Axeman's Jazz

7

ARIYEH USUALLY sleeps late on Saturdays, her one day off (she’s active in church on Sundays), but today she’s agreed to come with me to the hanging field where Cletus Hayes died. She believes my interest in the place is morbid — I suppose it is — and has no desire to see it. But the time we’ll have in the car will let us catch up with each other. I pull into her driveway at eight. She lives in Montrose, an old but slowly gentrifying area of town, just two miles from her daddy’s home. “Generic house, generic furniture,” she says, laughing, showing me around. “That’s what it means to join the middle class, isn’t it — you become just like everyone else?” She’s packed turkey sandwiches and some barbecued potato chips for us. On the road, she helps navigate me through a puzzle of cloverleafs, and soon we’re on open highway, heading west toward San Antonio. I feel us both relax.

“You really are looking good,” I tell her.

“You too. For a white girl.” She chuckles. She knows she can needle me and get away with it. Already, like the marshy lands here resettling after long winter rains, we’ve reestablished our balance. I tremble with anger at Mama, denying me this lovely friendship all those years.

“I’ll tell you who I’m worried about, and that’s your father,” I say, setting the cruise control. “He’s having chest pains.”

She blanches. “Again? I caught him a few months back, feeling poorly, but he swore to me the trouble had gone away.”

“Is he afraid of doctors? Does he have insurance?”

“He’s covered on my policy, through the school.” She chews her lower lip. “But you’re right. Getting him to a clinic will be like jump-starting a mule.”

Bluebonnet fields, past blooming, blaze green all around us. The bluebonnet is the Lone Star State’s official flower; every Sunday painter in Texas has whipped out acres of bad landscapes. It’s a hackneyed sight by now, but the blossoms are beautiful, little mirrors of the sky, and I’m grateful to be reminded of them.

I seem to have depressed Ariyeh, talking about Bitter. She’s spent more years than I have, trying to find cracks in his mask — if it’s a mask. “Reggie’s energy is astonishing,” I say. “It’s a wonderful thing he’s doing with the Row Houses.”

“It is. It’s hard for me to get him to slow down. But he’s such a relief after all the frogs I dated before. Lot of lazy black men in the city. I don’t know if you know that.”

I laugh.

“What about you?” she asks. “Any men?”

“Not any good ones.” I tell her about Dwayne — it feels natural to confess to her, the way we did as girls, gossiping and laughing all night.

“Jesus, T. Did you report him?”

“Not to the cops. I knew he’d claim the sex was consensual … and I wasn’t sure it wasn’t, up to a point — ”

“Oh, don’t do that to yourself. Guilt-tripping and stuff. The man raped you, honey. And because of your skin. Sick son of a bitch. I hope you got him fired, at least.”

“Transferred to another city office. I told him I couldn’t work with him anymore.”

“He escaped lightly. And you’ve been feeling guilty about it ever since, hm?”

“Mama took a turn for the worse soon after that, so I didn’t have much time to dwell on him.”

In fact, the week of Mama’s funeral, going through her things, I found Sarah Morgan’s letter from C and began to piece together what really might have happened between my great-grandfolks. I thought the night with Dwayne, a fresh chill in my mind, would help me clarify — or at least vividly imagine — the relationship. The attraction/repulsion of forbidden skin. The fine line, sometimes, between violence and mutual passion. Surely, because of what had happened to me, I could see Cletus a little clearer, from Sarah Morgan’s perspective? But really, the opposite occurred. I felt a swell of panic whenever I considered Cletus and Sarah’s rendezvous. I knew my alarm was more about Dwayne and me than family history, but knowing this didn’t help. I couldn’t calm my anxiety, and it’s part of what set me on the run, I suspect, back to what Bitter could tell me. How do black couples behave toward one another? And why?

“So what got this bee under your bonnet, to find your family?” Ariyeh asks. “Your mama’s passing?”

“Partly. Though I’d been curious for a long time. Sounds funny, I suppose, but I got tired of being white. Tired of the ‘burbs. The thing is, I remembered Houston, you know, though Mama had tried to erase it from me. I missed you and Bitter. You were like old songs I’d hear on the radio, tugging on me from far away.”

“I remember your mama crying in a back bedroom, in the dark, all by herself. It’s one of my strongest childhood memories. I don’t know why. She used to scare me, she was sad so much.”

“I wish I could cry for her. I mean, I know she had a hard life, I know she moved us to give me opportunities she never had … but I feel such rage at her, now, for orchestrating my life.”

Ariyeh reaches over, takes my hand, and holds it on the seat between us. We pass a pair of hitchhikers, a long-haired couple with bedrolls and a cardboard sign saying ALBUQUERQUE. I’m still thinking of Mama, and the hitchhikers remind me of the one time I had to bum a ride — on the day she died. I’d stayed upset with Dwayne, with everything that had happened the night of our date. I kept hearing in my head, “The dark side. The dark side.” One Monday, on my lunch break, I decided to exorcise this voice, to cancel Dwayne’s challenge to me and tackle what he so clearly felt I wasn’t facing.

But that wasn’t all. I was running from Mama, too, that day — not so much her sickness and the duties it required … refilling prescriptions, bathing her, reading to her. I was happy to do those things. It was the pretense. The get well cards from friends. By now, we all knew she wasn’t going to get well. The flowers. The move back home from the hospital, as though nothing had ever happened. The bedsheets her husband washed every damn day, as though she lay in a fancy hotel suite rather than a sickbed (she didn’t sweat and barely moved enough to soil the linens). Dale told me he was doing everything he knew to “make her feel comfortable.” But it seemed to me that he and Mama did everything they could to deny what was happening, the way Mama had disavowed our past. Just another whitewash. I wanted no part of it. I didn’t mean to be cruel. But I did want to grieve — openly, and with Mama. Apparently, that wasn’t allowed in Dale Licht’s subdivision.

So one Monday — though I knew Mama had worsened, and I should stick by a phone — I headed for Deep Ellum. I hoped it would be a dark and dreary place, that it would remind me of Houston, that it would confirm for me that my beginnings were as awful as I thought (that day) they were … as wretched as my Dwayne-and-Dale-infected mood.

Rain and wind buffeted the trees, made the streets hard to negotiate. I checked a map and soon found myself crossing railroad tracks, bumping along old brick roads. Since the night with Dwayne, I’d been reading about Deep Ellum — the history buff in me — and had come across a description of the neighborhood in an old black weekly, on microfilm in the public library: “Down on ‘Deep Ellum’ in Dallas, where Central Avenue empties onto Elm Street, is where Ethiopia stretches forth her hands. It is the one spot in the city that needs no daylight savings time because there is no bedtime, and working hours have no limits. The only place recorded on earth where business, religion, hoodooism, gambling and stealing go on at the same time without friction.”

I saw an empty train caboose, a streetcar shell, and several soft brick buildings, many of them burned, with faded signs on what remained of their walls: TOOL SHOP AND LOANS,INDIAN HERB EMPORIUM, SHOWS NIGHTLY. But mostly I saw slick new department stores, fern bars, antique shops. The neighborhood was rapidly redeveloping — the city didn’t want to face its dark past, either. Whatever secret places Dwayne knew, holdovers from the old days, I wouldn’t be able to find on my own in this driving rain. Discouraged, angry, still aching between my legs (more psychological now than physical), I turned around, tears in my eyes, to head back to work, and the car began to sputter. The “oil” light came on. I chugged another block or two before the engine died altogether. I didn’t have an umbrella, so as I walked, looking for a gas station or a pay phone, I sought shelter in doorways, under awnings. Inadvertently, I’d looped back onto one of the undeveloped blocks. Broken glass, metal strips torn from dead buildings curled across the walks. Drunks huddled on porches or under boarded-up windows, begging change. The nasty. This is what I’d come to find — to degrade myself out of spite, out of anger at Mama, Dwayne, Dale — but it didn’t make me feel any better. I heard a saxophone stutter somewhere inside an echoey room. Steam coiled from rusty grates in the concrete.

I was shivering and soaked when an old Ford Fairlane, dented and red, pulled up beside me, splashing my feet. It was as scratched and weathered as an old horse. A young black woman on the passenger side rolled down her window. “Need a lift?” I got in back, wary but grateful, and asked to be dropped at the nearest service station. Behind the wheel, a big, gruff man, bearded and with an afro the size of a bowling ball. The car smelled of French fries and talcum powder. We drove for several blocks, none of us speaking. Finally, at a stoplight, the guy turned to me. “I want you to know, I don’t normally stop for white folks,” he said. “It’s only on account of my old lady here that I’m giving you this ride.” I nodded and croaked, “Thank you.” He let me off at a Shell station. I had the car towed and wound up back at work around four. I called to check on Mama, and Dale, weeping, told me she’d passed away unexpectedly an hour ago (who wasn’t expecting it, you poor, pathetic …).

I sat at my desk, gripping the phone till my hand hurt. I’d been playing in the dark while my mama died. And the dark wasn’t really there anymore. Everything was a lousy, stupid joke. This is what I’d thought I wanted to happen — for the truth to burst through the laundered veneer of our lives, but no, it wasn’t what I wanted at all, not at all. What I really wanted, I knew now, was to return from Deep Ellum with the “dark side” all over my skin — inside-out, upside down — enough to shock Mama out of her sickbed stupor and force her to tell me everything, everything, right from the start. But now she was gone. How much of me, I wondered, went with her? I tried to weep, then and for several days afterward, but by now I was well-trained. Whatever’s inside, I’d learned, you keep back, like an old dollar bill in a mint tin.

By coincidence I see a Shell station and pull off the highway to fill up. Ariyeh has been quiet for several miles. As the young attendant wipes my windshield, she turns to me and says softly “I’ve just been thinking. Trying to decide whether I’m making this up or not, and I don’t think so. I believe I remember your daddy coming to the house one day.”

I sit up straight. The smell of gas through my open window dizzies me. The car shivers in the breeze of passing trucks.

“We would have been … oh, I don’t know, five or six? Can that be right? I’m not sure where you were. Off with your mama somewhere. I remember my own mama, Cass, was yelling and screaming about money or some-such, giving Daddy hell over something, and I’m just trying to stay out of the way, you know, when this strange man walks up on the porch, real slim, puffing a cigarette, and asks Daddy can he borrow a sawbuck or two? This is the part that seems like I’m making it up, ‘cause for all her yelling, Cass was never really violent … but it’s also the part that catches in my mind like an actual memory, it was so unusual. Cass rears back and hurls an open honey jar at the screen door, right where the man is standing, shaking sort of, like he’s sick, and she shouts at him, ‘Ain’t a dime in this house, and if’n there was, you’d never see it!’ I see him slouching there on the porch, spattered with gold, shaking his head and mumbling — I can’t believe I remember this now — ’Heads or tails, either way you lose.’ I asked Daddy about him later, and something he said made me think he was your dad.”

I try to picture the man. “You never told me.”

“Eighteen bucks even, ma’am,” the attendant says, startling me. I give him a twenty. My hand shakes.

“Didn’t I? Then maybe … I don’t know … maybe I’m dreaming — ”

“Oh hell, it doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s just an old ghost to me.”

“A ghost who won’t leave you in peace.”

I admit to her I put a call in to Huntsville, requesting a visit with Elias Woods. The official I reached said he’d get back to me. He was afraid I was a journalist. “No more death row interviews, all right? You goddam liberal writers always make us out to be monsters. We’re only doing our jobs.”

The attendant returns with my change, and we’re off again, through pecan groves and scrub oak, dewberry fields, gnarled old magnolias, moss-covered, leaves applauding in the wind. The air smells of mint. Just off the highway a drive-in movie screen looms in a field, an immense sheet hung out to dry. Bitter took me and Ariyeh to a drive-in once when we were little; I remember thinking, “Bitter’s the only dad I have”; remember popcorn and Cokes spilling over our dresses; remember Bitter sighing. I even remember the movie because I saw it again years later, this time in a suburban Dallas theater, a second-run place, with an all-white, upper-class audience. The film was Pinky, about a poor mulatta who decides not to “violate her race” by marrying a white man and inheriting a wealthy plantation; instead, she chooses to remain a Negro and opens a school for dark-skinned kids. The drive-in audience, mostly young, mostly black, howled with derision at the melodramatic, sentimental plot and at the woman’s stupidity, passing up the good life. Years later, the white audience in Dallas wept at the young woman’s selflessness. I recall glancing at Mama, who sat impassively beside me as Dale and her new white friends dabbed their eyes, careful not to topple soft drinks into their laps. (What was she thinking? Was the movie a surprise to her? Would she have gone if she’d known what it was about?) And I recalled the low, dark chortles in the night from long ago, the smells of sweat and food and sex (though I didn’t know that’s what it was, then) rising from the cars, the smell of the nearby bayou, rotty and dank, frog chirps competing with actors’ voices from the scratchy drive-in speakers, and I wanted to return to the noise and the stink and the mess, to real life (my lost daddy’s home), which seemed to me buried now under Mama’s department store catalogs, bedspreads, and furnishings. Her scented toilet paper.

“Yeah, I remember that drive-in,” Ariyeh says now. “It’s the first place I saw people fucking, though I thought they were hurting each other or something. I think Daddy wanted us to see it. Sex education.”

“Right.” I laugh. “When I was twelve, Mama took me to a series of films at the YWCA. Each week, cartoon cutaways of uteruses, penises, gumdrop sperm. No one said a word, all these mothers and daughters sitting stiffly in cold folding chairs. And in the car, on the way home, she kept her eyes pinned to the road. When I asked her what in the world we’d just been watching, she’d say, ‘Why don’t we get some ice cream?’ Or she’d stop and buy me comic books — Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, these boys’ books, you know, that I didn’t have the slightest interest in, though they weren’t any more outlandish than the sex-toons — and I’d wind up gorging myself at Baskin-Robbins. To this day, I associate conception with the taste of chocolate-chocolate chip.”

Ariyeh cracks up, and we recall all the places we sneaked off to as girls to talk about boys. The mud-dauber shack. A spot along the bayou, where someone had tossed an old stove and it lay rusting in the mud, tangled in poison ivy and tree roots. And of course, our favorite, the Flower Man’s house. Sometimes we’d see him nailing up a new treasure — a child’s tutu, a clay butterfly, a G.I. Joe doll — on the outer walls of his home.

“Is he crazy, the Flower Man?” I ask.

“Who knows? Maybe he’s just got a genius for junk. Like I do for lunch. Can we stop soon?” She smiles, embarrassed. She was always the first to get hungry.

I pull off near a billboard advertising mysterious ancient caves. A cow watches us unwrap our sandwiches. We sit on the hood of the car. “A developer’s dream,” I say, gazing at the fields. “I try to remember what it was like to enjoy nature’s beauty. Surely, at one time, I could just soak it up. Now, I can’t look at any place without imagining feasibility studies, cost estimates …”

“Do you like your job?” Ariyeh asks.

Sparrows gossip in the trees. Diesel smoke in the wind.

“I’m good at it. Is that the same as liking?”

“I don’t think so, sweetie.”

“I have an aquarium at home. The catfish always stays at the bottom, cleaning up the others’ leftovers. They’re darting around at the top, picking food off the water’s surface. He’s catching whatever falls between the cracks. I call him Hoover.”

“You feel like him, is that it?”

I waggle my head, neither yes or no.

“Sounds like he works too hard. Like he’s trying to hide.”

I open the potato chip bag. “You?”

“Jesus. Me? I’m a Band-Aid stretched across an open chest.” A rueful laugh. “We don’t have enough resources to give these kids a first-rate education. Or even a third-rate one. They’re going to wind up on the streets, killing each other, most of them. We all know it. The kids know it, too, so they don’t even try.”

“Are there any whites in your school?”

“Only a handful. Busing’s been repealed.”

“You’re very brave. You and Reggie both. I told him that.”

She nibbles her bread. “Daddy thinks we’re crazy, trying so hard to improve things. We fight about it all the time, and he and Reggie can hardly speak to each other. He says he’s lived long enough to see most ideals wither and die. ‘Pie in the sky don’t do black folk no good,’ he tells me. You know the way he talks. I admit, sometimes I think he’s right. I get so tired.”

I hug her. She sags, and I realize how tense she is most of the time.

“Well. We’d best get to this gloomy old field of yours,” she says, falsely bright.

“You sure?” I say, rubbing her back.

She nods, narrows her eyes. “I’m sure. It’s Saturday, for God’s sakes. What am I doing worrying about work?”

She’s done talking now. I won’t push her. I learned a long time ago not to do that. “Okay. Let’s see what we can see.” But I’ll watch her closely the rest of the day.

Just east of San Antonio I take a cutoff onto a narrow gravel road. My directions are makeshift, a slew of landmarks and locations from various historical sources, all incomplete, testifying to the fact that nothing remains to distinguish the hanging field from other meadows. In all likelihood, I won’t even know it if I see it. We bump over ruts and rocks. Billboards for foot powder, insecticide, Yankee Motor Oil. Hillocks of hay. Jutting stone. To the west, a line of pines, stiff but somewhat crooked: sloppy troops at parade rest. Behind them, sloping down the barest suggestion of a hill, mesquite trees tangled in dewberry vines. “This is it,” I say uncertainly. My face goes hot. “I think this is it.”

Ariyeh looks at the field, boredom in her eyes: a child disappointed at the fair. At least she’s forgotten her own troubles for now. “This? What makes you think so?”

“Those trees. That little hill. It’s got to be.”

“There’s nothing here.”

“Exactly. The army erased all traces of what it did.”

“Why?”

“Well, naturally the officers knew it was incendiary, lynching thirteen black men. They wanted to make an example for other Negro soldiers, but they didn’t want to incite more rioting in Houston. So they carried out the execution in secret away from the city and only announced it afterwards. Even then, they said it had taken place at a nearby fort in accordance with strict military procedure.”

“What do you hope to find here today?”

I shake my head, step from the car. Grass scratches my ankles. I make sure the Taurus is okay in the high weeds, not too hot underneath, no danger of flame. Ariyeh follows me, a few tentative steps, then stops to swat mosquitoes. Her boredom has turned into annoyance. The field is soft in places, then hard, like leftover food not fully frozen. It smells leftover, too: smoky, green, slightly spoiled. The pines are dry in the late summer heat, green-going-to-yellow. Red and purple dabs of flowers. Shadows move across the limp stalks as a warm breeze blows the trees, silhouettes huddled in soil clumps, praying men, bones bent by grief.

I survey the field the way I imagine the commander did that day, sweeping my eyes across its borders against the bronze and azure light, and I feel myself slip — out of my skin, out of time. Green bugs pop from the dirt. A khaki-clad guard, gripping his rifle, turns his collar up against a sudden early-morning chill. The folding chairs creak. A whiff of sweat and shit. Coming home, Lord, coming home. I can even smell the ropes, several yards away, resinous, dusty, redolent of earth and passing time. They sound violent, like disease must sound inside the body, eating it away. The hangman adjusts the knots. A train whistle echoes to the north, clacking wheels, roaring wind, goods speeding through the woods, sustenance for communities of fortunate men, far away. Sweat rivers my ribs. I call, “Attention!” and ask my god to forgive me. As the prisoners shuffle up the scaffolding, I turn my head away, and there, shivering in the shadows at the fringe, a pathetic white figure in a rumpled blue dress, hands clasped, her gaze darting, ratchety, quick as a hummingbird. Her presence unsettles, even angers, me. She has no business here. The army does not conduct charity work. Best to send her home with various physics, herbs, broths, with sympathetic sighs and the narcotic advice of talk-cure men. A thump. A shout. One of the doomed has tripped on the gallows steps. I flick my eyes to glimpse him …

… to see if he is safe. Is it he who is down? Shaken, tugged, kicked by a guard. My eyes sting. I pull a kerchief from my dress pocket. What does it matter if Cletus twists an ankle? Within minutes his soul will be lost. He stands stiffly now at the platform’s edge, his long arms, capable of such tenderness and warmth, neatly by his side as if he were about to be decorated for valor. I have felt the soldier in him, a slight formality as though his commander were judging him, even in our intimacies: his kisses little forays into unsecured territory, cautious, efficient. For all he has risked to spend a few unbuttoned moments with me, he is still a deeply proper man, his bravery dutiful, expected. I am the rebel, careless in my prim trappings (perhaps a tad ungrateful, unappreciative of how easy life has been till now), aching to secede …

Until last night, when the city fragmented. Sudden spasms like a Roman candle. The noise awakened me over my parents’ murky snoring. Gunshots. Guttural voices. Immediately I knew there was trouble at the camp, perhaps because Cletus had been nervous for days, sensing unease among his comrades, simmering anger. I rose quietly, buttoned my dress. Cletus and I … did we have a regular meeting time? Each night? Three nights a week? In my mama’s garden? Why not in a safer spot? How was he able to escape from his bunk? Did he tell his commanding officer he wanted to rise before dawn to lend us a hand, before his own chores began at the camp? Was he granted permission to be charitable to this stumbling white family for whom his father once worked?

And tonight, what had happened to him? Mud-spattered, soaked, frightened, and wild. “Cletus?” I whispered. “For God’s sakes, what is it?” He trembled as though his ribs were a spinning turbine. He gripped my arms, tearing a sleeve. He was at war. The causes were unclear to me, the reasons for sacrifice ambiguous, but I felt the conviction in his clench. He hadn’t waited to be shipped to France. “Cletus?” “Forgive me,” he said. Then my buttons spilled into the furrows at our feet, bitter seeds among the sproutings of weeds, and I was enemy, hostage, land to be seized … in a lurch, my perspective leaps again; I smell olives, gin, stale automobile upholstery; Dwayne’s face hovers above me; “The dark part of you wants it” … Coming home, Lord, coming home. Another leap. Cletus wears the rope now like a horse’s harness. He holds his dignity. Or he doesn’t. The soldiers pull the triggers. “Cletus! For God’s sakes!”

Ariyeh folds her arms, scratches an ankle with her foot. An edgy sound, insisting on the moment. “So?” she says, imploring me to be done with this place.

I bow my head to clear it, walk to the fringe, where the field starts to curve like a toppled bowl. I struggle to focus. “This must be where they had the coffins waiting. And there, where the Mexicans stood. The hired men who’d actually do the burying.”

“What do you get from this?” Ariyeh asks, not unkindly. She slaps another mosquito. “Looking around? Speculating?”

A whisper in the trees. Birds. Wind. “More questions,” I admit. “I think the only resolution I can hope for is to accept I’ll know only so much. Maybe I know as much, already, as I ever will. But to be convinced of that, I need to see this. To see it’s nothing. Does that make sense?

“Of course. Yes.”

“Too many perspectives …”

“What do you mean?”

“I wish I could settle on a single approach to the story …” A train — an actual one — goes speeding through the woods. “I’ve always blamed it on the women. Instability. A weakness of mind, even of soul. Mama and Grandma, neither black nor white, here nor there … and Great-Grandma, I can’t even pin her story down … but that’s not what I’m getting at. Sometimes I lose myself in other people. People from the past. It’s the weirdest thing, Ariyeh. It’s like my whole ego … I don’t know … just spills into others …”

“It’s a gift. A vision. The ability to see through the cracks.”

“I fear it means I’ve got no center.”

“No, really. Think of slaves,” Ariyeh says. “Living in shacks but gaining access to the big house, the masters’ bedrooms and kitchens. They had the whole perspective, in a way even their owners didn’t. Saw it all, top to bottom, inside and out. Maybe that’s the gift you have, T. I mean, I believe that stuff”

“If so, it’s a bitch to carry.”

“I know.”

“Sometimes I think I’m going nuts. Hearing voices, you know, like some crazy bag lady on the street.” I want to linger in the field, to breathe it inside me, but Ariyeh is getting more and more impatient. I smile at her. “Okay, what do you say? Dairy Queen? Time for an ice cream sundae?” I hear the false cheeriness in my voice, and I’m sure she’s aware of it too.

“Sure. I’ll buy.”

We move toward the car, listening to the insect buzz in the field. Back on the highway, signs for bail bondsmen, a semipro baseball team, an Arthur Murray dance studio. I’m disoriented; I grip the wheel until my fingers ache.

Ariyeh laughs, capping our uncomfortable quiet. “You ever take dance lessons?”

“No.” I feel the pull, still, of another world, another time. “I have enough trouble keeping my balance as it is.”

“I tried once, at ten or eleven. Talked Daddy into shelling out the cash — he still had his carpentry practice then. Right away I discovered ballet was not for black girls! Those pink tights? Supposed to blend in with the white girls’ skin, but my ass showed right through. Chocolate syrup in a strawberry sundae! And the movements, all shoulders, and tall, stiff postures — not for us low-slung types. Teacher used to scream at me, ‘Pull your hips up,’ and I’d tell her, ‘Lady, these hips ain’t going nowhere!‘ It was the one time Daddy yelled at me when I was a kid, the day I wanted to quit. I’d pestered and pestered him for the lessons, and he’d wasted good money. Told me I had to put up with the embarrassment. That’s the way it is for folks like us. He’d done it all his life. It’s the kind of attitude Reggie can’t stand in him.” She slumps in the seat. The outing is over for her; her world has come pressing back in. “I don’t know. I guess it worked in Daddy’s time — up to a point. Most fellas didn’t get hurt, putting on a silly clown act for the buckras. Reggie had the Movement, you know. It was on TV every night. Malcolm and H. Rap. He learned to clench his fist. And that worked too — up to a point.”

I spot a DQ sign and exit. “What about now?”

“Now?” She sags again.

In the Dairy Queen, Mexican kids clamber over mustard-smeared tables. Their father, tiny, in a straw hat and dirty shirt, stands helplessly by the napkin dispensers. A woman I take to be his wife balances four or five soft drinks in a mushy cardboard container and yells at the kids in Spanish. Ice cream drips like Elmer’s glue from a silver machine just behind the counter. The cashiers are either high school kids in braces or grandma types who can’t hide their contempt for their young partners, who will probably work here only for the summer. “You can supersize that for only sixty more cents,” a girl behind a register tells an overweight woman desperately counting her change. While Ariyeh buys our treats I’m standing back trying not to lose the hanging field. Its soft light, its moldering mulch smell. But even as I tighten my mental grip, it’s slipping away from me. The present is too damned insistent. Cletus shatters again, and Sarah Morgan. As ever, I’m left on my own. It’s now, it’s August, Ariyeh needs thirty-six — no, thirty-eight — more cents. I scrabble in my purse and hand her the coins.