The Gone Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  “I haven’t told anyone, but I think you’ll understand. So the night I got here, I went out for a walk by the creek and when I came back all of the lights were off, and I am pretty sure that I left at least one on. But when I went into the house, there was no one there.”

  “Nothing was taken?”

  “Nope.” Billie picks up a twig and traces a circle in the dirt.

  “Then either somebody’s trying to scare you or wants you to save on your electricity bill.” Lola takes her phone out of her purse. No service. “You’re definitely not gonna be living here full-time, right? You don’t want to be hanging around with folks still mad they lost the Civil War.”

  Billie almost spits out her whiskey. “Oh my god.”

  “Girl, I’m serious.”

  “It’s 2003. That’s just like a few morbidly disturbed old people.”

  “Maybe they don’t know it’s the Civil War they still mad about.”

  “You mean the War of Northern Aggression?”

  “You laughing, but nowadays, folks think they ain’t racist cause they got a black friend at work. But we ain’t friends when I’ve never sat down to a dinner you made me at your house. No girl, we just need all that hateful trash gone and then Mississippi would be all right, black folks could finally heal.”

  “Don’t you think a lot of people need to heal?”

  Lola purses her lips. “It’s like this: white people have invented their fears about us and tried their damn best to make them true, but our fears about white people have always been real. White people have always had conspiracy theories about black people, because you can’t trust the people you’re trying to hold down. You know there used to be this one conspiracy theory that Abraham Lincoln was Jefferson Davis’s illegitimate half brother?”

  “I don’t get it. What would that prove?”

  “That the war really wasn’t about slavery, that it was some kinda family feud.”

  Billie tosses the stick into the grass. “You know how it is around here better than me. But I can tell you one thing, death doesn’t heal.”

  Billie

  WHEN BILLIE SEES HER UNCLE THE NEXT DAY, THE WIND IS AN OCEAN, vast and crashing down with rushing pink blossoms. On the opposite end of his balcony, a man in a wheelchair with James Brown hair gives her a salute, which she returns. For a time, he watches her expectantly, then together they watch the red and white gas station across the two-lane road.

  Her uncle is inside making chicory coffee and not saying much. She’s avoided delicate subjects like how long could she have possibly hid out in a closet and why hasn’t she come here years sooner. He could have been like a second father. They’d joke and have favorite meals, he’d visit her in Philly. She’d have gotten a place with a guest room or at least a couch with a pullout bed. Maybe she would have had fewer mediocre boyfriends with pleasurably normal families.

  Across the street, a girl at the gas station drops a bag of ice. It smashes open, glittering over the asphalt. The girl kicks the bag, then stoops to shovel the loose ice back into the torn plastic, finally tossing the broken bag into a trunk with a dragging bumper.

  Down in the scaled parking lot, a silver pickup truck pulls up and the middle-aged woman who gets out slaps and curses a pigtailed little girl standing at her feet. A doubtful older man in a wrinkled Yankees cap gets slowly out of the driver’s seat. He leaves the truck door open and stands gazing into the gearbox as the little girl wails.

  Billie slides along the rail toward the stairs. James Brown raises an eyebrow as she nears the top step. But as if she can feel Billie deliberating, the woman in the parking lot looks up: wearied, outraged, sheepish. Then the woman pushes the little girl inside one of the apartments. The older man in the Yankees cap still stares into the truck, as if doubting the reality of the seat.

  “You making friends?” Her uncle is behind her shaking a cigarette from a flattened pack. He hands her a cup of coffee.

  “I’ve never been popular.” Billie sits down with the cup on his neighbor’s small blue and white cooler, the backs of her thighs gluing themselves to the plastic lid. “Do you know that lady?”

  “I seen her.”

  “And the little girl?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you think that happens often?”

  “If a child is disrespectful then they gonna get whupped. Can’t spare the rod. My momma didn’t like to do it, but sometimes it had to be done.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He only licked me once in a while when I’d been real bad. If he was around and could find me. Your daddy always said I got off easy being the baby of the family.”

  “But there is a difference between spanking and beating.”

  He lights his cigarette. “How often you get spanked?”

  “What I’m saying is that it instills fear not respect.”

  “How often?” He inhales.

  “My mother didn’t believe in spanking.”

  He laughs. “Ain’t she learn nothing from her time here in Mississippi?”

  “Doesn’t mean I never got hit.” Her mother had a boyfriend who hit her a couple times when her mother wasn’t home. Not a slap across the thighs, but a bend over, pants down, and wait for the belt. It was the dread that made her hate him. Billie peels her legs from the cooler. “Why do people who hate kids have them?”

  “That’s one of them age-old questions,” her uncle says, taking a drag on his cigarette. He waves to a man in a camo jacket with a long, thin blond braid walking up the steps.

  She sips the coffee and sets it down. “Where did you meet Lacey?”

  “Truck stop casino she work at.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want the house?”

  He smiles. “Don’t worry about me. This”—he gestures to the building—“is a temporary situation. I tell you what, nobody in here better off than me. I got a job and the place all to myself. There’s five, six people living in some of these rooms. Not only that but I finished high school and did a year of college at Jackson State.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  “I got offered a job at John Deere and went for the money. To be honest with you, I wasn’t all that interested in school. I just knew Cliff was interested in me being interested.”

  Her uncle points down to a dark cherry Buick in the parking lot whose back window is covered with a trash bag. “That’s my baby.” He hands her a set of keys.

  “You want me to drive?”

  “I got one of my headaches.”

  “Have you taken anything?”

  He waves this aside. “I got a prescription. But it don’t seem to matter what I do. They come when they want.”

  “What does your doctor say?”

  “That it could be any number of things.”

  “I think you need a second opinion.” Maybe if they get to know each other, she can help him find a better doctor.

  The air in the car is thick with canned heat. She dials up the AC, backing out of the spot so that they’re facing the two-lane road. He turns off the AC and rolls down his window, looking older than he did the other night. “It don’t work. Take a right out of the parking lot.”

  With the windows down, the hot wind rolls into them, burning and cooling. The sky above them is aching with rain. They drive behind a truck with an Ole Miss license plate and a large crucifix hanging off the rearview mirror. As the town is pulled behind them, the landscape becomes lush and stark. Brilliantly green with a few battered shacks half swallowed by a thicket.

  When the car crackles down a dirt road, they roll up the windows. They slide in and out of wet patches as dust coats the windshield. For the first time in her life, Billie wishes she had a truck.

  Avalon sits alone in the middle of a soybean field. She parks and opens the door, but her uncle doesn’t move.

  “I ain’t even drove by here in a good while.” His face is turned from her.

  “You don’t have to come in.”

  “I’
ll join you in a minute.”

  She gets out and walks up to a broken bottle tree guarding the scarred patchwork of wood and tin. Bottle trees are meant to trap bad spirits, but it looks like these ones got out. She tests the narrow set of stairs with a foot, then shakes the railing, glancing back. She can’t see her uncle through the glare on the windshield.

  Inside the air is dazed with heat. She can’t walk too far because the roof is caving in at the back. There are still scraps of posters on the walls and the low wooden beams are twined with rows of burned-out Christmas lights. On the rotting floorboards is the naked stain of where a jukebox once sat near the plywood stage, and above the bar, the squiggle of a broken neon sign.

  She sits on an uprooted church pew, her feet at the shattered cavern of a TV. She takes out her father’s first book of poetry, Race Records, and flips to “Song 33.”

  SONG 33

  My love,

  We made our own island:

  On soil too long blood fed

  Where the wind don’t come

  Our wooden conjure stood

  all night long.

  There you hear the voice of

  three hundred years of sweat,

  there ride on sweet mercy

  all night long.

  No it ain’t Paradise

  It’s only Avalon.

  Feels like living longer,

  But my love, we dying

  all night long.

  What does that last stanza mean? Why dying? The floor creaks. Uncle Dee. He bends to pick a thread of tinsel from the floor.

  “My Grandmomma Ida used to call it devil’s music. Sure could call the devil up.”

  “I bet. Did my mom ever come here?”

  “Only one time I can remember. She was carrying you. But she was still a real good dancer.” He twists the tinsel between thumb and forefinger. “In them days this was the place.” He pokes at a ripped vinyl chair, then sits. “Used to have a disco ball hanging right up there.” He points to a beam, then leans back in the chair, cocking the front legs. “You play chess?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Next time you come by the apartment we can play.”

  “The night my father died.” She hesitates, afraid of her words in this air. “Did he come in here?”

  “He stopped by.”

  “Where was I?”

  “With your Grandmomma Ruby.”

  “How did he seem to you that night?” Suicide by fall doesn’t really work unless it’s off a bridge, but what if it was a kind of letting go, a spiraling down that ended in an accident?

  He tosses the tinsel over his shoulder. “I don’t know. He was him. Your daddy was the type of dude that ain’t ever want to sit still. Didn’t even like going to sleep. Said it was a waste of his time. When he was a kid he used to sometimes climb out of the window at night. Momma called it helling around.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Meet up with other boys, his little friends, maybe drink a little bit of that corn liquor, you know. Or he went out to be by hisself. Rampaging he called it. Just wandering around the woods and shit, talking to the trees.”

  “Wasn’t he scared of snakes or running into the Klan?”

  “He said he knew the barn where they met.” Her uncle begins to pick bits of vinyl off of the seat between his legs. “Mama was real proud of him. She ain’t learn how to read till she was an old woman. She wanted to read the Bible and my brother’s poetry. Those were her motivations. But she didn’t like no cussing or anything disrespectful, so there was a lot she would not read. I tried reading his play to her, but that was too much. I remember Cliff wanted me to come to New York and see it performed, but at the time I was too busy being foolish over a girl.” He lets out a chuckle. “I spent the money he sent me for a bus ticket on her. Made her happy, but boy, he was mad. He call me up and say he ain’t ever gonna give me even a quarter again.

  “Now Momma liked that one poem—what was it called? ‘My Sinful Days.’ She like the hoping and preaching. No profanity, just redemption talk. She figure he wrote it for her. Maybe he did. I don’t know.

  “When he died, she was the one to go over and identify the body. I told her I would, but I hadn’t turned eighteen. Still had another month. She went with my uncles, Floyd and John. Those were her big brothers. After that, she read over that poem a whole lot. Like it had answers.” He looks down at the mess of vinyl on the floor. “She kept praying on it till she died. None of us understood why he had to go like that.” He looks up at her. “So young, I mean. But I moved on from it all a long time ago. Had to.”

  “I understand.”

  “Way I see it, they ain’t no point in dragging up something happen thirty years ago when I’m trying to make it through today.”

  Billie looks at her uncle sitting in the remains of Avalon. This place reminds her of a low tide when the sea has been sucked out and the skeletons of the deep are on display. He is like something left behind that was once alive, moving in shameless beauty, cold-blooded and innocent, concerned primarily with courtship.

  “Lola came to see me.”

  He looks at her.

  “Did you tell Lola’s nana that I didn’t want to see anybody?”

  He frowns. “I said not to overwhelm you since this was your first time back. I know you want to talk more about Cliff’s accident.” His eyes are on the floor. “But I can’t hardly talk about it to this day.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you. But I do wish I knew more of what happened. What he was doing out there, what I was doing.”

  He looks at her. “You don’t remember nothing?”

  She shrugs. “I was asleep, I guess.”

  He bends forward, rubbing his temples. “Well, baby, you in the right place cause nobody round here remembers anything either.”

  Avalon

  THIS HOUSE WAS ONCE A HOUSE. SEEN A GIRL MADE A MOTHER, A BOY become a father who come and go, come and go. Seen a son work the land, the land flood and ruin him and the bodies floating in it. Seen a woman rush home to check on her loose children, a white boy close by her side, another kind of son, devoted for now to his mighty black mother. Seen a child burned by a pot of boiling water on the stove. Seen these walls newspapered to keep out the cold.

  Heard children singing, laughing, running into the sun to chase a bullfrog. Heard a baby offer up a word for the first time. Heard the silence after underwater drinking, and the fishhook whine of hunger from a small belly. Heard the knock of white men looking for a boy hiding at his uncle’s house, heard shots in the night, far off but always too close, and heard weeping, too much weeping too damn much of the time.

  Once there was only the rumble of thunder, split of rain, pulse of locust, the sounds day makes turning over into night. I heard tell of an army of wretched people, hardly clothed, who cleared the brake and swamp and panther, who built and served and escaped only when they died. Their children came here to sweat out the demons that are carried in the body.

  This girl she comes wanting to know about a night in 1972 when the Isley Brothers were panting paradise for their queens and the Detroit Emeralds were asking all those babies to let them take them into their arms. But what can these walls say? Listen, girl, everything you want to know is near, telling itself over again, the song is on repeat.

  Billie

  FOR TWO DAYS, BILLIE DOESN’T ANSWER THE PHONE. SHE LISTENS TO the messages, crafts what she might say, but can’t seem to take the time. There is always something else she should be doing: an errand to run, a repair to arrange, something to read. It’s like she’s thirteen years old again on summer vacation—curling up with a book for a day, pausing to eat thick slices of bleached cheese while standing on one leg in front of the open fridge. Daddy’s house as fort.

  Work has called. Two messages asking if she will be back in time for an important meeting. Departmental reshuffling, a new initiative. They don’t need her. And really who does? None of the calls feel urgent, necessary.

 
; During the day, she drives around the county with a mind sun-dipped, thoughtless, and content. At night, the ghosts come back, speaking under cicadas. She paces the yard, her feet searching for the spot that will let her remember what she doesn’t know, bobbing under the surface of her own mind.

  In the absence of people, certain objects have become reassuring: the ticking of power lines, a collapsed barn drowning in purple blooms, clothes flapping dry on a wire, winking lights set in roadside cemeteries so cars don’t run over the graves. On the morning of the third day, she turns down the drive leading to Jim McGee’s white house.

  She pulls in next to a white pickup in the driveway, cutting the engine, then pushing up her sunglasses. As soon as she steps from the car, she is swallowed by the wet heat. Ringing the doorbell over and over produces nothing but the drowsy bark of a dog. She should have called first. She glances back at the pickup. No bumper stickers; no gun rack exhibiting love of hunting or general shooting at things; no cross dangling from the rearview mirror gesturing to a belief in the soul. She steps off of the front step and squeezes through a gap in the hedges, cupping her hand to the living room window.

  “Hello?” A bare-chested guy in jeans and a mesh trucker hat comes from around the corner of the house, gripping a dirty shovel.

  She quickly backs out of the shrubs. “Sorry, I was trying to see if anyone was home.”

  “Ma’am, this is private property.” He looks sternly at her. “It looked like you were fixing to break in.”

  “I saw the truck but nobody answered the door.” If something happens, no one will hear her but the soybeans. “I came to see Jim McGee?” The guy seems about her age, maybe younger. “Are you one of his sons?”

  “I’m Harlan McGee. His only son.”

  “I just inherited the house down the road. One of the old tenant houses out that way.” She points, hopefully with authority. “I’m Billie James.”

  He squints at her. “You’re a relative of Miss Ruby’s?”

  “She was my grandmother.”

  He grins. “Miss Ruby was one of my favorite people. She used to mind me when I was little. You’re staying in that old place? That house must be rotting to pieces. Like most everything round here, I guess. Sorry if I came across as rude just then.”