Ginny Gall (7 page)

Bunny Boy indicated to Delvin that this should be his role.

But even with Delvin and John Day holding the man’s thick, knobby ankles, Joe was unable to get far up under the house.

“You do it,” Bunny Boy said to Delvin. “Joe, get out of there.”

It took the three of them to pull Joe out. He came forth covered in red dust, a mummery of himself. Delvin laughed, but the laugh was squelched—Bunny made a flicking motion with his right hand, indicating that is was Delvin’s turn at the enterprise.

“What was it?” he said to Joe. “A person?”

“Hard to say,” Joe said. “It had human form, but that might not be the telling thing.”

Delvin’s stomach turned over. He wanted to run away but he was afraid to have these people see how scared he was. A couple of children stood on the picnic table Miss Ellereen kept in the backyard. One of the children—a boy a few years younger than him—was standing on one leg. It was a clearing day. The sky looked painted on.

He lowered himself into the dust, wanting to hold his nose for the stink he feared was in it and for the germs he’d read about swirling in such places but he didn’t and as he slithered into the opening he smelled not a stink but an odor of cleanness and a clayey sweetness that made him want to come back at another time and lie there a while. It was cool and quiet. At first he couldn’t make out anyone, but then as his eyes adjusted he saw a form scrunched up against the brick chimney that was a central feature of that part of the Emporium. This is the music room, Delvin thought; he hadn’t realized it. He pictured the ladies sitting up there listening to Punky Wills play the piano. He could hear someone faintly striking the keys, an idler or some lady dreaming of another life far from such houses. He thought of knocking on the floor to scare whoever it was, but he didn’t. The form, the dark figure—small, the figure of a boy like him—lay drawn up against the chimney. Delvin could see his shape but he couldn’t make out his face.

“You got to come out,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you? So you probably better just come on. After me they’re gon send somebody a whole lot meaner.” Little puffs of dust like thin smoke in the half light twirled up where he placed his hands. “Come on now,” he said, his voice quiet in the soft dust.

The man or boy let out a low moan.

“You hurt?” Delvin said. The figure didn’t answer. “You’re scared, aint you? I would be too. But you got to come on. They’ll go get the police directly.”

Delvin looked back toward the opening. Bunny Boy and Joe peered at him from either side of the torn-away trellis. Bunny Boy
waved him on. “Go,” he mouthed. There were doodlebug holes in the dust, little cone-shaped depressions. A strand of spiderweb like a wide white ribbon hung from a floor joist. Delvin shuddered. He turned back to the cowering form.

“If you don’t come on,” he said, “I’m going to have to gather you.”

He crawled up closer. The figure didn’t move.

“Come on now.”

The figure kicked at him hard, the sole of his bare foot flashing in the caliginous murk, a kick that would have hurt if it caught him.

“Damn.”

He could smell the figure’s odor, sour and sharp with the stink of fresh shit.

“Ah well,” Delvin said. “I’m sorry.”

He knew how he would be in a predicament like this. If it was just him, he’d leave this sniffler, let him work his way out when things died down. But it wasn’t just him. Next they’d send Joe up after him with the shovel.

Delvin feinted a grab and when the figure kicked, he caught his fully extended foot. When the figure tried to pull his foot back Delvin caught the other one and pulled hard. The figure—the person—started to kick his first foot loose, and that let Delvin catch both feet in his arms. He crabbed fast backwards, pulling the writhing figure with him.

“Snatch me,” he cried to Joe and Bunny Boy.

Somebody’s hands grabbed his ankles and jerked him in one sharp motion halfway out of the hole. The figured writhed, pulled partially free and snaked a ways back in, but Joe hauled them both out in a cloud of pale red dust.

Before anybody could stop him John Day reached over and whacked the figure with the broom handle. Delvin was angry too and he socked the figure in the thigh with the flat of his hand. The figure cried out in a boy’s cracked voice. He writhed on the crumbly dirt.

“Stand back,” Bunny Boy cried, and before anybody could move he flung a bucket of dishwater on the figure and on Delvin who was still holding one of his legs.

The water revealed the albino Winston Morgred. Delvin hadn’t seen him since the day he left the africano foundlings home. His orange hair was so thick the water beaded on it and on his pale freckled skin, his flattened nose and pursy lips.

He could pass—easy, Delvin thought, if he cut off that face.

Morgred kicked and Delvin struck him again on the thigh. Morgred moaned and began to cry.

Delvin got up off the ground and fetched Morgred a kick that struck his bare ankle.

The boy glared at him but he said nothing.

Delvin was ashamed even as he made the kick or at least right afterwards, but he knew he hadn’t been able to stop himself. In disgust, at Morgred, dirty and peculiar and smelling of shit, scrabbling in the muck, and at himself for even being in that backyard, he turned away from the gathering and went down to the wash shed and cleaned himself with water from the big tub.

From the window propped open with a hickory pole he watched them beat the boy with rough straw brooms and with sticks. Bunny Boy and the others and a few of the women were in on it. One woman swung what looked like a white china figurine at him, but she didn’t hit him. Another poked him with a riding crop. Morgred rolled on the ground, crying for them to leave him alone. People called him the Ghost; Delvin remembered that.

“I aint done done it,” the boy cried.

Done what? Delvin wondered and then he guessed it was the peeping that he was probably up to, but how could you tell? It could have been anything, maybe even just an outcast looking for a place where he could be left in peace. He had struck him hard in the thigh and meant to and now he was sorry.

Miss Ellereen came out on the back porch and stood watching the boy get his thrashing.

“Don’t you kill him,” she said.

“You could pinch his head off and it wouldn’t kill him,” Bunny Boy said, but maybe they thought they were about to because the hitters stopped. Bunny Boy’s face gleamed with sweat. The women
wrapped their housedresses around them and flounced off, one of them, Aphelia, with a broom twirling on her shoulder.

Avoiding the scene, Delvin crossed the yard back to the porch looking for Kattie, the cook’s helper, but she was gone into the kitchen.

“Don’t you have something else to do?” Miss Ellereen said, giving him a sharp look.

“Yessum, I guess.”

“Then you best haul along and do it.”

For a second he felt it would cost him his life not to peek into the kitchen after Kattie, but he would have to knock Miss Ellereen down to do it so he stepped back and headed around the side of the house, in his chest a scuff of frustration and another feeling like a weakness, some low-water place where nothing was. He stopped to look back and saw the boy Morgred crawling on his hands and knees. Blood dripped from his heavy, listless mouth. The water tossed on him made the pale red dust on his torn khaki shirt redder, its color for the moment deeper even than the blood. His drenched clothes were torn nearly from his body, and as he watched, Morgred’s pink penis swung loose from his mucky torn trousers and hung free. One of the girls on the steps whistled and Bunny Boy and Joe laughed. Morgred reached and fumbled with himself and tucked the member into his clothes but it wouldn’t stay and he had to hold himself with one hand as he crawled. As he crawled, lurching on his knees, the penis began to extend itself in an erection. He had begun to cry. The tears dropped unimpeded into the dirt.

Delvin wanted to run back and put a stop—to what? To the painful feeling, some painful feeling. Make Winston pull himself together. Something in him felt like beating the poor fissle til he quit crawling. Felt like hauling him to safety.

The men walked away from the half-wrecked boy. The women hooted at him from the steps, shaking their flimsy morning skirts.

The boy gathered himself and got to his feet.

Joe stepped up and gave him a kick in the ass, sending him stumbling into a trot that carried him right at Delvin who stepped back
to let him pass. As he did he smelled again the odor of shit, now augmented with the wet, sour-smelling dirt.

The boy fumbled at the low side gate of unpainted wood palings that separated the back from the front yard. Delvin came up behind him and snagged the latch for him and swung the gate open. The boy looked wildly at him, his pale eyes blinking in the light that had always seemed too much for them.

“I just wanted to get down in the dim spot,” he said.

Delvin didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

“You didn’t have to pull me out of there.”

“Yes I did.”

With the side of one finger Morgred scratched his eyebrows hard and then he screwed his eyes tight shut and opened them. His eyelashes were orange like his hair.

“You got a dime?”

Delvin started to say no but then he said, “I got one.”

“Let me have it. I got to get me somethin to eat.”

“Way you look nobody’d sell you anything if you had five dollars.”

“Let me have the dime.”

“I tell you,” Delvin said suddenly, and it was as if he had fallen through a shaky patch of leaf shade, “you follow on behind me to the house.”

“To the undertaker? I’m scared to go there.”

“You’re safer there than anywhere else I can think of.”

The boy dropped his eyes then looked quickly up as if trying to catch Delvin in some piddling joke at his expense. Delvin could see he was done in, that he had no other place to go.

“Just lope on along behind,” he said.

He started out across the street and ran along the dirt path that served as a sidewalk in Red Row and turned right onto Sweet August street running fast. In his mind he didn’t know if he was leading the boy or trying to lose him; maybe both. Children played in a puddle under the big gum tree that stretched heavy, grooved branches over the dirt street and humped it up out in the middle with its roots.
Delvin gave the children a sharp eye as he passed but still he could hear them hooting at Morgred as he came along. The path went up a plank step to the section of wooden sidewalk in front of New Big Bethel Baptist church. The wooden portion ran along the rest of the block and dipped down again two steps into the street.

Delvin ran steadily and he only looked twice to see if the boy was still with him; he was, both times, straggling but coming on in a half-lame trotting style, holding his pant remnants up with one hand and his pale squinting eyes looking squarely at him.

They came up the alley from wind-flecked Brocade street. Delvin checked off the flimsy leaves of chinese elms hanging over the board alley fence of the Askew house and then the great blanket of cherokee roses sagging from the crumbling brick fence of the Lewis house, running. Then came backyards opening directly on the alley, exposing gray- and yellow-streaked red packed dirt yards stacked with boxes or old horse collars or fragments of no longer identifiable machinery, pump parts or busted forge buckets or pieces of streetcar undercarriage or canvas-covered piles of plaster or old weathervanes—roosters or codfish or racehorses—and, in each yard, lines of washing; raised among these like guardhouses were the neighbors’ wash sheds and kitchens emitting mixed and penetrating smells of lye and raw ashes and boiled pork-fortified greens and cornmeal and brushwood fires. He checked these off and he checked off old Mr. Berke petting his blind german police dog and Mrs. Sanderson accompanying her tiny triplet daughters sitting side by side tied into a little blue wagon and Billy Batts who wore his engineer’s cap at all times and sang sorrow songs as he dug holes in his yard searching for confederate gold and Mrs. Opel and Mrs. Crawford, the former dancing twins, not dancing this afternoon, and a couple of the Pursleys who all looked exactly alike and Mrs. Vereen carrying on a big tray several of the fruit pies she baked and sold at the market over on Leopardi street on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and he checked off Mr. Campson who was home sick from the grocery store he owned at the edge of the chinese quarter, and Biddy Comber, the retired boxer, once a sparring partner for Jack Johnson
and father of James who loved only the piano, Biddy standing in the center of his yard staring up into a pecan tree as if from there the Second Coming might commence. Hello and hello and hello. Hidy, yall, he said, checking each one off.

He already felt trailed—hunted really—by the boy loping behind him. He wished he hadn’t said anything to him. The Ghost. He gave him an angry look. Elta Napier, a girl his age, stood out in her yard stringing ragged shirts on the washline. She wore a white shift that dragged up her thighs as she reached to pin a fluttering gray shirt. Delvin wanted to leave his self-appointed duty and go speak to Elta. Her thick hair was tied around with a pale blue cloth. His heart took a leap; it was a day, he thought, for heart leaping. He wanted to rush across the yard and push Elta to the ground. He wanted to fly to her and kneel on the packed and swept dirt at her feet. He slowed down, stopped and gave her a wave; Elta waved back without looking at him.

The boy came and stood close enough behind so Delvin could smell him.

“I thought you was going to show me a place.”

“We’re on our way to it now,” he said without looking at him. “I thought I told you to hang back.”

“I got to lie down.”

“Well come on then.”

He led him to the shed and piled a bed of straw for him in one of the unused stalls. As Delvin worked, the boy watched without offering to help, an impatient, grieving look on his face. The two horses shifted uneasily. The big gray nickered at him and Delvin stroked his nose. “Yall be friendly,” he said to the pair.

“You can camp here,” he told the boy. “I’ll go up to the house and get you something to eat.”