A Spool of Blue Thread (35 page)

He looked around quickly, half sensing he was being watched. Someone was lurking in the shadows and watching him and laughing. But no, he was alone.

He had the key out of his pocket before he realized the back door was already open. “Linnie?” he called. He stepped inside and found
Dodd McDowell at the kitchen sink, blotting a paintbrush on a splotched rag.

“What in the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” Junior asked him.

Dodd spun around.

“Did you paint that swing?” Junior asked him.

“Why, yes, Junior.”

“What for? Who told you you could do that?”

Dodd was a very pale, bald-headed man with whitish-blond eyebrows and lashes, but now he turned a deep red and his eyelids grew so pink that he looked teary. He said, “Linnie did.”

“Linnie!”

“Did you not know about it?”

“Where did you see Linnie?” Junior demanded.

“She called me on the phone last night. Asked if I would pick up a bucket of Swedish-blue high-gloss and paint the porch swing for her. I thought you knew about it.”

“You thought I’d hunt down solid cherry, and pay an arm and a leg for it, and put Eugene to work varnishing it in a shade to look right with the porch floor, and then have you slop blue paint on it.”

“Well,
I
didn’t know. I figured:
women
. You know?” And Dodd spread his hands, still holding the brush and the rag.

Junior forced himself to take a deep breath. “Right,” he said. “Women.” He chuckled and shook his head. “What’re you going to do with them? But listen,” he said, and he sobered. “Dodd. From now on, you take your orders from me. Understand?”

“I hear you, Junior. Sorry about that.”

Dodd still looked as if he were about to cry. Junior said, “Well, never mind. It’s fixable. Women!” he said again, and he gave another laugh and then turned and walked back out and shut the door behind him. He just needed a little time to get ahold of himself.

She was the bane of his existence. She was a millstone around his neck. That night back in ’31 when he went to collect her from the train station and found her waiting out front—her unevenly hemmed gray coat too skimpy for the Baltimore winter, her floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat so outdated that even Junior could tell—he’d had the incongruous thought that she was like mold on lumber. You think you’ve scrubbed it off but one day you see it’s crept back again.

He had considered
not
going to collect her. She had telephoned him at his boardinghouse, and when he heard that confounded “Junie?” (nobody else called him that) in her stringy high voice he’d known instantly who it was and his heart had sunk like a stone. He’d wanted to slam the earpiece onto the hook again. But he was caught. She had his landlady’s phone number. Lord only knew how she’d gotten it.

He said, “What.”

“It’s me! It’s Linnie Mae!”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here in Baltimore, can you believe it? I’m at the railroad station! Could you come pick me up?”

“What for?”

There was the tiniest pause. Then, “What
for
?” she asked. All the bounce had gone out of her voice. “Please, Junie, I’m scared,” she said. “There’s a whole lot of colored folks here.”

“Colored folks won’t hurt you,” he said. (They didn’t have any colored back home.) “Just pretend you don’t see them.”

“What am I going to do, Junior? How am I going to find you? You have to come and get me.”

No, he did not have to come and get her. She didn’t have the least little claim on him. There was nothing between them. Or there was only the worst experience of his life between them.

But he was already admitting to himself that he couldn’t just leave her there. She’d be as helpless as a baby chick.

Besides, a little sprig of curiosity had begun to poke up in his mind. Someone from home. Here in Baltimore!

The fact was, there weren’t a whole lot of people he knew to talk to in Baltimore.

So, “Well,” he said finally. “You be waiting, then.”

“Oh, hurry, Junie!”

“Wait out front. Go out the main door and watch for my car out front.”

“You have a car?”

“Sure,” he said. He tried to sound offhand about it.

He went back upstairs for his jacket. When he came down again, his landlady cracked her parlor door open and poked her head out. She had hair of a peculiar gold color with curls he couldn’t quite understand: each as round and flat as a penny, plastered to her temples. “Everything all right, Mr. Whitshank?” she asked, and Junior said, “Yes, ma’am,” and crossed the foyer in two strides and was gone.

Now, Junior’s belongings back then wouldn’t have filled a decent-size suitcase, but he did own a car of sorts: a 1921 Essex. He’d bought it off another carpenter for thirty-seven dollars when they all lost their jobs at the start of hard times. He’d justified the expenditure on the grounds that a car would help in his hunt for work, and that had turned out to be the case although he hadn’t bargained on its many crotchets and breakdowns. It crossed his mind, as he was coaxing the cold engine to life, that he could have told Linnie to take a streetcar instead. But he knew that would have been beyond her. Streetcars were foreign to her. She’d have bungled it somehow. He couldn’t even picture her making that train trip by herself, because she would have had to transfer in Washington, D.C., he knew, not to mention a whole lot of smaller stations before then.

He lived in the mill district, north of the station—a good distance north, in fact. To go south he cut east to St. Paul and then chugged between the rows of dimly lit houses, leaning forward from time to time to wipe the fog of his breath off the windshield. At length
he passed the train station and turned right, onto the paving that crossed in front of its important-looking columns. He spotted Linnie immediately—the only person out there, her white, anxious face swiveling from side to side. But he didn’t stop for her. Without consciously deciding to, he gathered speed and drove on. He took another right onto Charles Street and headed for home, but halfway up the first block he started picturing how her forehead would have smoothed when she caught sight of him, how relieved she would have looked, how experienced and knowing he would have seemed arriving in his red Essex. He circled back around and passed the important columns again, and this time he veered into the pickup lane. Slowing to a stop, he watched as she snatched up her cardboard suitcase and hurried to open the passenger door.

“Did you drive past me once before?” she demanded as soon as she was seated.

Just like that, he lost his advantage.

“I was getting ready for bed,” he said, and his voice came out sounding whiny, somehow. “I’m half asleep.”

She said, “Oh, poor Junie,
I’m
sorry,” and she leaned across her suitcase to kiss his cheek. Her lips were warm, but she gave off the smell of frost. Also, underneath, another smell, one he associated with home: something like fried bacon. It weighed down his spirits.

But after he started driving, putting the Essex through its gears, he began to feel in control again. “I don’t know why you’re here,” he told her.

“You don’t know why I’m
here
?” she said.

“And I don’t know where I’m going to take you. I don’t have the money to put you up in a hotel. Unless
you
have money.”

If she did, she wasn’t letting on. “You’re taking me home with you,” she told him.

“No, I’m not. My landlady only rents to men.”

“You could slip me in, though.”

“What: slip you into
my
room?”

She nodded.

“Not on your life,” he said.

But he kept driving in the direction of the boardinghouse, because he didn’t know what else to do.

They reached an intersection, and he braked and turned to look at her. Five years, just about, hadn’t changed her in the least; she might still be thirteen. Her face still seemed drawn too tight, as if she didn’t have quite enough skin to go around, and her lips were still thin and colorless. It was as if she had frozen in time the day he left. He didn’t know why he had ever found her attractive. But clearly she couldn’t tell what he was thinking, because she smiled and ducked her chin and looked up at him sideways and said, “I wore those shoes you like so much.”

What shoes could those be? He didn’t remember any shoes. He glanced down at her feet and saw dark, high-heeled pumps with ankle straps, so blocky and oversized that her shins looked as slender as clover stems.

“How did you find out where I was?” he asked her.

She stopped smiling. She straightened and stood her big purse on the tip end of her knees.

“Well,” she said, and she gave a sharp nod. (He’d forgotten how she used to do that. It said, “Down to business.” It said, “Let
me
handle this.”) “Four days ago was my birthday,” she said. “I’m eighteen years old now.”

“Happy birthday,” he said dully.

“Eighteen, Junie! Legal age!”

“Legal age is twenty-one,” he told her.

“Well, for
voting
, maybe … and I already had my suitcase packed; I already had my money saved. I earned it picking galax every fall since you left. But I laid low till I was eighteen, so nobody could stop me. Then the day after my birthday, I had Martha Moffat drive me to the Parryville lumberyard and I asked the fellows there if they could say where you’d gone off to.”

“You asked the whole yard?” he said, and she nodded again.

He could just picture how
that
must have looked.

“And this one fellow, he told me you might could have headed north. He said he remembered you coming in one day, wondering if anyone knew where this carpenter was they called Trouble, on account of his name was Trimble. And they told you Trouble’d gone to Baltimore, so maybe that’s where
you
went, this fellow said, looking for work. So I got Martha to ride me to Mountain City and I bought a ticket to Baltimore.”

Junior was reminded of those movie cartoons where Bosko or someone steps off a cliff and doesn’t even realize he’s standing on empty space. Had Linnie not grasped the
chanciness
? He could have moved on years ago. He could be living in Chicago now, or Paris, France.

It seemed to him all at once a kind of failure that he was not; that here he still was, all this time afterward. And that she had somehow known he would be.

“Martha Moffat’s name is Shuford now,” Linnie was saying. “Did you know Martha got married? She married Tommy Shuford, but
Mary
Moffat’s still single and it’s like to kill her soul, you can tell. She acts mad at Martha all the time about every little thing. But then they never did get along as good as you’d expect.”

“As well,” he said.

“What?”

He gave up.

They were traveling through downtown, with the buildings set cheek to jowl and the streetlights glowing, but Linnie barely glanced out the window. He had thought she would be more impressed.

“When I got off the train in Baltimore,” she said, “I went straight to the public telephone and I looked for you in the book, and when I couldn’t find you I called everybody named Trimble. Or I would have, except Trouble’s first name turned out to be Dean and that came pretty soon in the alphabet. And he said you
had
looked him
up, and he’d told you where you might could find work, but he didn’t know if they’d hired you or not and he couldn’t say where you were living, unless you were still at Mrs. Bess Davies’s where a lot of workingmen board at when they first come north.”

“You should get a job with Pinkerton’s,” Junior said. He wasn’t pleased to hear how easy he’d been to find.

“I worried you had moved by now, found a place of your own or something.”

He frowned. “There’s a depression on,” he said. “Or haven’t you heard?”

“It’s fine with
me
if you live in a boardinghouse,” she said, and she patted his arm. He jerked away, and for a while after that she was quiet.

When they reached Mrs. Davies’s street he parked some distance from the house, at the darker end of the block. He didn’t want anyone seeing them.

“Are you glad I’m here?” Linnie asked him.

He shut off the engine. He said, “Linnie—”

“But my goodness, we don’t have to go into everything all at once!” Linnie said. “Oh, Junior, I’ve missed you so! I haven’t once looked at a single other fellow since you left.”

“You were thirteen years old,” Junior said.

Meaning, “You’ve spent all the time since you were thirteen never having a boyfriend?”

But Linnie, misunderstanding, beamed at him and said, “I know.”

She picked up his right hand, which was still resting on the gearshift knob, and pressed it between both of hers. Hers were very warm, despite the weather, so that his must have struck her as cold. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she told him. Then she said, “And so here I am, about to spend the first full night with you I’ve ever had in my life.” She seemed to be taking it for granted that he had decided to slip her in after all.

“The first and
only
night,” he told her. “Then tomorrow you’re
going to have to find yourself someplace else. It’s risky enough as it is; if Mrs. Davies caught wind of you, she’d put us both out on the street.”

“I wouldn’t mind that,” Linnie said. “Not if I was with you. It would be romantic.”

Junior withdrew his hand and heaved himself out of the car.

At the foot of the front steps he made her wait, and he opened the front door silently and checked for Mrs. Davies before he signaled Linnie to come on in. Every creak of the stairs as he and Linnie climbed made him pause a moment, filled with dread, but they made it. Arriving on the third floor—the servants’ floor, he’d always figured, on account of its tiny rooms with their low, slanted ceilings—he gave a jab of his chin toward a half-open door and whispered, “Bathroom,” because he didn’t want her popping in and out of his room all night. She wriggled her fingers at him and disappeared inside, while he continued on his way with her suitcase. He left his door cracked a couple of inches, the light threading out onto the hall floorboards, until she slipped inside and shut it behind her. She was carrying her hat in one hand and her hair was damp at the temples, he saw. It was shorter than when he’d first known her. It used to hang all the way down her back, but now it was even with her jaw. She was breathless and laughing slightly. “I didn’t have my soap or a facecloth or towel or
anything
,” she said. Even though she was whispering, it was a sharp, carrying whisper, and he scowled and said, “Ssh.” In her absence he’d stripped to his long johns. There was a small, squarish armchair in the corner with a mismatched ottoman in front of it—the only furniture besides a narrow cot and a little two-drawer bureau—and he settled into it as best he could and arranged his winter jacket over himself like a blanket. Linnie stood in the middle of the room, watching him with her mouth open. “Junie?” she said.