A Fine Dark Line Read online

  “I hear them little white boys is hard to train.”

  “Naw,” Buster said. “Not if you whip ’em good with a sound piece of fishin’ cane and put down newspapers.”

  “Whatcha gonna feed that boy?”

  “Got it here in this cardboard box. Guts from the slaughterhouse. A hog’s head.”

  “Hell, I want that hog’s head,” said one of the men. “Why don’t you kill him, Buster, let me have that bicycle?”

  “Your fat ass would flatten that bicycle,” Buster said.

  Laughter rose up, drifted away as we moved on.

  I was, to put it mildly, becoming a bit nervous. What was I doing in the Section anyway? Had I lost my mind?

  ———

  WE TOOK A SIDE STREET, passed some kids playing. One of them was a small boy with a snotty nose that had collected dust and made dirt roads from his nostrils to his lips. As we passed, he looked at us as if he might ask us for identification.

  Alongside the railroad track we came to a small house the sick green color of our drive-in fence.

  I pointed this out to Buster. He said, “It ought to look the same color. I took me some of the paint. It ain’t pretty, but it keeps it from peelin’ and it looks better than gray.”

  There was a large stone step that led up to the porch. The house was simple but looked clean and cared for. The screen in front of the door was a new one and the windows were clean with shutters drawn back. There was a metal lawn chair on the porch. It too was painted the same ugly green.

  Behind the house, above all this, between railway and structure, rose an old billboard that had probably not been changed since World War II. It was a happy white woman holding a Coke, a smile as bright and wide as an idiot’s hopes.

  At the corner of her smile was a rip. The wind and rain had caught the rip, torn it back a piece. Crows gathered atop the billboard, and just above the woman’s head they had done what they had done to Robert E. Lee.

  The crows looked down on us as if we might be something to eat. I leaned my bicycle against the porch. Buster took out a key, pulled back the screen, unlocked the door.

  “Welcome to nigger heaven,” he said.

  Inside, the place was dark and smelled like stale paper. As Buster turned on the one weak overhead light, it became evident the smell was due to much of the walls being covered in shelves filled with books and magazines.

  There was a closet and a little table near the wall that held a hot plate, dishes, and eating utensils. In the middle of the room was a large plank table with chairs. Against one wall, next to a bookshelf, was a narrow bed. Off center of the room was a heating stove made from an oil drum. A crooked pipe ran from it, exited through the ceiling. There was a pile of split wood lying beside it, ready for winter.

  I said, “You read all these books?”

  “What kind of question is that, boy? ’Course. Do you read?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You got this many books?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, you get you a collection of books. Read them, or at least try to read them. I’d offer you some cake but I don’t have any.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I got coffee.”

  “I don’t drink coffee much.”

  “Me neither. Except every morning, during the day, and in the afternoon. I think I got a warm RC though, you want it.”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  Buster put the box on the plank table, gave me the RC, started coffee. He sat at the table, removed a number of folded newspapers and clippings from the box.

  “Sit down, boy. Grab a chair.”

  I did, said, “What is this?”

  “I told you Jukes was the janitor at the newspaper. Also the janitor at the police station and the high school. Just does the police station on the weekends. At the high school, he don’t have to do anything in the summer. When school starts up, he’s got a crew works for him. Old Jukes does all right.”

  “How do these clippings help us?”

  “You aren’t thinkin’, boy . . . And quit lookin’ out that back window. That girl on the billboard there, you ain’t gonna see no titties fall out or nothin’. She’s just paper.”

  I blushed. Buster said, “Now don’t get upset or mad. I’m just kiddin’ with you. A man’s got to learn to joke and he’s got to learn to laugh at his own self and know it’s okay to think about titties. You don’t do that, you ain’t gonna be worth the powder it would take to blow your ass up. Thinkin’ on titties too much is preoccupation, not thinkin’ on them is sign of some kind of anemia. You listenin’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One of the things you better learn to laugh at is the women you can’t have, ’cause they’re gonna be plenty. Now, think. Why would we want clippin’s that go back all these years?”

  “I guess to read about the murder.”

  “All right. Now you’re startin’ to fan the fire. But we got clippin’s here before that murder, and after it. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Things like this, sometimes they just happen. Man does the murder don’t even know why he does it. When I was in Oklahoma, time I was tellin’ you about, there was an Indian went off one morning and beat his wife to death with a stick of stove wood and set fire to the house, burned up their baby girl in her crib. He went out then and shot their dog and shot himself in the head. He wasn’t as good a shot when it come to shootin’ himself. He lived, but without his jaw. Asked why he done it. He didn’t know. Said they hadn’t been arguin’, and in fact, she was quite lovin’, and he really loved the baby, and the dog was second to none. But one mornin’ he got up and seen his wife bent over the stove, tryin’ to make his breakfast, and it just come on him. He took the stove wood and went to work. Said it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Did they shoot him in the heart too?”

  “Didn’t execute him. Was considered made mad by the gods, or some kind of Indian evil. He was set free. Besides, he had to live with that face of his, and the bullet had punched a hole in his head and hit his brain and he wasn’t good for nothin’ after that. Limped, drank liquor, shit on himself when he wasn’t falling down. Maybe he’d have been better with a shot through the heart.

  “Just because he didn’t have no pattern, rhyme, or reason, don’t mean most of this murderin’ business don’t. It usually has. Money. Love. Or more often than not, just some kind of pride gone wild. Pride makes you want money, or lack of pride does, and it makes you want love and not want to take insults. Pride is at the bottom of everything, boy, except stone crazy.”

  “Does the murder of Margret and Jewel have a pattern?”

  “Can’t rightly say yet, but I figure it did. What we got to figure is are these two murders linked up, or did they happen separate-like. You know, a coincidence.

  “If they’re tied together, there was some reason behind it. You can figure that, you can kind of work backwards, or forwards, dependin’ on the situation. You followin’ me, boy?”

  “Sort of . . . Well, not completely.”

  “You see, they got what they call a morgue at the newspaper, but not for dead folks. For dead papers. Things happened long ago. These start before the murder, and after the murder. This is just the first box. Juke’s gonna get me others. But this one, it’ll take some time to look through.”

  “What are we lookin’ for?”

  “There’s some things we know we’re lookin’ for, and some things we don’t know about yet.”

  “How will we know the things we don’t know?”

  “That depends on us.”

  “What do we know we’re looking for?”

  “We know we’re lookin’ for any mention of the Stilwind family and this Wood family that Margret belonged to. Don’t care if it’s just somethin’ about them goin’ some place, we want to study it.”

  “Goin’ some place?”

  “Stilwinds. They have money, boy. They did travelin�
�. Society section might have somethin’ on that.”

  “Why do we care where they went?”

  “Maybe we don’t. But we’re gonna look at it. Gonna look at anything has to do with them. We’re gonna look for any kind of crime resembles the crimes we’re interested in, before or after. Railway killin’s, people burned up in fires, even if it’s an accident. Then, we got maybe some police files to look at.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m gonna trust you, Stanley. You got to be quiet about that. And you don’t want to mention the papers either, hear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find out I got Jukes takin’ out old police files, well, he’ll not only lose his job, he got a good chance of bein’ hurt. Or worse. I’m askin’ him a big thing just to figure on some dead white folks some years back just so you and me got somethin’ to do.”

  “Why is Jukes doing it?”

  “ ’Cause I once helped him out. In a big way.”

  “What kind of way?”

  “That’s between me and him.”

  “Why are you doing it?”

  “I’m bored. I wanted to keep bein’ a lawman, Stan. But after them old days, wasn’t no place for me as a colored to do nothin’ like that. I didn’t want to move up North where I might do it, ’cause it’s cold up there. Besides, they ain’t no better than here. Just say they are.”

  “When do we get the police files?”

  “When Jukes can nab ’em. They’re old enough, I don’t think they’re gonna be missed. Least not right away. We’ll put them back when we’re finished.”

  “What if we do find out who did it?”

  “Cross that bridge when we get to it.”

  ———

  THERE WERE ALL MANNER of things about the Stilwinds in the papers. There were buildings they bought, weddings they attended, travels abroad, an announcement the older daughter had moved away to England, general society stuff, the charities they gave to.

  But nothing jumped out at me and said murder.

  Buster read carefully and wrote from time to time on a yellow pad with a fat pencil. I said, “You finding anything?”

  “Don’t know. All has to come together like a puzzle. You get a piece here. You get one there. You find some things look like pieces and almost fit, but don’t, so you toss ’em. But you don’t toss ’em far. Sometimes you have to go back and get them. Most of the time, you solve business just by doin’ business. You chip here, you chip there. You think about it. You want to make a statue, you start with a block of stone. You get through chippin’ on it, you’ve cut away a lot of stone to make that statue.”

  “But we’re not making a statue.”

  “Stan, it’s what they call a comparison. It ain’t supposed to mean just how it is. It’s a metaphor.”

  “The way you talk, kind of words you use, changes a lot, Buster.”

  “It do, don’t it?” He grinned at me. “Thing is, when it starts to come together, it’s like tumblers in a safe. You know. Click, click, click. Now, tuck your head into them papers, boy, think about what you’re reading.”

  ———

  A COUPLE HOURS LATER, Buster said, “I’m gonna take me a little break, take some of my medicine. Might be a good idea if you run along home.”

  Buster went to the bookshelves, pulled back some paperback books, removed a small, flat bottle of liquor from behind them. “Keeps my heart pumpin’.”

  “Is it okay to go back by myself?”

  “You scared colored gonna get you?”

  “A little.”

  “At least you’re honest. They won’t bother you none. Just wave at them men on the porch. Besides, they’re probably havin’ their medicine ’bout now. Ain’t much else for them to do. All the doctorin’ jobs is filled up.”

  I got up to leave.

  He said, “Take this home and read it. It’ll get you thinkin’ way you need to be thinkin’.”

  He handed me a paperback book with the title: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

  “Holmes, he had the mind for it, boy. He thought around corners and under rugs.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Read it. You’ll figure what I mean.”

  I put the book in my back pocket, got my bicycle off the porch. The ride was rough along the busted brick streets. I came to the porch where the men had been, but they were gone.

  I rode on until the trees spruced up and the bricks lay flat, on past the wrecked colored graveyard, on past the kept white graveyard, on into Dewmont, and from there I rode home.

  11

  NEXT FEW DAYS Buster brought the old newspapers to work. He arrived at least two hours before he needed to run the reels. Me and Nub spent time with him in the projection booth. We looked through the clippings. Well, Buster and I did. Nub lay on the floor on his back with his paws in the air. He was no help at all.

  Buster and I catalogued anything interesting on yellow pads, put the catalogued papers aside for future reference.

  Mornings, when Buster wasn’t there, I read from the Sherlock Holmes stories or taught Rosy to read better. She had graduated from the movie magazines and comics, and was reading a few short stories out of Mom’s magazines, like The Saturday Evening Post.

  Sometimes Richard came by to visit, and we rode our bikes down to the wood-lined creek, hunted crawdads in the muddy shallow water.

  We caught the crawdads by tying a piece of bacon to a string, jerking the mud bugs out of the creek when they grabbed hold of it.

  Richard would bring a bucket with him, and by noon of a good day, we had it half full of crawdads. Richard took them home to give to his mother, who boiled them until they were pink. Then she made rice and cooked vegetables and mixed them together.

  I had eaten crawdads once or twice at their house and didn’t like them much. They tasted muddy to me. And it was sad to see Richard’s mother move about like a whipped dog, her eye blacked, her nose swollen, her lip pooched out like a patch on a bicycle tire. Just looking across the table at Richard’s dad bent over his plate like a dark cloud about to rain on the world made the food in my mouth taste bad.

  One day Richard came to our house on his bike and his eye was blacked.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “Daddy and Mama got into it,” he said. “I tried to stop Daddy from kickin’ her. He blacked my eye and she got kicked anyhow.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I reckon me and Mama had it comin’.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Come on, let’s go catch crawfish,” he said.

  Down at the creek fishing for mud bugs, Richard and I started talking about the ghost by the railroad tracks.

  “Hey, want to sneak out tonight and go have a look? I can have you back before you’re even missed.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “You can’t be a sissy all your life.”

  “I’m no sissy.”

  “You do what you’re told, don’t you? I take chances.”

  “Well, my daddy doesn’t beat the tar out of me over just anything either. He doesn’t beat the tar out of me at all.”

  “My daddy says he’s just tryin’ to make me responsible.”

  “He’s just tryin’ to beat your ass. And he hits your mother too. My daddy doesn’t ever hit my mother.”

  “She’s sassy ’cause he don’t.”

  “What if she is?”

  “I don’t mean nothin’ by it, Stanley. But you want to fight, I’ll fight you. I ain’t afraid.”

  “And you might whip me, but don’t talk about my mom or my family.”

  “You started it.”

  I was still squatting on the creek bank, holding a bacon-loaded string. I thought for a moment, said, “Guess I did. I didn’t mean nothing.”

  “Me neither. I was just kiddin’ when I called you a sissy. You ain’t no sissy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure. You want to slip off or not?”

  “Why not,” I
said.

  “I can come by tonight. About eleven or so. That work for you?”

  “Better make it midnight.”

  “We can ride bikes to the sawmill, walk from there, since there ain’t nothing but a rough trail.”

  We wrapped our lines on sticks, stuck them under the bridge for another time when we could get some bacon, then I walked home with Richard, him carrying the bucket with the crawdads in it.

  We walked by the old abandoned sawmill. Most of it had rotted down and some of it had been torn away for lumber. One complete building remained. It was supported on posts and through a glassless window machinery could be seen. The roof was conical and had rusted and the rust made it look in the moonlight as if it were made of gold.

  The structure was open in front and from it swung a long metal chute held up by rusted chains attached to rods on hinges. The chute dipped toward a damp, blackened sawdust pile which was flattened on top by wind and rain. Blue jays called out from the woods and one lit on the chute for a moment. Even its little weight made the long chute wobble on its chains. The bird took to the sky and made a dot that went away.

  Dewmont was full of stories, and one of many I had heard from Richard was about a colored kid who had gone playing in the sawmill ruins and thought it would be fun to ride that old chute down into the sawdust pile. But when he got in the stuff, he went under, and was never found.

  According to the story, somewhere beneath that huge mountain of sawdust were his bones, and maybe the bones of others as well.

  I always wondered how people knew he was there if no one had seen it happen. And if he was there, surely someone would have dug his body out by now.

  When I brought this up to Richard, he said, “That boy’s mama had twelve other kids. She wasn’t missin’ one little nigger much.”

  When we got to his property, Richard’s demeanor changed. He lost a step and his shoulders sagged.

  He said, “I think me havin’ these crawdads will calm Daddy’s temper, since I been gone so long.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so we just kept walking into his yard. According to Richard, their house had been handed down to them by his mother’s parents. It was huge and once grand, but that grandness was gone.

  The yard was lush with high weeds divided by a cracked concrete walk. The porch sagged and the front door hung crooked on its hinges. One side of the porch roof had a hole in it and the lumber was hanging down, black and wet-looking, soft, as if you could tear it apart with your bare hands.