Devil on My Heels

by Joyce McDonald

  Delia gives one sharp sideways swing of her head, as if to put an end to this whole discussion. I unwind my arms from her shoulders and back away.

  “But Cholly thought he recognized one of them,” I remind her.

  Delia gets up and slams the pot of broken beans on the stove. “Now, do you really think that matters to white folks? Especially when it was white folks that Cholly was pointing his finger at?”

  Delia looks me right in the eye. She is daring me to take their side, the white folks who killed her Gus.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to Gus, Delia. I truly am. Who was it Cholly saw?”

  Delia shrugs. “He never did tell me, seeing as how it turned out the man had an alibi. Cholly just figured he’d made a mistake.”

  “Those men, whoever they are, should be in jail.”

  “Sweet baby Jesus. Haven’t you figured out yet there’s two kinds of justice in this world? There’s justice for the white folks and a whole other justice for coloreds.”

  “Delia,” I plead, “find out who it was Cholly thought he recognized, and I’ll get my dad—”

  Delia chokes out a laugh. At least I think it’s a laugh. It’s hard to tell. “Lord, child, sometimes I just don’t know what to make of you.” For some reason I have this feeling Delia isn’t talking about just me but about every white person she has ever known.

  She waves her hand at me. “Go on, now. You better get to your homework.”

  As I turn to leave I remember what she said the last time I brought up Gus, about having her reasons for wearing his clothes, about how it makes her feel close to him, like he is still with her. “Remember when you said you had your reasons for wearing Gus’s clothes?”

  Delia nods at me suspiciously.

  “You only gave me one reason. You got others?”

  “That’s none of your business. I told you enough already. More’n you needed to hear. Now go on, git.”

  I give in and head upstairs. For the longest while I stand by my bedroom window, looking out over the groves. Close to seven hundred acres of orange trees lined up in tidy rows like soldiers on the march. In the distance I see some of the pickers in the back of Travis’s produce truck. They are packed in like cattle. They stand, some with their arms stuck through the openings, holding on to the wood slats to keep from losing their balance. Travis is taking his crew back to the camp. When he’s not hauling them around in that produce truck, he drives this old blue Ford pickup with a skunk tail flying from the radio antenna.

  The late-afternoon sun is pouring through my bedroom window, making this soft cloud of drifting motes of dust in the light. I watch the truck as it comes near the house. Gator is pressed up against the ropes across the back of the truck. Even from here I can tell it’s him. I recognize the faded red T-shirt.

  That’s when it comes to me.

  Maybe this is why Delia wears Gus’s clothes, one of those reasons she doesn’t want to tell me about. Maybe she wears them to remind everybody in Benevolence of what happened to him. Folks can’t help but think of Gus when they see his clothes coming their way. It doesn’t matter that it’s Delia who is wearing them. Those clothes, Gus’s clothes, will keep right on reminding the men that killed him of what they did. That’s what she’s probably hoping.

  And maybe it does remind them. Because I know I will never be able to look at Delia again without seeing Gus too.

  15

  The next day I am standing in the cafeteria line with Rayanne and Jinny when Chase struts in with that walk he’s got. Very smooth. My heart picks up the pace, beating to his every step. Seems whenever Chase comes near me these days, I get a little wobbly in the knees.

  He walks over to a table where a bunch of seniors are sitting, pulls out one of the chairs with his foot, spins it around, sits down facing the back, and rests his arms on the top. It’s not even his lunch period. But that never stops Chase. For some reason, none of the teachers doing lunchroom duty ever seem to notice.

  I know his routine. He never stands in line with everybody else. If he is really hungry, he cuts in front of somebody. Nobody would ever dare challenge him. Otherwise, he waits till the line is gone, walks through, gets his food, and bolts it all down in two or three minutes.

  Today he is waiting.

  Last night was the first time in days that I didn’t sneak out to be with him. I had a French test to study for. My grades in that class have taken a real nosedive. I haven’t talked to Chase since I left school the day before. And the truth is, I’ve missed him.

  I come through the line with my tray, knowing full well I have to be out of my mind for what I’m about to do, but I do it anyway. I tell Rayanne and Jinny I’ll join them in a few minutes. Then I walk straight up to that table of seniors, look Chase square in the eyes and say, “Can I talk to you?”

  Chase gives me that lazy grin of his. For a minute, I get the awful feeling he’s going to leave me hanging. But then he stands up and jerks his thumb toward the empty table by the door. Nobody ever sits there because the legs are uneven and the table wobbles. Every kid in the cafeteria is watching us. I can feel their eyes boring into me. From the table over by the window, Willy and Earl are whooping and hollering and whistling like the complete morons they are. My face is burning with embarrassment. I wish like crazy that I’d thought this whole thing through a bit more before I went up to Chase’s table.

  I set my tray down. Chase slides into the chair next to mine. He helps himself to some of my meat loaf and sits there eating it with his fingers. “This is real cozy, Dove. Yep, you and me sitting here all alone with ten thousand kids gawking at us. I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before.”

  “I need to ask you something,” I say, ignoring his sarcasm.

  “Ask away.”

  “You hear anything about some trouble over at the migrant camp last week?”

  “Like what?” He doesn’t look at me.

  “Well, I heard something. About some of our pickers. Seems some folks were over at the migrant camp last week and set their clothes on fire.”

  “Nobody was wearing those clothes, I hope,” Chase says.

  “I’m serious!”

  “So am I.”

  “No,” I tell him. “Just the clothes got burned. They were hanging on a clothesline.”

  He nods, like that’s about what he was expecting me to say, then reaches for more meat loaf. The meat loaf usually tastes like roofing shingles, so I don’t object. “Sounds to me like somebody’s probably just trying to scare a few folks.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know who that somebody is, would you?”

  “Why would you think I’d know anything about it?”

  I nod in the direction of the table full of seniors he’d been sitting at. “I thought maybe you might have heard something.”

  Chase slides down in his chair and stretches his long legs out in front of him. “What’s with all this sudden interest in the pickers?”

  Jinny and Rayanne are watching Chase and me from across the room. Jinny is smiling. Rayanne is not. Jinny starts to giggle, and Rayanne gives her a little smack on the shoulder.

  Chase is watching them too. “You didn’t ask me over here just to talk about what happened at the camp, now, did you?”

  I tap my fork up and down on the mashed potatoes. I can’t bring myself to eat them. They taste like the paste we used to use in grammar school. “Why else would I ask you over here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe to announce to everybody in the school that we’re a couple?”

  Are we a couple? I want to ask. But I don’t dare. Not here. When I don’t say anything, Chase stands up and hooks his thumbs on the pockets of his dungarees. He tips his chin toward the cafeteria line, which has dwindled to two people. “You gonna be here when I get back?”

  “You didn’t answer my question yet. Do you know who did it? Or why?”

  “You’re something else, you know that?” He shakes his head and stares up at the ceiling.
“Okay. Here’s what I think. I wouldn’t put it past some folks around here to use those rumors about your barn and those other fires to stir up trouble for the pickers.”

  “Our barn? What folks? Why?” I stand up with my half-empty tray. All I’ve managed to eat is the little square of spice cake, which suddenly reminds me of Rosemary Howell. I follow Chase over to the line, dropping off my tray on the way.

  “Forget it, Dove,” he says. “Whatever’s going on, it’s nothing you can do anything about.”

  I can tell by the look on his face that he considers this conversation over. I leave him standing there in line and head off to French class. Part of me is furious that he wouldn’t answer my questions, because I’m pretty sure he knows more than he’s telling. And part of me is tickled to death that he called us a couple.

  It is too hot to sleep. The window fan makes scraping sounds, like someone is shoveling gravel at lightning speed. Mosquitoes the size of bald eagles are maneuvering their way through a hole in one of the screens. I turn on the light and dig through my desk drawer, looking for Scotch tape to patch the hole. No tape. I stuff a piece of tissue in the hole instead.

  I’ve pretty much given up on Chase coming by tonight. I keep going over everything that happened in the cafeteria earlier wondering if I did something wrong. Maybe he doesn’t want the whole school to know we’re a couple yet. Maybe he doesn’t even want us to be a couple. Maybe he doesn’t think of me that way. Maybe he just likes making out with me in secret. This is what I’m stewing about when from somewhere below my window comes the snap of a branch, loud enough for me to hear it over the fan.

  Someone or something is stomping around in the azalea bushes. The faint smell of cigarette smoke drifts in on the next wave of fanned air. I bolt upright in my bed. Sniff again to make sure. It is definitely cigarette smoke.

  I fly out of bed and pull on my shorts and a blouse. I don’t bother with shoes. I tiptoe past Dad’s door. But this is wasted effort. His door is wide open. His bed is still made up. He’s not home yet. It’s late, probably past midnight. And I have no idea where he is.

  I head down the stairs, banging the screen door on my way out.

  Chase is sitting beneath the oak outside my bedroom window. His back is pressed against the bark. He looks up.

  “What are you doing here this late?” I ask.

  He gets to his feet and stretches. “Same thing I’ve been doing almost every night for the past two weeks. Coming to see you.”

  “Most people who want to see each other go out on a date. A date. Ever hear of it?” I’ve been meaning to bring this up in a more subtle way, when the time is right. But there it was—it just came tumbling right out of my mouth.

  Chase grins at me. “So, consider this a date, then.”

  “It’s after midnight,” I tell him. “How come you waited till now to come over?”

  Chase crushes his cigarette with the toe of his boot. “Lost track of time, I guess.”

  Overhead the moon is full. It sets the shiny leaves in the groves to shimmering. I start walking toward them. Chase comes up behind me. He does a few circles around me, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Oh, come on, Dove,” he says. “I was joking about this being a date. You want to go on a date? Okay, how about Saturday night? We’ll go to a movie.”

  There is something about being in the groves at this hour with the moonlight peeking in and out of hazy clouds that sets my blood to dancing under my skin. Mosquitoes buzz in my ears. I brush them away and take off running. I dart in and around the orange trees where the moonlight can’t reach. I am daring Chase to come after me. Like when we used to play hide-and-seek as kids.

  I hear the soft thud of his footsteps behind me. He is laughing. And I start laughing too. I get down on my knees to climb under one of the trees. Chase is right behind me. We crawl under one, then over to another. We are acting like six-year-olds. I feel light and free.

  I try to scoot from beneath the tree, but Chase clamps his hand on my ankle, keeping me from crawling any farther. He holds both my legs while he gently slides me back under the glossy branches. The scent of orange blossoms makes me dizzy. He is beside me on the ground.

  “Dove,” he whispers in my ear, “this is my formal invitation. Will you do me the honor of accompanying me to the movies Saturday night?” His hand, gliding along my side, is like wind on my body. I could lie here forever, feeling his soft touch.

  We stay that way for a long time. At one point I hear my dad’s truck pulling around to the back of the house. But I don’t move. He doesn’t usually check on me when he gets home late. Not like he used to when I was little. I’m counting on that now.

  I rub my face on Chase’s T-shirt, taking in his scent. Something salty and sweet, mixed with orange blossoms. It makes me think about what Delia told me about Gus’s sweater.

  “You ever wonder who killed Gus Washburn?” I ask him.

  Chase is lying next to me, looking up at the branches. “What made you think of old Gus?” His voice is barely a whisper.

  Even in the dark I can sense he’s uneasy. “Delia told me what happened. How Cholly Blue saw the whole thing, thought he recognized one of the men in the car. But Cholly didn’t have any proof, except his word. You know how it is.”

  “Yeah.”

  We don’t say anything for a while. Then I feel Chase’s warm hand slip into mine. “If I tell you something, you have to swear not to tell anybody,” he says.

  I don’t like swearing to things I might not want to keep secret, and I tell him as much. Chase just lies there, quiet, like he’s thinking. “It’s about Gus,” he says. “About the hit-and-run.”

  I roll onto my side. My face is only a few inches from his. I can barely make out his profile it’s so dark under here. “Tell me.”

  “You have to swear.”

  “Okay,” I say, finally.

  “Say it.”

  “Okay. I swear.”

  Chase sits up as far as he can under the tree branches and lights a cigarette. “This one night, a few years back—I think it was the night after Gus died—I overheard Travis telling my dad about this accident. They were in our kitchen. Travis said he’d been drinking and lost control of the car and hit somebody. He said he thought it might have been Gus Washburn he hit, but he couldn’t be sure. My dad told Travis it was best to keep quiet about it. That it’d blow over.”

  It takes a few seconds for what Chase has said to sink in. Then it comes to me like a rush of ice-cold air when you open a freezer door. “Travis Waite was driving that car?”

  “If you can call it that.”

  “And your dad knows?”

  Chase stares down at the glowing tip of his cigarette. “So does yours. I’m pretty sure Travis told them both.”

  I sit up, hunch over, and grab my knees. The sickly sweet smell of rotting oranges—fruit that has fallen from the tree— seeps into my nostrils. It penetrates my pores. It is everywhere. My stomach is churning like an old washing machine. “But it wasn’t Travis’s pickup that hit Gus. That’s all Travis has got, that old Ford pickup. The one with that stupid skunk tail on the antenna. Cholly Blue said it was a sedan.”

  Chase buries the cigarette in the sand and lies down next to me on his side. “They were driving some woman’s car. Travis and Jimmy, they—”

  “Jimmy Wheeler?” I lean toward him, tightening my grip on my knees. “Jimmy was in that car?”

  “Yeah.”

  The rotten-orange smell has become liquid. It rises in my throat. I swallow hard, forcing it back down. No wonder Cholly Blue couldn’t get anybody on the police force to follow up on Gus’s murder, Jimmy being one of the local cops and all. It was Jimmy who’d been in the passenger seat that night. That was who Cholly had seen.

  “Why would Travis tell your dad and mine about this? Why would he tell anybody?”

  “Cholly Blue went to the police. He said he saw Jimmy in the car. I don’t know for sure, but Jimmy probably told Spudder Rhodes what happe
ned and Spudder told my dad. Best I can figure, my dad asked Travis flat out what happened that night. Lucas probably did too. They’ve all known each other since grammar school, Dove. You know how it is around here.”

  Chase is watching me. When I don’t say anything, he starts in again. “The way Travis told it, they were having a few beers over at O’Malley’s. And they met this woman who was already pretty drunk. I guess they thought if they drove her home. . . . Anyway, they put her in the backseat of her car and took off. They figured they’d take a shortcut through the colored quarters. Maybe stir up some trouble while they were at it. Travis said they were just having a little fun. They weren’t fixing to kill anybody. He didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  “But they did kill somebody,” I say.

  “Travis said it was an accident, Dove.”

  “No. It was not an accident, Chase Tully. If it was an accident, then they wouldn’t have kept it secret all this time. They wouldn’t have covered for him. Travis would have gotten charged with reckless driving or involuntary manslaughter or something. He would have maybe lost his license for a while. But it would have gone on record as an accident and everybody would have known how it happened and who was driving. That is how it works. A hit-and-run is a crime. It’s leaving the scene of an accident. People can go to jail for that. And if it was on purpose—”

  “It wasn’t,” Chase says.

  I ignore this. “On purpose, like Cholly Blue said it was, it’s called murder.”

  Chase lights another cigarette, and in the glow from his lighter I can tell by the look on his face that he knows I’m right. And this isn’t something he’s just figured out.

  We sit there not saying anything for a few minutes. The smoke from Chase’s cigarette stings my eyes, making them water. Then I say, “So how come your dad never told the county sheriff or the state police?” I am wondering the same thing about my own.

  Chase lets out a heavy sigh. “My dad said he wasn’t about to lose a good crew boss just because Travis was too drunk to pay attention to where he was going.” Then he adds, “And neither was yours.”