“I’m not gonna tell nobody, are you?”
He doesn’t answer and she smiles.
Billie
INSIDE, SHE SITS ON A FOLDING CHAIR WHILE HE SITS ON THE COUCH, hunched over his own lap. The trailer is too small for him.
“I’m his daughter.”
“I know, you said.”
He looks sick. Or does she just think he looks sick, want him to look sick, eaten up by whatever he did.
“All I want . . . you could tell me what happened to my father, you could.”
“Far as I know he had an accident and hit his head.”
She is silent. There must be something she could say to make him implicate himself. “You didn’t get along, did you?”
“Didn’t know him good enough to get along or not. I ain’t done nothing to him if that’s what you think.”
“I know about Louis Jackson. That you shot him.”
He looks at her, then back down. “That there was self-defense, justifiable homicide. It’s been proven in a court of law. I don’t need to comment on that now.”
The air-conditioning is sticking to her skin. “Were you in the Klan?”
“No.”
“Come on. What about when you were young?”
“I went to a meeting or two when I was young cause I was curious. At that time a lot of folks did. But I knew very little about their goings-on. My daddy wouldn’t have liked it.” His eyes are wide, as if that is what innocence looks like.
“Did you have friends in the Klan?”
“Some of them were, some of them weren’t.”
“Did any of them have something against my father because he was involved with civil rights?”
“I ain’t know nothing about that. I know people didn’t like strangers coming down to judge us. Who would? Some in the Klan weren’t even against blacks and whites being together, no matter what you might hear. They wanted it to happen gradual and not be forced on them by the federal government.”
“Why did you go to the meetings? Did it give you a sense of purpose?” She sits a little forward so that she can move her hand under her loose T-shirt and feel where the gun is. “That’s what I’ve always thought about the Klan.”
“It was just what— My uncle went, other folks I knew, so I went once or twice too. Like I said.”
“My father was writing a book about you and Louis Jackson. I know that now. But what I want to know is what you did about it.”
“Folks can write whatever they want about me. I got nothing to hide.”
This is getting her nowhere. He’s not going to confess. She shifts back, looking around the trailer. A woman’s shirt is hanging off the back of the couch, pink sandals by the door. Pictures on the wall near the kitchenette of Curtis holding a baby in a diaper. Grandkids.
Her eyes are hot. “Are you married?” She had been picturing him alone, full of the deed that had rotted his whole life.
“Yeah, my wife just went out to the store.”
She blinks the tears back. “Your wife. Why do you get to have a wife while my daddy lies dead in the ground?” She stands up, slipping her hand back under her shirt. “You know I can’t really remember him? I have these little freeze-frames and that’s it. I can’t feel what he was like.”
“It’s got nothing to do with me.”
She takes out the gun. He jumps up, his hands pushing toward her. “What are you doing?”
She swings the gun at him. “Stop moving. Sit back down.” She steps closer. “Sit.”
He sits. “You don’t want to use that, not a girl like you.”
“You know what I’ll say? I’ll say self-defense. Like you with Louis Jackson.” She walks backward to the door and gropes for the lock, turning it. “There. Now it’s just me and you.” A line of sweat drips down her outstretched arm.
“I go to church now.”
“That’s interesting. Does the thought of hell bother you? Especially now that you’re older, closer to death.” She steps over an ashtray, moving slowly where the floor dips, until she’s a couple of feet away. “There. See, now I can’t miss.”
“You want to be a murderer?”
“Just tell me what happened that night and I’ll go. It’s easy. Just do it.”
“I told you I wasn’t involved!” He almost gets up.
“Sit down.” Her hands are shaking the gun.
“I wasn’t the one!”
“What do you mean?”
“I wasn’t the one. I swear!”
“You tell me.” She steps closer until the barrel presses into the side of his forehead. It feels so good her heart might jump from her chest.
Curtis’s breathing goes ragged. “You ain’t got it right. I wanted to scare him off, teach him a lesson. I don’t hardly know. We waited for him outside of some juke joint and gave him a whupping. That’s it.”
“Then what?”
He wrings his hands over and over in his lap. “Well, I reckon he was pretty bad off. A few hours later we got a call that he had died, so we come over as officers. It was a terrible thing. You was there. We didn’t know at first. You were crying. You heard everything.” His eyes dart up at her. “You was that little girl.”
“Yes.” She remembers to breathe. “Then what happened? Did I go missing?”
“One of the deputies took you. He quit not long after that. He never was no good at it. Jim McGee, he took you home with him. Thought we were gonna hurt you, I reckon.”
“Were you?”
“No, ma’am. I would never harm a child.”
“But you did.”
Someone starts beating on the door. He looks but she doesn’t.
“Now I told you all I know. I can’t tell you nothing more. I told you it was an accident.”
“You know what I would like?” she says. The door shudders.
“Billie!” Her uncle’s voice.
But everyone else is in another time and place; only they are near to each other.
“I would like my mother. And I would like my father. I would like a mom and a dad. That would feel good. They were good people. They fought on behalf of other people. They probably even understood the forces that created someone like you.”
“Billie, open this door!”
“But me, I’m not good as them. And I can’t ever have what I want.”
“Billie.” Her uncle sounds underwater. “Let me tell you everything. I know all kind of stuff he don’t. Don’t you go and do something we all will regret.”
She looks at Curtis Roberts. “Are you right with the Lord? Isn’t that what they say?”
“Listen, listen I got kids, a wife . . .”
“Billie”—her uncle slaps the door—“your daddy would not want this. I promise you it would break his heart. I promise you.”
She swallows. “Go home, Uncle Dee. This is just me. Nothing to do with you.”
“Your daddy believed in forgiveness.”
“What about justice?” The arm holding the gun is beginning to burn.
“He was a man of God.”
She looks at Curtis. “He’s not sorry.”
“I am!” says Curtis.
“You’re sorry you did it? Or sorry I’m making you feel scared? Whatever you are it’s not enough. Not for me.”
“Let me help you get justice, Billie,” her uncle says. “He did it, but he ain’t know all the truth. I know, I can help you. We can get it, you and me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because it’s been long time coming. Don’t you want to be free? Free of that weight you been carrying? Open the door.”
Curtis’s eyes are fixed on her. Right now she is everything to him. But which way to freedom. It cannot be undone if she does it. In one second it would be over and just begun. He would be out of this world and she would have done it. And would Mom and Daddy ever have thought that their footnote of a daughter would end up a local news story for shooting a man dead? She pulls the trigger. Curtis yells and drops to the floo
r, shaking. The bullet has buried itself in the wall on his left.
“Now you know what it feels like when someone wants you dead.”
She opens the door. Her uncle grabs her and pulls her away, almost off her feet. She doesn’t know where the gun goes or how long it is before she’s wrapped in the stinging heat of her uncle’s car.
Her uncle is standing above her shouting, “Why y’all just gonna sit here and have her ruin her life? He would never forgive me—never!” He ducks down and presses his forehead to hers. “It’s all right, Billie, it’s all right, we’ll get you back to Philadelphia, we’ll tell all the newspapers, and the senators, and—”
“No. I have to stay. I have to see it through, you and me, right? You and me.”
It’s all right, Billie, her daddy always said. He would sit her down in the living room and put the TV on. When the door closed behind him, she thought he would come back. Sometimes he left her but he always came back.
Dee
HE WAS TURNING EIGHTEEN THAT YEAR. WHEN THEY HEARD THE CAR horn outside, his mother looked out the window and told him to go and take Billie out to his brother’s car. His niece was curled up asleep on the couch.
He got to the car and saw his brother in the driver’s seat. Dee had never seen him looking like that. Cliff was smoking a cigarette but his hands were shaking and he was bleeding everywhere—his eyebrow, mouth, from his ear—but he didn’t want to go to the hospital he said. Don’t tell Momma, Cliff said. He was his big brother. Dee lay Billie on the backseat.
Dee guessed right away that some white men did it. Other folk said things had changed, and they had some, but some things hadn’t. He never thought too much about it. But Cliff did. Cliff was always going on about Hiram Revels and the massacre at Fort Pillow. How even when Dee went to high school with whites and blacks, everything else was still separate—where he sat during lunch, church, Little League, homecoming. Dee didn’t care about if he could vote because as far as he was concerned the vote was between having nothing or having even less. He didn’t do all that well in school and nobody but Cliff—not his teachers, not his friends—expected more from him. Ever since he’d been back, Cliff came over for his exams and book reports and helped him write his college application. He was supposed to be going in the fall. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go, but Cliff said he had to at least give it a chance.
He said nothing to his mother, and after she went to sleep, he went over late that night to check on Cliff.
The house was dark. Not even the porch light on. When he walked up, he could not see. He knocked gently at first, not wanting to wake up his little niece, but there was no answer and he knocked harder. Then he tried the door and it was unlocked. In the hall, he turned on a light. He wanted to check that Cliff was all right, convince him to go up to the hospital, fuck whatever he said.
But Cliff wasn’t in his room. Dee called and called his name. Then he remembered his niece and went to the back hallway where she slept but she wasn’t in her bed. He really started to panic and hollered for her. But nobody answered.
He went back out in the yard and double-checked that Cliff’s car was there. He called for them both, but nothing. Then from the light coming through the living room window, he saw the outline of a hand in the grass. It was his brother lying facedown, collapsed, but still breathing a little.
When he called the police, an ambulance didn’t come. Only two patrol cars and two men, Oakes and Roberts. Not in uniform but in their shirtsleeves. Roberts acting like they done pulled him out of a bar. They handcuffed Cliff as he lay there and Dee started screaming, trying to pull them off his brother. But they wrestled him away, then Oakes checked Cliff’s pulse, saying he’s dead anyway and all the life flew out of Dee’s body.
They made a call and grabbed Dee again, talking like he might have done something to his brother, questioning him over and over. He was wearing a new shirt. It had blood on it now. There was blood under his fingernails too. Cliff’s blood, which was his blood, half his blood. He didn’t want them touching Cliff’s body. He wanted them to leave Cliff as he was. Only his mother should touch him or someone that loved him.
When they let him go, he lit a cigarette to get rid of the smell. It couldn’t be the body because it was too soon. Wasn’t it too soon? But there was a smell that was bothering him. Maybe it wasn’t the body but the smell of somebody’s cigar. Somebody smoking a cigar. What did they care? Just another black man dead.
As the sun was starting to rise, Jimmy McGee pulled up. He looked at Dee and gave him a sad nod but nothing else, trying to be professional. He went right to Cliff’s body, which was all he was now. Then Jimmy went over to the other men, who left Dee to talk in a little huddle. The side of his jaw was hurting like he might have a bad tooth.
Dee got up and went in the house, calling for Billie again and something moved on Cliff’s unmade bed. A bump under the blankets.
“Billie?” There was no answer.
He pulled at the quilt. There she was with her eyes wide open. “Why you hiding?” He picked her up. “Were you asleep?”
“The men were shouting.”
“I know, honey.”
“Daddy said don’t come outside.”
What had the baby seen? He didn’t know but she knew and would never know.
“It’s all right now,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her face.
He found some candy in the kitchen. The dirty dishes in the sink were collecting flies. He sat her in the living room and put on the TV, looking for something she could watch.
“I want Sesame Street,” she said.
“No, baby, that’s only on in the morning. It’s too late.”
He chose some late-night show but she only watched him. The bottoms of her feet were dirty, there was grass on the bottom of her nightdress.
“I’m hungry. I want pasta,” she said. “Make the men go away.”
“I get you something in a minute. You wait here for me.”
“Daddy doesn’t like it.”
“What don’t he like?”
She looked at the front door. “The moon.”
He didn’t think things could get worse, but then it all began to get real out of hand. Outside, they wanted him to come down to the station, said they’d talk to his momma. He felt scared but he was also watching himself at a distance, wondering if he was feeling like he should feel, like a man should, his brother being dead, his big brother, Cliff. Cliff. Oakes and Roberts went into the house and tried talking to Billie, wanting to know what she’d seen, what her daddy said before he left. Billie was crying, the TV running under everything like bad water. He went into the house and tried to pick her up, but Curtis Roberts shoved him back. They pushed against each other until Curtis stepped back and pulled out his gun. The other officer rushed over and told him to calm down, there was no call for it. Dee slipped onto the porch and saw Jimmy.
“Jimmy,” Dee said. “She’s just a little kid.”
Jimmy, who knew he wasn’t part of no “lower element,” Jimmy who Cliff claimed was decent but a product of that time and place. Cliff was always curious about how some men were born deep in the hell of Jim Crow—their daddy a Cyclops of the Klan, or founder of the local White Citizens’ Council—but knew it was wrong and dared to be different. Why those men were so few but did exist.
Jimmy looked directly at Dee and walked into the house.
When they were pushing Dee into the back of the car, arresting him for assaulting an officer, he saw Jimmy carrying Billie. She wasn’t crying anymore and trying to stay awake, half her hand tucked in her mouth. Dee heard her little baby voice and wanted to call her name, but he didn’t want to scare her. He didn’t know he wouldn’t see his niece for the next thirty years. That he would never get married. That he would never have kids. That his father would die in a few months, his mother have a stroke in a few years. He didn’t know how rough it was gonna get because it didn’t seem it could get no worse than the one person who ever he
lped him was lying dead on the ground.
Weeks later Sheila would come over to pay a visit to his momma and he would hear her in the kitchen crying about Curtis Roberts and Dee knew that was the name of one of the men responsible for the death of his brother. Who had handcuffed Cliff instead of taking him to the hospital. And all those men who had helped it happen had blood on their hands.
After Sheila left, his mother made him promise that he say nothing to nobody about it. She would not lose another son, her miracle baby, the only one she had left. She was scared and didn’t want more trouble brought on them, or little Billie. Or maybe all her life she had been preparing herself for this kind of pain.
Some nights he would lay awake planning all the ways he could get revenge, and as if she knew, his mother would remind him of his promise and when she couldn’t speak she said it with her eyes. He never got justice for Cliff. He just waited for those men to die. Spent the rest of his life trying to slip the weight, to forget that he hadn’t made Cliff go to the hospital, that he hadn’t spoken up when he had the chance because there was always the chance that worse could happen.
From the police car, he thought he could hear Billie looking for him, wondering where he’d gone. Or maybe she was looking for Cliff, wondering where he was, not knowing her daddy wasn’t in this world.
Billie
A RETURN TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME, WHERE HE WAS BORN AND where he died, where at certain times on random days love did not fail even if it could not make them safe.
The dull autumn sun goes behind clouds and Billie zips up her jacket. The harvest is over and the fields are bare. Uncle Dee leans on the hood of the car, smoking, while she goes in to see the new dust and cobwebs as if her stay was already in the distant past.
To get away from the Delta had been good, to let her mind breathe and forget for a little, to be silly, to not be afraid. But this place is in her blood and her blood is in the land and the land is hers.
She sits on the floor and closes her eyes. The house breathes and the bones in the fingers of her left hand ache. “I am not abandoning you,” she says. The sun trickles in and fills the cold room, washing up her back.
The Gone Dead Page 20
