Farsanna answered in English, mostly. “I am with—” she glanced over her shoulder, “with a girl from the school, Mata.”
The mother’s hands went to Farsanna’s eyes, feeling their shape. The mother faced in my direction and said something.
Farsanna shook her head. “Yes, she is there at the door. What? In English, Mata. You know he wishes for us to speak in English, no? You know he wishes for me to know friends of my same years.”
Farsanna’s mother took two steps in my direction, her body pitching heavily to the right as she swung her left leg forward. Holding one hand before her, she groped for the kitchen door frame and stopped there, still facing in my direction. Though I’d no idea what she could see of me. Me and my cutoffs.
Smoothing her mother’s headscarf, Farsanna kissed her mother on both cheeks. “You will not weary yourself this day, no? What? Yes. I will. Safely, yes, Mata.”
Not sure if I should speak at all, I waved good-bye, then dropped my hand. Who knows if she could see me? I backed into the pine veneer rectangle of a door, and into the outside.
“Thank you,” I mumbled from the front stoop, then added louder, “ma’am,” because even if the Moulavis were odd, and not just their color of skin, and even if my stomach was flapjacking over onto itself, I’d not been raised by a pack of wolves.
I waited until Farsanna pulled the pine veneer back into place—or as much as it shut, its having warped out of alignment with the door frame. “So,” I said as we walked toward the truck. I made sure my voice had a casual shrug to it. “So she…” I stopped there, a little stumped, wondering how Momma would’ve asked about how come Mrs. Moulavi limped, or whether or not she could see or hear like regular folks. “She …?”
Farsanna knelt to scratch the stray dog behind his ears, then looked me dead in the eye. “She did not wish it, to go away from her home. She does not wish for her daughter to cease in wearing a hijab.” She swept her arms over her head and I gathered she meant the scarf. “She does not wish to speak English or Sinhala, the languages of business in our ho—in Sri Lanka. Rather, she wishes to speak only in Tamil. She has,” Farsanna glanced away from me toward the trees as she felt for the word, “fear.”
It was more than I’d asked for, and still didn’t answer what I’d intended to ask. I tried again. “Is your momma, um, can she see?”
“She had sickness as a child. That made her see and walk not well. Although I think perhaps,” she glanced my way quickly, “I think perhaps her fear makes it more.”
The mutt licked Farsanna’s hand and as she stroked the dog’s ears, her eyes moved to the truck bed. “He likes me,” she said, “no?”
I watched the new girl swing her leg out from under her red skirt—a brown leg, darker at the knee than the thigh, and darker still more at the calf. And I watched the boys watching the brown, or maybe the shape—I wouldn’t know what boys see when they watch—of first one leg then the other, and not a one of them—Emerson or Jimbo or L. J. or Welp—able to talk. Except for Em to the stray: “You stay here, now. You hear? You be good.”
Me, I had a spasm of wanting to stay put myself, of fear that tripped up my feet and made me wish desperately I could miss this one trip to the Blue Hole with our mangy pack and the new girl. Because I was beginning to think what a bad, what a truly remarkably bad idea this whole thing might be.
2 A Shot Over the Bow
We always relied on Jimbo when some occasion called for gallantry. Maybe it was his name—James Beauregard for the Civil War general on his momma’s side—that made him seem like he was bowing when he smiled and shook your hand.
It was Jimbo who reached for Farsanna’s arm—her having struggled to climb, what with her skirt, into the truck. She floated in with the balancing help of Bo’s arm, one of her hands holding the side of that skirt like some dark Cinderella climbing into her coach. It occurred to me then, and not for the last time, I might not much like her.
“You’re from,” Jimbo kept hold of her hand to shake it, “somewhere— some island.” He pumped her hand and let go.
“That is correct. If this would be India …” She flattened her right hand against the air and placed her left fist beside it, but stopped. “Probably you know where is Sri Lanka.”
I doubt Jimbo Riggs passed a geography test in his life. Or if he had, it was only because the teachers all thought the same thing about Bo: “What a sugar.” Jimbo nodded at the new girl—and then winked, like he’d just arrived back from the place, and it was a secret between them.
But I knew it wasn’t just her. It wasn’t that she was special so much, or singled out with his wink. That was Bo’s way. That was all.
Emerson leaned out the left window of the truck cab to touch his hat, a filthy Boston Red Sox baseball cap he wore backwards and rarely ever removed, and Big Dog, who always rode shotgun, stuck her head out the right side and retriever-grinned and panted. Em put the truck into gear and pulled out, the tires spitting white dust and gravel. We settled ourselves down into the truck bed, taking some care—not too much—not to stretch our legs on flakes of mulch or manure. Welp sulked at scrub pine out over the sides of the truck bed.
Jimbo braced his feet against the tailgate. Because he’d slumped back onto his elbows, and because his Adidas were size 14, his stern stuck up as high as his bow, like a canoe. Bo rested the guitar on his chest and strummed from a nearly prone position.
The new girl seated herself in a right angle and then, multiplying right angles, folded her legs under her skirt and her arms over her chest, like she’d set up some sort of shield.
“Sri Lanka. The island nation,” L. J. said, all smug, “formerly known as Ceylon.” L. J. wore his disdainful smile, which seemed to scare the new girl a little: She started, and blinked. But I could have told her he meant nothing by it. Emerson, who’d camped out with him, swore L. J. even slept with a disdainful smile. It was as part of his face as the slope of his nose. “Under British rule prior to its independence.” Then he shrugged, like he could’ve reeled off major crops and annual rainfall too if he’d wanted.
I can speak ugly of L. J., his being kin. His daddy was my momma’s brother, and L. J. was the oldest of his siblings, the smartest, and the least well-liked of four brothers: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and L. J.—born before his daddy got religion. Folks outside family avoided L. J., mostly because he made people nervous by saying what he thought when he thought it, like he’d been raised in New York.
“How are you finding the Ridge,” L. J. asked, “and its inhabitants?”
Farsanna’s face registered nothing.
I’d seen that expression—the one that wasn’t one, really—before. At least twice before. First, in front of the water fountain, brown spit at her feet, and then again later at a baseball game just before the school year had ended.
_________
It was our last home game of the season, and Pisgah had the field in an inning that was whimpering to an end. Even the first baseman was yawning—that was Jimbo, his hair poking straight up from his head each time he whisked off his cap.
It was an afternoon game and they’d let us out early from classes to watch—sports being the primary purpose of Pisgah’s schools. I’d attended sixth-period typing class less than a half dozen times that whole May, and still couldn’t tap out The red fox ran from the hound without fumbling keys. I loved these afternoon games, if only for the view. At the far end of the ball field, hemlocks sawtoothed into blue sky, and off in the distance, the haze of more mountain ridges. From the trunk-skirts of those hemlocks, the earth drops three thousand feet to a ribbon of river called the French Broad. Emerson was a Red Sox fan, and rabid—I’ve learned now in Boston that all of them are—and he liked to think of that line of hemlocks as our own Fenway Green Monster. He’d once whacked a ball through it, during a high-tension ninth inning. Sometimes on rainy days in
the porch hammock, Em and Jimbo and I would make up stories about just where that ball had floated by now.
“The ball washed ashore,” I once suggested from deep in the hammock, “near Highlands, at the dock of a house on Lake Toxaway.” Highlands and Toxaway, we’d heard, catered to tourists from outside the South, served hash browns and unsweetened tea, and, unthinkably, sold no local newspaper but only the New York Times.
Bo, sprawled full length on the wide white planks of the porch and popping peanuts into his Coke, lifted his head. “What then, Turtlest?” In the big wicker chair, Em paused in picking out “Dueling Banjos” on his guitar, and waited for me to decide.
“Well … the lake house belonged to … let’s see … to Bucky Dent.”
Em spit violently to the side.
“Remind me,” Bo asked, too innocently, “who that was.”
“The Yankees’ shortstop,” I told him, “who hit the three-run homer last year during a tiebreaker and won the game and the American League pennant for New York. Remember? And prolonged the Curse.”
Emerson hurled a handful of peanuts at me. “C’mon, Turtle. Bo watched the game with us. He just enjoys seeing me suffer. So go on with your story.”
“So Bucky Dent picked up the ball,” I continued, “just to see, and it was still so hot from Em’s hit that the ball burned the man’s hands.”
Em considered this hopefully. “How badly?”
“So badly he fell to his knees in unspeakable pain, and in his agony, begged forgiveness for his sins, especially his playing for New York, and pledged an everlasting oath of allegiance to the Red Sox.”
Satisfied, Em sighed and Bo, grinning, popped more peanuts into his Coke.
Jimbo lifted his Coke in a toast. “Revenge and repentance go real nice together.”
But that particular afternoon at the ball field, I sat on the bleachers with L. J. and Welp while Jimbo and Em played ball. I was sucking in deep the scent of the mountains, like incense maybe for people who pray. I was basking, too, in the glory—if only reflected—of having a brother and a brother’s best friend star on the team. They were mine: my Emerson, my Jimbo, and I roused myself between snow cones to make that clear, their being mine, by clapping extra and calling their names that I shortened for show—because they were mine and I could: One more, Em, one more! ’Atta boy, Bo, ’atta boy!
Above me in the bleachers, I noticed Jimbo’s daddy. He sat there sunk deep into rolls of dark suit, there in full sun. He was sweating into his necktie, a wide, faded yellow triangular flag hanging limply, wearily, from his neck as if it were begging to be relieved of its duty. Reverend Riggs, his round face made rounder still by a balding blond head, resembled his son in nothing but the dimples. And unlike his son’s impish green glint, Reverend Riggs’ pale blue eyes above round-apple cheeks always looked eager—even desperate—to please. He waved to me tentatively. Come to think of it, Reverend Riggs always waved tentatively, as if he were asking permission to say hello.
When I turned back to the field, Jimbo was tipping his catcher’s mask to his daddy. I wondered if Bo saw in his daddy what everyone else did: the colorlessness that defined the man—his washed-out eyes, and worn-out yellow and off-white of his skin, his ties, his hair. The way neither his flesh nor his thoughts seemed to take on a firm substance, never seemed to push back against whatever happened to poke into him.
But Jimbo adored his daddy, and we all adored Jimbo, so I made a habit of stealing glances at the Reverend whenever I could, hoping to see whatever Jimbo saw there. Once again this day, though, I could see nothing much but that yellow triangular flag of a tie.
Sitting beside me, L. J. was scowling into a calculus textbook—the first time our school ever offered the class, and only because L. J. insisted. It had to be hard for a boy to be clumsy and stringy and smart in a school that cared nothing for schooling. He sat in that heat, the sweat on his nose making a slide for his glasses, him pushing the horn-rims back into place once a page.
Beside L. J. was little Welp, who’d never been smart or athletic or cute. Like always that year, he’d gone out for the team—he’d puppied after Emerson and Jimbo since we were all small. But he’d not made even the first cut, and muttered all through every game I remember about how the coach didn’t like him, had something against him, that life was unfair. And sometimes when he thought no one was paying attention to him—we rarely were—he’d fuss over how maybe if he’d had a dad to defend him, or even a mom, a mom who was sober …
In fact, it was Welp, occupied with carving “Bobby” into the chocolate top of his Snickers bar with his pocketknife, who first noticed when the new girl came walking alone toward the bleachers.
“Well,” he said through a mouth full of Snickers, “who let the black panther out of her cage?”
“Shut up, Welp,” L. J. and I said together, without looking at him. Welp was the sort you learned to handle that way.
But he got a good flutter and flap from the gaggle of girls sitting down the bleachers from us. They were the Miss Pisgah types, with Neesa Nell Helms as their leader, their hair in identically angled Farrah Fawcett swoops they recurled and resprayed between classes. Here in the bleachers, deprived of mirrors and plugs, they calmed themselves with strawberry lipgloss they passed like a pipe.
The girls turned and looked at Bobby and laughed, even as we all watched the new girl approach.
“Where do you s’pose she thinks she’ll sit?” Neesa asked, with her volume cranked up to full. “I’d real gladly let her sit here—except for my having a nose.” She sniffed high in the air then, and crinkled her face.
Passing behind home plate, the new girl paused, like she was watching the game for real, and not just stalling for time because she had no place to sit.
“I don’t reckon they learn them to shower in …” Hayley Neal held up her palm and one fist, “wherever the place is she comes from.”
“My folks say,” another one offered, “her kind’s got overdeveloped glands of some sort, bless their hearts. Been proved. Our yard man’s so bad you can’t hardly stand close enough to give him instructions.”
Hayley squealed. “Look, Neesa. Emerson Maynard’s staring at you again, I’m swearing. I been saying he likes you.”
Neesa’s eyes sliced back to me. “Lands, who could tell that all the way from left field?”
Hayley Neal must’ve forgotten Em’s kid sister two rows behind to bear witness. Or maybe she’d calculated, like most every other girl at our school, on my not much counting. “Lord, Neesa, look! I’m swearin’, I swear I’m swearin’!”
I gave them both glowers of utter disgust meant to slay them right there on the spot. But they lived. Lived, and even flipped on Hayley’s transistor. Three Dog Night crooned from her purse: The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and wr—. Hayley wrinkled her nose, and she shut the thing off.
“I swan,” Neesa was broadcasting, “I do believe Jimbo Riggs is the one staring this way. At you, Hayley Neal. You know, I sure see what you mean: He is awful cute.”
The bill of Bo’s cap ticked toward us, but then back over the plate—someone was at bat.
Hayley played at gasping and smacking her friend. “You hush, Neesa, or I won’t tell you nothing, not ever again.”
Neesa Nell held her hand out, arm straight, for the lip-gloss, and then stiffened, like a pointer back onto her prey: All she lacked was a tail. “Don’t look now, girls, but somebody’s coming. Hold your breath, ladies.”
The new girl had to have heard this. From that distance, she couldn’t have missed it—no one’s English is that bad.
But on she came, the new girl did, like she’d take us all out in one fast punch from those eyes. She walked straight up to where the Miss Pisgahs huddled. And sat down.
They were so stunned—we all were—that nobody spoke. L. J.
even shut his calculus book and made a point of cleaning his glasses, like he didn’t want to miss anything. The girls cut their eyes right and left at each other, shredding the air between them. But Farsanna Moulavi sat still, right there in the tatters of silence.
In fact, she sat still through the end of that inning and the whole limping next one and into the last. Then she rose, not hurried, not one little bit, looked slowly around her, those eyes looking short-fused and burning—then descended the bleachers.
I wondered when they’d go off, those eyes, and blow us all clear off the Ridge and down the French Broad. Never seen anything like it myself, the new girl’s way of behaving. It was like she’d had the great gate of teenage social approval clanged shut in her face—and in public. And yet she’d walked away from it all in one piece. Even defiant.
Me, I couldn’t help but like her a little—a little—for that, even if she was strange like they said, like I’d seen for myself.
A kethunk, kethunk behind me signaled Reverend Riggs making his way down from the bleachers one step at a time, his spherical body balanced, just barely, on each metal step. His head was bobbing in Bo’s direction, both arms already beginning to rise as if he could hug his son clear through the fencing that guarded home plate.
Farsanna had stopped walking just around the back of home plate which Jimbo had just crossed for our final run. She stood still, Jimbo turning toward her. He grinned.
“Good game,” he said to the new girl.
Her back to me, I couldn’t see her expression, only that her head cocked, unsure maybe what Jimbo meant, his words or his grin. I could see that she nodded, and walked on.
The kethunk behind me had ceased, Reverend Riggs’ round body motionless there on the third-to-last bleacher step. Perspiring from his balding blond head down into his yellow necktie, he was watching his son, who was watching the new girl walk away from the field. Reverend Riggs’ eyebrows crinkled together over the bridge of his nose.
_________
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