Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (13 page)

“My mother does not like American women. Perhaps fears. For me. For my sake.”

“Why? Because we’re all tramps?”

“You must understand: Rape among my people … among my parents’ people, people of my grandparents’ religion is almost unknown.”

“No kidding.”

“There are many reasons. It is the same with men and women who wish to love each other. To marry. They do not first undress.”

I nodded. “So that’s good, I reckon.”

“These things to my mother make sense.” She glanced my way to see my reaction. So I nodded again.

“And also,” she added, still watching me, “to me. Much of the old ways make sense, no?”

“So how come,” I asked, “you don’t wear a headscarf like your momma?”

Farsanna may have shot me a look then, though I couldn’t have seen it. She waited a moment to answer. “It is your opinion that I should wear a hijab?”

“Me? No. That is, I don’t care one way or the other. It’s just that your mom … and you seem … that is, you never seem embarrassed that she’s wearing one.”

“It is not right for a daughter be embarrassed by her mother, no? She is her daughter. That is enough. My mother was raised in Sri Lanka, a Muslim. My father wishes for me to be raised in America.”

“And your family is not all that devout, but without the headscarf, the hijab, don’t your parents worry about … you know. Boys? Your being looked at by boys?”

“And American parents, they do not worry about the boys?”

“Yeah, but—”

“You must tell me,” she said, her voice dropping lower, “what means Beau—” she stopped and corrected herself, “what does Beauregard mean?”

“Mean?”

“You said to me that Jimbo Riggs’ name …”

“Well, yeah. It is.” I would’ve liked to have left it right there. But she stopped walking and waited. I doled out a little more, and even that was whittling away at my own insides. “Middle name. His ancestor was a Civil War hero. That is, depending on whose side you’re on.”

“Whose side you are on?”

“I mean
were
on. Are on. Same difference, I reckon. You know. The war. Civil War.
The
War.”

“The war,” she repeated.

“What Bo calls The War to Make the Confederacy Comfy for White People.” It didn’t come out sounding anything like what Momma would have said just then—and so maybe shouldn’t have gotten said at all. “The Mrs. Reverend Regina Lee Riggs,” I added, “doesn’t much like his calling it that.” I’d meant this to help. But there the awkward still sat, heaving between us like a sick cat. And me wondering how to swat it out of the way.

Farsanna stared straight ahead. “This Beauregard—?”

“Confederate general. Real smooth with the ladies, people said. Reckon he passed that on down the line.”

She looked at me, her face telling me nothing.

“Yes,” she said. And still nothing.

I’d no idea what my face, which had never been loyal or discreet, might tattle to her about me. So I studied the way the pavement petered out into clay, which surrendered to weeds, which infiltrated the asphalt in cracks.

Soon we were within sight of the Dairy Queen, its fluorescent swirl corkscrewing up into the dark. Several Jeeploads of teenagers were just piling themselves in for departure, their vanilla ice creams frosting each other’s hair as bodies squirmed for position on floorboards and seats.

A white pickup that looked a little like Em’s from the back was parked just beneath the glowing cone.

Farsanna nodded toward the truck. “That is your brother’s, yes?”

We’d neared the parking lot by that time to see that the white pickup had red lettering on its door. I didn’t need to read “Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers” to know she was right. The Stray had already leapt to greet someone he’d sniffed out as familiar.

I saw Em, his back to us, standing in front of someone unreasonably blond—a shock of yellow showing behind Emerson’s brown.

I stopped in my tracks, my arms making a knot. “Well, what the heck does he think he’s doing?” I inspected Farsanna’s face for twinges of jealousy—or maybe she’d not seen the shock of blond—then took her by the elbow. “Come on.”

Neesa’s hot pants were as tight as they were short, and her orange halter top with daisies plummeted into a canyon of cleavage.

“Jeez,” I muttered as Farsanna and I approached. “What is he
thinking
?”

“Something is wrong?”

“That something’s name is Neesa.” I checked again, real quickly, for signs that maybe Farsanna felt threatened. Sad. Jilted. But her face told me nothing at all.

“Something’s wrong with this Neesa?”

“You mean besides the fact she can’t spell her own name?”

Farsanna studied her from the distance quickly decreasing between us. She nodded, accepting my judgment, but asked, “Why is she stupid?”

“Because she’s pretty.”

Farsanna frowned, unconvinced.

I tried again. “Because boys like her that way: stupid. At least all Southern boys do.”

Farsanna considered this. “All?”

I halted, my hands to my hips. “You got the ugly truth right there before you. I reckon they do.”

She gazed off into the woods, then shook her head. “I cannot think all of them.”

Maybe as a protection against the possibility of losing his share of the new girl’s affections to his best friend, Emerson must have decided to drown his sorrows in Old Seasick Hips. Maybe, I thought, just like small children find comfort in hollow milk-chocolate bunnies, men find comfort in figures alone, without caring if there’s nothing inside but air.

“My own brother,” I sighed.

“But if your brother prefers …” Farsanna suggested.

I shook my head. “Don’t ask. Come on. We can at least slow down her frontal assault.”

After buying our ice cream, I elbowed a place in their circle for Farsanna and me, right beside Emerson, and nibbled at my cone slowly. I turned to Neesa.

“Emerson here
loves
seventeenth-century poetry. I bet you’d want to know that, Neesa, may be some sort of something in common between you two.”

My brother looked from Farsanna to Neesa to me and looked as if he might lose the two scoops he’d just eaten. “Cut it out,
Shelby
Lenoir
,” he hissed in my ear. “Quit trying to make Neesa look dumb.”

I whispered back, “If it wasn’t so easy, I might could resist. You know I can’t stand stupid girls. Or you making an idiot of yourself just because you’re jealous of—”

He began to respond, but Farsanna was speaking.

“In my school, my old school, in Sri Lanka, we read
Paradise Lost
. To practice the reading English. Is that of the same time?”

Em beamed at her and nodded.

“Ever had
sambol
, Neesa?” I purred to my right.

“Do what?” Neesa was eyeing the Stray at her feet, her glance weighing Em’s friendly welcome of the dog with her own obvious discomfort. “Does he bite?”

“Not too awfully often,” I told her, pretending to pause a moment and count on the hands of one finger. “At any rate,
sambol’s
a Sri Lankan delicacy. Ever had it?”

Neesa’s eyes stayed on the dog. “What? Where?”

“Sri Lanka. Where Farsanna comes from. It’s in South America.”

“It’s—” Farsanna protested.

I stopped her rising arm. “On the West Coast. Next to Kenya.”

Emerson turned his mouth to my ear. “Cut it
out
, Turtle.” He called the Stray to him and held onto the dog’s collar.

Reassured, Neesa took a deep breath and swung her blond hair to the right and the left. “Never been there myself. Like my daddy says, ain’t too much point in travelin’ when you like where you are just fine.”

“You know, I never thought of it that way myself. What about you, Em?”

Emerson wouldn’t look at me.

“Or,” Neesa added, shifting her hips in Emerson’s direction to brush up against him, “when you like who you’re with.”

I smiled just real sweetly. “
Whom
. Right, Em?
Whom
you’re with.”

Emerson researched the ridges of his cone.

Neesa turned to me. “Why, Shelby Lenoir, don’t tell me you’re already
drivin
’ already. Or wait, don’t tell me you
walked
.”

“We
walked
,” I told her.

“Well, get out of town. What in heaven’s name is there around this little ol’ nowhere place to walk from?”

“My house.” Farsanna put that in. And I liked her for that.

Neesa peeked out from under a canopy of mascara. “Well, isn’t that
sweet
. Are y’all staying up late?” She waited until I met her eye. “You spending the night with the new girl there, Turtle?” The canopy lowered at me. “You always were the sweet little ol’ thing.”

I patted my brother’s shoulder. “We gotta run. Things to do. Em, sugar, that was good of you, helping Momma that way, bless your heart. Comfort to have a strong man around. I know unplugging that upstairs commode was
some
kind of chore.”

The slow, constant sway of Neesa’s hips, always seductive, even when she was standing in place, jerked to a stop. I’d done some damage at least.

Already beginning to back up, I blew my brother a kiss. “You have a nice night, Emmy, honey. Run on home now and be good.”

Em stepped forward and reached to catch hold of Sanna’s arm but she’d already turned and patted her leg for her Stray.

“Sanna—” he began.

Maybe she didn’t hear him, her attention having turned to the dog.

And, just as we turned to leave, a truck parked near the back of the Dairy Queen turned on its lights and started its motor—not that it struck me as strange at the time.

“For Emerson to like her,” Farsanna asked as we walked along the gravel shoulder in the dark, “you don’t want this?”

It was another contraction, like maybe her speech at least was settling in. It occurred to me then that I liked that about her, the fact she was trying so hard, slowly scratching the exposed roots of her heart into our granite-soiled Ridge.

I shrugged. “Men are generally idiots, you know. But the good ones don’t want to be all the time. They need our help not to be.”

She laughed. “This is much as
Mata
would say.”

“Yeah,” I joined her in the laugh. “My momma too.”

There was a pause. “And your brother … he is one of the good ones, no?”

I patted her arm then. “If you promise not to tell him I said so: yeah. My brother is one of the good ones.”

_________

As we walked, the night seemed too quiet to me. Our feet on the road’s shoulder crunched as if we were grinding the world as we knew it into powder. I wondered if this was how blind people felt, their senses heightened so that every crack of a twig or beat of a wing sounded alarm.

Sanna, who’d been less occupied in the business of ruining my brother’s evening, had long since finished her cone. I was gnawing the final stump of mine when headlight beams swung out from behind us with the open-throat roar of a gunning engine.

I turned and saw the bright parallel beams level out at my face and fly forward, lighting up the shoulder where we stood.

The last thing I remember after that moment was grabbing for Farsanna’s arm to pull her with me off the road and into the woods. But Sanna wasn’t beside me.

I dove for the ditch—a decision I hardly recall making. Gravel from the highway’s shoulder sprayed over my head and pelted me down. And I tumbled from the road’s shoulder down a steep bank toward the woods.

And then the roar seemed landmasses away, far up on the road and retreating. Where I lay down at the edge of the woods was impenetrably black and silent, like someone had pulled the power cord to my world.

14
Pearl of the Indian Ocean

When I came to, I lay still for a moment testing my limbs for signs of life. Everything seemed accounted for and functioning.

“Sanna?”

Nothing.

“
Farsanna
?”

Still nothing.

Now I was screaming. “
Sanna
! SANNA!”

Then there were footsteps. My heart threatened to hammer its way out of my chest.

“Sanna? Is that you?”

Without speaking, she hooked her arm through mine, nearly scaring me clean out of my skin. “Hey,” I said, when I could speak. I stepped away, glad I couldn’t see her face in the dark. Especially thankful I couldn’t see her eyes. “Hey, you all right?”

She didn’t answer.

I could hear the question, the What Happened, that neither one of us said, there between us, those words sapped of their strength lately for us. I pulled a row of thorns from my forearm and waited to know what to say, know what to think.

I tried to lay a hand on her arm.

“My Stray?” she asked then. The panic in her voice pushed it higher.

“I … he hasn’t …”

She whistled. We waited.

Something moved close beside us, something slinking out from the woods.

Then Stray touched his nose to our calves. He’d emerged, apparently, from wherever he’d been blown from the road. The dog sat at Sanna’s feet and she threw both arms around him.

The relief of his safety and Sanna’s gave me strength to say what surely couldn’t be true, but needed saying. I took a deep breath. “I reckon maybe somebody was playing.” It seemed the thing to say just then to build a seawall against the fear I could feel swelling.

“
Playing
?” She didn’t believe me.

I didn’t believe me either.

“Or,” I tried again, “or just, you know, not watching where they were driving. Maybe switching out tapes and looking up almost too late. But not aiming. Not aiming for us. Not even to scare us.”

She would not speak after that. The air between us vibrated with the sounds we weren’t making.

We walked the remaining stretch of highway back to her house in silence, sticking close beside each other, Sanna’s dog close by our feet. Every far-off growl from a motor or the woods sent us ducking for cover.

For the first time I could remember—and maybe the last—the Moulavi house looked attractive up ahead, its curtainless plate-glass windows’ yellow rectangles we ran toward like beacons of safety. Mr. Moulavi was kneeling, I could see, on the living room floor. Farsanna, still trembling, touched my elbow and we both skirted toward the back door. She knelt to stroke the Stray, and let him kiss her cheek and nose and chin. She may have been crying again, but she seemed not to want me to see, so I didn’t look. I bent to stroke his back and was startled to find his coat soft, homely as he was.

Sanna put a finger to her lips. Glancing right and left, she cracked open the back door and let the dog go in before us. Apparently not unused to this liberty, he skirted the one light thrown from the living room, and keeping to the shadows, padded down the hall.

Her mother nodded as we entered, and I held my breath waiting to be called upon to recount what had happened on the highway. If she saw the Stray slip past, she said nothing.

And Mrs. Moulavi didn’t ask if we’d had a nice time, and her daughter didn’t volunteer anything. Kissing her mother on the forehead, Sanna walked through her bedroom door that lay just off the kitchen. I nodded and cranked up one end of my mouth in an attempt at a smile and followed.

Watching Sanna’s
mata
limp back through the kitchen, I closed the door and collapsed on Sanna’s bed. I wriggled my legs between the sheets, rough and pilled, like I was tired, hoping maybe my body would take the clue. It didn’t. I lay awake in the dark, my head hurting with the crush of too many thoughts.

Sanna had lain so still and so quiet I’d assumed she’d long been asleep. The Stray certainly was, his snores rising and receding from the end of the bed. But Sanna rose and walked quietly to the window. Maybe sleep felt like a distant, unreachable place for her, just like it did for me. When she glanced once over her shoulder, she seemed as if she were checking to see that I wasn’t awake.

“What are you looking at?” I asked her.

She jumped a little at my voice, but didn’t take her eyes off the black outside her window. “Tonight, the moon is like a pearl.” She must’ve had a better view of the sky than I did, still huddled in bed. “Like the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.”

I could barely make out what she said, her face turned away like she was whispering words off a black screen.

“What?”

“My home. Sri Lanka is called the Pearl of the Indian Ocean.”

Her pretty face—I caught myself thinking how pretty it was—had gone hard, like she’d been whittled from onyx. “I miss the Pearl. I miss my home, Turtle.”

Her accent hitting my name like rapids at a rock stopped me cold in the midst of whatever flip thing I’d have said just then. With that one word, her
Turtle
, we’d passed somehow to a different place, crossed some threshold of understanding or trust—not one I was sure I wanted to cross. But there it was, already passed and no turning back.

“Hey, Sanna….” I began as she sat down on the bed. “Lemme ask you something: How come you hardly talk about Sri Lanka? Not even when somebody asks you, like L. J.? I mean, if you miss it so much—”

“
Because
I miss it so much.”

“Oh.” I thought about that.

“My father,” she said, her face toward the window. “My father said everything would be for us different here. In America, everyone is equal. In America, everyone is free. In America, everyone does as he wishes, and no one for stopping.”

“Hmmm,” I said, not sure when, or if, I was supposed to agree.

“When my father was young, he loved a Sinhalese girl. Her parents were wealthy and the Goigamas caste, the highest.”

“But I thought the caste system was … Never mind. Go on.”

“They wouldn’t allow with him marriage.”

“Because he looked … Arab? Or because he was Muslim? Or didn’t have enough money?”

“All.”

“Oh.” I thought about this. “That’s rough. So what happened?”

“So—” Her eyes stayed on the window. “So he said his daughter must be,” her voice curdled, “an American.
Free
.”

It was the kind of statement Momma would’ve assigned to the care of a hug. But I said: “Reckon it’s not always so great for you here.”

She had her face towards the moon again—which was just fine with me. “What do
you
think for me it is like?”

“You always look like … like you don’t care
jack
what anybody thinks. You always look, you know, like, like you don’t give a rip about public opinion. I’ve always liked that about you.”

“To pretend—this is for me to survive.”

I watched her profile, still and hard, which told me nothing. I followed her eyes to the moon.

“Is it beautiful?” I asked after several moments’ silence. “What’s it like, your home?”

She shrugged, a habit she must’ve gotten from me—and didn’t much suit her. “Colombo, the most big city, is full always of many people, and loud. And hot often. The roads are buses, cows, people in bare foot, bicycles, tuk-tuks—”

“What’s that?”

“Like a taxi, with three wheels only. The gutters are full. My father was a shopkeeper. But sometimes we traveled to the most high point, Mount Pidurutalagala.”

“What’s that like?”

“Waterfalls. Forests of big trees, old trees: pine, mahogany, ebony, teak. Women sold by the road cashews. Little villages I saw there. Very more cool than Colombo. At the end, we moved down the coast near to Beruwela. A very old mosque is there.”

“Your father got a better job?”

Farsanna shook her head. “My father rented to tourists equipment for sports in the water.”

“Oh. But you got to live at the beach. That must’ve been nice, huh?”

She leaned against the window frame. “I loved the rattle of the palms. Everywhere coconut palms. We drank from them, from coconuts, with straws. Everywhere was fruit: pineapple, watermelon, papaya, mangosteen, guava—you have these here? We, I mean. We have these here, no?”

“Some, I reckon. Nothing much exotic.”

“There are many rocks. The water was everywhere clear. And blue. So blue.”

I put on feigned surprise. “Bluer than our Blue Hole?”

She smiled, still gazing outside at the moon.

“Sounds like paradise.” That part I said more gently. “No wonder you miss it.”

“My family could not make a living there.” She turned toward me then, but seemed not much to see me. “No place on this earth,” she said, “is paradise.”

And over and over again that night, as I stumbled toward sleep, I slipped into faded dreams of Stray’s silky ears across Jimbo’s thigh. Of the screech of Em’s truck tires on Seventh Street as we tore away from gunfire and hailing streetlights.

I tried counting sheep, and then ticks of the Blue Hole’s rope swing with nobody on it. But then there was Mort’s face leering from the top of the sweetgum.

I tried smelling the sunbaked hemlock and decaying wood of the Hole, but I smelled instead the exhaust of the good Reverend Riggs’ El Camino as he, one foot on the running board, one foot on the road, straddled, indecisive, his intention to go.

As I crept closer to sleep, I saw Farsanna and me laughing and eating ice cream. And then came truck headlights like battering rams.

And I was reminded again that maybe things were worse than we thought, than we’d any of us been willing to say.

Those last words of hers swelled in my mind and wouldn’t leave room for sleep:
No place on earth is paradise.

There was more, I was sure, that she hadn’t told me. Something more that had happened out there on the road.

No place on earth is paradise.

That’s what I heard, propped up beside her against the pillows, both of us leaning a little in towards each other, staring down the blank face of the night. And that’s what I heard as I finally fell toward a sleep that was like tumbling down the slope toward the Hole:
Paradise … I miss my home, Turtle … No place on earth …