Safe from the Neighbors (25 page)

“Rick’s on the team,” Candace said, “but he’s injured.”

“Just got my feelings hurt a little bit,” he told me. “But I’ll be playing again next season.”

“We decided to drive to Fayetteville,” Candace said, “for the game tonight.”

“We’re playing the Razorbacks.
Sooey
, pig!” Trish squealed. Her eyes, I noticed now, were red rimmed. She’d definitely been toking.

“And this,” Candace said, nodding at the other two guys, “is our friend Billy Kershaw and his brother Bobby.”

Still holding my robe closed, I shook hands with each of them.

“We just took a notion to do this about three or four this morning,” Rick said. “I feel bad about waking you up, Mr. May, but Trish said you never slept past seven.”

“What time is it, anyway?”

“A quarter past eight,” Trish said.

“How’d you get in?”

“When we saw the front door was still chained, Rick lifted the garage door high enough for me to crawl inside, so I came through the laundry room.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you guys,” I lied, “but isn’t this a little bit of a detour?”

“Rick’s from Arcola,” Candace said. “We’ll stop at his place and pick up his sister.”

“To kind of balance things out,” Trish said.

And then, I figured, everybody would go one on one. I wondered
which of the Kershaw twins would get down in the trenches with her.

“People say it gets cold over in Arkansas,” Candace told me, “so we decided to pick up our down jackets.” She turned and started down the hall.

“Get mine too, okay?” Trish called.

At that moment it occurred to me to wonder whether I’d shut the bedroom door when I’d bounded through it. Surely to God I had, hadn’t I? I took off down the hall after her, but I was too late. The door was wide open, and my daughter had paused to look inside. I stood there shaking, an icy sweat flowing out of every pore. I could feel it trickling down my back and legs.

The bed was partially made, the covers thrown back at an angle on my side, exposing a triangular stretch of fitted sheet. The closet yawned open, as did the bathroom. Maggie was nowhere in sight.

“Want me to make you guys some coffee?” I asked, trying to keep the tremor out of my voice. I hoped that when I went into the kitchen, I’d see the chain dangling from the back door, and in the end I found just that, proving she’d mapped her exit strategy before getting into bed.

“Sure,” Candace said, “some coffee would be nice.”

But for some reason, she continued to stand there rather than move on down the hall.

When I was a boy, my grandfather had an annoying little dog named Johnson. He could have been named for LBJ, though that seems unlikely, or—more plausibly—for Paul B. Johnson, Jr., who succeeded Ross Barnett as governor. I don’t remember and am not sure I ever knew.

Johnson, who I guess was a rat terrier, stayed busy from morning till night, causing as much trouble as he could, gnawing on people’s shoes while they tried to eat, chewing the Memphis
paper to bits if you didn’t get it first thing in the morning, before Grandpa turned him loose. He’d pick up virtually any small object with his mean little teeth and carry it off to places none of us ever discovered. And unlike most Delta dogs, he was nonracial. Usually, dogs belonging to black people would only bark at whites, or vice versa, but Johnson barked at every living creature who entered his sphere of existence.

As far as anyone could tell, he was completely useless—up until you put him in a boat and paddled out on a lake, at which point he finally fell silent. Then, when you passed over a bream bed where the bluegills were spawning, he’d stick his nose into the air and sniff, letting you know it was time to drop your hook.

Standing there in the hallway, Candace did the same thing. She sniffed once, then twice. And though she never said a word, just trudged at last down the hall to get those down jackets so they wouldn’t freeze to death up in Fayetteville, I knew exactly what she was thinking: That’s not Momma’s fragrance.

B
EING SOMEONE’S CHILD
, it seems to me now, is a maddening state of affairs. You can always sense when something’s wrong in your parents’ lives, but you generally don’t know what it is, and they aren’t about to tell you, even if you’re already an adult yourself. They have—or believe they do—a vested interest in preserving your ignorance. There are questions they don’t want you to ask, and if by some accident you happen to pose them, they’ll either refuse to answer or just lie.

From an early age I understood that my father was a man of few words. In Parker Sturdivant’s barbershop he seldom spoke. In the rare instances when he did, it was usually to say something about the weather or to comment on how the fish were biting or not in Lake Lee. He never complained about his wife like the other men did, nor did he join in when they talked about football. His father hadn’t let him go out for the team when he was in school, since practice would’ve interfered with his cotton picking. Never having played—in a society where tall, athletic-looking boys were duty-bound to uphold their town’s honor on Friday nights by catching passes, leveling runners or scoring touchdowns—was something I don’t think he ever lived down. It just gave him one more reason to hate the fall—which, as I once heard him say, was the season when his fortunes always fell.

Oddly enough, given his membership in an organization
openly dedicated to preventing the advancement of blacks, he spoke far more freely in their presence than around the men in the barbershop. One day I heard him tell a black man named Tea Burns, as they crawled around in the dirt beneath our old Allis-Chalmers, that there were times when he wished the Sunflower River bridge would collapse while his mother-in-law was driving across it, then went on to say that he also sometimes hoped she’d contract a deadly disease, though he never explained why. I heard him tell another black man, whose name I don’t remember, how much he hated having to go and beg Herman Horton for money every March, that he’d rather drop his drawers in the middle of Front Street and take a crap while the whole town watched. Nodding sympathetically, that man, whoever he was, said, “Yes sir, I know just what you mean. There’s days when I’d like to shit downtown myself.”

While I couldn’t imagine why my father wanted bad things to happen to my grandmother, what he said about turning Front Street into a bathroom made me giggle. But later on, when I imagined having to face Eugene and my other friends if he ever did anything like that, I became deeply unsettled. Something was wrong in my dad’s life, I could see that, though I didn’t know what it was or how I could help fix it. I just figured it wasn’t anything he and I would ever discuss, and that assumption, I’m sorry to say, was correct.

On that September day in 1962, when Arlan Calloway made his remarks about the land we lived on being “public” and then clapped my father on the back, it was unusually quiet in the pickup going home. Normally, Dad would gaze out at whatever cotton field we were passing and offer some bit of information he thought would prove useful when I started farming myself, and it was a given that I would. “Time’s coming,” he might say, “when most folks’ll be growing those high spindling stalks like’s
in that field out there. That stuff slides into a mechanical picker nice and easy. But those old breeds with lots of heavy branches down low, that’s where the real yield is. Pick by hand just as long as you can.” Or “Been me, I would’ve rotated soybeans or peanuts into that patch this year. That land’s tired, and soybeans and peanuts are a source of free nitrogen.” That day he didn’t say a thing. He didn’t even look out the window, just trained his eyes on the ridge of gravel in the middle of the road, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

I wondered how our land, and the house we lived in, could be “public.” The school I went to was public, and it said so on the side of the bus I rode:
LORING PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM.
That meant anybody could go to school there, as long as they were white. In that sense, all of us owned it. But if our land was public, and our house, too, that must mean that they belonged to everybody, not just us. This made me wonder if everything else I’d thought was ours was public property as well. Did my father own the pickup we were riding in? What about our tractors, our cotton trailers, our combine? And all the stuff in our house? Did Eugene have as much claim to my clothes and toys as I did?

Up ahead, on the left, the Calloways’ place came into view. Mr. Calloway’s truck wasn’t there—he’d driven away from the barbershop in the opposite direction, as if headed downtown—but Nadine’s sky-blue Tempest was parked in the driveway. I’d gotten to know that car fairly well, having ridden to town in it on numerous occasions with her and Eugene and Maggie. She always let me sit up front beside her, making her own kids ride in the back. “Luke’s company,” she said if either of them complained, “though he’s also family.” She’d reach across the seat after saying that, giving my hand a little squeeze and following it up with a wink.

I waited to see if my father would slow down and look across the yard, as it was common to do when you passed a neighbor’s
house. Whoever was inside might glance out the window when they heard you driving by, and it would be offensive not to wave. You even waved at people you didn’t know, if you passed them on the road, or at least you raised your hand, unless, of course, they happened to be black. If they were, waving seemed to be optional, but my father always did it, so I did, too.

Not only did he fail to slow down that day, he actually sped up, as if he wanted to put the Calloways behind us just as fast as he could. He continued to stare straight ahead.

I looked over the gun rack in the rear window, thinking maybe Nadine had stepped outside when she heard us, but I couldn’t see through the cloud of dust. “Daddy?” I said.

He acted as if he hadn’t heard me. Though he was known to be the slowest driver in the county—something the men in the barbershop joked about sometimes, claiming they’d fallen asleep at the wheel while creeping along behind him—he pressed the accelerator to the floor.

Cotton fields dissolved into a white blur. The wind whipping in through the window took my breath away, and I had to turn in his direction to fill my lungs. What I saw scared me. His jaw was locked tight, his bottom lip quivered, and his right cheek looked damp, though it wasn’t hot out.

When we got to our house, he wheeled into the yard so fast that for a moment I thought he intended to drive right into the living room and knock all the walls down, since apparently they weren’t ours anyway. As I braced myself against the dashboard he finally slammed his foot on the brake, throwing up dirt and gravel. Later that afternoon, while he was out in the field, I inspected the deep grooves in the driveway.

I expected him to jump out of the truck, slam the door and storm inside, but he didn’t. My mother was home, and my grandmother was there, too, and I doubt he was in a hurry to give them any news. On the other hand, he must’ve been afraid that I wanted to ask him about the conversation in the parking
lot. It’s nice to think that if I had known of his apprehension I would have kept my mouth shut, but that gives the child I was then too much credit. I was interested in only one thing: how all that talk about our land being public would affect me.

“Daddy?”

He didn’t answer right away. What he did was turn loose of the steering wheel, resting his left hand on his thigh. He turned his right hand over and studied it for a moment, as if he’d never noticed it before. Then he reached across the seat and patted my knee. “Yeah, son?”

The whine I heard in my own voice only scared me further, but taming it was beyond my control: “Was Mr. Calloway saying he might take our house? Is that what all that stuff about things being ‘public’ was about?”

“Arlan ain’t nothing but a blowhard,” he said. “You know what a blowhard is?”

“No sir, I don’t.”

He puffed his cheeks out until it looked as if they’d explode, then blew all the air out at me, and it smelled like coffee and cigarettes. He lifted his hand off my knee and mussed my hair. “That was just a waste of breath, wasn’t it?”

“Yes sir. I guess so.”

“Well, sometimes that’s what Mr. Calloway likes to do. Wasting a little breath’s just his way of staying amused. Didn’t do that, he’d bore himself to death. He’s not going to take our house, don’t you worry.”

Just like that, he put it out of my mind, which I believe he would’ve said is what a father’s for, had we ever discussed that topic in later years, after I became a father myself. “Well, good,” I said. “He doesn’t need another house anyhow. He’s already got one of his own.”

“Yeah, and he probably ought to spend a little more time worrying about what goes on there. But that’s for him to decide, not me.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on,” he said, “and let’s
eat us some Viennas and saltines. I believe I saw a big bottle of RC in the refrigerator. That still your favorite soda water?”

“Yes sir, that and Dr Pepper.”

So we got out of the truck and walked towards our house. And if he sagged any beneath the weight I’d deposited squarely on his shoulders, it was never apparent to me.