by Tom Franklin
“You don’t smell so good yourself.”
“If her son come up and seen her like that what would yall do?”
“Last I heard he ain’t going nowhere.”
“This how yall treat folks?”
Brenda gave him a sharp look. “Nigger, don’t come up in here telling me how to do my job. We got forty-five old people here and we get to em best we can. Come in here all high and mighty just cause you got your picture in the paper?”
“Fuck this,” he said and went back down the hall.
He found a closet with clean sheets and a box of disposable wipes and snatched the sheets off the rack and put the wipes under his arms and went looking for an orderly.
A man standing by a broom pointed him down the hall and he pushed through a glass door in the back and found Clyde, leaning against the wall, smoking.
“You best come with me,” Silas said. “Now. Mrs. Ott done had a accident.”
“Chill out, bro,” he said. “I’m on my break.”
Silas got up in his face. “You go clean Mrs. Ott up right now or I’m gone take your sorry ass back to the jail.”
“For what?”
Silas plucked the cigarette from Clyde’s lips and threw it down and pushed the sheets and wipes into his arms. “I’ll think of something.”
He stood outside her door, just in sight of Clyde, making sure he treated her right.
“I’m sorry,” he heard her say. “I messed myself again.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Ott. We getting you all clean now. It’s somebody out there to see you.”
“My son?”
“Naw, ain’t him. Somebody else.”
“It’s not true,” she said, “what they’re saying?”
Clyde came out wearing rubber gloves and carrying the soiled sheets and her nightgown in a plastic bag. “You happy now, motherfucker?” he said.
Ignoring him, Silas went in and she looked better, her bed raised and the smell nearly gone, the window opened.
“Mrs. Ott?”
She turned toward him where he stood holding his hat. Her good eye widened but otherwise she showed no surprise at a big strange black constable in her room.
“I’m Silas Jones, ma’am,” he said. “People call me 32.”
“32?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned her head to regard him from another angle. Wedged between the beds, a small table held nothing but a worn-out Bible. Out the window, past the black woman still asleep and beyond the chain-link fence, cars on the highway. Her dying view.
“I may have met you,” she said. “But I’m forgetful.”
“Yes, ma’am. I come seen you once before, about your son. I used to be friends with him, a long time ago.”
“He’s okay, idn’t he?”
“Well,” he said.
“I called him but nobody answered.”
Silas looked down at his hat. Maybe this was why police wore hats, for the distraction they provided when you had to tell somebody their daughter had not only been strangled to death but beaten and raped first, or to tell a woman her son had not only been shot but maybe had shot himself, and that if he ever woke up he’d be charged with killing the girl.
“Well,” he said again.
“He didn’t have many friends,” Mrs. Ott said. When he looked up from his hat she was watching him.
“I came to ask you about my mother,” he said.
“What’s her name?”
“Alice Jones.”
“Who?”
He took the photograph of her from his wallet and showed it to her. Alice holding Larry as a baby. Silas realized that she must have been pregnant in the picture, though she didn’t show.
“Why, that’s my boy,” Mrs. Ott said. “And that was our maid, I can’t recall her name.”
“Alice,” he said.
“Yes. Alice Jones. But she had to leave.” Mrs. Ott lowered her voice but continued to look at the picture. “A nice colored girl, but loose. She got herself in a family way and wasn’t married. I don’t know what ever happened to her. What was her name?”
“Alice,” he said gently. “She died a while back. Had a heart attack in her sleep.”
She reached out to touch his hand, laid there on the side of her bed. “I’m so sorry.”
“Reason I came,” Silas said, “was to ask you if you know who her baby’s daddy was.”
“What’s your name again?”
“32.”
“That’s not a name. What did your mother call you?”
“Silas.”
“I remember you, Silas. You were Larry’s friend.”
“Yes, ma’am, I was.”
For a long time she watched him and he saw himself come and go in her eyes, she knew him then she didn’t. Then, for a moment, she did again.
“Silas?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I’m frightened.”
“Of what?”
Shaking her head. “I can’t remember.”
They sat. The other old woman in the bed by the window shifted in her sleep and made a low noise.
He watched Mrs. Ott’s good eye brim, a tear collect and fall and fill one of her deep wrinkles and never emerge at the bottom. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ott,” he said and saw he’d lost her, she was looking at him as if she’d never seen him.
“Clyde?” she said.
“No, ma’am. It’s Silas.”
“Who?”
He sat for a while longer, finally admitting that yes, he was Clyde. He let her ask about her chickens and he began to tell her how Eleanor Roosevelt kept trying to lay with no success and how Rosalynn Carter was getting fatter and Barbara Bush had lain two eggs in one night, and finally, as the chickens moved in their pen, smudges in her memory, she closed her eyes and began to sleep. He turned his fingers to free them of her brittle grip and took, from the sheets where it had fallen, the photograph. He fitted it in her good hand and rose and left her in the light from the door and went down the hall and outside to his Jeep.
HE WAS LATE for dinner with Angie, her turning her cheek to catch his kiss there and leaving him standing by her open apartment door as she descended the stairs toward her car. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt. He’d left his hat, which she only liked if it came with the uniform.
She drove, unusual for them, a sign she was peeved. Ten minutes later, he sat across from her in a booth in the Fulsom Pizza Hut while the Braves lost on the television on the far wall.
“Baby,” he finally said over their medium supreme, “what is wrong?”
“What you mean?”
“You know what I mean. You all quiet.”
“Maybe cause I ain’t see you all week and you late and don’t even call? I put on my best jeans and you ain’t even say I look nice?”
“You look nice.”
She shook her head. “I know I do, you ain’t got to tell me. My point is, where are you?”
“I’m tired’s all.”
She lifted her pizza and took a bite and chewed slowly. “You know how I can tell when you lying, 32?”
He met her eyes. “How?”
“You start messing with that hat.”
He looked to the table, where the hat would’ve been, and saw his fingers, fiddling with air. He put his hand in his lap and had to smile. “When else did I lie?”
“Last week at the diner. When I asked if you ever dated that girl.”
Cindy Walker.
He glanced at the television. Braves changing pitchers. He was suddenly on the Fulsom City Park infield as Coach Hytower stood talking to his pitcher, and Silas, at short, was looking past them into the stands, where she always sat.
Angie put her pizza down. “Well?”
“Would you stay here a minute,” he said, starting to rise. “I got to get my hat.”
“Sit your lying ass down, 32, and talk to me.”
WHEN SILAS PLAYED baseball, Cindy had come to games, smoking cigarettes and sitting i
n a miniskirt with her legs crossed on the high bleachers, her hair in a scrunchie. Sunglasses on. He knew she watched him and at some point he realized he was playing for her, swiping impossible line drives out of the air and short-hopping bullet grounders to flip to M &M on second or fling over to first for the out. Sometimes he felt invincible on the diamond, white people and black both watching him, taller now, up to six feet by the eleventh grade, growing so fast he still had stretch marks on his lower back. Daring that baseball to come anywhere near, willing it to, seeing it big as a basketball when he crouched at the plate, hitting for power to all fields so everybody played back, and then he’d bunt and most times there wouldn’t even be a throw, him standing on first before the third baseman or catcher barehanded the ball.
On the infield tapping his cleats with his glove to knock off dirt, he’d watch Cindy leave after the eighth inning, walk off away from town, but always look back.
Then the time where he went five for five (including a triple) and dove and caught a liner up the middle to end the game. His teammates swarmed him and carried him off the field and from his perch he saw Cindy at her usual spot, smoking, and smiled at her. She smiled back.
She’d stayed till the end.
He skipped his shower and slipped away and followed her still in his dirty uniform and caught up and walked along the rural road with her, carrying his cap and glove, a few houses back against the trees, the two of them stepping around mailboxes in the weeds and hurrying when dogs boiled out from beneath a porch to bark at them.
“You see that catch?”
“You seen me there, didn’t you?”
“You like baseball?”
“No.”
“For a girl don’t like baseball, you sure come to a lot of games.”
“Maybe it ain’t the games I come to see.”
He looked down. Grass stains on his pants, infield dirt. “They put me at short even though I’m a leftie. Coach say I got a chance for a scholarship to Ole Miss.”
“You lucky.”
“Might go all the way, he say. Say if I focus. Keep my mind off distractions.”
“That what I am?”
Yeah, he wanted to say. She was thin with small bright blue eyes that had a kind of beaming intensity, especially when she frowned at him. She had freckles tiny as sand on her nose and throat and bare shoulders, her hair blond and curly and cinched back. Even sweaty she smelled good. Her breasts were little things under her top; he kept trying not to look at them. She had a concave figure, walking with a little hook to her, her belly in, as if waiting to absorb a blow. Today she wore sandals, and he liked her white freckled feet and red toenails.
“You from Chicago?”
He said he was.
“What’s it like up there?”
“It’s cool.” He told her about Wrigley Field, the Cubs, Bull Durham on first, Ryno on second, Bowa at short, and the Penguin, Ron Cey, on third. Bobby Dernier in center. Silas and his friends skipping school to catch home runs on the street outside the stadium, the time he’d nearly got hit by a cab going after a bouncing ball, and then his fantastic catch on the sidewalk, dodging parking meters and diving and landing in the grassy median with a group of white people watching from Murphy’s Bar, the old man who came out and traded him four tickets for the ball. They’d gone the next day, him and three buddies, sitting in the sun in the bleachers. They got a drunk man to buy them beer, buying him one in return, Silas knowing as he watched the acrobatics on the field that he’d found his calling.
“What else,” Cindy said, “that ain’t about baseball?”
He told her how the snow sometimes covered cars entirely, and about his neighborhood, how the old black men would gather in the back alley around a fire in the trash drum and pass a bottle of Jim Beam and tell stories, outdoing each other, he told her about hopping the turnstiles and catching the el train, going to blues bars where the musicians smoked weed in the alley between sets, the endless honking traffic, freezing Lake Michigan glittering under the lights and buildings blocking the sky. Chicago pizza was the best, a thick pie of it, and burritos were as big as your head.
“They got shows, ain’t they?” she asked.
“Like movie shows?”
“No.” She puckered and frowned but kept walking. “Like Broadway. Plays.”
“Yeah.” He remembered seeing their titles in the Chicago Tribune. Sunday mornings lying on the rug waiting for Oliver to finish with the sports pages. “My momma went one time,” he told Cindy, “for her birthday. Saw The Wiz.”
“That’s what I want,” she said.
“You mean be a actress?”
“No. To be able to see them shows. You can’t see shit here.”
“You could be a actress,” he said. “You pretty enough.”
She gave him a sad smile like he was a simple child. She went on talking, though, said how she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Mississippi, away from Cecil and her mouse of a mother, and as they walked along the road, no houses now, a field with cows following them along the other side of the fence and his cleats clicking on the pavement, a passing car slowed and the white man behind the wheel glared out his window.
“You okay?” he called to Cindy. “That boy bothering you?”
“Mind your own business, doofus,” she said and flipped him off. He sped away shaking his head.
“Hey,” Silas said, looking back. “I best go.”
“Suit yourself.”
He kept walking alongside her.
“Your stepdaddy like it you walking with a black boy?”
“What you think? He’s ignorant as a damn weed. Won’t even try to get a job. Say he hurt his back at the mill.”
Another car, the woman behind the wheel turning as she passed to stare.
“You ever kissed a white girl?”
“Naw,” he said. “You ever kissed a black boy?”
“Sure,” taking his hand, leading him down the embankment and into a stand of trees.
From there, notes passed at school, their secret meeting place in the woods behind the baseball field. He was a virgin but she wasn’t, and on their blanket spread over the grass they became lovers and for the second half of his junior year he’d never been happier, a great season with an average just over.450 most of the time and a secret white girlfriend watching from the bleachers. A lot of people came, he knew, to see him, the sense he was going places, even old Carl Ott sometimes.
Cindy liked beer and Silas drank with her and they hid their relationship from everyone else, Silas not even telling M &M, knowing if anybody found out they’d have to give each other up. Slipping away from his friends, from hers, like the haunted house that Halloween, the one where Larry came and brought his mask, the two of them leaving separately but meeting later, in her mother’s car or in his mother’s, whoever could borrow one. Going to the drive-in, her driving and letting him off by the road, him sneaking through the trees to where she parked in the back corner, the thrill of being discovered a thing she seemed to like, Silas terrified but unable to resist the hot vacuum of her cigarette breath, click of their teeth, her soft tongue, her perfect breasts, the patch of secret hair in her jeans.
Once, as they lay on a blanket on the ground, Cindy told him she’d started liking him when he came out of the woods and stood up for her when Cecil was pulling off her towel.
“He does that kind of shit all the time,” she’d said. “Trying to see me without my clothes, come stumbling in the bathroom with his thing in his hand. Does when he’s drunk, acts like he don’t remember when he sobers up.”
“What about your momma?”
“How you tell your momma she married a slime? Sides, she always takes his side over mine. She, kind of, believes the worst about me. I always been trouble for her. I don’t guess I help none, cussing, smoking, messing with boys.”
“Messing,” he said. “That what we doing?”
“What else you gone call it?”
At school one day Si
las walked up to her in the smoking area, and she said he’d slapped her. Cecil. Said she was a whore. Off fucking boys.
Standing all casual so nobody would notice them.
“Your momma let him do that? Slap you?”
“She wasn’t home. But now he won’t let me leave the house cept for school, says he’ll tell her I been trying to come on to him, like I ever would.”
“Your momma believe that?”
“If he said it she probably would. They’d throw me out.”
She’d always caught rides to school with her friend Tammy and now Cecil had decreed that Cindy had to come home right after school, that if Tammy couldn’t bring her, Cecil would come get her himself.
“I told him, ‘You ain’t even got a car, fool,’ but he said he’d get one if it meant keeping me away from-”
“Me,” Silas finished.
When he went home a few nights later, their trailer in Fulsom, his mother was waiting up in the dark living room, sitting rigid in a kitchen chair, her old tomcat, now half blind, purring in her lap.
“Silas,” she said.
“What?”
“Son, you got to stop with that white girl.”
He had no idea how she knew.
“Momma, what you mean?”
“Silas, don’t lie to me.”
“We just friends.”
“Son, nothing good ever come out of colors mixing.”
“Momma-”
“Such and suching like you doing would be dangerous enough in Chicago, but you in Mississippi now. Emmet Till,” she said, “was from Chicago.”
“You the one brought us down here.”
He went to the refrigerator and opened it and got out a carton of milk.
“Silas, baby,” getting up, holding the cat to her chest, “you all I got. And you all you got, too. Please tell me you gone stop. Please, son?”
He said he would. Promised he’d focus on his ball, work on his grades for that scholarship to Ole Miss. He didn’t mean it, though, knew he would keep seeing her, this girl who would fall asleep on their blanket in the woods, how her lips opened and he’d lean in and smell her breath, sweeter to him for the cigarettes and beer.
It was Cindy who’d said she had a plan to see him that last weekend. If he could get his mother’s car, she could outsmart Cecil. On Fridays Alice worked until seven at the diner, then came home and, tired from a twelve-hour shift, went to sleep in her chair by the television. Didn’t even eat. He took the car without asking.
