The Wreckage (29 page)

“Did I hurt you?”

“I want it to hurt a little,” she whispered, rocking her hips to urge him on.

Before he came she reached down to his ass, slid a wet finger inside him, and the unexpected burn of it set him off. The afterglow simmering all the way to his toes.

He lay awake a long time afterwards, trying to understand what could possibly have kept him from this sweetness for so long. And he could hear the voice in his head warning him off it even now, repeating its single word of advice:
Run, run, run
.

In September, something happened to Magnolia Cooksey. When she came to the theatre she was grim and withdrawn. She didn’t sing to herself as she worked through the aisles and when Wish stopped in to say goodnight she only said, “Yes sir,” curtly. She seemed angry with him personally, although he couldn’t imagine what might have prompted it.

One evening he said, “Is everything all right, Magnolia?”

She was halfway down the aisle and stood upright, one hand on the back of a chair. “Mr. Furey,” she said. “Do you know where I’m from? Where I belong?”

“Down south, is it?”

“I am from Mississippi,” she told him. “From the Delta.”

“Did I do something?” he asked her.

She bent back to the aisle to say she was through talking.

Wish mentioned Magnolia to Jane on the El the next morning as they rode into the stockyard, thinking maybe it was a woman’s problem of some sort that plagued her, something another woman would be able to explain to him.

Jane turned her head away from him slightly and blew air through her lips. She had been hinting broadly at marriage since their first night together and was becoming increasingly frustrated that Wish ignored her on the matter. When Jane said she loved him, he nodded into her hair or squeezed her hand, incapable of returning the sentiment. It was just a matter of time, he told himself. She had the two boys to think about and wasn’t about to wait around forever.

Jane said, “Who’s to say what goes on in a nigger’s mind.” There was almost a wistful tone in her voice. She looked across at him. “I got more important things to worry about,” she said.

He fell asleep over the table in the projection booth after the show ended that Friday night and for the first time in years he dreamt of the wake for Willard Slade’s boy, Mercedes walking into the room where the corpse sat up in the coffin, leaning in to kiss the empty space that had been a mouth.

Magnolia Cooksey woke him as she came in to sweep and empty the trash can. She started to back out of the room as soon as she saw him there. “Sorry, Mr. Furey, sir,” she said. “Thought you was gone for the night.”

“It’s all right, Magnolia,” he said. His head felt sluggish, he could almost hear the liquid rock to one side as he looked up. He got to his feet and grabbed the edge of the table to steady himself. She had interrupted the dream before Mercedes turned to him to speak but he heard the words in his head, like a line of dialogue he’d snipped from a reel of film.
Don’t make a whore of me
.

Magnolia said, “I’ll come back when you finish up in here.”
He-ah
.

“Come in, come in, my love,” he said, looking around for his coat. “Come in, I’m just on my way home out of it.”

She was partially hidden behind the door. He looked up to see the whites of her eyes huge in the blackness of her face.

“What is it, Magnolia?”

She said, “Where you all from, Mr. Furey, sir?”

He said, “My name is Wish, Magnolia.”

“You Irish, Mr. Wish, sir? You sounds about Irish.”

“No,” he said.

“You’re not from nowheres around here.”

“Nowheres. No, I’m not.”

“I’ll come back when you finish up,” she said again.

“Magnolia.”

She had almost closed the door completely and peered in through the crack. She didn’t trust him, he realized. Had never trusted him, a drunken white man, the theatre all but empty.

“It’s a nice name,” he said. “Magnolia. I had a friend from home,” he told her. “Mercedes, her name was. You ever hear tell of someone else with that name?”

“No, sir. Not as I can recall.” And then she said, “I’ll come back when y’all finished up here.”

On Monday he sat flipping through newspapers, waiting for Ingrid to bring him a slice of pecan pie. He’d grabbed a handful of dailies, and near the bottom of the pile was a week-old copy of the
Chicago Defender
, a Negro paper he’d never seen in the diner before. He shook it out and laid it across the counter, scanning the headlines. The entire front page dedicated to the story of Emmett Till, a teenager from the South Side who had gone missing while visiting an uncle in Mississippi that summer. Wish had heard talk about it around the stockyards but hadn’t paid much attention. A photo of the crowds from the Black Belt who gathered to file past the boy’s open casket after his body was shipped home to Chicago dominated the page. Hundreds upon hundreds of them on the sidewalk and spilling out onto the street.

Another photograph showed the dead boy in his coffin. Wish stared at the image, just to the left of his coffee cup. He traced the black-and-white square, his hand shaking. The corpse had been found in the Tallahatchie River three days after the disappearance, a gin fan tied to the boy’s neck with a loop of barbed wire to weight him down. The fourteen-year-old had whistled at a white woman, the paper said, and the woman’s husband and brother-in-law had taken him from his uncle’s house at gunpoint. He turned back to the photo of the crowd. He knew Magnolia Cooksey was in that mass of people, waiting her turn to see the boy.

“They got off,” Ingrid said. She was standing opposite him, looking down at the paper.

“Who?”

“The men they say killed that boy. It was on the radio today.”

“They got off?”

“Not guilty.”

Wish glanced back down at the paper. The face in the picture was not a face. It had been beaten so severely that there was only a blank, featureless pulp above the shirt and tie. The nose was missing. A dark spot above the ear where a bullet had entered the skull. Wish wouldn’t have been able to say even that the dead child was a Negro if the caption hadn’t named him. A sheet of glass had been fitted over the corpse to shield mourners from the worst of the smell.

“I bet we won’t ever hear the end of this one,” Ingrid said. She had one hand on her hip and the pie in the other. She dropped the plate in front of him with a disgusted shrug.

Wish folded the paper and stood up. He took two dollars from his pocket and set them beside his plate.

“You want this pie?” Ingrid called as he went to the door.

He walked out into the evening air, gulping it in, trying to settle his stomach. He looked up and down the street and then started back to his room.

He took his one suitcase from under the army cot and packed as much of his clothes as would fit, leaving the rest in the tiny closet. He took the back off the radio and pulled out a small envelope and Mercedes’ picture and a roll of bills he’d been adding to since his arrival. Twos and fives and tens mostly, a few twenties. He slipped a fiver from the roll and set it on the table with his key and a note to say he wouldn’t be needing the room any longer. He put fifty dollars in each of his shoes and pocketed the rest of the money. He filled his flask and stuffed a full bottle of whisky into the suitcase. He opened the small envelope and shook out the Military Medal into his hand. He stood holding it a moment, testing the weight. He considered leaving it behind but put it back in its envelope, stuffed it into his coat pocket. He set his copy of the
Chicago Defender
on top of his clothes, the faceless face staring up at him before he closed the lid and fastened the snaps. He flicked off the lights on his way out the door.

He took a train out of Chicago to Madison, travelling north across Wisconsin through Sauk City and Baraboo, Black River Falls and Wisconsin Rapids before stopping at Eau Claire in the Chippewa Valley. He stayed a couple of months there, renting a room by the week on Runway Avenue, living off his savings and casual work with a trucking and moving company.

He walked down to the railway station every Sunday morning and asked the agent where the day’s trains were headed. The station agent came to know his face. “East or west?”

“Don’t matter,” Wish said. “West.”

“Listen here,” the agent said one Sunday, “I told you last week and the week before. Train headed west today goes into St. Paul, Minnesota. From there you can go on just about anywhere you like. Are you travelling or not?”

“I’m just curious,” Wish said. “Where I’d wind up if I went.”

The agent was a tall, sallow man who in Wish’s mind was the very picture of a mortician. Lank black hair combed flat and perfectly manicured hands. He was wearing a striped shirt and wire cuffs above the biceps. “You want a for instance?” he asked.

“All right.”

He brought out a map. “Look here,” he said. He used a pen to point to towns and cities along the rail line. “You can take the 57 out of St. Paul to Monticello, Albany and Glenwood. Past Glenwood, you run through Wahpeton and Detroit Lakes and then on into North Dakota.”

“North Dakota?”

“That’s right.”

Wish studied the map a few minutes. “You got Sherwood on there somewhere?”

The agent glanced up at him. “You want to get to Sherwood?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Take a train north out of West Fargo on the Burlington Northern Line. Take that as far as Great Falls and head west from there.” He dotted the map with his pen. “Devil’s Lake. Rugby. Granville. In Granville the BN line turns north and that’ll take you all the way. You can sleep until they kick you off the train, if you like. Sherwood’s the end of the line.”

The last time he’d crossed the prairies by train was with Harris on their way to the Atlantic coast from San Francisco after the war. Mile after mile the same placid surface of turf sectioned and squared. He saw something of the ocean on its most serene days in the landscape that made him lonesome for home at first. But it began to feel surreal soon enough, artificial, like the scenes painted as movie backdrops. It was almost as if the prairies had been scraped flat by hand, a carpet of greens and browns and ochre rolled across it. North Dakota reminded him of a hospital for some reason, the acres of farmland scoured smooth, the endless antiseptic blue of the sky. It filled him with the same vague sense of panic.

He ate a meal of minute steak and eggs at a diner on the main street and the waitress jotted down the address of a widow who let rooms by the day or by the week. He thought of Mrs. Gillard in the Cove.

“Why’s it always widows let rooms, I wonder?”

The waitress shrugged. “They got room, I imagine.”

It was dark by the time he went back out onto Main Street, carrying his one suitcase. The wind was blowing hard and he turned up the collar of the Navy coat he’d picked up in Eau Claire. He walked till he found the three-story farmhouse and rang the bell.

He slept in till mid-morning and found his way back to the diner for breakfast. The temperature was near freezing, the windows of the restaurant running with condensation on the inside. Apart from two men huddled together at the counter, the place was empty. Orange vinyl seats, the cracks sealed with tape.

“How’d you sleep?” the waitress asked.

“Best kind, my love.”

She was wearing the same mustard-coloured acrylic uniform. Her eyebrows were plucked clean and drawn back in with an eyebrow pencil. She brought the coffee pot across to his booth along with a handful of newspapers. He put his hand over the mouth of his cup, asked for tea with a drop of fresh milk.

“As opposed to sour milk?” she said.

He glanced up from the papers. “What’s that?”

“You asked for
fresh
milk.”

“Out home,” he said. “You get tin milk or fresh.” She kept staring and he said, “Never mind.”

“You don’t want steak and eggs again this morning, do you?”

He considered it and shrugged. “Why not.”

He leafed through the papers, noting the scores of hockey games played a week and more ago, until she brought him his breakfast.

“Have everything you need?”

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he said.

She raised one of her carefully drawn eyebrows. “What kind of friends you got need to be looked for?”

“We were in the army together.”

She stepped away from him, the coffee pot dangling from her hand. “Whatever you are,” she said skeptically, “you ain’t American.”

“I was with the Brits.”

“You don’t sound British, either.”

He shrugged.

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“Spalding.”

“Lucas?”

“I never got his first name.”

“He’s not in trouble or nothing, is he?”

“I was just passing through. Thought I’d look him up.”

“Have a gander around you, mister,” she said. “No one just passes through Sherwood.”

“Do you know where I can find him?”

He walked back and forth in front of Spalding’s house half a dozen times, looking for some indication someone was home. He stood on the front porch, thnking about what he was doing there in Sherwood, North Dakota, trying to track down a stranger. What it was he was looking for. There wasn’t anything he could put words to, though it wasn’t less real or less perilous for that. He hadn’t had a drink since he left Eau Claire two days before and he felt the lack of it at the core of himself suddenly, his legs trembling underneath him.