Song of Solomon

Chapter 11

The women’s hands were empty. No pocketbook, no change purse, no wallet, no keys, no small paper bag, no comb, no handkerchief. They carried nothing. Milkman had never in his life seen a woman on the street without a purse slung over her shoulder, pressed under her arm, or dangling from her clenched fingers. These women walked as if they were going somewhere, but they carried nothing in their hands. It was enough to let him know he was really in the backwoods of Virginia, an area the signs kept telling him was the Blue Ridge Mountains. Danville, with its diner/bus station and its post office on the main street was a thriving metropolis compared to this no-name hamlet, a place so small nothing financed by state funds or private enterprise reared a brick there. In Roanoke, Petersburg, Culpeper he’d asked for a town named Charlemagne. Nobody knew. The coast, some said. Tidewater. A valley town, said others. He ended up at an AAA office, and after a while they discovered it and its correct name: Shalimar. How do I get there? Well, you can’t walk it, that’s for sure. Buses go there? Trains? No. Well, not very near. There is one bus, but it just goes to…He ended up buying a fifty-dollar car for seventy-five dollars out of a young man’s yard. It broke down before he could get to the gas station and fill the tank. And when he got pushed to the station, he spent $132 on a fan belt, brake lining, oil filter, gas line filter, two retreads, and a brand-new oil pan, which he didn’t need but bought before the mechanic told him the gasket was broken. It was a hard and bitter price to pay. Not because it wasn’t worth it, and not because it had to be in cash since the garage owner looked at his Standard Oil credit card like it was a three-dollar bill, but because he had got used to prices in the South: socks two pairs for a quarter, resoled shoes thirty cents, shirt $1.98, and the two Tommys needed to know that he got a shave and a haircut for fifty cents.

By the time he bought the car, his morale had soared and he was beginning to enjoy the trip: his ability to get information and help from strangers, their attraction to him, their generosity (Need a place to stay? Want a good place to eat?). All that business about southern hospitality was for real. He wondered why black people ever left the South. Where he went, there wasn’t a white face around, and the Negroes were as pleasant, wide-spirited, and self-contained as could be. He earned the rewards he got here. None of the pleasantness was directed at him because of his father, as it was back home, or his grandfather’s memory, as it was in Danville. And now, sitting behind a steering wheel, he felt even better. He was his own director—relieving himself when he wanted to, stopping for cold beer when he was thirsty, and even in a seventy-five-dollar car the sense of power was strong.

He’d had to pay close attention to signs and landmarks, because Shalimar was not on the Texaco map he had, and the AAA office couldn’t give a nonmember a charted course—just the map and some general information. Even at that, watching as carefully as he could, he wouldn’t have known he had arrived if the fan belt hadn’t broken again right in front of Solomon’s General Store, which turned out to be the heart and soul of Shalimar, Virginia.

He headed for the store, nodding at the four men sitting outside on the porch, and side-stepping the white hens that were strolling about. Three more men were inside, in addition to the man behind the counter, who he assumed was Mr. Solomon himself. Milkman asked him for a cold bottle of Red Cap, please.

“No beer for sale on Sunday,” the man said. He was a light-skinned Negro with red hair turning white.

“Oh. I forgot what day it was.” Milkman smiled. “Pop, then. I mean soda. Got any on ice?”

“Cherry smash. That suit you?”

“Fine. Suit me fine.”

The man walked over to the side of the store and slid open the door of an ancient cooler. The floor was worn and wavy with years of footsteps. Cans of goods on the shelf were sparse, but the sacks, trays, and cartons of perishables and semiperishables were plentiful. The man pulled a bottle of red liquid from the cooler and wiped it dry on his apron before handing it to Milkman.

“A nickel if you drink it here. Seven cents if you don’t.”

“I’ll drink it here.”

“Just get in?”

“Yeah. Car broke down. Is there a garage nearby?”

“Naw. Five miles yonder is one, though.”

“Five miles?”

“Yep. What’s the trouble? Mebbe one a us can fix it. Where you headed?”

“Shalimar.”

“You standin in it.”

“Right here? This is Shalimar?”

“Yes, suh. Shalimar.” The man pronounced it Shalleemone.

“Good thing I broke down. I would have missed it for sure.” Milkman laughed.

“Your friend almost missed it too.”

“My friend? What friend?”

“The one lookin for you. Drove in here early this mornin and axed for ya.”

“Asked for me by name?”

“No. He never mentioned your name.”

“Then how do you know he was looking for me?”

“Said he was lookin for his friend in a three-piece beige suit. Like that.” He pointed to Milkman’s chest.

“What’d he look like?”

“Dark-skinned man. ‘Bout your complexion. Tall. Thin. What’s a matter? Y’all get your wires crossed?”

“Yeah. No. I mean … what was his name?”

“Didn’t say. Just asked for you. He come a long way to meet you, though. I know that. Drove a Ford with Michigan tags.”

“Michigan? You sure Michigan?”

“Sure I’m sure. Was he supposed to meet you in Roanoke?”

When Milkman looked wild-eyed, the man said, “I seen your tags.”

Milkman sighed with relief. And then said, “I wasn’t sure where we were going to meet up. And he didn’t say his name?”

“Naw. Just said to give you some good-luck message if I was to see you. Lemme see…”

“Good luck?”

“Yeah. Said to tell you your day was sure coming or your day…something like that…your day is here. But I know it had a day in it. But I ain’t sure if he said it was comin or was already here.” He chuckled. “Wish mine was here. Been waitin fifty-seven years and it ain’t come yet.”

The other men in the store laughed congenially, while Milkman stood frozen, everything in him quiet but his heart. There was no mistaking the message. Or the messenger. Guitar was looking for him, was following him, and for professional reasons. Unless … Would Guitar joke about that phrase? That special secret word the Seven Days whispered to their victims?

“The drink abuse you?” Mr. Solomon was looking at him. “Sweet soda water don’t agree with me.”

Milkman shook his head and swallowed the rest hurriedly. “No,” he said. “I’m just…car weary. I think I’ll sit outside awhile.” He started toward the door.

“You want me to see ‘bout your car for you?” Mr. Solomon sounded slightly offended.

“In a minute. I’ll be right back.”

Milkman pushed the screen door and stepped outside on the porch. The sun was blazing. He took off his jacket and held it on his forefinger over his shoulder. He gazed up and down the dusty road. Shotgun houses with wide spaces between them, a few dogs, chickens, children, and the women with nothing in their hands. They sat on porches, and walked in the road swaying their hips under cotton dresses, bare-legged, their unstraightened hair braided or pulled straight back into a ball. He wanted one of them bad. To curl up in a cot in that one’s arms, or that one, or that. That’s the way Pilate must have looked as a girl, looked even now, but out of place in the big northern city she had come to. Wide sleepy eyes that tilted up at the corners, high cheekbones, full lips blacker than their skin, berry-stained, and long long necks. There must be a lot of intermarriage in this place, he thought. All the women looked alike, and except for some light-skinned red-headed men (like Mr. Solomon), the men looked very much like the women. Visitors to Shalimar must be rare, and new blood that settled here nonexistent.

Milkman stepped off the porch, scattering the hens, and walked down the road toward a clump of trees near a building that looked like a church or clubhouse of some sort. Children were playing behind the trees. Spreading his jacket on the burnt grass, he sat down and lit a cigarette.

Guitar was here. Had asked for him. But why was he afraid? They were friends, close friends. So close he had told him all about the Seven Days. There was no trust heavier than that. Milkman was a confidant, almost an accomplice. So why was he afraid? It was senseless. Guitar must have left that particular message so Milkman could know who was looking for him without his giving his name. Something must have happened back home. Guitar must be running, from the police, maybe, and decided to run toward his friend—the only one other than the Days who would know what it was all about and whom he could trust. Guitar needed to find Milkman and he needed help. That was it. But if Guitar knew Milkman was headed for Shalimar, he must have found that out in Roanoke, or Culpeper—or maybe even in Danville. And if he knew that, why didn’t he wait? Where was he now? Trouble. Guitar was in trouble.

Behind him the children were singing a kind of ring-around-the-rosy or Little Sally Walker game. Milkman turned to watch. About eight or nine boys and girls were standing in a circle. A boy in the middle, his arms outstretched, turned around like an airplane, while the others sang some meaningless rhyme:

Jay the only son of Solomon

Come booba yalle, come booba tambee

Whirl about and touch the sun

Come booba yalle, come booba tambee…

They went on with several verses, the boy in the middle doing his imitation of an airplane. The climax of the game was a rapid shouting of nonsense words accompanied by more rapid twirling: “Solomon rye balaly shoo; yaraba medina hamlet too”—until the last line. “Twenty-one children the last one Jay!” At which point the boy crashed to earth and the others screamed.

Milkman watched the children. He’d never played like that as a child. As soon as he got up off his knees at the window sill, grieving because he could not fly, and went off to school, his velvet suit separated him from the other children. White and black thought he was a riot and went out of their way to laugh at him and see to it that he had no lunch to eat, nor any crayons, nor ever got through the line to the toilet or the water fountain. His mother finally surrendered to his begging for corduroy knickers or straights, which helped a little, but he was never asked to play those circle games, those singing games, to join in anything, until Guitar pulled those four boys off him. Milkman smiled, remembering how Guitar grinned and whooped as the four boys turned on him. It was the first time Milkman saw anybody really enjoy a fight. Afterward Guitar had taken off his baseball cap and handed it to Milkman, telling him to wipe the blood from his nose. Milkman bloodied the cap, returned it, and Guitar slapped it back on his head.

Remembering those days now, Milkman was ashamed of having been frightened or suspicious of Guitar’s message. When he turned up, he would explain everything and Milkman would do what he could to help. He stood up and brushed his jacket. A black rooster strutted by, its blood-red comb draped forward like a wicked brow.

Milkman walked back toward Solomon’s store. He needed a place to stay, some information, and a woman, not necessarily in that order. He would begin wherever the beginning was. In a way it was good Guitar had asked for him. Along with waiting for him and waiting for some way to get a new fan belt, he had a legitimate reason to dawdle. Hens and cats gave up their places on the steps as he approached them.

“Feelin better, are ya?” asked Mr. Solomon.

“Much better. Just needed a stretch, I guess.” He jutted his chin toward the window. “Nice around here. Peaceful. Pretty women too.”

A young man sitting on a chair tilted to the wall pushed his hat back from his forehead and let the front legs of the chair hit the floor. His lips were open, exposing the absence of four front teeth. The other men moved their feet. Mr. Solomon smiled but didn’t say anything. Milkman sensed that he’d struck a wrong note. About the women, he guessed. What kind of place was this where a man couldn’t even ask for a woman?

He changed the subject. “If my friend, the one who stopped by this morning, was going to wait for me here, where would he be likely to find a place to stay? Any rooming houses around here?”

“Rooming houses?”

“Yeah. Where a man can spend the night.”

Mr. Solomon shook his head. “Nothin like that here.”

Milkman was getting annoyed. What was all the hostility for? He looked at the men sitting around the store. “You think maybe one of them could help with the car?” he asked Mr. Solomon. “Maybe get another belt somewhere?”

Mr. Solomon kept his eyes on the counter. “Guess I could ask them.” His voice was soft; he spoke as if he was embarrassed about something. There was none of the earlier chattiness he’d been full of when Milkman arrived.

“If they can’t find one, let me know right away. I may have to buy another car to get back home.”

Every one of the faces of the men turned to look at him, and Milkman knew he had said something else wrong, although he didn’t know what. He only knew that they behaved as if they’d been insulted.

In fact they had been. They looked with hatred at the city Negro who could buy a car as if it were a bottle of whiskey because the one he had was broken. And what’s more, who had said so in front of them. He hadn’t bothered to say his name, nor ask theirs, had called them “them,” and would certainly despise their days, which should have been spent harvesting their own crops, instead of waiting around the general store hoping a truck would come looking for mill hands or tobacco pickers in the flatlands that belonged to somebody else. His manner, his clothes were reminders that they had no crops of their own and no land to speak of either. Just vegetable gardens, which the women took care of, and chickens and pigs that the children took care of. He was telling them that they weren’t men, that they relied on women and children for their food. And that the lint and tobacco in their pants pockets where dollar bills should have been was the measure. That thin shoes and suits with vests and smooth smooth hands were the measure. That eyes that had seen big cities and the inside of airplanes were the measure. They had seen him watching their women and rubbing his fly as he stood on the steps. They had also seen him lock his car as soon as he got out of it in a place where there couldn’t be more than two keys twenty-five miles around. He hadn’t found them fit enough or good enough to want to know their names, and believed himself too good to tell them his. They looked at his skin and saw it was as black as theirs, but they knew he had the heart of the white men who came to pick them up in the trucks when they needed anonymous, faceless laborers.

Now one of them spoke to the Negro with the Virginia license and the northern accent.

“Big money up North, eh?”

“Some,” Milkman answered.

“Some? I hear tell everybody up North got big money.”

“Lotta people up North got nothing.” Milkman made his voice pleasant, but he knew something was developing.

“That’s hard to believe. Why would anybody want to stay there if they ain’t no big money?”

“The sights, I guess.” Another man answered the first. “The sights and the women.”

“You kiddin,” said the first man in mock dismay. “You mean to tell me pussy different up North?”

“Naw,” said the second. “Pussy the same everywhere. Smell like the ocean; taste like the sea.”

“Can’t be,” said a third. “Got to be different.”

“Maybe the pricks is different.” The first man spoke again.

“Reckon?” asked the second man.

“So I hear tell,” said the first man.

“How different?” asked the second man.

“Wee little,” said the first man. “Wee, wee little.”

“Naw!” said the second man.

“So they tell me. That’s why they pants so tight. That true?” The first man looked at Milkman for an answer.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Milkman. “I never spent much time smacking my lips over another man’s dick.” Everybody smiled, including Milkman. It was about to begin.

“What about his ass hole? Ever smack your lips over that?”

“Once,” said Milkman. “When a little young nigger made me mad and I had to jam a Coke bottle up his ass.”

“What’d you use a bottle for? Your cock wouldn’t fill it?”

“It did. After I took the Coke bottle out. Filled his mouth too.”

“Prefer mouth, do you?”

“If it’s big enough, and ugly enough, and belongs to a ignorant motherfucker who is about to get the livin shit whipped out of him.”

The knife glittered.

Milkman laughed. “I ain’t seen one of those since I was fourteen. Where I come from boys play with knives—if they scared they gonna lose, that is.”

The first man smiled. “That’s me, motherfucker. Scared to death I’m gonna lose.”

Milkman did the best he could with a broken bottle, but his face got slit, so did his left hand, and so did his pretty beige suit, and he probably would have had his throat cut if two women hadn’t come running in screaming, “Saul! Saul!”

The store was full of people by then and the women couldn’t get through. The men tried to shush them, but they kept on screaming and provided enough lull for Mr. Solomon to interrupt the fight.

“All right. All right. That’s enough of that.”

“Shut your mouth, Solomon.”

“Get them women outta here.”

“Stick him, Saul, stick that cocksucker.”

But Saul had a jagged cut over his eye and the blood pouring from it made it hard to see. It was difficult but not impossible for Mr. Solomon to pull him away. He left cursing Milkman, but his fervor was gone.

Milkman backed up against the counter, waiting to see if anybody else was going to jump him. When it looked as if no one was, and when the people were drifting outside to watch Saul scuffling and cursing at the men pulling him away, he slumped a little and wiped his face. When the entire store save for the owner was empty, Milkman hurled the broken bottle into a corner. It careened by the cooler and bounced off the wall before splintering on the floor. He walked outside, still panting, and looked around. Four older men still sat on the porch, as though nothing had happened. Blood was streaming down Milkman’s face, but it had dried on his hand. He kicked at a white hen and sat down on the top step, wiping the blood with his handkerchief. Three young women with nothing in their hands stood in the road looking at him. Their eyes were wide but noncommittal. Children joined them, circling the women like birds. Nobody said anything. Even the four men on the porch were quiet. Nobody came toward him, offered him a cigarette or a glass of water. Only the children and the hens walked around. Under the hot sun, Milkman was frozen with anger. If he’d had a weapon, he would have slaughtered everybody in sight.

“You pretty good with a bottle. How you with a shotgun?” One of the older men had sidled up to him. The smile on his face was faint. It was as though now that the young men had had their chance, with unsatisfactory results, the older men would take over. Their style, of course, would be different. No name-calling toilet contest for them. No knives either, or hot breath and knotted neck muscles. They would test him, match and beat him, probably, on some other ground.

“Best shot there is,” Milkman lied.

“That so?”

“Yeah, it’s so.”

“Some of us is going huntin later on. Care to join us?”

“That toothless motherfucker going too?”

“Saul? No.”

“Cause I might have to knock the rest of them out.”

The man laughed. “Sheriff took the others—with the butt of a gun.”

“Yeah? Good.”

“Well, you comin?”

“Sure I’m coming. Just get me the gun.”

He laughed again. “Name’s Omar.”

“Macon Dead.”

Omar blinked at the name, but didn’t comment on it. He merely told him to come by King Walker’s, a gas station about two miles up the road, right around sundown. “It’s straight up yonder. Ain’t no way in the world you can miss it.”

“I won’t miss it.” Milkman stood up and walked to his car. He fumbled for the car keys, opened the door, and slid into the seat. He rolled down all four windows, found a towel in the back seat, and stretched out, using his jacket for a pillow and the towel as a bandage for his face. His feet stuck out the open door. Fuck ’em. Who were all these people roaming the world trying to kill him? His own father had tried while he was still in his mother’s stomach. But he’d lived. And he had lived the last year dodging a woman who came every month to kill him, and he had lain just like this, with his arm over his eyes, wide open to whatever she had in her hand. He’d lived through that too. Then a witch had stepped out of his childhood nightmares to grab him, and he’d lived through that. Some bats had driven him out of a cave–and he’d lived through that. And at no time did he have a weapon. Now he walked into a store and asked if somebody could fix his car and a nigger pulled a knife on him. And he still wasn’t dead. Now what did these black Neanderthals think they were going to do? Fuck ’em. My name’s Macon; I’m already dead. He had thought this place, this Shalimar, was going to be home. His original home. His people came from here, his grandfather and his grandmother. All the way down South people had been nice to him, generous, helpful. In Danville they had made him the object of hero worship. In his own home town his name spelled dread and grudging respect. But here, in his “home,” he was unknown, unloved, and damn near killed. These were some of the meanest unhung niggers in the world.

He slept, unmolested by everything and everybody except a dream in which he thought he saw Guitar looking down on him. When he woke he bought two cans of pineapple and a box of crackers from Mr. Solomon. He ate on the porch with the hens. The men were gone, and the sun was leaving. Only the children stayed to watch him eat. When he poured the last of the pineapple juice down his throat, one of the children stepped forward to ask, “Can we have your can, mister?” He held it out and they snatched the can and ran off to fashion some game out of it.

He started out for King Walker’s. Even if he could have come up with a way to get out of the hunt, he wouldn’t have taken it, in spite of the fact that he had never handled a firearm in his life. He had stopped evading things, sliding through, over, and around difficulties. Before he had taken risks only with Guitar. Now he took them alone. Not only had he let Hagar stab him; he had let the nightmare witch catch him and kiss him. To a man surviving that, anything else was a joke.

King Walker was nothing like his name suggested. He was a small man, bald, with a left cheek bulging with tobacco. Years ago he’d been a star pitcher in one of the black baseball leagues and the history of his career was nailed and pasted all over his shop. They had not lied when they said no garage or mechanic on duty was nearer than five miles. King Walker’s station had obviously gone broke a long time ago. The pumps were dry; there wasn’t even a can of oil in the place. Now it seemed to be used as a kind of clubhouse for the men and Walker lived in the back of the station. In addition to King Walker, who wasn’t going, there was Omar and another man who had also been on the porch and who introduced himself as Luther Solomon—no relation to the grocery store Solomon. They were waiting for some others, who came soon after Milkman got there, driving an old Chevy. Omar introduced them as Calvin Breakstone and Small Boy.

Calvin seemed to be the most congenial of them, and followed the introductions with a command to King Walker to “get this city boy some shoes for his feet.” King rummaged around, spitting tobacco, and came up with some mud-caked brogans. They outfitted Milkman completely, laughing all the while at his underwear, fingering his vest—Small Boy tried to get his wrestler’s arms into Milkman’s jacket—and wondering what had happened to his feet. Bits of skin still peeled from his toes because of the two days he had spent in wet shoes and socks. King Walker made him sprinkle Arm & Hammer soda on them before he put on the thick socks they gave him. When Milkman was dressed in World War II army fatigues with a knit cap on his head, they opened some Falstaff beer and began to talk about guns. At which point the revelry mixed with meanness abated and King Walker handed Milkman his Winchester .22.

“Ever use a twenty-two?”

“Not in a good while,” Milkman said.

The five men piled into the Chevy and drove off into the lessening light. From what Milkman could tell, after fifteen minutes or so they were going up to high ground. As the car swerved through narrow roads, the conversation picked up again and they talked about other trips, game, kills, misses. Soon the only light came from the moon and it was getting cool enough for Milkman to be grateful for his knit cap. The car pulled ahead and around some sharp bends. In the rear-view mirror Milkman thought he glimpsed the headlights of another car and wondered briefly if they were being met by others. The sky was dark enough now for stars.

“Better make time, Calvin. Coon be done ate and gone on home.”

Calvin pulled over and stopped the car.

“Let ’em rip,” he said, and handed the car keys to Small Boy, who walked around to the back and unlocked the trunk. Three hounds leaped out, sniffing and wagging their tails. But they didn’t make a sound.

“You brought Becky?” asked Luther. “Oh, man! We gonna get some coon tonight!”

The dogs’ nervousness, their eagerness to hear the signal that would allow them to race off into the trees, made Milkman jittery. What was he supposed to do? Two feet in any direction from the headlights was black night.

Omar and Small Boy hauled equipment from the trunk: four lamps, one flashlight, rope, shells, and a pint bottle of liquor. When all four lamps were ablaze, they asked Milkman if he wanted to use a lamp or a flashlight. He hesitated, and Calvin said, “He can run with me. Give him the torch.”

Milkman put it in his back pocket.

“Take that change out your pocket,” said Calvin. “Makes too much noise.”

Milkman did as he was told and took King’s shotgun, a piece of rope, and a deep swig from the bottle they were passing around.

The dogs padded about, silent, panting, almost faint with excitement. But still they made no sound. Calvin and Omar both loaded their double-gauge shotguns with .22 shells in one barrel and buckshot in the other. Small Boy clapped his hands once, and the three hounds sped screaming into the night. The men didn’t take off after them at once, as Milkman had supposed they would. Instead they stood quietly and listened for a while. Small Boy laughed lightly, shaking his head. “Becky’s leadin. Let’s go. Calvin, you and Macon go off to the right. We’ll head this a way, and circle over by the gulch. Don’t shoot no bears, now.”

“Shoot him if I see him,” said Calvin as he and Milkman moved away.

As they left the Chevy, the car that Milkman had noticed sped past them. Obviously, there were no others in the hunting party. Calvin was ahead, the burning lamp swinging low from his hand. Milkman flicked on his flashlight.

“Better save it,” said Calvin. “You don’t need it now.”

They plodded on in a direction that may have been toward the screaming dogs, but Milkman couldn’t tell.

“Any bears out here?” he asked in what he hoped was an interested but not anxious voice.

“Just us, and we got the guns.” Calvin laughed and was suddenly swallowed up by the dark, only the low swinging lamp marking his path. Milkman watched the lamp until he realized that focusing on it kept him from seeing anything else. If he was to grow accustomed to the dark, he would have to look at what it was possible to see. A long moan sailed up through the trees somewhere to the left of where they were. It sounded like a woman’s voice, sobbing, and mingling with the dogs’ yelps and the men’s shouts. A few minutes later, the distant screaming of the dogs and the calls of the three men stopped. There was only the soughing wind and his and Calvin’s footsteps. It took Milkman a while to figure out how to pick up his feet and miss the roots and stones; to distinguish a tree from a shadow; to keep his head down and away from the branches that swept back from Calvin’s hand into his face. They were walking upland. Every now and then Calvin stopped, threw his lamplight on a tree, and examined it closely from about three feet off the ground to up as far as his arm could go. Other times he lowered the lamp over the ground, and squatting down on his haunches, peered into the dirt. Each time he seemed to be whispering. Whatever he discovered he kept to himself and Milkman didn’t ask him. All he wanted to do was keep up, be ready to shoot whatever the game was when it appeared, and look out for an attempt any of them might make on his life. Within an hour after arriving in Shalimar, a young man had tried to kill him in public. What these older men, under cover of night, were capable of he could only guess.

He heard the sound of the sobbing woman again and asked Calvin, “What the hell is that?”

“Echo,” he said. “Ryna’s Gulch is up ahead. It makes that sound when the wind hits a certain way.”

“Sounds like a woman crying,” said Milkman.

“Ryna. Folks say a woman name Ryna is cryin in there. That’s how it got the name.”

Calvin stopped, but so suddenly that Milkman, deep in thought about Ryna, bumped into him. “Hush!” Calvin closed his eyes and tilted his head into the wind. All Milkman could hear was the dogs again, yelping, but more rapidly, he thought, than before. Calvin whistled. A faint whistle came back to them.

“Son of a fuckin bitch!” Calvin’s voice broke with agitation. “Bobcat! Come on, man!” He literally sprang away and Milkman did the same. Now they moved at double time, still on land that sloped upward. It was the longest trek Milkman had ever made in his life. Miles, he thought; we must be covering miles. And hours; it must be two hours now since he whistled. On they walked, and Calvin never broke his stride for anything except an occasional shout and an occasional pause to listen to the sound that came back.

The light was changing and Milkman was getting very tired. The distance between himself and Calvin’s lamp was getting wider and wider. He was twenty years younger than Calvin, but found himself unable to keep up the pace. And he was getting clumsy—stepping over big stones rather than around them, dragging his feet and catching them in humped roots, and now that Calvin was not directly in front, he had to push the branches away from his face himself. The doubling down and under branches and pushing things out of his way were as exhausting as the walk. His breath was coming in shorter and shorter gasps and he wanted to sit down more than anything in the world. He believed they were circling now, for it seemed to him that this was the third time he had seen that double-humped rock in the distance. Should they be circling? he wondered. Then he thought he remembered hearing that certain prey circled when it was being stalked. Did bobcat? He didn’t even know what a bobcat looked like.

At last he surrendered to his fatigue and made the mistake of sitting down instead of slowing down, for when he got up again, the rest had given his feet an opportunity to hurt him and the pain in his short leg was so great he began to limp and hobble. Soon it wasn’t possible for him to walk longer than five minutes at a time without pausing to lean against a sweet gum tree. Calvin was a pinpoint of light bobbing ahead in and out of the trees. Finally Milkman could take no more; he had to rest. At the next tree he sank down to the ground and put his head back on its bark. Let them laugh if they wanted to; he would not move until his heart left from under his chin and went back down into his chest where it belonged. He spread his legs, pulled the flashlight out of his hip pocket, and put his Winchester down near his right leg. At rest now, he could feel the blood pulsing in his temple and the cut on his face stinging in the night wind from the leaf juice and tree sap the branches had smeared on it.

When he was breathing almost normally, he began to wonder what he was doing sitting in the middle of a woods in Blue Ridge country. He had come here to find traces of Pilate’s journey, to find relatives she might have visited, to find anything he could that would either lead him to the gold or convince him that it no longer existed. How had he got himself involved in a hunt, involved in a knife-and-broken-bottle fight in the first place? Ignorance, he thought, and vanity. He hadn’t been alert early enough, hadn’t seen the signs jutting out everywhere around him. Maybe this was a mean bunch of black folk, but he should have guessed it, sensed it, and part of the reason he hadn’t was the easy, good treatment he had received elsewhere. Or had he? Maybe the glow of hero worship (twice removed) that had bathed him in Danville had also blinded him. Perhaps the eyes of the men in Roanoke, Petersburg, Newport News, had not been bright with welcome and admiration. Maybe they were just curious or amused. He hadn’t stayed in any place long enough to find out. A meal here, gas there—the one real contact was the buying of the car, and the seller needing a buyer would naturally be friendly under those circumstances. The same thing held when he’d had to have those elaborate repairs. What kind of savages were these people? Suspicious. Hot-tempered. Eager to find fault and despise any outsider. Touchy. Devious, jealous, traitorous, and evil. He had done nothing to deserve their contempt. Nothing to deserve the explosive hostility that engulfed him when he said he might have to buy a car. Why didn’t they respond the way the man in Roanoke did when he bought the car? Because in Roanoke he did not have a car. Here he had one and wanted another, and perhaps it was that that upset them. Furthermore, he hadn’t even suggested that he would trade the old one in. He had hinted that he would abandon the “broken” one and just get another. But so what? What business was it of theirs what he did with his money? He didn’t deserve …

It sounded old. Deserve. Old and tired and beaten to death. Deserve. Now it seemed to him that he was always saying or thinking that he didn’t deserve some bad luck, or some bad treatment from others. He’d told Guitar that he didn’t “deserve” his family’s dependence, hatred, or whatever. That he didn’t even “deserve” to hear all the misery and mutual accusations his parents unloaded on him. Nor did he “deserve” Hagar’s vengeance. But why shouldn’t his parents tell him their personal problems? If not him, then who? And if a stranger could try to kill him, surely Hagar, who knew him and whom he’d thrown away like a wad of chewing gum after the flavor was gone—she had a right to try to kill him too.

Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved—from a distance, though—and given what he wanted. And in return he would…what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.

They were troublesome thoughts, but they wouldn’t go away. Under the moon, on the ground, alone, with not even the sound of baying dogs to remind him that he was with other people, his self—the cocoon that was “personality”—gave way. He could barely see his own hand, and couldn’t see his feet. He was only his breath, coming slower now, and his thoughts. The rest of him had disappeared. So the thoughts came, unobstructed by other people, by things, even by the sight of himself. There was nothing here to help him—not his money, his car, his father’s reputation, his suit, or his shoes. In fact they hampered him. Except for his broken watch, and his wallet with about two hundred dollars, all he had started out with on his journey was gone: his suitcase with the Scotch, the shirts, and the space for bags of gold; his snap-brim hat, his tie, his shirt, his three-piece suit, his socks, and his shoes. His watch and his two hundred dollars would be of no help out here, where all a man had was what he was born with, or had learned to use. And endurance. Eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch—and some other sense that he knew he did not have: an ability to separate out, of all the things there were to sense, the one that life itself might depend on. What did Calvin see on the bark? On the ground? What was he saying? What did he hear that made him know something unexpected had happened some two miles—perhaps more—away, and that that something was a different kind of prey, a bobcat? He could still hear them—the way they had sounded the last few hours. Signaling one another. What were they saying? “Wait up?” “Over here?” Little by little it fell into place. The dogs, the men—none was just hollering, just signaling location or pace. The men and the dogs were talking to each other. In distinctive voices they were saying distinctive, complicated things. That long yah sound was followed by a specific kind of howl from one of the dogs. The low howm howm that sounded like a string bass imitating a bassoon meant something the dogs understood and executed. And the dogs spoke to the men: single-shot barks—evenly spaced and widely spaced—one every three or four minutes, that might go on for twenty minutes. A sort of radar that indicated to the men where they were and what they saw and what they wanted to do about it. And the men agreed or told them to change direction or to come back. All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeeee’s of a cornet, the unh unh unh bass chords. It was all language. An extension of the click people made in their cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them. And he was hearing it in the Blue Ridge Mountains under a sweet gum tree. And if they could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn’t they know about human beings? Or the earth itself, for that matter. It was more than tracks Calvin was looking for—he whispered to the trees, whispered to the ground, touched them, as a blind man caresses a page of Braille, pulling meaning through his fingers.

Milkman rubbed the back of his head against the bark. This was what Guitar had missed about the South—the woods, hunters, killing. But something had maimed him, scarred him like Reverend Cooper’s knot, like Saul’s missing teeth, and like his own father. He felt a sudden rush of affection for them all, and out there under the sweet gum tree, within the sound of men tracking a bobcat, he thought he understood Guitar now. Really understood him.

Down either side of his thighs he felt the sweet gum’s surface roots cradling him like the rough but maternal hands of a grandfather. Feeling both tense and relaxed, he sank his fingers into the grass. He tried to listen with his fingertips, to hear what, if anything, the earth had to say, and it told him quickly that someone was standing behind him and he had just enough time to raise one hand to his neck and catch the wire that fastened around his throat. It cut like a razor into his fingers, tore into the skin so deeply he had to let go. The wire pressed into his neck then and took his breath. He thought he heard himself gurgling and saw a burst of many-colored lights dancing before his eyes. When the music followed the colored lights, he knew he had just drawn the last sweet air left for him in the world. Exactly the way he’d heard it would be, his life flashed before him, but it consisted of only one image: Hagar bending over him in perfect love, in the most intimate sexual gesture imaginable. In the midst of that picture he heard the voice of the someone holding the wire say, “Your Day has come,” and it filled him with such sadness to be dying, leaving this world at the fingertips of his friend, that he relaxed and in the instant it took to surrender to the overwhelming melancholy he felt the cords of his struggling neck muscles relax too and there was a piece of a second in which the wire left him room enough to gasp, to take another breath. But it was a living breath this time, not a dying one. Hagar, the lights, the music, disappeared, and Milkman grabbed the Winchester at his side, cocked it, and pulled the trigger, shooting into the trees in front of him. The blast startled Guitar, and the wire slipped again. Guitar pulled it back, but Milkman knew his friend would need both hands to keep it that way. He turned the shotgun backward as far as he could and managed awkwardly, to pull the trigger again, hitting only branches and dirt. He was wondering if there was another blast in the gun when he heard right up close the wild, wonderful sound of three baying dogs who he knew had treed a bobcat. The wire dropped and he heard Guitar breaking into a fast run through the trees. Milkman stood up and grabbed his flashlight, pointing it in the direction of the sound of running feet. He saw nothing but branches resettling themselves. Rubbing his neck, he moved toward the sound of the dogs. Guitar did not have a gun, otherwise he would have used it, so Milkman felt secure heading for the dogs with the gun in his hand even though it had no more shot. He didn’t miss; his sense of direction was accurate and he came upon Calvin, Small Boy, Luther, and Omar crouching on the ground a few feet away from the dogs and the glistening night eyes of a bobcat in a tree.

The dogs were trying their best to get up into the tree, and the men were considering whether to shoot the bobcat down, shoot a limb and make him jump down and fight the dogs, or what. They decided to try and kill the cat where he lay. Omar stood up and took his lamp over to the left. The cat crept a little ways out, following the light. Then Small Boy took aim and put a bullet just under the left foreleg and the bobcat dropped through the branches into the jaws of Becky and her companions.

There was a lot of life in the cat; he fought well until Calvin hollered the dogs away and shot it again, and once more, and then it was still.

They held the lamps over the carcass and groaned with pleasure at the size, the ferocity, the stillness of it. All four got down on their knees, pulling rope and knives, cutting a branch the width of a wrist, tying it and binding it for the long walk back.

They were so pleased with themselves it was some time before anybody remembered to ask Milkman what he was shooting at back there. Milkman hoisted the stake he was carrying a little higher and said, “I dropped the gun. I tripped and it went off. Then when I picked it up it went off again.”

They burst into laughter. “Tripped? What’d you have the safety off for? Was you scared?”

“Scared to death,” said Milkman. “Scared to death.”

They hooted and laughed all the way back to the car, teasing Milkman, egging him on to tell more about how scared he was. And he told them. Laughing too, hard, loud, and long. Really laughing, and he found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there—on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp.

They met dawn in King Walker’s gas station for a rehash of the night they had spent. Milkman was the butt of their humor, but it was good-humored humor, quite unlike the laughter the trip had begun with. “Lucky to be alive. Cat wasn’t the problem; this here nigger was the problem. Blastin away at us while we got a mean cat gettin ready to chew us and the dogs up both. Shootin all through the woods. Could have blown his own head off. Don’t you city boys know how to handle yourself?”

“You country niggers got it all over us,” Milkman answered.

Omar and Small Boy slapped him on the shoulders. Calvin hollered to Luther, “Go get Vernell. Tell her to get breakfast ready. Soon’s we skin this cat, we comin in there with a appetite and she better be ready to meet it!”

Milkman went with them to the back of the station, where, on a small cemented area covered by a corrugated tin roof, the dead bobcat lay. Milkman’s neck had swollen so it was difficult for him to lower his chin without pain.

Omar sliced through the rope that bound the bobcat’s feet. He and Calvin turned it over on its back. The legs fell open. Such thin delicate ankles.

“Every body wants a black man’s life.”

Calvin held the forefeet open and up while Omar pierced the curling hair at the point where the sternum lay. Then he sliced all the way down to the genitals. His knife pointed upward for a cleaner, neater incision.

“Not his dead life; I mean his living life.”

When he reached the genitals he cut them off, but left the scrotum intact.

“It’s the condition our condition is in.”

Omar cut around the legs and the neck. Then he pulled the hide off.

“What good is a man’s life if he can’t even choose what to die for?”

The transparent underskin tore like gossamer under his fingers.

“Everybody wants the life of a black man.”

Now Small Boy knelt down and slit the flesh from the scrotum to the jaw.

“Fair is one more thing I’ve given up.”

Luther came back and, while the others rested, carved out the rectal tube with the deft motions of a man coring an apple.

“I hope I never have to ask myself that question.”

Luther reached into the paunch and lifted the entrails. He dug under the rib cage to the diaphragm and carefully cut around it until it was free.

“It is about love. What else but love? Can’t I love what I criticize?”

Then he grabbed the windpipe and the gullet, eased them back, and severed them with one stroke of his little knife.

“It is about love. What else?”

They turned to Milkman. “You want the heart?” they asked him. Quickly, before any thought could paralyze him, Milkman plunged both hands into the rib cage. “Don’t get the lungs, now. Get the heart.”

“What else?”

He found it and pulled. The heart fell away from the chest as easily as yolk slips out of its shell.

“What else? What else? What else?”

Now Luther went back into the stomach cavity and yanked the entrails out altogether. They sucked up like a vacuum through the hole that was made at the rectum. He slipped the entrails into a paper bag while the others began cleaning up, hosing down, salting, packing, straightening, and then they turned the cat over to let the blood drain down on its own hide.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Milkman.

“Eat him!”

A peacock soared away and lit on the hood of a blue Buick.

Milkman looked at the bobcat’s head. The tongue lay in its mouth as harmless as a sandwich. Only the eyes held the menace of the night.

Hungry as he was, he couldn’t eat much of Vernell’s breakfast, so he pushed the scrambled eggs, hominy, fried apples around in the plate, gulped coffee and talked a lot. And, somehow, he had to get around to the purpose of his visit to Shalimar.

“You know, my grandfather came from somewhere near here. My grandmother too.”

“Did? From around here? What’s their name?”

“I don’t know her maiden name, but her first name was Sing. Any of you ever know anybody with a name like that?”

They shook their heads. “Sing? No. Never heard of nobody name that.”

“I had an aunt live down this way too. Name of Pilate. Pilate Dead. Ever hear of her?”

“Ha! Sound like a newspaper headline: Pilot Dead. She do any flying?”

“No. P-i-l-a-t-e, Pilate.”

“P-i-l-a-t-e. That spell Pie-late,” Small Boy said.

“Naw, nigger. Not no Pie-late. Pilate like in the Bible, dummy.”

“He don’t read the Bible.”

“He don’t read nothin.”

“He can’t read nothin.”

They teased Small Boy until Vernell interrupted them. “You all hush. You say Sing?” she asked Milkman.

“Yeah. Sing.”

“I believe that was the name of a girl my gran used to play with. I remember the name cause it sounded so pretty. Gran used to talk about her all the time. Seem like her folks didn’t like her to play with the colored children from over this way, so her and my gran used to sneak off and go fishin and berry-pickin. You know what I mean? She’d have to meet her in secret.” Vernell eyed Milkman carefully. “This Sing girl was light-skinned, with straight black hair.”

“That’s her!” Milkman said. “She was mixed or Indian, one.”

Vernell nodded. “Indian. One of old Heddy’s children. Heddy was all right, but she didn’t like her girl playin with coloreds. She was a Byrd.”

“A what?”

“A Byrd. Belonged to the Byrd family over by the ridge. Near Solomon’s Leap.”

“Oh, yeah?” said one of the men. “One of Susan Byrd’s people?”

“That’s right. One of them. They never was too crazy ‘bout colored folks. Susan either.”

“Do they still live there?” asked Milkman.

“Susan do. Right behind the ridge. Only house back in there with a brick front. She by herself now. All the others moved out so they could pass.”

“Can I walk it?” he asked.

“Most folks could, I reckon,” said Omar. “But after last night I don’t recommend it for you.” He laughed.

“Can you drive a car through?”

“Part of the way you can. But the road is narrow and messy back up in there,” said Vernell. “Horse, maybe, but not no car.”

“I’ll make it. Might take me a week, but I’ll make it,” said Milkman.

“Just don’t carry no guns”—Calvin cooled his coffee in his saucer—“and you’ll be all right.” They all laughed again.

Milkman thought about that. Guitar was out there someplace, and since he seemed to know everything Milkman was doing or getting ready to do, he’d also know he was going out to some ridge. He touched his swollen neck. He didn’t want to go anywhere alone without a gun.

“You ought to have a rest before you go trottin off anywhere,” Omar said, looking at him. “There’s a nice lady up the road a ways. She’d be proud to take you in.” The look in his eyes was unmistakable. “Pretty woman too. Real pretty.” Vernell grunted and Milkman smiled. Hope she’s got a gun, he thought.

She didn’t, but she had indoor plumbing and her smile was just like her name, Sweet, as she nodded her head to Milkman’s query about whether he could take a bath. The tub was the newest feature in the tiny shotgun house and Milkman sank gratefully into the steaming water. Sweet brought him soap and a boar’s-bristle brush and knelt to bathe him. What she did for his sore feet, his cut face, his back, his neck, his thighs, and the palms of his hands was so delicious he couldn’t imagine that the lovemaking to follow would be anything but anticlimactic. If this bath and this woman, he thought, are all that come out of this trip, I will rest easy and do my duty to God, country, and the Brotherhood of Elks for the rest of my life. I will walk hot coals with a quart of kerosene in my hand for this. I will walk every railroad tie from here to Cheyenne and back for this. But when the lovemaking came, he decided he would crawl.

Afterward he offered to bathe her. She said he couldn’t because the tank was small and there wasn’t enough water for another hot bath.

“Then let me give you a cool one,” he said. He soaped and rubbed her until her skin squeaked and glistened like onyx. She put salve on his face. He washed her hair. She sprinkled talcum on his feet. He straddled her behind and massaged her back. She put witch hazel on his swollen neck. He made up the bed. She gave him gumbo to eat. He washed the dishes. She washed his clothes and hung them out to dry. He scoured her tub. She ironed his shirt and pants. He gave her fifty dollars. She kissed his mouth. He touched her face. She said please come back. He said I’ll see you tonight.