The Lost Songs (5 page)

To her relief, Rebecca, who was in concert choir and honors chemistry with her, was in Youth Group, and so was Jenny, another soprano.

But instead of playing games during which Doria might find a partner and make inroads to friendship, the kids were forced to listen to some woman named Miss Kendra talk about her hot meal ministry. Of course, in the South people were so polite you couldn’t tell what they really thought. They sat with their cheerful expressions and their nice posture and Doria tried to imitate them.

It seemed that every Saturday morning, Miss Kendra prepared—in her own kitchen, on an ordinary stove—enough food for a hundred people. Then she drove into poor neighborhoods and served dinner right out of her car to anybody who walked up hungry.

Doria was impressed. No soup kitchen in town? Fine. I’ll do it myself. Doria wanted to be just like that—stopped by nothing.

Miss Kendra had come to Youth Group because she needed volunteers. Everybody’s hand went up. It sounded so fun.

Except—where were these poor neighborhoods? Court Hill looked pretty prosperous to Doria. It was a difficult town to get a hold on. Everything was brand-new and weirdly identical. It was strewn with housing developments, each with a
cute name emblazoned on a brick wall. Half the streets weren’t even on GPS yet. There was nothing local about Court Hill: its features were more like national currency—they could be spent anywhere and nobody would notice a difference. CVS and Walmart and Target and Rite-Aid and all the other pharmacy chains and box stores and groceries were so regularly spaced that you didn’t measure in miles; you measured by stores.

Doria couldn’t think of anyplace she would consider poor, where there were actual hungry people.

Miss Kendra beamed at all those hands in the air. But she wanted only one volunteer at a time. “We don’t go into a neighborhood like an army,” she explained. “When we serve meals, there’s me and my husband, Mr. Billy, because I don’t drive into Chalk unless there’s a man along, and then I like two other people. One has to be an adult, but one of you kids would be a great help next Saturday.”

Doria wanted to laugh when Miss Kendra referred to her husband as “Mr. Billy,” which sounded like the name of a goat in a nursery rhyme, but it was the local style. Children here grew up calling their friends’ dads Mr. Nick or Mr. Jason. They called their Sunday-school teachers Miss Joanne or Miss Katy. Doria couldn’t go there. It was like the way they called their male teachers “sir” and their female teachers “ma’am.” It didn’t sound polite to Doria. It sounded like a military academy.

She wondered what Chalk was. Presumably not the stuff with which little kids wrote on sidewalks.

When the Youth Group realized that only one of them was wanted for this volunteer opportunity, they lost interest. Only Doria’s hand was still up, making her the sole volunteer for next Saturday.

There was no way out.

She couldn’t say to Miss Kendra, I don’t actually care about you and your mission. I don’t want to do good. I just want a friend.

Now, in chorus, Doria entered the music, which was so much easier than entering a social life. The baritones were history. Now she played the alto part, the tenor part, the soprano part, and finally all four together. This stumped most pianists. It was hard to read four staves. Doria did it all the time and hardly noticed.

Lutie was so sorry she had come back to school after her shocking morning. The shadowy figure of the professor inside the music office was a threat. It tangled her mind, as if she didn’t have enough knots and shreds thinking about Saravette.

Of course when she was desperate for chorus to end, Mr. Gregg dismissed them late. The next class, Music Appreciation, was coming into the big music room before the chorus had even stopped singing.

In previous years, bored kids who needed an easy credit signed up for Music Appreciation. This year, another type had enrolled. Train’s type.

Train Greene was trouble. He lived on a street where drugs ruled, and he planned to be one of the rulers, like his brother before him. His big brother, DeRade, had finally gotten the prison sentence he’d been working on for so long, and now it was Train who was preparing for prison, the way Lutie was preparing for college.

The older Greene brother had been a pit bull, a boy who should have been on a chain but instead roamed the neighborhood, biting children. DeRade developed a taste for twisting arms, and broke one or two. He not only kicked dogs, he
ran after them in order to kick them. It was something when a junkyard dog was afraid of a kid.

Train had not caught up to the level DeRade had achieved at his age, but Lutie figured it was only a matter of days. Train was seventeen now and six foot two. He’d been pretty hefty for a while, well over two hundred pounds, and a football-team wannabe. Train had not made the team. Perhaps that was what had made him so angry.

Train had lost weight in the months since DeRade went to jail. He now had the thin tight look of a starving animal. His eyes blazed feverishly. Lutie figured dogs with rabies had eyes like that.

Train buzzed into the music room like a hornet. People looked elsewhere, because making eye contact with Train wasn’t good. They stepped aside quickly, because blocking Train wasn’t good.

If Train had made the football team, thought Lutie, he’d be at practice every afternoon. If they weren’t going to confine him to jail, they could at least confine him to the gym.

The professor emerged from Mr. Gregg’s office. What a contrast the two men were: blustery red-cheeked yellow-haired Mr. Gregg, his shirt untucked and his tie askew; slim trim ebony Professor Durham, looking like a guest on a Wall Street talk show. They seemed unaware of the chaos caused by the boy formerly known as Cliff Greene.

Doria got up from the piano bench. Train stuck out a huge foot, his white sneaker filthy and his laces dangling. Doria stumbled on it, Train withdrew it quickly, smiling, and Doria lurched into the line of exiting sopranos. Her books and music—the ugly yellow plastic briefcase she always carried, and her little red purse, which she had forgotten to zip—flew out of her hands. From the purse shot coins, pencils, a cell
phone, Chap Stick and keys that hung from a brass treble clef chain.

Only Lutie, stranded in the top row while the sopranos dawdled, saw that Train had tripped Doria on purpose. Rebecca and Jenny, closer to the door, just saw clumsy Doria. Sighing, they paused to retrieve Doria’s scattered belongings. Train stooped and picked up Doria’s key chain. He held it by the brass treble clef, swinging the keys too high for Doria to reach. Train loved to withhold things. “Lots of keys,” he said, in the creepy taunting voice he had begun using this year.

Train and DeRade had a nice mother, and although DeRade had never been nice, Train had been sweet when he was little. Miss Veola—whose church Train had attended until he’d gotten too big for his mama to order him around—believed that if she could just separate Train from bad influences, he would return to being nice.

Lutie did not believe that.

Kids like Train were not making choices about being nice; they were making choices about getting attention. Nice kids were noticed by their mothers. Vicious kids were noticed by everybody. DeRade Greene was famous. Train wanted the same. He too wanted some girl to say admiringly, “You the baddest.”

Train jangled the keys in the air. “You the super for an apartment building, Doria?”

Doria shook her head. “Thank you for picking up my keys,” she said, all Yankee and prim, holding out her hand.

Train kept the keys out of reach, separating two of them. “Car keys,” he identified. “The other seven?”

Lutie elbowed her way forward down the risers.

Once they had all been friends—Kelvin and Lutie and Cliff, before anybody had thought of calling him Train. They got off the school bus at the same stop near Chalk. Lutie
would walk all the way to Peter Creek and hop from rock to rock across the water. Sometimes she fell in. Then she’d slime home to MeeMaw, who would say, “Girl, either improve your balance or get off at the next stop instead and use the bridge!”

Last year, after a homicide, Train’s brother was picked up by the police. Somebody had ratted on DeRade. People in Chalk did not talk to the police; it was a lapse of judgment on the part of a kid who thought he was helping society. The police didn’t have enough evidence to keep DeRade. He was out in a day and went straight for the kid who’d ratted on him. Poor Nate got himself packed in barbed wire one night and lost an eye.

The barbed wire had been cut right out of the fence in DeRade and Train’s backyard. Nobody had mended it. The big rectangle was still there, sagging on both sides. Since DeRade boasted about getting Nate, it was easier to put him in jail this time, and eventually he got the years in prison he’d been hoping for.

Everybody knew that Train had been along. But DeRade didn’t give his brother up, and Nate, who had learned a hard lesson, told the police it had been very dark out and he hadn’t seen his attacker.

He really couldn’t see now.

Lutie thought of Saravette, who hung twenty-four hours a day with people like DeRade. Who might
be
a person like DeRade.

“House keys,” said Doria, so brainless that she pointed them out to Train. “And church keys.”

Train looked repelled. “Church keys?” Then he laughed. “Which church?”

Lutie didn’t like this. Churches had terrific music equipment—high-quality electric keyboards and guitars, drums and microphones. Recording gear. In church offices
were computers and printers, and in old Sunday-school rooms, air-conditioning units.

If you planned to steal, you wanted a building to be empty. But if you were looking for entertainment, which was more up Train’s alley, you might want to enter when somebody was there. Somebody like Doria.

Alone.

Jenny handed over Doria’s fallen cell phone and said in her high, carrying soprano, “Doria, is it true that you practice the organ in that big old church every day by yourself? You’re alone in the dark with the music?”

Telling Train that here was a girl who stayed alone and unsafe in the dark of an empty building? And by the way, you’re holding the key?

Finally Lutie arrived on the scene. She plucked the key ring from Train’s hand, tucked it into Doria’s purse, zipped the purse closed, hooked her arm in Doria’s and said over her shoulder, “She’s never alone, Jenny. What idiot would be alone in a big empty building? Come on, Doria, we’re late for lunch.”

Kelvin believed that Train needed to be on strong medication.

Of all the boys who had dropped out of school—this was a school system where less than two-thirds of kindergartners would be onstage to receive a high school diploma twelve years later—what a puzzle that Train still attended. Even more amazing that he remained at large in a neighborhood like Chalk, where a quarter of the young men either had been or were now in juvenile detention or jail, and his own brother was serving a prison sentence. You would have expected him to drop out in eighth grade, go straight to drug-dealing and die young.

When Kelvin and Train—Cliff, back then—were little,
they had gone to the same church. Kelvin had memories of them both getting Sunday-school attendance pins.

Every Sunday, Miss Veola prayed for her young men: Lord, keep them in school. Keep them righteous. Keep them safe. Keep them from doing bad things. And if they do bad things, keep them from harming others.

She was a realist, Miss Veola. She didn’t pretend there was no evil in the world. She didn’t pretend there was no evil in Chalk.

African American ministers made a great effort to get their teenage boys off the road to prison and onto the road of ordinary lives, but the trouble was—who wanted to be ordinary? Jobs, mortgages, lawn mowing? What was the attraction?

Even Kelvin didn’t want those.

Kelvin’s parents felt that most evil came from drugs. Every day of Kelvin’s life, his parents would demand to know who his friends were. “Pretty much everybody,” Kelvin would say.

“And Quander? You friends with Quander?” his mom asked.