One Mississippi (27 page)

I was ready for him. “If you hadn’t been up walking around, you wouldn’t have missed the first half of it, which you did without any help from anybody. So just shut up.”

“I didn’t miss it. I was right down in front, to the side of the speakers. Where we could be sitting right now.”

Rachel was riding shotgun in silence. In the back, Arnita sat beside me just as silent. When I touched her hand, she moved her whole body closer to the door.

It was summer and no air-conditioning, but it was cold in that car.

“Look, Arnita, I told you the truth,” I said. “Would you rather have me keep lying to you?”

“No, thank you,” she said politely.

When in doubt, I thought, try funny. “Why do I get the feeling this has turned into, like, the worst date of all time?”

“Not even close,” Tim put in. “Are you forgetting Prom Night?”

How cavalierly he introduces the subject! What a delicate touch! He picks the thinnest ice in the world and goes skating on out there, doing high jumps and double axels.

“Oh come on, not that,” I said.

“Why not?” In the rearview I saw his eyes dancing. “That was Arnita’s big night! You’ve never told her about your encounter with a certain seat belt that shall remain nameless?”

“Leave it alone, Tim,” I warned.

Sure enough, he had tickled her interest. “What happened? Tell me, Tim.”

“Well first, on the way to the prom, your boyfriend gets a nosebleed and gets himself stuck in the seat belt in the back of my dad’s Buick, and he can’t get out.” Tim’s eyes flicked from mirror to road and back to us in the mirror. “We had to cut the belt to get him out. [
We!
] Skippy bleeding like a stuck pig. With a Maxi Pad up his nose. Talk about funny — now
that
was funny.”

“Okay, enough,” I said.

“No, Daniel, let me hear this,” Arnita said. “You always want to talk about what happened to me that night. I’ve never heard a word about you.”

Rachel said, “Timmy, can we just go home now? Let’s talk about something else!”

“No, Arnita wants to hear this, and we have to give her everything she wants.” He flashed his gregarious smile. “Isn’t that the deal?”

He blamed me for making us leave the concert. So now he would have his revenge through Arnita. He would do what he’d wanted to do all along: break us up and get rid of her.

I couldn’t think of a single way to stop him other than to grab the wheel, swerve into a telephone pole, and kill us all. I saw right through to the end of what he wanted to do, and there was nothing I could do about it. That’s how helpless I was, how strongly in his thrall.

He switched off the radio. “What Arnita wants,” he said, “is the truth. The whole truth and nothing but. And really, Skippy, does she deserve anything less?”

I had the sensation my whole life was flash-frozen in place, suddenly brittle, about to shatter into ten million pieces. I fought to keep my voice even. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Oh, I do.” He grinned. “What you used to nag me to do. ‘It’s the right thing, Timmy, it’s the only honest thing.’ You want to do the honors? Or you want me to?”

“Tim, don’t.”

“I guess that means me,” he said. “Arnita. We were on Barnett Street on Prom Night. We saw you talking to Red Martin. He was hassling you. You fell off your bike, and he drove off. Left you there on the ground. Daniel and I stopped to help. You didn’t want to have anything to do with us, you were kinda drunk. I wanted to drive along with you, make sure you got home. But Skippy here grabbed the wheel, and . . . you hit us. You ran into our bumper. That’s when you fell and hit your head.”

It was such a simple story. He told it just that fast, and it was over.

Arnita squeezed her eyes shut. “That’s not how it was,” she said.

“We didn’t stop to help you,” Tim said. “We drove to a pay phone and called an ambulance. We came back, to see if they showed up. But we didn’t stop.”

“Why not?” She opened her eyes but she wouldn’t look at me.

“We were scared,” Tim said. “We thought they would blame us. They had Red, they weren’t looking for us. So we just went home.”

When I had pictured this confession it was always me doing the confessing, and Tim trying to stop me.

Rachel said, “Y’all, please cut it out.”

Arnita turned to face me. “Daniel?”

You cannot imagine how quiet it can be in a Starlite Blue Pinto speeding down I-20.

My voice scraped in my throat. “I was scared too.”

“You looked dead,” Tim said. “We thought you were dead.”

She winced. “So the part I remember — with Red —”

“That was the first time you fell. The second time is when you got hurt.”

She looked straight into my eyes. “You were there, and you never told me?”

I felt a desperate urge to make up a new story, try to blow some air back into our old deflated Lie. But what good would that do? In the end it was just me and Arnita, and the truth I had to tell her.

“That’s right,” I said.

She hugged her own arms. “And you let Ella go on pestering them until they arrested Red Martin.”

I rested my face on my hands. “We didn’t care about Red,” I said. “He’s an asshole. We were glad they arrested him. It was justice for what he did to us in school.”

“No it wasn’t,” Tim put in. “That didn’t even begin to count as justice. He still has to pay.”

Her eyes wouldn’t let me go. “Is that why you came to our house? And did all those chores?”

I pictured Ella Beecham shaking her finger at me.
Musgrove!

“Your mother knew the truth,” I said. “She saw right through me. That’s why she made me do all those things. It was like a payback.”

“That’s why you were nice to me? And helped me with my homework and spent all that time, and took me for walks, and . . . ?”

“At first it was.” I tried so hard to tell the truth now, as if it might make up for the Lie. “But then it changed. I got to know you. I fell in love with you. You’ve got to believe me.”

“No.” Suddenly she was crying. “How can I believe you? You’re a liar.”

There! Call the devil by his name!

I was hoping she would not cry. When she cried, everything began to fall apart. She didn’t love me anymore. How could she? She had trusted me and I had betrayed her from the very first day. It was as if we had come together to build something incredibly complicated, an elaborate model of a city skyline with hundreds of intricate nuts and bolts and connections. And then she started crying. And the tiny parts holding everything together dissolved, and our beautiful city collapsed.

Tim was watching me in the mirror. His eyes looked satisfied.

“Stop the car,” said Arnita.

“Keep going,” I said.

“Aw, come on,” Tim said. “We’re almost to Minor.”

“Stop it, I said! Let me out of here now!”

“Whatever you say.” He applied brakes and swerved onto the shoulder, skidding to a stop in loose gravel. Car horns bent and blared around us.

“Tim, don’t stop here,” I said.

Arnita said, “Rachel, let me out.”

“Please wait,” I said. “Give me a chance to explain.”

Rachel got out, flipped the seat forward. Arnita launched herself out the door. I scrambled after her.

She tottered down the edge of the highway in her heels, outlined in the Pinto’s headlights.

“Arnita, wait!”

“Get back in the car!” she cried. “Don’t you come near me!”

Cars whipped past at high speed, flinging up bits of gravel, lashing us with gusts of turbulence. Arnita turned to face the traffic. My God, she was beautiful as she stuck out her thumb.

“Let us take you home!” I cried. “Hitchhiking is dangerous!’

A big white Lincoln flashed its brake lights and pulled to the shoulder. A Continental Mark IV Brougham with the fake spare tire inset in the trunk lid. Arnita took off her shoes and ran lightly across the gravel to meet it.

I chanted the license plate to memorize it: 30L4340.
Thirty L, forty-three forty.

The driver leaned to open the passenger door. Arnita said something to him, and hopped in the front seat. The car scratched off. She never looked back.

21

I
MADE TIM FOLLOW
the white Continental all the way to East Minor. We watched Arnita jump out and hurry to the porch. Lincoln Beecham came to open the door. She pushed past him and went in.

Nobody in the car said a word until we had dropped Rachel at her house. Tim backed the Pinto into the street. “Now Durwood, I know what you’re going to say, so don’t say it.”

“What am I going to say?”

“I was horrible, I was reckless, I’ve put us in danger,” he said in a mincing little-girl voice, his imitation of me. “If she goes to the cops now, we both go to jail.”

“You don’t get it at all,” I said. “Arnita won’t do that. She’s a really good person, unlike you — or me. She’ll tell her mother she’s not sure anymore. They’ll drop the charges against Red.”

“That’s what you were gonna say?”

“No, Tim. I got nothing to say to you.”

“Aw come on, Skippy . . .”

“You don’t have to drop me off anywhere. I’ll get out at the next corner.”

“Aw Skipperino, don’t be that way.” He reached out as if to tousle my hair.

I knocked his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

“You know something, Skippy? Let you in on a little secret. You’re better off without her. You really are.”

“I didn’t realize till tonight how much you hate her.”

“I don’t hate her,” he said. “She’s cute. I see why you like her. She sure is wild about you.”

“Not now,” I said. “You took care of that.”

“Nah — she’ll get over it. Give her time. Before you know it she’ll be sweet on you again, you watch.”

“Not a chance. You wanted to kill it, and you did. Did that make you happy?”

Tim chewed his little finger. “What choice did I have? She’s in love with you, son. Anybody could see that from ten miles away. All of a sudden I realized, you don’t have to put on this act anymore. You’ve done a great job getting close to her, but it’s not necessary now. You’ve got her so crazy about you she’ll never turn us in, not even now when she knows everything. She’s in love.”

“That’s not why you did it.”

“I had to do something! Or else what, you keep getting more and more mixed up with her? One of these days she finds out the whole thing anyway — and then look out. Or were you gonna try to keep it a secret forever?”

“That’s what you promised. What you made me promise.”

He grinned. “Ah, but don’t it feel good to get it off your chest?” He thumped his breastbone like Tarzan, to illustrate how good it felt.

We were idling at the Dairy Dog corner in a line of cars, waiting for the light to change. No time like the present when it comes to opening a door and stepping out.

“Skippy, where are you — hey! Get back in the car!”

I dodged a pickup truck and ran across the road. I didn’t care whether he followed me or not.

I didn’t let myself look back until I was all the way across the parking lot. The Pinto’s taillights disappeared up Minor Boulevard.

B
AM
.
I thought it was Dad’s hand smacking the thin wall between our rooms, but no, it was dark, the TV off, Janie curled up on the other twin bed. Someone pounding on the door. I stumbled to answer it.

Barely dawn out. Tim looked alarmed and wide-awake. He still wore his black clothes from the concert. “That is some weird news, huh Skippy. Did you get the call?”

“What call?”

“Eddie Smock killed himself,” he said.

“Oh my God. No way.”

“Night before last.”

“How?”

“He hung himself,” Tim said. “Passworth said he was blue when they found him. They tried to revive him, but he died in the ambulance.”

I didn’t have to ask why Eddie might want to do such a thing.

It must be the worst thing in the world, to feel so low you just want to die.

But I guess there are worse things. Like being suddenly revealed to the world as a queer. The kind who makes desperate phone calls to boys. Eddie decided he would rather die than be known as one of those. So would I. So would any self-respecting boy in Mississippi.

The door to Room 30 flew open. Dad was a fearsome sight in his sagging Fruit of the Looms. “What the hell is this!”

“Oh hey, Mr. Musgrove. Sorry to wake you up.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“That’s Tim,” I said. “You know. My best friend?”

“Sorry to wake y’all up, sir,” Tim said. “It’s just — this guy from the show we were doing for Full Flower Baptist? He died.”

“What you mean, died?”

“He killed himself.”

“Well for pity’s sake,” Dad said, “it’s five-thirty in the morning. Can’t it wait a couple of hours?”

“No sir, see, the funeral’s today, way up in the Delta. And his mother, Miz Smock? She wants us guys from the show to be his pallbearers. We gotta leave in like an hour to make it up there in time.”

“Well, come back in an hour, then.” Dad moved to close the door.

Tim stopped it with his foot. “No sir, but see, first we have to go to Full Flower to get our costumes. Eddie’s mother wants us to wear the costumes from the show.”

Dad looked from Tim to me, trying to decide who annoyed him more. He settled on me. “Get your clothes on and go. Don’t wake up your sister.” He slammed the door.

“Whoa,” Tim said. “What’s with Mr. Personality?”

“Shh — he can still hear you.”

“Sorry,” he said. “But I mean, God.”

I changed the subject. “What does a pallbearer do?”

“We carry the coffin. I think that’s about it.”

“She really asked for us?” I said. “We barely even know Eddie.”

“Yep. And she insists on the costumes. Passworth was real clear on that. My damn mother promised her I’d pick ’em up, so there’s no way we can bail out now.”

The costumes! Now I was awake enough to recognize the implications of that. “Oh no. Tim. Oh God, no.”

“I know, Skip. It’s gonna be bad. But what can we do? It’s his mom. Her son is dead.”

He was right. If Eddie Smock’s mother had asked us to carry his coffin (his
coffin!
) the least I could do was go carry it.

Poor Eddie.

The sun was still trying to rise when we met Alicia Duchamp’s mother in the Full Flower parking lot. We transferred eight costumes in dry-cleaning plastic from her trunk to the back of the Pinto. Mrs. Duchamp insisted on giving us a hug (soft, plump, a whiff of baby powder) and five dollars for doughnuts. We took the money straight to Krispy Kreme, ate a dozen glazed in the store, and bought two dozen to go. We inhaled those doughnuts like the weightless sugar-drenched french fries they were. To wash them down we bought huge Cokes — the size of the one that hit me in the neck at Sonny and Cher.

Soon we were buzzing north out of Jackson on a bumpy old two-lane. At first I didn’t say much. “Look, about last night,” Tim said.

“Don’t talk to me about last night.” I turned to face him. “I’m here because Eddie is dead and we have to go do this. That’s all. If you want to get through this day, just leave it alone.”

“Ooh, Skippy,” he said, mock-impressed. “You’re still royally pissed, huh.”

“It’s beyond that. You — you’re just amazing, Tim. The things you will do. Is there anything you won’t do?”

“Not really. If you want something, you have to do what it takes to get it.”

“You wanted Arnita to get out on the side of the interstate?”

“That was her choice.”

“You wanted her to hate me? You wanted — no. No. Just forget it. We can’t talk about her.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” he said.

“But can I ask you one thing?”

“Why not?”

“That night up in Itta Bena. When Eddie made those calls. Why didn’t he call our room?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Never thought about it. Maybe we weren’t his type.”

“He called all the other boys, right?”

“I don’t know. Did he?”

“I didn’t hear our phone ring that night, did you?”

“No. I slept through the whole thing, remember?”

“But then . . . when did you put on your shoes?” I said.

“What?”

It was a small detail. I had not paid much attention when I first noticed it. I put it away and meant to forget it. But it kept nagging at me, like a gnat at the corner of my eye. “When you came back from the bathroom, you had on your shoes. But you took them off before you went to bed.”

“Did you see the floor in that bathroom? It was filthy.” He watched me carefully. “Why do you ask, oh great Durwood?”

“Just wondering.”

“No, tell me. You know the rule: if you think it, you have to say it.”

I faked a grin. “I just had to find out if you really are so neurotic you would put on your shoes just to go pee.”

He smiled. “Ah, I get it. You think I went out that night? Why would I go out?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“You think Eddie called our room and I went over to his room? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“No,” I lied.

He grinned. “You are so chock full o’ shit, Skippy. Is that what you’ve been doing since we got back? Putting this whole scheme together in your busy little brain? Here’s what I did that night, wanna hear? I went to bed. I went to sleep — after you quit talking my head off. When I woke up, you told me they were taking Eddie away for making dirty phone calls. That’s it, buddy boy — that right there is the entire extent of my involvement in the conspiracy. Now what kind of a moron does that make you?”

He was an excellent liar. Better than ever.

“You know, if you’ve got a problem,” I said, “there are people you can talk to about it. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

He winced. “Oh, okay. I’m fucked up. What are you saying, I should see a shrink?”

“You could.”

“I went once, okay? The woman was an idiot. She was evil. All she did was ask the same question over and over, how does that make you feel, how does that make you feel. Like killing you, lady! Dammit! We better not talk about this either.” He sighed. “Man, I’m telling you. If you live up here, you better like it flat.”

He switched on the radio. “Jungle Boogie” jumped out of the speakers,
Get down tonight bay-beh!
It was the right song at the wrong time. He switched it off again and fished a joint from the glove compartment. “Didn’t y’all’s worldly goods burn up around here somewhere?”

“Not here. Highway 61. Just south of Greenville.” I didn’t like to think about that day.

Tim took a hit off the joint and offered it to me. I declined. If Cher was not around I wanted no part of his drugs.

“Your family, Dagwood, I don’t know,” he said. “Talk about weird. First you got all your stuff burned up, then your house explodes, then there’s spooky old Jacko, and now you’re all living in the Gandhi Motel . . . some people might say that situation’s a little crazy too, but I don’t hassle you about it. Do I?”

“What are you talking about?”

He was furious. “I don’t like you saying I’m fucked up. Okay? I don’t like it. I’m fine. My problems are none of your business, okay? There’s nothing wrong with my family — it’s not like at your house. Sorry. Your
motel room.
Can you imagine if my mother had to spend one night in that place? She’d be up all night with the Lysol and the bleach.”

“Okay, Tim, you’re fine. If you say so. It’s just — I don’t like what you did to me.”

“I said I was sorry for last night,” he said.

“When did you say that? No, you didn’t!”

“I say it a lot, but you never listen. I swear to God, Dagwood, I keep no secrets from you. I tell you everything. But all I get from you is these questions, these goddamn ultimatums, all these holy fucking speeches about what an asshole I am. Okay, I can take it. I may even deserve some of it. But give me a break! Fuck! We’re going to his funeral, right? I’m driving us up there and paying for the gas! What more do you want?”

“I want you to shut up and drive,” I said.

“You shut up.”

“Fine! I will!” I folded my arms.

He turned on the radio, cranked the volume, and puffed his joint. I rolled down the window to let the wind suck the smoke out. We kept up our sullen silence through a string of dinky towns. Outside Parchman we passed the gate of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, the prison sprawling beyond a cotton field speckled with black men in white jumpsuits. From a distance they didn’t look like people, just white coveralls with black specks for faces, broiling under the sun. I bet every last one of those men was sorry to be where he was.

My own skin was sticking to the vinyl seat. The Pinto had a perfectly good air conditioner, but Tim refused to turn it on because his father told him it put a strain on the engine.

“Of course it puts a strain on it, that’s what an engine is for,” I said. “To strain, and work hard, and make us cool. That’s why they put A/C in cars, by the way. So you can turn it on when it’s nine hundred degrees out, and not die.”

He sighed. “Let’s just bury this son of a bitch and try not to get on each other’s nerves, okay? People survived for many years before air-conditioning. You’re not going to die.”

We drove into the town of Tutwiler, to the Kool ‘N’ Kreemy drive-in, where we found Passworth and the
Christ!
boys waiting for us — six guys in a parental-brown Ford LTD. They looked about as miserable as I felt. They were Ted, Mark, Evan, Sam, and two Steves I could never quite tell apart. We shook hands and stood around quizzing each other about our prior funeral experience.

Take it from me, any seventeen-year-old boy would rather stick nails in his eyes than go to a funeral. Death is so far from your plans at seventeen that a funeral seems silly, a meaningless ritual, something for old folks to obsess about. Accidents happen. People get old and die. Big deal. A lot of stupid fuss about nothing. Stick ’em in the ground and move on.

Mrs. Passworth was a vision in a shapely black suit, tiny black hat, filmy Jackie Kennedy veil blurring her face. She gripped a Kleenex, and her eyes were shining already — you could tell she was going to be crying a lot today. “Hello, boys, thank you for coming. Eddie’s mother will be so grateful.”

We mumbled politely, you’re welcome and oh God please strike us dead, take us out of here, God, take me first! I expected everything from that point forward to be awful, and mostly it was, but first we got Kool ‘N’ Kreemy burgers and fries, which turned out to be the best in the world.