Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (7 page)

But Sanna, her legs pinned underneath fallen bags of mulch, snagged the hem of my T-shirt, yanking me back to the floor just as Em threw the truck into a sharp left. The pickup winged into another curve.

All of us in the truck bed plowed against its right side, as the wheels screamed—our bodies flailed. As if in slow-motion replay, I can still see the lights whirl all around me, still see the blood that had pooled underneath me on the truck bed. Then my head slammed onto the white metal floor, and the spin of lights snuffed out.

6
Blood on the Truck Bed

“Is she bad hurt?!” I heard a voice say.

I had clearly fallen in the truck and passed out, and the world was just taking form again over my face. I assumed he meant me, if I was okay. The voice was my brother’s.

Followed by Jimbo’s voice: “There’s blood enough here coming from her head to float Dracula’s castle.”

“Typically,” L. J. spoke now, quickly, “the cranium does bleed excessively.”

I felt my head for the gash that they must be speaking about, and could find nothing. Except for a large bump on my forehead.

I could see their faces now. And they were not looking down onto mine.

Jimbo and Emerson and L. J. all knelt over the new girl.
Fine, I thought. Well that’s just fine. I’m here with no doubt a concussion and internal bleeding, and they’re not even watching me die.

My head throbbing, I sulked on my back for a moment, alone. I let my head roll to the side and felt my hair stick, warm and wet, to my cheek.

Alarmed, I sat up, pulling back the wet hair from my face. It was blood. And lots of it. Apparently not mine or the boys’.

Farsanna lay flat on her back, her eyes open, her face entirely red and blood still pouring from the right side of her head.

“You’re sure,” Emerson pressed L. J., “it’s not grazed from a bullet? You’re sure it’s just where her head hit the side of the truck?”

L. J. shook his head in disdain. “You’ve watched far too much Big Valley. This, my friends, is nothing but a flesh wound.” He chuckled at his own Monty Python allusion and adopted a bad English accent: “Only a flesh wound.” None of us laughed. “Look, she’s fine, all right? We can take her to a doctor for stitches, but he’ll only tell us she doesn’t need them. Look closer.”

I saw then he was using someone’s T-shirt to dab at her head and stanch the wound, and that Jimbo was shirtless.

My brother leaned down closer still to the wound. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

Farsanna shook her head slightly. “You are not the one at fault, no?”

“I slammed on the accelerator when I saw the idiots swerving and heard the first shot,” Em moaned.

Bo lay a hand on Em’s shoulder. “So you, good man, get credit for saving all our lives.” He tousled Em’s hair. “I, on the other hand, failed miserably. Despicably. Unforgivably.” He, too, leaned further in. “I failed to protect the ladies among us. I dove for them, like a good human shield, but only knocked Turtle upside the head.” The boys shifted their joint gaze toward me.

“Don’t y’all worry ’bout me none,” I snipped at them. “I’m just
fine
over here with a knot on my head the size of … of my head.” That sounded a bit selfish, even to me, given the amount of blood, not mine, in my own hair. But I was annoyed with the boys. So I crawled the three feet to Farsanna. “How are you?”

“Only a flesh wound,” she mimicked in her own island accent. And she smiled up at us, weakly, and gave a fleeting thumbs-up.

“You need to see a doctor,” Em persisted.

“No.” Farsanna’s jaw squared and her eyes went black, liable to smolder.

My brother wouldn’t let it alone. “You need to—?”

“My head is fine. L. J. has said.”

“But—”

“And the doctor visit means for me that my father will know what happened tonight. And my father will fear.”

“Well,” L. J. mumbled to me, “maybe your father has reason to fear.”

“And,” she continued, “I prefer for him not knowing that we were here.”

Bo drew his long legs up to his bare chest and scooted closer beside her. “Your momma gave you permission to go riding with us. So they’d not be so hop-along happy to hear you’d been cruising the streets of the city.”

Farsanna nodded.

Bo nodded back, then looked up at us. “Well, then, that settles it. We say nothing to nobody about this.”

L. J. raised an eyebrow. “And when the civic authorities pursue their inquiry into what happened tonight on Seventh Street?”

Farsanna rose to her elbows. “Tonight, what
did
happen?”

It was then I heard sirens. Emerson must have driven us blocks from that corner of Seventh, but we were still in the city, and the city’s concrete and asphalt echoed with their wail.

Emerson spoke first. “I only saw in the rearview mirror everyone diving for cover, and screaming like us. I think, though I’m not sure, I think the guy driving was too drunk or too nuts to give a straight aim to whomever was shooting.”

“
Whomever
?” I said. Even in the face of near-certain death, my brother couldn’t let go of grammar.

My brother ignored me. “At least it’s possible no one was hurt terribly badly. As far as I could tell, the shots, most of them, were going high and wide.”

“So,” L. J. pulled a hand over his chin’s growth of peach fuzz as if it were a full beard, “so perhaps that little display was primarily for the purpose of show. Let’s conjecture a moment: What if it were only a tactic of intimidation?”

“Directed at … us?” I asked.

My cousin shrugged. “Perhaps. Or perhaps blacks in general, just a little reminder of who calls the shots.”

“Or fires them,” I muttered.

Jimbo’s arms were crossed over his chest, a sure sign he was paying attention. “Or both.”

L. J. nodded. “Or both. Yes, one might conjecture that.”

Emerson pulled a quarter from his shorts pocket. “Let’s conjecture that somebody needs to call and report them at least. Like right now.”

“The sirens …” I pointed out.

“I mean not just report there was trouble, but report what we saw. I’ll make an anonymous call from this pay phone. They do that sometimes now in cities, you know. I’ll report the car we all saw, and I’ll say we saw … that we saw…. Did any of us see the guys driving?”

Silence.

L. J. rolled his eyes. “Stupendous. At the very least, they’ll inquire whether the perpetrators were black or white. Or—” He stopped, glanced sideways at Farsanna, and left off there. “They’ll want a thorough description.”

Emerson looked from one to the other of us. “Did anyone see what they were?”

“White,” I offered at last.

“You’re sure of that, Turtle? Did you recognize faces? No need to be frightened now.”

“On the contrary,” L. J. put in, “there’s every reason to be frightened of thugs who roam city streets inebriated and armed.”

“No faces,” I told him. “And the Gremlin you and I saw, I didn’t recognize it as belonging to … well, to anyone whose car I know. But I think … I think the faces were white. Yeah, I’m sure of it. I think.”

L. J. put the hand back to his forehead. “Inebriated and armed
and
unidentified. Great. Just great. Not so much as an eyewitness to contribute to the cause of justice.”

And so we contributed nothing that night, nothing except to each other, to a sense of belonging, perhaps. And to a load of guilt we shouldered together for saying nothing to anyone else.

“We did,” Em reassured us, and himself, “hear the sirens. Which meant the police had been called. Which means they’re going after the guys. Which means they’ll catch them.”

I watched L. J.’s face as Em said this. “You just rolled your eyes, dear cousin. So what are you thinking?”

“That’s my default demeanor.” He shrugged. “Just contemplating whether anyone will actually
try
to catch them.”

In the one open gas station we found, I asked the man inside for the key to the ladies restroom, and Farsanna met me back in the shadows, her face still covered in blood. We washed her hair and her face, and staunched the wound with the remaining white of Jimbo’s T-shirt. We arranged her thick, heavy hair over the wound, which, once it stopped bleeding, lay nicely disguised.

“Good as new,” I pronounced her. “You feeling okay?”

“My wound is obvious, no?”

“No. Really. You’re looking gorgeous as ever. Just maybe a little … shaken, that’s all.”

“You do as well.” She smiled, and her dark eyes crinkled at me. “Gorgeous and shaken.”

We left the gas station and reached the summit of the road up the back side of our ridge well before midnight.

I scooted along the truck bed and settled in next to L. J. “Can I ask you something?”

“You’re going to regardless of my giving consent.”

“Right. So, listen, I know I’m not always real fair to Welp, so Jimbo wouldn’t be happy with me if he heard this. But did it occur to you that he wasn’t with us? I mean, does it bother you any that he left before we went down, that he said he wouldn’t go down there
tonight?
You think he knew anything?”

L. J. raised an eyebrow at me. “You impress me, small cousin. I thought no one but I had caught what he said about tonight. Yes, it occurred to me. Though that’s circumstantial, at best. Wouldn’t hold up one moment in court.”

“Except that we know how he can be. And how Mort and his crowd could sweep Welp along into most anything. “

“We also know that wasn’t Mort’s car. And that none of us saw him, or Welp either. And that none of us witnessed anything substantial at all. That we have now agreed upon collective silence. And that we are in effect less than useless, if not actual aids and abettors of crimes committed tonight.”

“Right,” I said, and slumped so low my chin touched my chest. Then I sat up a bit straighter.

Emerson pulled the truck from asphalt, pocked as it was, into the trenched gravel of Farsanna’s driveway and stopped close to the carport. Its metal supports, I noticed, seemed weary of holding its roof. Or maybe that was only my own weariness, and now this new thing to carry, this secret of what we had seen, and hadn’t.

For no good reason, we all stood in the back of the truck. Emerson emerged from the cab. Farsanna ignored Jimbo’s hand to help her and swung down by herself. Bo and L. J. and I landed beside her. Her gaze gone into searchlight, she looked from one of our faces to the next.

In all times of crisis, we let Jimbo speak for us, as he did then. He held up his right hand, flat to the air, and placed his left in a fist beside the right thumb. Emerson did the same thing, and so did L. J. and then I did. Farsanna was last, and most slowly.

It then became our Pack’s secret handshake—though not a handshake at all. From then on that summer, in moments of tension or crisis, or when someone needed to laugh or loosen up from a fit of the grumps, or cheer up after a parental rebuking, we would form Sri Lanka with a palm and a fist, and define our own little culture. Years later in a college class called “Social Deviance,” I studied subcultures and gangs. Primary-source research told me what I’d learned long before in the back of a pickup: that subcultures gravitate toward ways of symbolizing belonging. And that summer, whether we liked it or not, we belonged to the Pack. And the Pack had its own sign, its own grasp at exotic and secret.

With the white dust of the new girl’s gravel still clouding around us, Jimbo raised the fist that he’d placed by his palm. “This would be Sri Lanka.”

Farsanna reached for his fist, covered her own hand around it, and pulled his down. “And this,” she told him, raising herself to full height and motioning to her house, to the truck, to the block of bare lawn, “would be home.” And maybe because this met with incredulous stares from us, she added, “Home is for us here now.” She looked from one to the other of us, her eyes somehow darker than even the night and her face set into its mask that said nothing of what she was thinking. I waited for the
no
? that should’ve ended that sentence, and for once it didn’t come.

It was so utterly absurd, her choosing this day, this night, this moment, to announce this place as her home. It flew in the face of what anyone could have expected, of what she ought to have done, and been afraid of.

“So …” I offered. And I almost met her eye—but not quite. “So, we’ll …” We’ll what? Nothing came to me then. I was hearing Earth, Wind, and Fire punctuated with gunshots, hearing the hail of shattered streetlights and shriek of truck tires. Just then even the sound of the “we’ll” sounded false to my ear.

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Em finished for me. “For the Blue Hole. We got to have you there with us. Okay?”

I never thanked Em for that, for saying what I never did. It struck me at the moment, though, that I liked him, my very own brother, liked who he was—not something I’d have said to his face.

Em snatched his towel from the cab and flung it over Farsanna’s shoulders. “You look cold,” he muttered.

She didn’t look cold to me. Or scared. Though she had to have been, seeing what we all had seen.

Jimbo and Em walked with her almost to the end of the drive, where she nodded to them, but that was all before walking away.

We watched Farsanna tenderfoot the rest of the way to her door, her feet bearing witness to her first time down the slope to the Hole. She turned once, knelt to pet the stray, who’d fallen asleep on the stoop but rose to lick her feet. She looked right and left, seemed to listen a moment. Then, clutching Em’s towel tightly around her, she opened the door and let the dog in. I pictured her momma inside, stiffening to hear the door creak open, limping to greet her daughter, both hands stroking Farsanna’s hair.