The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “Sheriff Jackson. Good Lord!”

  He squinted at me genially. “I missed the service.”

  “You didn’t miss much.”

  He took a drag from his cancer stick. “Why don’t you set a spell?” He reached behind to lurch a chair over.

  “All right.”

  The legs of our folding chairs stabbed like spears into the soft earth. Collard extricated a handkerchief from a vest pocket.

  “You may be the only white man’s ever set foot in this yard,” I observed.

  “Without a doubt,” he mopped his brow.

  “You really could have attended, Sheriff. No one would have said anything.”

  “Not out loud, no.”

  “I’m not so sure,” I rejoined. “You’re practically family.”

  “I ’spose.”

  There was something in the way he said it, some note of despair or irony. I couldn’t quite make it out.

  “I hope it’s not guilt,” I finally managed. “I hope you didn’t come here out of guilt.”

  He turned those deep set eyes into mine. “Well, if I did, I expect it’s something you and me have in common.”

  “I’d be a liar to deny that.”

  He stirred the sand with the toe of a leather shoe. “I was reading somethin’ ’bout you just the other day.”

  “Better to be in the news than not, I suppose.”

  A breeze gusted suddenly. The flaps of the canopy reported like a flag. Collard crushed his cigarette into the bone-yard sand. Fished a fresh one from its pack.

  “Those things are going to kill you,” I said.

  “Gave ’em plenty of chances. They ain’t done it yet.” He leaned sideways to fish out a box of matches. “I been in this yard one other time. For Corrie Jean.”

  “Nobody told me when she died,” I said. “Nobody called.”

  “Nobody knew how,” Collard grunted. “Watn’t like you was over in Perry or Live Oak. We couldn’t keep her in deep freeze.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “I remember taking your mama to Dowling Park. Raymond came and got me. I was sleeping off a drunk. It was cold, raining. Corrie Jean had a melon in her belly.”

  “Two melons,” I corrected.

  “Right,” he grunted. “Right.”

  “Do you have any idea who our father was, Sheriff?”

  “Nobody knows. My guess’d be Lester, be just like that sumbitch to take a retard. No offense. But I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t say.”

  I beheld my brother’s grave. “I shouldn’t have let Joe Billy go to prison.”

  “You didn’t let him go anyplace. A white jury sent him to prison and there’s nothing in hell you could of done to stop ’em.”

  “I could have spoken up. I should have.”

  “You think you’d of finished school and done your music and all the rest with Monk’s murder hanging around your neck?”

  “It does hang, Sheriff. It has hung. Like a lodestone. An albatross. You have no idea. Sometimes I think it’s dragging me to the grave.”

  “Don’t let it.” The old command was back in his voice. “You think this don’t stick in my craw, too? I’m the one told you to shut up. I’m the one sat by and watched an innocent boy put behind bars. But I wasn’t about to see Corrie Jean’s daughter go to jail for something I’d of been proud to do myself.”

  I pressed my hand to my temple.

  “I got to be going,” Collard announced. He had to use the tent pole to pull himself up. “He was a good boy,” Collard declared, facing the silent stone. “He had sand.”

  That eulogy delivered, the man who used to be sheriff of Lafayette County limped away from the graveside, alone, in the heat. Didn’t take ten steps before he lit up another cigarette.

  Chapter twenty-five

  “It’s Just One Of Those Things…”

  — Peggy Lee

  I don’t know exactly how long I remained at my brother’s grave. A few minutes? A half hour? Not long. Not compared to eternity, certainly. I needed to get back to New York, but even allowing travel there were hours to kill before my flight out of Tallahassee, plenty of time to change clothes, to indulge in a long, cold shower.

  I drove from the grave to my motel, stopping along the way at a convenience store for bottled water and munchies.

  “Paper or plastic?” I was given a choice of bags.

  “Paper,” I replied. “Always.”

  Cindy’s Motel nestled beneath a shade of oaks not fifty yards from Betty’s still-existing café. The room was not much larger than the dorm at Florida State, but frigidly air-conditioned. My suitcase opened wide on a double bed to expose the essentials for travel.

  The television was useless, its coaxial ripped from the wall, but there was a radio in the room, vernier tuned. I dialed that pleasantly old-fashioned receiver past National Public Radio to find an FM station and Vivaldi’s Spring Movement, shucking my sand-filled shoes and clothing on the way to the shower. I emerged refreshed from the sting of water and while changing into a light skirt and blouse saw the message light winking on the touchtone phone.

  “Cilla, it’s me…”

  That would be my latest inamorata. Veronica.

  “Listen, when you get back we need to talk.”

  I skipped the rest. When a younger woman wants to talk it always means the same thing. She’s found another interest, a better deal, a more fantastic orgasm—who knows? And she wants to tell you she’s moving on without hurting your feelings, which is patently impossible. Or it could be she just wanted money.

  I swear it’s enough to make you want to go back to men.

  The only other call of import came from my agent at ICM . Green light for a film. Big budget. “John says he’s got to have you on the track.” By which he meant the sound track for the film’s score. I wasn’t sure I knew who John was, but his enthusiasm for me was relayed through Syd who I was assured was so totally close to Rene that the deal was as good as done.

  My bassoon, naturally, was to be featured.

  “It’s schlock,” Syd’s voice always sounded like tin over the phone. “But the money’s filthy.”

  Filthy money, yes. I’d got used to it.

  But there were clean sheets in my suitcase just waiting to be scored. I had a pen, and time. So I decided, as I had on countless other occasions, to sit down and make myself write. Just sit, quietly, and compose.

  To once again make music in my head.

  I gave it less than an hour, and still barren, gave up. It was time to leave these haunts. I tossed my pad in the overnight and collected my pharmacy of medicinals and fiber. My bill was prepaid in plastic. Within ten minutes I was ready to turn my back on Laureate and Colored Town. All I had to do was gas up the car.

  I was surprised to find Charles Putnal’s full-service station pretty much as I remembered it, and Charles, too. He was beneath the hydraulic lift in his garage when I drove up. Even from the pump I saw a full head of hair, a posture still as casual and powerful as an athlete’s. His arms still filled the shirts I recalled from childhood and there was no gut hanging his oil-stained jeans. He saw me from the garage, came out bareheaded. Unlike most local men Charles never preferred the bib of a cap, squinting into a west-falling sun like some sailor of old, the creases thus laid into his face deep and abiding and honestly got.

  I buzzed my window down.

  “Fill her up?” he asked.

  “If you would, please.”

  He paused for a moment at the pump, squinted inside my rental. “I know you?”

  “It’s Cilla, Charles. Cilla Handsom.”

  “I will be damn, Cilla! Sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

  “It’s been twenty years. More.”

  “Still, I bet perfect strangers come up to you at airports or concerts, they know who you are. Hell, I ought to. We ought to.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Charles.”

  “Will that be regular or high test?”

  “You
r call.”

  “If you’re renting, I’d go cheap,” he advised and reached for the low octane.

  I used that chance to get out of the car.

  “’Long you in town?”

  “Leaving now. I just came for Joe Billy.”

  He set the pump’s nozzle, shaking his head on to way to my windshield.

  “We heard all kind of stories. Was he killed up there?”

  “Suicide, they’re saying. Guard found him hanging.”

  “He deserved better.”

  “Yes, he did,” I found my eyes going down to the ground.

  “Juanita was asking about you couple of weeks back,” Charles remarked.

  “Juanita Land?”

  “You got time you ought to go see her.”

  “I’m sure Juanita wouldn’t want me dropping in unannounced.”

  Charles stopped his labor to regard me.

  “She’s at Dowling Park, been a nurse out there for years, the Infirmary. And for what it’s worth, you can’t never be sure about what people want. Hell, half the time we don’t know ourselves.”

  I heard the nozzle chunk with the backflow of gasoline.

  “Be seventeen dollars, eighty-three cents,” he announced and I handed him a twenty.

  “Get your change,” Charles said and I knew better than to suggest otherwise.

  My itinerary for travel did not include reunions with high school classmates unless they were black, and my reception at Mr. Raymond’s did not encourage a widened scope of exploration. I had not expected to hear at all from Juanita Land, could not believe she had not flown her small-town coop as soon as she was able. I always imagined Juanita in Tampa or Miami, married to some wealthy scion, or perhaps a good-natured halfback with a trust fund. I could not imagine the richest and most vivacious girl in the county nursing the dead and dying at an old folks’ home. She might as well be a missionary.

  Was she a missionary?

  Was she married?

  Did she have children?

  What had Charles said, exactly? That she had asked about me? Or that she asked for me?

  It was not yet three o’clock in the afternoon when I saw the tower supporting the cables that span the Hal W. Adam Bridge. I crossed high above the Suwannee River, turning off the hard road four miles later to the patched and broken two-lane that leads to Dowling Park. I was amazed to see a roadside gas station familiar to me from my youth. The scenery was equally familiar, pastureland broken with hickory and pine and, yes, the bright spring blossoms of dogwood trees. The sign marking the entry to Dowling Park is large and metal and raised for easy sighting. The tires of my hired car rumbled over a cattle-gap, a relic of the days when dairy cows grazed the grounds.

  My mother had endured two hard labors here, the first to give life, the second to give up living. I used to be able to walk up to the place where Corrie Jean brought me into the world, a small, tin-roofed farmhouse down from the dairy. But the dairy and orphanage and other buildings familiar to me were long gone, entirely replaced now by retirement homes and geriatric facilities. I saw wheelchairs where once I saw children.

  Bounded by a high bluff overlooking the Suwannee and by pastureland once attached to an active dairy, the Park’s growing community spread uncluttered between original growths of oak and pine and rosebud trees. Lining the drive were groupings of photina and juniper and hedges of azalea. Wild flowers and palmetto, all well tended.

  There were bungalows nestled beneath the trees that were reserved for the Park’s staff. The larger homes at the outskirts were owned by retirees buying or building under the Park’s aegis. Extended care was managed from a hospital set in the middle of the complex, on the site of what had been the Park’s orphanage. Apartments nearby were intended for what has come to be called assisted living.

  A caduceus mounted in stainless steel on the brick face of the building marked the entrance to Dowling Park’s pharmacy. A community center abutted that facility; the infirmary and emergency room were accessed directly behind. I entered via the pharmacy, going directly past that apothecary and through a pair of swinging doors to reach the infirmary beyond. The infirmary at Dowling Park was a medium-care facility which with pharmacy, x-ray room, and E.R ., served all of the Park’s residents. There were probably no more than eight or ten rooms in the sick bay itself, fifteen or twenty beds. The nurse’s station was no more than a countertop shoehorned along a modest hallway.

  “Can you help me locate Juanita Land?” I asked a young woman the size of a newt in a uniform starched stiff as boards. “I won’t keep her long.”

  “Of course,” she nodded pert and professional. “She’s in room one nineteen.”

  I proceeded down a linoleum-tiled hallway in the indicated direction, wondering idly what kept a woman working for years in a place so near death’s door.

  There was room 119.

  I turned my hand to rap knuckles lightly on the door.

  “Come in.”

  I entered, to find Juanita cranked up in a hospital bed. Her hair was loose, something I had never seen. And she was not tending anyone. I realized suddenly, with shock, that my old friend was herself a patient. A physician leaned over her partly bared chest, that pale skin, some white man in a snowy white lab coat flapping open over Gucci slacks and weejuns. He handled a stethoscope and a somber demeanor. A bag of fluid distended by a tube from what looked like a hat rack to the needle in my schoolmate’s arm. She smiled at me.

  “Cilla! I’m so glad you came!”

  “What is this?” I steadied myself on a side rail. “What have they got you in here for?”

  “Cilla, this is my doctor, Dr. Larry Hall. Larry, this is Cilla Handsom.”

  I barely acknowledged the introduction.

  There was some kind of gauze or dressing about her breast.

  “Oh, Lord,” my hands went to my own. “Oh, Lord.”

  “It’s all right, Cilla. It’s just chemo.”

  Just chemo?

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  I sank to the side of her bed. The doctor excused himself quietly and I was left with a woman I had always thought impervious to age or infirmity.

  “I almost didn’t come,” I confessed straightway.

  “Glad you changed your mind.”

  She reached over and squeezed my hand.

  “How was the funeral?”

  “Terrible.”

  Her laughter was so pure, so unaffected. Here she was facing death herself and yet unchastened, apparently, by any wisp of mortal fear. A peal of pure mirth. We talked small for a while. She had married a boy from Gainesville, it turned out, not a wealthy scion, not a halfback. There was a divorce. No children. Halfway through nursing school Juanita learned that her father had mortgaged the family store to finance a real-estate deal in South Florida that totally collapsed.

  “Wasn’t long after daddy filed Chapter Nine I came out to the Park,” she smiled. “Been here ever since.”

  “Charles told me you worked out here. He didn’t say anything about you being sick.”

  “I didn’t want him to, Cilla. I wouldn’t want you coming out here on that account. I think about you often, though.”

  “You do?”

  “Mmmhmm. But you had pretty much forgot about us, hadn’t you, honey? Or tried to?”

  “Guilty on both counts,” I replied, unable to dissemble before such artless candor.

  She folded my hand into hers. “So how’s life in the big city, girlfriend? How you doin’?”

  I paused a long moment. I had wanted, for so long, to have someone take my hand like this. But now the moment was here and I felt myself preparing the canned response. What did it matter, anyway? But then Juanita looked up to me, pale and small.

  “Cilla, I don’t have that much time. Let’s not waste it.”

  I looked into her eyes. There was nowhere else to look. “I’m not doing so good,” I blinked. “I’m scared. I’m running out of money. I buy things I can’t afford. I had to take in a roomm
ate to keep my apartment in New York, and I’m damn near positive when I get back she’ll be gone. But the worst is, I haven’t written anything worthwhile in a year. I keep wanting to break into jazz with my bassoon, try something original, but every time I do I come up dry.