Wedding Bell Blues (27 page)

I reached down and tried to turn the rolled-up something over. It wouldn't budge. Then I tried again to roll it over and one end of the rug flapped loose, lay open. I unrolled it a bit more to make sure there was no body, nowhere. It was just a rug rolled up and pushed aside. Nothing and nobody in it. I scolded myself for letting my imagination even suspect such a thing. Whew. The dark and the quiet were getting to me. And the spooks.

Ida Plum was nowhere around. Maybe she had gone home in her “curtains.” Gone home the same way she had come, in her own car. When the melee started she'd probably gotten the hell out of there like any sensible person would do. Not like me, hanging around a deserted backstage, poking around where anything could happen. Not someone alone after everyone else had left. A prime target for danger. For anything.

I took the back way out from the stage to a deserted parking lot. People sure could get out of places fast when something was over. I thought of all those plastic green beans littering the auditorium floor and seats and probably even in the light fixtures. A night to remember. Was Pearl Buttons in the audience? Would she capture this event for the environs, the historians of Littleboro? The night of the Littleboro riot and great green bean fight.

Our poor Mayor Moss. She had planned such a unique event, a night to make history. And it sure had. Plus she lost her cool. For the first time I'd seen beneath her sleek exterior, all her polish and poise. Would she pick up her husband, her turtle and leave Littleboro in her Rolls just when she had begun to make her mark? And would Littleboro be better off? Or worse? We certainly had lacked for innovation and forward thinking in the past and look where that had gotten us. Same old, same old. Staid, stuck in the boonies of the past. “Progressive” was not a word in many Littleborians' vocabularies. But was that a bad thing?

I took a deep breath, told myself I was all grown up and this was Littleboro, and I bravely headed toward home. I had walked these five blocks home from school a million miles and too many times to count. In the daylight though. To and from. First Littleboro Elementary, grades one through seven, then Littleboro High, grades eight to twelve, where I met Malinda. Our lockers were side by side. Mine was rusted and caved in and the door wouldn't close all the way. Malinda painted hers purple. I did mine in wild pink. In those first years of integration the school officials didn't care what we did as long as we didn't create a disturbance. They must have heard and read reports from other school systems and held their breaths. There were few black students in Littleboro and they were mostly like Malinda, smart and friendly. I never saw her without a smile, a ready laugh. I was lucky to be her best friend, sorry we had those empty lost years when we hadn't kept in touch.

Now, even in the half dark, getting darker fast, my feet still knew all the cracks in the sidewalks even if I couldn't see them, knew the places raised by tree roots growing underneath. I walked past the gym, the football field, past the tennis courts and wondered who used them now that Father Roderick was dead. I had a momentary shiver remembering how I had been the one to find his body. Poor man. So young, so darn good-looking in his tennis garb, such a bright future ahead in the Catholic Church.

I had always felt afraid walking these streets home, though I had not done it at night very much and I couldn't remember ever walking it alone. After football games there was a lot of noise, cars roaring and popping down the streets, people still celebrating a win or just because it was Friday night and they were seventeen and had a car with Daddy's gas in it.

Now there was only quiet. Too much quiet and too many shadows. I didn't remember it being so dark, so few streetlights. Shadows from the willow oaks, always slow to leaf out, seemed large and dark and full of danger. I remembered the scene in the movie
To Kill a Mockingbird,
where Jem and Scout are walking home from a school event and Scout gets attacked by Bob Ewell but rescued by Boo Radley, who was played by a young Robert Duvall. Oh where was my Boo Radley Duvall when I needed him?

How many Bob Ewells were out there in the night? Not to mention Mrs. Butch Rigsbee. I had heard she'd been given a citation and paid a fine for shooting balloons at the fairgrounds. She'd claimed target practice but word was Ossie charged her with destroying property and disturbing the peace. Why had he not arrested her and put her in jail? What would it take to make this man do his job? It seemed to me he just sloughed it off, shrugged and looked the other way, when he could have been serious and done his bit to keep Littleboro clean and quiet.

 

Chapter Forty-five

Few lights burned in any of the houses I passed, mostly from upstairs windows where someone lay reading in bed, but most probably watched TV. The good God-fearing people in Littleboro tended to go to bed early. Once in a while I'd hear a dog bark or howl, though there was no moon to howl at. Most dogs I saw outside these days were being walked on leashes, probably better for their own good and ours as well. “No moon” made me think of honeymoon and poor Reba. She'd never be a June bride and never have a honeymoon, or a groom.

When I was twelve I'd had a paper route, delivering
The Mess
Wednesday afternoons after school to these same houses, these streets. I had some frights being chased by dogs, especially one white German shepherd who loved to wait around the side of the house where he lived until I walked past. He'd come charging out, sharp teeth at the ready, chomping his chomps and a growl down his throat that made my heart drop to my shoes.

I made myself not run. Do not run. Do not show fright. Stay steady. Keep walking. Keep your hands close to your body. That's what I told myself now.

I remembered when that white German shepherd got close enough that I felt his hot, wild breath on the back of my legs, he would slink back and sit down on the sidewalk. When I glanced over my shoulder, he seemed to be laughing. I know that dog laughed. Heh heh, scared you, didn't I? Then he'd scratch awhile, lick his lower parts at length, and sprawl out on the sidewalk and go to sleep.

Even with so little light from the streetlights, I saw my shadow. It looked so alone and vulnerable, a clear target if there ever was one.

I began to recite from memory the Robert Louis Stevenson poem beginning “I have a little shadow that goes…” Mama Alice had taught me to read from
A Child's Garden of Verses
. She read the poems so often to me she thought I'd probably memorized them so she pointed her fingers to words at random places on the page. I read them. “Lord,” she said to Mama, “this child can read.” After that there was no stopping me. I read every book in the children's section of the Littleboro Library and started on the adult section, which meant I had to sneak past Hazel Grogan, the librarian. If I tried to check out a book she didn't think suitable for my age, she'd withhold her inked date stamper high above the book and ask, “Did your mother approve your reading this?” Only after I lied would she reluctantly stamp the due date and hand it to me, shaking her head as if to say, “What is this world coming to.”

After I finished reciting “The Land of Counterpane” and “The Swing,” I started on Bible verses: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…” Maybe I should have said those first?

Quiet hung over the neighborhood like fog. I heard my own footsteps, sounding hollow and afraid. I kept walking. Two streets to go. No traffic. I smelled gardenias, heavy, brown-tinged and sweet. I always hated the smell, same with magnolia blossoms. Too sweet, like too much vanilla or rotting fruit. Or overripe bananas?

I kept walking. Then I thought I heard a rustle in the shrubbery, saw something move. Oh damn, I thought, is this the house where that white German shepherd lived? He's got to be dead by now. Some people though, when one dog died, they just replaced it with another of the same kind, same color, hoping for the same personality. I hoped the German shepherd was not among the replacements.

I kept walking. Something white slunk from the bushes. Smaller than a dog, moving very quietly. Had to be a cat. A white cat. One of Sherman's friends? Did Sherman prowl this far? I'll bet he did. “Here kitty,” I called to the white cat and it came over, let me rub it, arched, purred under my fingers, made me feel better for a few minutes. Then the cat turned and went down the street the way I had come.

That's when I saw the parked car I hadn't noticed before. I had walked past that car and never thought a thing about it. Now I looked back, saw its low lights on, heard the motor running. Waiting for someone? A date? Movie? Not this time of night. It was nine thirty and Littleboro's only movie theater had closed years ago. For a while afterwards some church held services in the theater and I thought, why not? Good job, reuse existing space. They used the old movie marquees for cute sayings like
SEVEN DAYS WITHOUT PRAYER MAKES ONE WEAK
or
WITHOUT THE BREAD OF LIFE, YOU ARE TOAST.

Whenever I looked back the car kept coming closer, moving very quietly, very slowly behind me. Spooky. The car stayed with me. What the hell?

 

Chapter Forty-six

To get to the Dixie Dew I would have to cross the street but if I crossed, the car could speed up, run me down.
Wham, whap,
I'd be flat on the ground in seconds and the car long gone, roaring up the street with no witnesses, no one the wiser. Hit-and-run, plain and simple. Would Ossie even investigate? I somehow couldn't see him going door-to-door asking for witnesses. I'd probably not even make the front page of
The Mess,
just a line or two at the bottom of the obituary page.

I could knock on the door of one of these houses, ring a bell, ask for asylum, but would anyone answer, much less let me in this late at night? It wasn't really late and this was Littleboro, but no one I knew lived in these houses. Their kids had grown up, gone away to college, joined the military, discovered the world and never come back. No jobs here, no reasons to return. The parents? They'd died, sold or left most of these houses to move to a retirement community. They rented them out or left them vacant. A lot of the houses looked vacant, but I couldn't tell at night. I couldn't see if there were cars in the driveways, bicycles on the lawns or furniture on the porches. It was so damn dark.

I kept walking. The car kept following. One more block and I'd be on Main Street at the Dixie Dew. Then I saw someone standing on the sidewalk in front of me. A man. A man holding out something in front of him that glinted in the streetlight. Metal? A gun? He stood in front of me, the menacing car still following behind. I heard the low growl of its motor.

I felt trapped tight now. If I kept walking I'd run into the man in the dark on the sidewalk in front of me. He could be working in tandem with the black car following me. If I tried to cross the street, the car could speed up and run me down, leave me mangled and bleeding on the street.

The man kept coming closer. Whatever he had in his hand was at his side now. He stopped beside a tree, waited, still holding the thing that glinted in his hand. He lowered it. I heard a metal
click
and a whirring sound like fishing line being reeled in. It looked like a dog leash, one of those string things you control with a trigger to lengthen it or make it shorter, but I didn't see a dog.

He stopped, waited there on the walk. I walked nearer, relieved. A dog walker would be friendly, safe, kind, take me in, let me use his phone or drive me home. All the above or any of the above. I'd take any of the above, with pleasure and appreciation.

“Dogs,” the man said as I got closer.

I recognized the voice. Pastor Pittman, dressed in striped pajamas and red felt slippers.

“Yes,” I said, “dogs.” Then I saw the dog that walked him, a blond cocker spaniel who trotted out from a big boxwood beside Pastor Pittman.

“Honey,” he said.

Me? I wanted to ask. Was he making a pass at me? Honey? I wanted to answer yes. Hug me. Hold me. Make me feel safe. Call me anything. Just thank you for showing up when I needed somebody.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“The dog,” he said. “That's her name.”

“Nice name, Honey,” I said and reached down to pet her. Cockers waggle all over and melt when you touch them. “Nice dog.” Oh, nice, nice dog. Thank you for being here.

The car behind me in the street suddenly brightened its lights, sped toward us and roared past. I felt a rush of cool air.

“Kids,” Pastor Pittman said and shook his head.

“Kids, I'm sure,” I agreed and crossed the street toward home. “Nice night.”

I started running toward the Dixie Dew. Running as if my life depended on it, which it very well may have. Whoever was in that car was not making nice with me. They were following me, out to do me harm, but why? Hadn't stolen anything or cooked up anything. I was so ordinary, so law abiding, so careful in my little life, my everyday days. I hadn't rigged the Miss Green Bean contest or thrown any beans in the food fight.

I ran like the Devil himself was after me. Ran, ran, ran as fast as I could. My breath got shorter and my heart felt hard in my chest. When was the last time I'd run? Walking didn't cause the frantic, fast breathing I felt now in my chest.

 

Chapter Forty-seven

When I saw the porch light of the Dixie Dew—my own porch light—one last spurt of energy got me to the steps, where I almost collapsed. I stopped for a second to catch my breath a little, then ran inside, locked the door behind me and stood with my back against it. Still breathing hard, I closed my eyes. I was home. I was safe. I was alive. I let out a long, slow, relieved breath. Whew. Thank you, Jesus.

I heard a noise and opened my eyes to see, halfway up the stairs, two very small, white feet. Real? or did Dixie Dew have a ghost? Who stood on the stairs in the Dixie Dew? Who? Miles Fortune was the only guest and he either wore custom-made running shoes or very elegant Italian loafers. And he had big, male feet!