A Fine Dark Line (14 page)

“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.”

———

T
HERE 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.

N
EXT 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.

Out back of the house I could hear their big black dog barking, running on its chain attached to the clothesline.

Richard paused, studied the dog as it ran back and forth.

“Daddy loves that dog,” Richard said. “He’s crazy about him.”

Back and beyond the clothesline and the dog was the twenty acres or so Mr. Chapman farmed in potatoes and peas. There too were the crumbling outbuildings, the ill-fed plow mule contained within a rickety fence, and an anemic-looking hog in a mud hole surrounded by closely driven posts made of hoss apple wood. The hog lived on day-old toss-away cakes Mr. Chapman got from the bakery, scraps from the kitchen.

As we stepped on the porch, the door opened, and Mr. Chapman came out. He was a tall lean man who looked as if he had once been wet and wrung out too hard in a wash wringer. There didn’t seem to be a drop of moisture in him or his hair, and his eyes were as dark and dry as pine nuts.

He looked at me, then at Richard.

“You got in that bucket, boy?”

“Crawdads,” Richard said. “Enough for supper, I think.”

“You think. Do you or don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You been gone all day, boy. I had some work for you to do.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Get in the house, give ’em to your mama. Your friend can’t stay.”

“See you, Stanley,” Richard said. The expression in his eyes was like a suicide note.

“Sure,” I said.

Behind me, I heard the door slam, followed by a flat whapping sound. Richard cried out shrilly from behind the door and his father said something sharp. Then I was gone, on out to the road, walking fast, the sunlight warmer and cleaner out there, away from the weeds and the trees and the big rotting Chapman place.

———

I
ARRIVED
at the drive-in to find Mom in a state. She had been shopping with Callie and had had an adventure.

She was dressed in a black dress with a black hat with a red bow on it; it looked like something Robin Hood would wear if he were in mourning and was a sissy.

Mom removed the hat, which was somehow fastened with a couple of pins, put it on the drainboard by the sink. Her hands were shaking.

“He was pacing us, across the street,” she told me and Rosy Mae.

“Shu it was him, Miss Gal?”

“Well, no. I’ve never seen him. But I think it was. He was big and very black. Had a fedora, pulled down just above his eyebrows. A longish coat. He looked strong.”

“What kind of shoes was he wearin’?” Rosy Mae asked.

“I didn’t think to look at his shoes,” Mom said. “He could have been wearing ballet slippers for all I know. I have to sit down. Stanley, will you get me a glass of water?”

“He had on army style boots with red laces,” Callie said. “I noticed it. I’ve never seen a man with red laces before.”

I brought Mom a glass of water. She sat at the table, and after a few sips, she set the glass down and took a deep breath.

I hadn’t noticed if the man out front of the drive-in the
other day, smoking a cigarette, was wearing army boots with red laces, but the rest of it, the clothes, the hat, fit.

Daddy, who had been out back, picking up trash from the drive-in yard, came in, said, “Stanley, I want you out here right now, picking up trash. You can’t go off fishing when there’s work to . . . What’s going on here?”

“I’m not sure if anything is,” Mom said. “I think it may be my imagination.”

“Well,” Daddy said, “am I going to have to imagine what happened?”

“No,” Mom said. “I just don’t know it was anything. You see, me and Callie, we were in town shopping. Going to Phillips’s Grocery, but had to park down from the store a ways. It’s coupon day for the store. They’ve started this thing with their own coupons—”

“Gal, for heaven’s sake,” Daddy said.

“Okay. Anyway. We were walking back to the car, and across the street was this big colored man wearing a brown fedora. He looked so scary. He . . . Well, I didn’t like the way he was looking at us. As we walked back to the car, he paced us on the other side of the street. When we stopped, he stopped, and he glared at us. I didn’t imagine that, did I, Callie?”

“No. He was watching us, Daddy.”

“He followed us all the way to the car, and when we got inside, and I was starting to back out, he came next to the window and looked in. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t do anything. But he had the strangest look on his face. And his eyes, they were so . . .”