Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (29 page)

Hours of dancing passed on top of hours of drinking and the night wound down. Couples were filing out on foot, holding each other up. Tanner walked over to each spades and craps table and announced that it was closing time in ten minutes. “Last bets for the night. Make them count.” A hand reached out for Tanner’s and caught her at the wrist. Tanner looked down at her hand and over to the arm holding hers. “Can I help you with something, sir?” She was used to the belligerent drunk from time to time and escorted them to the front yard to sober up. Come morning, they’d be gone and ashamed. This man’s front tooth was as gold as his watch, and he smiled big as payday, not a whiff of alcohol on him. His suit was a butter yellow and his white shoes were unscuffed. There was no dust on them either. He was a good foot and a half taller than Tanner and his reach, she estimated, twice that of hers. “I think maybe you can help me, ma’am. I’m looking for a missing person. Any information you could fetch me would sure be a nice gesture on the part of you and yours. Name is Tanner Harris, wanted dead or alive. Ring any bells for you ma’am?” The man’s grin faded as he whispered through his teeth, “Maybe you want to be clearing the party on out of here so we can settle this. You got a debt to pay, girl.”

Flora, never missing a thing, hit the lights. “All right now, y’all heard Tanner. Jook’s closed. Next week, same time, same place.” She moved from table to table pointing folks to the way out. Some of the drunk ones begged a dance from her, and she chided them, “Go on, now. Go on, I said.” The last patrons bid farewell to Jessie and promised to be back. Jessie thanked them for coming and walked them to the front porch. Tanner stayed in the parlor with the gold-toothed man. When Jessie returned to the parlor, Flora headed in a quick scramble for the kitchen door. “Come on over here and take a seat,” the gold-toothed man said. He kept his hand wrapped tightly around Tanner’s wrist and had a smile on his face as she sat. Flora returned to the parlor with a gun pointed at the back of her head. The man had not come alone. His companion was thin, with a face slender as toilet plumbing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and nudged Flora forward with the gun. “This one here was reaching for this gun, boss.” The gold-toothed man looked over at Flora and smiled at Tanner. “Tanner love a talented woman, don’t you Tanner? I’ll be damned. I come to talk to you and your girlfriend here want to shoot me down.”

The gold-toothed man let go of Tanner’s wrist and draped an arm around her shoulders. Tanner looked over to Flo, but she ignored the gaze. Flo pushed back on the mouth of the gun, putting weight on her captor’s arm. Jessie was still sitting at a table, weaponless and remote. Jessie was good at disappearing inside of herself. The gold-toothed man cleared his throat, making a show of himself. “Seems to me like we have us a problem here. See, I only need Tanner, but it don’t seem like you girls gonna let me leave here with what I need. Second problem is I know either one or two of you bitches helped this fat nigger kill off all my brothers. I’m no adding man, but that’s simple enough math to me.” Droplets of sweat populated his upper lip as he talked. “Except Maud can count and do. Eight dead boys divided by three living niggers ain’t enough change at all.”

“Speak plain, if you come to speak. Kill if you come to kill,” Jessie blurted at the man.

“I’ll be damned, Tanner. I thought that other one was a robust woman, but this one here, this one got some nerve, don’t she?” The man turned his full attention to Jessie. “You want it plain, country girl? I’ll give it to you plain, baby. Name’s Glenn, Maud’s baby boy, and I come to collect this here debt. You see, girl, dead don’t scare Maud because Maud been dead, but she lonely something awful. Now Tanner here, and you bitches, the two of you, end up killing every messenger she sends. That ain’t right. Maud took her time when she made her sons. Took her time when she found Tanner, too. You know what taking time is, country girl? Let me spell it out for you. Eight niggers minus three niggers is five and you going to pay that five out in lifetimes. With Maud. Maud’ll like you. She’ll like your big girlfriend over there, too.”

“I never did nothing to Maud,” Jessie said.

“You call killing eight grown children nothing? If that’s nothing, I sure would like to see what you call something,” Glenn said.

“Maud’s the one doing it. She already done cursed us. Why she keep sending her sons to kill us?”

“That don’t have much to do with me. I come for Tanner, and I come for Tanner’s women keep helping Tanner. That’s all.”

Peanuts shot into the air like fireworks following a parade. Flora had picked up a tray full of them and smashed it against the head of her captor. His face burned down to the bone and revealed rat’s teeth. Jessie ran toward Flora, and Tanner booted Maud’s boy with the flat of her shoe. “Salt, Jessie, salt!” Tanner screamed out. Jessie hit Flora’s captor with another tray of bar nuts. Flora held the man’s head and snapping jaw in the crook of her arm as Jessie threw every salty thing she could find. The man’s arms and legs flailed about. He snapped his jaw at Jessie’s torso until he melted into the creases of Flora’s black dress, blue and red clumps of him exploding down her front, into her patent heels. The women were so busy they didn’t hear the shot. Didn’t see Glenn’s body slumped at Tanner’s feet or see the blood trickling from his nose and into the wood floor.

“Flora, how’d you know that wasn’t no real man?”

“When I went into the kitchen to get the gun, he was eating Rinny.”

“Eating him?”

“That’s what I said.”

“The dog?”

“Only one, unless you know another.”

Tanner looked at the dead man on the floor, turning the bottle opener over in her hands. She listened to Jessie opening then slamming drawers for a sheet to wrap the body in and knew that, even in distress, Jessie would not waste a good sheet on a dead man. Tanner listened to the sound of the whiskey cabinet’s old latch and heard the shuffle of glasses sliding onto the bar. Jessie poured faster than usual and Tanner half-smiled when she gulped. Tanner liked to see Jessie throw her head back and down a drink. Jessie was no wine woman. “Want one?” Jessie asked. Tanner looked at the dead man again, figuring out how long it would take to strip him down, bleed him and bury him. “Set me up,” she whispered back, letting the back of her shaved head cool on the wall behind her.

Jessie came from behind the bar holding Tanner’s drink in her right hand and a ragged sheet draped across her left arm. Her hair, usually mussed about her shoulders, was braided into a single rope, doubled over itself and secured with a rubber band. “You can’t keep killing these boys and expecting they won’t come back bigger and badder,” Jessie said. His was the ninth body on the floor in almost five years.

“You’d think they’d stop coming after me by now, Jessie. I’m trying to live good on this place here. I didn’t send for them, they come for me. You’d think Maud’d be tired of sending her boys to slaughter by now.” Tanner held the drink in hand but didn’t sip from it. Maud only had nine boys, just nine of them. If she could get this one buried by nightfall, she would be rid of Maud for good. “We need to get a move on it, baby. You know sundown comes quicker than a fly to shit.”

Jessie fixed the sheet around the dead man’s body, tucking its ends beneath him. She stood up to get salt and licorice root for his ears and mouth and backside. “He’s stinking already. We got to plug him up.”

“Can’t plug him until he’s bled through and through,” Tanner said. “This ain’t a time to be skipping steps. You know the way it’s got to be done.”

Jessie stared at Tanner as if to cut her down. “I didn’t leave Georgia to get caught up in this mess you got yourself into with Maud. And now I’m trapped, just like Flo and just like Newt. You got me here plugging up dead bodies because you couldn’t tell your last woman goodbye the right way. Now I’ll never get to California. It ain’t no more safe for me here in Phoenix burying Maud’s sons than it was in Georgia. At least in Georgia I could walk off the land when I wanted to.”

Tanner didn’t shush her. Didn’t make sense to. It was all true. Tanner left Maud one morning without so much as packing a bag. She left on foot, the weight of travel and her body at times too much for her knee. She stopped every few days in a field or under a tree to wash herself and rest up. Sometimes she found a rabbit, other times she ate nothing. She laid her suit out in the sun to dry and napped, naked, through afternoons too hot to travel. She chewed leaves of mint and packed them under her arms to keep her dry. When she could hop a train car she did and shared liquor with the men aboard. Men with names like Willie and Richard and Bartholomew and with pasts as unspeakable as her own. Most of them were going north or west. Most of them had left women behind, too. And kids to send back for. No one was lucky enough to ride one train all the way out, but no one was willing to hop off before getting into Arkansas. Some piled out in northern Texas and others in New Mexico. None of the men bothered her because none of them knew she was a woman. Her breasts were no larger than the chest of a very stout man. She wore her hair shaved close to her scalp and carried a handkerchief to wipe sweat from it. She kept a pair of socks stuffed down her shorts and listened as the other men chortled through stories of close encounters with another man’s wife. She told her own stories of being ran out of a house and marked for death. When she spoke, the gap between her two front teeth seemed to grow and swallow her audience. The soft flap of gum that hung there was the most delicate thing about her. By the time she walked from New Mexico to Phoenix, her knee had doubled in size and her cane was about ready to give up the ghost. She settled on a little abandoned ranch and in a year converted it into a motel for colored people traveling west. Out of the south, Lord knows.

It took Maud almost as long to find her and send the first boy. That first one wasn’t sent over to kill Tanner so much as he was sent to tie her there. Maud’s juju kept Tanner bound to the place. She could go anywhere on the property, but she could not leave. The first time Tanner tried to leave the motel, she learned what it was to die and come back. The juju allowed her to walk off but every step took a little bit of her life force from her. Walking off the motel property meant dying. She couldn’t leave if she wanted to and, by extension, anyone she loved couldn’t leave either. That meant Jessie. It meant Flora. It meant Newt. Maud was holding them hostage until she was ready for them all. Most Tanner could do, the most she asked her family to do, was make the best life they could. “Ain’t no such thing as life with both feet tied,” Jessie would say, “no such thing.”

Flo came down the stairs with Newt in hand, not bothering to shield the child’s eyes in any way. “The two of you can keep the hollering down because some of us need to sleep before folks start ringing on the bell tonight,” Flo said, stepping over the dead man. “What’s taking y’all so long to get this one in the ground? He the last one, ain’t he?” Jessie waited for Tanner to answer and continued to work on the body.

“Well Miss Flora, we need to get him outside and my knee is in no good condition today. Can’t bleed him in here, on the wood floor, but Jessie done washed him down with turpentine soap. If you could help get the body out back, I’d be mighty obliged, ma’am.” Tanner’s grin spread across her face when she said ma’am and tipped her head toward Flo.

Flora kicked up at Tanner, “Just shut the hell up and get the hell on before I change my damn mind. Least you could do is grab the stretcher out the back for me and Jessie, or we got to do that too?”

Newt ran from his mother’s side to follow behind Tanner and held the screen door open as Tanner came up the back steps with the canvas and wooden pole contraption. Tanner held out her hand to the boy, and he slapped her five. “Thought I told you not to come out on this back porch without any shoes on, boy. I gotta start repeating myself around here?”

“No, Uncle Tanner,” Newt said, running through the parlor, over the dead body and into the coat closet for his shoes.

Flo rolled the dead man on his side and slipped a new ragged sheet halfway under his body, then turned him back toward her so Jessie could get to the other side. With the sheet in place, they slid the body onto the stretcher and out into the yard. They left him atop a butcher block table like they had with his brothers. Tanner walked over with her knife in hand and made incisions in his neck, groin, and armpits. Newt placed buckets around the table where Tanner had made the cuts. They sat around the dead man and said nothing, Jessie sometimes looking at Tanner, Tanner sometimes looking at Jessie. “Maybe the bottom of his feet too. This is taking too long,” Jessie said and Tanner walked over, knife and cane in hand, and bored a hole through the dead man’s arch.

“Ain’t nobody had breakfast yet,” Flo said, “no more courting the dead until we all eat. C’mon, Newt.”

Newt looked over to Tanner and waited for her to get up. “Mama said let’s eat, Uncle Tanner.”

Tanner smiled at the boy. “Tell Auntie Jessie that your mama said come and eat. I don’t think Auntie Jessie wants to come in the house. What you think, Newt?”

Newt shrugged his shoulders and smiled at Jessie. “Better come and eat before Mama gets mad at you, Aunt Jessie.” Newt pulled Jessie up off the ground playfully, making a show of his little muscles until Jessie laughed.

The three of them walked into the house as Flo set the table. “About time. Thought the dead man got up and walked away with all of you.”

They got on good together, but Tanner never wanted any juju, not even for her knee. Most Maud could do was offer a poultice of steamed herbs or strong tea. Wasn’t church that kept Tanner away from juju. Maud thought maybe she was raised in the Christian way, but that wasn’t it, wasn’t it at all. It scared her. Tanner was plain scared of juju. Scared of going to bed with a locked knee and waking up to throw out her cane. Scared of having split teeth then the next minute all the spaces gone. Scared to know the hair on her head didn’t gray as long as she was with Maud, and her skin didn’t grow slack. Because Maud told Tanner that the only reason why her knee still hurt was so she wouldn’t have to hear no mess about juju, because she told Tanner that as long as she lived so would Tanner, Tanner walked down the road. Because Tanner wanted a natural death, she kept walking. Carried a little salt with her for all she learned and kept on walking.