by John Enright
“Dominick, this is my daughter Sissy,” Vernon said as they came up to the car.
They shook hands. “Pleasure,” she said.
“The pleasure is mine,” Dominick said.
Vernon got into the driver’s seat and Sissy got in the back seat. Dominick retook his front passenger seat.
“It’s a perfect day for a picnic, don’t you think?” Sissy said. Vernon took one of the roads back into the woods.
“Dominick, you are probably wondering what that scene back at Jefferson’s was all about. Well, a couple of months ago I did a piece about Mr. Lubitch employing some undocumented workers, whom he was treating basically as slaves. That got him in some trouble, and I guess that got me on his black list.”
“So, you’re a reporter then,” Dominick said, turning sideways in his seat.
“That’s right, for the Hudson Register Star.” Sissy had found the bag and box with the chicken wings and was finishing them off.
“If she don’t get herself fired,” Vernon said.
Dominick watched Sissy as she licked and sucked the hot sauce from her fingers. This was becoming a perfect day. They stopped at a park with picnic tables and a pond adjacent to a Little League field where some kids were playing a pickup game. The plastic sacks from the general store held bags of chips and cartoons of dip and bottles of iced green tea. They found an empty picnic table near the pond.
“So, Dominick,” Sissy said, opening the chips and dip and handing him a bottle of iced tea, “Daddy says you’re interested in our local history. How is that? Are you an historian?”
“No, I’m not an historian. I’m a consumer of history, not a producer. Just curious.”
“Not that many people are curious about the past, especially other people’s past,” she said.
“It’s safe. I mean all that stuff has already happened, and to someone else. I just wonder what it was like, that’s all. Thanks.” Dominick dipped a corn chip into the offered jalapeño bean dip.
“Even though it has nothing to do with you or your people?”
“It’s just interesting, that’s all.”
Vernon got up from the table and stretched out on the grass down the slope toward the pond, out of earshot.
“So you’re not a writer?” Sissy was making a lunch of the snacks. “You’re not here to write us all up for some magazine?”
“No, nothing like that. I just stopped up here to visit my sister over in Diligence.”
“So, you are that Dominick?”
“Which Dominick is that?”
“The one who was picked up over in Greene County two days ago on suspicion of rape.”
Dominick said nothing. Was this going to be his new identity? Suspected rapist?
“I’m the local police beat reporter,” Sissy said. “It’s my job to know this stuff.”
“I am neither a writer nor a rapist,” Dominick said.
“I figured that, or those trolls in the sheriff’s department over there wouldn’t have turned you loose. But what’s up with being charged with that? I mean, what goes on out at that place? Your sister’s place, you say?”
“What’s that other dip?” Dominick asked.
“Cheddar cheese,” Sissy said, and she laughed as she passed the dip across the picnic table to him. “I like you already, Dominick. My daddy gives you a pass, which means something to me. What do your friends call you? Dom?”
“Just Dominick.” He took another swig of sweet green tea. The warmer it got the more insipid—unsippable—it became. What goes on out at that place? Your sister’s place. It could be his place. “Sissy, what do you know about the Underground Railroad hereabouts?”
“Pretty much what there is to know. Daddy’s people back then were involved in all that. Black folks pretty much ran it hereabouts, even if the white folks took all the credit. Why?”
“Because that is what I would like to talk with you about.”
***
Amanda cheated. She grabbed a glass of wine when Morgan wasn’t looking. She needed it. Over the years she had gotten pretty good at closing deals, at giving clients what she had made them think they wanted, but she still wasn’t good at opening them. “Hello, total stranger. You look like someone who needs a bigger house. Have I got a deal for you!” She tried to mix with the crowd at the party, but she didn’t know anyone there and everyone else seemed to be old friends. After her second glass of wine she began to wonder what she was doing there. Is Morgan just playing some game with you, giving you something pointless to do just to keep you busy? She knows you suck at this. And for that matter where is she? Typical of her to stick you with this then vanish somewhere. I swear she is getting more mysterious all the time.
Amanda wondered what Nemo was doing. Morgan had said forget about him for now, he wasn’t going anywhere without his car, and they could catch up with him next week. “He’s a natural loner,” Morgan said. “Dropping him off at that hotel was like throwing a fish back into the water. But he is more on our side now, don’t you think? Common enemies and all?”
But Amanda just felt like a lousy host. He had come there to see her. They had spent next to no time together. And she and Morgan had just shuttled him off to a one-star hotel. All along they had been playing her brother like some sort of patsy: How could they get his share of Marjorie’s money? Well, it was different now, wasn’t it? In thanks for coming out of his way to visit he’d been stranded, deserted, clocked on the head, had his car stolen, and been accused of a felony. She got out her cell phone and called his room at the St. George. No answer and no one came on the line to take a message. She left the party to have a cigarette. The only place she felt safe doing that was back at the car. Wasn’t it funny when something you’d done your whole adult life suddenly became a sort of quasi-crime? It was as if society as a whole had a sustaining need to single out one or another minority segment of its population to demonize for some unshared trait or practice or belief, an innate sense of caste that had to be satisfied somehow. No, it wasn’t funny; it was sad.
Sitting in her car, enjoying her Pall Mall, Amanda realized she was not going back to the party. But she couldn’t leave without Morgan. She called her cell phone number, but it was busy. Olana wasn’t that big a place, but Amanda was damned if she was going to hike back into the crowd in these heels and look for her. She called the front desk of Nemo’s hotel and left a message saying that she had called and asking if he wanted to do dinner. Morgan’s phone was still busy; when it beeped she had to know it was Amanda calling. The bitch. Amanda lit a second cigarette. She turned the rearview mirror so she could see herself in it. It was that time in a late summer afternoon when the light got golden and everything got prettier, including herself. It was the one light she didn’t mind seeing herself in, the one light that made age insignificant. She loosened her hair and shook a strand across her forehead, struck a pose, and exhaled. Yes, that Lauren Bacall look was still there.
“You ready to go, then?” It was Morgan opening the passenger-side door and hopping in. “Any luck with the rich nearly dead?”
Amanda dropped her cigarette out the window and readjusted the rearview mirror. “What have you been up to?”
“Well, that’s not exactly my crowd. I was hanging with the colored folk in the kitchen.”
“You were not.” Amanda started up the Chevy. “You were on your phone.”
“Okay, and the catering staff’s not black anyway, but Honduran or Hmong or something, non-English speakers, the new underclass. What’s it to you? Where to now? It’s still early. I’m sure our goddess Denise has got her whole weird flock united against us by now.”
“I thought we’d drive up to Hudson and check in on Nemo.”
“He’s not there,” Morgan said. “I just called his room. I’m sure he’s out somewhere prowling historic graveyards or something. Leave him alone. He’s alright. He’s a big boy. But we can definitely head up there to find something to eat, us all dressed up and all. Sometimes they hav
e fresh catfish at that barbeque place. You like catfish. Let’s go there.”
Amanda headed for Hudson. She really wasn’t all that fond of catfish. She had ordered it once out of curiosity—they didn’t eat catfish where she came from—and Morgan had made a big deal of it, discovering that Amanda ate catfish. That was a tell-tale trait for some reason. Morgan wouldn’t eat catfish herself. “Bottom-suckers my daddy called them. He’d only eat saltwater fish.”
Wasn’t it strange how you would latch onto something that defined someone else, even if it wasn’t true? Her version of Morgan, for instance, had been shaped at their first meeting—of a young (if prematurely gray), uppity black woman playing out of her league. But of course she wasn’t that at all. Amanda had taken her for young because her body hadn’t seemed to age, and uppity because of her nervous energy. And because she had assumed that Morgan was younger, she had figured she was new to the game, a game in which there were very few black players. Over the years all of that had been disproved and her true age revealed, but Amanda still thought of Morgan as an uppity kid.
Or Nemo, the brother whom she had only known through Marjorie’s sarcastic stories. He had always been just the spoiled junior copy of his satanic father, whom Amanda also only knew through her mother’s selective presentation. What was Nemo really like? Maybe if she started giving him his real name? No. “Dominick” had been a bad word for too long, a name she’d been taught to hate.
“Will you watch where you’re going?” Morgan said.
Amanda had taken the last curve too fast and had to jerk the car off the shoulder back onto the road. “Sorry,” she said. “I was thinking.”
“Look, I’ll do the thinking,” Morgan said. “You just drive. What are we thinking about?”
“How we can never really know anyone else.”
“Oh, a no-brainer. Why do you think we should know any more than anyone wants us to know?”
“But what if what we think we know is wrong?”
“Then probably you’ve made that person more interesting than he or she really is. Who are we talking about anyway? Anyone I know?”
“I don’t think I’ll have catfish tonight. I think I’ll have something else,” Amanda said, slowing down as they came into the reduced speed zone at the edge of town.
***
“First, I have to ask, what happened to your head?” Sissy said. “Did the police do that?”
“No, that was an earlier accident.”
“An accident?”
“My head ran into a beer bottle, someplace called The Hill Top. Know it?”
“Only from police reports. Are local rednecks part of your field research? Do you mind? Your bandage is coming loose.” Sissy reached across the picnic table and gently touched his tender temple, massaging adhesive back in place. “Aren’t you a little old to be getting in bar brawls?”
“Like I said, it was an accident. Generally I do my best to avoid sociopaths.” It felt good to be touched, even briefly, an uncommon sensation.
“Why the Underground Railroad?”
“The period interests me,” Dominick said, “and the phenomenon—citizens banding together to break the law.”
“A bad law, the Fugitive Slave Act.”
“But a law of the land nonetheless, federal law. You said your father’s people were involved. Was it pretty active around here?”
“The Hudson was a trunk route toward Canada. Freedom seekers came through here for decades. There were stations all along the river up to Albany, where the route split either west to Buffalo or east into Vermont. Relatively speaking there were a fair number of free black people living in this area then, a couple of thousand between this county and Greene County across the river, so self-emancipators could find help here on their way north. Thousands passed through here. Impossible to say how many. If you’re breaking the law it doesn’t make sense to keep records, and what records had been kept were destroyed when the stricter law was enacted in 1850. In any event, only the white folks kept count, and they didn’t know the half of it.”
“So, both blacks and whites were breaking the law?”
“But only the blacks were punished if they got caught. The honkies just got bragging rights at church. You don’t mind being called a honkie, do you?”
“That’s alright, though I’m not Hungarian,” Dominick said.
“What does being Hungarian have to do with it?” Sissy laughed. She laughed easily, effortlessly.
“Origin of the term, originally hunky, a derisive Northern black slang term for working-class white guys, Hungarians for some reason. I believe the Black Panthers metastasized the term to refer to any and all of us.”
“Good work. Nice to have a single inclusive term.”
“Haole, cracker, gringo, gwailo. Take your pick. Tell me, Sissy, where does your name come from? It’s unusual. Is it short for something?”
“Actually, my given name is Sister, a long family tradition, but that’s too confusing. People think I’m a nun or something. I’ve been Sissy since I was a kid. Not even Daddy remembers where it came from. One day I was just Sissy and it stuck.”
“Sissy, do you know of any locations, any houses in the area that served as stations on the railroad? You know, places where fugitives were actually hidden until they could be moved on?”
“No, not hereabouts. Like I said, it was kept pretty secret, and of course all the black people’s places are long gone. You could always go up to Auburn where there are some historic sites if that’s your thing—the Seward House and Harriet Tubman’s home, but that’s two hundred miles away, not hereabouts.”
The Little League diamond was now empty, and Vernon was sound asleep on the grass. Dominick had been putting off his cigar craving since lunch. Now he pulled a Churchill out of his pocket case and prepared to light it.
“Oh, please don’t do that,” Sissy said. “I despise tobacco. I don’t know why it isn’t illegal.”
Dominick stopped and looked at her. She was actually making a face like a little kid. “Don’t you think enough things are against the law already?” he said, but he put the cigar back in his case.
“That’s one that should be added. That and alcohol, just vile addictions that don’t do anyone any good. If they’re going to outlaw any drugs they should start with the big two. Thank you.”
This was a conversational topic Dominick had always found it best to avoid. As with any prejudice, giving the holders a chance to hold forth only deepened their prejudicial resolve. “Tell me about Harriet Tubman,” he said as he slipped the cigar case back into his pocket.
“I guess she and Frederick Douglass have the honor of representing all the unnamed black people who helped free their brothers and sisters from slavery. She did a lot of fine and brave things in a very long life, starting as a slave. She was a champion manipulator. Up here she made some powerful white friends.”
“Wasn’t she famously beaten as a slave?”
“When she was just a girl she was hit in the head with a lead weight by her master when another slave tried to escape. Changed her life.” Sissy laughed that liquid laugh again. “Made her kind of crazy, I guess, made her the original crazy, angry, powerful black Christian mama.”
“How so?”
“Supposedly she had headaches and seizures and attacks and visions the rest of her life, and she’d act on her dreams and visions, which she called revelations from God. I guess no one wanted to stand in the way of someone getting messages from God. She was called Moses, you know.”
Vernon sat up on the grass, rubbing the side of his face. “Goddamn mosquitoes,” he said.
“Daddy, don’t swear. It’s Sunday. But they are coming out. We’ll head back,” Sissy said, gathering the trash from the picnic table. “Dominick, how long are you going to be around? Daddy said you’re staying at the St. George.”
“I have no idea. That depends upon the Greene County Sheriff’s Department, who impounded my car.”
“I’ve got
a few books you could look at about what we were talking about. I’ll drop them off if you promise not to steal them.”
“You live in Hudson?”
“Just outside of town. Come on, Daddy, get up and we’ll go.”
They dropped Sissy back at her car in the restaurant parking lot. On the drive back to Hudson, Vernon and Dominick didn’t talk much. “You and Sissy have a good chat?” Vernon asked.
“Smart girl.”
“Don’t know where she gets it,” Vernon said. “Not from her mother. Sissy’s got a college degree, you know, from the campus up in Albany, but it seems to me that smart women always end up sad.”
Chapter 13
It was well after dark by the time Amanda and Morgan got back to Diligence. All seemed peaceful at the house as they drove up. There were only the usual cars parked in the driveway. There were just a few lights on inside. The veranda lights were off.
“All quiet on the Wiccan front,” Morgan said.
As they crossed the front porch Amanda, who had shed her high heels after they left the restaurant and was walking barefoot, carrying her shoes, stepped in something sticky. “What is this?” she said, stepping backwards.
“Hold on,” Morgan said and went inside to turn on the light above the door. There was a broad irregular band of something dark on the veranda floor spread in an arc around the front door. It was a dark reddish brown in the light. Morgan stooped down to look at it, then touched it with a fingertip and tasted it. “Blood,” she said. “How melodramatic.”
“What in the world?” Amanda just stared at it, then she looked at the sole of her foot. “Of all the nerve.” She stepped over the border of blood and joined Morgan in the doorway. “What’s next?”
“A little talk with our tenant Denise,” Morgan said.
The kitchen was a half-redeemed mess—big black plastic garbage bags of trash stacked against the walls, and on the counter tops pizza boxes with one or two slices still left in them, unwashed serving dishes and utensils, stacks of dirty plastic cups.
