Sacred Dust (31 page)

He chased me into the road yelling how sorry he was as I pulled away. I don’t care what guilt Lily asks me to alleviate by running something by his house. From now on, the answer is “No.”

I did have one thought on the way home. It came to me that
whatever you want to say about Dashnell, he’s no mystery. He wears who he is consistently on his sleeve and it never varies. Glen’s sickness is made of a closer woven and, in my opinion, a good deal more deceptive cloth. I try not to judge, but here lately I’ve quit upbraiding myself when I do. I knew from very early on where I stood with Dashnell. You couldn’t ever really know that with a man like Glen. I don’t think Lily ever came out and said she was afraid of him. I would’ve been. I don’t think it’s just because I’m afraid of everything. That man bears watching.

I
seen Rose’s car down at his house. I had to laugh out loud over that. Wouldn’t that just be her? His tart takes out for Texas with that fairy, and Rose is up there throwing her homely self at him? No, I had to laugh and laugh myself sick and drink a boiler-maker over that one. I seen that car down there just before dark. I waited till the sun was down and then I stood outside his kitchen window watching the two of them. I couldn’t hear what was said. But he was ranting and raving. Rose looked as if she was fixing to cry. They had some kind of fight with him following her to the car later on. She had obviously thrown herself at him. He’d rejected her. I did hear him say something about she’s a dry old bag. She scratched off, and I come back up here to the house gasping for air, I was laughing so damned hard.

Jake and Marjean have stood by me through this, and that’s a fine thing. They got an open door policy where I’m concerned. I can run down there for supper without invitation. Let me tell you, Marjean can cook, which Rose cannot. You know, in their way, all the boys has asked me was I doing all right, you know, since she left, and I’ve had a lot of good laughs over that. Am I all right? Hell, Rose is the one who’s gone off her nut.

Some of them has tried to suggest to me that there’s a connection between Rose losing her mind and me quitting KemCo. Well, they
ain’t met that skinny bastard supervisor I had up there. He always had something to say about me: I smelled like a box of wet puppies. I looked like I’d tied one on the night before. My work was sloppy. I insulted the women in the lunchroom. You name it. He had it in for me since day one. Hell, I knew him back in school. He’d wear the same clothes two weeks running and his teeth was black. But not no more. No, hell, prettiest white pearly teeth you ever seen. Pressed pants, slicked back hair, and I hear tell always running his hands up the skirt of a different secretary up in the front offices. Not that he don’t sing in church choir every Sunday. Oh, hell, yeah, he’s cleaner than Jesus Christ nowadays and all the time saying I smell like a box of wet puppies. As if I’m ashamed to sweat.

Well, it was one morning last week, the morning after Lily’s dish-rag sucker husband and I had some fun in his yard. You know, I kind of think that slick mama’s boy has the idea he whipped me. I’ve had a lot of laughs with that too. I told Jake about it and he says, “Hell, you should have rolled him over while you had him down and made him understand your point!”

I laughed my ass off and says, “Hell, I would’ve, Jake, but I was scared to death he’d like it.” We have a lot of fun up here on this lake.

Anyhow, I come into work ten minutes late that morning and Jerry, the supervisor, he’s on me in a flake of a second. I says, “Jerry, a man has a damned point and you’re pushing me to it.” He commences to tear down my appearance and tamper with my manhood and I says, “You got a factory full of sheep to butt-fuck, you get off my ass.” That’s when he tried to tell me I was fired. Hell, I rolled my eyes and went over to my stand and started soldering per usual. I never did notice where he walked off to, but he was back directly with the manager. The manager told me I was fired again. I just made like I didn’t hear him, so he blows a whistle and sends the whole line off for break twenty minutes early and then he has four security men eyeballing me. Was I going to go peaceably or was they going to have to haul me out of there? I laughed my head off at that and then I says, “You got no call to fire me. I quit.” I walked
out of there with my head so damned high it almost wouldn’t fit through the goddamned door.

I hated to have to put that jig in nigger heaven. I have nothing personal against any nigger, no truck or grudge or unpaid debt with their race. This world is overrun with white hypocrites. Because the fact is, there’s not a white person on this earth who wants to live around niggers. Truly decent niggers want to be with their own kind. It’s just that half of one percent of troublemakers in between who see a way to get themselves some attention by stirring the waters. The men who framed the United States Constitution was slaveholders. They had no intentions of handing God’s Promised Land over to the niggers.

My granddaddy could show you chapter and verse where it was wrote in the Good Book that niggers was meant as a servant race. I have searched and searched the Scriptures looking for that, but with our modern publishing companies controlled by Jew atheists, it was probably stricken right out, Holy Writ or not. Our Founding Fathers understood that. The great pyramids of Egypt, the Colosseum of Rome and the mighty Confederate nation here was built by the sweat of niggers who accepted that simple fact. I learned a very little in school, but in the peanut fields beside my daddy, I was privy to the wisdom of the ages. He wasn’t what you’d call an educated man, but he understood the foundations of freedom and he showed them to me. In his time, if a nigger jumped off the path, you hunted the son of a bitch down like a fox and you brought him into town and you strung him up and burned him as an emblem for all the world black and white to see. It wasn’t a pleasant task. It required stamina and courage and inner strength and vision. A lot of people would have you believe that those cherished characteristics have been lost by the white race.

Now, what got me to thinking about this is earlier this evening, I seen a Alabama Bureau of Investigation car parked up at Jake’s house. I hung around on the porch waiting until it left. I just knew Jake would come down here like a bullet. But after twenty minutes passed and he wasn’t, I walked on up there. I was barely into their backyard when I heard Marjean yelling that he’d better talk to the
others and get a straight story worked out. That was just some of her stupidity, because from time unmeasured, men of good will have operated off the code of silence. You don’t know nothing, and you don’t know nobody who does. I went on up the back steps and walked into the kitchen.

Jake was already out the front door, and when Marjean come into the kitchen, she looked at me like I was fixing to rape her and says, “We got a cherished custom in this country called knocking at a person’s door before you waltz on in.” I grinned thinking how much hell Jake would give her when I told him about that.

“I see y’all had company.”

“Jake did. I know nothing about it.”

“Don’t nobody know nothing about it.” I grinned, opening the refrigerator and helping myself to a beer. Jake is a brother to me and welcome to do the same in my house anytime. “What was they asking Jake?”

“I didn’t listen.”

“Where is Jake?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll just wait around here on the porch for Jake.”

“I’d rather you not.”

“What’s crawling up your butt?”

She’d been plenty hospitable to me when I spent six Saturdays running helping Jake get a new roof on their place.

“It don’t look nice. Me alone here with a man.”

Even Jake said he had to black out the bedroom and close his eyes before he could touch her. Snaggle toothed bitch.

“Go on home, Dashnell.”

Jake would be the first to tell you how mean she was. It never made sense to me, a good looking, square shouldered, tell it like it is fellow like Jake putting up with a bony mule like Marjean. If ever a man had a license to run around on his wife, she was it.

“What are you trying to hide, Marjean?” That scared her. She picked up her purse off the kitchen table and moved through the house out the front door, and I heard that Chrysler of hers cough and wheeze and then it spit gravel. How many times had my head
been under the hood of that old Newport adjusting the carburetor and changing the filter? I set there and drank three or four beers waiting on Jake. Around midnight I heard Marjean’s Chrysler hit the driveway. She came on into the house and walked directly into the kitchen.

“What are you doing in my house at this hour?”

She looked like she had just hopped off her broom and I told her as much.

“You get out and you keep out.”

I just smiled pretty as you please and got up from my chair and walked over to the door.

“You thank your Christian God that your husband is a brother to me, horse face,” I says. I get a lot of laughs. I swear to Buddha I do.

W
hy does trouble always come in the night? Mother and I had our coats on. We were standing on the front porch admiring the azaleas and Burford holly I had planted that afternoon. She had told me a hundred times they had Burford holly along the porch when she was a girl, but it had died the summer Granny passed away, and she never had the heart to replace it. I’m not much for Burford. It won’t grow much in a shady place like by the porch. It’s scraggly and it doesn’t trim up very neat. Mother was thrilled.

Next thing we knew, Marjean’s old Newport was squealing into the driveway. She thundered up the porch steps like a ball of fire and says, “I need to talk to you.”

She’d been on my back porch up at the lake a thousand times with exactly the same attitude. It was generally some witless piece of gossip she’d heard about herself, and half the time she’d come to accuse me of starting it.

“Let’s go on inside,” she says, cocking her head towards Mother as if she was blind or a child. Mother smiled sweetly at her, but underneath she was burning. Mother relegates Marjean to a group she refers to as that other class.

“How’s Jake?” I asked, hoping to get her directly onto the subject. Marjean will moan and lament generally for an hour before she zeroes in on the specific offense. I didn’t get up and go inside. I
motioned for her to sit. I don’t like Marjean, and at my age, I’ve completely give up hiding things from Mother. She figures it out anyway.

“It’s private,” she says. Mother was already insulted because Marjean didn’t so much as speak to her, and she was getting cold out there anyhow. She stood up. She looked Marjean in the eye and made an effort at a smile.

“How are you, Marjean?”

“Hey”—that with Marjean’s fists all knotted against her stomach and her tongue trying to dislodge something from between one of her teeth. Mother went on inside.

“How’s Jake?” I repeated as she sat on the edge of a metal chair as if she wanted to be able to take flight at a moment’s notice.

“It’s Dashnell you ought to be asking about.”

“Why?”

“He’s in trouble. Bad trouble. He’s going to need you.”

Marjean talked like that. I learned a long time ago not to panic when she slaps you with one of her dramatic openings.

“I heard he lost his job,” I said.

“That’s the least of it.”

I have no regret for leaving Dashnell except that I waited so long. But a change like I made comes at a price. It sharpens your edges a little. Marjean had bet my patience a hundred times before and my patience had always won. Not this time.

“I have no desire to sit out here in the cold and waltz with you, Marjean. What
kind
of trouble is Dashnell in?”

“Alabama Bureau of Investigation kind.”

The man on the lake. Some black preacher down in Birmingham had hounded the Alabama Bureau of Investigation about it. They’d been up and down the lake asking questions. They had computer records of three gun owners up there whose weapons could have been used. One of them was deceased. The other only used their house in the summertime and could prove they were in Savannah, Georgia, the night it happened. The third was Jake. They had taken his gun with them. What they could prove by that no one knew.

“But Jake isn’t going to set back and take blame for something he
didn’t do,” I says. “Because you have six men ready to testify it was Dashnell who pulled the trigger.”

“It was Dashnell’s idea,” she minced.

It was all of their idea. It was Dashnell they were planning to sacrifice. None of them amount to much. But all of them hold themselves out to be more than Dashnell. It was always as plain as mud to me that they sipped their liquor slow while he gulped his until he was fired up enough to do whatever they told him to do. It’s not that I hold Dashnell innocent. It’s just that I consider all of them guilty.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Don’t he have people in Oklahoma?”

He does, a sister.

“Might be best if he went to see them for a while.”

I’ll own a certain amount of ignorance, but I won’t accept that kind of stupidity. The Alabama Bureau of Investigation comes around asking questions, and Dashnell hightails it for Oklahoma. Oklahoma isn’t Hong Kong, China. They could bring him back if they wanted him.

“How would that look to the authorities, him running off?” I says.

“They wouldn’t have to know,” she says.

“Oh, they’d know,” I says. “It wouldn’t take much to get any one of y’all to tell them.”

That bothered her. She wasn’t sitting on Mother’s porch to put me wise. She was trying to figure out what I knew and where I stood and what I might have to say to the authorities. She had one concern, and that was how much I valued her skinny red neck. Was I going to tell the ABI who all had sat around my porch planning it that night? How much did I actually know? What proof did I have?