Phantom Nights

by John Farris

  "How do you know?" he asked in a reasonable tone. "Catch him at it?"

  "Rhoda does Alex's laundry too."

  "Fact is Alex is having what I've heard called 'nocturnal emissions.' I can vouch for those, my pajama pants used to get—"

  "Not talking about pajama pants, Bobby. And there's nothing nocturnal about it. Does it in his handkerchiefs, then leaves them wadded up under his bed." Cecily shuddered at the thought.

  Bobby let out a slow breath and looked at his wife, not knowing what to say anymore. That bulge of muscle had reappeared in Cecily's small jaw, and the hollows of her eyes were moist. Usually hers was a lively, humorous face, streaked blond hair brushed back from her brow in a neat arrowhead, emeralds in her earlobes the exact shade of lazy-looking eyes that always seemed to be on low simmer.

  Humor had largely been missing lately, the hijinks in her smile.

  "There is an answer, Bobby. I was talking to Dr. Leathers about it yester—"

  "No. Promises are sacred to me, Cecily."

  "What about your wedding vows? It isn't like you wouldn't be taking care of Alex anymore! You would be doing exactly what needs to be done for him if he's going to grow up and amount to something instead of climbing radio towers and getting into fights."

  "You know those schools cost a ton of money we don't happen to have."

  But as soon as he spoke he realized what was up. "Mom said she would loan us whatever is needed to do the right thing for Alex."

  "Out of the goodness of her heart," Bobby said slowly, stalling, trying to think how he was going to get out of this. An opportunity had been presented to his mother-in-law, and obviously she had pounced on it. Bernie, as her friends called her, had realized a profit of nearly forty thousand dollars when she sold her late husband's printing business. She was sixty-two and still looked good when she was dolled up. But arthritis was evident in both her hands. Prospects for another husband, given what was available in Evening Shade, looked dim. Cagey as always, she had to be thinking ahead to a safe haven in which to spend her declining years. What could be more appealing than to ensure Alex Gambier's absence and move into the roomy house Bobby had bought Cecily as a wedding present with the insurance money? Spend the rest of her life with her two most precious possessions, Cecily and Brendan, while Bobby found himself slowly relegated to the status of odd man out in his own household? He had wryly observed the same thing happening to other married men; it was like being squeezed to extinction by one of those big South American snakes.

  Bobby smiled at Cecily as if he'd been enlightened instead of outmaneuvered, then put the brakes on.

  "It's worth thinking about," he said.

  "Seriously, Bobby?"

  "Sure I'm serious."

  "Because you know—when it was just the two of you, Alex and Bobby, you had all the time in the world for him, and it was what he needed after the trauma. But now it isn't true anymore. You don't have the time to play baseball and fix cars together and take fishing trips. I think that's what he resents so deeply and has him doing reckless things to try to get your attention back." Bobby nodded, knowing the truth when he heard it, quick flush of guilt in his face, which encouraged Cecily all the more. "And resents Brendan and me for—we've taken you away from him, probably is how he sees it. That's why I think Alex needs a complete change of scene, a school with other kids who have handicaps. Kids he can relate to, not some of the bullies around town. But of course his hostile attitude. I think Alex wants to get into fights."

  "Just give me a little time with this, Cece."

  She took a breath, relief in her eyes, getting ready to wind it down. "Mutism isn't such a terrible burden, after all. What about polio, or—I know it's a big decision, but you'll see there isn't a better one you can make. Aren't you having any more to eat, Bobby? There's tapioca Rhoda made."

  "Raisins in it?"

  "A few; you can separate them out."

  "I believe I've already had my fill."

  "I'm feeling awfully tired," Cecily said with a small yawn. "You wouldn't care if I went upstairs now?"

  "I'd call it a night myself, but I've got at least an hour's reading. Tort law."

  "You know how proud I am of you," she said, getting up to put dishes in the sink. "Working so hard and going to night school besides. My husband's going to practice law!" She caressed Bobby, her hand lingering on the side of his face. "Couldn't you read in bed tonight, Perry Mason? Because I want you next to me while I go to sleep." She lowered her eyes in that sharpie way of hers that indicated she wanted sex to happen. Although she was too shy to directly say so.

  Bobby was tired too, but he never got so tired to resist being drawn, weightlessly, into the spell of her glisten.

  "Let me call Dispatch, and I'll follow you on up. Wherever Alex is, poolroom or just riding circles around the courthouse, I want Tuff or Terry Ray to see that he gets his butt home pronto."

  "They called my husband William 'Highpockets,'" Mally said to Alex. "'Cause that's what he was, all arms and 'specially legs."

  She tapped a forefinger on one of a wall of framed photos: the team picture of the 1939 Memphis Red Sox.

  "William played short and batted cleanup for the Red Sox. That was before the war. Marty Marion—are you a St. Louie fan?—saw William play a couple times. He said William had the range and arm to be a big-leaguer. But that was years before Jackie Robinson, Campanella, and that boy Doby plays for Cleveland now."

  They were in the front room of the small house that William and his brother Cal had built fifty yards deep into the hollow behind the rib shack on Highway 19 that William had tried to make a go of the last two and a half years of his life. Playing days over with, he'd come back from the Pacific with only two and a half fingers and a thumb stub left on his throwing hand.

  Mally explained that to Alex, who was sitting on the bamboo sofa Mally had paid eight dollars for at a yard sale and made over with bright slipcovers. His hair was nearly dry after his meager bath; both wash water and flush water were getting scarce at her house, so she'd had him do his business in the seldom-used privy out back and handed him a bucket of water to use in her own bathtub. He had put on the pants and shirt Mally had pulled from a trunk of things she would never part with—William's letters home from the Pacific, his baseball spikes and dowdy old fielder's glove that enclosed a baseball with frayed stitching autographed by Satchel Paige. The alternative was to have an unfamiliar white boy sitting in her parlor in a too-small towel because he couldn't put filthy clothes back on after a washing-up. Mally had no neighbors to tell malicious stories, but still it would have been an uncomfortable thing.

  Highpockets' plaid shirt hung to Alex's knees, and the boy had rolled up half a foot of cotton trousers on each skinny, tanned leg. He was drinking from a tall bottle of Nehi orange pop, sugar a hypo to his store of nervous energy, foot tapping the floor.

  Mally had learned that even though he couldn't speak, he did a good deal of talking with his eyes and head motions when he wanted to be understood. Now he was looking at the centerpiece photo of William so handsome and dashingly proud in his Navy dress whites.

  "Were you too little to know what was going on in the war?" Mally asked, fingers trailing along a series of photos on the image wall, stopping at a picture of a Navy destroyer. Alex shrugged. "Well, this was William's ship, the USS Taneycomo. William was one of the first colored ensigns commissioned by the Navy. At the battle for Okinawa, what I believe was the last big battle of the Pacific war, the Taneycomo took a direct hit from a Japanese kamikaze. That was their name for suicide pilots. When the magazines blew up all at once, the Taneycomo was sheared in half. Went down real fast. William and maybe two dozen of his shipmates found themselves in the flaming sea. Blood in the water, Lord, and sharks everywhere. William hurt bad and just clinging to some flotsam. Hours, it must've been, before he was rescued. Terrible things going on around him. Burned men screaming."

  Alex flinched, trembled. He looked down.

 
; She'd told it too strong, Mally thought; he was just a kid, after all.

  "But William did come back from Okinawa. Spent some months in the Navy hospital in California, being treated because he couldn't get out of his mind, like a lot of them who suffered in the war, all he'd seen and heard. William tried his best, and I—I tried hard for him too, but in the end he just couldn't shake it."

  Her next thought came with barely a pause: her half-mad, will-o'-the-wisp mother and her betrayed, emotionally benumbed father; she might have been speaking to herself.

  "Sometimes I think it's my fate to suffer for haunted men."

  Alex put his soda bottle down, more or less bolted from the sofa and went outside on the porch, where he stood looking at the stars through the tall pine trees. When she followed and touched his shoulder he looked back at her with sore-looking saddened eyes.

  "Didn't mean to upset you. I don't get to talk about William to anybody much anymore, but it's good for me not to keep him shut up inside my mind. Was there somebody close in your family didn't make it home from the war?"

  Alex shook his head.

  "Then what is it has you in such a state, flapping around on your bike after dark, jumping under trains?"

  After a few moments, Alex put his head down again. Like an ol' lop-ear mule, Mally thought. Suddenly she felt very tired and aching in spirit and wanted this day over with.

  "You want to write down where I'm supposed to take you, then we best get started; it's going on ten-thirty already."

  As soon as she saw the house on West Hatchie Road they were going to, Mally knew immediately a lot more about Alex and understood his reaction to her tale of the ill-fated USS Taneycomo. Her aunt, Rhoda Jenks, worked days there as housekeeper; afflicted with the dooms of their subjugated race, Rhoda moved through her daily chores like a bus in heavy traffic, humming moodily to herself.

  So the Alex she had in the backseat of her car had to be Bobby Gambier's brother, called "Twig" when he was little. Bobby was undersheriff to Sheriff Luther Tebbetts, and Bobby's own father had been high sheriff of Evening Shade for better than twenty years before Luther, until the Gambier house burned down with Robert Senior unable to escape in time.

  Mally had hoped to leave Alex and his damaged bicycle off without having to offer an explanation of what they were doing together this time of night, but no such luck. Porch lights were on and Bobby Gambier was outside having a smoke, wearing only pajama bottoms, chest hair like finely shaved copper. Not tall but put together just fine, wide shoulders making him look shorter than he actually was.

  When she pulled into the drive next to the brick house and he saw that it was a woman driving, one he knew on sight, he had the courtesy to go inside and put on a robe.

  "Aren't you Mally Shaw?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Reckon I know who that is with you," he said with a vexed grin.

  "Yes, I've brought your brother home," Mally said, employing the fine art of speaking to a white man she barely knew without looking him directly in the face but also not appearing to avoid his gaze.

  Bobby's grin got bigger, and he seemed truly amused when he saw Alex climb out of the backseat in clothing way too big for him.

  "What did you do, ride your bike into the Yella Dog?"

  Alex looked at Mally, who said, "He had a little accident, Mr. Gambier. Gone too fast, I reckon. Messed up his bike some. It's there in the trunk of my car."

  "Where'd those clothes come from, church barrel?"

  "No, sir. They were some things of my late husband William's I had around the house. Your brother's clothes was too dirty for him to wear, so I put them in with my wash."

  "Where did he have this accident, out by your place? That's way out, isn't it, Highway 19?" Alex standing right there at the bottom of the porch steps, but Bobby, aside from a couple of quick glances, paid his attention to Mally. Alex watched her too, with uneasy eyes, probably afraid of all she could tell although she'd made it plain, to put him at ease on the ride home, that she wouldn't let on about the Dixie Traveler

  "Yes, sir. It wasn't far down the road where I am, and I just happen to come along about then."

  "So you weren't anywhere near him—in your car—when he had this accident?"

  "I didn't run into him, if that's what you're asking, Mr. Gambier." Alex was shaking his head vehemently. Bobby looked from one to the other and made up his mind he was hearing at least some of the truth.

  "See you got some scrapes and bruises," he said to Alex and made a rotating, over-and-under motion with his fists. Over the handlebars? Alex nodded, looking sheepish.

  "I put some iodine on the worst of those scrapes after he had his bath," Mally said.

  "That's right, you're a nurse. At your place?"

  "It was close by. Like I said, Mr. Gambier, I'm washing his clothes, and I'll have them ironed and ready to leave off in the morning, if that's all right."

  "Real kind of you, Mally. And thanks for taking care. Alex, help me get that bike out of Mally's car. Then you can go on in. But keep it quiet: Everybody's asleep. Mally, if you'd stay around just another minute?"

  It wasn't exactly a request, but Mally wasn't bothered. What she knew about Bobby Gambier as a lawman was, he didn't go out of his way to make trouble for her people. That had been his daddy's philosophy as well. Luther Tebbetts, he was a different sort.

  While she stood by admiring some trellised morning glories and climbing roses, no expression, but a headache beginning like wasp buzz behind her eyes, the two brothers hauled the bicycle up to the porch and Bobby looked over the damage.

  "Nothing we can't fix ourselves," he told Alex, putting an arm around the boy's shoulders. Alex held still for about four seconds, then shrugged off the arm and opened the screen door. Bobby looked at him with a slight grimace and said, "There's half a ham in the Frigidaire. Buttermilk. If you want something before bed."

  "Good night, Alex," Mally said as he was going into the house. He paused momentarily but didn't look around at her. The steel ID bracelet he wore caught light as he closed the screen door. She saw both of his hands and noticed that the man's ring he'd been wearing earlier wasn't there.

  Bobby came down into the yard, Mally waiting beside her old Dodge that needed repainting. There were a Plymouth coupe and a spiffy Packard Six station wagon parked on the double strips of concrete ahead of her own car.

  "Mally, it's not to my credit I never let you know how bad I felt about William's passing."

  "That's all right, Mr. Gambier."

  "Daddy always swore 'Highpockets' was one of the best infielders ever played the game. I saw him myself when the Bob Feller All-Stars took on the Memphis Red Sox in an exhibition game at the Memphis Chicks' ballpark. William could slug, too: drove in two runs with a triple that day. Daddy had a keen eye for baseball talent. He was a part-time scout for the Cubs."

  "I never knew that."

  "Sad news about Priest Howard. We heard from Rhoda how good you were about looking after him in his last days."

  "It was going on seven months that he lingered. Poor suffering soul."

  "So are you back in Evening Shade for good?"

  "I really can't say, Mr. Gambier."

  "All right, then. Nice seeing you again, Mally. Appreciate you dropping Twig off." He looked at her with a half smile, eyes resting on her casually but alert with the intuition good lawmen develop early. "Someday you might want to tell me what it really was Alex got up to tonight. Knowing Alex."

  "Was pretty much the way I told it to you already." And she added, realizing she probably ought to just keep her opinions to herself, "From what little I've come to know, he's a good boy."

  "I hope you're right. He's reached an age now where he's—hard for me to understand."

  "Mr. Gambier, pardon me for asking, please, but was he born that way, not able to talk?"

  "No. He talked early and talked a streak after that; you couldn't get him to shut up. He could make up the tallest tales, but they were always w
orth a listen." There was a faint yearning within Bobby's smile. "Now he scribbles them down but won't let anybody see what he's writing. Anyhow, diphtheria did a lot of damage to his voice box when he was four. For three years, either Mama or Daddy had him down to Memphis or up to Nashville, St. Louis a couple times, consulting with specialists. Alex had speech therapists too, and after a lot of hard work, Mama would write to me—I was in the Army then—that he might relearn how to talk. But"—Bobby felt around in the pockets of his robe as if he wanted to smoke, but came up empty-handed—"then the fire took both our parents away from us and Alex shut up again, for good I'm afraid."

  "Or closed up? What he's been through in his young life does bring a lot of anger to a child."

  "He's probably going to a special school soon—another month or two. We're talking about it."

  "You and Alex?"

  "No, he doesn't know yet. Once we've got it all settled." The need for a cigarette was making him restless, Mally's cue that she'd overstayed.

  "Well, good night, Mr. Gambier."

  "Good night, Mally."

  Mally got home feeling too edgy to sleep. The diamond ring missing from Alex Gambier's finger was right where she expected to find it, on the shelf above the wash stand in the bathroom. Grimy tape made it small enough to fit the boy's ring finger, although it was the kind of old-style ring men of substance flaunted on their pinkies. She left it where it was.

  Habit more than anything prompted Mally to unpin her other nurse's smock from the clothesline on the front porch and iron it in the kitchen, as if she still had employment and would be going to the homestead at seven-thirty in the morning to relieve Priest Howard's night nurse. She hung the smock up in her bedroom chifforobe and returned to the kitchen of her four-room house. Cinder block and roof-shingle siding, well made, wouldn't leak through Noah's flood. She pumped water for the kettle. Mally was a coffee drinker in the morning and a tea drinker at night. Spearmint or chamomile. With her tea strainer steeping in the cup she opened a jar of home-canned peaches, removed the paraffin plug, and carried everything to the screened porch, where she settled down in her bentwood rocker to enjoy the peaches straight from the jar. Traffic on Route 19 was light, whoosh of a car or small truck going by every thirty seconds or so. She heard jump music from the Negro tonk a quarter-mile down the road, what the sheriff's deputies called a "dinge joint." When the wind was right she could smell the gage they all smoked there. The tonk was one that attracted mostly the ill-natured and shiftless, and there was frequent knife play.