Littlejohn (19 page)

The three of us stop at Hardee’s for burgers and fries, then go down to the park, where I get the joints out of my bag. I don’t think Winfrey and Blue smoked a lot of dope before I got here, because it really gets to them once they get the hang of inhaling. I brought enough down to get high a little every night for a couple of months, but now I cut back some on personal consumption to share with the Geddies. What are friends for?

Anyhow, we smoke three joints among us, and we are pretty messed up. We’re like pumped up over what we did to the En-Kays, and Winfrey finally tells me what En-Kays stands for. Nigger-Killers. This strikes us as so funny that we fall down and start rolling around in the wet grass. Blue forgets he’s sprained his ankle until he stands up all of a sudden to go piss. He screams and falls in a heap, and this just makes us laugh that much harder. I almost roll into the river.

We go back to Hardee’s for shakes, ’cause we’ve got the munchies worse than anything. Hardee’s, I should tell you, is where the black people hang out on the east side of Port
Campbell. White people hang out at the Burger King up the street. Sometimes, somebody white who’s taken a turn off the interstate looking for food will turn into Hardee’s by mistake, and it’s funny to see how tight-assed they look when they loop around the parking lot and realize that they’re in what Winfrey calls the jungle. I just sit kind of low and quiet when we’re here. My out-of-town status kind of gives me diplomatic immunity, I guess.

We head out of Hardee’s about ten o’clock. I’m thinking that Granddaddy might be worried. He locks up at eleven, and he can’t understand what there is to do that time of night that isn’t meanness, as he calls it. But he doesn’t ride me very hard. He makes me help around the house, and I’ve cut the grass and picked some peas and beans, although I’m so slow that even he can outpick me. If you do a job bad enough, Trey always says, after a while they won’t make you do it anymore. I miss old Trey. I miss old Marcia even more. I sent her two letters; got one postcard that didn’t say much.

We take the Old Geddie Road. It seems to me that even the roads are like segregated down here. Black people take the old narrow one that kind of slides down from the center line to the shoulders, which are like eight inches wide, while the whites use Highway 47, which is four-lane almost all the way to Geddie and straight as a string. Old Geddie is where the towns got started, Granddaddy told me. The church there, which looks like a strong wind would blow it over, is the one the white people built right after the Civil War. They sold it to the black congregation a long time ago and built a new one, which looks pretty old to me, nearer to East Geddie. Now, Old Geddie seems to be just about all black, except for this new white housing development called Geddie’s
Branch that’s on a new road running back of the church. Winfrey says they’re building a gate at the entrance to it “to keep the natives out.”

Winfrey stops at the 7-Eleven where the Old Geddie Road forks off Highway 47, and we all buy Cokes. Winfrey and Blue buy the kind in bottles, so they can hit road signs with them on the way home, which is like a major sport around here. It’s not hard when you’re sitting on the passenger side, but Winfrey can flip a bottle from the driver’s seat over the top of the car going 55 and
whump!
just knock hell out of a sign on the right-hand side.

Tonight, though, Winfrey’s a little crazy. As we come up to the only curve on the Old Geddie Road, which has a creek just before it, Blue’s already smacked a
35-MPH
sign pretty good with his empty, and Winfrey just keeps waving his bottle around and yelling. He almost throws it into a crowd of girls who look like they’re walking back from town. When we reach the bridge, which goes over this half-assed creek, it makes that rumbling, hollow sound these bridges make when you drive over them, and Winfrey flings the bottle toward the railing on the left side.

I don’t know what happens, but what probably happens is that when Winfrey swings his arm left, he pulls the steering wheel of the Vega with his other arm. Just over the bridge, the road curves right to miss some farmer’s cornfield. We go left.

When we leave the road, we clear the ditch in the air, and I guess we’d have been okay, but something’s wrong with Winfrey, because we’re bouncing along through this field at like 40 miles an hour, except it feels like 100, and he’s not stopping.

“Stop, Winfrey! Stop, man!” Either I’m screaming or Blue’s screaming, but Winfrey’s hit his head on the side of the car or something, and his foot’s still on the accelerator. All this doesn’t take long, but it seems like forever. They have these big irrigation ditches around here, like Granddaddy’s crop ditch, and there’s one straight ahead. I’m in the backseat and Blue’s on the right up front, what they call the suicide seat, and just before we hit, I duck down, because I don’t know what else to do.

The crash is like nothing I could have imagined. When we look at the ditch the next day, you can hardly tell where we hit, but the Vega is, as Granddaddy puts it, “tore all to pieces.”

At first after we hit, it’s very quiet. I can’t figure out what’s happening, because I’m looking up at the stars, and my face is all wet. Then I taste the blood. And my nose is starting to ache. I hear voices that sound like they’re beneath me. Winfrey asks Blue if he’s all right, and Blue doesn’t answer. They’re under me, somehow, and I can smell this smell like when the hose burst on Dad’s car on the way from the beach that time.

Finally, I hear Blue moan, like he’s in a world of pain. It feels wet underneath me, and every time I move, Blue moans like I’m hurting him. It takes me awhile to figure out that the front of the car is pointing down and to one side, and I’m looking backward, out the rear window. One back door is up in the air and the other is buried in the ground, so that I can’t get to one and the other one won’t open.

“I’m sorry, Blue. I’m sorry,” Winfrey keeps saying, and Blue’s not saying much of anything. I can just barely see Winfrey’s face, and it’s a mess. He doesn’t even seem to see
me, he’s so worried about Blue. What I finally do is roll the glass down on the low side of the car, the driver’s side, and crawl out. I can’t breathe through my nose and my head hurts, but it doesn’t seem like anything is really wrong. I get Winfrey out through the window, too, finally. He must have hit the windshield with his face, and he’s a little out of it. I get him to sit down in the field, right on a corn row by the ditch bank, then I go back to check on Blue. He’s all crumpled up on the high side of the front seat, and his leg’s bent back. I try to get him to move, but he says it hurts too much. I tell him not to move, that I’ll get help. It occurs to me that if the car catches fire, he’ll burn to death before anyone can get him out, but I don’t mention that and try not to think about it.

I tell Winfrey I’m going for help and head for the road, except I have no idea which way it is. I run through corn taller than I am for what seems like at least five minutes before I get out of that field, and then I can’t get anybody to stop. Cars going by slow down, see my face and speed up. The first two houses I go to belong to black people who don’t even want to talk to a white boy who looks like he’s gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

Finally, on the third try, I get lucky. It’s this black guy and his family in a mobile home with one of those black-tongued chows on a chain in front. The dog wants me so bad, he’s about to pull the metal stake he’s attached to right out of the ground. But the guy says, “Hush that fuss, Polly,” and the mutt calms down, probably out of embarrassment. I tell the guy what happened and he calls the fire department, which is also like the rescue squad out here. It takes them fifteen
minutes to get there, and it takes us another half hour to find Winfrey and Blue because, idiot that I am, I forget to make any note of where we were in the state’s biggest cornfield.

They follow the tracks of the car after I finally remember to tell them that we went off just past the bridge, and when we get there, Winfrey is like next to the car, talking to Blue, telling him not to worry and not to die. They get the farmer that owns the land to get out of bed and open his gate so they can move an ambulance near the wreck, and by the time they get Blue out, it must be like two in the morning. They put all three of us in the ambulance, and when we get to the hospital, Granddaddy is already there. He looks awful; I don’t guess he’s been up this late in his life. Cousin Jenny and Harold, her husband, are there. They’ve driven Granddaddy. He’s trying to be calm, but his hands are shaking and he looks like he’s about to cry.

“I’m okay, Granddaddy, I’m fine,” I keep telling him, and he keeps asking me am I sure. All of the Geddies are there, and they’re huddled together on the other side of the emergency room. They take Blue right in, but it’s like another half hour before they take care of me and Winfrey, since we obviously aren’t going to die. But Jenny and Harold are after the admitting nurse on one side and Winfrey’s mother is after them on the other, and finally they take care of us.

It turns out that Winfrey has a concussion and is cut up pretty badly around his lip and over one eye. I have a broken nose and a couple of little cuts. After we get stitched up, Blue’s brother pulls Winfrey aside and is talking to him pretty intensely, and Winfrey is just shrugging and shaking
his head. Blue’s brother doesn’t speak to me, but he gives me a look that indicates I won’t be getting a Christmas card from him this year.

It turns out that Blue has a compound fracture of his left leg, which got pretty mangled when the front of the car crunched into that ditch bank at forty miles an hour. The doctor says he’ll walk again, but that basketball is over. They haven’t told him yet.

The next day, a state trooper comes by Granddaddy’s to get my statement as to what happened. I don’t know what Winfrey and Blue have said, so I try to be as general as I can. Then he gets down to it.

“We found a butt from a marijuana cigarette in the ashtray, Justin,” he says. He’s called me Mr. Bowman up to this point. It’s like he’s changing gears, like now we can get cozy and talk about what really needs talking about. “To your knowledge, was either one of those colored boys using drugs?”

I give him as emphatic a no as I can muster with a broken nose and six stitches. I tell him that I had never seen either one of them smoking dope. Damn, I’m thinking, I can’t believe we left roaches in the ashtray. But I stick to my story, because I’m sure Winfrey and Blue won’t waver on this part. Finally, the trooper leaves, but I’m like thinking he might be back. A roach probably won’t be enough to convict anybody of anything, but if he can get somebody to say that Winfrey was driving stoned, he could go to jail.

It’s just starting to hit me what we’ve done to Blue. Granddaddy has been very quiet through all this, and especially the part about the roaches. He sees the trooper to the back screen door and watches the black-and-gray car make a
dust trail up the rut road to the highway. Then he comes back in the living room.

“Justin,” he says, without any beating around the bush, “what’s in that green tin box at the bottom of your backpack?”

It never occurred to me to hide it any better than that. Granddaddy doesn’t seem like the snoopy kind. But now he’s got me, and he knows it. He can probably see guilt in big block letters all over my face.

It turns out that he never opened it. He just saw it there when he was getting my clothes out to wash some of them the first week I was here. I hid the dope box back behind some underwear, and he must have heard it clang when he was moving the backpack around. But I have never been able to lie well, and by the time I know he hasn’t opened it, I’ve already confessed.

“So you got them boys messed up on drugs, and now one of them is ruined for life, is that about it?” Granddaddy sure gets to the point in a hurry, never raising his voice. I try to explain to him that marijuana is like something everybody my age does, and that it doesn’t hurt you, but that part kind of gets caught in my throat. I beg him not to tell the police, and he says he won’t, but not because of me. He says he’d like to see me spend a few days in jail. Might straighten me out. But he doesn’t want “the colored boys” to suffer anymore.

“You’ve made them suffer enough, I reckon,” he says.

So this is like Saturday. I just sit there and he just sits there, me in my room and him on the porch. By midafternoon, it’s broiling, but I just don’t want to be anywhere where anybody can see me, especially Granddaddy. He’s made me get rid of the dope, which I flush down the toilet.
He looks at it, afraid to touch it, like he’s seeing the weed from hell. Jenny and Harold come by for a while, but they see that nobody feels much like talking.

Mom’s back in Montclair, just flew in on Friday, and she’s coming down here for a couple of weeks before she has to get ready for fall semester. I’m wondering how this is going to go over with her. When Granddaddy asks me how I think my mother will feel about this, I swallow the urge to tell him the first people I ever saw smoke dope were Mom and Dad and their friends, when I was a little kid. They quit doing it when I got older, so that Mom’s and my dope-smoking days didn’t really overlap, at least as far as I know. But I’m not into coke or crack or anything like that, and I never felt like Mom would like slash her wrists if she knew I was getting high once in a while. Until Mark the Narc came along, she took pretty much a live-and-let-live attitude.

Granddaddy says he isn’t going to tell her about any of this now, because he doesn’t want to upset her before she gets in the car to drive down here. But that doesn’t mean he won’t tell her later.

I fall asleep on the cot back in my room, and about six o’clock, Granddaddy wakes me up. I’m sweating like a pig, and when I look at my watch, which somehow still works, I can’t believe that twenty-four hours ago, Winfrey and Blue and I were just taking the court against the En-Kays. I think again about what Winfrey told me that stood for, and I have to stifle a laugh in spite of everything. Then I think of Blue, and all of a sudden, I can’t stop crying. It’s the most embarrassing thing, but at least Granddaddy shows a little sympathy.