A Fine Dark Line

16

SUMMER VACATION was winding down. I was nervous about the prospect of starting a new school, and I had Bubba Joe on my mind. At night, when I tried to lie down, I no longer thought of something ghostly. I thought of Bubba Joe. The way he had looked at me just before the light went out of his eyes and his soul fell down that long tunnel to hell.

Bubba Joe had deserved it. Buster had saved my life. But it wasn’t that easy. Someone cleared their throat, the water gurgled down the sink, it sounded like that gurgle Bubba Joe had made before he let go and went away.

Even some of the movies we showed bothered me. The way people died on film was not the way Bubba Joe died. No last words, dramatic moments. Just bloody and dead.

I tried to stay busy, and one thing I stayed busy with was mine and Buster’s mystery. I guess it was Callie’s mystery too. I kept her informed but she didn’t show much interest.

She started dating Drew Cleves. He seemed nice enough. He had treated me well enough that day on the hill.

Mama liked him.

Daddy didn’t. Then again, he wasn’t crazy about any boy who dated or even wanted to date Callie.

Because of Drew, Callie was out on dates a lot, driving away the summer, going downtown to the indoor movie, hanging out at the drugstore over hamburgers and malts.

The family still thought about Bubba Joe now and then, but not much. It was assumed he had moved on since the cops hadn’t heard of nor seen hide nor hair of him.

I, of course, knew he was dead, and every day I woke up as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. A big shoe. Bubba Joe’s body found somewhere along the creek. In time, though, even I thought less about him.

Daddy had gotten used to me going out to the projection booth to spend time with Buster, and I think, in the back of his mind, he thought I was learning better how to run the projector. It was a practical consideration for him. For me it was fun.

We had still not talked to Winnie.

I asked Buster about that.

“I’m holdin’ back,” he said. “This is a game to us, but that was her daughter got killed.”

“I really do care who killed her. I’d like to see the police nab him.”

“That may be, Stan, but this woman, she don’t understand that.”

“What is there to understand?”

“She gonna believe some boy and a nigger gonna get her daughter justice? That’s hard to buy, even if we are sincere . . . And you know, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell we’ll solve anything. I’m doing it to keep from thinkin’ about whiskey and what I ought’a have done and didn’t and won’t never and can’t never do. You understand what I’m sayin’, boy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I ain’t sayin’ your heart ain’t in the right place, I’m just tellin’ you life ain’t fair. Just ’cause you want somethin’, don’t mean you’ll get it. It ain’t like them Sherlock Holmes stories. They help you to think. Why I gave the book to you—You keep it. I don’t want it back. Anything happens to me, all them books are yours—”

“Nothing is going to happen—”

“Just listen. Life ain’t fair, and it don’t always have everything fit together like a puzzle. Some things just are and there ain’t no explainin’ them. You can come up with maybes, and sometimes you’ll find the real reason. But a lot of what happens don’t never make sense and don’t never jibe together. Hear me?”

“Yes, sir . . . But, isn’t there some way we can talk to her?”

Buster grinned at me. “You ain’t no quitter. I give you that. Maybe there is. I been thinkin’ on it. If I do talk to her, it ain’t gonna be we. It’s gonna be me.”

“But you said—”

“Don’t remember what I said, but I ain’t gonna drag no little white boy off to a whore’s house to chat about her dead daughter. Now how you think your daddy feel about that? You think that’s gonna do my job any good?”

I was disappointed. I thought I was going to be in on it. Not only the investigation, but meeting Margret’s mother, and a live whore. I sat there for a while and listened to the reel clatter in the projector. I knew pouting would get me nowhere with Buster. Finally, I said, “Well, when are you going to do it?”

Buster pursed his lips. “Tonight, when I finish here.”

“Won’t that be late?”

“Not for her. I’ll report to you tomorrow mornin’, if you’ll come over to the street alongside the grocery. We can sit on the curb and visit. Let’s say nine in the mornin’.”

“If I’m not there, Daddy or Mom hung me up. Okay?”

“I understand.”

———

NEXT MORNING I was up early. I left a note saying I was going to buy comic books at the drugstore with my allowance.

Rosy caught me on the way out.

“Where you runnin’ off to this mornin’ without yo’ dog?” She was sitting up on the couch, scratching her head.

“I’m going to buy comics. I thought I might be in town for a while, so I left Nub in my room. Will you let him out later?”

“Them comics won’t be there after breakfast?”

“I don’t want breakfast.”

“Don’t need to go without yo’ breakfast. Let me fix you toast and eggs.”

I started to beg off, but didn’t want to seem too hasty.

Rosy made eggs and toast, prepared some for herself, along with coffee. She had gotten a lot more sure of herself around the house, and had even taken to giving Daddy orders. Which he took.

While I ate, Rosy said, “I can read gooder now. Gonna start workin’ on the way I talk next. Don’t want to sound like no field hand all my life. You can help me on that.”

“I don’t have perfect diction either.”

“You don’t sound ignern’t, though.”

“Well, you might say ‘I can read better’ instead of ‘gooder.’ There really isn’t a word called gooder.”

“Gotta be. Been sayin’ it all my life.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I ain’t so sure you ought to be goin’ out there with Bubba Joe around. I ain’t like yo’ daddy. I ain’t so sure he’s not gonna bother no white boy.”

“I think I’m all right, Rosy. Really.”

“Yeah, well, I ain’t one to tell you nothin’, but you watch yo’self, hear?”

———

I RODE MY BICYCLE to the place Buster asked me to meet him. It was Saturday, and the town was jumping. I saw Buster standing at the far end of the street. He had a pop bottle and was sipping from it.

As I got closer, I noticed just how old he was. He had quit putting shoe polish on his hair, and it was white at the roots. He was tall, but slouched, as if the world were on his shoulders and it had grown too heavy.

I leaned my bike against the curb and sat beside him. A white lady carrying a shopping bag of groceries came by and saw us sitting there. She gave us a kind of smirk and kept walking.

“What she got to sneer about,” Buster said. “She was any uglier they’d have to hire someone to guide her around while she wore a sack over her head.”

I laughed. He grinned, reached inside his shirt pocket and took out a PayDay candy bar. “Thought you might like one. I got myself a plain Hershey’s. My teeth don’t like them peanuts in a PayDay.”

“Did you see Margret’s mother?”

“I did. It was kinda interestin’, Stan. And we got to rethink a few things.”

I had unwrapped the candy bar and, in spite of Rosy’s breakfast, dove into it.

“Now, I couldn’t just go out there and say howdy, I want to talk about your daughter got her head run over by a train, or whatever the hell happened to it. Took some of them letters you had, Stan, and I gave them back to her.”

“You did?”

“Uh huh. May see them as your letters, but really they belonged to her daughter, so I thought the mother should have them. Some of them anyway. I wanted to keep a few around for the flavor, case we needed to look back over them and make sure of somethin’. Just picked out ones didn’t matter much, repeated what had already been said.

“Told her I found them workin’ out back the drive-in fence, buried in a jar. I don’t know why I said a jar, but I did.”

“What did she say?”

“Let me set this up. Went out there late last night. Her husband—he’s common-law, which means they just live together—he invited me in, gave me a cup of coffee, ’cause she was busy, if you know what I mean, in the back room.”

“Her husband knows?”

“He’s her pimp, Stan.”

“Pimp?”

He explained what a pimp was, added: “He gets a big share of the money. Likes money so much, I had to pay him some to sit and talk for a half hour. He didn’t care I had letters from Winnie’s daughter, felt I was burnin’ work time. So, I had to pay. Expensive coffee that way.”

“He isn’t Margret’s father, right?”

“I told you. Some Puerto Rican, or Mexican. Winnie is mixed herself. This here was a colored gent.”

“What did Miss . . . Miss Winnie think?”

“Hate to report, but she feel same as her husband. Least, she had to act like she did around her old man, ’cause he’ll beat her she don’t do right the way he sees right. I didn’t see him whup her, but I know how it works with pimps and whores, even if they live together as husband and wife.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Well, Stan, they ain’t the PTA. Know what I’m sayin’? She looked the letters over a little, gave ’em back to me. Said toss ’em, whatever.”

“She didn’t cry?”

“She didn’t even tear up. She said, ‘You got money on the clock, boy, why don’t you use it for somethin’ matters.’

“Now, I was tempted. She don’t look too bad, and I did put down ten dollars . . . I told her, sure, and we went in the back room, and when she closed the door, she said, ‘You’re gonna have to be kinda quiet so we can talk.’ We sat on the bed and she took the letters again and looked them over. This time she cried a little.”

“So she was sad?”

“In her own way. You see . . . Well, let me go through it. I showed her the letters again, and she said, Margret always treated her good, but she didn’t believe the girl got pregnant.”

“But Margret says she is in the letters.”

“No. No she doesn’t, Stan. What I noticed right off was she talked about pregnancy, didn’t say she was with baby. There’s never one line in them letters says she’s pregnant. Says she and J can deal with pregnancy, but she ain’t talkin’ about herself.”

“Who could she have been talking about? James can’t get pregnant.”

“No,” Buster said. “No, he can’t. But I’ll come back to that. Asked Margret’s mama about James Stilwind, and she said she didn’t know him, but that Margret was friends with the little Stilwind girl.”

“Jewel Ellen.”

“That’s right. Said they together all the time. That she knew the Stilwinds didn’t approve. Margret couldn’t go over to her place, for instance. She said the Stilwinds didn’t approve of her profession, and they didn’t approve that she had turned Margret out.”

“Turned her out?”

“Made a whore of her.”

“Her own daughter? She did that?”

“Winnie thought she was passin’ on the family trade, Stan.”

“Margret was just a girl!”

“Lot of men like that. Little girls, I mean. They sick sons-abitches in the world, Stan. Margret was a real moneymaker, her mother said. But she didn’t like the life and wanted to do more with herself. Thought she could run off to Hollywood and be an actress, ’cause she was so pretty. Winnie said she tried to tell Margret she wasn’t good for nothin’ else but what she was doin’.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It is. But she’s tellin’ all this to me with tears in her eyes. She loved her daughter in her fashion, but she just doesn’t have any bottom to her, Stan. She couldn’t see her daughter doin’ any better than her, makin’ anything of herself. Said how irritated she’d been that the girl wanted to go to school, and she didn’t want her to. This what a person does when they really love themselves better than they own child. Don’t want them to improve.

“Finally Margret did quit, started picking up jobs here and there. Savin’ for goin’ to Hollywood. Mother called it pissant labor and sneered, like what she was doin’ herself was some kind of scientist work.”

“This is hard to understand,” I said.

“Come from a family like yours, it is. But Winnie was worried Margret wouldn’t take to whorin’. Then she found out Margret was different. Said at first it made her mad, then she thought it might be a way to make some unexpected money. But then Margret got killed.”

“What does she mean different, Buster?”

“When Winnie said that, things in the letters clicked. J ain’t James. It’s Jewel.”

“But she’s a girl.”

“Uh huh. Sometimes it goes that way.”

“You mean . . .”

“Yep. That’s different.”

“A girl can make a girl pregnant?”

“No, son. That requires a man. Or a boy. Like I said, don’t think it was Margret that was pregnant. Mother might not know for sure, of course, but from them letters, and what I learned, I think Jewel Ellen was pregnant, and Margret was talkin’ about the two of them raisin’ the child after it was born.”

Buster looked at me, saw I was bewildered.

“Growin’ up, just full of confusion, ain’t it, Stan?”

“I’ll say.”

“Question is this: Who is the father of Jewel Ellen’s baby? We start from that idea, even if it’s just an idea, and we see where that leads us. Thing I’m thinkin’ is this: If Jewel was funny for Margret, then maybe she’s not wantin’ a man. Or maybe she wants both. It happens. That ain’t it, it means some man could have raped her? If that’s the case, who done it? So, that’s where we are.”

“Wow.”

“One thing I didn’t mention, Stan, was I did end up buyin’ me a little bootleg liquor from Jukes before I went out there. Took it with me, and in the bedroom, me and Winnie shared it. So she talked a lot. About all manner of things. But wasn’t all that much of it about her daughter. She gave me the letters back a second time, said for me to do what I wanted with them.

“She was gettin’ a little tipsy, so I said, ‘You sure you don’t know this James Stilwind?’ She said she’d never met him, but her old man—meanin’ her husband, pimp—had taken some money from James’s daddy. I asked her why, and she said, ’cause he wanted them to be quiet.”

“About what?”

“About her daughter knowin’ Jewel. Said it was a lot of money Old Man Stilwind gave ’em and she hadn’t said a word about it until now, because she didn’t think it mattered. She figured they didn’t want Jewel Ellen’s memory sullied by her sayin’ she was queer. Bottom line is, Winnie misses her daughter in her own way, but she was willin’ to take money, be quiet, not talk to the police, even if it meant not solvin’ her daughter’s death. Money was more important to her.”

Buster settled back and sipped the last of the pop he was drinking.

“That’s all?” I said.

“I had ten minutes left on my ten dollars, and I used them.”

“Oh.”

“One thing I’ve learned over the years. Don’t waste your money.”

———

BUSTER SAID he was going home to sleep for a while. I decided to actually buy comic books. I walked along as if in a dream. The world was certainly turning out to be a peculiar place, and I was becoming one perplexed little boy.

Jewel and Margret? Girlfriends? Real girlfriends?

I went over to Greene’s and looked at the comics. They had three long shelves and they were full of comics and other kinds of magazines. I found several that looked good, checked to see how many dimes were in my pocket. I had a dollar’s worth.

I bought an Adventure Comics, Challengers of the Unknown, and a thing called Strange Worlds. I even broke down and bought Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane.

I checked the back of the store where the five-cent comics were. The ones with half the cover cut off. Some of them were fairly recent, but many were old. Maybe as much as two or three years. I guessed everyone but me and Richard Chapman were picky about the state of our comics.

I picked out three or four, including a dust-covered one called Captain Flash. Like all those on the back table, the top half of the cover had been cut off, and the cutting had decapitated a dinosaur. It left a fellow in a red and blue suit with a big rock in his hand. A masked companion in yellow lay knocked down at his feet. The bottom logo read: “The Beasts From 1,000,000 B.C.”

I bought the comics, and an RC, went out to sit on the curb and read.

It was warm out, but not uncomfortable. A light wind was blowing and there was the smell of honeysuckle with it.

After a while, the comics did the trick. They took me out of the world I lived in, which had within a matter of weeks become more baffling than I could have ever imagined. At that moment, I preferred the world with bright color panels and superheroes.

By the time I read two of the comics, the real world had drifted back in. I thought of Margret and Jewel.

I had been flustered enough about male and female relations, and now this. I’d have to ask Callie about it. She seemed to be a fountain of information. So was Buster, but sometimes his fountain gushed a little too powerfully for me.

I heard a car horn honk. Looked up. Near the curb was a fine-looking blue Cadillac. It had fins like a spacecraft. The window on the passenger’s side was rolled down, and Callie, in her ponytailed exuberance, was leaning out of the window yelling at me.

I thought: Think of the devil.

Drew Cleves was at the wheel.

“Come ride with us, Stanley,” Callie said.

I gathered up my comic books and pop bottle, went over to the car.

“You got to watch that pop,” Cleves said. “My father’s car. He’d kill me if I got anything on the seats.”

“Sure,” I said. “One minute.”

I drained the RC, took the bottle into Greene’s store, traded it for two cents.

Outside, in the Cadillac, Callie said, “Isn’t this divine?”

“Daddy says it’s like driving your living room,” Drew said.

It was the biggest, most luxurious car I had ever been in. The seats were soft leather. I was tempted to stretch out and go to sleep.

Callie said, “We’re driving out to the lake.”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Drew said. “I could drive you around the block or so and let you out back here.”

“He can’t get a feel for it just around the block,” Callie said. “Come on, Stanley.”

“I don’t know how long we’re going to be out there,” Drew said. “It could be a while.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“It’s pretty hot,” he said.

“Oh, not with this nice wind blowing,” Callie said. “And the lake will be even nicer.”

“I suppose,” Drew said, but he didn’t look very happy. He leaned over the seat and looked at me as if pleading. “You’re sure you want to go?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, all right,” he said, and drove us away.

———

NEAR THE LAKE the trees were thinner because the bulldozers that had made the lake had knocked them down. Where they had done their scraping, red clay sloped into the water. There was no sand on the shore, just clay. I mentioned this.

“They have to haul it in,” Drew said, as we got out of the car.

“It would have been a lot nicer,” Callie said, “if they had left more trees. Maybe the shore wouldn’t be falling off into the water if they had.”

“My father owns the company that made the lake,” Drew said.

“He could have still left more trees,” Callie said, never one to waffle on an opinion if she sincerely held it.

Drew didn’t really care, however. He was holding Callie’s hand as they walked. He moved like his feet weren’t touching the ground.

It was awfully mushy to me at the time, and I hated seeing it, Callie holding hands and cooing, Drew falling all over himself. It was hard to believe he had the grace to run with a football.

The cool wind blew for a time, and we walked, and talked. None of it was about murder and whores and girls liking girls or headless bodies on railroad tracks.

We went along the edge of the lake for some distance, but it was too muddy to get up close, and though we had had plenty of rain, it had been compensated for by the heat, which had sucked away a lot of the water. You could see a couple of little islands out in the center of the lake, maybe thirty or forty feet apart, and the vegetation on them had died flat-out and turned the islands to mounds of dirt. There was a smell in the air of dead fish, and the kind of smell that makes the skin crawl, the kind associated with water moccasins who have lain in slick, smelly river mud gone sour and stale.

After an hour or so, we started back. Partly because the wind had stopped blowing and it was now hot as a baker’s oven. We stopped at a log near the car and sat and scraped our shoes free of mud with sticks.

“Daddy says they’re going to put in some tables and benches, cooking areas, boat ramps. Maybe plant some trees.”

“Like the ones that were here?” Callie said.

“Fast-growing trees. There’s going to be a colored section too. On the other side of the lake.”

“How convenient,” Callie said.

“I haven’t a thing against coloreds,” Drew said. “Really.”

He sounded like he meant it.

“Why don’t we go back to town,” Drew said, “get a burger and soda?”

By this time, I was actually starting to get hungry. That’s the way kids are. Bottomless pits.

“Callie, you got any money?” I asked.

“I’ll take care of you,” Drew said.

“You can take care of me,” Callie said, “but I have Stanley’s money. He’s not your responsibility. You’re not dating both of us.”

“Well,” Drew said, “that’s true. But I don’t mind.”

“You’re sweet,” Callie said, in that syrupy voice she uses when she wants something from Daddy, “but it’s not a problem.”

We tooled back into town in the Cadillac, and I must admit I felt pretty special when we stopped in front of the drugstore and climbed out of that fine machine, stood on the hot sidewalk like three gods descended from heaven.

———

WE HAD HAMBURGERS and malts at the drugstore, and I might add Drew paid for all of it. Timothy was working again, and he looked less than happy to see Callie with Drew. He put our food on the table like he was delivering bubonic plague. He had his soda hat pulled down close to his eyes, and his mouth was held so tight the thin line it made could have been used to thread a needle.

“What’s with him?” Drew said.

“Don’t pay him any mind,” Callie said.

“He wants to date her,” I said.

“Stanley!” Callie said, as if this revelation shocked her.

“You want me to take care of him?” Drew said.

“What? Hit him because he wants to date me?”

“Tell him to leave you alone.”

“No, Drew. I want to eat, then maybe we can go to the movie. It starts at one. I’ve already checked.”

“You have a theater,” he said. “Don’t you get tired of movies?”

“No,” she said. “And that’s our theater. I think of it, I mostly think of work. Besides, I want to see the movie at the Palace.”

“It’s a love story,” I said.

“Well,” Drew said. “If you want to.”

I almost felt sorry for Drew, way Callie had him tied around her little finger. She could have asked him to take her to a ballet recital and have him watch while wearing a tutu and a beret, and he would have done it.

We went to the picture, and it bored me. I slept through most of it because the theater was air-conditioned. Back then, any place that was air-conditioned in the summer was a treat.

As we were going out, we saw James Stilwind at the candy and popcorn counter, leaning over it, talking to a young girl raking popcorn out of the popper into a bag.

“There’s James Stilwind,” Callie said.

“That’s him?” Drew said. I thought he sounded a little sour about the recognition. I had a feeling he had come up in their private conversations. For all I knew, Callie had blabbed about all the things I had told her.

’Course, I was kind of a blabbermouth myself.

Stilwind turned his head, saw Callie. He had a bright white smile that looked as if it belonged in a Pepsodent commercial. “Y’all enjoy the picture?”

“It was good,” Callie said.

“It was all right,” Drew said.

I remained silent.

James came over to us, leaving the girl behind the counter looking pouty, raking popcorn, shoving it into bags, stacking it at the back of the popper.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” James asked Callie.

“I believe so,” she said. “We were coming out of the drugstore, and I saw you with your wife.”

“Wife? No. You saw me with a date. I forget who it was, but she isn’t my wife.”

“You forget?” Callie said.

“Well, if it were you, I wouldn’t forget.”

“We have to go,” Drew said.

“Sure,” James said.

“And what’s your name?” he asked Callie.

She told him.

He asked ours. We told him. I don’t think he was listening.

“And you’re James Stilwind?” Callie said.

“You know my name?”

“I know you own the theater, so I suppose it must be you.”

“Come around anytime. Here . . .” He went back behind the candy counter, reached into a drawer, came back with three tickets. He gave us each one.

“Free passes,” he said. “On me. I own the place. If I’m here, I’ll see you get a free bag of corn and a soft drink.”

“Thanks,” Callie said.

“We got to go,” Drew said, and he took Callie by the arm.

Outside, Callie said, “Drew, you’re hurting my arm.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“That’s all right,” she said, rubbing it.

“What a creep,” Drew said.

“He seemed all right to me,” Callie said.

Drew sighed. Even his daddy’s Cadillac couldn’t trump a handsome grown-up with his own theater and a Thunderbird that didn’t belong to anyone’s daddy.

I thought: James Stilwind is someone who should be talked to if I’m going to truly investigate this murder. Buster couldn’t do it. Even the idea that a colored man might be quizzing a white man on something as sensitive as a sister’s death could get him beat or worse.

Problem was, I didn’t know how to do it either.

Drew drove us home. Except for Callie commenting on how much she liked what some girl walking along the sidewalk was wearing, it was a silent trip, the air thick enough to carve into shapes.

Drew let us out at the Dew Drop. Callie slid over and kissed him on the cheek. “See you soon, Drewsy?”

That kiss broke the ice. Drew smiled. “Sure. Real soon, I hope.”

“You can bet on it,” Callie said.

“See you, Drewsy,” I said.

Drew gave me a stony look.

We got out of the car and started inside. I said, “You sure know how to work them, don’t you, Callie?”

“Comes natural,” she said.