Out of Darkness (2 page)

He bit his lip and waited. The woods gave him the feeling of being inside and outside at the same time. Full of birds and animals but hushed, too, like a church the hour before Mass. Back in San Antonio, there were no woods. If you were outside, you knew it. The trees there were no match for the sun.

“Get over here, Cari,” Naomi called finally. Cari stopped walking, but she didn't come back. “That's enough sass,” Naomi said when they caught up to her. “Let's hear the rules.”

Beto jumped at the chance to put things on track. “We keep to ourselves. We stay out of trouble. We go to church. We do good in school. And the main thing is—”

Naomi stopped him. “I want to hear it from her.”

Cari scowled.

Naomi raised an eyebrow and said that seven wasn't too old for a spanking.

“Despot,” Cari said. She jutted her lip.

Beto could see that Naomi didn't know what the word meant, but she just gave Cari a long hard look. With a sigh, Cari said, “The main thing is, we don't talk Spanish in the street or at school or anywhere. Which is stupid, if you ask me.”

“All right, then,” Naomi said. “Just remember. And what else?”

“We call Henry ‘Daddy,'” Cari said. She frowned. “And what about you? Do you have to even though he's not your daddy?”

“Me, too, and you know it,” Naomi said. She crossed her arms over her chest.

“There!” Beto stopped and pointed up at a leaf on a low branch. The morning sun turned it into a pane of green, brighter even than the freshest limes in Abuelito's store.

“Why that one?” Cari asked. She stretched and pulled it from the branch. That was how the good luck game worked. If one of them noticed something worth having, the other picked it up. That way, it belonged to them both. A thing shared from the start was a lucky thing.

After Cari looked over the leaf, she handed it to Beto. Shallow lobes and a jagged border and hard veins that rose up from the rubbery green flesh. He turned the thick red stem between his thumb and pointer finger, then sniffed: tea and dirt and cane syrup.

“Does not smell like tea,” Cari said. She pulled the leaf out of his hand, scrunched it up, and pressed. “It smells like—”

“Careful!” He reached for the leaf.

“—an outhouse,” she finished, and she let him take it back.

“I know what I smell,” Beto said. He pressed the leaf against his cheek until the cool went out of it, and then he rolled it carefully. Maybe Cari could afford to shred things before the day was even started, but he needed the luck.

He tried to think of every good thing Abuelito had said about the new school, but that only made him feel more frightened. Then the path curved to the right, and a group of buildings stood bright and yellow under red tiled roofs. Spanish style. All around the school grounds were the towers that his daddy called derricks. “That's where the money comes from, Robbie,” Henry had said when they drove past some on the way from San Antonio.

Cari took off running toward the school. “Bye, Omi!” she called back. “Beto, let's go!”

Naomi reached over and squeezed his hand. “See you at the flagpole after school.” She leaned close and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

Beto sucked in a breath and ran after Cari. He held on tight to the leaf.

 

NAOMI
Belly down on a thick branch, Naomi settled into the sway and creak of the tree. She closed her eyes and let her ears fill with wings beating air and early acorns falling onto the soft pad of pine needles. She tried not to think of the kids outside the school in their neat circles. Girls and boys with their yards and yards of ease, each group knotted tight around their belonging. She listened to small things chewing through leaves and to a scurrying in the undergrowth, and it did not remind her of white smiles flashing bright in white faces, or of the girls with their trim new dresses and headbands and bobbed hair, or of the laughter rolling off the boys in letterman jackets, or of the school bell ringing, or of the circles dissolving into streams that channeled toward the entrances. She breathed in the air and the scent of sap, and it did not remind her of the quiet after the bell stopped ringing, her still standing there, watching the empty schoolyard, dumb as a rabbit in a mown field and just as obvious. She pressed her palms hard against the branch, felt all the little hurts of its years and felt how the bark had grown up tough and fierce over those hurts, and it did not remind her of her promise to Abuelito—to watch out for the twins, yes, but also to stick with school a little longer herself and so get the diploma that not one girl in their San Antonio barrio had, all of them falling away to work or to watch their sisters' or brothers' kids or to marriages and babies of their own.

When she opened her eyes, the world flooded in. Light, so much light, falling down around her. Green and the shadow of green locked away in stem and bark. Green and green and green, leaves like coins pressed to the closed eyelid of the sky, and none of it reminded her of the empty space in the world where her mother should have been nor of Henry who had taken her out of it.

 

WASH
Wash never got tired of the woods. There was the beauty of the place and also the pleasure of finding things. The woods had a way of grabbing bits out of pockets and scattering them for other people to come across. Also there were the folks who let things fall or plain dumped them when they no longer had a use for them. Mostly it was trash, but sometimes there was something worth salvaging, something he could make useful again or even sell. Things he didn't know what to do with he gathered in a small crate under his bed.

So he wasn't surprised to see a black shoe lying on its side just off the path. It looked to be a woman's shoe. He kicked through the dry pine needles and leaves, checking for its mate.

Something moved in the branches above him. For a moment, a slim brown foot dangled through the leaves. A second later he glimpsed a face. Dark eyebrows, enormous brown eyes, and a full, serious mouth. A kissable mouth.

Wash made a point of knowing every pretty black girl within walking distance from Egypt Town—knowing in whatever sense he could get away with, biblical if possible. But he'd never seen this girl. Of course, the oil field brought new people all the time. Folks looking for work and something better than where they came from. And they came from all over, what with most of the country in drought and debt and hungry to boot. Most of the oil field work was for whites only, but because of the oil there were fat cats to chauffeur, dance halls to clean, ditches to dig, pipes to lay. And there was still cotton to pick for a few nickels and a hunk of cornbread. Since most of Wash's friends were picking today, he might well be the first to meet this new girl, and he meant to make the most of it.

“Your shoe, miss?” he asked. He smiled up into the tree.

“It fell,” she said from inside the green. Her voice was soft but clear.

“I'm not sure if I can reach it up. Should I chuck it?” Wash made a motion as if to throw the shoe.

“Better not.”

“All right, then. I'd be happy to help you down so you can get it.” Most girls lapped up the gentleman bit. When she didn't answer, Wash said, “Do you always spend your mornings in the trees?” Still no response. He took a few steps back to see if he could get a better look at her. “You still up there?” he called. The breeze rustled through the trees. A squirrel scurried past with a bulging mouthful. “Not much of a talker, huh?”

After a long moment, she said, “My grandfather says I could out-quiet a stump.”

“And my ma says I could get a stone to tell its secrets,” he said, still staring into the tree's dense canopy. “Listen,” he tried again. “It's hard to converse like this. Why don't you come down from there? You're new to town, right? I can show you around. Be my pleasure.”

“No, thank you.”

He wasn't going to get her down. And anyway, he could hear the sound of children in the distance, which would be the little white kids at the New London school, hollering through their first recess of the year. The white school always started the day after Labor Day. Much as his father hated it, Wash and his classmates wouldn't be in class until after all the cotton was picked. That looked to be October, maybe later. So today his time belonged to the New London school superintendent. Mr. Crane wanted a fresh coat of paint on the trim of the house, which sat proudly on the edge of the school grounds.

Wash tossed the shoe between his hands. “If I can't get you down, I'll leave you to your thinking. I'm Wash, by the way, Wash Fuller. What'd you say your name was?”

“Naomi.” He thought he could see those pretty red lips moving, but he couldn't be sure.

He poked around in the underbrush until he found a long, sturdy stick. He balanced the shoe on the end and raised it up to the branch. A hand reached down, and for a second Wash saw that sweet face again. Also smooth arms and a long dark braid hanging down over one shoulder.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Nice to meet you and your shoe, Miss Naomi.” He lifted his hat to the tree.

The only answer was the swishing of the leaves.

 

BETO
Beto stroked the top of the desk he shared with Cari. It was smooth as a church pew. Not a single scratch or initial. While the other kids finished their sums, a thought floated between the twins: what did they think of Miss Bell?

They had had prettier teachers and younger ones, too. Miss Bell looked like an untinted photograph of a teacher, all pale skin and black hair and black dress, lips gray and puffy as the worms that sometimes ended up in the big jugs of tequila that their uncles in San Antonio brought from Juárez. A birthmark on her throat peeked up over the high collar of her black dress.

Beto wondered if Miss Bell liked him or might come to like him. That was something Cari would never waste a thought on. Their last teacher in San Antonio had dipped her fingers into Cari's curls at least once a day. She was always saying things like, “You sweet thing, I could eat you right up!” But if one of the Gutierrez boys so much as sneezed, she'd pin her lips into a line, slap him with the ruler, and tell him to stay home if he was going to be nasty. Teachers weren't mean to Beto; they hardly noticed him. When they did, they seemed to be studying the gap between what he was and what he should have been: a real twin, a double of Cari.

The black sail of Miss Bell's dress appeared at Beto's side. He kept his eyes on the floor while she checked their work. She tapped a finger on each answer before setting their slates down on the desk. Then he watched her flat black shoes go up the long aisle to the front of the room. A moment later, she was back, and she set a fat red book with gold lettering in front of Beto and another one in front of Cari.

Beto's book was Volume 1 of the 1917
World Book
. It had tidy columns with block letter headings and drawings on nearly every page. And there were hundreds and hundreds of pages. It would not run out in an hour like the ripped and soggy mystery magazines he sometimes fished out of the garbage bins behind newsstands near Abuelito's shop. It wouldn't bore to death, either, like the dull primers they were used to at school.

He started with AARDVARK. The name meant “earth pig,” and the book said that a “sharp blow with a stout stick” was all it took to kill one, if that was what you wanted to do.

“We like her, don't we?” Beto whispered, his finger holding his place.

Cari nodded once, then went back to her own reading.

 

WASH
When Wash pulled the front door closed behind him, he kept the knob turned so the lock wouldn't click too loudly. Inside, the cover was down on the piano, and the hymn-book was closed. Usually Peggy practiced until Ma needed her help for dinner. Already cooking smells were drifting from the kitchen. It was even later than he had thought. He should never have let Cal talk him into that detour to the creek, girls or no girls.

“Wash?” his mother called. “You come in here.”

He strolled into the kitchen, hands in his pockets.

“What you using the front door for?” Peggy asked. She balanced her paring knife on a neat pile of turnip peels and put her hands on her hips. A lot of nerve for a fourteen-year-old with buckteeth and a weak chin.

“Free country,” he said, tossing his hat onto a chair.

His mother shot Peggy a disapproving look. “
Why
are you using the front door. Wash, you use
complete
sentences, and pick up your hat.”

“It is a free country,” Wash mumbled. He reached for the hat and put it on a hook by the back door.

“Now you, Peggy,” Rhoda prompted.

“Wash, why are you using the front door?” Peggy rolled her eyes at Wash, but she did it so that their mother couldn't see. Rhoda Fuller had been a schoolteacher until the state started making laws to free up jobs for unemployed men. One was that a woman couldn't be employed in the same school district as her husband. Wash's father was already principal of the New London Colored School, so that was the end of her teaching. Now she stayed home. Mostly, she looked for ways to make extra money and hassled him and Pegs.

Wash was sliding toward his bedroom when Rhoda said, “No, sir. Empty your pockets right here.”

“Ma,” Wash sighed.

“Don't ‘Ma' me. You pay Booker first thing, as always.”

◊ ◊ ◊

When Wash was ten and Peggy was seven, their father hung two empty frames on the wall in the living room, one to the left of his own Tuskegee diploma, one to the right of their mother's. “This is where your college diplomas will go. That's what you're working for. Don't you forget it,” Jim told them.

◊ ◊ ◊

Rhoda inspected his earnings, counting out the four pennies and three nickels twice to make sure before she looked up, eyebrows raised. “Is that all?” She clucked her tongue as all but one coin clanked into the tin with the rest of that week's Booker money. “A whole day you've been out and you don't have anything more to show for it? It makes me wonder if you've been working or loafing around with Cal. That boy is lazier than a slug in summer.”