Jimbo, who was struggling to strip off his landscaping khakis without losing his swim trunks beneath them, paused for a moment to consider the question. He held out his hand to Farsanna. “Then I reckon you wouldn’t be our honored guest.”
She examined his face. And then smiled.
I don’t suppose I’d seen her smile before, not a real one—maybe she hadn’t smiled since she’d moved to the Ridge. It was strange, that smile, and slow coming. Like a dark wave that swells and then crests, and splashes everything in its path. Her smile had that splash to it, whether or not I’d been looking to like her.
It took me a minute to recover from the force of that smile. And maybe Jimbo a minute longer, or two. But I tried not to let this nettle me much, since Bo was a man, or almost, and they’re all weak, Momma said: the first lesson every Southern momma teachers her girls, just before the Why We Let a Man Think He’s Won.
So I ignored Bo and took charge myself. “Follow me.”
I led the way, a half-circle around the pond, leaping boulder to boulder, to where Emerson and the other boys had spread out their towels. We joined them out on the palm of our favorite rock, which could cup us all in close.
As usual, the games had already begun for the doctors’ and lawyers’ and CPAs’ kids who didn’t work in the summers. Between Em and Jimbo’s landscaping and L. J.’s daddy’s Feed and Seed, our mangy pack rarely arrived during the most miserable heat of the day.
Already well established for the day, then, were the rope swing competitions. Boys from all over Pisgah Ridge conducted wild contests of masculine prowess from the rope on the sweetgum tree. Scrambling up the scrap wood nailed to the trunk, the boys hurled themselves to the rope and down into the water from branches higher and higher.
“Be a man about it,” they taunted each other.
“Put some hair on your chest!” they called out to the arc of an upside-down spin.
The day Farsanna first showed up with us, the banks of the Blue Hole were heavy with teenagers conducting the business of life from where they lay: long, lean bodies like big cats, stretching and sleeping and sunning and occasionally striking a particularly gorgeous pose for anyone who cared to admire. Farsanna Moulavi, walking last behind all of us, stepped from the shade of the hemlocks to a boulder soaked in full sun.
She was dark all right—no mistake about that. Even skin the color of homemade cocoa was dark for our Ridge. Her hair turned under in stiff, shiny waves, laying like uncoiled black licorice on her shoulders, glistening with the heat of the day. Beside her, I felt wan and anemic, like I’d been shipped from the factory without my final glaze and firing.
I remembered, there in the midst of admiring her, how just when you thought the world had gone still and soft, you could be blasted flat to the ground from behind.
More to comfort myself than because I believed it, I whispered to L. J. beside me as we watched the boys swing from the rope, “We’re a good generation past … you know. Stuff. Right?” Farsanna had already approached the water, dipping her toes in, taking her time.
“Technically, more than one generation,” he corrected, “depending on your denotation of ‘stuff.’ Assuming you’re referring to fatalities on the Ridge. On the other hand, if you’re alluding merely to life-threatening violence or legislation significant to racial discrimination—”
“Right. But fatalities, not so much. Lately. So, there’s no problem. Right?”
He cut his eyes at me. “Oh sure, Turtle. Right.”
But I wasn’t letting go of my comfort so quickly. “Times have changed, L. J. Right? Even here.” I said this with confidence I had to concoct right there on the spot.
He grunted. “Sure, times have changed. Who’s there to lynch on the Ridge nowadays? Only a Yankee or two.”
I knew that was a jab at my father, of course, and at Mollybird Pittman, who spent twenty years in New York, then came home—but never was quite right after that. We knew all about her not being right, with all the trouble she gave us on a regular basis as we landscaped her yard. Seemed she brought back to the Ridge the kind of attitude New Yorkers were feared for, which she delivered now from under a straw hat encircled by phony red roses. She’d inherited the hat, as well as her house and acres of gardens, from an aunt who, like Mollybird, lived out her days alone on the Ridge.
“I’m just saying,” I said.
L. J. turned that sneer on me. “Okay, Turtle.” It was the voice he used for his baby brother, Luke. “I’m entirely certain you’re entirely correct.”
“Shut up, L. J.,” I told him. Because I agreed with him.
Determined to shake off my conversation with L. J., I hit the water at a dead run and, climbing out of the water, shifted my attention to the new girl.
“You can’t just wade in,” I said to her as I surfaced. “Even in this heat, the water’s too cold.”
But she had already begun edging in beside our hand-shaped boulder. She nodded toward the chicken fights, which happened regularly near the north beach of the hole. “I would drown, I believe.”
“What? Oh, them. That’s nothing—just a kind of … mating ritual here.”
She studied them. “If you wish to join them, please, I have no—”
“Me? Shoot, I’m not—” I could have put her mind at ease by admitting I’d never once been asked to join in. But I left it only at this: “Don’t worry about it.”
Farsanna toe-stepped her way into the water, so cold it sometimes felt like it filleted the flesh clean off your bones. I sat on the rock, watching her closely. She never complained, or gasped even—and I had to give her credit for that. She edged in more and more, and as she submerged, I saw red bubbled up to her ribs.
For several seconds, I thought she’d been shot. Then I realized it was only the red cotton skirt. But it shook me a little that my mind had slipped there so fast.
And apparently, I wasn’t the only one to notice her floating red skirt: The rubble of boys at the base of the sweetgum erupted. In the sweetgum that held up the rope swing, Mort Beckwith and Buddy Buncombe stopped trying to shoulder each other off their precarious perch. They both hung to a limb with one arm and stared.
“Hey, Turtle,” Mort thundered. He must’ve dropped down the trail just after us. He stood there, his shirt off now, his gut-flesh gleaming white, not as heavily muscled as his arms or chest, and rounded out from his waist. There was no rifle holstered from his swim trunks or crooked under his arm, but I reckon I checked anyhow. I flipped on my back, floating, examining the blue circle of heaven above my head. Maybe if I ignored Mort, he’d go away. The sun impaled itself on a hemlock above my head.
“Hey, Turtle!” This time he had my attention—and everyone else’s. “So, Turtle, what’s that you brung with you? A black dog in a skirt?”
Buddy convulsed in laughter that looked for all the world like seizures—he’d laughed like that since we were all little, and he’d scared the fifth-grade teacher Miss Buckshorn half into her grave.
All around the Blue Hole in ripples like a stone had been dropped at its center, I could sense bodies rolling up into sitting positions, everyone watching, waiting for me to respond. I could feel Jimbo’s eyes on me. And Em’s and L. J.’s. Not to mention Farsanna’s. Even Welp watched me, and I knew without seeing just how he looked: his acne mottling still darker red as he smirked.
In the blue circle of heaven above my head, a long line of civil rights heroes marched before my eyes: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks and Marian Wright Edelman, and my father’s voice describing the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter and my mother’s asking sweetly, Now Shelby Lenoir, what do we think Jesus would do? But so far as I could tell, there was no we here—no me and Jesus or me and Martin or me and Momma.
Only me, floating. And wanting to weep for being unworthy of Bo’s faith in me. I could feel hi
m compelling me to speak: Say something, Turtle. Say something.
But I was that terrified child behind the steering wheel all over again and a truck barreling down. I pretended that I’d heard nothing, and dove under the water.
By the time I’d resurfaced, Bo, at the base of the sweetgum, had crossed his arms over his chest and was shouting to the top of the tree. “You know, Mort, your white done bleached out your brain. And if you’d like to come down here so’s I can say that to your face, I’d be happy to wait.”
Balancing on his branch, Mort let his snarl crack open, just the tiniest bit. The Beckwiths were all as slow as they were surly, so Mort only changed expressions in jolts and jerks, like a car whose clutch has gone bad.
With a Tarzan yell, he swung by one arm from the rope, and was still whooping when the water swallowed him whole.
And then it was finished. The rope resumed its pendulum rhythm over our heads, and boys dropped into geysers of Blue Hole brown water. A chicken fight broke out near the mud beach’s north end. Sunbathers rolled like pork on spits. And some rules got unraveled that day, there by the ragged hem of a pond.
I beached myself and crawled up to the granite palm. And I watched the Blue Hole, now with the sun almost completely below the rim of treetops, grow dim. Jimbo joined me, but his eyes had drifted past me to the new girl, sitting off to the side. My chest ached with the clamor of too many words that wanted out now—now—when it was too late. I whispered into the deepening light, and not even to him, the only thing I knew for sure I believed: “I’m so sorry.”
Still not looking at me, he slipped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me to him, just long enough for me to smell peanuts, and reach my fingers to the curls at the back of his neck. And then he was standing again.
I caught his hand and had lots I was going to say, all of it eloquent and heartfelt and stirring, beginning perhaps with Forgive me for my silence? And can you make the new girl forgive me? But a blowfish had found a home in my throat and sealed off my voice and my air.
Looking down at me for the first time, Jimbo squeezed my hand, and I knew it was absolution he was trying to give me. But I couldn’t curl even one finger around it just then.
I sat still and alone and hardly able to breathe in my nearly airless vacuum of not-yet-forgiveness. The granite palm that had always been my favorite perch now felt cold and not sufficiently cupped, like I might be pitched headlong out into the dusk that had begun swelling around us.
Farsanna stayed in the water for longer than I would have guessed—seeing how cold the water always was, and its being her first time.
“Farsanna,” I began slowly. “I ought to say …”
She looked back at me with that lack of expression I’d seen before. “My friends,” she said, “call me Sanna.”
I stood, the breath knocked clear out me, not knowing if she’d just accused me of not being her friend, or invited me in. I reached for her hand to help her out of the water. She ignored it, but nodded at me. “Call me Sanna,” she said again, looking me in the eye.
She emerged from the water, her skirt all limp from her hips, and her blouse a good seven shades darker from the silt. She took the towel Emerson offered her and let him wrap it around her shoulders.
Em held his towel on the new girl’s shoulders like it might slide to the ground if he didn’t anchor it there with his own hands. I watched the Blue Hole watching Em, but my brother was focused on Farsanna’s wet shoulders and didn’t seem to notice or care.
He tipped his head close to hers, and then allowed Farsanna to hold the towel for herself.
I wanted to shake Em. To rattle some sense back into my brother. To tell him how he was looking just then, and what people might think if he kept standing like that with the new girl. At the far side of the Hole was Mort Beckwith, watching it all. The right side of Mort’s mouth was lifting back into a snarl.
I turned to Jimbo—he always knew what to say. Bo was watching the two of them too. But saying nothing. And not looking my way.
As we gathered our things to leave for the day, it seemed to me that murmurs rose from the banks of the hole in a tide all around us. But then it backwashed into flotsam, just a whisper or two, floating there, unmoored and harmless. So how bad could it have been? That’s what I told myself every few feet of the way back out of the Hole: How bad, how bad, how bad could it …? Harmless, harmless, how bad? I didn’t look back to see if Mort was still watching. But I knew that he was.
4 Hog Wild
Extracting yourself up from the Blue Hole’s hollow was always the trickiest part: Having finally been cool for the first time all day—maybe all week—you had to climb real slow, just below sweat-speed, back out of that bowl with the sides of slick clay and slate. Sanna examined us laboring up, hand on root over foot on rock, then swung herself into the steep. Once, maybe twice, but not more, she accepted the hands that Emerson and Jimbo both offered to help. Mostly, she climbed on her own, jerking that skirt out of the lift of each foot.
“That’s right,” I told her once, because she deserved some kind of praise, her climbing nearly as fast as I did and her in a long skirt. And her not taking the hands that the boys offered. I was liking her better.
At the top, I bent to retrieve my flip-flops, and still barefoot, I sprinted to the pickup, arriving first, beating L. J., who generally didn’t think too highly of girls—which made it worth breaking a sweat again. We piled into the truck bed, all of us flesh-heavy and quiet, this time not caring whether or not we rested our legs on mulch and manure.
Emerson’s truck bucked its way out of the woods and back onto paved roads.
Lifting his head a few inches from the metal floor, Jimbo was the first to trouble himself with talk. “Hot retching road kill, I can smell Steinberger’s from here. Who’s in?” He was our social chairman, in charge of judging when we might extend our play at the risk of missing the dinner our mothers had warned us to be home for.
L. J. cast his vote without stirring. “By all means, if you could refrain from unsavory allusions to maimed wild life, I’d say let’s attend to digestive demands. I’m utterly famished.” But his mother was out of town, and his father would work late at the Feed and Seed, so he was hardly popping up courage. I didn’t say this out loud, because he was family.
“We got to. I’m starved,” Bobby Welpler said. “All those gonna stick with the pack, raise their hands.” He looked straight at me, like it was me who might spoil things by reminding us all to get home. And then he stared straight at Farsanna, and that look spoke for itself too, reminding us all who wasn’t a part of the pack. Then his little melon-seed eyes, wide set and without much sign of intelligent life, settled on me. “All those got to get home to their mommas can hop off right here.”
“Yeah,” I came back, “but your momma wouldn’t notice one way or the—”
Jimbo was shaking his head real small at me. I stopped there. But I’d already treaded a little too far. We were all thinking the same thing, even Welp, I wanted to shout, defending myself. He knows what his momma is. Everyone does. And that was true. Only Jimbo mostly saw things out his own porthole, he liked to say, and you could count on his judging people a whale of a lot either better or worse than they looked to everyone else.
Welp turned his face to the woods and shot air through his teeth. Whatever he said, to me or to his mom or to himself, he finished his thought into the wind, still hot off the side of the bed.
Emerson swung his pickup off the highway at Stonewall Jackson Pike.
“A half mile down here’s Hog Wild,” I told Farsanna. I pointed to the sign ahead: a pink pig gone sassy in a miniskirt and cowboy boots.
“This is a …” Farsanna squinted down the road at the low-slung log cabin with an arrangement of picnic tables out front, “… a restaurant, no?”
“An establishment
. A joint,” L. J. corrected. “‘No shirt, no shoes’ is entirely customary, if not entirely hygienic.” He swung himself out of the truck before it came to a stop. The rest of us scurried to follow, and even the Big Dog pawed open her passenger-side door before Emerson had properly parked.
Emerson pulled a quarter from his shorts pocket, and we flipped to see which one of us would call our mother.
“Tails, you call,” I said just before it spun to a halt, “heads, I do.”
We both bent over the coin.
He sighed. “I always call Momma.”
I patted my brother’s cheek. “She likes to know a man’s in charge, sugar.”
“She’ll be ticked, our missing dinner.”
“Not if you charm her.”
Even Emerson had to agree. Our momma believed in men. And our momma believed in charm. He stalked off, quarter in hand.
Sanna stood watching, maybe waiting for someone to explain. I stopped myself just short of pointing, and nodded to the man taking orders behind a screen mesh. “Steinberger owns it. Hyme Steinberger—that’s him there—Steinberger and daughters. They go to our school.”
Jimbo motioned us all to a table and bowed, like he was the maître d’. “Steinberger hickory-smokes his pigs for three squealing-free days. Don’t got no competition in all Carolina.” He bowed again and grinned at us all in a sweep. “Wet shells and welcome.”
Bobby Welpler lowered his voice and elbowed Farsanna. “Steinberger don’t eat the stuff himself; Steinberger’s a Jew.”
We all looked at Bobby.
“And,” Jimbo said, “he cooks one almighty mean pig.” He led the way to our favorite table—Steinburger himself called it our table.
Welp turned to the new girl. “What about you? You worship cows where you come from? What if there’s beef in this here barbecue? You afraid you’ll eat up one of your gods?” He snickered through lips he always kept closed when he laughed—Welp’s front teeth were brown at the gums and one incisor was missing.
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