They Come in All Colors

by Malcolm Hansen

  I leaned back against a piece of cordwood. She took a clothespin from her mouth and pinned it up, then explained how her grampa had to scratch the CanTab out of his Green Book shortly after they built Turner Airfield.

  I wiped peach juice from my chin. What’s a Green Book?

  It’s like the Yellow Pages, only for colored people—listing places where they’re welcome. Anyway, the motel’s not in there anymore. The furniture—threw it out. The carpet—tore it out. Wood paneling gone—tore that out, too. Anything in that motel that held even a trace odor of Mister Abrams’s old customers had to go. Then he outfitted it with a new pool. Been the Camelot ever since.

  I sat up. The Green Book still exist?

  Of course.

  Can I see one?

  I don’t see why not.

  Mom reached down into the laundry basket and fished around for another clothespin. The porch floorboards were itchy and creaked under my weight, but that didn’t stop me from dozing off. While I was lying there half asleep, Dad came out onto the front stoop, wiping his hands on a red rag. He helped himself to a peach slice and asked if I wanted to go for a drive.

  I shot up so fast I bumped my head on the rail. It felt like forever since Dad had asked if I’d wanted to go into town, six days a week of having to go without that pool having turned into seven. I darted into the house for my shoes and notepad before he changed his mind. This was my big chance. Green Book, Yellow Book, Purple Book, or whatever book, there was more to the Camelot than met the eye. That much was for sure. I needed to know more—lots more. Who knew where it might lead?

  The sun burned the top of my head before I’d even cleared the three lopsided steps out front. I stood there with my shoes in one hand and a pencil and notepad in the other. Dad disappeared around the side of the house. The sky was a crisp blue, and skylarks swirled about in the trees. The laundry was all up, and the bed sheets wafted in the breeze. Mom was hunched over in her vegetable garden, patting down a tomato vine.

  You coming?

  Mom tossed her garden shears into a bucket, came over, and took up the plate. The screen door clicked shut, and she was gone. Her voice rang out from inside.

  Maybe next time.

  • • •

  AKERSBURG HAS A business route that branches off a two-lane highway that takes traffic straight through the center of town. At its northern edge, Main Street merges onto Cordele Road, and a couple of miles up we passed the Camelot. Judging from the way Mom and Dad had been talking, I expected to find yellow tape strung around it and a bunch of patrol cars out front. But Mister Abrams’s Pontiac was sitting all by itself underneath the carport of the otherwise empty parking lot.

  How long before we can go for a swim?

  Filter’s busted.

  Busted?

  I know. Can you believe it? Probably got clogged or something. God knows from what. Could have been from all those little frogs that are always getting in there, for all we know.

  The town council had issued a notice decreeing that the Camelot’s pool was closed until further notice. I turned to Dad with my pencil still in my hand. Detective Joe Friday wrote stuff down, that much I knew. But what, I had no idea.

  I doodled little frogs instead. Wouldn’t stop me.

  Dad chuckled. And here that ol’ fussbudget went to all that expense of applying a fancy chemical treatment, and after all that headache it turns out it’s just his filter.

  Why doesn’t he just ask Toby to fix it?

  Borrow Toby for half a day—in July? Are you kidding me? Not on your life. That boy’s up to his gills with work. But I’m sure he’ll buy a new one soon. Probably have it in, oh, I dunno—best case, a couple of weeks.

  I looked down at my fingers and counted. Two whole weeks? But that only leaves eleven days until Danny’s gotta go back to Fayetteville!

  The order fulfillment alone is bound to take a week.

  Order fulfillment?

  You didn’t think a pool filter just arrives here magically, did you? No, sir. A stock clerk’s gotta package it up first. Likely to arrive with bubble wrap stuffed all around it so it doesn’t break in transit. Then he’s gonna have to invoice it and ship it. Didn’t think of that, did you?

  Mister Abrams is gonna turn us kids away all that time?

  What choice has he got? Our health is a matter of the public trust. Next thing you know, you have the Black Death getting spread. Could be catastrophic.

  The tattered billboard leaning off to the side of the road announced that the Camelot was the only place with a pool for the next seventy-five miles. I screwed myself up in my seat.

  Know what I don’t understand?

  What’s that?

  You remember how we were the only ones there?

  Dad grinned.

  Well, how’d everyone else know?

  The moms probably called around.

  The Norkfolk Southern Railway cuts right smack through the center of Akersburg on its way to Blakely. We followed the dirt road running alongside it for a good quarter mile before turning off to park. Dad tossed me a couple of plasterer’s buckets from the back, and we started up the dirt road on foot.

  There must have been at least five hundred head of cattle in the confinement feed lot, and every single one of them was making such a squawk I couldn’t hear myself think. Their handlers were gouging cattle prods into their hindquarters, trying to get them up a ramp and into a paneled boxcar. One ambled over. Or maybe he was shoved, I dunno. I could only see a foot or two into the boxcar. After that, it was a dark well filled with bloodcurdling squeals I thought only pigs were capable of making. Anyway, this one cow was crammed in at one end of the boxcar, sorta pinned in, trying desperately to poke his snout through the slats. I reached up and petted his bristly hair, caked flat with dried mud.

  I stroked his rubbery snout and told the poor fella not to worry because with any luck they’d get the dirty business done and out of the way before he knew what had hit him. Then I asked Dad how they did it. But before he could answer, I told him how it’d be neat if maybe someday soon we could setup a sanctuary, kinda like the wildlife preserves they got down in the Everglades for the heron that people love so much, only for cattle. Then I looked into this big, dumb animal’s beady eyes and gave it to him straight. I told him that it was nothing he’d done. Life just wasn’t fair. The trick was just to be so bony no one wanted to eat you and—who knows?—maybe grow some wings.

  I turned to Dad and asked him to level with me.

  Like I was saying—there’s a beefy fella whose job it is to hold him steady, and another burly fella holding the ax. You always gotta have two. One’s just not enough. And they do it from behind so the poor bastard doesn’t see it coming. Because the meat doesn’t taste nearly as good if he does. And if he can get the blade just right behind the ear here—

  I mean, how come no one called us?

  Dad kicked at the dirt and grimaced like he was afraid that was something I was going to ask, then looked away.

  Huey, there’s something about your mother that you oughta know. No matter what she does, she can’t help but stir up resentment in this town on account of how good-looking she is. Now, you may not know this, being just a boy, and her son at that—but she’s a knockout. Okay? There, I said it. Because it’s the God’s honest truth. I dunno. You’re observant. Maybe you’ve noticed that it causes her more than her fair share of grief. Which is why she doesn’t even like coming into town anymore—it’s too much of a hassle. No matter how modest she tries to be about it, people resent her. The other moms see how their husbands look at her, and they don’t like it. Doesn’t matter that it’s unwanted attention, either. No one ever looks at them like that, or offers them the same courtesies, which gets under their skin. And they blame her. So ask yourself: why on earth would they have called her?

  Dad shook his head disconsolately. Huey, I’m not proud of it, but that’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Okay? Now you
know. And you and me had both better just get used to it.

  • • •

  BUSKIN BROTHERS WAS the local consolidator and supplier for all the farmers in Early County. They didn’t sell a whole lot, but what they did sell, they sold a lot of. Dad stood at the counter shooting the breeze with Mister Buskin’s eldest son, Stuart.

  Still no leads?

  It’s like a ghost done it. Personally, I don’t even see how that’s possible. We’ve got the boy’s shoe sitting in some evidence box, for crying out loud.

  Dad took the two buckets from me and set them atop the counter and wandered off to the back of the store. I stooped down to the gumball machine and started fiddling with the knob. Derrick claimed that he knew how to get a handful of gumballs to come out without having to put anything in. After what seemed like a million turns of that knob, I was about to punch a hole through the glass case when I felt a pinprick on the back of my neck.

  Stuart leaned over the counter and spit out another sunflower seed shell at me. Go easy on the machine, squirt.

  Stuart wasn’t even a real grown-up.

  Aw, go suck on a lemon.

  Stuart went back to flipping through a stack of receipts.

  Dad was fingering over the sweet gum display case on the far side of some paint cans. Wanna help me pull the truck around?

  I shook my head no, then turned the knob and jiggled the machine some more. Still nothing. I turned that damn knob round and round, shoving and jerking and tugging at the glass case, wondering what in the Lord’s name I was doing wrong, only vaguely aware of the stupid front door opening and closing and our truck’s diesel engine knocking as Dad pulled into the loading bay and, above me, some loud-mouthed woman shouting over the siphon pump hee-hawing behind the counter, Of course you know him! The one Buck always has fix that piece of junk truck of his!

  I looked up, surprised. It was Missus Orbach.

  Stuart spiked a receipt. Toby?

  Yes!

  I stood up, brushed the sawdust from my knees, and tapped Missus Orbach on the elbow.

  Ma’am? Can Derrick come over to play later?

  Missus Orbach was dressed in overalls, and her boots were covered in mud. She was looking down at me kind of funny. Her face was red and sweaty. She didn’t look very happy.

  VI

  TOBIAS WETHERALL MUNCIE WAS A smart-as-hell colored man known for being the best farmhand around. The fact that he worked for us was just pure luck; we’d had him since he was a boy. A week after our Buskin Brothers run, he was standing in our field, plunging a posthole digger into the ground, when we pulled up alongside him. Dad leaned out of the truck’s window.

  What’s wrong with your leg?

  Hurt it putting up a swing a few nights ago.

  Dad laughed. You crazy nigger. Don’t you know better than to hang a swing after dark?

  Toby had been that way for two weeks. How Dad hadn’t noticed it before then is beyond me. It was as if he only ever really saw Toby when he was working in the fields. Anyway, Toby didn’t seem to care. He limped out into the field and continued hammering away. For the next several days, that’s all we did. After lugging hundreds of stack poles into our fields, Toby worked that posthole digger while Dad and I stood close by with a pair of eight-foot stack poles in hand. When the hole was dug, Dad slid in the long, heavy pole, and I’d get down on my hands and knees and tamp down the dirt around it.

  Later that week, I was patting down the last bit of loose dirt for what felt like the millionth time when a car came up the road, past the shade trees. It slowed down and turned onto our access road like it wasn’t sure where it was headed. People who stopped off for gas in town usually had difficulty finding their way back onto the highway; I assumed the driver was lost. The car pulled over beside Toby and two men got out—to ask directions, I figured.

  Dad was hammering a stack pole into one of Toby’s postholes, cussing about it not being deep enough. The two men looked like no tourists I’d ever seen. I hollered out to Dad and pointed. Next thing I knew, he was walking toward them so fast I had to run to keep up.

  Dad asked Toby if they were bothering him. One of the men offered him a cigarette and wondered aloud how anyone could hoe ground this dry. They were with the Tenant Farmers’ Association and were investigating reports of a Mister Nestor Hines charging things on a farm commissary book and refusing to let his customers add up the figures at the end of the month. The men asked if Dad knew him. Dad nodded, but wanted to know what it had to do with us. He pointed at Toby and told them that they could see with their own eyes that he was happy. Dad and Toby had worked together for twenty years, ever since Toby was my age and Dad was a young man. Dad said that he’d taught Toby everything he knew, and that as far as he was concerned, Toby didn’t have a single complaint in all the world. Isn’t that right?

  Toby glanced my way. He was so still I could see the rise and fall of his chest, which startled me. Him being anything less than perfectly happy was a scary thought. The man said that Dad wasn’t on the chopping block, Mister Nestor Hines was, and did Dad care to help. Apparently, he’d received word from someone in Albany that Dad was different. All I could think was, different than who? Aside from being the last in town to seed, with the single exception of Mister Harrison, Dad wasn’t different than anyone.

  Dad was tall and wiry. He had a chronic slouch that was in part due to working all the time, but mostly it was because of his bad knee. He was leaning on his sledgehammer with an exasperated look on his face. If his eyes drooped from too little sleep, they were still cold and hard. The man held out a business card. Pop tucked it in his shirt pocket, and the two men left. Didn’t even say goodbye—just kicked their way back toward the flower strip, holding out their arms to balance themselves as they crossed our windrow beds. Their car whined in reverse all the way down the access road. All the while, I stood there watching them, thinking how they never explained how they intended for Dad to help.

  Dad ordered me to get my finger out of my nose and called me over to his side. I was caked in dust and sweat and was tired of digging around on my hands and knees in dirt as hard as Sheetrock. I had so much of it caked underneath my fingernails that my hand hurt. I wanted a rest. I braced for him to start chewing me out, but he told me to go wait for him in the truck, which irked me. He never let me listen when he talked business with Toby. The only thing he ever shared with me about it was when he went on like a broken record about how city folks think it’s just salted peanuts and roasted peanuts and peanut butter, as if the food we raised was good for nothing but sandwiches and ball games.

  I moseyed across the ten or so rows between me and the road, smushing every last peanut I could, thinking how I should’ve gone over to his side to listen in while I had the chance. The truck’s hood was hot. Dad’s sideview mirror made me look goofy, and the dusty ring around my eyes made me look like a hobo. All the while, Toby and Dad were standing in the middle of that bone-dry field in rain boots.

  I assumed that they were bickering over Toby’s insistence on planting after the alders had blossomed. But it had been a while since they’d squabbled about anything like that, ever since Mister Schaefer had drummed up worries that the year’s crop wouldn’t be worth the trouble of digging out of the ground, but ours had weathered the heat just fine. That was the first time that Mister Schaefer ever conceded how good Toby was.

  The beds of withered leaves on either side of them went up to their knees—half as high as they were supposed to be. Even if I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, I could tell it was important. Toby’s face was rock hard; Dad’s, too. Toby snapped open a peanut with his teeth and spit out the shell.

  My nubby-toed sneakers were clay colored from the road, and a cucumber beetle was snaking its way around my left heel. I squatted down and picked it up.

  Don’t worry little fella. I won’t hurt you.

  I glanced up. The rows of sun-withered leaves stretched out behind Dad and Toby as far as I could see.
Our field was almost entirely dug up, and we all needed to pull together to get our vines up on stack poles before they rotted. Toby took his cap off and wiped his brow—didn’t even blink.

  What in the world was taking them so long? The sun was directly overhead; I was starting to roast. Never mind that there was a shitload of work that needed to get done and no one but us three to do it, and with Dad usually running around helter-skelter this time of year complaining about there not being enough hours in the day to get everything done in time, now here he was rambling on like we had all day when all I wanted was to go home and sit in the relative cool of our den and watch TV.

  Figuring that my wiggly little friend might make good fish bait, I was digging around to see if there were other beetles burrowed into the nearby dirt when the damn thing bit me. Can you believe it? Dug his pincers into the tender skin between my thumb and pointing finger. I flicked him to the ground. One twist of my shoe and he crunched like an acorn.

  Toby let his posthole digger fall to the dirt and limped off. I wiped the dust from my eyes and stood up. Holy mother of God—that was not something I saw every day. Dad ordered me into the truck. I got in and asked what the heck was eating Toby.

  • • •

  I WAS SCRATCHING at the rash of little pinprick scabs up and down my left arm when Dad strolled through the den, trailing peanut hay. He complained to Mom about how he didn’t have time for any of Toby’s horseshit and how he’d almost had to knock some sense into him earlier that afternoon. Mom asked what for. When Dad explained about Toby walking off the job, Mom said he was probably just tired.