A Fine Dark Line Read online

  “What’s he bitter about?”

  “Lord if anyone knows. There’s just some people like persimmons, they bitter when they born, sweet for a short time, then they go fast rotten.”

  Rosy Mae sat down in the chair Richard had occupied, picked up one of the comics from my nightstand, thumbed through it a bit. “I can read this and them movie magazines pretty good, but there’s words I ain’t never learned that throws me in books.”

  “I can help you learn to read better,” I said.

  “Can you now?”

  “I can.”

  “I don’t think I got the brains to learn more than I done learned.”

  “Sure you do.”

  Rosy Mae brightened. “Guess I can learn I want to. Learned to read them magazines, didn’t I? Even if I got to skip and guess at some words. Learned to read what I read now so I’d know prices at stores and such. Had to learn so the white man down at the store, Mr. Phillips, don’t overcharge me. He always adds a bit to colored people’s stuff. ’Course, since we got to buy through the back door, it’s hard to know he don’t mark them prices up before we sees ’em.”

  Rosy Mae scratched at her woolly head.

  “Either I gots me Mr. Richard’s bugs, or I’m thinkin’ I gots ’em. I’m gonna go down, wash up, and fix lunch. You want me to bring yours up?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “I will. And don’t you lay up here now and starts to feel sorry for yo’self. You jes’ got a broken leg. There’s boys can’t and ain’t never been able to walk. You okay. You gonna heal up. You a little white boy with a good home and good mama and daddy. You could’a been me.”

  “All right, Rosy Mae. I won’t feel sorry for myself. But there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “I thank you for that, Mr. Stanley.”

  “Just Stanley.”

  “Uh huh. You know your daddy done fixed your bike. He straightened out some of them spokes, got another bike from some junk, and he used them parts to fix yours. He done painted it up for you too. But it ain’t that rust color no more. Now it’s blue.”

  “That’s great.”

  Rosy Mae went out, and contrary to her suggestion and my agreement, I lay there feeling sorry for myself, Nub lying across my chest, his eyes closed, one of his legs kicking as if he were having a bad dream.

  Probably about the car that passed over him.

  ———

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS I mostly stayed in my room with Nub. Daddy had Buster run Vertigo for a week, but never did have anyone over for a special showing.

  I finally watched it from the veranda where there were speakers, and thought it was dumb. I could not believe anybody could be as stupid as Jimmy Stewart was in that movie.

  Not long after that we got in a John Wayne cowboy movie. That one I liked.

  My leg itched a lot and I straightened out a coat hanger to stick down in my cast to scratch. I carried that hanger with me wherever I went. I named it Larry.

  Worse than the itch, however, was my head. It really ached. Not all the time, but often enough, and when the pain came it was like being hit all over again by that Mack Truck. It seemed as if there was a crack in my head and my brains were about to ooze out. But all I had was a big blue knot that pulsed like some kind of second head growing.

  When my head wasn’t killing me, I read Hardy Boys books, and when I tired of that, I managed the box out from under my bed and took to reading the letters and the journal again, this time more carefully, and completely.

  I began to know something about Margret, began to feel certain she was the Margret that ended up dead, down by the railroad track, her head cut off. There were hints in the letters.

  She talked about how at night she could hear the trains go by and how they rattled the glass in the window of her bedroom and how lonesome the whistle sounded and how much her mother drank and yelled at her. She wrote about her mother’s “friends” and how her mother took them in and they paid her money. She never said what all the friends and money were about, but now from talking to Callie, learning about the world a little, it was all starting to click together fast.

  I had also begun to notice an oddity. At night, when I lay down and closed my eyes to sleep, I had the sensation of someone being in the room. I felt cold all over, thought if I opened my eyes someone would be standing by my bed, looming over me like a shadow, perhaps the cronish shadow I had seen in the Stilwind house on the hill.

  I feared whatever it was would take hold of me and drag me with them across the fine dark line that made up the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

  After a time, the sensation would pass, and I would awake exhausted, usually with the sun shining through the window, Nub beside me, lying on his back with his feet in the air, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his tongue hanging out.

  This feeling was so intense I began to suspect someone was actually entering my room at night.

  Callie?

  Maybe Mom or Dad coming in to check on me because of my leg, just making sure I was okay?

  Maybe it was the letters and the journal entries that had me feeling that way. Thinking about Margret (I no longer thought of her as M, because I was certain it had to be Margret) and how she died, down there by the railroad track, her head cut off, stories of her ghost wandering along the rails.

  In the letters, Margret wrote to J, telling how she missed him, that she hoped to see him soon. She talked about the trees where she lived, big dogwoods, and how she heard that the dogwood tree was the one used to make the cross that held Jesus up. That the white flowers that bloomed on the dogwoods had little red spots inside, like the drops of blood Jesus shed. That this was God’s message to remind us that Jesus had given his life on a dogwood cross.

  This dogwood cross thing was a popular story of the time, though when I grew up and read about such things, I never found serious reference to it. Most agreed the crosses used by the Romans would have been made of almost anything but dogwood.

  But Margret talked about all kinds of things like that. She was a dreamer, and I enjoyed her dreams.

  There were pages and pages of the journal where Margret mentioned the pregnancy, said how they could keep the child, raise it, as she said, “In spite of everything.”

  When I finally bored of the letters and journal pages, I put them back in the box and used my crutches to get me across the room to my closet. I put the box on the top shelf behind my cowboy hat and my Indian war bonnet, noticed something had eaten off the tips of the feathers.

  Oh well, I didn’t wear the bonnet anymore. I had outgrown playing cowboys and Indians. I had even stored my Davy Crockett coonskin cap away in my wooden chest. I now found the idea of running around the yard on an invisible horse with a racoon’s hide on my head, or an Indian war bonnet, foolish.

  I crutched back to the bed and lay down. I used Larry to scratch inside my cast, and gave up thinking about Margret for a while.

  7

  NEXT DAY I spent in a lawn chair pulled up next to the projection booth, residing in its shade, reading a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs called Tarzan the Terrible. Nub lay at my feet, snoozing.

  I paused briefly to stretch, realized the sun was falling away. I was amazed to discover I had spent all day, except for a brief bathroom trip and time for lunch, in that chair reading.

  Late as it had become, it was still hot as a griddle, and when I returned to my book, sweat ran down my face.

  “You better get you a hat, boy. Only an idiot sits out in the sun like that.”

  I turned, startled. Nub raised his head for a look, lowered it again and closed his eyes.

  It was Buster Abbot Lighthorse Smith, carrying two paper sacks. One was wrapped tight around a bottle. The lid and neck of it stuck out of the top. He was unlocking the projection booth, sliding inside.

  He left the door open to let the heat out. He had a fan in there and he lifted it and sat it on a chair and turned it on. It could swing f
rom left to right, but he had screwed it down so it wouldn’t move. He sat in a chair across from it and opened the top of his paper sack, produced a church key, and popped the top off the bottle and took a swig.

  “Shit,” he said, when he brought the bottle down. “Don’t ever take to this stuff, boy. Seen it knock many a nigger low, and it won’t do a white boy no good neither. You put this in a Mason jar lid, bugs will get in it and die. That ought to tell you somethin’. So, you don’t want none of this.”

  “No, sir.”

  He pulled the sack down and revealed an RC Cola.

  “Had you fooled, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  But I could smell alcohol, and knew he had been hitting the liquor before arriving.

  “I’m just kiddin’. Wouldn’t want you to think I’m drinkin’ on the job. Your daddy might not like that, and I wouldn’t want to have to go find some job shoveling gravel in this hot sun. How’s that book? That the one where Tarzan finds them dinosaurs, people that’s got tails.”

  “You’ve read it.”

  “You think niggers don’t read.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Buster laughed.

  “See you got you a plate by your chair. You eat out here?”

  “Lunch. Rosy Mae brought it to me.”

  “That old fat nigger gal?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said nothing. I had never had a conversation with Buster before, and this one seemed out of character. He was usually broody and sullen, his brows knit up tight. But I guessed he’d nipped enough before arriving today to feel friendly.

  Daddy knew he drank, but so far it had not affected Buster’s job, and therefore had not been a real problem.

  “You know today’s my birthday?” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Well it is. You know how old I am?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Guess.”

  “Forty?”

  He laughed. “You tryin’ to flatter me, little boy, that what you’re tryin’ to do? I ain’t seen forty in a long time. Try seventy-one.”

  “Try seventy-eight if you a day,” Rosy Mae said.

  She had come out of the house with a glass of lemonade for me. In spite of her size, way she walked, she moved silent as an Indian when she wanted to. I hadn’t even heard the gravel crunch.

  “You don’t know nothin’, woman.”

  “I know what you full of. You ain’t seen seventy in at least eight or nine years.”

  “Well, I don’t look seventy, now do I?”

  “Sure you do. You look about a hundred and forty-five, you axe me.”

  “You go on back in the house. Me and the young man here was talkin’. This ain’t none of your business. Why don’t you get in there and fry up some chicken or somethin’. I could use some chicken myself. I ain’t got nothin’ but a bologna sandwich in this bag.”

  “And about two quarts a whiskey in you already, ’bout half a bottle of that there is RC, rest full of cheater.”

  “Now I was just tellin’ the boy here to stay away from alcohol, wasn’t I, boy? And he saw me open this bottle. Ain’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why don’t you get on in the house, Mr. Stanley. I got some cookies I done made fresh for you in there. I’ll carry yo’ lemonade back for you. You don’t need to be hangin’ around out here with this old man.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Happy birthday, sir.”

  “You damn right it’s happy. Happy, happy, happy.”

  I slipped the Tarzan book into my back pocket, started crutching for the inside, Rosy Mae following, Nub dragging up the train.

  As we went inside, Buster called out to Rosy, “Your ass looks like two greased pigs squirmin’ up against one another in a sack, woman. But I want you to know I ain’t got nothin’ against pork.”

  “Least they happy pigs,” she said. “Ain’t nothin’ happy about you.”

  “They so happy, why don’t you take ’em out of the sack and let ’em smile, run around a bit.”

  “You ain’t never gonna see these here pigs, you ole fool.”

  ———

  INSIDE AT THE TABLE, I said, “Is he really over seventy?”

  “He been around long ’fo I was born. Around when my mama a girl. But he right, he don’t look it. He look pretty good, actually. Got that white kinky hair and all.”

  “It’s black, Rosy Mae.”

  “No, it’s white, and looks better when he leaves it white, and he used to. He got to puttin’ shoe polish on it now.”

  “Shoe polish?”

  “That’s right. Get up close, you can smell it. Makes him look smart he leaves it white. And he is smart, not like me.”

  “You’re not stupid, Rosy Mae. I told you that.”

  “Well, I ain’t educated.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Thing about Buster is I don’t like him.”

  “You sound like you like him.”

  “Do I? Well, he could be liked he didn’t drink. I done had me a drinkin’ man. I ain’t gonna have me another. ’Sides, he too old for me. And he got a mean streak. Not bad as Bubba’s, I guess, but I’m all through with them mean men and moody men.”

  “He doesn’t sound like he likes you, Rosy.”

  “Oh, he likes me all right. I can tell.”

  Rosy Mae went away to attend to other matters. I sat drinking lemonade, eating cookies. I pulled the Tarzan book from my pocket and went back to reading, but I didn’t read long.

  I crutched outside, Nub beside me. I think he really wanted to stay inside in the fan-cooled room, but he followed me. He had that sort of dutiful stride he adopted when he was working against his will. Moving fast, head down, tail swinging. A dog on a mission.

  It was near dark now and the movie would be starting before long. I leaned on my crutches and looked at all the speaker posts sticking up like runted trees, at the projection booth and the back fence, thought about what was beyond it.

  Buster was sitting in my lawn chair with his RC. He called across the lot to me.

  “You finally shake that old witch?”

  I didn’t want Rosy Mae to hear that kind of talk, so I started working my crutches, heading on over to him.

  “Me and Rosy Mae are friends,” I said.

  “You are? Go over to her house a lot?”

  “She lives here.”

  “Where you keep her?”

  “She sleeps on the couch.”

  “Not good enough for a bed?”

  “We don’t have another bed. She’s staying with us until she can do otherwise.”

  “How come she’s stayin’ with you?”

  I didn’t think that was any of his business, so I said, “She just doesn’t have a place to live right now.”

  “What you mean when you say friends, is she waits on you, takes care of you. But that don’t make you friends.”

  “It’s her job. She gets paid for it.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bet it ain’t even half what a white woman would get to do that kind of work.”

  “I don’t know any white women who do that kind of work.”

  “True enough. Now think on that.”

  “Well, I got to go back.”

  I turned to go, and Nub, who had once again lay down on the ground, stood up. He sort of let out his breath, seeming to suggest I was a boy who couldn’t make up his mind.

  “Hey, it’s my birthday. I could use a little company. That dog, he’s somethin’ way he follows you around.”

  “That’s Nub,” I said. “He’s a good dog.”

  “Yeah, he looks all right. Ain’t nothin’ like a good dog, is there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How’d you do that to your leg?”

  I told him. I didn’t mention that I went in the Stilwind house, but when I finished, he said, “You must have got scared up the house on the h
ill, way you’re talkin’. Scared enough to ride out in front of a truck.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but I can tell. I always hear that house is haunted. Kids think that. It ain’t though. You know what you saw?”

  “I didn’t say I saw anything.”

  “You saw old Mrs. Stilwind. She’s crazy. Runs off from where she is in the old folks home, goes up there. Ain’t no one gets in any kind of hurry to go fetch her. They know where she is. They go up there and get her when it pleases them. She comes to that house through the back, where the woods are. There’s a trail, leads right to the old folks home. Didn’t know that, did you?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I know coloreds work at the old folks home, wipe them old white asses and give them their green peas. They tell me about it. Now, I could be just yarn’n you, but which yarn sounds more likely? Think about it. Don’t knowin’ it could have been Mrs. Stilwind make what you saw up there less spooky?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then you did see her?”

  “I saw a shadow that looked like an old woman.”

  “You could have seen just what you thought you saw. Shadow of an old woman. Not a ghost. Life has some clear answers, and then it has things where the questions ain’t even clear. Ain’t like in a movie where it all comes together all the time. You know who Sherlock Holmes is?”

  “I’ve seen him on TV.”

  “Read the stories. Mr. Sherlock Holmes got a sayin’ go somethin’ like this. Take away the possible from somethin’, show that ain’t it, whatever is left, no matter how impossible, is it. That’s what he says. Or somethin’ close to it. But you see, first you got to get rid of the possible.

  “You got to look at a thing careful-like. If you done set to believe somethin’, you got to know you likely to believe it even if there ain’t no truth there. Followin’ me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m just talkin’, ain’t I?”

  “That’s all right.”

  Buster paused as if considering a math problem. He took a drink of his RC, wiped his mouth.

  “I want to tell you somethin’, boy, and keep it quiet. I been drinkin’. I try not to drink on the job. Well, just a little nip now and then. But today, my seventy-fourth birthday, I’m nippin’. It’s makin’ me talk. Don’t mean nothin’ by it. Ain’t normally this friendly. But I got enough hooch in me, and it’s my birthday, so, I’m friendly. You savvy that?”