A Fine Dark Line (8 page)

“That probably won’t be there long,” I said.

“I’ll write it again,” he said. “Next time I’ll use ink.”

As he wrote, he leaned forward so his long brown hair hung almost to his chin. As it dipped toward my leg, Nub, who was lying beside me, sniffed the tips of it with a wrinkled nose. Considering Nub would lick his ass hour on end, yet seemed offended by the smell of Richard’s hair, I assumed my friend’s locks were fairly ripe.

“I was really lucky, I wouldn’t have got hit at all,” I said. “I wouldn’t have a broken leg. My bike wouldn’t be a bunch
of bent-up metal. I wouldn’t be spending most of what’s left of the summer in a cast. I’m just glad Nub wasn’t hurt.”

“You could’a been smashed like a possum, truck that big.”

“Driver saw me, slammed on his brakes. Nub ran past me and another car went right over him. Mrs. Johnson was standing in her yard and she saw it all, told Mom and Mom told me.”

“Who is she?”

“She lives down from the drive-in a bit. Mom knows her some. She’s the one came and got me and my bike out of the highway. Her and the truck driver. It wasn’t his fault. I slid right out in front of him.”

“Did you think it was all over, you seen that truck?”

“I didn’t think much of anything. Not until the hospital anyway, and they were putting the cast on me.”

“You really don’t remember the in-betweens? Don’t remember the truck running over your leg?”

“Nope. Truck didn’t break my leg. I did it sliding on the road, that’s what Mrs. Johnson says. I got a real bad case of concrete rash, that’s for sure. My head got banged too. If I had been sitting up the truck would have knocked my head off. I just sort of slid under it and it passed over me, way that car did Nub.”

“I got an arrow run right through my side oncet. I made it myself, sharpened it with my pocketknife, and I fell on it runnin’. It went right through the meat on my side. Hurt like the dickens, but I didn’t get nothing but a hole in my side and some blood. I got over it quick. I had to. Daddy put me in the fields cutting down dead corn stalks with a scythe. He don’t cotton much to foolish injury.”

“I wish I’d got an arrow through my side. It beats this.”

Richard finished writing his name, flipped his oily hair
back in place, and tossed the pencil onto my nightstand, atop a stack of comic books.

“You want me to bring you some more funny books? I want ’em back, but you can borrow ’em.”

“Got anymore
Batman
?”

“Naw, just them. I got some
Superman
funny books, though. I can’t buy the new ones. They’re a dime. But in the back of Mr. and Mrs. Greene’s store, they got them with half the cover cut off. There might be some
Batman
there. They’re just a nickel. I’ll be checking when I get a nickel.”

“Why are they cut like that?”

“They don’t sell after a time, they cut off half the cover, send it back, they get their money back, then they sell the funny book anyway. For a nickel. Ain’t supposed to, but they do. I got to hide all mine ’cause my daddy will tear them up. Actually, he takes them out to the outhouse and wipes his ass on ’em. He says they’re devil’s stuff. I thought about that, and I couldn’t picture no devil reading a
Batman
comic book.”

“He won’t let you read comics?”

“He don’t think you ought to read nothin’ but the Bible. He calls all them books man-made book learnin’. He wants me to drop out of school when I get a little older, go to work. He says that’s what a man does. Reckon I will drop out.”

“I’m surprised your dad doesn’t want you to be a preacher.”

“He don’t want nobody but him to be a preacher. What’s your daddy want you to be?”

“Whatever I want. He always tells me to find something I’d like to do for free and learn to make a living at it. I don’t know what that is yet. Mama wants me to be a teacher.”

“Your daddy lets her contradict him like that, tellin’ you what to be after him sayin’ do what you want?”

I was a little taken aback.

“Sure. He doesn’t care.”

“In our house my daddy runs things and what he says is how it is.”

“I guess Mama runs things here.”

“Your mama?”

“Daddy thinks he runs things, but Mama runs them.”

“My mama don’t run a thing. Daddy’ll hit her in the mouth if she sasses back. He told me you got to treat a woman like a nigger sometimes.”

“That doesn’t sound right to me,” I said. “No one should be treated that way.”

“Well, I’m just sayin’ what he said. Mama, she reads that Bible all the time, and that’s the only thing Daddy gives her credit for. Hey, do you know Elvin Turner?”

“No.”

“He beat up a nigger with a stick. It was just a little nigger, but Elvin beat him anyway because he said the nigger looked at him funny.”

“I’m sure Elvin is proud,” I said.

“He’s pretty proud, all right, but I don’t know how Elvin could beat up much if he didn’t have a stick. Even with that, that little nigger put up a pretty good fight . . . Got to go. My old man is gonna whup the tar out of me with a razor strap or that darn belt of his I don’t get back in time to do chores.”

“Thanks for loaning me the funny books, Richard.”

“That’s okay.”

“Richard. Don’t say nigger here. Rosy Mae might hear it and it might hurt her feelings.”

“Oh. Well, okay.”

“Something else. You ever heard about a ghost in the house on the hill?”

“Naw.”

“What about by the railroad track?”

“The girl lookin’ for her head? My daddy mentions her and her mother from time to time, and ain’t none of what he mentions is good. Then again, he ain’t got a lot of good to say about nobody less it’s Jesus. I been down there at night couple of times, and it’s spooky, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you.”

“See any ghost?”

“Naw. But they say it’s like a light that bounces around.”

“I got this mystery going,” I said. “It seems to have something to do with this girl.”

“What kind of mystery?”

I briefly outlined it for him.

“I heard about that Stilwind house burnin’ down from my daddy. He’s talked about it several times. He worked for the Stilwinds, odd chores and stuff. But I didn’t know the house used to be back there behind the drive-in.”

“There wasn’t any drive-in then. On your way home, go to the trees out back and look up. You’ll see.”

“I’ll do that.”

Richard left, scratching at the lice in his hair.

Rosy Mae came up a few minutes after Richard left. She had been living with us ever since the night she came in hurt and confused. She was still sleeping on the couch. She smiled big, said, “I swear, that Mr. Richard’s momma need to hold him down and pour kerosene on his head and get rid of them bugs. Or get him some lye soap. I got me some I made from hog fat and lye and boiled mint leaves, and I’ll give him a right smart piece, if’n he’ll use it.”

“He’s all right,” I said.

“He come to see you, didn’t he?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You is so polite. He bring them funny books?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then he all right, ain’t he? He better than his daddy.”

“How do you mean?”

“His daddy, he all the time nervous as a corn-fed duck on Christmas Day.”

“Nervous?”

“Uh huh. He got that religion, and ain’t a bit of it the way he understands it good to nobody but him. You know, twenty years ago, he a handsome man. But not now. He done let all that bitterness eat him up.”

“What’s he bitter about?”

“Lord if anyone knows. There’s just some people like persimmons, they bitter when they born, sweet for a short time, then they go fast rotten.”

Rosy Mae sat down in the chair Richard had occupied, picked up one of the comics from my nightstand, thumbed through it a bit. “I can read this and them movie magazines pretty good, but there’s words I ain’t never learned that throws me in books.”

“I can help you learn to read better,” I said.

“Can you now?”

“I can.”

“I don’t think I got the brains to learn more than I done learned.”

“Sure you do.”

Rosy Mae brightened. “Guess I can learn I want to. Learned to read them magazines, didn’t I? Even if I got to skip and guess at some words. Learned to read what I read now so I’d know prices at stores and such. Had to learn so the white man down at the store, Mr. Phillips, don’t overcharge me. He always adds a bit to colored people’s stuff. ’Course, since we got to buy through the back door, it’s hard to know he don’t mark them prices up before we sees ’em.”

Rosy Mae scratched at her woolly head.

“Either I gots me Mr. Richard’s bugs, or I’m thinkin’ I gots
’em. I’m gonna go down, wash up, and fix lunch. You want me to bring yours up?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“I will. And don’t you lay up here now and starts to feel sorry for yo’self. You jes’ got a broken leg. There’s boys can’t and ain’t never been able to walk. You okay. You gonna heal up. You a little white boy with a good home and good mama and daddy. You could’a been me.”

“All right, Rosy Mae. I won’t feel sorry for myself. But there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“I thank you for that, Mr. Stanley.”

“Just Stanley.”

“Uh huh. You know your daddy done fixed your bike. He straightened out some of them spokes, got another bike from some junk, and he used them parts to fix yours. He done painted it up for you too. But it ain’t that rust color no more. Now it’s blue.”

“That’s great.”

Rosy Mae went out, and contrary to her suggestion and my agreement, I lay there feeling sorry for myself, Nub lying across my chest, his eyes closed, one of his legs kicking as if he were having a bad dream.

Probably about the car that passed over him.

———

O
VER THE NEXT FEW DAYS
I mostly stayed in my room with Nub. Daddy had Buster run
Vertigo
for a week, but never did have anyone over for a special showing.

I finally watched it from the veranda where there were speakers, and thought it was dumb. I could not believe anybody could be as stupid as Jimmy Stewart was in that movie.

Not long after that we got in a John Wayne cowboy movie. That one I liked.

My leg itched a lot and I straightened out a coat hanger to stick down in my cast to scratch. I carried that hanger with me wherever I went. I named it Larry.

Worse than the itch, however, was my head. It really ached. Not all the time, but often enough, and when the pain came it was like being hit all over again by that Mack Truck. It seemed as if there was a crack in my head and my brains were about to ooze out. But all I had was a big blue knot that pulsed like some kind of second head growing.

When my head wasn’t killing me, I read Hardy Boys books, and when I tired of that, I managed the box out from under my bed and took to reading the letters and the journal again, this time more carefully, and completely.

I began to know something about Margret, began to feel certain she was the Margret that ended up dead, down by the railroad track, her head cut off. There were hints in the letters.

She talked about how at night she could hear the trains go by and how they rattled the glass in the window of her bedroom and how lonesome the whistle sounded and how much her mother drank and yelled at her. She wrote about her mother’s “friends” and how her mother took them in and they paid her money. She never said what all the friends and money were about, but now from talking to Callie, learning about the world a little, it was all starting to click together fast.

I had also begun to notice an oddity. At night, when I lay down and closed my eyes to sleep, I had the sensation of someone being in the room. I felt cold all over, thought if I opened my eyes someone would be standing by my bed, looming over me like a shadow, perhaps the cronish shadow I had seen in the Stilwind house on the hill.

I feared whatever it was would take hold of me and drag
me with them across the fine dark line that made up the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

After a time, the sensation would pass, and I would awake exhausted, usually with the sun shining through the window, Nub beside me, lying on his back with his feet in the air, his head thrown back, his mouth open, his tongue hanging out.

This feeling was so intense I began to suspect someone was actually entering my room at night.

Callie?

Maybe Mom or Dad coming in to check on me because of my leg, just making sure I was okay?

Maybe it was the letters and the journal entries that had me feeling that way. Thinking about Margret (I no longer thought of her as M, because I was certain it had to be Margret) and how she died, down there by the railroad track, her head cut off, stories of her ghost wandering along the rails.

In the letters, Margret wrote to J, telling how she missed him, that she hoped to see him soon. She talked about the trees where she lived, big dogwoods, and how she heard that the dogwood tree was the one used to make the cross that held Jesus up. That the white flowers that bloomed on the dogwoods had little red spots inside, like the drops of blood Jesus shed. That this was God’s message to remind us that Jesus had given his life on a dogwood cross.

This dogwood cross thing was a popular story of the time, though when I grew up and read about such things, I never found serious reference to it. Most agreed the crosses used by the Romans would have been made of almost anything but dogwood.

But Margret talked about all kinds of things like that. She was a dreamer, and I enjoyed her dreams.

There were pages and pages of the journal where Margret
mentioned the pregnancy, said how they could keep the child, raise it, as she said, “In spite of everything.”

When I finally bored of the letters and journal pages, I put them back in the box and used my crutches to get me across the room to my closet. I put the box on the top shelf behind my cowboy hat and my Indian war bonnet, noticed something had eaten off the tips of the feathers.

Oh well, I didn’t wear the bonnet anymore. I had outgrown playing cowboys and Indians. I had even stored my Davy Crockett coonskin cap away in my wooden chest. I now found the idea of running around the yard on an invisible horse with a racoon’s hide on my head, or an Indian war bonnet, foolish.