by J. C. Sasser
Sincerely,
Ceif Walker
Delvis read the letter twice through, trying to grasp its meaning. The letter didn’t contain any foreign names, but some of the words he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand at all what idle hands being the Devil’s playground meant. He had heard of riddles before, but even after they were explained, he wasn’t any good at making sense of them. He grabbed his head and squeezed. He squeezed out all of the words he didn’t know and read the letter with only the words he did. He read them out loud, slow and focused on pronunciation. When he finished, he grabbed his heart because he felt like he was the one shot and bleeding.
He lifted Ceif’s shoulders, cradled his head into his chest, and rocked him like a baby. “Don’t die. Please don’t die.” He looked into Ceif’s eyes. They were glassy and bright.
“I done did a bad thing,” Delvis said, as tears puddled up in his eyes.
He lifted the boy in his arms. He felt Ceif’s heart beat against his. It was warm and wet with blood. He turned toward the shack, and when he did, there was a truck coming at him, silver and mean like a bullet. The truck slammed on the brakes and fishtailed to the left before it stopped.
Delvis stared through the windshield and watched Sonny Joe’s smile vanish and his eyes turn afraid. With Ceif limp in his arms, he ran toward the truck. Sonny Joe shifted the gear column and sped in reverse down the drive before Delvis could yell for help. He watched the truck disappear around the bend, realizing Sonny Joe didn’t want anything to do with him or what he held in his arms.
He turned in all directions, looking for help, but there was only the road, a broken cane and a Bible, and the crows that had come back to scream in the trees. He grabbed Ceif’s cane and Bible and rushed Ceif inside his shack. He waded through the swamp of junk, wanting to bury Ceif under it, to hide him deep beneath his treasures so no one would know where to find the boy except him. But Ceif was still breathing, and maybe he could save him.
He situated the boy on the bed and stripped him from his shirt. Blood pumped from Ceif’s heart and drooled down his ribs, coloring the sheets the brightest red he had ever seen. He snapped open his switchblade and poked the tip into Ceif’s wound until he heard the clink of metal. His finger dug in beside the blade. He lifted the bullet from the wound and placed it on his bedside table. He worked fast and gathered cobwebs from the ceilings and high corners. After packing all of the spiderwebs and all of the sugar he had in the house into Ceif’s wound, he tore the sheet with his teeth and wrapped it around Ceif’s ribs.
Ceif grabbed Delvis’s arm and pulled him toward his lips. The boy tried to say something, but no sound came out of his mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Delvis said. “I didn’t know it was a game.”
“Eden,” Ceif said, and gently his bright black eyes went still while a river of blood ran down from his frozen smile.
“You can’t die,” Delvis said, shaking his head. “If you do I’m the one who done it to you.”
He listened for the boy’s breath, but it was gone off somewhere. He sobbed over Ceif’s body, quitting long after its warmth had turned cold, long after its skin had paled. He dried his eyes and stared at the bullet he’d plucked from Ceif’s side. He lifted the bullet from the table and unbuttoned his shirt. With his switchblade, he slit his chest and lodged the bullet into the same spot where he had shot Ceif. He found the duct tape, tore off a piece with his teeth, and patched it over his heart.
“Please forgive me. I didn’t know what I was doin’.” He lay down with his body heavy from the weight of two spent bullets, one that had saved Ceif’s life and one that had taken it away.
GRADLE WOKE UP on Grandpa’s chest to the sound of morning birds. They had fallen asleep in the swing, slept there all night wrapped up in each other’s arms. The wire bird Grandpa constructed with a coathanger and her gold-cross earring nested in the crook of his elbow. She rose up, careful not to wake him, and stared at his face, his black caterpillar brows and silver boomerang mustasche. He looked different, reminded her more of a boy than an old man, and it made her wonder if what he told her last night had somehow made him young again, if keeping that inside for so long was what made him old in the first place.
A bird lit on the porch railing. Its twitchy eye inspected her and Grandpa for a while and flitted off. It dawned on her that Grandpa never said what happened to that little bird that flew in his house the night she was born.
She rose from the swing, went into her room, and sat down at the vanity mirror. She reached in her bra and took out the photograph of Grandpa and her mama standing barefooted on the banks of the Ohooppee River. She stared at her mother with a different view than all of the times she had stared at her before. All this time, she had tried to look like her, hoping she could make Grandpa happy, but now she knew that by looking like her, she had made him sad. It was clear now why he trembled in her presence, why he escaped inside his work, why he never looked at her.
She reached behind her back, unzipped the dress, and pushed the sleeves off her shoulders. She got up from the stool, and the dress fell into a green puddle around her feet. She looked at her unclothed self in the mirror and for once didn’t try to mimic her mother’s smile, for once she didn’t see any resemblance at all.
She bundled the dress and smelled it one last time. Sweat, blood, Delvis’s Old Spice, and the Holy dunking waters of Ceif and Sonny Joe’s church. She pinned the photograph on the inside of the dress where her heart for so long had kept it warm. She spread the dress on her bed, folded it up with the photograph into a square, and placed them in the the box she’d unpacked her motel-life with, knowing that while she would covet them for the rest of her days, she would never wear them again.
She put on one of Grandpa’s white undertanks and an old silk slip she found in the wardrobe, and she lay atop her bed.
Grandpa came in her room with his hair a nest and the wire bird swinging on his pinky. He climbed on her bed and shoved his glasses up his nose. “Where’s your dress?” he asked, as he worked to attach the bird to her mobile.
“I put it back in a box,” she said. “It was getting too small.” She watched the muscle in his forearm as he hooked the bird onto the feet of another bird. “Grandpa?” she asked. “What happened to that little bird that flew in the house the night I was born?”
“It took a little shit on your precious little head and flew back out the window,” he said. “There’s an old wives’ tale about that, too.”
“What’s that?” Gradle asked.
“It’s a sign of good luck and riches,” he said.
An urgent knock pounded on the front door. She and Grandpa left her room and saw Sheriff Hill chewing on a cigar. His gold badge shimmered like a Christmas ornament through the beveled glass.
Gradle opened the door, and the sheriff shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. He rattled the change in his pocket, nodded hello at Grandpa, and looked down the street away from her as if he couldn’t face her gaze. “We’ve got a situation with your friend Delvis,” he said, his eyes still parked on something down the street.
“Is he guarding the Piggly Wiggly pay phone again?” she asked.
The sheriff turned back her way and squinted his eyes through grey currents of cigar smoke. “It’s more serious than that,” he said, scratching the side of his face. “He’s holding a boy hostage in his shack.”
“Sonny Joe or Ceif?” she asked.
“Ceif,” the sheriff said. “Sonny Joe reported it.” He pulled his cigar from his mouth, spat on it, and the cherry sizzled to its death. “We need your help. We’ve been out there for a couple of hours. And we can’t get him to come out of the house.”
He fired his cigar back up and stared down at his mud-caked shoes. “I’ve known Delvis for a long time. You’re the only person I’ve ever seen who halfway understands him. I was hoping you could help.”
“What do you want me to do?” Gradle asked.
“I want you to t
alk him out of his shack,” Sheriff Hill said, rattling the change in his pocket. “Y’all can ride out there with me.”
Grandpa grabbed his gun propped by the door and pointed it at Sheriff Hill. “You can ride with us.”
Gradle sat behind the wheel while Grandpa drove the sheriff into the backseat with his gun. Grandpa slammed the car door shut. Gradle cranked the Chrysler to life and burned rubber in reverse.
“Mind if I smoke?” Sheriff Hill asked, lighting his smoke.
Gradle rolled down her window and pushed the pedal down to the floor. The Chrysler barreled down the highway and the wind whipped Grandpa’s silver-snaked hair. She turned down the dirt road leading to Delvis’s house, and the canopy of green seemed to put everyone in the car at ease.
“The house is starting to come back how I remember it,” the sheriff said with a puff of smoke. “You’re a relentless man, Mr. Spivey.”
Grandpa kept his gun trained on the sheriff’s temple.
“It was sad what happened to Annalee,” the sheriff said. He relit his cigar. “It’d kill me to have to let go of a child.”
Gradle turned the Chrysler down Delvis’s drive, and at the end of it were three police cars parked sideways in the yard. The uniformed men used their cars as shields to protect them from what lurked behind the bolted up door of Delvis’s shack. An ambulance parked off in the distance next to Sonny Joe’s Cheverolet.
Sonny Joe crouched beside his truck tire smoking a cigarette as if it was the only way he could get air.
Gravel popped under the Chrysler’s tires as she slowed the car to a stop. She stared through the window at Delvis’s shack and remembered the first time she came here. It had so much allure then and even now, even though she knew it like a home, there was still so much mystery left.
Gradle put the car in park and honked the horn three times. She waited for Delvis to come out, but the door didn’t budge.
“He’s threatened to shoot anybody who tries to break inside,” Sherriff Hill said. “It’s okay if you want to change your mind.”
“He won’t shoot me,” Gradle said. “He’s my friend.”
“You can take that gun off me, Mr Spivey,” the sheriff said. “I’m not gonna let anybody hurt him. But if I was you, I’d take it with me while you escort Gradle to the door,” he said, and he got out of the car.
The atmosphere at Gradle’s back grew deathly still, as if everyone in her wake had drawn their last breaths, except Grandpa, whose presence was strong like a giant. She climbed the front porch steps, ducked under the barbed wire, and knocked on the door three times.
“Step back you dirty outlaw!” Delvis yelled from the inside. “I done told you I’ll shoot anybody who trespasses or tries to trespass through this door. I got a six-speed Ruger pistol, and I can draw and shoot in two seconds flat, ninety-seven percent accurate each and every time. You think you foolin’ me with the three times honk and the three times knock? ‘Cause you ain’t. I done some studyin’ on tricks and jokes, and I ain’t gonna be taken to the advantage no more. Only real true friends know about the three horn honk code, and whoever you are, I know you ain’t a real true friend!”
Gradle drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She turned back to Grandpa who stood at the top step with his shotgun aimed at the sheriff.
She put her trembling palm against the boarded door. “Delvis,” she said. “It’s Gradle.”
The other side of the door went quiet.
“Can you let me in?” she asked.
The quiet stayed, but soon came the sound of shuffling feet. “You ain’t gonna like what you see in here,” Delvis answered.
“Why not?” Gradle asked.
“I done somethin’ wrong. And you ain’t gone be happy with me.”
She pushed on the door, trying to find some give. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“I was the butt of a joke,” he said. “And I ain’t no good at understandin’ jokes and make believes. I ain’t a professional in that area.”
“You can’t be a professional at everything, Delvis.”
“I should be at this, ‘cause I’m the butt of a lot of jokes. And this one’s gonna get me locked up, and they gonna put me to the electric chair.”
“Don’t worry, Delvis. I’ll explain everything to them.”
“Are they still out there waitin’ for me to come out?”
“Yes,” she said, and tried to turn the doorknob. “Is Ceif in there?”
“Yes, he’s here,” he said.
“Can I talk to him?”
“He can’t talk.”
An unease came to Gradle’s stomach. She felt dizzy and light. “Why can’t he talk?” she whispered.
She waited for Delvis to respond, but nothing came. “Delvis?” she called. “Delvis, let me in.” She banged on the door three more times. “I won’t let them hurt you. I’m your friend.” She put her ear to the door and heard his breath. It was fast and scared.
She turned around and stared at the sheriff while Grandpa trained his gun on him. Cigar smoke snaked from his mouth. He removed the cigar and nodded at her. She should have been scared, but she felt at ease in a way she had never felt before.
She knocked on the door three more times and waited. One of the bolts turned and unlocked, and then another and another, and several more after that. “Delvis?” she whispered. She saw his eye, a painful and erupting blue, through the crack in the door.
“Slide in like a snake,” Delvis said, cracking the door enough for her to squeeze in.
The room was dark, despite it being day, and a heavy, wet-metal scent hung in the air.
“I’m sorry,” Delvis said, as he bolted the door back shut. His body began to shake. “I’m so sorry.”
She cradled his head in her arms. “What are you sorry about?”
He embraced her with a clamping hug. “They gonna put me to the electric chair.”
“What’re you talking about?” she asked. She tried to pull away, but Delvis would not let her go.
“That boy said he wanted to challenge me to a duel and to meet me here. And he did. But it was the other boy who come. It was all a joke, and I done screwed it up. I’m so sorry. I’m guilty. I didn’t mean to.” His face burrowed in the crook of her neck.
Gradle relaxed with his weight and let him cry. Her collarbone grew hot and slick with his tears, and when Delvis’s body shook, hers shook along with his.
He finally lifted his face, wiped his nose, and let her go. Wet blood stained the left side of his shirt.
“You’re bleeding,” she said.
“I done that to myself. I put the bullet I used on Ceif in me. I plucked it out of him and put it in me ‘cause I should’ve took that bullet instead of him,” he said. “It belongs in me.”
“Where’s Ceif?” she asked.
Delvis stepped to the side, allowing Gradle to see the bed where Ceif lay. The red tattered blanket was pulled up and neatly folded across his chest, as if he was a child tucked in for a good night’s sleep.
She stood over the bed and nudged Ceif’s shoulder. His body was cold, his flesh, graying. She lifted his hat sitting atop his navel and pulled the covers down. Her breath rushed down her throat at the sight of blood puddling in the sheets beneath Ceif’s side. She folded the covers back up. Her hand trembled as it fled to her mouth to catch the rising vomit.
She swallowed what had made it to her mouth. “What happened?”
“I shot him,” he said. “Western duel style. I ain’t braggin’. Just the facts.”
“He’s dead, Delvis,” she said.
Delvis turned away from Gradle and bowed his head. “I’ll be dead too,” he said. “That’s why they’re all out there. They’re waitin’ for me to come out so they can put me to the electric chair.”
“It’s all a big mistake, Delvis. It was an accident. A misunderstanding.”
“I been missed understandin’ things all my life. And people been missed understandin’ things about me.” He
paused long enough for his Adam’s apple to slide up and down his throat. “I know I ain’t easy to get. And I know I ain’t considered average. Them people out there don’t understand me like you.”
“They’re afraid,” she said. “That’s not your fault.”
“I can’t go out there like they been orderin’ me to. With my hands up.”
“You can’t stay in here forever either,” she said. “They’ll get to you one way or another.”
“Not if I turn into a flyin’ diamond like the Tooth Fairy,” he said.
“Delvis, the Tooth Fairy is make-believe. She’s not real.”
“Why’d you tell me she was real?”
“To make losing your tooth feel magical,” she said.
“Ain’t nothin’ magical ‘bout losing your teeth.”
“I know.”
Rain began to tap against the shack’s tin roof, and soon it began to drum. As she listened to the drumming, she sensed an end was nearing, like the ending of the day’s light outside. But unlike the light that would come again tomorrow the same as it had today, the end she sensed would never come back or be the same as it had before. She sat on the bed with Ceif’s still body at her side and felt the twilight rapidly coming down.
Delvis picked up his tooth from his bedside table and held it between his thumb and index finger. “The Tooth Fairy ain’t gonna never come for my tooth?” he asked, as he cradled his tooth in his hand.
“There’s no such thing as the Tooth Fairy,” she said.
Delvis shuffled his feet against the floor. “But I seen her with my own two eyes,” he said. He nudged the tooth back in the vacant hole in his mouth. “They’ll take everything from me in jail, but unless they got X-ray vision, they won’t never know I got this. If anything, it’ll remind me of you,” he said. “And you’re the most magic I ever seen in my life.”
