Wolf Whistle

by Lewis Nordan

  Then somebody said something that shut the mouth of everybody standing in the locker room. The words froze the smile on Roy Dale’s face and caused it to crack and fall right off.

  “I’m for the nigger.”

  That’s what somebody said.

  Huh? Who said that? What did you say?

  On a sudden impulse, Roy Dale turned to Phillip, the bucktoothed boy who was the team’s manager.

  He said, “Hey, Phillip, you know what we ought to do, we ought to sign us a blood oath together, a pact, you know, like Indians, or pirates, we ought to promise one another, no lie, no smiles, no kidding around, that wherever we end up in life, right here or far away, or when we’re young or when we’re old, don’t matter, that you’ll get you some braces to straighten out them buckteeth and I’ll get my ball shortened, okay, you want to go in with me on this deal, want to be partners?”

  What had got into Roy Dale’s head, saying a thing like that!

  Phillip looked at Roy Dale like he thought Roy Dale was probably going to end up in Whitfield with Smoky Viner.

  Roy Dale said, “Sorry. Just kidding.”

  Phillip went back to tape and Tuff-Skin.

  Except nobody really went back to anything. The words were still in the air.

  Did Roy Dale hear those words? He must have.

  Everybody shut up. Nobody even noticed what Roy Dale had said to Phillip.

  Who said he was for the nigger?

  It was Smoky Viner.

  Smoky Viner said, “It ain’t right.”

  Maybe it was a dream, that would be one explanation.

  It wasn’t a dream.

  Smoky Viner said, “Y’all ought to be shamed of yourself, laughing about a boy got killed.”

  Roy Dale thought, Yeah, I better take me a shower today, I think I might better start taking me a shower most every day from now on, feet smelling bad as they do.

  The room was still very quiet, no one was moving, or scarcely breathing.

  Some time passed like this.

  Roy Dale wondered why he hadn’t known enough to say what crazy Smoky Viner said. Roy Dale even had a daddy that warned him, and he still didn’t know enough. Roy Dale was laughing like a durn hyena, that’s all Roy Dale was doing. Roy Dale realized he hated Smoky Viner worse than ever.

  Finally, in a low voice, almost a whisper, somebody said, “Uh, Smoky, it was a, you know, white lady. A colored boy and a white lady.” This was gently said, a means of assuring that the record was straight.

  Smoky Viner said, “It ain’t right.”

  Somebody said, “We ain’t said it was right, Smoky. We just kidding around.”

  Smoky Viner said, “I laughed too, I couldn’t help it.”

  Well.

  Smoky Viner said, “I hope I live long enough to forgive myself for that laugh.”

  Roy Dale thought, Maybe I’ll ask Runt about an operation to correct this long ball, the hernia. I don’t have to wait until I’m old. Runt might could come up with the money, if I asked him.

  Smoky Viner said, “I’m shamed of myself. I want to die, I’m so shamed of myself.”

  There weren’t any more jokes. Everybody was about all dressed-out and ready for practice, anyway.

  They gathered up their equipment, they rattled their arrows, they strung their bows, they moved out of the locker room and onto the practice field in ones and twos.

  There was one more thing that happened that day that Roy Dale would always remember.

  The team was out on the wide, green field. The sun had been out for a few days and was warm on their faces.

  Roy Dale said, “Coach Heard, Sweet and Sugar neither one ain’t here today.”

  Coach Heard said, “Well, I heard, you know, I heard about the bad news.”

  Roy Dale said, “Bad news.”

  Coach said, “Them finding that floater and all.”

  Roy Dale said, “I was just, you know, wondering—”

  Coach Heard said, “How about I pair you off with Smoky today, Smoky Viner ain’t got no regular partner. That’s the ticket, it’d do him good, too, you take him up under your wing for a day, build up his confidence maybe, sure would, do him some good.”

  Nobody wanted to be on a team with Smoky Viner, even on a regular day. Smoky Viner couldn’t catch an arrow for shit. On the best day of his life, Smoky Viner couldn’t catch an arrow.

  Roy Dale said, “You want me to team up with Smoky Viner?”

  Coach Heard said, “Well, yeah, Roy Dale, I do, I think I would like for you to do that today.”

  Coach Heard said, in a confidential way, “Ease up a little on Smoky Viner, you know, take a little bow off that string, won’t you, Roy Dale, he ain’t real skilled at this game. He’s all tore up today, anyway, you know.”

  In Roy Dale’s hand today the bow was a weightless thing, like air, it was so easy to draw to the limit, full forty pounds.

  The arrow, when it flew, was, as he had known it would be, all his rage, his emptiness and loss, outward, outward, forever away from his heart. It was mothers gone off to Kosiesko with strangers, grandparents named Cyrus and Janie, graves to earn a family’s daily bread.

  To Smoky Viner the arrow seemed to emerge from another world into his own. It came towards him, mysterious, whistling, bustling, lustering invisibility, point and shaft and fletch, sucking up, as it flew, all the available oxygen from the atmosphere and into its hungry, insatiable self.

  The atmosphere rarified.

  Birds fell from the air.

  Cattle toppled over in a field.

  Car motors stalled on the highway.

  The body of the Bobo-child, dressed in a heavy garment of fish and turtles and violent death, reversed all its decay, and flesh became firm once more, eyes snapped back into sockets and became bright, bones unbroke themselves, feet became swift, laughter erupted like music, and bad manners and disrespect and a possessive disdain for a woman became mere child’s play, a normal and decent testing of adolescent limits in a hopeful world.

  The arrow hit Smoky Viner in the dead middle of his forehead.

  Maybe Roy Dale could learn to call Runt “Daddy,” he believed he could try. Maybe he could learn to speak words of love to him, though he felt nothing in his heart like love. Maybe he could speak to his mother honest words of rage for leaving him behind. Maybe he could believe that his vile laughter at the death of a child, like himself, did not eliminate him from human hope, by its villainy.

  The arrow that hit Smoky Viner’s head was a “blunt.” It struck Smoky Viner so hard that the arrow collapsed upon itself, this density of meaning, and splintered a million ways at once, throwing shards of wood and a spray of sawdust around Smoky Viner’s head like the muddy, chaotic rings of Saturn.

  Smoky Viner saw little of this. Smoky Viner saw only a flock of tiny bluebirds flying around and around his head, cheep-cheep-cheeping some familiar tune, perhaps the lullaby that Dumbo’s mother sang to the baby elephant in the cartoon movie Smoky Viner saw one time, he was just not sure, good night, little one, good night.

  Everyone else on the field saw only a miracle.

  They saw Smoky Viner, for once in his life, still standing but knocked unconscious by a blow to the head.

  He teetered, he began to fall.

  They saw a boy with courage to speak words that they had not had courage even to think.

  They saw hope.

  For themselves, for the Delta, for Mississippi, maybe the world.

  Coach Heard hollered, “Roy Dale!”

  Smoky Viner toppled over, like a tree felled in a forest.

  Coach Heard hollered, “Smoky Viner!”

  Roy Dale emptied his quiver onto the ground, the seven remaining arrows, and found the steel-tipped arrow among them, the one that he drove into his wall at night.

  He separated it from the rest. He held it in both hands in front of him. He broke it across his knee, crack, and flung the two pieces aside.

  He said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,
I’m sorry!”

  11

  ARROW CATCHER began to fill up with strangers.

  They seemed to be everywhere. They wore ties, some of them, in this heat. They loosened their ties and opened their shirt collars. They took off their jackets and carried them flung over one shoulder. They took a good look at everything. They looked like people visiting the zoo.

  Every time the Greyhound pulled up to the curb in front of the Arrow Cafe, and the bus doors whooshed open, more new strangers got off. Most of them were white men, with suitcases in the compartment beneath the bus. Some carried leather valises off the bus with them. Some even carried small typewriters in hard cases.

  They stood on the curbside. They looked around them, right and left.

  These were the reporters from Look and The New York Times, all the papers and magazines from outside the South.

  They wiped their faces and necks with white handkerchiefs. They said, “Humid.”

  They looked at the retired farmers sitting on benches on the square, men in Big Smith overalls and wearing brogans on their feet. Men with sun-creased faces and a pack of Red Man stuck out of a back pocket.

  The reporters said, “Amazing.”

  They looked at the loiterers around the courthouse. They noticed the white men with unshaven chins and crumpled straw hats, standing about the courthouse green. They noticed the coloreds segregating themselves beneath the Confederate statue.

  They said, “Do you believe this?”

  They noticed the statue of the Confederate soldier in front of the courthouse, with a hand up to his brow to shade the sun.

  Somebody said, “That old boy is facing south.”

  Somebody else said, “He’s planning his retreat.”

  This gave them a laugh. They had a few good, strong male laughs about this. “He’s planning his retreat!” they said, many times.

  They went into the Arrow Cafe and looked at the menu.

  They whispered to one another, “Fried catfish.”

  They whispered, “Collard greens.”

  To the girl behind the counter, they said, “Do you have any grits?”

  This gave them a good laugh, too. They laughed their heads off about this joke. Grits!

  “How about selling us some grits, sweetcheeks,” they said.

  These boys never had such a good laugh.

  The girl said, “just at breakfast.”

  She knew they were making fun of her, she just wasn’t sure what the joke was all about.

  They looked at the trees in a small park in the center of town. They said, “Which one of these trees is a magnolia tree?”

  They said, “Are there any alligators around here?”

  “Snapping turtles?”

  These boys knew how to laugh.

  They asked colored men standing on a corner if they would sing a verse or two from “Old Man River.” They were serious. They said they’d be willing to pay two dollars just to hear a verse or two of “Old Man River” by an authentic soul of the South.

  The colored men said they couldn’t recollect ever having heard of that song.

  The reporters said, “Amazing.”

  They wrote dispatches for their newspapers and magazines. They wrote that the scenery itself was hostile. The scenery is as oppressive as the moss that hangs from the cypress trees, they wrote. The silence is like taut skin, they wrote, and the faint heart startles, when that silence is cracked by the hiss of a suddenly opened Coke.

  That’s the way they wrote about Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. It was pure-dee poetic.

  They shook their heads in disbelief at everything they saw.

  They said, “Faulkner was only a reporter.”

  They said, “Faulkner was only the camera’s eye.”

  They went up to men sitting on benches in front of Wooten’s Cobbler Shop. They said, “Where is the nearest motel?”

  The men on the benches considered the question. They leaned down between their legs and spit into a lard bucket and wiped snuff drippings off their chin.

  The men on the benches said, “The nearest whut?”

  The out-of-town visitors repeated this story many times. “And so then this old guy spits, you know, down into a pail of some kind, and then he looks up, real thoughtful, you know, and he says—get this, it’s going to kill you—he says, ‘The nearest whut?’” Oh boy, what a joke! “‘The nearest whut?’”

  So the tourist season had fallen upon Arrow Catcher, Mississippi.

  The Arrow Hotel was back in business.

  Miss Peabody was back in business.

  The old lady who owned the Arrow Hotel, who pronounced her name Miz Pee-buddy, had not been seen or heard from in years. A ghost might as well have been picking up the occasional two dollars from beneath the shot glass beside the register-book, her presence was so scarce.

  Now, one morning, Miz Peebuddy showed up on the front porch sitting in a high-backed rocking chair, as if she had never been gone. She was fanning herself with a church fan and watching all the commotion. She was wearing dollar signs in her eyes.

  Miz Peebuddy complained to one reporter that there used to be a sign on the outskirts of town that said ARROW CATCHER A GOOD PLACE TO RAISE A BOY.

  She said nobody knew where that sign was anymore, didn’t know what went with it. She said it was a shame, too, a crime and a shame to misplace a nice sign like that.

  She said the sign had been shot several times from passing cars—she said Big Boy Chisholm, the marshal, had confirmed this fact—and then it was taken down, for some unknown reason, she said, and it had never been replaced.

  “Now nobuddy knows where the old sign went, let alone a new one. Just when we need some good publicity around here, all you kind strangers arriving in our little town, we ought to be making our best impression on you, and nobuddy seems to be able to find the sign.”

  Miz Peebuddy said, “A few bullet holes don’t make the message unreadable if the message is strong.”

  Miz Peebuddy was hot news. Miz Peebuddy made the New York papers two days in a row. Miz Peebuddy hit the AP wires.

  Miz Peebuddy didn’t care. She didn’t notice. There was a new sign above the register-book at the Arrow Hotel. It replaced the sign that said $2. The new sign, with its own strong message, said $5.

  Miz Peebuddy carried a little metal strongbox full of money around with her.

  She said, “I hope you boys like biscuits and ham gravy. That’s what we’re having for breakfast tomorrow.”

  They looked at one another. When Miz Peebuddy was out of the room, they broke up. They said, “Biscuits and ham gravy! For breakfast!”

  New details about one thing and another came out in the newspaper every day—a federal judge was chosen, Durwood Swinger.

  The prosecutor was a local boy, a graduate of Arrow Catcher High. He had a deep limp, from a case of polio when he was a child. He gave a little skip to his step when he walked. People who knew him called him Hopalong Cassidy, because of that skip in his step. The paper even reported this.

  A New Orleans lawyer was named for the defense. Poindexter Montberclair could afford it. Solon Gregg was flying on Lord Montberclair’s coattails.

  The two defendants were being tried together, the papers said.

  Now that was a surprise, people said. It didn’t look like Lord Montberclair would want his name attached to the Gregg name in this public way, people said. Even if they did do the killing together, those people said. White trash like Gregg and a fine man like Lord Montberclair, well, my gracious, what won’t they think of next.

  The two defendants admitted taking the boy out of the house. The newspapers learned this through their New Orleans lawyer. Mr. Gregg had been kind enough to report the infraction in a local hangout, the problem, the breach of etiquette, the wolf whistle, whatever you want to call it, and the two together had gone to speak to the boy, the New Orleans lawyer said.

  My clients only meant to scare him, their lawyer told the reporters. That was reasonable
, wasn’t it?—after what the boy said to Lady Montberclair? Whistling like that? But they sure didn’t kill him, the New Orleans lawyer told the newspapers. They warned him, well sure, they admitted doing that, but then they let him go, right after they gave him a good talking-to, a good scare.

  They said they told him, “Now you git on back home, boy, and don’t let us never catch you doing such of a thing again.” They said they didn’t know what happened to the boy after that. They figured he walked on back home, like they told him to. He seemed like an obedient child, so they just figured he went on home. All they did was scare him.

  People talked about this all over the county.

  People said, “Well, now, I can see their point there. If all they done was take the boy out and give him a scare, a good strong warning, well, there wont really no harm in that, now was there. That boy needed some sense shook into his head. Wonder where he went after they left him go?”

  The out-of-state press reported every word. When Delta people saw their words in print, they were astonished, some of them.

  One man had repeated the joke about a nigger trying to swim across Roebuck with a gin fan he had stolen, and then a couple of days later, there it was, his words, printed on the front page of The New York Times.

  The report made the statement seem as though the man actually believed this to be true, that he believed a colored person had actually done this foolish thing and had drowned as a result of it. And there was his name, his full name, right beside what he had said and supposedly believed!

  The reporter who filed the report handed the newspaper to the man at the marble soda fountain in Mr. Shanker’s Drug Store.

  The man said, “What’d you want to write a thing like that for? That was just a joke.”

  The reporter said, “It wasn’t much of a joke.”

  The man said, “Well, I grant you that.”

  The reporter said, “What have you got to say about it?”

  The man said, “Well, it looks like to me all this attention you been giving to this little town is about as bad as a durn nigger murder.”

  And then the next day, this statement appeared in the newspaper as well, and again the man’s name was right beside it. DELTA MAN SAYS REPORTING TRUTH THE SAME AS MURDER.