The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (31 page)

Clarice’s children were at home with Richmond. My three were at Mama and Daddy’s house being bribed into good behavior with candy bars and potato chips. Barbara Jean’s Adam was at Mama and Daddy’s, too—at least that’s what we thought. He’d left about half an hour earlier for the fifteen-minute walk to Mama’s house. This was a period of time when no one thought twice about a child of seven or eight walking a familiar path alone in Plainview. It was the last day of that era.

Lester answered the doorbell and I was surprised to hear James’s voice. In that big house the kitchen was half a block away from the front door, so I couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying. I don’t know if it was the tone of James’s voice or Lester’s that drew the three of us into the foyer to see what was going on, but I knew something terrible had happened the second I saw James’s face.

The first thing I thought was that it was one of our kids, or maybe Mama or Daddy. Then Lester, who’d had his back to us, turned around. Right away, I knew. So did Barbara Jean.

Lester’s skin had gone gray and I could see him wavering on his feet like he was standing in the center of a whirlpool. James, who was wearing his Indiana State Police uniform, stood in the doorway with another trooper, a big white guy with a smooth red face who kept his eyes focused on the floor in front of him. James reached out and held on to Lester’s shoulder to keep him upright.

Barbara Jean said, “Lester?” Tears began to fall from Lester’s eyes as he stood supported by James. Barbara Jean turned to James and asked, “What’s happened to Adam?”

It was Lester who answered her: “He’s dead, Barbie. Our boy is dead.”

And then Barbara Jean screamed. She screamed like she was trying to cover up every other sound in the world. I had never heard anything like that, and I hope to God I never will again. She started to stumble backwards, her feet losing traction and her arms flailing like she was suddenly standing on ice. The white cop stepped forward to keep her from falling, but I had her already. We fell back together against the wall and then slid down to that elegant parquet floor. She stopped screaming and started making a low, pained moan while I
squeezed her against my body and Clarice knelt beside us stroking Barbara Jean’s hair.

I heard Lester asking, “Where?” I heard James answer, “North end of Wall Road.”

Lester protested that it had to be a mistake. Like all the black children in town, Adam had been warned. He’d been told, time and time again, that bad people drove on that part of Wall Road. It couldn’t be Adam.

But James shook his head. “There’s no mistake. It’s him, Lester. It’s him.”

Lester stood up straight and knocked James’s hand from his shoulder. “I have to go see,” he said. Then he started for the door.

The white trooper tried to stop him. “Mr. Maxberry, you really shouldn’t. This isn’t something you want to see.” But James pulled a windbreaker from the coat tree near the door—it had started to sprinkle outside—and handed it to Lester, saying, “I’ll take you.” The men left while the three of us huddled on the floor.

By the time Lester and James came back, Barbara Jean was in her bedroom, lying with her knees drawn up to her chest. We lay beside her in the bed, me clutching her hand and Clarice praying, while Barbara Jean gasped out Adam’s name over and over like he’d hear her wherever he was and come on home. When she heard the sound of the front door opening, Barbara Jean hopped out of bed and ran downstairs, chasing after the one last bit of hope that it had all been a mistake and she’d discover pretty little Adam standing in the front hallway waiting for her.

We found James and Lester in the library. James stood by the fireplace watching his old friend and former boss pace the room and strike his head with his balled fists. Lester’s face wasn’t gray anymore; his light brown skin was purple with anger.

Lester said, “You know he did it. You know he killed my boy.”

James tried to calm him. “Lester, please just take a breath and sit down. They’re over at his place right now. I promise we’ll get to the bottom of it. I’m telling you, it’s not like it used to be.”

Lester snorted. “There’s nothing to get to the bottom of. You
know he did it. If you cops won’t do something, I swear to God I’ll take care of it myself.”

James said quietly, “Lester, please don’t let anybody but us hear you say that.”

Lester turned to Barbara Jean, his voice almost unrecognizable in his grief and fury. “Desmond Carlson murdered our Adam. He hit him with his truck on Wall Road. Hit him so hard our baby got tossed against a tree.” Lester started hitting himself in the forehead again as he croaked out his words. “His neck snapped, Barbie. That fuckin’ redneck piece of shit broke our baby’s neck.”

Barbara Jean let out a grunt and doubled over like she’d been punched in the stomach. Then she ran from the room. She was up the stairs and back in her bedroom before Clarice or I could get our feet moving. We went up after her when we heard the screaming start again.

Later that night in bed, James and I stared at the ceiling while he explained to me what had happened to Adam. James said Adam had been on his way to Mama’s house when he was hit. He was eight years old and knew that he was supposed to go the long way from his house to get to Grandma Dora’s, but Adam was an adventurous boy. The temptation of taking the shortcut had, apparently, been too great. And the risk of punishment hadn’t stopped him. James said, “I guess we haven’t done a good enough job of making them afraid.”

James said Lester was right about it being Desmond Carlson. There were tracks in the muddy road that led directly from the place where Adam was hit to the unnamed street that wound through the woods and led to a neighborhood of only five houses, one of them Carlson’s place. Desmond, who had been falling-down drunk when the police got to his house, claimed his truck had been stolen the day before and he hadn’t gotten around to reporting it. The truck was nowhere to be found and Desmond’s girlfriend was backing up his story. Even after the police had located the truck later that evening, hidden in the woods less than a mile from his house, its grille streaked
with blood, he’d stuck to his tale that he didn’t know a thing about what had happened to little Adam.

Desmond had probably been playing the same game of chicken he had been playing with blacks along Wall Road for years. This time he’d just gotten too close. Or maybe Desmond had simply been so drunk he couldn’t keep his truck in a straight line and it was just horrible luck all the way around. After all, Adam was so fair-skinned that most people seeing him would think he was a tanned white child. The
why
of it didn’t matter. The result was the same.

“We’ll get him, though,” James said. But he didn’t sound too certain to me.

James was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Adam was lying on his side against a tree. I thought Lester was going to die when he saw him. He made this terrible sound like he couldn’t breathe out, just in. Then he dropped down beside Adam and grabbed ahold of him and just rocked back and forth in the dirt and mud with him.”

“Oh, James,” I said, reaching out to touch my husband’s arm.

“When I finally got him onto his feet, he just stood there wheezing and staring down at Adam. Then he said, ‘Where’s his shoes?’ Over and over, he kept asking where Adam’s shoes were. He wouldn’t leave or let them take Adam away until we found the shoes.

“We poked around, looking in the weeds and underbrush for what seemed like forever, and the whole time Lester’s wailing louder and louder, ‘Where’s his shoes?’

“It was the coroner’s assistant who finally found them. They were twenty feet away at the side of the road, little white sneakers, just sitting there side by side, like they’d been polished and set out for him by his mama. Lord, Odette, I’ve seen some bad things since I’ve had this job, but as long as I live I don’t believe I’ll ever forget watching Lester put those shoes on that poor dead baby’s feet.”

James mumbled, “His face was okay. The back of his head was bashed in and his neck was broken. So was one leg and probably an arm. But his face was okay, so they’ll be able to have an open casket if they want to. That’s something, I guess.”

James and I rolled over toward each other in the bed and we pressed
our foreheads together. We both shook with tears of grief over Adam and sorrow for our friends. And we cried with guilty relief that this thing, the monster that all parents fear most, had swiped near to us with its sharp and merciless claws, but had not carried off one of our own babies.

Neither of us got any sleep on the night of that worst day. Both James and I were up and on our feet at least once every hour, prying open the doors of our children’s bedrooms to watch them as they slept safe in their beds.

The second round of chemo with the new drugs gave me an even fiercer ass-whupping than the first round. To make matters worse, in May the great love of my life deserted me. It wasn’t James. It was food that left me. I woke up one morning with a sour taste in my mouth that wouldn’t be scrubbed away with a toothbrush or rinsed out with mouthwash. Worse than that, nearly everything I ate tasted like tin. And what didn’t taste like tin, I couldn’t keep down.

Mama and Mrs. Roosevelt greeted me when I came into the kitchen. That morning’s breakfast was a cup of watered-down coffee—my stomach wouldn’t take full-strength anymore—and a small bowl of oatmeal that I couldn’t persuade myself to eat.

For the first time in my life, my doctor was concerned that I was losing too much weight too quickly. I wasn’t skinny by any stretch of the imagination, but I had lost several more pounds in a short period of time and I didn’t see any way I was going to slow down the weight loss. Food and I just weren’t getting along.

When I gave up on my oatmeal and rose from my chair at the kitchen table to toss the remainder away, Mama said, “You know what you need? You need some herb.”

“What?” I asked.

“Herb. Marijuana, ganja, buda, Tijuana tea, pot, bud, skunkweed, giggleweed, wacky tobacky, kif, reefer.”

“Stop showing off. I know what you’re talking about.”

“Whatever you wanna call it, that’s what you need,” Mama said. “It’ll fix that appetite of yours right up.”

I didn’t want to admit it, but I’d been thinking the same thing for a few weeks. I’d been on the computer researching it when James
wasn’t around, and I’d been thinking maybe medical marijuana might be the thing to get me back on track. Unfortunately, I didn’t live in a state where I could get it legally.

I said, “You may be right, Mama, but it’s not like I can go to the drugstore and order some. And please don’t tell me to go over to the campus and hang around at the frat houses. We both know where that leads.”

“Scaredy-cat. I thought you weren’t supposed to be afraid of nothin’,” Mama teased.

I wasn’t going to be baited that easily. “I mean it, Mama. James has had enough to deal with lately. I’m not about to get arrested and add to it.”

Mama let out an exaggerated sigh. “I won’t get you arrested, Miss Priss. Get dressed and come on with me.”

Once we were in the car, Mama guided me along the familiar route from my house to her and Daddy’s old place in Leaning Tree. She instructed me to park the car on the street, rather than in the driveway, and follow her around to the back. She led me and Mrs. Roosevelt behind the house and toward what remained of her once-magnificent garden. It had been a damp spring and my feet sank into the wet ground as we walked. I could hear Clarice playing the piano inside and I was thankful that she was occupied. I certainly didn’t want her to see me sneaking through the yard and ask me what I was doing: “Oh, hey, Clarice, my dead mama, Eleanor Roosevelt, and me were just heading out back to fetch some marijuana.”

We stepped onto the cobblestone garden path and passed the gazebo. It was already green with clematis and honeysuckle vines, though they hadn’t bloomed yet. We passed the roses and alliums and walked through the vegetable garden, which was untended and going wild that season. I hacked with my forearms at the tall reed grass and miscanthus Mama had grown at the back of her garden to keep prying eyes from spotting the illegal crop that James and I had pretended not to know about. A sad thought came to me then that brought our entire journey into question.

With as much gentleness as I could muster, considering I was
panting with exhaustion by then, I said, “Mama, you do realize that you’ve been gone for a long time now and nobody’s taken care of your special plants in years. I don’t think we’re gonna find anything still growing back there.”

“Hush,” she said. “We ain’t goin’ there.” We trudged on several more yards and then turned. Ahead of us was an old tool shed that I’d forgotten all about. It was a short structure, more the height of a child’s playhouse than a work shed. But Daddy had been a small man and he had made this shed for himself. It made me happy to see that it still stood and that, even though the vestiges of its white paint were long gone, leaving the bleached pine boards exposed, it looked solid. My daddy built things to last.

Mama instructed me to open the door of the shed. It took some effort because, although only a sliding wood bolt kept the door shut, reed grass and honeysuckle—which would smell divine in a month, but was now just an invasive pest—had nearly swallowed the building. I yanked repeatedly at the door until it opened just wide enough for me to squeeze inside.

We entered the shed to the rustling sound of small creatures scurrying for cover. Mama said, “Over there,” pointing at the back wall.

I climbed over an ancient push mower and a rusted tiller, and then stood staring at the wall. All I saw were cobwebs, mouse droppings, and corroded garden tools hanging from a pegboard. I asked Mama what exactly I was looking for and she said, “Just slide that board over to the left and you’ll see.”

I curled my fingers around the edge of the pegboard and gave it a vigorous shove. I didn’t need to try so hard, as it turned out. The board slid over on its metal track so easily you’d have thought it had been oiled that very day. Behind it, I saw an old plastic spice rack that was screwed into the wall. In the cubbyholes of the rack were small glass jars, each of them filled with brownish leaves and labeled in Mama’s neat, loopy handwriting with a name and a date.