A Fine Dark Line

2

THERE WAS ONE KID I met after moving to Dewmont who I made friends with. His name was Richard Chapman. He was a little older than me, but in the same grade, because he had failed a year.

Like Huckleberry Finn, Richard wasn’t the sort that would make a great adult, but he was one hell of a kid. He could ride a bike faster than the wind, could toss a pocketknife between his toes and not stick himself, knew the woods, could climb a tree like a gibbon, and juggle four rubber balls at a time.

He had a shock of brown greasy hair, made greasier by generous doses of Vitalis, sweat, and body oil. Richard combed his mop straight back like Johnny Weissmuller, who he resembled.

Richard’s hair was constantly slipping out of place, and he spent a good portion of his time flipping it back into position with brutal jerks of his head, and knowing lice lived there, this activity made you nervous. Still, at the time, having a cowlick and a white spot at the front of my hair, I envied that greasy mop of his, along with his muscles.

My thought was, if Richard were in a plane that crashed in the jungle, he would survive and become someone like Tarzan. He would figure out how to hunt, build a hut, and fight natives.

I, on the other hand, would be eaten by lions, or beaten to death by monkeys within moments.

One Saturday morning Richard came over to watch television, to see all the shows on Jungle Theater. While he watched, he held and mooned over my Roy Rogers cowboy boots. He had a thing for those boots; they were red leather and written on the pull-up straps in silver letters was “Roy Rogers.”

Richard’s family didn’t have a TV. They had owned one, but when a storm knocked down their antenna and twisted it up like a pretzel, his father decided it was a sign from God, and sold the set to a sinner.

Even before the jungle shows finished, Richard held one of my cowboy boots against his foot to see if it would fit, and informed me he had to go, had to get back home and do chores and take a beating because he was running late and had left home without asking.

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“Because Daddy would have said no.”

“Then why did you come?”

“I wanted to.”

“What about the beating?”

Richard shrugged.

Being accustomed to beatings, Richard wasn’t overly frightened by the notion. He told me if he thought of himself as Tarzan being tortured by natives, he could make out tough enough to take it.

Richard pretended he was Tarzan a lot.

When Richard talked about chores, he meant grown-man chores on Mr. Chapman’s worn-out farm. I picked up my clothes and a few odds and ends like that, but Richard had to feed the chickens, slop the hogs, put hay out for cows, plant and harvest crops. He fixed fence and cut fence posts, and once dug a six-foot-long, twelve-foot-deep trench for their outhouse before breakfast.

His daddy made him slave as hard as the people he hired to work the fields. Usually, this was an unending cycle of one or two colored people, sometimes Mexicans, who, whether native to Texas or from across the border, were referred to as wetbacks.

These workers, migrants and transients—anyone who lived in Dewmont knew better than to work for Chapman—didn’t last long on the farm, and were soon gone, fired either for laziness or religious infractions.

Mr. Chapman thought he was called by God and had set up a kind of church in his barn. Richard said he and the workers had to memorize passages from the Bible and listen to preaching from Chapman. Richard figured a lot of the workers who decamped left because of this, or they were just plain tired of so much work for so little pay.

This kind of life was alien to me. My daddy would get upset with me, and I had occasionally gotten an ass shining. But it was nothing savage like what Richard got, and I didn’t live in fear of it or expect it on a regular basis. In fact, since the age of eleven I had not had a spanking.

Frankly, on this day, I wasn’t concerned with Richard’s chores or the whipping he would take. I was more disappointed I was going to have a full summer day, a Saturday, without anyone to play with.

After Richard left and the television shows were over, I vacated the comfort of our water-cooled window fan, and went out into the blinding heat.

Me and Nub took to playing at the edge of the woods out back, just off our property, but not far from the drive-in fence. The fence was about eight feet tall and tin, supported by two-by-fours and two-by-sixes. It was designed to prevent sneaking into the theater.

The outside of the tin was originally been painted in a mural fashion, and someone had bothered to paint four long slices of it with colorful paintings of a flying saucer and little green men before they said the hell with it and painted the remaining expanse of back and side fence in the same green that adorned the dew drop symbol and gave hue to the skin of the aliens.

I was playing what I called Nub Chase. It was a simple game. I ran and Nub tried to catch me, and, of course, he always did. When he caught up with me, he’d latch his teeth into my blue jeans, and I’d keep trying to run, him hanging on my pants leg, growling like a grizzly bear. I’d drag him about for a while, free him, break and run again.

Dutifully, he’d charge after me, and we’d repeat this process, running the hundred-yard gap between fence and woods. We had been doing this much of the summer, along with other games like prowling the woods and throwing rocks into a pond I wasn’t supposed to go near. The pond was large and the water was as green as our fence. Moss and lily pads floated on its surface.

I often saw large frogs bunched up on the pads and logs and along the bank. There was a kind of smell about the place that brought to mind something primitive, like a prehistoric swamp containing dead dinosaurs. I liked to pretend there were dinosaurs in there, in suspended animation, and that any moment one, awakened by a crack of thunder, or maybe a stroke of hot lightning on the surface of the algae-slick green pond, would rise out of there shedding water and begin a rampage through downtown Dewmont, hopefully taking the school out first.

I loved going there to see the frogs and the blue and green dragonflies. Once, I even came upon a fat water moccasin sunning itself on the shore, a frog’s hind legs hanging out of its mouth.

But on this day, playing between fence and woods, running from Nub, I suddenly tripped and fell. It was a hard fall, and my ankle, where something had snagged me at the top of my black high-top tennis shoe, felt as if an anvil had been dropped on it. I sat down crying, rubbing my foot, easing off my shoe to see if it was worse than I thought. Once the shoe and sock were removed, I saw only a red mark turning purple at the top of my foot and along the ankle.

I rubbed my foot and Nub licked my toes. When I looked in the direction I had first stumbled, I saw something dark brown and sharp sticking up out of the edge of the ground.

I put my sock and shoe on, and leaving my tennis shoe untied, limped over to take a look. It was the edge of a metal box sticking out of the ground. I was immediately excited, thought perhaps I had discovered some kind of pirate treasure chest, the edge of a flying device from Mars, or perhaps, as in one of the books I was reading that summer, At the Earth’s Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the tip of a metal mole machine burrowing up from the surface.

I gave up on the latter idea immediately. It wasn’t burrowing at all. It was just sticking out of the ground. Perhaps, I thought, it’s the tip of the machine and it’s stalled, and Abner Perry and David Innes from the novel are trapped down there and need my assistance.

Now, I didn’t really believe this, anymore than I believed a dinosaur would rise out of that old pond and crash and chew its way through Dewmont, though I should add there was always a part of me that did believe it and thought on some level, in some universe, in some far corner of my mind, that it was real. But for the most part I knew it was the edge of a metal box.

I attempted to dig around it with my hands, but the dirt and grass had become too entwined.

I went into the drive-in, used the padlock key hidden under a brick next to the shed, got a shovel out of storage, and went back.

When I returned to the spot where Nub and I had found our treasure, Nub had already begun to dig up the unidentified ground object. He had managed with paws and teeth to make pretty good progress.

I carefully pushed Nub aside, and ignoring my sore foot, I dug.

I had to stop and take a breather a couple of times. It was so hot it felt as if I was sucking down hairballs with every breath. I wished then I had filled and brought the army canteen my Uncle Ben had given me, and I even considered going to get it, but didn’t.

I stayed at it, and pretty soon, the little box was free. It was about twice the size of a cigar box and it had a small, rusty old padlock holding it together. I tugged at the lock, and rusty or not, it was still firm; in fact, the rust may have only made it tighter. The keyhole in the lock was filled with dirt and roots.

A summer rain started up. One moment there had not been a cloud in the sky, the next the clouds rolled in and the rain started, soft and steady, giving the earth that sweet smell that either makes you want to plant or sin.

I knew I had to finish up whatever I was doing, because Mom would be wanting me out of the rain, and it was near lunchtime.

I thought about using the shovel to knock the lock off, but hesitated. I was afraid I’d end up breaking the shovel.

I decided the best thing to do would be to get a more serviceable tool out of the shed for the job. But when I got back to the shed with the box, I heard Mom calling me to eat.

I pushed the metal box on a shelf, put a greasy cardboard box full of electrical fuses and switches in front of it, went to wash my hands and eat.

Though I would not have imagined it right then, what occurred at dinner caused me to actually forget about the box for a time.

———

I SUPPOSE DADDY could have picked a more opportune moment to confront Callie, and it’s my guess he would have had it not been an immediate and shocking discovery, but my father was not in any way like the fathers you saw on television in the 1950s, calm and collected and full of sharp wisdom.

We were sitting at the table waiting for him, plates of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy stacked in the center of the table, when he arrived holding something with a pair of tweezers.

I thought it was a balloon. It dangled limp from the tweezers and was tied in a knot at the top and was filled with something, and Daddy’s hand shook as he held it.

He looked at Caldonia, said, “I found it in your room.”

Caldonia turned red as Santa’s suit, slid down in her chair. Even her ponytail seemed to wilt. “You couldn’t . . .” she said.

But, he had.

Later we learned he had gone in Callie’s room to shut her window against the rain, and had seen what he now held with tweezers. But at that moment, all I knew was here was a very upset man standing at the table with an odd balloon dangling from a pair of tweezers.

“You’re only sixteen,” he said. “Not married.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Callie said, and with the speed of the Flash, she leaped from her chair and darted for her room.

Still holding the thing with the tweezers, Dad looked at Mom, who stood up very slowly, put her chair under the table and left the room with a sob. Down the hall I heard her crying, and over that I could hear Callie wailing.

Daddy looked at me, said, “I’ll just get rid of this.”

Not knowing what it was he was disposing of, or what had actually occurred, I just nodded, and when he left the room I sat there bewildered. Eventually he returned. He sat at the head of the table and stared off into space. Finally he noticed me sitting there. He said, “You go ahead and eat, Stanley.”

I filled my plate and started in, curious about what was going on, but in no way put off my feed. I was through my second piece of chicken when Mom came back and sat down and made a production of placing her napkin in her lap.

Daddy said, “You spoke with her, Gal?”

Mom’s voice wasn’t any better. “Some. I’ll be speaking with her again.”

“Good. Good.”

She looked up at me, smiled weakly, said, “Callie won’t be joining us for dinner. Would you pass the chicken, Stanley?”