Solemn (5 page)

“I been thinking about getting a little group going out here,” Stephanie said. “Everybody so close, but we stay so spread out. But, well, a book club … maybe. Get together and talk about books. Drink some wine. Oh, and certainly a lotta food.”

She leaned in close to Bev, like a high school girl behind the teacher's back.

“Best part is husbands won't know what in the world we doing.” Stephanie laughed.

Bev forgot Solemn somehow. She imagined herself holding a wineglass and laughing about a big, fat book.

“Better than slucking through all this alone,” Stephanie said. “Would you come?”

“I guess so,” Bev said. “I mean, I used to read so much more, but now…”

“We should do it,” Stephanie said. “Take my telephone number.” She handed
The Poisonwood Bible
to the pinkness, to pick up a tote bag slung over her chair. Inside her purse she juggled around sunglasses, a billfold, a heavy bottle of perfume, and other things before she found a gold pen tucked into a leather pouch with a notepad attached.

“Feel free to use the phone anytime you need it,” Stephanie told Bev, handing her a telephone number to force—much as Bev distrusted sensing it in herself—some trust.

Redvine had ended the game with money on the table divided equally between the men. Then, Beverly just waited. Redvine arrived home with his duffel bag on his shoulders. The food and tools he carried around for the days were still inside.

“I'm so tired of that girl running off. Red, I tell you, I'm gonna lock her in here.”

“She off with Landon, at one of them meetings, learning how to complain…”

“But Landon was long gone when Solemn left. She didn't say nothing to me 'bout following him round nowhere. Something's wrong. I should've watched her…”

“You get back to the phone and I'll get to the road. I know my kids. Ain't nothin' wrong. That girl just out here getting fass. You gotta put your foot down.”

“Me? And you?”

The Magnolia Bible College recruiter had said she'd graduate in a year.

In just one year, she would have not only gotten out of the house on her own. She would have also gotten a certificate to work, have her own mind, and skip out on being the only one steering kids in the proper directions. Landon agreed with her, but he agreed with everything she said. Solemn never understood what she was talking about. Redvine thought school was useless for her; they only had one car. Either he'd have to drive her to her classes or she would have to take him to work and pick him up, or they would have to buy another car for her to have all her own, or they would have to have Landon do all the driving since he had so much spare time. And who was going to watch Solemn? Would they have to pay for that, too? They couldn't leave her by herself. The idea just became too complicated before it became nonexistent. It relaxed to a wish. If the wish inched into conversation, it could not lengthen. It was a fantasy locked inside Bev's fixed stare at the television whenever she was alone. Often. And she wondered if she should run back to the neighbor's house to read the Oprah books, without telling anybody where she went off to, so they could search her out for a change. But that was the future, not real yet.

For now, Bev was worried. Bev wasn't so worried about Solemn disappearing into Singer's vortex of speckled porch lights and absolute quiet. No. Here someone would see and hear her child. Bev was more worried at the nerve. The absolute nerve. Here she was—the only one who was actually in the house, attending to the results of others' lives in that house—and every other body in that house was out in the world doing exactly what they wanted to do without even telling her where they planned to do it. Hmph. Yet had she done the same thing, the others would have had a fit.

What we supposed to eat? Mommy, where you been? Mama! Mama! Man, where she at? I need … Oh, well, I came by and you weren't even there … Yes, sure I can come back … Can you tell me when your mother will be home?

Bev simmered, to finish her husband's cigarettes and plan to pray the pack away next Communion. Was this her family and her life, or her prison and its guards? Was this the ceiling of regard at the end of her rainbow? If she was outside still at midnight to hunt down her own child she brought into the world, was she out of her place?

She stood outside her home and swirled dirt up between her toes, like Solemn liked to do. She flung a mental note up to the sky, hoped her daughter would catch it:
I'm sick of this shit.
She was going to be making some needed changes in her house—soon.

 

FOUR

As usual, before he left, Justin Bolden rejuvenated the coffeepot in corner room 106-B. Then he jotted case notes about situations or customers to tend to the next day. He returned people's telephone calls about their cases and conflicts only if necessary. For him, that meant any brown or darker face the others didn't want to see crying and carrying on. He sharpened a pencil he set down on his notes atop the desk he shared with Hanson: younger than him, white, already at the desk it had taken him a couple of years to scoot up to. His reward for all this drama was an undeniably red 1998 Buick Skylark with an arrogant hood and capable trunk, one of the last of a final production. He was proud of this detail. It impressed ladies. When he drove around to his people, he got slapped on his back about it. He was the fancy one with the good job, the legal gun, the white man's respect, the work desk, the thick wallet.

“You think the old man's gonna show back up there tonight?” Hanson asked.

“I hope so,” Bolden said. He snatched up a few of his coworkers' cigarette butts from the ashtrays strewn about. “If not, lady's gonna be back in here and I'll be having nightmares about babies. Just what I need, right?”

And the babies would be black. Many of the pink, white, creamy people wouldn't even talk to him. If they did, even in this day and age, they still called him “boy.”

Bolden left through the back door. He walked around to the front where he parked the Buick, unlocked, in a handicapped spot everyone knew he borrowed.

The esoteric outbacks of Kosciusko had the best bars. Their rain-pelted and toughened awnings outstretched against the plains. They begged for attention. They relied on heavens-high sweet gums and elms, postured branches in a wicked assortment of poses, to play well against a wet brain's imagination. It called more folks inside that way. Pearletta Hassle put Bledsoe back on Bolden's mind. A playful den of iniquity named “I'll Be Good” leaped to Bolden. It was somewhere obscured in the crook of Natchez Trace Parkway, encircled in or near or around Bledsoe, a little different from the rest and still the same. He would find it. First time Bolden had happened upon the spot was with a cousin visiting from Tampa. A gap-toothed smart-mouth named Tammy tended bar there. He believed she flirted with him. He emptied his pockets and stayed until 4:00 a.m. He tried to get her number. Didn't matter how long he had stuck around. She said, “No.”

It was a long time since then. Little waited at Bolden's apartment but utility bills in the mailbox, a dozen tropical fish in an aquarium he always forgot to scrub, a GE clock radio with a neglected off knob, a few voice-mail messages from a gal he was trying to shake, his job, and his parents. His father wanted to be sure he would be there in the morning before work, for their fifty-push-up and thirty-minute-walk daily commitment. He was sick these days, so visits from his son were more powerful than prescriptions. He already knew his mother wanted to know if he had gotten her message … about getting her message. If he could have rewound it all he would have been an astronaut. It was too late.

On his way to interstate MS 12, Bolden passed the Attala courthouse on Washington Street, the joints where the high schoolers drove in circles and crazy eights, a few gas stations, the drugstore, a new Chinese buffet he thought to use for the next date when he was inspired to one, the dollar store where he once bought little cheap gifts for his daughter's mom before he grew to buy real gifts for his daughter, and a few railroad tracks with no mechanized guardrails to alert casual walkers and slow drivers. This was a part of the world somebody just had to know, or not. Bolden stopped at each railroad crossing, squinted for a light point from a distance he didn't chance to second-guess.

He had never been summoned to a railroad crossing to take care of a gnarly, twisted, unforgettable scene beyond comprehension and his own needs for bravery. He never had to rush to a far-off creek or secret basement or unbeaten path. The turbulence of their lives crashed down in the ordinary and presumably friendly places—bars, parking lots, bank accounts, park houses, picnics, barbecues, bonfires, road trips gone awry, a night somebody left the party too late, the day somebody got home too early.

He was never off. He only took breaks. As luck would have it, he graduated from the police academy in late summer and started the Central Mississippi force at the bottom of April 1992. Same day he reported, shoes polished and high-top fade fresh and badge pinned perfectly, the cops who beat Rodney King got off and L.A. got mad. The government council told his force to brace for the worst. Bolden was stuck at a job with men who originated in schools and a church and a neighborhood where every context of the blacks held such a sentiment: to brace and prepare, for they were incapable and knew not what they did, and they did not even look like real people. This included him.

So, the Adams Street sheriff's office placed Bolden on the front line of the guard that evening. He had never shot a man before. They told him not to hesitate. And they rode around the county looking like school principals ready to paddle, with adrenaline run through their haunches and excitement under their skins, to no incident. Instead, they saw subdued and stricken black faces on these streets. No riots. No bloody bacchanals. Just more people than usual out on the porch, a few less hunched over in patches of cotton to tackle what machinery left behind. He heard stirring words from somber assemblages come from under the church steeples hidden inside the backwoods swamps and glens. Into the night, stereos blasted loud, but no one made a noise complaint.

And that was when Bolden changed. He saw his job less as a purpose and more as an appointment: to daily drive on and on in a stupor, to wonder nothing at the houses or places or people or things around him, to think only of his paycheck and not the job for which he was paid, to curse his start time every day and Pearletta Hassle and her husband and her problems and all those like her. And he had seen it all get better. His uncle even joined a club in town—only way to join was for every black man to have a white friend join, too, and vice versa. The younger kids didn't seem so weary or alert. It was hard to say if that was because they were better or they were young.

By the time he arrived at MS 19, ten miles to go to I'll Be Good, he had wandered farther down the greasy radio dial. Then, he saw the roadkill.

Damn.

It would take five minutes for him to describe where he was to the nonemergency line; the freight line provided some crossroads, but the landmark itself was sketchy at best, really not one at all. The night was clear, at least. The work, itself, might be swift. It would take five minutes for that nonemergency line clerk to understand why he called. It would take ten minutes for the responder to wake the Animal Control officer out of a
Tonight Show
trance or a nap. It would take about twenty more for a truck to come with the men who would take care of it. It was a lot of work for an animal Bolden had not hunted himself. If it still had a pulse he would have to finish it off.

So with all those things considered and the nearest pay phone at least five songs back and his radio putting him right back at work should he use it, Bolden pulled over to handle the matter alone. He kept the headlights on. He remembered he had a few bottles of Guinness to rinse his hands with. He could splatter cologne to get rid of any blood smell. He imagined it would be easier to drag than sling over his shoulders. Before he stooped, he knew it was down and not worth it to check first. It didn't look like a thing that could kick his eye out or pack an interior bruise next to one of his two known ulcers. He walked alongside the grass edge dipped down from runoff of the decades; the tree roots unburied in skinny tangles looking like lady dancer's legs curled wildly around one another.

At just that time Bolden was a few feet away; there was a gentle wind across the plains and a breeze through his receding hairline. An improv of white fabric, dark pigtails, and shredded gray shoelaces danced before him. A finger, or so it appeared, circled around or near or attached to red cloth. He stopped, squinted, tiptoed closer, stopped again, took a breath, and then rushed forward when his fawn tried to get up, a firm palm in the gravel and ankle pointing up. It wasn't a fawn. It was a little girl—black—prostrate in the middle of the road, with a pickle jar of suffocated fireflies in her other palm, her panties exposed and her eyes curled back into their own thinking place. When Bolden put the tip of his black low-rise Doc Marten at the crown of her head, their eyes met.

Neither one knew what to think.

*   *   *

Solemn had her address, down to the nearest milepost, memorized like an Easter speech—enunciated and praiseworthy. The address was just a couple miles away from where Bolden himself had stormed out of, until he ran into the police academy. Down the road, matter of fact. In Bledsoe. Solemn bit down on the temptation to tell the policeman what gripped her to the ground. Or who. Anyway, she was unsure. The quivery but calm cop—beer on his breath—brought her back to her trailer, plastic and drained and silent.

Wrapped up in thanking God, Bev misheard the cop's part about finding her daughter in the middle of the road, waiting to be roadkill.

Redvine ripped open their flimsy door ten minutes later, frenzied, on edge, tense.