The Promise of Jesse Woods (9 page)

“I’ve had my eye on this since he put it out last year,” she said.

“Good things come to those who wait,” Dickie said.

She looked back at me. “I’ll pay you back when my mama’s check comes.”

“You don’t have to.”

She stopped in the road, her hair falling over her face. When she shook it away, I noticed her lips, red as a beet, though she wore no lipstick. She studied my face like she was about to say something important.

“There ain’t enough money in the world to buy friends, Matt.”

“I’m not trying to buy a friend. I’m just trying to be nice.”

“Reckon there’s enough money in the world to rent a friend?” Dickie said.

Jesse frowned and pushed on, cutting through a farmer’s field and crossing the creek, winding up at Dickie’s house. It wasn’t really a house, it was an apartment over a garage that Dickie’s mother rented. She was at work at the warehouse across the railroad tracks, but Dickie grabbed the handle and opened the door and invited us into his shop. Dickie’s father had collected tools and hubcaps and every imaginable castaway nut and bolt, and Dickie was a natural at fixing things. He pulled out a crescent wrench and a flathead screwdriver and went to work. Dickie seemed at home with dirty hands.

“I didn’t know your dad got his arm cut off,” I said, trying to make conversation.

“There’s a lot of things you don’t know,” Jesse said.

She didn’t seem to want to talk about that or her sister. I tried a different route as Dickie fussed and fumed over the tires.

“Say, we’re having a picnic at church tomorrow. My dad said I should invite you.”

“Picnic?” Jesse said.

“Right after church. People are bringing lots of food. It’s kind of a celebration of my dad coming here.”

Dickie looked up. “He said to invite us?”

I nodded.

“Do we have to come to the service, or can we just show up for the food?” Jesse said.

“That wouldn’t be right,” Dickie said. “The food is the reward for sitting through the service. Mama and me go to the Holiness church when she’s not working her second job. I don’t know if she’s working tomorrow or not.”

“What church do you go to?” I asked Jesse.

“We used to go to the little white one down yonder,” she said, pointing.

“Don’t believe her,” Dickie said. “She attends Lazy Butt Baptist. Just sits at home Sunday mornings and watches TV preachers.”

Jesse gave him a glare, then asked me, “Is your daddy one of them preachers that smacks people in the head and makes them fall over? ’Cause if he is, I’d come to see it. That’d be food and entertainment.”

“He’s not the smack-you-in-the-head type,” I said.

“More reserved?” she said. “The people stay to their seats and don’t hop around?”

I nodded.

Jesse frowned. “Well, I don’t believe in God.”

“Of course you do,” Dickie said. “Don’t believe her, Matt.”

“Why not?” I said to her.

“Preacher at the white church said if you didn’t get baptized, you’d split hell wide-open. And he didn’t mean you had to believe in God or Jesus. That wasn’t enough. If you didn’t get dunked in the water, you didn’t make it, even if you was sincere in being sorry for your sins and all that. Even if you’re laid up in the hospital, if they don’t get you into the water, you’ll burn. I give up on it.”

“Her cousins go there,” Dickie said. “That’s the real reason she don’t believe in God.”

“I won’t be coming to your church picnic,” Jesse said matter-of-factly.

“You don’t have to believe in God to go to the picnic,” Dickie said. “You just have to believe in fried chicken and potato salad. And flies.”

Jesse almost smiled at that.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1984

I sat in the parking lot of the Dogwood Food and Drug trying to figure out which car was Jesse’s.

There wasn’t a spot in town that didn’t spark vivid images. The gas station on the other side of the grocery, for instance, had been an Esso. They had changed the sign to Exxon, but the inside remained the same. Dickie had found a copy of the
Green Book
behind a shelf when we went inside for a pop. The smell of gasoline and oil hung heavy as he leafed through it. Underneath the title were the words
Negro Traveler’s Guide, 1964
.

“Bet you never had to use one of these,” he said.

Dogwood Food and Drug had eventually run Blake’s
out of business. It was evidence of the slow economic encroachment. Dogwood Feed and Implement still stood on its original site, but most farmers drove farther east to a supply store. There was also fear that bigger churches would siphon off members of other congregations with revivals or special speakers. My father believed that faith was meant to be lived where you did. It wasn’t a spectator sport. As a child, I’d agreed with him.

I closed my eyes and listened to the birds preparing for their flight south. A train whistled and rolled under the overpass. Tires on pavement lulled me and I drifted off, a trickle of sweat dropping from my underarm. A soft, leaf-laden breeze blew through both of my open windows and I felt a sense of contentment, wanting to bottle these sounds and feelings and smells.

A week after stealing from Blake’s store, Jesse had turned to me as we rode by the railroad tracks. We were searching for signs of her father’s missing arm. She spat in her hand and held it out.

I looked at it with disdain and horror. “What are you doing?”

“Go on and shake,” she said.

Not understanding the native ways and not wanting to offend, I held out a tentative hand and Jesse grabbed it. “There, you satisfied?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” I said, wiping my hand on my shorts.

“Dickie and I talked. You was right about Old Man
Blake. We promise not to do it again. Cross our hearts and hope to die.”

“Dickie said that too?”

“He said he never liked stealing. He did it so I wouldn’t feel alone.”

That made me smile.

She stared a hole through me. “A promise is a promise. I give my word, you can bank on it. No more stealing from Blake’s or anywhere else.”

“Okay,” I said, looking at my hand. “Thank you.”

Jesse curled her top lip, something that always reminded me of Elvis, and poked me in the chest. “But don’t go trying to change me. What you see is what you get.”

So many memories flooded now, the good and bad flowing together in a torrent until I opened my door and walked into the Food and Drug like Odysseus returning from battle.

A cashier at the front didn’t look up. You had to take the long route by the deli to get to the meat department. I had worked here as a bagger in high school. I knew every aisle, every rat in the back room, and where the “mystery item” was that went on sale each Tuesday.

“Matt Plumley?” someone said to my right.

I turned toward the canned goods and Gwen Bailey smiled at me.

Gwen had been a bright bulb in our class. She had excelled at Latin, biology, and physics and everyone saw her as most likely to become a medical doctor. Her family
faithfully attended our church until they had a run-in with Blackwood. I shook her hand and her mother waved from the canned corn.

“What are you doing here?” Gwen said. “I heard you were in Chicago.”

“I’m back for a visit.”

Life has a way of circling. While I had looked at Jesse as an unrequited love, Gwen had looked at me the same. She had played Emily Webb in the production of
Our Town
, opposite my George Gibbs. Backstage in rehearsals she had invited me to her house to run lines. She was having trouble keeping her scenes straight, she said, and I obliged, showing up on the appointed evening at the appointed time.

Gwen’s parents were out and I could tell she wanted to do more than practice the play. She wore loose terry-cloth shorts that crept up when she sat on the couch. She’d extended her bare feet and stretched them like a cat, touching my leg.

Gwen was not a homely girl. In fact, she was quite pretty. She had been on the plump side in junior high, like I had been in my early teens—all that studying and little interest in sports had given her a full figure. Now she smiled and again I saw the difference money and orthodontia can make.

“Do you ever think of our school days? All the fun we had?”

I could think of them, but Gwen’s days had been pool parties and majorettes and pizza after football games.
Compared with Jesse, hers was an easy life with an intact family and a paved road with college at the end.

“Are you finished with school?” I said, changing the subject.

“I finish grad school in December.”

“Something in the medical field, I suppose?”

“Anesthesiology,” she said.

“Bless you,” I said.

She laughed. “Oh, I miss that quick wit of yours. You were always so funny.” She touched my shoulder. “One of these days I’m going to get up to Chicago and see you in a play.”

I looked behind me at the meat counter, but there was no one there. “I haven’t exactly broken into the big time. In fact, I’m mostly counseling young kids—”

“You were always such a success. Do you have a girlfriend up there?”

I winced but tried to hide it. “Still looking, I guess.”

Someone pushed a cart past us and we moved closer to the stewed tomatoes.

“‘Does anyone ever realize life while they live it . . . ?’ Do you remember that from
Our Town
?”

I nodded.

“‘Every, every minute?’”

I pulled the dialogue from memory. ‘No. Saints and poets maybe . . . they do some.’” I said the line as a good-bye.

Gwen smiled sadly. “It’s a shame about us. We would have been good together. Maybe we still can be.”

I thought of some quick-witted joke about being married to an anesthesiologist, that you never had to worry about insomnia, but I held back. It was my quick wit that she loved.

“It was good seeing you again, Gwen.”

She followed her mother toward checkout and I glanced behind me at the bloody meat counter. Gwen’s life had been high heels and dance shoes and I couldn’t help comparing her to Jesse’s rough feet. Gwen waved from the front of the aisle and I turned to the back of the store.

The meat counter was empty but I noticed a fresh chicken on a wooden slab with a cleaver next to it. Dexter Crowley, a boy two years ahead of me in school, pushed a load of laundry detergent toward a far aisle and stopped.

“Matt Plumley,” he said, sticking out a rough hand.

Dexter had the frame of a football player but not much coordination. He was all arms and gangling legs and a blank stare that felt like menace to opposing teams but was more Dexter trying to remember who he was supposed to block.

I shook his hand and he wiped his nose with his sleeve. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m back for a few days. Is Jesse working today?”

His mouth was open as he glanced at the counter. “Yeah, she was there a minute ago. She works all this week except for Saturday. Did you know she’s getting married?”

“I heard.”

“First time I heard it, I thought they was funnin’ me. But she showed me the ring and said it was true. And Earl, he comes in here—why, there’s Verle now.”

Verle Turley was cut from the same cloth as his brother, and if there had been a sound track for his approach, it would have been a cross between the banjo from
Deliverance
and the strings in
Jaws
. He walked up to Dexter with a John Deere hat pulled low.

“Verle, you remember Matt Plumley, don’t you? He was in those plays at school.” He turned back to me. “You know, the one I remember was when you played that guy who sees the ghosts at Christmas. Remember that?”

I nodded as Verle gave me a slack-jawed stare. He crossed his arms and planted his logger boots. “I didn’t know you was here.” His voice was as flat as a skipping rock.

“I didn’t know I had to file a report.”

After an uncomfortable silence, Dexter threw back his head and laughed. He was slow but exuberant. “That’s a good one, Matt.”

“When I tell Earl you was in here, he’s not going to be happy,” Verle said.

“I doubt I’m as committed to his happiness as you are.”

Verle drew a little closer, and judging from the bulge in his lower lip, he had only a couple of minutes before he needed to spit. “I’m watching you, Plumley.”

“I see that,” I said, matching his tone.

I turned and took one more look at the empty meat department. I didn’t want to put her in the middle. Not now.

“Nice seeing you again, Dexter,” I said, clapping his shoulder.

I went back to the car and drove through the parking lot to where Dumpsters lined the alley and the loading dock sat empty. I waited a few minutes, hoping she might appear behind the plastic liners over the door. When she didn’t, I drove to my parents’ house and slipped inside without notice. I closed the door to my room and fell into bed still dressed, burrowing my head into the pillow.