SS Details (v5.0)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “A whole buncha people saw you talk to her, share a Coke with her, and buy her another one. A few said it looked like there was an attraction. Couple others coulda sworn you was flirting.”

  I had been flirting. I hadn’t seen her as black — and yes, back then, it would have made a difference to me. I’ve learned a lot about racial tolerance since, and a lot more about intolerance. I wasn’t an offensive racist in those days, just a passive one. A man who kept to his own side of the street and didn’t mingle, just as he was supposed to do.

  I would never have flirted if I had known. No matter how beautiful she was. But that hair, those features all belied what I had been taught. I had thought the darkness of her skin due to tanning not to heredity.

  I had seen what I had wanted to see.

  Sheriff Conner was watching me think. God knows what kind of expressions had crossed my face, but whatever they were, they weren’t good.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “Is it against the law now to buy a woman a drink on a hot summer day?” I asked.

  “Might be,” he said, “if that woman shows up dead the next day.”

  “Dead?” I whispered.

  He nodded.

  “I never saw her before,” I said.

  “So you usually just go up and share a drink with a nigra woman you never met.”

  “I didn’t know she was colored,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows at me.

  “She was in the shade,” I said and realized how weak that sounded.

  The Sheriff laughed. “And all pussy’s the same in the dark, ain’t it?” he said, and slapped my leg. I’d heard worse, much worse, in the army but it didn’t shock me like he just had. I’d never heard Sheriff Conner be crude, although my father always said he was. Apparently the Sheriff was only crude to adults. To children he was the model of decorum.

  I wasn’t a child any longer.

  “How’d she die?” I asked.

  “Blow to the head.”

  “At the station?”

  “In the desert. Her pants was gone, and that scrap of fabric that passed for a blouse was underneath her.”

  The desert. Someone had to take her there. I felt myself go cold.

  “I didn’t know her,” I said, and if she had been a white woman, he might have believed me. But in McCardle, in those years and before, a man like me didn’t flirt with — hell, a man like me didn’t talk to — a woman like her.

  “Then what was she doing here?” he asked.

  “Getting a divorce?”

  “Girls like her don’t get a divorce.”

  That rankled me, even then. “So what do they do?”

  He didn’t answer. “She wasn’t here for no divorce.”

  “Have you investigated it?”

  “Hell, no. Can’t even find her purse.”‘

  “Well, did you trace the license on the car.”

  He frowned at me then. “What car?”

  “The ones the guys were fixing, the green car. They had it nearly taken apart.”

  “And it was hers?”

  “That’s what she said.” At least, that was what I thought she said. I suddenly couldn’t remember her exact words, although they would come to me later.

  The whole scene would come to me later, like it was something I made up, like a dream that was only half there upon waking and then came, full-blown and unbidden, into the mind.

  That your car? I said to her, and she didn’t answer, at least not directly. She didn’t say yes or no.

  “Did you check with the boys at the station?” I asked.

  “They didn’t say nothing about a car.”

  “Did you ask Jed?”

  The sheriff frowned at me. I’d forgotten until then that he and Jed were drinking buddies. “Yeah, of course I did.”

  “Well, I can’t be the only one to remember it,” I said. “They had it torn apart.”

  “Izzat so?” he asked, stroking his chin. “You think that’s important?”

  “If it tells you who she is, it is,” I said, a bit stunned at his denseness.

  “Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t seem to be thinking of that. He seemed focused on something else altogether. The look that crossed his face was half sad, half worried. Then he heaved himself out of the chair, and left without even a good-bye.

  I sat in the sofa, wondering what, exactly, that all meant. I was still shaken by my own blindness, and by the Sheriff’s willingness to accuse me of a crime that seemed impossible to me.

  It seemed impossible that a woman that vibrant could be dead.

  It seemed impossible that a woman that vibrant had been black.

  It seemed impossible, but there it was. It startled me.

  I was more shocked at her color than at her death.

  And that was the hell of it.

  ***

  I tried not to think of it.

  I’d learned how to do that during the war — it’s what helped me survive Normandy — and it had been effective during my tour.

  But it stopped working about a week later when her family showed up.

  They came for the body, and they seemed a lot more out of place than she had. Her father was a big man, the kind most folks in McCardle would have crossed the street to avoid or would have bullied out of fear. Her mother was delicate, with the same Dresden features as her daughter but on much darker skin. The auburn hair didn’t seem to come from either of them.

  And with them was her husband. He wore a uniform, like I did, and his eyes were red as if he’d been crying for a long, long time. I saw them come out of the mortuary, the parents with their arms around each other, the husband walking alone.

  The husband threw me, and made me even more uncomfortable than I had already been.

  I thought she had flirted with me.

  I usually didn’t mistake those things.

  But, it seemed, I made a whole lot of mistakes in that short half hour I had known her.

  They drove out that night with her body in the back of their truck. I knew that because my conscience forced me over to the hotel to talk to them, to ask them about the green car, and to tell them I was sorry.

  When I got there, I learned that the only hotel in McCardle — my family’s hotel — didn’t take their kind. Maybe that, more than an assumption, explained the Sheriff’s remark: Girls like her didn’t get a divorce.

  Maybe they didn’t, at least not in McCardle, because the town made sure they couldn’t, unless they had some place to stay.

  And there weren’t blacks in McCardle then. The blacks didn’t start arriving for another year.

  ***

  The next day, I moved, over my mother’s protests, into my own apartment. It was a single room with a hot plate and a small icebox over the town’s only restaurant. I shared a bathroom with three other tenants, and counted myself fortunate to have two windows. The place came furnished, and the Murphy bed was long enough for me, although even with fans I had trouble sleeping. The building kept the heat of the day, and not even the temperature drop after sunset could ease it. On those unbearable summer nights, I lay in tangled sheets, the smell of greasy hamburgers and chicken-fried steak carried on the breeze. I counted it better than being at home.

  Especially after the nightmares started.

  Strangely they weren’t about her. Nor were they about the war. I didn’t have nightmares about that war for twenty years, not until I started seeing images from Vietnam on television. Then a different set of nightmares came, and I went to the VA where I was diagnosed with a delayed stress reaction and given a whole passel of drugs that I eventually pitched.

  No. Those early nightmares were about him. Her husband. The man with the olive green uniform and the red eyes. I knew guys like him. They walked with their backs straight, their faces impassive. They didn’t move unless they had to, and they never talked back, and if they showed emotion, it was because they thought guys like me weren’t looking.

  He hadn’t car
ed about hiding any more. His emotion had been too deep.

  And once Sheriff Conner figured out I had nothing to do with it, he’d declared the case closed. Over dinner the night before I left, my father speculated that Conner’d just shown up to show my father who was boss. Mother’d ventured that Conner hoped I was guilty, so it’d bring down the whole power structure of the town.

  Instead, I think, it just brought Conner down. He was out of office by the following year, and the year after that he was dead, a victim of a slow-speed single vehicle drunken car crash in the days before seat belts.

  I think no one would have known what happened if it hadn’t been for those nightmares. I’d dream in that dry, dry heat of him just standing there, looking at me, eyes red, face impassive. Her body was in the green car beside us, and he would stare at me, as if I knew something, as if I were keeping something from him.

  But how could I have known anything? I’d shared a Coke with her and gone on.

  I hadn’t even bothered to learn her name.

  ***

  In the sixties they called what I was feeling white liberal guilt. Not that I had done anything wrong, mind you, but if I had known what she was — who she was — I would have acted differently. I knew it, and it bothered me.

  It almost bothered me more than the fact she was dead.

  Although that bothered me too. That, and the dreams. And the green car.

  I went to Flaherty’s soon after the dreams started and filled up my tank. I got myself another Coke and I stared at the spot where I had seen her. The shadows were dark there, but not that dark. The air was cool but not that cool, and only someone who was waiting for a car would chose to wait in that spot, on that day, with a real town nearby. She must have been real thirsty to ask me for a drink.

  Real thirsty and real scared.

  And maybe she took one look at my uniform, and thought I’d be able to help her.

  She even tried to ask.

  You’re the first hospitable person I’ve met here, she’d said.

  I’m sure you’ll meet others.

  What she must have thought of that sentence.

  How wrong I’d been.

  I took my Coke and walked around the place, seeing lots of cars half finished, and even more car parts, but nothing of that particular shade of green.

  Her family had taken her home in a truck.

  The car was missing.

  And as I leaned on the back of that brick building, the bottle cold in my hand, I wondered. Had the mechanics started working on the car because they too hadn’t realized who she was? Had she gotten all the way to Nevada traveling white highways and hiding her darker-than-expected skin under a trail of moxy?

  I went into the mechanic’s bay, and Jed was there, taking putting oil into a 1937 Ford truck that had seen better days. A younger man stood beside him, and I wagered from the cut of his pants and the constant movement of his feet, that he’d been the guy under the car that day.

  I leaned against the wall, sipping my Coke, and watched them.

  They got quiet when they saw me. I grinned at them. I wasn’t wearing my uniform that day, just a pair of grimy dungarees and a t-shirt. Even so, I was hot and miserable, and probably looked it.

  I tilted my bottle toward them in a kinda salute. The younger man, the one I didn’t recognize, nodded back.

  “You seen that girl the other day?” I asked. I might have said more. I try not to remember. I can’t believe the language we used then: Japs and niggers and wops; the way we got gypped or jewed down; laughing at the pansies and whistling at the dames. And we didn’t think nothing of it, at least I didn’t. Each word had to be unlearned, just as — I guess — it had to be learned.

  Jed put a hand on his friend’s arm, a small subtle movement I almost didn’t see. “Why’re you askin’?” And I could feel it, that old antipathy between us. Every word we’d ever exchanged, every look we had was buried in those words.

  He wouldn’t talk to me, not really. He wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know. But his friend might. I had to play that at least.

  “I was wondering if she’s living around here.” I said with an intentional leer.

  “You don’t know?” the younger asked.

  My heart triple-hammered. I knew then that the sheriff hadn’t told anyone he’d come after me. “Know what?”

  “They found her in the desert with her face bashed in.”

  “Jesus,” I said softly, then whistled for good measure. “What happened?”

  “Dunno,” Jed said, his hand squeezing the other boy’s arm. Jed saw my gaze drop to his fingers, and then go back to his face. He grinned, like we were sharing a secret. And I didn’t like what I was thinking.

  It seemed simple. Too simple. Impossibly simple. A man couldn’t just sense that another man had done something wrong. He needed proof.

  “Too damn bad,” I said, taking another swig of my Coke. “I woulda liked a piece of that.”

  “You and half the town,” the younger one said, and laughed nervously.

  Jed didn’t laugh with him, but stared at me with narrowed green eyes. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear of it,” he said. “The whole town’s been talking.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I wasn’t listening.” I set the Coke down beside the radio and scanned the bay. “What’re they gonna do with that car of hers? Sell it?”

  “Ain’t no one found it,” the younger boy said.

  “She drove it outta here?” I asked. “She said it seemed hopeless.”

  Finally Jed grinned. He actually looked merry, as if we were talking about the weather instead of a murder. “Women always say that.”

  I didn’t smile back. “What was wrong with it?”

  “You name it,” the younger one said. “She’d driven that thing to death.”

  I knew one more question would be too many, but I couldn’t stop myself. “She say why?”

  “You gotta reason for all this interest, George?” Jed asked. “You can’t get nothing from her now.”

  “Guess not,” I said. “Just seems curious somehow. Woman comes here, to this town, and ends up dead.”

  “Don’t seem curious to me,” Jed said. “She didn’t belong here.”

  I stared at him a moment. “People don’t belong a lotta places but that don’t mean they need to die.”

  He shrugged and turned away, ending the conversation. I picked up my Coke bottle. It had gotten warm already. I took another sip, letting the sweet lemony taste and the carbonation make up for the lack of coolness.

  Then I went outside.

  What did I want with all this? To get rid of some guilt? To make the dreams go away?

  I didn’t know, and it angered me.

  “Hey.” It was the younger one. He’d come out into the sun, ostensibly to smoke. He lit up a Chesterfield and offered me one. I took it to be companionable, and we lit off the same match.

  Jed peeked out of the bay and watched for a moment, then disappeared, apparently satisfied that nothing was going to be said, probably thinking he had the kid under his thumb. Only Jed was wrong.

  The younger one spoke softly, so softly I had to strain to hear, and I was standing next to him. “She said she was driving from Mississippi to California to join her husband. Said he’d got back from Europe and got a job in some plant in Los Angeles. Said they’d make good money there, but they didn’t have it now, and could we do as little as possible on the car, so that it’d be cheap.”

  “Did you?” I asked. And when he looked confused, I added for clarification, “Keep it cheap?”

  He took a long drag off the cigarette, and let the smoke out his nose. “We didn’t finish,” he said.

  I felt that triple-hammer again. A little bit of adrenaline, something to let me know that I was going somewhere. “So where’s the car?”

  “We left it in the bay. Next morning, we come back and it’s gone. Jed, there, he cusses her out, says all them people are like that, you can’t trust ‘em f
or nothing, and that was that. Till the sheriff showed up, saying she was dead.”

  The car I saw couldn’t have been driven, and the woman I saw couldn’t have fixed it. She would not have stopped here if she could.

  “You left the car in pieces?” I asked. “And it was gone the next day? Someone drove it out of here?”

  He shrugged. “Guess they finished it.”

  “That would’ve taken some know-how, wouldn’t it?”

  “Some,” he said. He flicked his cigarette butt onto the sandy gravel. I glanced up. Jed was staring us from the bay. I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise.

  I took another drag off my cigarette and watched a heat shimmer work its way down the highway. The boy started walking away from me.

  “Where was she?” I asked. “When you left? Where was she?”

  And I think he knew then that my interest wasn’t really casual. Up until that point, he could have pretended it was. But at that moment, he knew.

  “I dunno,” he said, and his voice was flat.

  “Sure you do,” I said. I spoke softly so Jed couldn’t overhear me.

  The man looked at my face. His had turned bright red, and beads of sweat I hadn’t noticed earlier were dotting his skin. “I — left her outside. Near the Coke machine.”

  With a car that didn’t run, and no place to take her in for the night.

  “Did you offer to give her a lift somewhere?”

  He shook his head.

  “Was the station still open when you left?”

  “For another hour,” he said.

  “Did you tell the sheriff this?”

  He shook his head again.

  “Why not?”

  He glanced at Jed, who had crossed his arms and was leaning against the bay doors. “I didn’t think it was none of his business,” the boy whispered.

  “You didn’t think, or Jed there, he didn’t think.”

  “Neither of us,” the boy said. “Jed told her she could sleep in there by the car. But it woulda been an oven, even during the night. I think she knew that.”

  “Is that where she slept?”

  “I dunno.” This time the boy did not meet my gaze. Sweat ran off his forehead, onto his chin, and dripped on his shirt. He didn’t know, and he was sorry.

  And so was I.