A Killing in This Town

by Olympia Vernon

  The same sharp line. The startling comparison of the dead, how the bone lies with a stiff, obligatory setting to the vertebrae.

  She touched her thigh. Her entire hand rested there, her finger sliding into the crux of its position. Her belly, all pygmified, bellowed out from her ribs, as if it took no part in her ceremony.

  It was no wonder that when she reached out for Hurry, he turned in his dreaming, away from the construction of her pale body: the doctor had told her, and she well knew it, that there was nothing to spare: a she bastard’s deformity.

  The wind from her nostrils seeped through her round head, the hairs parting.

  For she had done nothing this morning, only stood in her wrinkled gown, facing an untied ribbon on her vanity, as if at any moment she would pull her hair up from her face and bridge the purpose of her activity to a close.

  She had gotten word: the postmaster was out for good. Surgery. And now she would have to make the journey into town, go to the fabric store, and ask, her voice public, Anything good?

  She could not bear it, although she was a part of the name—Bullock—and it was her post office and her town, her confined government. How it plagued her even more so now, the matter of her existence, how they’d all chatter and gossip about her.

  Lenora Bullock. Orphan. The structure of the words pushed her chin outward, and there was no turning away from the mounted shape they’d formed in her head. Her index finger traveled up the pulse of her jugular, and she felt folded and laid aside like the battered fabric of an unwanted pattern, cut and fringed, asymmetrical.

  She walked toward the vanity, the untied ribbon lying in wait, and pulled her hair up until the ribbon held its weight.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Disturbed, she faced the window. No horse.

  She took her path down the staircase, and there she saw him, Gill.

  Immediately, she traced the edge of the door’s hinge: like Adam, he had stood in her kitchen, a boy on the eve of thirteen, and awaited the height of his measurement.

  Of course she remembered him, could not forget the striking character of his shoulders: they were tyrannical, an output of incredible power, manlike.

  I come for Hurry, said Gill.

  From his place, he stood with a thirst that seemed to gather in the hot and permeable heat around him.

  Lenora Bullock stepped up to the screen, where his face had grown evermore solid in her mind. And with this, the memory of his folks—their abandonment of him—drew her eyelids together.

  Gill, she whispered, how long now?

  His hand traveled, without complexity, up to where her face was: it was not really her face that he saw but the darner needle that lay behind her, flat and elevated on a hooded sheet.

  A white envelope lay beside it, the name ADAM.

  Seasons, he said.

  Well, don’t let the heat take you, she said. Come in.

  Gill stepped into the house, Lenora Bullock apologizing for her condition: her back turned now, she looked to him an unnecessary depiction of vanity, her hair all tied up and pitiful, a train station baby.

  How it had come down on him, how she’d made him stand near the door’s edge in a vertical and wavering line, the moderate stench of her vagina throughout the air, as if she wanted him to stick his finger underneath her gown, find her freedom.

  She poured him a glass of lemonade and motioned for him to join her at the kitchen table. Hurry’s out, she said. The morgue.

  An invisible corpse seemed to lie between them: Gill, at the audible news of the morgue, could hear the sound of both pulley and laughter. The nigger. The nigger is dead. He heard it and then, too, saw the broken ankle of the foot. It dangled from the chain, the circular bone out of proportion, bloody.

  What time’s he due? he asked.

  Not sure, said Lenora Bullock.

  In her response, she turned toward the costume she had made for Adam. It hung on the curtain rod above the windowsill. She wanted to show him, just now, what she had done, the meticulous embroidering of the hooded Klan suit: she hoped, if only for the value of her breathing, that he would come to notice.

  It wrung in his head like the time he’d seen an accordion player stumble in front of him, his foot out of step, the sound of the instrument disappearing underneath the tracks of the railroad deck, the final tune muted and catastrophic.

  Thirsty, ain’t you? she asked.

  Gill picked up the glass she had prepared and drank her lemonade, the Klan suit rising in the wind of heat. He then stood to his feet: Tell ’m I come.

  Lenora Bullock stepped toward him.

  Never said what you turned into, she commented.

  Her head broke the alignment of her body.

  He faced her as if he knew it would hurt: A clerk, he whispered. The railroad.

  His response forced her fingers apart. She reached behind her for the arm of a chair. It alone held the ingredients of her memory together.

  For Gill had stepped away from the porch, his head a blur.

  chapter fifteen

  Adam lay in the dust, the moon perpendicular like the panting iris of a victim.

  The entire globe hung above him, white and circular.

  There on the powdered ground, he opened the shape of his mouth and let it hang there—the shape—the oxygen bleeding into a cloud.

  He was on his stomach, Midnight beside him, listening to the Bullocks and his father in the barn. They breathed with a sort of agony, loud and wet, the atmospheric pressure of their bodies rising upward.

  The Klan suit hung from a cowhided loop above their figures. And so it was done: the pale fabric of the thing that had been sewn together was cause enough for their laughter. How they looked at it: the crooked details of the hemline, stitched and punctured by the darner needle of Lenora Bullock’s ripe, ill-fated measurement.

  D. D. Pickens stepped out onto the breakfast porch. Adam yet lay in the dust as she journeyed toward him. Adam, she said. You’re dirty.

  At the sound of her voice, he turned.

  I know, he said.

  His hand went up to his forehead and it would not go away, the laughter of his father and the Bullocks, the Klan suit, the humidity of the earth and moon, at once and altogether striking.

  D. D. Pickens was lake fog. She had come from the house white and out of place in her mockingbird bone. It was her lurking, her inability to disturb the meeting, to extract the feeding tube from her speech, that made it all the more seem that she had nowhere to put it.

  A buzzing mosquito fluttered in the space around her. The turbulence of the wings, tactile and disobedient, was electrifying. As the hummingbird, it had come to find her, as if she had called upon it. She stretched out her hand. It roared on the bridge of her elongated arm and bit her.

  She turned toward the laughter of the barn. They were invisible and naked, a cylindrical cone inside her head. A nigger. A bird: the difference exploded and swiveled in her head, down the cylindrical cone and upon the item of her thinking, and she could not hold herself together on purpose.

  Her arm fell to her side. She went back into the house before pausing on the steps of the breakfast porch. Go to your father, she whispered.

  Midnight panted around her, the odor of his tongue permanent: he caught the tail end of her gown. It was not out of malice, but as if to say, We don’t want to be here.

  Her face remained hidden until she forced the fabric out of his jaw—the gown torn—and disappeared into the dull seed of the house.

  Adam lifted himself from the dust, a pain in his backbone from lying down so long a time, and faced the barn. Hoover Pickens signaled to him, the Bullocks behind him like a sharp and heavy jade: the moon had forced their yellow bodies into the alignment of disaster.

  Adam, yelled Hoover Pickens, get yonder.

  Midnight had come to a halt before the men. Hurry Bullock stepped out of the horizontal line. There fell a discernible silence: the panting had drawn him forward. He was mesmeri
zed by the manner in which the pulse of Midnight’s breathing had pushed his belly out.

  There lived within Hurry Bullock a fascination with the dead. Now, in his potent and deliberate nature, he had stopped the breathing of this animal. He had laid him upon the table at the morgue and come down, down upon the breathing organ, caused it to burst.

  He had done it in his mind.

  Midnight walked backward, away from Hurry Bullock and the men, until he felt the security of Adam behind him.

  What’s a matter, boy? asked Adam.

  The hairs of Midnight’s spine stood upward, the resistance of gravity.

  Hoover Pickens broke the silence again: Son, get yonder.

  Adam looked up at Hurry Bullock, who stood in his place, a grin about him that lifted the defining muscle of his jawbone. Even in the light of the moon, Adam could see how far-reaching it was. He had seen Hurry Bullock from his window, the malignancy of his standing. He looked then, as now, a resounding tumor.

  He walked between the men, his chin upward to the hanging Klan suit.

  Salem, the brother of Hurry Bullock, stood beside him.

  Adam’s father reached for his shoulder: Son, he said. It’s done went through.

  The men rejoined themselves in laughter. The commandments of the Bullock Klan hung there, too, up high above the stable of horses and men: it had all come forward, the corpse he had witnessed in Hurry Bullock’s morgue, the contents of the dead man’s pocket, the emptying of his stomach.

  Bring it down! yelled Hurry Bullock.

  The Bullocks had begun to clap, each man in his own recanting sound, as Hoover Pickens walked toward a battered nail and tugged at a rope line connected to the pulley. The hooded Klan suit began to come down.

  It was the color of opium.

  The horses reared in an uproar.

  Adam alone heard the solitary, disturbing chaos like the final tune of a tumbling accordion.

  Go, son, said Hoover Pickens. Try it on.

  There was a push to his shoulders.

  The men redeemed their clapping. The sweat, the mixture of sound and hurry, all a devouring edge of false, sanctimonious outrage that bellowed like a fiery and struck cloud of smoke: it shifted the bones of the throat to suffocation.

  Take to it, son.

  Adam paused.

  A voice, at once familiar, rose from the crowd.

  I come to help, whispered Gill.

  The men paused.

  Hurry Bullock stepped out with his foot, circling Gill with rhythmic mobility: the same sporadic design of the jawline, vast and angular now. There was no sign of expression. So nude and jarring was the presence of Gill that it seemed never to belong to pity.

  Gill stood in his gaze: he thought of how his father had walked him through the woods to the Bullock house for training. The heated sun was beaten into his father’s wrist, the winding print of a wrenlike pattern traveling toward the palm, as if an egg had been hatched.

  You hear that, boys? yelled Hurry Bullock. He’s come to help.

  For a moment, silence seeped into the wind of Gill’s disturbance, but then it broke and the men surrounded him. It was good that he had come.

  Hoover Pickens signaled for Adam.

  Adam stepped forward. He shook with the memory of the encounter.

  The words: You never saw me.

  With this, he realized the power of his own pretending.

  Adam, said Hoover Pickens. This here’s Gill Mender.

  Gill faced Adam: Couldn’t help but hear, he said. You’re the talk o’ the station.

  Salem Bullock patted Gill on the shoulder: the weight of his hand was judicious, a kind of burdensome tremor that pushed the root of Gill’s sleeve into a pouch. The air had come out of his shirt, the odor of solitude.

  Gill abandoned Adam, the men, and stood before the hooded Klan suit. He waited for it, but no one, not even Hurry Bullock, questioned where he had been all this time. Again he was amid the dragging season.

  He lifted the fabric from its place and put his face in it. Hate carried within it the ageless stench of the corpse: it lived beneath his eyelid, Curtis Willow.

  Adam, he said. Come to.

  Midnight had begun to howl. This was when Adam joined Gill.

  And it was Gill who led the men in the reciting of the commandment:

  We are white men, born unto the earth

  And land, which is ours and belongs to us, as Free and automatic white men.

  All niggers must be obedient.

  They are not a part of the human thread, But are animals and must be dragged from Their properties and stricken from the Blood of the nation.

  The same thing goes for hypocrites.

  Gill brought the hooded Klan suit upon Adam’s head and, amid the chaos, whispered: I come to help.

  chapter sixteen

  There fell within the context of her body an obesity drawn about her so that it bulged over the blade of her shoulder, a redness throughout her face; the heat had swelled in her stomach. She had begun to sweat, her yellow hair singed like the healing effects of a bruise.

  She waited at the train station, alongside a row of others in their wait: beside her, a child with little connection to the breast he had woken from dangled on the edge of an elongated wooden chair. His mouth hung low. As it happened, he had discovered how warm it was coming out: a stream of urine had come out of his penis and now leaked from under him, from the seat of the wooden chair onto the floor, as if all along he had planned its journey.

  A grin, somewhat cunning in its cruelty, trapped the contours of his round head, and he pointed to it, the urine, and his tiny shoulders began to rise in the warmth of the disaster he had created. Look, he said.

  The woman who held him, who had just released him from her breast, heard the malicious gathering in his throat, the manner in which he had used the word look, and in her embarrassment of what he had done, the urine all about, she slapped his face.

  Everyone heard it, even the sleeping and dilapidated man who had once dropped his accordion—a tumbling that had cost him sound—and saw, with amazement, how the child turned to the woman and, too, slapped her square-shaped head into vision.

  She brought her hand up to her face, a hue of scarlet on her cheek, and picked up the child by his arm and stripped him until all at once he stood in his nudity, his penis holding a steady and crooked vein where it seemed to predict the ferocity of his exposure.

  The obese woman could not hold in her sitting. The sun struck the horizontal window of the train station and landed on her calf: she wore a sandal, strapped at the toe; the oval muscle of her foot, near the swollen ankle, bore the resemblance of an embryo—plucked from the belly of a dirty syringe, jelly-like.

  They were all waiting for Gill: the man who had tumbled in his steps and dropped his accordion, the woman and the nude child, the others who waited with deafening activity for a ticket. All except the obese woman, now pregnant: she pretended—her posture told of it—that someone was coming to get her, a man from Bullock, perhaps. If only she waited, he would come and she could get out of these clothes and rest her vertebrae, the pressure of baby weight pinning her to one side.

  Indeed, a man from Bullock opened the door of the train station, a bell sounding. Her eyes, once drawn to her sunlit ankle, leaned in to a solitary, muted gaze, when she lifted her shoulders, as if to say, Come for me?

  But the man, gray-haired and linear, lifted the sleeve of his shirt to track the hour of his standing and, while in his place, nothing else to capture his attention, let go of a sigh that had taken too long a time to come out—heat, he supposed—looked at the obese woman and she heard it: Too fat.

  He wore a hat upon his molecular head, a feather extended above his forehead from a mahogany-colored band at its center. The nude child began to sob. The mother laid him on the fabric of her lap, and his body shook in the rising temperature of the horizontal window.

  Not even the nerve to love him, he thought.

  The
mother of the nude child stared at the awkward and jutted setting of the feathered cap, the odor of urine bleeding into the saturated clothing beside her. She had seen him before, perhaps in Memphis, the train’s final destination. He was as poised as ever and attuned with the same judgment of the things he had witnessed, as if he were greater than the perplexities of the world, and nothing—not even fire—could bid him compassion.

  Without word, he nodded at her.

  She had seen how he looked at the obese woman and turned toward her, the determinable signs of an orphan abounding in her pitiful face as she drew her head forward. Her hair, travel-beaten and distorted in color, fell around her ears, a part through the center.

  The nude child had fallen asleep.

  It was Memphis where she had seen him. It was he, the accordion seller, who had taken the train from Bullock each Monday afternoon and sat on the little bench outside the Memphis ticket counter telling of the quality of the instrument: each accordion had a note in it, a message for the mute.

  The man whose accordion had tumbled underneath the train’s coming stood to greet the accordion seller. He had no speech. His larynx had been crushed under the weight of a cog wheel: the reins of the mule had come loose from his father’s grip, a sudden jolting of the wagon, and thus it happened, the crumbling of the bones.

  He took from his pocket a bound journal of his writings, until he reached a quiet page, ivory-like, and jotted down the language of his questioning.

  The accordion seller awaited the first line.

  Will work for it, these were the beginning words.

  The accordion seller lacked expression.

  The man without sound wrote a second line. The jotting down of the words leaked throughout the train station among the waiters, carbon monoxide.

  Old one dead was the second line.

  The accordion seller laughed at the muted man, as if he had become aware, in his matter-of-fact overture, that he was God. Such is life, he said.

  The man without sound tapped the dull edge of the stencil on the page. He remained with what he had written the second time: Old one dead.