accidents happen.” I had no earthly idea if I was telling the truth, and the truth was beside the point just then. “And you gotta know that had nothing to do with you.” I could see from her eyes that consolation was a mistake, that it might not have occurred to her to think the shot
could
be about her. And now I’d put the idea in her head.

The boys walked back to where we stood, none of them, Emerson or Jimbo or L. J., looking too much at ease, and L. J. was all but staggering, his glasses perched cockeyed and low on his nose. Bobby Welpler tagged behind.

Jimbo must’ve caught the new question on Farsanna’s face. “Reckon it wasn’t too much on purpose, as much as a Beckwith ever purposes anything much,” he told her. “Don’t reckon that old son of a swamp sucker was aiming to hurt anybody. Mort’s too mean to let life alone, and too soft to much injure it up. He’s just expressing his views.”

What the new girl made of that, I couldn’t say.

We now had nothing to do but walk on—a little closer to each other than we might have done ten minutes before—like we knew now what we hadn’t before: that we were moving somewhere underneath a bullet’s spiraling run, or inside whatever kind of grace explodes and leaves you seeing things for what they are but hoped they weren’t.

_________

From the Clearing, the footpath to the Blue Hole threaded through boulders in a slow descent and then, without warning, tilted cliff-steep almost, tumbling hikers into a slide from tree to tree and rock to rock. Every summer, we’d dared each other to run down it and we’d later signed each other’s plaster casts.

At the top of the tilt, last in line behind me and the boys, the new girl studied L. J.’s and Emerson’s and Bobby Welpler’s descents.

I kicked off my flip-flops. “Here’s where the shoes come off,” I said to the new girl.

She looked from my bare feet to the jumble of sneakers and sandals beside me to the vertical path, covered in root webs and rocks, that dropped like a slide from where we stood.

“It’s what we do here,” was how I explained.

But Jimbo wouldn’t leave it at that. “Gotta go barefoot on holy ground,” was how he tried to make it make sense. Stomping on his sneaker heels to remove them, he flung them with a swift kick over his head to the heap of unclean shoes behind him.

The new girl just stared at the drop, then back up the path to the Clearing.

I could guess what she was thinking, that her choices just then both looked pretty bleak: to return up the path where a gun might go off any minute, or go forward, where the path fell away now in a nearly ninety-degree angle. So I tried to help. “Now don’t be letting Mort Beckwith bother you any, him and his toys. He’s always pointing that thing at whatever’s smart enough to look scared. He’s harmless, though.”

Jimbo had fallen in beside me. “Ain’t none of us harmless,” he said—like that was helpful somehow.

So I pointed down at Bo’s huge feet, for something to say. “How in heaven’s name do you run on those things?”

“Turtle, you wound me. You don’t reckon the glass slipper’ll fit when my prince comes someday?”

“Glass-bottom boat, maybe. One for each foot.”

He grinned at me before starting down and then, holding a towel out to the new girl, glanced back over his shoulder at her. “You all dine and fandy?”

“Fine and dandy,” I translated without looking at her, and gave back Bo’s smile.

And my heart pinged in my chest, an engine all off rhythm, when he reached one arm back to pat the back of my calf.

Farsanna accepted the towel Bo held out to her, but shook her head at his offer: “Haul on down beside me if you’re feeling scared.”

“This,” she said, “I can do by myself.”

Which, I had to admit, was a point in her favor. And that was with her still a little shaky from the gun going off.

Jimbo flashed her the dimple that said
that
was the right answer.

But I wasn’t missing the chance to get the jump on Jimbo’s getting his usual jump on me. “In that case,” I said to them both, “Geronimo-o-o!” And I flung myself on my backside before I’d finished the word.

The proper, and unused, path down to the Blue Hole wound slowly, switching back on itself to avoid erosion. But the one we all took threaded straight through the trees and the outcroppings of rock, the course always slick with a carpet of leaves and loose soil. From the top, a good eighty yards up, just before the path tipped into descent, hemlocks and oaks blocked any view of the water below. But even from high up above, even if you weren’t listening for it, you could hear the rumble and rush of the stream that fed into the Hole. On a hot summer’s day, the mere sound of the stream spoke coolness and mercy, pulled on us, tumbling, helpless, to where the water pooled for us, waiting.

Well into my slide, I slammed feet-first into an old yellow poplar on the way down, and Bo rolled in next and, shoulder first, hit the boulder before me. We crashed and careened the next several lengths of the path, Jimbo cursing me and my future offspring all the way down. We landed in the usual heap, bruised in the usual places, at the mud beach on the north bank, where the stream indulged itself with a final flourish of small waterfall before becoming the Blue Hole. Panting, we rolled on our backs to watch the new girl, sliding—stiffly, of course—on the towel, her long red cotton skirt tucked around her ankles as she descended.

I clapped a couple of times for her. Then, noticing the sweat blossoms flowering on my tank top, I began shedding my clothes down to my suit.

Still on his back, Jimbo made the baseball referee’s sign for an out in the new girl’s direction. “Disqualified!”

“What?” I laughed at him.

“We can’t be allowing that kind of behavior. Look at her.”

I looked at her. “What about her?”

“Way too smooth and clean. What would it lead to if we all did it that way?”

The new girl levitated to her feet without the use of her hands, and dusted off her skirt, which was not anywhere dirty from what I could tell. And I came close to saying, disgusted, how behavior like this—this princess act—wouldn’t likely turn Em’s truck into a pumpkin, or a proper coach, either.

Her gaze swung out toward the Hole, whose clay sides and black bottom silt had been churned up all day, suspended now in water that was deep rusty brown. Granite boulders rimmed the pond, and mountain laurel and hemlock provided shade like umbrellas at street cafes: The Blue Hole was a study in greens and grays and browns and rust-reds, with round punctures of pink where rhododendron blooms still hung on to life, badly wilting.

I followed Farsanna’s eyes. “Okay, so nothing here at the Blue Hole’s blue except sky. It was never officially named, really,” I told her. “We just call it that.”

She examined the scene. “There are many crocodiles here—or no?”

I laughed at her, laughed out loud at the thought: a croc slithering out from under a pink rhododendron. “We get a water moccasin every once in a while—and nobody tells their mommas. That’s rule number one. And we get mosquitoes as big as a baby’s fist. They attack in a swarm, like the moccasins will. But just make sure you look where you land when you jump in, and you’ll be all right.
Before
you jump in.” I waited for her to go big-eyed or back away from the edge.

But she nodded, taking it in, not even rattled. I couldn’t help but like that about her. Bo saw it too. His head swung around with interest at her not squealing or acting squeamish. She had just earned herself points.

“So,” I asked, “does this look anything like where you come from?”

She glanced down at her toes, already sunk into the red clay that lined the banks of the Blue Hole. “In Sri Lanka, there is sand, beautiful sand, gold, and some brown, the color of king coconuts in my country. The color of …” She paused, searching for a more local example. Her gaze resting on me, she brightened. “Yes, the color of Shelby’s hair. Like this, the sand of Sri Lanka is beautiful.”

Jimbo winked at me.

“You see,” I told him, while pretending to pat my wheat-sheaf of ponytail into place, “I have one friend in this world.”

Farsanna was inspecting the scene before her. “Who discovered it the first, this place?”

Discovered
it? I raised both eyebrows at Jimbo, who took up the question.

“Well now, I don’t reckon nobody first discovers a place like this. You just know about it. Or don’t. Average folks don’t. And most folks are average.” He winked at her. “You got to have someone show you the way.”

“What if,” her head came up then, like she was trying to keep a bead of sweat from falling off the end of her chin, “I had come by myself here?”

Jimbo, who was struggling to strip off his landscaping khakis without losing his swim trunks beneath them, paused for a moment to consider the question. He held out his hand to Farsanna. “Then I reckon you wouldn’t be our honored guest.”

She examined his face. And then smiled.

I don’t suppose I’d seen her smile before, not a real one—maybe she hadn’t smiled since she’d moved to the Ridge. It was strange, that smile, and slow coming. Like a dark wave that swells and then crests, and splashes everything in its path. Her smile had that splash to it, whether or not I’d been looking to like her.

It took me a minute to recover from the force of that smile. And maybe Jimbo a minute longer, or two. But I tried not to let this nettle me much, since Bo was a man, or almost, and they’re all weak, Momma said: the first lesson every Southern momma teachers her girls, just before the Why We Let a Man Think He’s Won.

So I ignored Bo and took charge myself. “Follow me.”

I led the way, a half-circle around the pond, leaping boulder to boulder, to where Emerson and the other boys had spread out their towels. We joined them out on the palm of our favorite rock, which could cup us all in close.

As usual, the games had already begun for the doctors’ and lawyers’ and CPAs’ kids who didn’t work in the summers. Between Em and Jimbo’s landscaping and L. J.’s daddy’s Feed and Seed, our mangy pack rarely arrived during the most miserable heat of the day.

Already well established for the day, then, were the rope swing competitions. Boys from all over Pisgah Ridge conducted wild contests of masculine prowess from the rope on the sweetgum tree. Scrambling up the scrap wood nailed to the trunk, the boys hurled themselves to the rope and down into the water from branches higher and higher.

“Be a man about it,” they taunted each other.

“Put some hair on your chest!” they called out to the arc of an upside-down spin.

The day Farsanna first showed up with us, the banks of the Blue Hole were heavy with teenagers conducting the business of life from where they lay: long, lean bodies like big cats, stretching and sleeping and sunning and occasionally striking a particularly gorgeous pose for anyone who cared to admire. Farsanna Moulavi, walking last behind all of us, stepped from the shade of the hemlocks to a boulder soaked in full sun.

She was dark all right—no mistake about that. Even skin the color of homemade cocoa was dark for our Ridge. Her hair turned under in stiff, shiny waves, laying like uncoiled black licorice on her shoulders, glistening with the heat of the day. Beside her, I felt wan and anemic, like I’d been shipped from the factory without my final glaze and firing.

I remembered, there in the midst of admiring her, how just when you thought the world had gone still and soft, you could be blasted flat to the ground from behind.

More to comfort myself than because I believed it, I whispered to L. J. beside me as we watched the boys swing from the rope, “We’re a good generation past … you know. Stuff. Right?” Farsanna had already approached the water, dipping her toes in, taking her time.

“Technically, more than one generation,” he corrected, “depending on your denotation of ‘stuff.’ Assuming you’re referring to
fatalities
on the Ridge. On the other hand, if you’re alluding merely to life-
threatening
violence or legislation significant to racial discrimination—”