Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel (9 page)

“You could arrange it,” L. J. suggested, “in piles untended in the back of the truck. And you could drive in your typically pell-mell fashion down the Pike. That would disperse the wealth rapidly enough.”

Jimbo looked hurt. “Now what the Helsinki’d be the point in that? Why would you want it landing on folks already too loaded to stand up straight?”

I pulled his head toward me and ruffled his hair. “It’s why we all love you, dear Bo.”

“What Turtle means,” Welp snickered, “is her. She means she loves you, Bo.”

Once again, Bobby Welpler had come far too close to echoing what I hadn’t meant to be saying. But no one except Bobby caught how I turned pale and desperate just then.

L. J. leaned out over the Hole to address Farsanna at the end of our line of dangling legs. “Excuse me, Sri Lanka. But since you’re currently garnering information about America, take heed: The particular specimen you see before you,” he motioned to Bo, “would not personify the American Way.”

Farsanna’s small feet kicked a circle of froth. “This,” she asked L. J., but she was looking at Jimbo, “is not to you so attractive?” We all stared at her feet and the froth, then at Jimbo, who grinned at the ground.

We laughed at the blood that was rising from Bo’s neck into his cheeks.

Farsanna was speaking again. She’d shifted her focus to L. J. “You will make much money?”

“Most assuredly I will. And not by selling cow poop and pine bark to octogenarian gardeners.”

The new girl leaned forward to listen. “Tell to us how you will make it.” It was not a challenge but a question, a real one. And that was the thing about her: Like steam rising from her steady simmer of anger or worry—whatever it was—came this need to know—almost desperately—how the rest of us thought, how we saw the world and chose to handle what it might throw at us.

L. J. sneered. “If Emerson can find someone to pay him to live the life of a bibliophile, I’ll find someone to pay me to be unpleasant. It’s what I do best.”

“Well, friend,” Jimbo laughed with the rest of us, “you already got that goat good and roped.”

“You wait. The world shall reward my skill. Hey, what about Turtle? We’ve not yet been privy to her professional aspirations.”

Farsanna leaned past Emerson, sitting close beside her, to look me in the eye. “An American woman may do as she wishes, yes?”

Em tugged on the fringe of my cutoff shorts, then on my ponytail, wet and limp and weighted with Blue Hole silt. “Fashion model, no doubt.”

I bounced up to my feet and pretended to walk a runway, pausing to show off an imaginary ensemble. “Note the lines,” I emceed myself, “the detail, the exquisite proportions of this one-of-a-kind creation.”

My brother, bless him, clapped for me.

Jimbo, better still, catcalled and whistled. “Wearing,” he announced into a microphone-hand, “designer duds from the exclusive Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers.”

Bobby Welpler hadn’t spoken to that point. But then: “I’m sayin’ Turtle here’s gonna be an erratic dancer.”

“Erotic,” L. J. corrected, laughing. “Or exotic.”

I felt my spine shrinking down into my heels.

“Yeah, right,” Welp roared, framing a marquee with his hands. “‘GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS—AND THEN THERE’S TURTLE!’”

It was a direct hit at my figure—my figure that wasn’t—my baggy T-shirts and ratty shorts, my big flop as a flirt: my not being a girl, as girls go.

Then “Can it, Welp,” came from Em and Jimbo together, but it arrived late and Bobby, smirking, knew he’d scored a hard hit, which was when Farsanna pulled herself to her feet, small-boned and yet somehow gianting just then over Bobby. “And when you have many years more,” she asked him, “what will
you
someday become?”

But Welp didn’t answer, focusing instead on his knife and his stick. Under the smolder of Sanna’s black eyes, Welp’s gloat shrank into a sulk.

Like her quiet gift for making us feel larger and grander, we witnessed that day Sanna’s talent for the opposite, for decimating anyone who failed to observe the bonds of loyalty or affection. I waited until the boys were back in the water, and I stood beside her.

“Hey, Sanna,” I said. “Thank you.”

She waved this away. “It is nothing. You would be protective of me, no?”

It wasn’t a question. And yet I wondered:
Would
I do the same for her?

8
Beauregard

I think that was the day I decided the new girl and I could be friends. For a girl, Farsanna Moulavi was not at all bad. But she was still a girl, and sometimes, even with her, I was reminded why I’d never much liked my own kind.

Her swimming in clothes quickly became impractical, so I gave her one of my old swimsuits, one I’d never much liked. The first time at the Blue Hole she lifted her blouse and her skirt to reveal my suit underneath, L. J. tripped over his feet and Welp ran smack into a tree and Emerson dropped the truck keys into the water when he was aiming them for his pants pocket. He even removed his Red Sox cap, and then returned it to his head backwards, bill forward.

Jimbo was the only one of them who said anything, and that was only to me.

“Well,
remember me at Christmas,
” he whispered, all hoarse.

I pretended I didn’t hear and dove off my finger of rock.

Farsanna was short and dark so you wouldn’t have guessed it, but the new girl looked good in my suit.

“Your daddy approve?” I asked her later. Reckon I was feeling a little vindictive.

“In America, girls who are good wear a bathing suit, no?”

“Even good girls, you mean, wear bathing suits. Sure,” I muttered, and wondered if maybe she might catch a cold soon and not be able to join us sometimes at the Hole—and wouldn’t that just be a shame. And I was trying to recall why I’d passed on my old suit to her. “He’s a real sucker for anything American, huh? Your dad, I mean.”

Emerson’s Big Dog snoozed on her side on my left, the Stray on my right.

I was feeling sleepy myself, a rock for my pillow, when Farsanna offered, “In my home … in Sri Lanka, some Muslim women even do wear bathing suits since the 1950s or so. The expectation for the hijab has been somewhat relaxed, although some women prefer to keep the hijab.”

“Like your mother.”

“Yes, like
Mata
. She says that women are responsible for not tempting men. American women do not believe that, no?”

I lay on my back thinking of the new girl in my suit, and of the boys’ reaction to her. I pretended not to hear her question and stroked Big Dog’s pudgy stomach. Here was a creature everyone loved, especially Em and Jimbo, and she was no picture of perfect proportions.

I turned my head toward Sanna. She probably didn’t deserve to be punished, I was trying to convince myself, for looking good in my suit.

“And Shelby … who does ... are you asleep, Shelby?”

“No …” It occurred to me then I might tell her to call me Turtle. But I didn’t. Not yet.

“Who does Jimbo …? Does he … prefer … someone?”

“You mean prefer, like,
prefer
?”

“Yes. Jimbo.”

Sanna’s tone sure sounded casual-like—that’s what I reckoned, lying stone still, my eyes closed. Maybe if I pretended to have drifted back off, the question would die right there where it had got itself born—breach, and not right in the head.

But she propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over me. I could smell curry.

I told myself that the metal tacks mamboing on my insides wasn’t fear for myself—only concern for her sake. For her mistake. I opened one eye. “You know,” I began slowly, “his momma named him after a Civil War hero, some great-great-great-something or other in the family.
Beauregard.
Which is how she got accepted into the Daughters of the Confederacy, real active member.” I shut that one eye and waited.

Farsanna did not budge.

I opened the other eye this time and tried another sail into the wind. “Jimbo’s never been one to go out much just for the sake of something to do.”

“Then he is … dating … no one?”

Now she was making me mad, her not understanding, not even trying. “Jimbo? Shoot. Who’d go out with Jimbo?” I lifted my head to see her looking at me, and returned my head to its rock. “He’d rather spend an evening reading
Consumer Reports
on fertilizer and pulling ticks off the Big Dog. Not,” I told the beast beside me, “that there’s anything the matter with that.”

I could feel the new girl’s eyes on me and the dog. “He is nice for looking.”

“Big Dog’s a girl.”

“No, I—”

“Who ...?” I shielded my eyes with my hand. “
Jimbo?
”

“Yes. You do not think—?”

“Shoot.
No.
”

It was partially true anyway. Jimbo Riggs was not handsome, not really. Dark hair stuck out over his ears in crow’s wings because he never could remember to keep it clipped. His two front teeth stuck out slightly and just barely crossed; his nose was a little too large; his eyebrows, a little too bushy. Like a koala bear cub, Jimbo Riggs was one of those irresistible creatures who meet not one single standard of beauty.

And then, too, Jimbo Riggs’ green eyes always looked up to mischief—mischief he himself probably knew nothing about. His way with language was the only form of rebellion he’d ever practiced: All the fathers on the mountain trusted Jimbo fully with their daughters, a reputation Jimbo preferred not be publicly known.

“Em,” I once asked my brother as we rocked on our front porch. “You and Jimbo are both still virgins, aren’t you?” I’d never used the word—outside singing “Silent Night” during the annual Methodist church pilgrimage my mother forced on our family. But I was feeling grown-up that day, and worldly.

Em’s fingers froze on the neck of his guitar. “Where’d my kid sister learn to talk that kind of smut?”

“Well, aren’t you?”

Jimbo was there on the porch too, sprawled deep in the hammock. “Now Turtle, my girl,” came from inside the hammock’s green folds, “what comes to make you think that?” His hands were dropping peanuts into the glass neck of a bottle—the way he liked his Cokes best.

“It’s what people say, is why.”

Jimbo sat up slowly. He and Emerson exchanged glances. “Well, sweet tea and Jesus,” Jimbo said.

Emerson thrummed a mangled chord. “Lord, Bo. It’s even worse than we thought.”

And then there were Jimbo’s dimples: Whether or not they’d got the consent of their owner, they said flattering things girls wanted to hear. Even a best friend’s little sister could see the attraction. Maybe especially a best friend’s little sister.

Though I chose not to say so to the new girl.

“I don’t know that Jimbo’s your type,” was what I managed instead.

Sanna propped herself up on one elbow. “And your brother?” she asked. “He is not either my type?”

I could feel her inspecting my face. I could feel the air between us, hot and humid, unstable, like summer had reached a rolling boil.

But she said no more of Jimbo Riggs that day. Or my brother Emerson, either. So I told myself there was no need for me to explain. Things happened around Jimbo, and at the Blue Hole, that didn’t make sense, not given how the rest of the world worked. I told myself she ought to know by now about lines, and about boundaries and walls. “‘Good fences make good neighbors,’” Em had quoted from one of his poets to me months ago. It was during a dispute over the bathroom we shared, but I thought now how that was true. Sanna surely understood about how things could go only so far and no farther.

A “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was all well and good in its place, and we all sang along on the front porch when Em or Jimbo thrummed out Simon and Garfunkel on the guitar. But some waters couldn’t be bridged overnight, or at all, and she ought to be able to see that.

9
In the Heat of the Night

Down in the Valley, police had yet to turn up a suspect in the Seventh Street shootings. One of the victims, whom the paper described as a fifty-year-old black female, was released from the hospital. The area of her shoulder that a bullet had grazed had become badly infected.

“Hey, L. J.,” I said as we slid down the final drop to the Blue Hole. Maybe it was the descent that reminded of me of our trip to the Valley, or maybe it was the eerie red of the twilight that was settling into the rim of the Hole that reminded me that darkness was coming, and how arson fires still burned most nights down in the city. “L. J., you read this morning’s paper?” Of course he had: He was L. J. I didn’t wait for his answer. “You know the article on the search for the perpetrators of the Seventh Street shooting, how it mentioned one of the victims was finally healing well?” Dusting himself off from the slide, he nodded and let me go on. “Well, how come we didn’t even know she was hurt in the first place? I mean, do you remember the paper’s ever mentioning a bullet actually made contact?”

L. J. pushed his horn-rims up his nose and examined the water. “First, we weren’t fully cognizant because we didn’t go back to check.”

“You think we should’ve gone back?”

“What do
you
think?”

“I think our parents would’ve tanned our hides if they’d known we were there in the first place.”

“Beside the point. And secondly, we didn’t know because the paper only informed us of what we wanted to hear: that no one was seriously injured, no reason for concern.”

“But …” I felt contentious. Something about L. J. always made me take the other side of a subject. “But her shoulder
was
just grazed.”

My cousin let his glasses slide down the sweat on his nose so he could give me a look over the top of the rims. “If the group of women on the sidewalk had been you and Farsanna …” He stopped there, reconsidered. “If
you’d
been the one on the walk and a bullet brushed by your shoulder, and the guy firing might have been drunk and might have been black, do you think it likely that our legal system would have tracked down at least one suspect by now?”

I felt the wet red clay rise between my bare toes. I might have answered, eventually, but L. J. grew tired of waiting—if he even expected an answer—and rose, leaving his glasses folded alongside his towel. By the time I’d thought of a way to respond, L. J. was upside down on the rope swing, his legs flailing back over his head in a slow roll whose final flourish, a loud, full-belly flop, earned him applause and hoots from the boys lined up at the sweetgum.

_________

On the way home from the Hole that evening, after ice cream, we stopped first at Sanna’s, which was closest to the Dairy Queen. In the house, one light burned in the living room, unguarded by curtains. I thought I saw the top of a head, or perhaps the mound of a rounded back.

Farsanna must have noticed my squinting to see better.

“My father is making a prayer,” she offered. But only that. And even that, the word
prayer
, pronounced with a kind of a warning, told me that she would not willingly offer more.

I nodded, to let her know I’d no desire to go panning for more—which was true. Religious practices of the truly faithful have always made me nervous—maybe because I’ve lived my life outside the glass with my nose pressed against it. Those who water their beliefs down to weak broth I tolerate better, maybe because I can scorn them.

But a man with his face to the floor in that red box of a house was not something I needed to know more about. I wondered what he was praying about. If I’d been in his place, knowing what I knew about where he’d moved his family, I’d have prayed for safety from a whole band of heavenly hosts—anyone they could give me.

“I was under the impression,” L. J. mused, his arms crossed over folded knees, “that your family were not practicing Muslims.” It was a real request for information, and lacking several layers of his usual sneer.

Farsanna sat in the truck bed, apparently in no hurry to exit. “The parents of my parents follow more closely,” she returned. “My parents do not follow completely all …” She felt for the word.

“Are not devout,” L. J. corrected.

She nodded. “Yes. However—”

“Which is evidenced,” he continued like it was an additional mathematical fact required to solve this equation, “by your being allowed to run around virtually naked.”

We all scowled at L. J.

His face torched red underneath his glasses. “That is, scantily clad. At the Blue Hole, at least. Naked, I mean, only relative to female populations among devout followers of Islam.”

I’d never seen my cousin so rattled, and I was enjoying the show—though it occurred to me to be hurt that no one had ever accused me of looking practically naked when I’d worn that same suit.

L. J. was trying to dig himself out of his hole. “That is, naked not in any epistemological sense, but only in a comparative …” Wisely, he shifted direction. “I believe you mentioned Sri Lanka was Buddhist.”

Farsanna didn’t seem to be much offended. “In Sri Lanka, it is not most common to be Muslim. Nearly seventy percent Buddhist is the population. Fifteen percent Hindu. The Moors, my people, speak Tamil as our first language, but are not of the Tamil people. We support the Sinhalese government. However, we wish most to be left in peace.”

L. J. nodded, looking relieved to be back on the firm footing of world politics. “You’ve faced discrimination, then?”

Sanna glanced up at us. “Yes.” She shifted in her seat and played with Stray’s ear.

“So,” Bobby Welpler interjected from the corner of the truck bed where he’d been sulking in a tight, curled-up ball, “you folks just plain don’t belong, huh? Nowhere. Reckon your people would be just like old Stray here.”

I hurled a handful of loose mulch toward Welp’s corner. “Stray belongs with Sanna. Sanna belongs with us. You got a problem with that?”

Bo squeezed my leg in approval. But Sanna’s face didn’t register that she’d heard my heroic defense of her. She directed her response to Welp. “It,” she said slowly, “has been sometimes difficult.”

From his corner, Welp’s eyes were glowing like a cat in a closet. “So what do you people do? Worship rocks? Or trees, maybe? Line up behind your daddy and his fifty-nine wives and bow west?”

“East, idiot,” was L. J.’s contribution.

Jimbo motioned for Welp. “Bob, you got something on you. C’mere.”

Welp leaned over for Jimbo to see, while Jimbo wiped his own filthy thumb in two swipes, down and across, over Welp’s forehead.

“Ashes to ashes,” Bo said. And that was all.

After dropping off Sanna, we passed the Pump and Run, and Jimbo put his hand up in greeting. Mort Beckwith was there filling his tank, and, moving in his usual slow motion, his big head swung up from where he’d been staring at the gas nozzle and focused in on the back of our truck only once we’d passed by.

At the end of Fairview, where my cousin lived, L. J. swung himself out of the flatbed.

Welp stood too. “Reckon I’ll come spend the night again.”

L. J. never turned his head. “No,” he said, his Keds already crunching up the gravel drive. “Reckon you won’t.” With his hand held above his head in a quick wave—more of a chop—but his face never turning, he disappeared behind the screen door.

Bobby Welpler recoiled into his ball and did not speak until we reached his mother’s drive, two parallel dirt tracks between which knee-high weeds flourished. No lights glowed from the trailer, not even the faintest pulse of a television screen that, it occurs to me now, I’d always seen as its weak, flickering heart.

His eyes on the dark trailer, Welp paused for moment just before he lowered himself to the ground. There, too, he stood looking, his hands on his hips.

“Anybody home, you reckon?” Jimbo asked gently as Welp began his approach, not once turning to look back over his shoulder.

Bobby did not turn back, but only barked over his shoulder. “Beat it,” was Bobby Welpler’s benediction to us.

_________

On the next Saturday afternoon, punctured to useless by thundershowers and drizzle, Emerson and I stayed home to read. I’d just discovered a third Brontë sister, Anne—Emily and Charlotte had been my favorites the summer before—and I was busy helping the heroine escape with her son from the demon of a husband who’d just installed his mistress as the son’s governess.

Tucked inside the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue,
The Complete Poems of John Donne
was open on Emerson’s chest. I knew better than to let out I knew it was there.

Emerson and Jimbo had just that week determined to look more official and paint their business’s name on the cab doors of the truck: Big Dog Lawn and Garden Beautifiers. Jimbo had phoned that morning.

I answered. “Maynard residence. Shelby speak—”

“Hey, lady,” Jimbo said.

“Hey.”

“Tell that guy who claims to be your brother he ain’t half as good-looking as you, and that I got to paint the truck door with our name, so I can’t make it to the Hole today. Got to design the sign—design the sign this time in rhyme—”

“In
rhyme?”

“Naw. Just got going and couldn’t stop.”

“But it’s supposed to rain, Bo.”

“Who the whom says?”

“Me. Look at the sky.”

“Then tell him I gotta de-lice my nose hairs and can’t make it.”

“I’ll tell him, but—”

“So we’ll go tomorrow, okay?”

“I’ll tell him. But, Bo—”

“You be good, Turtle.”

“Hey, Jimbo?”

“Yep?”

“You know, did I ever tell you I’m not real fond of that name.”

“Of
Turtle?
”

“Yeah. Turtle.”

“Me either. Corn-shuckin’ shame you got stuck with it.”

“But it was you who gave me it, Bo.”

“Poor Turtle-Girl. Didn’t your momma ever warn you ’bout hanging with the wrong crowd?”

L. J. called after that to say he and his brothers had to help their daddy at the Feed and Seed unloading bales of pine straw. “I have been unavoidably detained” was actually how he said it, but the few of us who liked L. J. even a little back then tried to help cover for his talking funny. So L. J. couldn’t go to the Hole either. Emerson made a point of calling Farsanna—
we gotta at least let her know that nobody’s going today,
he explained—but nobody was home.

I don’t recall if we thought to call Bobby Welpler.

It was nearly dinnertime when the sun came out and my novel’s husband-villain was finally killed off. I had decided along with Anne Brontë that they were all villains—all husbands, I mean, maybe all men—and I turned to Big Dog lying beside me for comfort. I stretched out full length in the hammock I’d been curled in for hours, and raised my head slightly toward Em. “You hungry? Wanna go out?”

Emerson lowered his
Sports Illustrated
, its tell-tale weight in the middle making it slip from his hands. Real hastily, he tucked John Donne back beneath a tanned, busty blonde in a chartreuse bikini—it was college before I learned how much John Donne would have liked that.

“Where?” It was a rhetorical question. Pisgah Ridge in those days had only two restaurants: Hog Wild and one other, a brown daisy linoleum kind of place called the Home Plate Special. But with its all-you-can-eat buffet of fried okra, broiled liver and onions, black-eyed peas, and cornbread, the Plate was the exclusive domain of folks who cut coupons and remembered the Great Depression firsthand. There was, okay, maybe a third place to eat, a concrete box fixed to the side of our one gas station—what Jimbo never called by its name, Pump and Run, favoring something close and a bit cruder—but their sandwiches stank of brake fluid.

Emerson and I borrowed our mother’s car, since Jimbo had kept Emerson’s truck to paint their new name on its door. We swung by the Riggs’ parsonage on Elm, twelve blocks away. At first, no one answered the door.

“Hey, Em,” I launched out, making a point of inspecting the brass dogwood door knocker, “does Bo prefer … I mean does Bo … you know …
like 
… anyone?”

My brother stared at me. “Well, I know you’re not asking for yourself, since I
know
Bo’s like another brother to you, and only Alabamans get funny that way.”

I swallowed hard. “Don’t be weird. I meant, like, you know, anybody. Like maybe Neesa or Haley, that crowd. Like, does he think they’re … you know …”

“Like they’re
what?
”

“Like they’re … good-looking … or something.”

“Well, sure.”

“
What
?”

“Sure he does. You think the man hadn’t got eyes? And if he could make out with ’em and leave without having to try to actually talk with them, he’d do it, I reckon. But as it is, he’d just as soon spend his evenings with me. Or Big Dog. Or you.”