“He ain’t married, he don’t have kids, and he don’t play games.” She doesn’t touch the tip. “And he’s funny.”
“Don’t people around here give you trouble?”
“My momma. Fifty dollars says she’s got the ladies at church praying for me to date a nice white Christian boy. But we don’t hang out here, we go to his place or out of town, sometimes down to New Orleans.”
“Well, if you actually care about him, don’t make a big deal out of this.” Billie picks up the glasses and heads back to the booth.
Harlan takes his drink from her, glancing up at the bar. “You know her?”
“No,” she says, sitting down.
Her whiskey doesn’t taste right. Something in the glass.
“I should go,” she says.
“You just got our drinks.”
“My knee hurts.” Which is true but not.
ON THE DRIVE BACK, HIS TRUCK CUTS THROUGH THE DOWNTOWN neighborhoods and they pass a little black girl with braids sitting in a driveway, leaning against a brown car door. The house across from the girl is draped in Confederate flags. It even has one hoisted up a thick metal flagpole in the middle of the lawn. Every time she sees the state flag with its mini Confederate flag in the corner she double-takes. Lola says it’s grief for what never was.
At the house, Rufus scuffles to the door. She goes in, catching his paws before they hit her sore thighs, and sets them down.
“Bad owner.” She scratches his head and neck. “Poor puppy, poor boy.” She opens the screen door to let him out. He bounds toward Harlan, who is walking up the drive.
She’s been away too long. “Down, Rufus.”
Harlan stops at the bottom of the steps. “Can I come in?” Rufus is prancing at the backs of his legs. Harlan holds a hand out for him to sniff. “Hey, buddy.”
It is tempting to latch the screen with the little hook screwed into the doorframe. Rufus abandons Harlan and rolls in the shorn yard, dead grass coating his back. Harlan’s eyes meet hers through the mesh.
“That rolling means he needs a bath.”
“Probably. I’ll come out there,” she says.
On the edge of the porch, he watches the field while she picks at the jagged edge of a fingernail. He turns to the woods behind them. “Do you know the names of these trees?”
“Of course not.”
“That there’s a pine.”
“I know that one. I’m not stupid.”
He hops down, holding out his hand. “C’mon.”
She doesn’t move. “Where?” She shouldn’t care what he does or who with.
“To the woods.”
“There’s snakes.”
“I bet there’s plenty of cypress out by the creek. They’re a real fascinating tree.”
“I never would have guessed you were such a tree fanatic.”
“You should know what’s on your property.” He walks closer. “What’s wrong?” He seems genuinely concerned.
“I’m tired.” But she lets him pull her to her feet and calls to Rufus. “How did you know there was a creek behind the house?” If she walks behind Harlan, then he’ll get bit first, and she won’t be sucking out any poison.
“I’ve been out here a million times since I was a kid. I don’t know if you remember but Miss Ruby’s stood about a mile that way.” He points to his left. “It was torn down about twenty years ago. And the creek runs behind my folks’ place too, just farther back.”
Harlan shows her the bald cypress trees dotting the creek with their wide bottoms and flat green feathery branches. Rufus trots ahead until there is only the tinkle of his collar.
“I like the roots,” she says. “Sort of like bubbles of wood coming out of the water.”
“They’re called knees. Cypress can live for a thousand years.”
These trees know what happened. “My father died out here.”
He looks at her.
“I don’t mean right here in this spot,” she says. “It could have been the front yard, I don’t know.” Maybe if Mr. McGee dies she could buy the cemetery off of Harlan.
“How did he die?”
“Your dad didn’t tell you? They said it was an accident. He fell and hit his head and it sent him into a coma and he died.”
“I’m sorry. That’s hard, real hard. And here I was complaining about my ex.”
“I don’t think that one person’s pain cancels out another’s.”
Back at the house, they sit on the back porch. The back door has a ladybug infestation. A crawling mass whirling over the screen during the day then vanishing at night.
She points to a tree beginning to bloom with clusters of purple flowers. “What’s that one?”
Harlan picks a long blade of grass that she missed with the lawn mower. “A crepe myrtle.”
“This is us just being friends, right?”
He looks away, nodding. It’s hard to say more. To say this is all they can be, given their history, which began before them and may go on long after they’re dead.
He ties the blade of grass into a knot. “If you’re gonna stick around for a while, you need to teach Rufus not to go after snakes or he’ll get bit in the face.”
Harlan
HE BARELY REMEMBERS DRIVING HOME BUT HERE HE IS IN THE PARKING lot. He pulls the keys from the ignition and stares at the still-glowing odometer. When she kicked off her boots, her little ankles were freckled in mosquito bites. Weird how he somehow finds that attractive but being into a pretty girl is the most natural thing in the world. No harm in it. He gets out and slams the door, walking through the poorly lit parking lot then across the bald square of grass at the center of his apartment complex.
From the beginning he knew he shouldn’t be messing with her. Ain’t he got enough on his plate trying to hold on to his kid? But right when he thought she was gone, he spotted her on the side of the road, struggling with that crappy bike, all scraped up like a little kid. She needed him to swoop in. But later in the yard, she spooked him when she told him about her daddy’s death; he felt like she was the one swooping in, prophesying something.
He unlocks the door. The apartment always looks bad because of the wall-to-wall tile floor. But it’s what he could afford what with child support. He flops down on his parents’ old couch, head next to a basket of unfolded laundry, and turns on the TV, tossing the remote. The game is on. Might as well let it play. He planned on coming home and cleaning up. Tomorrow is his night with Tyler. But he lays back and stares into the spackled ceiling, only glancing at the score twice, not remembering what it is either time.
At the fridge he grabs a beer. Just one left and he has a mind to head out for more. Maybe he’s ready to do more than hook up, to start dating again. He tried right after Debbi, but nothing lasted. He needs someone who likes to go out and do things, be active. Someone who would actually get along with his family.
He lays back down on the couch with his head propped up. Maybe if they slept together he could get closure or something. He could stop thinking about Billie’s beautiful smile—she almost has dimples. And her ass and her legs and what she’d look like under him.
She doesn’t really look black, unless you know it and then you can see it. More like Hispanic. He had a crush on a black girl in fifth grade, Shonda, who would never even look at him except to make fun. He was sure Shonda felt something too, but neither of their daddies would have ever let them come home with the other. At his high school there was only one black student, a serious kid with glasses that he never saw speak, except in English class.
Now he ain’t like some of the old folks round here. He didn’t grow up believing in all that. His daddy, though he hated all the negative press on the town he was raised up in, did say that while he was living his life of hunting and clowning around, the blacks on the other side of town were living one very different. His daddy said that too many good people blamed the town’s trouble on the blacks or rednecks and never took any responsibility on themselves. But
he only spoke about it once when Harlan had come home for the weekend that first and only year at Ole Miss. His father had pulled some strings after he finally got his GED. They were sitting on the back porch, his father pouring bourbon like he was Faulkner. Harlan had felt like a real man out there discussing hard subjects in the dark with drinks in hand. But then like a little boy, marveling at the love he felt for his father and the rich land buzzing all around.
Harlan never had nothing against the shy black boy with glasses, even said what’s up to him in the hall. His parents had been strict about being decent to everybody no matter if they were brown, white, or purple. But he has brought enough trouble on them. Enough heartache over Tyler and Debbi and her fucked-up family. They bailed him out when Debbi’s brother stole a car while on probation and tried to fight him in a parking lot. Bought him the car seat and the stroller and the crib and pretty much everything for Tyler. He’s never been able to explain to his dad as to why he did the things he did. His younger self seems like someone only faintly related to him. It’s a mystery. He had thought he could change Debbi or save Debbi, but she was who she was even when she was ashamed of it. And now he is cursed spending his nights wondering where she is and in what condition and who she’s left the baby with. Tyler loves his mama, but Harlan can see the distance growing in the child’s eyes when Tyler sees her coming, and he will never forgive her for it.
So why think about a girl who doesn’t even go to church. Whose people worked for his. Billie will go soon and he won’t remember why he ever carried on about it.
Dr. Melvin Hurley
HOW HE MUST APPEAR SO SHORTLY AFTER HIS FLIGHT AND THE TWO-HOUR drive down from Memphis in his woefully creased blazer, redolent of cinnamon gum. He could explain why he has gained five pounds, why his coffee-stained slacks rise a centimeter too high above his ankles, or why his briefcase is bursting with boxes of assorted flavored toothpicks, or even why, for example, he, a distinguished professor of English and African American studies, could only concentrate on a discarded issue of Vogue on the plane as opposed to reading a particularly salient essay by one of his colleagues about the way in which kinship was contested during the terror of slavery. But the ubiquitous gerbil brain is something that only another smoker could truly understand.
“Can I get you something to drink?” Billie flips the thick braid, hanging half loose, over her shoulder. Cliff’s daughter is tall and disheveled, perhaps artfully so, her palms covered in multiple Band-Aids and the thighs under her denim shorts raked with scabs.
She follows his gaze. “Biking accident,” she says. “I have a little stick stain remover if you want it.”
“Thank you, I”—he rubs at the coffee stain above his knee—“we hit some awful turbulence. I considered changing before I picked up the rental car, but I didn’t want to be late.”
“Oh, you should’ve called. It’s not like I have anywhere to be. Coffee? Water? Beer? Whiskey?”
He stops rubbing. “Coffee would be perfect. And I would be grateful for that stain remover. Thank you.”
“I bought this coffee downtown and it’s actually pretty good.”
“Anything would be better than what posed as coffee on the plane.”
“I’m sure.” She doesn’t go into the kitchen, playing with the edge of a Band-Aid over her wrist. “When were you last here, in the Delta?”
“I believe it’s been about eight or nine years.”
“Does it seem like it’s changed at all?”
He straightens. “Funny you mention it because thus far it seems remarkably unchanged. I was thinking on the drive about how the desire to change is uniquely expressed in this landscape, by which I mean how the Mississippi River seeks to merge with the Atchafalaya River, which would of course flood this whole area, so that it would be a sort of Delta Atlantis, and how the Mississippi’s desire to change course is thwarted by the Army Corp of Engineers. What’s so fascinating to me is how the tension between our desire for stasis and the natural world’s appetite for change is such a potent symbol for this region. Think about the way in which hurricanes, floods, extreme heat, and rich soil shape so much of the Global South. In a sense, the Delta is not supposed to be here.”
Billie cocks her head a little to one side. “Huhn. I don’t think I knew that about the Mississippi.”
“There are some gorgeous maps charting how the course of the river has changed over the years.” He could really do with that coffee. “Do you miss the city—Philadelphia I believe you said?”
“Yeah, Philly. Not really. I’ll be back soon enough. It’s weird but I don’t even mind not having a dishwasher. You know, when I drive around here I get this title in my head, like if this place were a book it would be Ruins: A Love Story. But I thought that it was missing something, so maybe it’s Ruins: A Love Story; The Place That’s Not Supposed to Be Here.”
Before moving toward the kitchen, she smiles and Cliff James surfaces. An odd dissonance in his easy smile against her large, sad eyes. Although Melvin’s book (tentatively entitled Against Redemption: The Biography of Clifton James, or, The Prophet of Avalon: The Life of Clifton James) centers primarily on the transformation of Cliff’s work from deceptively simple almost Whitmanesque poetry to a pointed exploration of the contradictions of American blackness, Melvin is, of course, quite interested in Billie. Indeed, what she could tell him about her relationship with her father may shed much-needed light on what role fatherhood played in Cliff’s life. And at the same time, Melvin has never been satisfied with his chapter on Cliff’s return to Mississippi. What precisely was the rupture with the city? Of course, it was in one sense a homecoming, but in practical terms, it meant moving away from the hub of black literati in New York, where he was just starting to make inroads. The question isn’t so much why did Cliff leave Harlem for Mississippi, but why at that particular moment?
Billie comes back in and hands him the stain stick. “I don’t really have any food worth offering. Unless you’re hungry for something very close to cheese?”
“I already ate. Thank you. Do you remember that there used to be another house right over there?” He points out of the front window.
“Harlan, Mr. McGee’s son, said that it was my grandmother’s house.”
“Yes, and if I remember correctly, it was a smaller and of course much older structure. I wonder when it was torn down?”
“I think he said twenty years ago.”
“This house”—he glances at a calendar of the Kennedys and MLK—“was built by your grandmother Ruby’s family. Your grandfather, Willie, was in fact from the Hill country, but I’m sure you know all that.” Even with the calendar, the room is monotonously stark. “I apologize if I’m being somewhat overbearing but it’s helping me to retread this ground out loud.”
“Not at all. Actually I don’t know much about my grandfather. What was he like?”
He can’t resist chewing a stick of gum, no matter how gauche it may be. “I think it would be fair to say that he was a hard man who lived a hard life. And like so many black veterans of World War II, he came back expecting to be treated with dignity and not as a second-class citizen. But instead he was greeted by this, I would say, surge of terror. What I mean is that many white men, particularly in the South, feared that these returning black veterans had forgotten their place. And consequently, you see a rise in lynchings. Even at the level of— I mean at the same time as this increase in violence, most black veterans are also being kept from receiving the benefits of the G.I. Bill, which in turn hinders the growth of a black middle class. No college, no housing loans, and so on. This is all to say that it seems to me a crucial mistake to write Willie, and men like him, off as wandering philanderers, and this is not to detract from the plight of single, black mothers, but to point out the complexities that—”
“My grandfather cheated on Grandma Ruby?”
“He left your grandmother. But that’s a good example of where I would argue that while on one hand, yes clearly he had
met another woman, but it was also very much about the effect of the daily humiliations he encountered on his return to Greendale, heightened by being treated quite differently in Europe. So I think that one of the particular questions he would have been facing was: How do I stay in an even more hostile, and in a number of ways potentially deadly, environment when I have risked my life for this country?”
The coffee machine beeps from the kitchen. Billie is staring at him. “You know so much more about my family than I do.” It seems almost an accusation.
“I tend to run on when I’m excited. You must know I’ve been working on this—essentially portrait of your father—for so many years. I may have said on the phone, but in this book I am, in a sense, trying to lay bare his creative process, his artistic transformation, and by degrees, his life. Which is all to say, although I have this glut of information, you know, it hardly equals the bond between you and your father.”
Her eyes are on the dog, gently tapping the tip of her shoe against the bottom of one of his paws. “I’m not sure how much of a bond I can have. I mean, I don’t remember much. You would think that because he died thirty years ago, it would get easier. But weirdly the older I get the more I feel the loss.” She looks up at him. “Anyway. Cream? Sugar?”
“Both if you wouldn’t mind.”
She disappears into the kitchen. A spoon taps against the side of a mug. He sits on a rather ghastly brown armchair.
When she comes back, she seems soft with thought. “I never met my grandfather. But he was alive when my father died, right?”
“Yes.” Perhaps it is wrong to drown her immediately in all of these narratives. What he’s privy to—well, he has a certain distance as an observer, almost a kind of detective.
She hands him a purple mug. “Did he come to the funeral?”
“Yes.” He reads the side of the mug—BLESSED.
She smiles. “I bought it at a garage sale. It seemed to fit the house. Did you go to the funeral?”
The Gone Dead Page 8
