A Fine Dark Line (19 page)

My sister certainly had them, and so did my father, but nothing like this. Looking back now, I know that Buster’s mood swings were probably due to some chemical deficiency mixed with the alcohol, but as of that moment in time, I could only think what so many Southerners thought back then about an odd friend or relative: “It was just his way.”

When we got back to Buster’s, he let Nub inside with us, had me strip off my clothes. He wrapped a blanket around me and I sat in a chair while he stoked up that old stove of his with chunks of wood and scraps of paper. When the fire was burning hot enough to melt silver, he had me sit by the open door of the stove, next to my clothes, which he shook out and racked on the back of a chair. I thought about what had almost happened to me, and had happened to Bubba Joe. I shook not only with cold, but with fear. I felt vulnerable and embarrassed sitting there in wet underwear.

“You sure he’s dead?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, Stan, he’s dead. I know dead when I see it. I’ve seen it a few times.”

“Shouldn’t we tell the law? It’s self-defense.”

“No tellin’ how them law will act when it’s a colored done the killin’. Even if it’s colored killing colored. No tellin’, so we ain’t gonna tell. Are we?”

“No, sir. You saved my life, Buster.”

“Wouldn’t have needed to had I not acted like a jackass.”

“He must have been following me from home. He’s been watching our house, ’cause of Rosy Mae. I saw him the other night. Me and my sister and a friend sneaked out of the house to go down and look for Margret’s ghost, and we saw it, a kind of light, and then we saw Bubba Joe. He chased us. But we lost him by running in front of a train, leaving him on the other side.”

“You knew he was out there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you came here to tell me about my job?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You little fool.”

I hung my head. A few moments went by, then Buster, almost bright, said: “The railway light. I’ve seen that. That ain’t no ghost, boy.”

“What is it then?”

“I don’t know. I seen similar lights out at Marfa, Texas, once. But whatever it is, it ain’t no ghost. It’s some kind of gas or somethin’. Hell, I don’t know. But it ain’t no ghost.”

“You killed him, Buster. He’s dead.”

“Yep. He’s dead all right. In time he’d have got Rosy or one of you, ’cept maybe your daddy. That’s a hell of a man, your daddy.”

“I’ve never heard you say anything good about him before.”

“You haven’t really heard me say anything bad about him.”

“No.”

“Listen. I recognize him for what he is. A good father. I wasn’t never that. He cares for you. He’s tough, and everyone in town knows it. White town, and here on the colored side. Your daddy is known, boy.”

“How?”

“Men know. I can’t tell you how. Way he carries himself. ’Course, I don’t think he likes colored all that much.”

“I don’t know. He helped Rosy Mae. He’s still helpin’ her. He says some things that sound bad, but he does pretty good.”

“I suppose you’re right. You didn’t get cut nowhere, did you?”

“No. It was like he was studying on me. Like he was looking to make it last.”

“That would have been his way. He got in a knife fight up the old sawmill once, took his time on that nigger. Cut him maybe fifty times, near killed him, got cut a lot himself, but he didn’t mind it. Figured he could finish a knife fight at any time.”

“He didn’t finish you.”

“I took him by surprise, and I had a couple of Jap tricks up my sleeve. I learned them from folks picked it up in the army. And I wasn’t gonna give him a chance. I threw him, pinned him, finished him. He’d have killed me otherwise. I had to do what I did. You understand that, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

Buster looked down at his shirt. It was covered in blood and the rain had washed it down and into his trousers.

“You’re hurt,” I said.

“His blood. It sprayed. I’ll change shirts.”

He took off the bloody shirt and put it in the stove. It burst into flames. His skinny body was covered with scars. Across his back there were welts that made it look as if barbed wire were under his skin.

He got a folded shirt from a box under his bed, slipped it on.

“Someone will find him, won’t they?” I said.

“Starts to smell . . . Yeah, they’ll find him. And you and me, we ain’t gonna say a word. Are we?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t mean that as a threat, boy. I’m askin’ as a friend.”

“You did save my life.”

“Suppose I did. Your dog took a little cut.”

“What?”

“It ain’t nothin’. I’m gonna pour some stuff on it. He’ll be good as new. Hell, tough dog like this, he don’t even know he’s been cut.”

Nub may not have minded the cut, but he sure minded that alcohol. He bit Buster.

———

W
HILE MY CLOTHES
finished drying, we moved to the table, me with a blanket draped over me, Buster drinking coffee, trying to get “the mood out of him,” he said.

He got a record player and put a record on it and let it play. “Need to get my mind off this,” he said. “Got to not think on it too hard.”

The record was of a kind I had never heard before. It wasn’t rock and roll, but it reminded me of it.

“That’s the blues,” Buster said. “Big Joe Turner.”

We listened. While we did, I looked at his notes. I said: “What does this mean, Buster?”

It was what I had seen earlier: “Girl’s mother.”

“That means we got maybe a wedge into this. A way of pushing open the case and seein’ what’s inside. You find the roots of somethin’, then you can better understand the flower of the thing. The flower bein’ the murders and the murderers.”

“So what do you know?”

“Well, what I know is the mother of that little white girl killed down by the tracks is still alive and maybe she knows something. You remember, I told you how I knew her.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I talked to some folks I know would know if she’s still alive, and she is. She ain’t that old actually. She’s still in the same house.”

“I know,” I said. “Down by the tracks near the swamp, not far from the trestle bridge. That’s where we went to see the ghost. It’s near where Margret was killed.”

“You gettin’ to be a first-class snoop, Stan. The momma, Winnie, she might know somethin’. I think we can talk to her. Normally I wouldn’t bother to talk to no white woman ’cause it could get me lynched. But I know who Winnie is, and she lives with a black man down there by the slough. He’s an ornery sort named Chance. Besides, she’s not all white. She’s dark-skinned ’cause she’s got that Mexican, or Puerto Rican, or whatever in her. But I told you that.”

“We’re going to see her now?”

“Of course not. Not in this weather. And though she’s used to seein’ men with little or no clothes on, I don’t think you’d be all that anxious to go over there in your drawers. Now am I right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What we need to do now is get you dressed and home.”

“You’ll be at work tonight?”

“If I can stay away from the liquor.”

“Daddy told me you don’t come to work . . . he’s gonna make me the projectionist. I don’t want that.”

“I know you don’t. You’re a true friend. And I ain’t much of one.”

“It doesn’t get any truer than what you did for me.”

“You go on home and don’t think about this no more. You ain’t at fault no kind of way. And Bubba Joe, he’s about as important to the world as a flea. Another thing. I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, you ain’t doin’ me no shame takin’ my job. A man’s responsible for what he does or doesn’t do. Hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Yes, sir . . . But, Buster . . . Please be there.”

“I will. I really do try to keep my word, but that old alcohol gets on me sometimes. You ever been coon huntin’, boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you get dogs runnin’ a coon, and you get down in the bottoms, and that ole coon, when he’s bein’ chased, he’ll lead those dogs out into the wetlands, deep water if he can, then he’ll jump on a dog’s head and try and drown him. I ain’t a lyin’. That’s what he’ll do. And that dog, he’s done committed himself to that deep water, and he’s got this coon on him with teeth and claws, and a coon’s strong for its size, and it’s pushin’ down on him, and it’s all that dog can do to swim and fight and keep his head above water. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he don’t. Alcohol is like that. It’s like I’m out in deep water, and that stuff is jumpin’ on my head, tryin’ to hold me under. I keep fightin’. One day, I don’t shake it, that ole coon is gonna win. Gonna push me under for good . . . Good thing, though, is, I’m out of whiskey and ain’t got money for more.”

———

T
HE RAIN HAD DIED
, but it was still misty. I decided I had to go home anyway. I got dressed. My clothes felt strange, toasty in spots, damp in others.

“You get home. You pet that dog good, you hear?”

“I will,” I said.

As I tentatively stepped off the steps, started away, Buster, who had followed me as far as the porch, said, “You ain’t got no worry about him anymore. Trust me on that. But that storm ain’t through yet. You just got a lull. You get on. Hear?”

I nodded at him, and kept walking.

With the wind gone and the sky less black, it was no longer cold and the summer heat began to make things steam and soon I was sweating like a staked goat at a Fourth of July picnic.

I walked by where Bubba Joe had bought the farm. I saw his knife lying there. Buster had forgotten to pick it up.

I looked around. No one was in sight. I went over and kicked the knife against a tree, used the toe of my shoe to knock dirt over it.

As I did this, a tremble went through me. I thought of Bubba Joe chasing us the other night, earlier today when he had his hand twisted in my shirt, his breath beating me with tobacco and liquor. I thought about the way Buster had drawn his own knife across Bubba Joe’s throat, quick and simple like a teacher drawing a chalk line. I thought too of the creek where Buster had tossed Bubba Joe like so much rotten wood.

I could hear the creek water rushing, full of the power of the rain. I thought of Bubba Joe lying down there, the crawdads working at him like they work at bacon on a string. I had the urge to go over for a look. But didn’t.

I
ARRIVED HOME
in the late afternoon. When I stepped inside the house, I tried my best to act as if nothing had happened. At first, somehow, I thought my family knew. They were as excited to see me as Lazarus’s family was to see him step from the tomb.

Rosy Mae started in with, “We been worried ’bout you, Mr. Stanley. We thought you’d have enough sense to come home right away, way that storm was goin’.”

Callie laughed. “But you didn’t.”

“I got stranded in town,” I said. “I sat it out in the drugstore.”

I felt sick to my stomach lying like that, but didn’t know what else to do. Telling them I had gone to Buster’s and that Buster was stone drunk, and Bubba Joe had tried to kill me, and Buster had cut his throat, just didn’t seem like the kind of information they needed to hear right then. In fact, it was information I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Ever.

“We should never have let you go out with that storm brewing,” Mom said. “I get so mad at myself when I allow my common sense to be overridden by my desire to make you happy.”

“I bet there won’t be any use opening the drive-in tonight,” Dad said, standing at the front door, looking out. “I got a feeling the rain will start up again.”

Mom hustled me through the kitchen, into their bathroom, pulled a big towel out of the cabinet and gave it to me. I was still damp, and so were my clothes, but compared to how wet I had been, I thought of myself as comfortable.

“Go upstairs and put on some dry clothes,” Mom said. “Come down and I’ll have you some cocoa warmed up . . . Is Nub bleeding?”

She had eyeballed a streak of blood running down his fur, and she bent down to examine him.

“Yeah,” I said. “He sort of run off for a while. I guess he got in a fight.”

Now I was compounding my lie.

Daddy came into the kitchen, bent over Nub, examined the wound. “Looks like a knife cut. Must have been a cat he got into it with. I’ll put some alcohol on it.”

“He won’t like that,” I said.

“He won’t even notice.”

Since Buster had poured alcohol on Nub, and Nub had yelped, I knew he minded.

Upstairs, I put on some dry clothes, combed my hair in front of the mirror. I looked at my face, thinking somehow it looked different. Older. Scared. Confused maybe.

I sat for a moment, just breathing. Trying to get my strength and courage back. I felt as if something living inside of me had been stolen, taken away and mistreated, then returned without all of its legs.

Downstairs, I found Nub dried off and doctored. He was lying on the floor on a thick towel Mom had laid down.

“How did he like the alcohol?” I asked.

“You were right,” Daddy said. “He didn’t like it.”

I had the cocoa while Mom clucked over me.

Callie had said very little. She sat at the far end of the table with her own cup of cocoa, looking at me with those woodburner eyes of hers.

Finally, everyone but myself moved into the living room. They planned to watch television, but the storm had come back and was so fierce, they knew that was pointless. With only three channels, and one of them brought in only by judicious turning of the outside antenna, it would have been nothing but a crackling noise and a screenful of electric snow.

I sat in the kitchen and sipped my cocoa. Rosy Mae came in from the living room to start dinner. She said, “You look like you done seen a ghost, Mr. Stanley.”

“Just Stanley. Remember?”

“You ain’t been in no kind of trouble, have you, Stanley?”

I shook my head. Rosy Mae didn’t push it. She got a cup, went to the stove, poured the remaining hot milk from the pan into her cup, then stirred in cocoa.

“It works better you put the cocoa in first,” I said.

“I didn’t know that, and me bein’ a cook. But I don’t drink me no cocoa much.”

She sat down at the table and studied me. “You sure you’re all right? I read one of them Sherlock Holmes stories from that book. He sure smart, ain’t he?”