We went home after that, and the next day I read in the local paper how the Robbie family, which was the first time I’d heard their last name, had been arrested for murder, and how the law found Tom’s body on their property. They were digging a hole out behind the house to bury him when the law came up with a search warrant. Eventually the Robbie boys, perhaps with the persuasion of rubber hoses and phone books upside the head, admitted they had killed the family, and showed the law where the sunken boat was. Of course, there was no more dope. The man’s and the woman’s bodies were claimed, but they didn’t find the child.
About a week before Christmas I read in the paper that the kid’s remains were found caught up in some stumps and brush. There wasn’t much left of him by then, of course, but it was the child alright.
The little black mammy figurine, which was about the size of a chest piece, quit being one of Leonard’s fishing sinkers. He fastened it to his key chain, and when he gets a new ride, he always moves the figurine to his latest set of keys.
Sometimes, I lay down at night, and there, in the dark of my dreams, swirling around and around, is that poor unfortunate child, his head blown apart. It’s a dream that’s been with me so long, I can from time to time wish him back into a swirling cloud of shadow, push him and the knowledge of what some people can do to others, far away from me.
9.
Stopping for Coffee
We finished up out at Marvel Creek and tooled back to my house. Brett and Chance and Buffy were home. The car was parked in its spot in the car port.
When we came in Brett was at the table playing checkers with Chance. Our shepard, Buffy, was lying under the table, her head on Chance’s foot.
“Who’s winning?”
“Brett is,” Chance said. “I thought I had her a couple of times, but she blindsided me.”
“She cheats a little,” I said.
“Do not,” Brett said, lifting her head so quick her thick mane of red hair snapped up and the clasp on it came loose and her hair cascaded over her shoulders like a fiery water fall. “Now look what you made me do.”
“This,” Leonard said, “is when you grab a checker, when she’s picking up a hair tie, or push one closer.”
“Not likely,” Brett said. “I memorize the board.”
“She does, you know,” Chance said.
Chance, my daughter, was just the opposite of Brett. She was dark-skinned, with dark-eyes and hair as deeply dark as the bottom of a coal mine. They were both lovely. They were both wearing footy pajamas and had cups of hot chocolate near the board.
“How was the club?”
“Kasey was good,” Chance said. “We hung out a little after she got off stage. I got my CD signed. The food there was lousy.”
“How was Buffy?” I said.
“She was okay. I think toward the end she just wanted a place to crap and then lie down,” Brett said. “The noise and the crowd made her nervous.”
“Were there a lot of dogs?” Leonard said.
“A few. It doesn’t work as well as you might think. The dogs get nervous with all the noise. I give it another six months, and then that place closes.”
“Is there any more hot chocolate?” I said.
“If you make it,” Brett said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Vanilla cookies?” Leonard asked.
“Nope,” Brett said.
“Animal crackers, though,” Chance said. “In the cabinet by the sink.”
I opened the cabinet and got out a large canister of animal crackers. My mouth was already watering.
“Those would be nice with chocolate,” Leonard said. “I mean, if any was made.”
“Wouldn’t they?” I said. “Oh, okay. I’ll make us some. But stay out of the animal crackers until I do.”
I heated up some chocolate and poured us cups and we sat at the table with the ladies. They had wrapped up their game and Brett was folding up the checker board and gathering up the checkers and slipping them into the box.
“So, you boys been playing?” Brett said.
“Some,” I said. “We punched each other and rode around for a while.”
“Did you and Leonard do this when you were kids?” Chance said. “Drink chocolate and eat animal crackers?”
“We didn’t meet until we were seventeen,” I said. “And had we met before then, might not have been so easy to hang out.”
“Oh, yeah, of course,” Chance said. “I forgot. My history is shorter. How bad was it then?” she asked.
“Darling,” Leonard said. “You don’t want to know.”
“I don’t know things are all that better,” Brett said.
“Oh hell, sure they are,” Leonard said. “They got a ways to go, but they are nothing like they used to be. Let me tell you, those times blew. Me and Hap grew up in a racist, mean-spirited time, and I have never been one to say race has held me back, nor has being a homo, but it was worse then, at least in those respects.”
“Still a lot underground, though,” I said.
“Shit,” Brett said. “It’s not all that underground. Last few years, they’re surfacing like dead bodies floating up. It’s actually the change that’s scaring the mean-spirited. The idea that it won’t be like it used to be, even if it was never like they think it was, drives them crazy.”
“On the same page,” I said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Leonard said. “But now I get to go in a store and buy a Coke and not have people looking at me. I can sit down in a restaurant and eat. I was a boy, couldn’t do that. Neither could my uncle, and he wasn’t happy about it. He caused a few scenes. Amazing he lived long as he did. He bucked that system. Being a homo wasn’t all that easy for me either. For the dumb asses, being gay was the same as being a child molester. Didn’t matter that child molesters come from both sides of the fence, you got labeled that, like all we did was hang around bus stop restrooms waiting to snatch a child and carry them into a stall in the toilet. I pushed forward no matter what. I think it made me stronger, it being like that and me going up against it.”
“I think it was an unnecessary barrier and a burden,” I said. “But you’re right. It was worse, though if some people have their way, it’ll go back to the dark ages.”
“Sounds horrible,” Chance said.
“Give Chance a history lesson,” Leonard said. “Tell her about the café.”
It was something Leonard knew about, but neither Brett nor Chance did. I didn’t like talking about it. Didn’t like thinking about it. But . . .
“Yeah,” I said, “you ought to know. Ought to understand how things were, how they’ve changed, and how we don’t want them to slip back into that old groove. Not in any kind of way.”
Chance gained a serious look. “What happened, Daddy?”
On that afternoon I was out driving. I was sixteen and had owned my license for only a short time. I was going from LaBorde to Tyler, not for any reason, but just because I could. I had tried to find someone to ride with me, a girl hopefully, but I hadn’t had any luck, so I went on my own.
It was a nice day at first, but then it got cloudy and started to rain. I hadn’t planned to stop at the café, but the rain seemed to have come out of nowhere and it was very serious. By the time I reached No Enterprise, a place about a third of the way between LaBorde and Tyler, the wipers on my ’64 Chevy Impala were working hard and accomplishing little. The ditches and gullies in the town were rolling with water and the water was flooding over them and into the street. I could barely see what was in front of me. I did manage to see some lights through the rain, off to the left, and when I felt I could safely cross the road, I did, and pulled in where the lights were. It was a café.
I decided to wait out the rain. I sat in the car to do it, and then I thought, well, if I’m going to wait I might as well go inside and have some coffee. The idea of being able to go inside and do that somehow made me feel like an adult. I had never really done that before, driven along by myself and
stopped somewhere to have coffee on my own. It sounds like a little thing, but right then I thought it was a swell and amazing idea.
Jumping out of the car, I ran inside, shedding water and wiping my feet at the door. The place smelled of hamburgers, the way they only could smell back then when I was a kid and they were cooked on old black grills that were never truly cleaned by anything other than heat and scraping off the grease with a spatula.
I went in and sat down at a booth on the side and waited for my waitress. There were three older men sitting at a table, and two guys I judged to be in their thirties at a booth near the kitchen.
The waitress, an older woman with a slight limp and badly dyed hair that made it look blue, came over and asked me what I wanted. I told her coffee, but by then I had added a hamburger to the order and some French fries. Those burgers cooking really smelled good.
“I think they should bomb the whole country and come home,” said one of the older men at his table. He was talking loud and so were the men with him. “Bunch of yellow niggers is all they are, ought to bomb the whole damn country into sticks and mud holes, is what I think.”
“We just fought them yellow savages, didn’t we. Goddamn Japs,” said one of the other men. He was a fat little guy with a face like a jack-o-lantern.
“Well, it’s been a while since then,” said the third man at the table. He wore glasses and had on a business suit. The other two were wearing khaki shirts and pants and work boots, and had their hats hanging on the tops of their chairs. The suited man had his hat in a chair beside him. It was a very nice fedora.
“They’re still Japs,” said the man who had been talking the most. “I say the only good Jap is a dead Jap.”
“Actually, they’re Vietnamese,” said the man in the suit.
“You can call them Siamese or Vietnamese, Chinese, or whatever, but they’re all slopes to me.”
“China was on our side during the war,” the well-dressed man said.
“I don’t give a shit,” said the loud man. “I don’t give a good goddamn one way or another.”
“There are women in here,” said the waitress from behind the counter where she was standing and eating potato chips out of a bag. “Watch your language and taking the Lord’s name in vain.”
“What ladies?” said the loudmouth.
“Me, Charles. Me. I’m a lady.”
This revelation appeared to startle the loudmouth.
“Yeah, well, sorry, Louise. I got a bit het up.”
“Yes you did,” she said.
I glanced at the younger men in the booth. They had been talking when I came in, but now they were merely sitting quietly, eating hamburgers and drinking Co-colas out of the bottle.
Right then, a sharp-dressed black man came out of the kitchen and partway into the café. He looked about thirty, in good shape, with his hair cut close to his head. He was holding open the kitchen door, which was on a spring.
“I don’t mean to bother,” he said, “but we been waiting a long time.”
“You got to go back to your place,” Louise said. “You got a place back there. You know that.”
“I’m just saying we been waiting a long time, and I don’t think the cook has even started ours.”
“He may not have. We serve white people first. You don’t like it, you go on down the road a piece. You might find something there.”
“I was just checking,” he said.
“You ought not come through the kitchen like that. You go on back now.”
The black man seemed to let his thoughts linger in front of him for a moment, and then he went back into the kitchen letting the swinging door swing shut on its spring.
“Damn niggers,” Louise said. “They been listening too much to that Martin Luther Coon.”
“It’s alright if a woman says damn, but I can’t say what I said,” the loudmouth said.
“It’s my place. I can say what I want, and I can serve who I want, and I’m thinking I might not serve those niggers at all. And I didn’t use the Lord’s name in vain.”
She let her face crease, and then she let it un-crease and came around to my table with more coffee. She poured my cup full.
“You doing okay, Sugar?”
“I am,” I said. “You want to feed that man first, I’m in no hurry.”
“Niggers wait their turn,” she said.
“Isn’t it his turn?”
“It’s his turn when I say it is,” she said. “Don’t go feeling sorry for niggers. You do, next thing you know they’re up on your porch and trying to get their nose in your house. You can’t be good to them, they take advantage.”
She went around to the table with the older men and filled their coffee cups. They were talking about something or another, but I had tuned them out by then. I kept thinking about that poor man waiting on his food out back and the waitress and the cook not getting it fixed for him.
While I was waiting, Louise went behind the counter and the black man came back through the swinging doors. He said, “Really, we just need three hamburgers and some chips, some Co-colas. We been waiting near an hour.”
“Didn’t I tell you not to come through the kitchen,” Louise said. “Colored got the porch out there.”
“The screened porch with the holes in the screen that flies come through?” said the black man. I could tell he was starting to lose patience.
“You can’t come through the kitchen,” Louise said.
“There’s a black cook in there, he comes through the kitchen.”
“When he goes home, he goes out the back way. I ain’t going to ask you again. You go on now. Fact is, you pack that nigger family of yours up and get on down the road.”
The black man stood there. He was holding the swinging door. “Let me buy some chips and some Cocolas and we’ll go on.”
“You’ll go on, and without chips or Co-colas,” Louise said.
The one called Charles, the loudmouth, got up and came to the edge of the counter where it was open and you could go behind it. He was looking right at the black man. He said, “In my day we tarred and feathered smart niggers.”
“Your day is still here,” the black man said.
This made the older man turn red.
“Yeah,” he said, “it is, and sometimes niggers come to the wrong places and talk the wrong kind of talk.”
“I’m talking alright,” said the black man.
The other khaki dressed man at Charles’ table stood up and came over to stand by the loudmouth.
The older man in the suit didn’t move from the table. He said, “Hey, it’s alright. Just go on back and wait. They’ll get you those burgers.”
“No we won’t,” Louise said. “Get on down the road, coon.”
“Look, we been traveling all night. We been traveling a few days now, all the way from New Jersey. We got family in LaBorde. We just want something to eat.”
“You can get it somewhere else,” Louise said.
“You heard,” said Charles the loudmouth.
“I fought for my country,” the black man said. “I was in Korea.”
This jumped out of his mouth as if it had been hiding behind his teeth, waiting to pounce.
“I was in Korea too.” It was one of the younger men at the other booth. They had been so quiet, I had almost forgotten they were there. “Hell, lady, give the man some chips and some Co-colas.”
“I’m not doing that.” She reached under the counter and pulled out a sawed-off baseball bat and shook it at the black man.
“I was in Chosen Reservoir, so that bat doesn’t scare me,” said the black man.
“Give me the bat,” said the loudmouth. “I can scare him with it.”
The black man didn’t move. He stood there holding the door to the kitchen open.
“That’s enough,” said the younger man, and he got up and went over and reached over the counter and snatched the bat from Louise. He tossed it to his buddy in the booth. His buddy caught it, stood u
p and leaned against the wall by the booth and held the bat against his leg.
“We’re done with this stuff,” said the younger man. He pulled half a dozen chips loose from the rack and walked past the old man, went behind the counter, and gave them to the black man at the door. He went over and got four Co-colas out of the Coke box, opened them with the opener in the box, walked over to the black man with them, holding the drinks between the fingers of his two hands.
“You better not do that,” said Charles the loudmouth.
“Stop me,” said the younger man.
Charles did nothing. He remained where he was and boiled.
The black man put the sodas between his fingers, pressing them in tight against the rims of the drinks. He had the bags of chips pinched between his thumbs and fore fingers. Both hands were full of all he was going to get that day in that café.
The younger man said, “You ought to go on now.”
“Thank you,” said the black man.
“I was at Chosen,” said the younger man.
“It was hell,” said the black man.
“It was more than hell. Now go on. I’ve done what I can.”
The black man went through the kitchen and disappeared with the door swinging shut behind him.
The young man pulled out his wallet and put some bills on the counter, went around it and back to where he had been eating.
“You ought to go on,” Louise said. “We don’t know you two, and you ought to go on.”
“You heard the lady,” Charles said.
“Now she’s a lady,” the other young man said. It was the first time he had spoken.
Their hamburgers were only partially eaten. The young man who had given the black man the food put some bills on the table and he and his buddy started for the door.
Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade Page 11
