Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (6 page)

“Ah, I see you were fooled by my clever display of wit and athleticism.”

“I was worried you’d bust your fool head open on one of those lower branches.”

He leaned in toward me. “But tell us the truth: You’d miss my fool head, if it was to bust open.”

“I would miss,” I said sweetly, reaching my fork to his plate, “your sharing your fried okra with me.”

We dug our toes deeper in sawdust.

I leaned in against Jimbo; he leaned against me. I could feel his landscaping muscles still taut from the day. I lay a head on his shoulder, he draped an arm over my back, and all was right with the world.

Even Welp settled in to something that crept past civil and almost to warm.

After dinner, we began to stagger our way toward Emerson’s truck, arms draped around each other’s shoulders. I turned my head back to Hog Wild, satisfied, and glimpsed Mort’s truck in the corner of the dirt lot. Wiping the last of barbecue sauce from his mouth with his forearm, he must’ve been there at Steinberger’s some time already and we’d just not seen him and they must not have seen us. He and Buddy, their bulky backs to us, were walking away from the picnic tables and toward Mort’s truck. They were sauntering first, and then Mort lifted Buddy’s wrist for a look at his watch. They both broke into a run.

I nudged Jimbo, who was beside me, his right arm over my shoulders, his left over Welp’s.

“What do you suppose,” I whispered to Bo, “the two of them are off to this time of night?”

Bo shrugged. He could be irritating that way, his not getting worked up when worry seemed rooted in nothing but air.

By the time we stopped by Dairy Queen for chocolate-dipped cones on the way to drop Farsanna off, the fireflies had already begun damping their lights for darkness to tuck the town into sleep.

Sleepy and no longer hungry, we curled up next to each other like kittens, and Em’s engine purred for us. My head resting against Bo, I idly pedaled the warm air with bare feet.

“What could I grow up and do for a living,” I murmured into his shoulder, “and never wear shoes?”

His eyebrows crumpled together in one long, shaggy line. “Well, lemme cogitate now. There’s surfing. And pearl-diving. And there’s professions I can’t pronounce in the presence of ladies.”

I nuzzled in closer. “Hmm. What else?”

He ran a hand down my hair. “Or we could keep doing this.”

“You think,” Bobby Welpler wanted to know, “that we could?” He looked, I thought, about four years old just then, his mouth gone all round and hopeful.

Bo closed his eyes, nodding. “Day in, day out. Day up, day down. Day good, bad, and ugly.”

“How ’bout,” I whispered, “we just skip all the ugly?”

He rested his chin on the top of my head. “All right, then. We’ll skip all the ugly.”

“Hey … Bo?” I whispered.

“Hmm?”

“You don’t reckon …”

“Don’t reckon what, Turtlest?”

“You don’t reckon Mort’s gonna do anything with that gun, do you? I mean, anything besides cart it around like he’s always done?”

Bo tightened his arm around me. “Shoot.”

“You … don’t think he will, do you?”

He chuckled into my hair. “Shoot no’s what I meant. His kind’s all blam and no bullet.”

I thought about this. “But … Bo?”

“You plan on ever letting a man sleep?”

“Bo, you may be right about Mort all by himself. But what about as a group?”

“Mort’s big enough to be his own group.”

“I meant … you know how wild dogs, by themselves, wouldn’t do much harm but eat trash, but once you let them start running in a pack—”

“And then you got trouble.” His chin still on the top of my head, I could feel him nodding. That was all the reassurance he offered just then. But just then, it was enough.

Jimbo was right, I had decided. Mort was mostly a loner, except when he ran with Buddy. And Buddy only followed whatever Mort did. Mort himself, Jimbo had said and I was believing, was all swagger and snarl. Him and his gun for a security blanket.

Everyone’s eyes were closed by that time except mine, and I’d like to think Emerson’s because he was driving—and maybe also the new girl’s, whose head was turned toward the white wake of taillights behind us that sometimes washed red. We rode in silence down the Pike, Em pulling his truck onto back roads that led to the Look. Slowing, he followed the two-lane road without guardrails that traced the edge of our mountain. Far below, the lights of the valley below winked back at us—those of us who opened our eyes to see them. L. J. was snoring by now against Welp’s shoulder, and I made a mental note to abuse L. J. tomorrow for that. Welp himself came to long enough to see where we were and then squeeze his eyes shut, like Emerson might be on the verge of missing a turn and sending us all plunging over.

I watched the lights in the Valley and felt Jimbo’s chin on the top of my head and tried to feel safe. Although without guardrails and at night, the point where our mountain ended and the Valley began was not clear to me.

The whole day, in fact, had been unclear to me: just where the point was when someone goes plummeting over the edge, and whether you get to see that coming before it happens, or whether sometimes the edge is under your wheels before you find there’s no reverse gear.

Em’s truck eased off the side of the road on the thin strip of grass before the Look dropped off into air. He parked, startling us, and we all sat up, L. J. snorting awake and rubbing his eyes.

Emerson unfolded himself from the cab and joined us back in the truck’s bed. “Pretty, isn’t it?” He said this to the new girl.

She nodded, pointing. “What is there?”

“Nothing but valley,” I dismissed it. You can’t be raised on a mountain without growing a good, healthy disdain for the pitiful souls who live on flatland and closer to sea level.

Farsanna’s head was cocked toward the Valley, the clusters of white lights, and the lines of red and blue glowing pinpoints way out toward the airport. She waved a hand across the clusters of white. “And ...?” she said.

Innocent as this hand gesture and one word might’ve seemed, I knew it for the challenge it was. The new girl wasn’t accepting that so many clusters of lights could be only nothing.

“Nothing worth seeing,” I persisted, a little peeved now. “And it’s dangerous at night anyhow.”

The new girl waited for me to explain.

“Nobody goes downtown at night, and it’s late.” I reached for the Mickey Mouse watch on Bo’s wrist. I’d hoped it would announce we were nearing eleven, our summer curfew, but it was still only nine-thirty. “And anyway, it’s rough and dirty, not at all safe this time of night and it’s crowded.…” I stopped myself there, irritated that
crowded
and
nobody
might seem to contradict each other, when in fact we all knew why they didn’t.

My own cousin didn’t help matters any. “There are some splendid examples of Victorian architecture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on several streets. They’re desperately in need of rehabilitation now, but someday perhaps someone will have the foresight to fix them back up. And the lights down by the river aren’t half bad. It’s predominantly warehouses now, but someday …”

Welp spit off the side of the truck. “What Turtle here was trying to say was the Valley ain’t safe at night, not in town anyhow, because there’s a certain
kind
of nobody lives there.”

It was, in a way, exactly what I’d been saying. And hearing it bounced back to me, all crawling with ugly from Welp’s mouth, meant I had to switch sides. “It’s worth seeing,” I contradicted myself, quickly and loudly. Which I meant not one bit, but it had to be said.

The truck radio, fuzzed in static but on Em’s favorite station, introduced the next band, Kool and the Gang. Emerson cranked up the volume.

Then he and Jimbo, the two tallest of us, looked at each other over the tops of our heads and had clearly reached some kind of agreement without speaking.

“Hang on, then,” Em called as he slammed the cab door behind him and U-turned onto the two-lane road that looped down our mountain. Welp clutched the side of the truck as if he’d been loaded into a carnival ride with the safety bar gone. “
What
? Where we going?”

5
The Way of the World

Bo leaned back against a six-bag pile of mulch and manure and laced his hands behind his head. “Wherever the spirit leads and the road rolls is where we’re going, Welp.”

Welp crouched as if he would leap. “No. Not to that part of town, we’re not.”

Bo looked at him and grinned. “You driving from back here?”

“I ain’t going down there tonight. You hear?” Welp stood up straight then, not seeming to care that the truck was already moving at near full speed.

Bo dove for Bobby’s legs and buckled him down into the truck bed. “Are you
nuts
?” Jimbo banged on the back of the cab. “Em, man, swing Bobby by his house.” To Farsanna, Bo added, “He lives close by. Won’t take but a clip of a minute.”

She nodded, looking more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. And more relaxed than I felt, or she should have been, had she known where she was headed.

Welp sat sulking as the truck tunneled into the dark of a back road that connected the Look with the Pike, a road so obscure that no one but Bobby and his mother lived there, so far as I knew, and no zoning laws could apply.

At the foot of Welp’s drive, L. J. roused himself for a moment. “Anyone home at the Taj?” The Taj was Jimbo’s name for Welp’s mobile home, which even for an ancient single-wide trailer was in sorry condition. But L. J. had said it out of kindness, even if it was L. J. We were grown up, almost, but still of an age that our mommas liked us not to be home all alone for too long, and we looked out for each other.

Welp shot me a look. “Ask Turtle. She’d be real glad to tell you: Is there ever anyone here?” He’d swung out of the truck before Emerson’s back wheels had followed his front into the drive.

Emerson let the truck idle there at the head of the drive till we saw a light go on in the trailer. “You’d think,” I said then, “that I made a habit of slamming his momma. Or that she didn’t do nothing to earn it.”

As Em drove off, I could feel the truck engine and the bumps of the old road beneath us. I closed my own eyes and let the last few miles of our Ridge disappear under the tires without my having to watch. Then the road that left the backside of our mountain pitched downward and switched back on itself again and again in a long, slithering snake whose tail petered out in the Valley.

We reached the snake’s tail in a few windblown minutes: Our record down was fifteen, but that was by daylight. Farsanna was rubbing her ears from the rapid descent. And I was nauseous from the dozen switchbacks and getting swung side to side in the truck bed. But it had been my suggestion, these lights down here in the Valley being worth seeing after all—my suggestion that I didn’t even remotely agree with. So I wasn’t saying a word.

Em steered the truck toward downtown, and then exited onto Seventh Street. I pounded on the cab window, but he ignored me.

Seventh Street was the border of the neighborhood of Victorian homes L. J. described. And while I’d never thought twice about them before, I could admit if I squinted and imagined fresh paint and new front porches and turrets that weren’t collapsing into bare yards, maybe there was something attractive about them—like the black-and-white sketches in children’s versions of Dickens’ novels, his young ladies of good family who’d fallen on hard times and were hungry.

But Seventh Street also housed a number of bars and lounges and long lines of shanty houses whose roofs slumped in tired, halfhearted attempts at protection. The bars throbbed with music, their walls seeming to pulse and push those inside out into the street. Unlike our Ridge, where after nine at night, most house lights flipped off so inhabitants could retire to bed respectably early, Seventh Street blazed with light. The bars pulsed with neon carnival color, bold red block letters and yellow floodlights and green cursive words, “Appearing Nightly” and “Live Music.” But the houses, too, spilled out bright yellow light from every window and door, flung open to the night air, and from cracks between planks, as if their being so small meant their flimsy walls couldn’t contain all the life pent up inside.

On a corner where our truck pulled to a stop at a red light, a group of young men huddled just outside one of the buildings, metal bars over the neon of its windows. Their arms around one another and their heads tipped toward the inside of the circle they’d formed, they looked like they were waiting for a quarterback to shout them their plays. I shrunk tighter into my corner, watched the new girl’s face for signs of abject terror at being stuck at a stoplight in this part of town, where white people, we’d been told all our lives, were not welcome and, God knew, not safe. Sanna’s face registered, so far, that she didn’t understand the danger we were in, a truck bed full of white teenagers, and one new girl from someplace we’d only recently learned to find on a map, all of us with no doors we could lock.

But she was leaning out over the side of the truck. And so was Bo. Trying to listen.

I suddenly realized what she was trying to hear. The young men—at least ten of them circled there on the Seventh Street sidewalk—were singing. One of them bent first forward and then back, lifting a fully extended trombone toward the sky. A saxophone flashed, red neon reflecting off its brass, and a trumpet flared high and clear about the melody.

“One would surmise,” L. J. said into my ear, “they were too hot inside. With which one can sympathize.” He nodded toward the low-slung building where bodies pressed into each other as they squeezed through the door and emerged, swaying, hands on each others’ waists, following the band into the night.

The red traffic light was just turning green, but Emerson kept the truck where it was. The musicians ignored us, each of them finding his part, breaking into harmonies and half-harmonies, falsettos and rhythms I’d heard nothing quite like. Not in person at least. Their knees bent and straightened in time to the beat so that the whole huddle sank and rose to their tune.

I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there.
Another road, where maybe I could see another kind of mind there …

I waited for the young men to notice us staring at them from the truck, until I realized their eyes were closed, most of them, and the ones that were open were not watching us. They’d been swept into their own music and swam there still, feeling the rapids and steering together. We were nothing but far-off spectators on shore, irrelevant.

Jimbo snatched up a shovel and put its handle to his mouth as a mike. He leaned forward over the edge of the truck bed in time to supply the Ooohs of the next lines.

I leaned in toward L. J. “Beatles,” I whispered, recognizing the song and savoring a moment of superior knowledge. “This is their song.”

L. J. cut his eyes at me. “Earth, Wind and Fire’s covering of this song is the far superior version, as demonstrated by this group’s rendition. Complete,” he nodded toward the band, “with homemade kalimba.” He pointed toward the wooden box someone had nailed metal spoons to, and now strummed with his thumbs.

A group of five women slipped out onto the sidewalk from another one of the shacks. They looked middle-aged, one of them heavy, another one of them tall and stalk-slender, and she tucked her own arm under the heavy one’s for support. They were well dressed, the tall one in heels and the heavy one in a floral print dress with a wide scoop of lace at her collar. At least three of the ladies carried books under their arms that maybe were Bibles. I’d noticed once the way Jimbo cradled his own; there’s a certain way people carry them, gingerly, like there was something inside they were a little scared of, something that might go off if you treated it roughly or ignored it too long.

For a moment, I expected the ladies to charge through the huddle of young men and into the bar and clear it of all iniquity. Or maybe to turn to us in the truck and tell us how much we didn’t belong here. But they stopped there on the walk just beside us in the truck, just beside the singers, and listened.

The heavy one nodded and kept time with one hand patting her purse. The slender one turned to smile at us.

Joining the brass that had gathered us all in to them, several of the band’s listeners added their own instruments. One grabbed a metal pipe from the ground to tap on the concrete. Another drew the long neck of a bottle over the crenellated top of chain-link fencing. Another cupped his hands into a horn.

The heat of the day still clung to the pavement, trapped in canyons of concrete and brick. The white lights of the streetlamps, the red and green neon of the bars, the yellow lights of the houses all throbbed through the heat, making the human forms on the sidewalk seem almost transparent, unreal, like a mirage that would soon flicker back into unbroken night.

I felt at that moment like a medical student who’d just seen inside a living body for the very first time, and realized he’d only ever
thought
he’d seen a person before—the lips and the eyelashes, the painted nails—till now, seeing the heart swelling each beat. The Valley I thought I knew, the department stores on Market and Main where our mothers dragged us for school clothes, the steak place we went to on birthdays down by the river, the city we made sure to leave before dark, the smokestacks and back alleys and shanties that lay far beneath our mountain, beat all along with a life I’d known nothing about. But now I felt drawn to it, the lights and the music and the sway of the forms on the sidewalk, the deep, throaty laugh of the tall singer, all tugging us in like a tether.

The band had modulated to another key, and the brass turned toward one another and cut swaths in the dark. Me, I couldn’t take my eyes off the guy with the trumpet, his long fingers rolling over the keys, his wide shoulders hunching then broadening back with the effort of a high trill, his arms keeping the instrument’s mouth pitched above his head and rocking right to left in perfect time with the trombone. I’d hardly noticed there were words to the next song until it was well begun.

…
looking back we’ve touched on sorrowful days
Future pass, they disappear

The stoplight turned red, and then back to green, Seventh Street empty of cars, and our truck had not moved. We sat and listened. And the young men sang on.

A child is born with a heart of gold
The way of the world makes his heart grow cold

The women walked on toward us, all of them staring at us but not hostilely, just amused, maybe, and curious, our Pack lolled in the back of an old pickup and all of us turned audience. Big Dog and Em with their heads out the passenger window, both with their mouths open and smiling, Em with his Sox cap, Jimbo and the new girl leaning out over the side, Bo drumming the beat now on the metal side of the truck. Even L. J.’s head ticked side to side with the sway of the brass.

Then Jimbo pulled Farsanna to her feet and spun her around. The Baptists on our Ridge frowned on dancing, but never quite managed to frown on Jimbo, and even with the size of his feet, he danced well. From the dip he dropped her into, Sanna laughed up at him. L. J., severely lacking for partners, pulled me to my feet. He was clumsy at dancing, but so was I, and bags of manure and mulch in the way served as excuses. Emerson opened the cab door like he might join us, and Big Dog strained at the passenger door. One of the young men in the band offered a hand to the tall lady in heels, and she took it, twirling in toward him and laughing.

A car from far down the road was approaching. But Seventh Street was four lanes at this point; the car could sweep past our truck idling there at the light, so we ignored it.

The car, though, was approaching too fast. It shot through the intersection a block north of us without so much as a tap of the brake at the red. Swerving, it came on.

Someone was shouting. It might have been someone on the sidewalk, or the shouts might have come from the car. Maybe both. And something long and thin jutted out the passenger window.

I remember thinking the car was a Gremlin, orange and awkward and already sounding like its transmission was grinding its last. The car’s design was distinctive—in the way of the memorably shoddy. And I recall wondering why a big stick poked from its windows.

Until it was clear it wasn’t a stick.

Gunfire shattered the night into jagged pieces of screams and flying glass. The music of a few moments ago had become the screech of rubber melted on asphalt and more shots through the dark and a streetlamp hailing its white light and glass onto our heads, and more screams. Stomping on the accelerator, Em sent the whole truck bed of us slamming back toward the tailgate, its latch faulty and held with nothing but thin-gauge wire.

The truck swerving, its tires screeching, we tore through one red light, then two, fleeing from the direction of the shots and from the streetlight raining white light and glass down on our heads, and from the bedlam as those on the sidewalk dove for cover and the front windows of Seventh Street shanties dissolved into shards.

The Gremlin came tearing behind us, its occupants hooting and throwing bottles. The lights of Seventh Street blurred like a spun pinwheel as the pickup’s engine roared over the sharp report of the rifles. As Em threw the truck to the right and the pickup took a turn on two wheels, I groped frantically for the side of the truck to keep from being thrown clear out of the bed. My hands met with nothing but air. I felt my body lift off the metal floor, and I knew I was flying over the side.