The Promise of Jesse Woods (23 page)

“We can run the wire out my bedroom window,” Jesse said when we reached her house. She put up a rickety wooden ladder and pointed. “The antenna could go right there.”

Dickie nearly turned white when he looked up. “Don’t you dare put that ladder there. See that electric wire? I don’t know who installed that, but that wire’s hot. You put the antenna there and the thing will splatter every time you key the mike. And if we slip and the antenna touches it, they’ll be burying all three of us.”

Jesse’s mouth dropped open. “I climb up there all the time and I’ve never gotten shocked.”

“You put your hand on that and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

“Where should we put it, then?” I said.

“At the front, right there. You could run the coax in the living room window. That way you can talk on it without waking Daisy Grace.”

“She sleeps about as hard as you do, Dickie,” Jesse said.

He squinted at us but didn’t ask how she knew that.

Dickie marked a spot on the ground and dug with a posthole digger into the soft earth. Jesse and I leaned the
metal pole up to the house and sank it deep in the hole, and Dickie packed it down with rocks and dirt. He said it should have cement but Jesse didn’t have any.

“How are we going to keep it from falling over?” I said.

“Just hold it while I look for something.”

He disappeared behind the house and Jesse looked at me. “You think this is really going to work?”

“You doubting Dickie’s ability?”

She smiled. Her hands were next to mine. And I could see the blue-green ocean in her eyes. “I’m doubting our ability to dig a hole deep enough to keep this thing from blowing down in the wind.”

Dickie returned with a flattened Maxwell House coffee can, four nails, and a hammer and climbed up the ladder. He put the can around the pole and drove nails in on either side. He pulled on it hard and smiled. “That ain’t going nowhere.”

The antenna stuck up above the roof. I backed up for a better view.

“Looks right pretty, don’t it?” Jesse said.

Dickie climbed down and wiggled the pole again, seeming proud of his work. He fed the coax through the window and Jesse went inside and screwed the connector into the CB, but all we could hear was static. He showed us how to work the squelch knob to cut down the noise.

“Not many people on channel 17, but that’s good if we just want to talk to each other,” Dickie said. “You two need to come up with handles while I ride home and test it out.”

“What do you mean, handles?” Jesse said.

“A name. What to call yourself so nobody knows who you are.”

“Why wouldn’t I want anybody to know?” Jesse said.

“It’s got to do with the FCC. You wouldn’t understand it. But everybody has a handle. Classy Chassis. Tin Bender. Electric Man. That kind of thing.”

“What’s your handle?” I said.

“Listen to the radio. You’ll see.”

Dickie rode Jesse’s bike back to his house. She and I waited in the living room, watching the little lights flash on the CB. Every now and then we heard fuzzy voices that Dickie later said were from truckers passing along the interstate. Their voices bled over from channel 19.

“Breaker, breaker 1-7,” Dickie said, his voice higher pitched but clear. “This is the Breakthrough Kid. You copy?”

I handed the microphone to Jesse but she shook her head. I keyed the mic. “I hear you, Dick—I mean, I got you, Breakthrough Kid.”

Dickie laughed. “Who am I talking to?”

“This is the Dogwood Pirate,” I said.

Jesse’s mouth was wide-open. “It really works.”

“Nice to meet you, Dogwood Pirate,” Dickie said. “Now hand the mic to the little lady.”

I handed Jesse the mic but she shook her head again.

“Come on, you’re going to have to talk for him to hear you. This is a CB, not a TV.”

Jesse frowned and picked up the mic like it was a dead mouse. She finally keyed it and said, “Hey, Breakthrough Kid.”

“There you are—and who am I talking to?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“If you don’t make up a name for yourself, I’m going to do it for you,” Dickie said.

She thought a minute, then held the mic up and keyed it. “Call me Wildflower.”

“Now that’s the best handle I think I’ve ever heard. Fits you perfect, Wildflower.”

It took some cajoling to get my mother to sign on to the idea of a CB in my room. But all the cajoling in the world wouldn’t get my grandmother to agree to an antenna by her house, even if we did use a clamp instead of a coffee can. She said the CB was for low-class people.

Two days later, after considerable hounding, I convinced my father to take me to Heck’s, where we looked over the inventory. There were base units that went in people’s houses and mobile units for the car. I picked the cheapest one that plugged into the wall and asked the man behind the counter about an antenna.

“If you’re talking with people short-range, you can get one of these,” he said. He pulled out a small coil from the glass case. “Plugs right in the back. You’ll want a bigger one soon, but this will get you started.”

I connected everything when we got home and flipped the channels, listening to a few faint voices. I switched to channel 17 and keyed the mic.

“Break 1-7, for Wildflower.”

My father sat on the bed and listened.

The needle on the meter flew from left to right and I heard a tiny voice say, “Daisy. I’m Daisy. . . .” She held the mic on and I heard Jesse in the background. “Turn loose of it. You can’t hear if you don’t let go of it.”

The needle fell and my father laughed and left the room.

“Daisy, this is Dogwood Pirate. Is Wildflower there?”

“I’m here, Pirate. Looks like we’re in business.”

“Is the Breakthrough Kid on?”

I waited but didn’t hear anything. Then Jesse said something to Dickie and we determined my antenna wasn’t strong enough to pull in his signal. Dickie could hear me but I couldn’t hear him.

“Breakthrough Kid says he’ll work on your setup, Pirate.”

“10-4,” I said, beginning to learn the vocabulary of our new experiment.

Later that night, after all was quiet in our house and Daisy had gone to bed at Jesse’s, I turned the sound down as far as it would go and put a pillow over my head to muffle my voice. The lights were out in my room and all I saw was the soft glow of the CB.

“This is the next best thing to a phone line,” Jesse said.

“The antenna holding up over there?”

“Yeah. The wind wiggles the top but it’s secure like Breakthrough said.”

I pictured her in her living room, on the couch, holding the microphone and maybe in a nightgown. Then
I thought better of it because Jesse wore the same clothes every day, so she probably slept in her T-shirt and shorts too.

“What do you think is gonna become of us, Pirate?”

I took a deep breath, listening to the sounds of crickets and frogs through the open window. “I don’t know, Wildflower, but I think something good’s going to come from all of this.”

She said something but was yawning while she spoke and I laughed and so did she.

“Daisy wore me out today. I’m going to bed. Talk to you tomorrow, Pirate.”

We began an easy back-and-forth, Jesse and me. Because I couldn’t hear Dickie, Jesse relayed his messages to me, acting as a repeater. Then late at night when I was reading, I’d hear her familiar
click click
of the microphone and I’d answer with two clicks.

“You okay?” I said one of those nights.

“Yeah, just a little lonely. I was up on the roof tonight, looking at the stars.”

“You’ve got to be careful going up there with that live wire.”

“I put the ladder a long ways from it. You can see stuff and there’s a breeze up there. It helps me clear my mind.”

I had never considered climbing on my grandmother’s roof for any reason, but Jesse was a free spirit.

“Won’t be long till you’ll need to get a bigger antenna,” Jesse said.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you’re moving to the parsonage, right?”

This was a constant topic of conversation around our dinner table. “There’s a holdup on it. I don’t think we’ll be moving anytime soon.”

“Good. I mean, good for me.”

I smiled. “My mom is headed to the Kroger’s tomorrow. You need anything?”

“No. Thank you, though.”

There was silence a moment before Jesse spoke again.

“What’s it like to play the piano?”

“It’s okay, I guess. I don’t really know how to explain it. You ever thought of playing an instrument?”

“I play the radio, that’s about it. But I thought about the harmonica when I was younger. They had this thing at school in the second grade where if you brought fifty cents in, you could get a harmonica and take lessons, but my mama said we couldn’t afford it. My music career went out the window before I got to third grade.”

She meant it to be funny, but I thought it was sad. And it made me appreciate my piano lessons more knowing Jesse wanted to take them but would never be able to.

“I wish I could hear you when you talk,” I said to Dickie at his house the next day.

“You should just hang a mobile antenna on the laundry pole,” Dickie said.

“I suggested that and my grandmother said she doesn’t want to get struck by lightning.”

Dickie laughed. “When you move to your new house, you can put one up.”

Dickie and I were poring over a magazine he’d found. It showed the cadavers of Martians discovered in the New Mexico desert, and Dickie said this was the kind of photograph he was hoping we could take with my new Polaroid. A car pulled up outside the garage and two uniformed men got out, put their berets on, and walked toward us. One man was white, the other black.

Dickie kept the magazine open on his lap as he studied their faces, not saying a word, as if he knew why they were there. I wasn’t sure, but I immediately thought of my promise to Jesse about praying for Dickie’s father. With all that had happened after Jesse’s mother’s death, I hadn’t kept my side of the bargain.

“We’re looking for Mrs. Leena Hancock,” the white officer said.

“She ain’t here, sir,” Dickie said.

“Could you tell us where she is?” the black officer said.

Dickie’s eyes danced between both of them. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

“I’m sorry, son,” the white officer said. “We need to talk with your mother.” He walked up the steps behind us and knocked on the door.

“I told you, she ain’t here,” Dickie said over his shoulder. Then to the black officer he said, “Don’t you believe me?”

When no one answered the door, the two officers retreated to their car. Dickie stood and followed them. “If this is about my dad, you can tell me.”

The men didn’t speak. They just got in their car and drove to the dead end and turned around. Before they returned, Dickie shouted, “Come on, Matt.”

He jumped on his bike and I followed. I’d never seen him ride so fast. His legs pumped and his shirt flapped in the wind and he left me so far behind I could barely see the turns he made through town.

I finally caught up with him on the dirt alley that led past the volunteer fire department. “Why are you in such a hurry?”

“I need to go to the warehouse. That’s where they’re headed.”

“How do you know?”

He slowed and wiped his face with his sleeve. “I just got to be there. You don’t have to come.”

He only slowed again when he crossed the main street in town and rode past the post office, the flag flying high and proud. We crossed the train tracks and wound through an industrial area, where there were big trucks and a long warehouse.

“There they go!” Dickie said, pointing at the parking lot.

In the distance I saw the men walking toward the building in lockstep. Dickie reached the warehouse entrance first and let his bike fall near the front door. I coasted up and stopped, wishing Jesse were with us. She would know what to do.

When Dickie opened the front door, I heard wailing. I’ve never been able to get the pain of that voice out of my
mind. It reached to the bone. The door closed and muffled the sound, but I could still hear it through the glass.

A man in a blue work shirt with the name
Williams
on it walked up beside me. “What’s going on?”

“Two Army guys just went inside looking for Mrs. Hancock,” I said.

The man muttered a curse. When the door opened, the two men came out on either side of Dickie’s mother, holding her up. Dickie followed them to their car. The man beside me took off his hat as they passed and put it over his heart. When Dickie walked by, the man said, “I’m sorry about your dad, son.”

Dickie looked up in a daze. “Thank you.” Then he turned to me. “Could you take care of my bike?”

One of the officers came back and put the bike in the trunk of Dickie’s mother’s car and they all drove away.

It was one of the longest bike rides I ever took alone. I rode to Jesse’s place and found her in the backyard with Daisy and explained what happened.

Jesse shook her head. “It don’t make sense, does it, PB? A good kid like Dickie losing his daddy?”

I had been to funerals for older people, but never for a friend’s father. Dickie had told me stories of his dad and what he was like. He was not an easy man to live with, to hear Dickie tell it. He expected a lot, expected chores to be done correctly. But Dickie always spoke admiringly about him, as if he knew he was hard for a reason.

“I used to think my dad was mean,” Dickie said one day
after the funeral. “But that’s just how he was brought up. And he wanted me to learn.”

Several people from the military got up to talk about Dickie’s father, telling of things he had done in Vietnam and how he had saved lives. None of it made us feel any better. There was a closed casket with an eight-by-ten picture on top and flowers all over the church and people crying.

A full military team with rifles and a twenty-one-gun salute met us at the cemetery. Mr. Hancock could have been buried at Arlington in Virginia, but Dickie said his mother wanted him in Dogwood, where she could visit him.

Jesse didn’t come to the church, but it wasn’t because she didn’t care. She had no place to take Daisy Grace and no nice clothes. I sat with my mother and father and didn’t cry, but when we got to the cemetery, I saw Jesse in the shade of an oak tree with her little sister by her clutching a handful of daisies. I couldn’t hold back the tears then or when they handed the folded flag to Dickie’s mother.