by Safran, John
Sherrie breathes out.
“But we’re at the end of time,” she says, “so none of us will be dealing with this much longer. I don’t know if I’m going to die or get killed or what, but I haven’t done anything to anybody.”
“I don’t think anyone’s trying to kill you,” I say. “I think you’ll be fine.”
“Well, you know, reading the Bible has taught me that two people . . . two people are going to get killed and that they’ll be put in the holy city. What is the holy city? Do you think it’s Pearl?”
“Why would the holy city in the Bible be Pearl?” I ask.
“What is the holy city? Jerusalem? They’re going to take me away to Jerusalem?”
Sherrie tells me she thinks “the rose of Sharon” in the Bible’s Song of Solomon is referring to her, because Tina wanted to name her Sharon but her daddy said no.
“I can read some to you,” Sherrie says. “The Song of Solomon. I want to read the part where it states about Sharon.”
“I’ve got a Bible with all my books,” I tell Sherrie. “I’ll just go and get my Bible, too.”
And Sherrie takes me through the Song of Solomon. It must be talking about her, she says, because Verse 1:5 reads: I am black but lovely.
Pull the Trigger
There’s this true crime book about an Aboriginal death in custody. The author paints precisely what happens the morning of the man’s arrest. He was wandering down the street like so. A woman was lounging over by that house. He was whistling this specific tune. The sun shone like this. The police van pulled over like that.
It bugged me, the precision with which the author knew about the morning, while I was still floundering over whether Richard pulled up outside the McGees’ in a black SUV (like Vallena told me) or a bicycle (like Tina said). I spoke to the author, and as it happens, she didn’t really know any more than me. She just committed herself to a fair-enough version of events. None of the true crime writers know any more than me, they just commit. They just pull the trigger. Safran, pull the trigger.
• • •
So here’s what I think happened. Richard had come to Mississippi because it’s a place to hide if you’re a little queer. People will overlook it, act ignorant. From Vincent’s side, his community is decimated by poverty, partly the legacy of racism. Pain has been cascading toward Vincent’s house since before the Civil War. A black guy at my apartment complex told me, “You know why they’re called McGee? Why these Africans have a Scottish name? Vincent’s ancestors, their slave master would have been McGee.”
I once interviewed this ex–Christian minister, excommunicated after being caught having gay sex. He told me about his first gay encounter. He was in his midteens, in the 1960s. He knew no one gay in his rural Australian town. No one spoke of it one way or the other. He hadn’t really processed he was gay himself. One night he went walking. He ended up ambling along the side of the road just out of town. A car slowed down, pulled up twenty meters ahead of him. He headed to the car and climbed in. He had sex with the man in the car and left. Nothing was said before, during, or after about what they were doing. I asked the ex-minister, “How did you know to go to the car? How did the car know to pull over?” He said he didn’t really know, everything just drifted together that night on automatic.
I’m going to guess something like this went down with Richard and Vincent. Nothing said about what they were doing before, during, or after. Vincent with his prison rules that you’re not gay if you give and don’t take it. Richard the Grand Dragon of Cognitive Dissonance. That night in the crummy little house, Vincent and Richard danced their unspoken dance of sex for money. A tinderbox of self-loathing over sex and bitterness and exploitation and small lives caught fire that night. That’s what happened.
And Richard pulled up on a bicycle.
God and/or Fate
Not ten minutes have ticked past since finishing the Song of Solomon with Sherrie and my cell buzzes again. It’s Vincent McGee. He sounds different.
“I need a wedding ring,” Vincent announces.
“You need a what?” I ask.
“I need a wedding ring. Think you can get me one?”
God and/or Fate gave me the perfect entry point to this murder. Because He wanted me to be here and document all this. And now, the night before I’m scheduled to leave, He gifts the story again, with a winding up of sorts, where otherwise there would be no winding up.
“You need a wedding ring?”
“Riiiight,” he says. “So I can propose.”
“No way!” I say. “You need a wedding ring for who?”
“You already know who it’s for,” Vincent says bashfully.
“For Chywanna?”
“Riiiight.”
A moth flutters in the window and lands on the arm of the couch. I toss up lying that it’s a butterfly for the book.
“No way,” I say. “Have you spoken to her since the flowers?”
“Yeah,” he says. “We been talking since she got the flowers, you know? Murbleandstatic.”
“I can’t believe . . . You’ve spoken to her since and you think . . . What did she say to you?”
“You know, so we did chat it up a bit and murbleandstatic . . .”
“I’m leaving tomorrow, so I won’t have time to get a ring.”
“You can go to murbleandstatic.”
“Where can I go?”
“You can go to Walmart, they sell rings, you know? It ain’t got to be no ten-million-dollar ring, you know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah, but then what happens? I go to her house and I give her the ring?”
“Sorry, wha’?”
“How do I get the ring to her?”
“Just go to the house! I ain’t told nobody but you. You go over there.”
“But how do you know she wants to . . .” I trail off.
“Murbleandstatic.”
“It just seems a bit weird to me.”
“It seems weird, but I’m like staticandmurble.”
“Yeah, sure. But my flight. If I did it I’d have to do it at nine a.m., or even earlier, like seven a.m.”
“Like I said, I ain’t got nothing else on. I wake up easily about four in the morning.”
“Yeah, sure, but what about her? Will she be happy if I ring on the door at seven in the morning?”
“Murbleandstatic.”
“Just say she says no, though?”
“If she says no then I’ve still got it for another one . . .” Vincent interrupts himself. “Nah! She ain’t gonna say no.”
“What about her? You’re not going to get out for about thirty years or something. What is she meant to do?”
“That’s not even in the . . . We ain’t worried about that right now. We just need a ring. That’s the only thing we’re focused on. I’m dead serious, dude.”
“Yeah, I know you’re dead serious.”
“Hey, listen. Don’t you call her up and tell her, ’cause I know you got her number.”
“Yeah, sure. I won’t call her up. I did call her today ’cause I felt . . . ’cause I didn’t see her yesterday when I dropped off the flowers.”
“What did you say when you talked to her?”
“Yeah, I just said to her that I hope it’s okay that I dropped off the flowers. That’s all I said to her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said it was fine.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“You know, I’ve got to be on both your sides. I’m on her side and I’m on your side.”
“You’re on both our sides?”
“I was slightly worried, to be honest, today, after I thought about it. I was slightly worried she might think it’s a bit unsettling—that suddenly flowers were just left there, you know, so that’s why I rang her up. But she said she was f
ine.”
“A’right,” says Vincent McGee. “This is some serious-ass shit. Asking a female to marry you, yeah, that’s a lifetime commitment. You don’t know how this shit turns out.”
“Yeah, sure.” Out the bedroom door my eyes catch the Leaning Tower of Pisa of dishes in the sink. When will I wash those?
“You’re like a motherfucker!” he snaps. “You put shit together just to see how it turns out.”
He’s right of course. This wasn’t only God and/or Fate. I delivered the flowers. There was and/or me in the mix.
“You wanna see the outcome!” Vincent continues.
“Yeah, why not?” I say. “The wedding ring was your idea, though.”
“Yeah, it was my idea,” he says proudly. “I’m just sayin’, though, you still wanna see if I’m gonna get the girl, or shit.”
“Definitely!” I laugh.
“You know, I’m tellin’ you, failure ain’t an option.”
My thumb hangs up. Before snapping the cell shut, I spot a flashing envelope. Vincent sent me a text half an hour ago when I was in Bible study with Sherrie.
I NEED A WEDDING RING A.S.A.P. I WANNA MARRY MY SHORTY. IF YOU CAN MAKE THAT HAPPEN I OWE YOU MY UNDYING LOYALTY. TRUTH. AND RESPECT. CAN YOU DO IT?
His new signature is:
“PRESIDENTIAL”
Walmart, with the Dictaphone
Oh my Lord. It’s 10:52 at night. That’s that. I’m in the little Ford Focus bullet now. I’m exiting Ashland Apartments. It’s chilly on my legs because my only pair of long pants have chocolate stains on them and are wearing away at the hem. So I look like a hobo unless I wear my shorts. I’ve put on weight—I’m going to have to lose weight for the book tour. The radio is saying, “Would you kill Hitler if you knew he was going to kill all those people?” It’s about abortion.
Okay, I’m at Walmart. Nearly had a car crash on the way. I have to get back home and start catching the trams. I seem to be nearly driving into traffic every day now.
I’m walking into Walmart, past big cardboard boxes of pumpkins for Halloween. There are huge ones stacked on the outside. Walking past the in-Walmart Subway. A military man walks past on the other side. Halloween cards. Fruit. Mickey Mouse balloons. Bibles. Magazines. Post-it notes. Underpants—no doubt not many mediums or smalls. Oreos. Paper plates. Girls’ clothing. Shoes. Babywear. There’s the in-Walmart TV network playing. Past the Green Dot cards. There must be jewelry here somewhere. Tire & Lube Express. Toys, where I bought my Scrabble set. Oh, I see. Yep, over there.
Cool, thank you very much.
A black man pulling cardboard boxes has just pointed me toward the jewelry.
Oh, Lord. Lots of jewelry, watches . . . I guess I can be a cheapskate on the ring, can’t I? What’s anyone going to know? There’s lots of . . . I don’t want to be a real cheapskate. Oh no, they’re just earrings. Digital clip watches. Girl Power key rings. Hmm, rings, rings, rings. Thankfully no one’s at the counter, which means I can look without being awkward. It looks like the most expensive one is $198, but it looks a bit garish. Oh, here are some more expensive ones. How high do I really want to go, though? Do I just go for a crappy one? Here we go. I don’t know. I wish there were a girl here to tell me. What’s simple but nice? I just don’t know. I guess I’ve got to be grateful that there are wedding rings here at all, that there’s a place that’s open at eleven at night in Mississippi. Aren’t wedding rings meant to be plain rather than have big things on them? I don’t really know. Since I can’t really get an expensive one, shall I just go for a seventy-buck one? There’s a couple . . . they’re looking at jewelry themselves. Maybe I’ll ask them. Wedding bands.
Okay, I think I found the one. It’s not ’cause I’m trying to be cheap, but it’s just because it’s got the least garish stuff on it. It’s ninety-eight dollars and it’s called “Bridal Collection,” so you know, that should be good. It just occurred to me—this is meant to be, like, an engagement ring, though, isn’t it? It’s not a wedding ring. So maybe it can be a bit garish. It doesn’t have to be all thin. Oh, God. Wish there were someone that I could talk to about this. It’s all too embarrassing. I’m going to go up to someone to ask them how I can buy something from the jewelry department.
Okay, I bought a ninety-eight-dollar ring. I’m in the Ford Focus driving out. I promise I was willing to go up to five hundred, but it just seemed . . . they seemed garish. It’s like, the simplest ones seemed . . . It’s got, like, one little diamond in it and it just seemed, to my eyes, the least risky, ’cause it looked the least garish. But I could be wrong. ’Cause maybe this is meant to murble . . . Oh, I don’t know. It’s too late now, and it’s a ring.
Lord, I’m on the wrong side of the street with my headlights off.
The Morning
My silver Ford Focus is tucked under a tree on the corner of Highway 469 and Chywanna’s dirt road. Vincent McGee’s file sits next to me on the passenger seat.
“My girl ain’t around,” Vincent says from my cell phone on the dashboard.
Vincent had called Chywanna’s home. He wanted to smooth my arrival.
“I don’t know where she’s at,” he says. “She might be asleep, she might be out at somebody’s—I don’t know, she ain’t around.”
“So what should I do?” I ask. “Should I ring on her bell?”
“Hell!” sheepish Vincent says.
Screams, from a prisoner or a guard, bounce off the walls at the East Mississippi prison for the criminally insane.
“I don’t want her people to be in on this, you hear?” he says. “I don’t know what her people might do. When you went there last time, were her people there?”
“Yeah, yeah, there was her brother-in-law, I think . . . Not her brother-in-law, I think maybe her stepbrother or something, and then there was also a little boy.”
“I’m not talking about them!” Vincent says. “I’m talking about moms and dads—those all motherfuckers.”
“No, no, they weren’t there,” I tell him.
“You know what I’m sayin’? There are a lot of people that stay over there. But look, if that’s what you wanna do, man, she didn’t answer the phone, so I ain’t told her what happened. If you want to go over there and knock on the door and give her the bag—that’s what you do.”
Knock on the door and give her the bag. Vincent must think she is there. If so, she didn’t pick up his call, or someone else in the house pretended she wasn’t home.
“Okay, cool,” I say.
Each boot step down the dirt road, toward the house, raises a puff of dust.
“Here we go,” I say. “Stay on the phone.”
The woods shadow me on both sides of the road.
“You’re there at the house?” he says.
“No, no. I’m still . . . I’ll be about one minute, I’ll be half a minute.”
I clomp on, a big aqua bag with the ring swinging by my side.
“Murblestaticmurblestatic.”
“What’s that?” I say. “I didn’t understand that.”
“I’m saying you gotta hit Walmart up before you leave, too, man. You gotta go get the Green Dot card, you know what I’m sayin’, you hear?”
“Let’s just get rid of this first. Deal with this.”
“Okay, we’re going to deal with the main problem here.”
I clomp on.
“How much did the motherfucking ring cost, though?” he says.
“Maybe a hundred dollars.”
“You bought a ring for that?” he squeaks.
“What?”
“Man, you’re bullshitting.”
“What, is that too cheap?”
“Hell yeah!”
“Well, you can buy her another one later. It wasn’t my fault—it was the best-looking one. There weren’t that many at Walmart.”
“W
hat color is it?” he asks. “Gold or platinum?”
“No, it’s silver.”
“It’s got a little diamond in it?”
“Yeah, it’s got a little diamond in it.”
“A real one?”
“Oh, who knows? Who knows? I knew I should have got . . . I would’ve . . . Can I tell you the truth? I would have been happy to . . . The ones that looked a bit more . . . The ones that cost more, I didn’t think looked as good. They looked like . . . you know. The ones that weren’t as simple didn’t look as good. But I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t really know what I was doing.”
“Man,” Vincent says. “You’ve got me on some strangest Australian adventure–type shit.”
I clomp on. The white house rolls closer.
“I’m outside the house now. Okay, just a sec. I’ll go . . . so I’ll go ring on the bell.”
My finger presses the silver buzzer.
An elephant starts thumping from somewhere deep in the house. The elephant thumps closer and closer, louder and louder, until it arrives at the other side of the door.
The door creaks open. I look down. It’s a small boy.
“Are you the delivery man?” he says, hypnotized by my aqua bag.
“Yes,” I say. “I have something for Chywanna.”
The boy creaks shut the door. The elephant thumps up the stairs. The elephant thumps down the stairs. The boy reopens the door.
“She’ll come down in a moment,” he says. “She’s just goin’ to change and piss.”
Four tiny children and a yelping dog spin out from the home. The kids are giddy and want me to tell them what’s in the aqua bag. They’re stomping up puffs of dust. The dog won’t shut up.
Beneath it all I can hear a tiny shouting murble. I press the phone to my ear.
“Who you talkin’ to?” Vincent says anxiously. “Who you talkin’ to?”
I head away from the house toward the trees.
