Love (6 page)

On the first day following the party, nobody refused him court time but he never got a pass and when he intercepted he had to try for a dunk wherever his position because there was no one to receive the ball. They dropped their hands and looked at him. If he made a rebound they fouled it away from him and the trumpet spat before he could see who blew it. Finally they just tripped him and walked off the court. Romen sat there, panting, eager to fight but knowing that if he answered the fouls, the tripping, the trumpet spit, it would be the same as defending the girl again. Somebody he didn’t know and didn’t want to. If he fought back, he would be fighting not for himself, but for her, Pretty-Fay; proving the connection between them—the wrong connection. As though he
and
her had been tied to a bed; his legs
and
hers forced open.

Lucas Breen, one of the white boys whose hoop skill was envied, dribbled and shot all alone at the far end of the court. Romen got up and started to join him, but realized in time that there was another word in the trumpet’s repertoire. He passed Lucas with a glance, muttering, “Hey.”

The second day was miserable, lonelier. Freddie brought him the jacket he’d left and said, “Hey, man. Don’t get shook,” but didn’t hang around to say more. After he saw Pretty-Fay’s friends, the two who had come running out with her coat and purse, waving at him through the window of the school bus, he began to ride the commuter bus. Readily he chose the inconvenience of walking two miles to and from the stop to avoid the possibility of seeing Pretty-Fay herself. He never did. Nor did anyone else.

The third day they beat him up. All six, including Freddie. Smart, too. They hit him everywhere except his face, just in case he was a snitch as well, happy to explain a broken mouth or swollen eye; girl enough to point a weak finger at them if questioned. All six. Romen fought well; raised a lump or two, kneed deep into a groin, tore a shirt till they got his hands behind his back and tried to break his ribs and empty his stomach at the same time. That last was starting to happen when a car drove up and honked. Everybody scattered, including Romen, who stumbled away holding his stomach, more fearful of being rescued than of passing out with vomit on his jeans. He threw up behind a mimosa tree in the woods back of Patty’s. Contemplating his grandmother’s cooking in the grass, he began to wonder if he could ever live his body down. He did not question Theo’s sneering or Freddie’s disgust; he shared both, and couldn’t understand what had made him melt at that moment—his heart bursting like a pump for a wounded creature who a few seconds earlier had been a feast he was eager to gnaw. If he’d found her in the street, his reaction would have been the same, but in the company of and part of the pack who put her there—shit! What was that thing that had moved him to untie her, cover her, Jesus! Cover her! Cover her up! Get her on her feet and out of there? The little mitten hands? The naked male behinds convulsing one after another after another after another? The vegetable odor mixed with a solid booming bass on the other side of the door? As he put his arm around her and led her away, he was still erect, folding only as they stepped together out into the cold. What made him do it? Or rather, who?

But he knew who it was. It was the real Romen who had sabotaged the newly chiseled, dangerous one. The fake Romen, preening over a stranger’s bed, was tricked by the real Romen, who was still in charge here in his own bed, forcing him to hide under a pillow and shed girl tears. The trumpet stuttering in his head.

3

STRANGER

The Settlement is a planet away from One Monarch Street. A little huddle, a bit of sprawl, it has claimed the slope of a mountain and the valley below since World War I. No one uses its name—not the post office or the Census Bureau. The State Troopers know it well, however, and a few people who used to work in the old Relief Office have heard of it, but the new employees of the County Welfare Office have not. From time to time, teachers in District Ten have had students from there, but they don’t use the word “Settlement.” “Rurals” is what these strange unteachable children are labeled. Although they infuriated ordinary students from decent farming families, Guidance Counselors had to choose some socially benign term to identify these children without antagonizing their parents, who might get wind of it. The term proved satisfactory, although no Settlement parent ever appeared to request, permit, observe, consult, or complain. Notes or forms placed in their children’s unsoaped hands were never returned or responded to. Rurals sat in class for a few months, sharing textbooks, borrowing paper and pencils, but purposefully silent as though they were there to test, not acquire, education; to witness, not supply, information. They were quiet in the classroom and kept to themselves, partly out of choice and partly because they were carefully avoided by their peers. Rurals were known as sudden fighters—relentless and vicious. It was common knowledge that sometime in the late fifties a principal managed to locate, then visit, the home of a Rural named Otis Rick. Otis had loosened a child’s eye on the playground and had not understood or obeyed the expelled notice stuck in his shirt pocket. He had come back every day, his victim’s dried blood still on his sleeves. Not much is known of this official visit to demand Otis’s permanent absence—except one vivid detail. When the principal left the Rick property, he had to cover the whole length of the valley on foot because he had been given no time or chance to get back in his car. The DeSoto was towed back to town by State Troopers because nothing could make its owner go back to retrieve it.

Very old people who were young during the Great Depression, and who still call that part of the county “the Settlement,” could describe the history of its inhabitants, if anyone asked. But as their opinions are seldom sought, Settlement people have it the way they want it: unevolved and reviled, they are also tolerated, left alone, and feared. Quite the way it was in
1912
when the jute mill was abandoned and those who could leave left and those who could not (the black ones because they had no hope, or the white ones who had no prospects) lolled on, marrying one another, sort of, and figuring out how to stay alive from day to day. They built their own houses from other people’s scraps, or they added on to the workers’ cabins left by the jute company: a shed here, a room there, to the cluster of little two-room-and-a-stove huts that wavered on the slope or sat in the valley. They used stream and rain water, drank cow’s milk or home brew; ate game, eggs, domestic plants, and if they hired out in a field or a kitchen, they spent the earnings on sugar, salt, cooking oil, soda pop, cornflakes, flour, dried beans, and rice. If there were no earnings, they stole.

Unlike the tranquillity of its name, the Settlement heaved with loyalty and license, and the only crime was departure. One such treason was undertaken by a girl with merged toes called Junior. Her mother, Vivian, had meant to name her right away. Three days had passed after the hard delivery before she could stay awake long enough to make a decision—during which time the baby girl’s father called the newborn “Junior,” either after himself—Ethan Payne Jr.—or after his longing, for although Vivian already had four boy children, none of them was Ethan’s. Vivian finally did choose a name for the baby and may even have used it once or twice after Ethan moved back to his father’s house. But “Junior” stuck. Nothing more was required until the child entered District Ten and a last name was demanded of her. “Junior Vivian,” she murmured, and when the teacher smiled into her hand, the girl scratched her elbow, having just realized she could have said “June.”

Settlement girls were discouraged from schooling, but each of Junior’s uncles, male cousins, and half brothers had spent some time at District Ten. Unlike any one of them, she was seldom truant. At home, with no one or anyone in charge, she felt like one of the Settlement dogs. Fifty strong, they swung between short chains and unfettered roaming. Between fights and meals they slept lashed to trees or curled near a door. Left to their own devices, hounds mated with shepherds, collies with Labradors. By
1975
, when Junior was born, they were an odd, original, astonishingly handsome breed instantly recognizable to folks who knew as Settlement dogs—adept at keeping outsiders out, but at their brilliant best when hunting.

During years of longing for her father, Junior begged relentlessly to visit him.

“Will you hush up?” was all Vivian said, until one day she answered, “Army. That’s what I heard.”

“When’s he coming back?”

“Oh, he weren’t nothing, baby. Nothing at all. Go play now.”

She did, but she kept on looking out for the tall, handsome man who named her after himself to show how he felt about her. She just had to wait.

Bored at last with the dogs and her mother, faster and slyer than her brothers, afraid of her uncles and unamused by their wives, Junior welcomed District Ten, first to get away from the Settlement, then for itself. She was the first Rural to speak up and make a stab at homework. The girls in her class avoided her and the few who tried to sprinkle the seeds of friendship were quickly forced to choose between the untidy Rural with one dress and the crafty vengeance little girls know how to exact. Junior lost every time, but behaved as though the rejection was her victory, smiling when she saw the one-recess friend retreat to her original fold. It was a boy who succeeded at befriending her. The teachers thought it was because he fed her Yodels and Sno Balls from his lunch bag, since Junior’s lunch might be a single apple or a mayonnaise sandwich stuffed in the pocket of the woman’s sweater she wore. The pupils, however, believed he was playing dirty with her down in a ditch somewhere after school—and they told him so. But he was a proud boy, son of the bottling-plant manager, who could hire and fire their parents—and he told them so.

His name was Peter Paul Fortas, and having lived through eleven years of being called Pee Pee, he had grown insolent and unyielding to popular opinion. Peter Paul and Junior were not interested in each other’s bodies. Junior wanted to know about vats of Coke syrup and capping machines. Peter Paul wanted to know if it was true about brown bears on the mountain and whether it was the calves or the smell of milk that attracted snakes. They traded information like racetrack tipsters, skipping biography to get to the meat of the game. Once, however, he asked her if she was Colored. Junior said she didn’t know but would find out for him. He said it didn’t matter, because he couldn’t invite Gentiles to his house anyway. He didn’t want her feelings hurt. She nodded, pleased with the serious, pretty word he had called her.

He pilfered for her: a ballpoint pen, a pair of socks, a yellow barrette for her finger-combed hair. When, for Christmas, she gave him a baby cottonmouth curled in a bottle and he gave her a jumbo box of crayons, it was hard to tell which one was happier.

But the cottonmouth was a snake, after all, and it did them in.

Some of Junior’s uncles, idle teenagers whose brains had been insulted by the bleakness of their lives, alternated between brutality and coma. They did not believe the jarred snake had been for a class assignment, as Junior told them when asked, “What’s ’et you hauling off, gal?” Or if they did believe her, the act was deeply offensive to them. Something belonging to the Settlement was being transferred to the site of a failure so dismal it had not registered on them as failure at all—but as the triumph of natural light over institutional darkness. Or perhaps it was too late for possum, or one of them had not shared his beer. Whatever the reason, the uncles were wide awake the morning after Christmas and fun-seeking.

Junior was asleep, her head on a stained “Jesus Saves” pillow, wrapped in a blanket serving also as a mattress. The pillow, a Christmas gift from an uncle’s wife who got it from the trash box of her then-employer, encouraged dreams. The crayons, held to her chest, decorated them. So colorful was her sleep, an uncle had to tap her behind with his boot more than once to wake her. They questioned her about the snake again. The crayon-colored dreams drained slowly as Junior tried to figure out what they wanted, there being no point in wondering the why of anything with them. They didn’t know themselves why they set fire to a car seat rather than remove it. Or why a snake was important to them. They wanted the cottonmouth returned to its rightful home.

Among the threats if she didn’t go get it were “to break your pretty little butt” and “hand you over to Vosh.” This latter she had heard many times before, and the possibility that it could happen, that she could be handed over to the old man in the valley who liked to walk around with his private parts in his hand singing hymns of praise, jolted her up from the floor, out of reaching hands and through the door. The uncles chased her, but she was swift. Chained dogs growled; loose ones joined in. On her way down the path, she saw Vivian returning from the privy.

“Ma!” she called.

“Leave her ’lone, you goddamn polecats!” screamed Vivian. She took a few running steps before fatigue ended in futile rock-throwing at the backs of her younger brothers. “Leave her ’lone! Come back here, you skunks! You better mind me!”

Urgent, heartfelt if not optimistic, the words were a comfort to the running girl. Barefoot, clutching a jumbo box of crayons, Junior dodged, hid from, and managed to lose the howling uncles. She found herself in the kind of wood lumbermen salivate over. Pecans the size of which had not been seen since the twenties. Maples boasting six and seven trunk-size arms. Locusts, butternut, white cedar, ash. Healthy trees mixed with sick ones. Huge black cauliflowers of disease grew on some. Others looked healthy until a wind, light and playful, ruffled their crown. Then they cracked and fell like coronary victims, copper and gold meal pouring from the break.

Darting, then pausing, Junior arrived at a sunlit stand of bamboo strangling in Virginia creeper. The howling had stopped. She waited, then climbed a Northern Spy to scan the mountainside and what she could see of the valley. No uncles in sight. Just the parting of trees where the creek ran. And beyond it the road.

The sun was high when she got to its edge. Of no importance to her were flesh cuts or twigs embedded in her hair, but she mourned the seven crayons broken in flight before she got to use even one. Vivian could not protect her from Vosh or the uncles, so she decided to find Peter Paul’s house, wait for him somewhere nearby, and—what? Well, he would help her somehow. But she would never, ever, ask him to return the baby cottonmouth.

She stepped out onto the road and had not gone fifty feet when a truckful of uncles clattered behind her. She jumped left, of course, instead of right, but they had anticipated that. When the front fender knocked her sideways, the rear tire crushed her toes.

A bumpy ride in the bed of the truck, a place on Vivian’s cot, whiskey in her mouth, camphor in her nose—nothing woke her until the pain ratcheted down to unbearable. Junior opened her eyes to fever and a hurt so stunning she could not fill her lungs. Breath came and went in thimblefuls. Day after day she lay there, first unable, then refusing, to cry or speak to Vivian, who was telling her how thankful she should be that the uncles had found her sprawled on the roadside, her baby girl Junior struck down by a car driven, no doubt, by a town bastard too biggedy to stop after running over a little girl and check to see if she was dead or leastwise give her a lift.

In silence Junior watched her toes swell, redden, turn blue, then black, then marble, then merge. The crayons were gone and the hand that once held them now clutched a knife ready for Vosh or an uncle or anyone stopping her from committing the Settlement version of crime: leaving, getting out. Clean away from people who chased her down, ran over her foot, lied about it, called her lucky, and who preferred the company of a snake to a girl. In one year she was gone. Two more and she was fed, bathed, clothed, educable, and thriving. Behind bars.

Junior was eleven when she ran away and wandered for weeks without attention being paid. Then suddenly noticed when she stole a G.I. Joe doll from an “Everything for a Dollar” store, taken into custody when she wouldn’t give it back, transferred to a shelter when she bit the woman who yanked it from her, remanded to Correctional when she refused to provide any information other than her first name. “Junior Smith,” they wrote, and “Junior Smith” she remained until the state let her go and she reclaimed her true name with an
e
added for style.

Some of the education at Correctional was academic; most of it was not. Both kinds honed the cunning needed to secure a place in a big, fancy house on Monarch Street where there was no uniformed woman pacing in the half-light of a corridor or opening doors any old time to check; or where the sleep thrum of bodies close by siphoned the air. This was the right place and there he was, letting her know in every way it had been waiting for her all along. As soon as she saw the stranger’s portrait she knew she was home. She had dreamed him the first night, had ridden his shoulders through an orchard of green Granny apples heavy and thick on the boughs.

The next morning at breakfast—grapefruit, scrambled eggs, grits, toast, bacon—Christine was less hostile but still guarded. Junior tried to amuse her by poking fun at Heed. The lay of the land, so to speak, was not entirely clear, and she had no direction. It was when she’d finished eating and was back in Heed’s bedroom that she knew for sure. The gift was unmistakable.

Awkward in Heed’s red suit, Junior had stood at the window and looked again at the boy below while Heed rummaged in a footlocker. Earlier she had seen Christine shoot down the driveway, leaving the boy holding a pail and shivering in the yard. Now she watched him wipe his nose with the back of his wrist, then brush the residue on his jeans. Junior smiled. And was smiling still when Heed called out to her.