The Drawing of the Three (25 page)

She listened attentively to Eddie, not speaking at all, her eyes fixed on his. At one moment Eddie would guess she was five years older than he, at another he would guess fifteen. There was one thing he didn’t have to guess about: he was falling in love with her.

When he had finished, she sat for a moment without saying anything, now not looking at him but beyond him, looking at the waves which would, at nightfall, bring the lobsters and with their alien,
lawyerly questions. He had been particularly careful to describe
them.
Better for her to be a little scared now than a lot scared when they came out to play. He supposed she wouldn’t want to eat them, not after hearing what they had done to Roland’s hand and foot, not after she got a good close look at them. But eventually hunger would win out over
did-a-chick
and
dum-a-chum.

Her eyes were far and distant.

“Odetta?” he asked after perhaps five minutes had gone by. She had told him her name. Odetta Holmes. He thought it was a gorgeous name.

She looked back at him, startled out of her revery. She smiled a little. She said one word.

“No.”

He only looked at her, able to think of no suitable reply. He thought he had never understood until that moment how illimitable a simple negative could be.

“I don’t understand,” he said finally. “What are you no-ing?”

“All this.” Odetta swept an arm (she had, he’d noticed, very strong arms—smooth but very strong), indicating the sea, the sky, the beach, the scruffy foothills where the gunslinger was now presumably searching for water (or maybe getting eaten alive by some new and interesting monster, something Eddie didn’t really care to think about). Indicating, in short, this entire world.

“I understand how you feel. I had a pretty good case of the unrealities myself at first.”

But
had
he? Looking back, it seemed he had simply accepted, perhaps because he was sick, shaking himself apart in his need for junk.

“You get over it.”

“No,” she said again. “I believe one of two things has happened, and no matter which one it is, I am still in Oxford, Mississippi. None of this is real.”

She went on. If her voice had been louder (or perhaps if he had not been falling in love) it would almost have been a lecture. As it was, it sounded more like lyric than lecture.

Except,
he had to keep reminding himself,
bullshit’s what it really is, and you have to convince her of that. For her sake.

“I may have sustained a head injury,” she said. “They are notorious swingers of axe-handles and billy-clubs in Oxford Town.”

Oxford Town.

That produced a faint chord of recognition far back in Eddie’s mind. She said the words in a kind of rhythm that he for some reason associated with Henry . . . Henry and wet diapers. Why? What? Didn’t matter now.

“You’re trying to tell me you think this is all some sort of dream you’re having while you’re unconscious?”

“Or in a coma,” she said. “And you needn’t look at me as though you thought it was preposterous, because it isn’t. Look here.”

She parted her hair carefully on the left, and Eddie could see she wore it to one side not just because she liked the style. The old wound beneath the fall of her hair was scarred and ugly, not brown but a grayish-white.

“I guess you’ve had a lot of hard luck in your time,” he said.

She shrugged impatiently. “A lot of hard luck and a lot of soft living,” she said. “Maybe it all balances out. I only showed you because I was in a coma for three weeks when I was five. I dreamed a lot then. I can’t remember what the dreams were, but I remember my mamma said they knew I wasn’t going to die just as long as I kept talking and it seemed like I kept talking all the time, although she said they couldn’t make out one word in a dozen. I
do
remember that the dreams were very vivid.”

She paused, looking around.

“As vivid as this place seems to be. And
you,
Eddie.”

When she said his name his arms prickled. Oh, he had it, all right. Had it bad.

“And
him
.” She shivered. “
He
seems the most vivid of all.”

“We ought to. I mean, we
are
real, no matter what you think.”

She gave him a kind smile. It was utterly without belief.

“How did that happen?” he asked. “That thing on your head?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m just making the point that what has happened once might very well happen again.”

“No, but I’m curious.”

“I was struck by a brick. It was our first trip north. We came to the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey. We came in the Jim Crow car.”

“What’s that?”

She looked at him unbelievingly, almost scornfully. “Where have you been living, Eddie? In a bomb-shelter?”

“I’m from a different time,” he said. “Could I ask how old you are, Odetta?”

“Old enough to vote and not old enough for Social Security.”

“Well, I guess that puts me in my place.”

“But gently, I hope,” she said, and smiled that radiant smile which made his arms prickle.

“I’m twenty-three,” he said, “but I was born in 1964—the year you were living in when Roland took you.”

“That’s rubbish.”

“No. I was living in 1987 when he took
me
.”

“Well,” she said after a moment. “That certainly adds a great deal to your argument for this as reality, Eddie.”

“The Jim Crow car . . . was it where the black people had to stay?”

“The
Negros,
” she said. “Calling a Negro a black is a trifle rude, don’t you think?”

“You’ll all be calling yourselves that by 1980 or so,” Eddie said. “When I was a kid, calling a black kid a Negro was apt to get you in a fight. It was almost like calling him a nigger.”

She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then shook her head again.

“Tell me about the brick, then.”

“My mother’s youngest sister was going to be married,” Odetta said. “Her name was Sophia, but my mother always called her Sister Blue because it was the color she always fancied. ‘Or at least she fancied to fancy it,’ was how my mother put it. So I always called her
Aunt Blue, even before I met her. It was the most lovely wedding. There was a reception afterward. I remember all the presents.”

She laughed.

“Presents always look so wonderful to a child, don’t they, Eddie?”

He smiled. “Yeah, you got that right. You never forget presents. Not what you got, not what somebody else got, either.”

“My father had begun to make money by then, but all I knew is that we were
getting ahead.
That’s what my mother always called it and once, when I told her a little girl I played with had asked if my daddy was rich, my mother told me that was what I was supposed to say if any of my other chums ever asked me that question. That we were
getting ahead.

“So they were able to give Aunt Blue a lovely china set, and I remember . . .”

Her voice faltered. One hand rose to her temple and rubbed absently, as if a headache were beginning there.

“Remember what, Odetta?”

“I remember my mother gave her a
forspecial.
”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got a headache. It’s got my tongue tangled. I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you all this, anyway.”

“Do you mind?”

“No. I don’t mind. I
meant
to say mother gave her a special plate. It was white, with delicate blue tracework woven all around the rim.” Odetta smiled a little. Eddie didn’t think it was an entirely comfortable smile. Something about this memory disturbed her, and the way its immediacy seemed to have taken precedence over the extremely strange situation she had found herself in, a situation which should be claiming all or most of her attention, disturbed
him.

“I can see that plate as clearly as I can see you now, Eddie. My mother gave it to Aunt Blue and she cried and cried over it. I think she’d seen a plate like that once when she and my mother were children, only of course their parents could never have afforded such a thing. There was none of them who got anything
forspecial
as kids.
After the reception Aunt Blue and her husband left for the Great Smokies on their honeymoon. They went on the train.” She looked at Eddie.

“In the Jim Crow car,” he said.

“That’s right! In the Crow car! In those days that’s what Negros rode in and where they ate. That’s what we’re trying to change in Oxford Town.”

She looked at him, almost surely expecting him to insist she was
here,
but he was caught in the webwork of his own memory again: wet diapers and those words. Oxford Town. Only suddenly other words came, just a single line, but he could remember Henry singing it over and over until his mother asked if he couldn’t please stop so she could hear Walter Cronkite.

Somebody better investigate soon.
Those were the words. Sung over and over by Henry in a nasal monotone. He tried for more but couldn’t get it, and was that any real surprise? He could have been no more than three at the time.
Somebody better investigate soon.
The words gave him a chill.

“Eddie, are you all right?”

“Yes. Why?”

“You shivered.”

He smiled. “Donald Duck must have walked over my grave.”

She laughed. “Anyway, at least I didn’t spoil the wedding. It happened when we were walking back to the railway station. We stayed the night with a friend of Aunt Blue’s, and in the morning my father called a taxi. The taxi came almost right away, but when the driver saw we were colored, he drove off like his head was on fire and his ass was catching. Aunt Blue’s friend had already gone ahead to the depot with our luggage—there was a lot of it, because we were going to spend a week in New York. I remember my father saying he couldn’t wait to see my face light up when the clock in Central Park struck the hour and all the animals danced.

“My father said we might as well walk to the station. My mother agreed just as fast as lickety-split, saying that was a fine idea, it wasn’t
but a mile and it would be nice to stretch our legs after three days on one train just behind us and half a day on another one just ahead of us. My father said yes, and it was gorgeous weather besides, but I think I knew even at five that he was mad and she was embarrassed and both of them were afraid to call another taxi-cab because the same thing might happen again.

“So we went walking down the street. I was on the inside because my mother was afraid of me getting too close to the traffic. I remember wondering if my daddy meant my face would actually start to
glow
or something when I saw that clock in Central Park, and if that might not hurt, and that was when the brick came down on my head. Everything went dark for a while. Then the dreams started. Vivid dreams.”

She smiled.

“Like
this
dream, Eddie.”

“Did the brick fall, or did someone bomb you?”

“They never found anyone. The police (my mother told me this long after, when I was sixteen or so) found the place where they thought the brick had been, but there were other bricks missing and more were loose. It was just outside the window of a fourth-floor room in an apartment building that had been condemned. But of course there were lots of people staying there just the same. Especially at night.”

“Sure,” Eddie said.

“No one saw anyone leaving the building, so it went down as an accident. My mother said she thought it
had
been, but I think she was lying. She didn’t even bother trying to tell me what my father thought. They were both still smarting over how the cab-driver had taken one look at us and driven off. It was that more than anything else that made them believe someone had been up there, just looking out, and saw us coming, and decided to drop a brick on the niggers.

“Will your lobster-creatures come out soon?”

“No,” Eddie said. “Not until dusk. So one of your ideas is that all of this is a coma-dream like the ones you had when you got
bopped by the brick. Only this time you think it was a billy-club or something.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the other one?”

Odetta’s face and voice were calm enough, but her head was filled with an ugly skein of images which all added up to Oxford Town, Oxford Town. How did the song go?
Two men killed by the light of the moon,/Somebody better investigate soon.
Not quite right, but it was close. Close.

“I may have gone insane,” she said.

The first words which came into Eddie’s mind were
If you think you’ve gone insane, Odetta, you’re nuts.

Brief consideration, however, made this seem an unprofitable line of argument to take.

Instead he remained silent for a time, sitting by her wheelchair, his knees drawn up, his hands holding his wrists.

“Were you really a heroin addict?”

“Am,”
he said. “It’s like being an alcoholic, or ’basing. It’s not a thing you ever get over. I used to hear that and go ‘Yeah, yeah, right, right,’ in my head, you know, but now I understand. I still want it, and I guess part of me will
always
want it, but the physical part has passed.”

“What’s ’basing?” she asked.

“Something that hasn’t been invented yet in your when. It’s something you do with cocaine, only it’s like turning TNT into an A-bomb.”

“You did it?”

“Christ, no. Heroin was my thing. I told you.”

“You don’t seem like an addict,” she said.

Eddie actually was fairly spiffy . . . if, that was, one ignored the
gamy smell arising from his body and clothes (he could rinse himself and did, could rinse his clothes and did, but lacking soap, he could not really wash either). His hair had been short when Roland stepped into his life (the better to sail through customs, my dear, and what a great big joke
that
had turned out to be), and was still a respectable length. He shaved every morning, using the keen edge of Roland’s knife, gingerly at first, but with increasing confidence. He’d been too young for shaving to be part of his life when Henry left for ’Nam, and it hadn’t been any big deal to Henry back then, either; he never grew a beard, but sometimes went three or four days before Mom nagged him into “mowing the stubble.” When he came back, however, Henry was a maniac on the subject (as he was on a few others—foot-powder after showering; teeth to be brushed three or four times a day and followed by a chaser of mouthwash; clothes always hung up) and he turned Eddie into a fanatic as well. The stubble was mowed every morning and every evening. Now this habit was deep in his grain, like the others Henry had taught him. Including, of course, the one you took care of with a needle.