By five, having labored all day in the heat, we’d exhausted not only our bodies but also her imagination for what else we might do with magnolias and roses.
She held up a blossom for us as we packed up our tools. “This one’s gone pink,” she accused.
“Yes, ma’am,” Emerson said. “It’s grown a little different from the rest. Kind of nice, don’t you think?”
Mollybird’s look assured us that no, she did not.
Jimbo hauled a shovel back out of the flatbed. “How ‘bout I just dig up that pesky old rebel for you, Miss Pittman?”
“See that you do that, young man.”
Em reached for his clipboard, which was his subtle signal for payment. “And where would you like us to transplant the rose, Miss Pittman?”
“I do not care for pink, Emerson Maynard. I do not care for pink.” She turned and strode toward the house, her hat’s roses—red roses—nodding emphatically. “You may bill me,” she said as the screen door slammed shut.
I helped Jimbo ease the old rose into a black plastic nursery container. I lowered my voice to imitate Mollybird Pittman’s root-cellar range: “I do not care for pink, young men. Must I tell you again? I do not care for pink!”
Jimbo braced the rose with two bags of manure. “What pink you reckon bit her in the Mollybird?”
“What do you reckon,” I asked him back, “they did to her in the North?”
_________
Up to full speed on the main road—Em’s truck strained at fifty—we passed the Moulavi house without comment. I watched Bo’s face, but he only winked and passed me his Coke. When we pulled into the parsonage drive, my heart idled, real roughly, as Jimbo’s daddy waved from the porch. For a moment, I thought he would walk out to greet us. And for a moment, I half wished he would, and lay bare Jimbo’s plans for the night, because whatever they were, they weren’t with his daddy—to me that was stark naked clear. I was wondering why I’d handed Bo his alibi, just like I’d wanted him to hand it back to us.
But Jimbo just patted my knee and scrambled to unload himself and a half bag of peanuts.
Em snarled from the truck cab, “Just you recall there, Riggs, nobody ever got let into heaven rooting against the Sox.”
“Fenway be dyed pink,” Bo retorted cheerfully from the porch.
_________
The Sox tanked in the last inning.
When Em’s muttering turned to abject despair, I looked up from the novel I’d opened to read during time-outs.
“What’s wrong, Big Brother?”
“Nothing. Why should anything be wrong?” He glowered at me. “We need pecan pie at Steinberger’s. Now.”
I closed my novel only halfway. “If you can be nice.”
“I can be nice.”
“And if you’re paying.”
Em whistled for Big Dog, who appeared, retriever-grinning, the truck keys in her mouth. He grabbed the Paradise Lost he’d been smuggling inside Field and Stream all week, and glanced to see if I’d seen. I had mercy on him and pretended not to.
It was just after dusk. Slowing on Elm, Bo’s street, Em nodded toward the dark, lifeless windows of the parsonage. “Now what do you make of that?”
“What?”
“That. Nobody’s up.”
“Asleep, maybe,” I said. “Game just ended. The good Reverend Riggs’ been looking whooped lately—the kind of late-night prowling he’s been up to can take it out of a man, don’t you think?” Em shot me a look.
Big Dog, circling on the seat between Emerson and me, recognized the house and whined. Emerson drove on, slowing again before the Moulavis’ house. “You wanna see if Farsanna wants to come with us? Tell her we won’t be out but a minute.”
I pointed to the naked plate-glass window. “Her dad’s got his face to the floor. I’d be scared to disturb his … him.”
“C’mon, Turtle. How ’bout you just knock on the door.”
“I don’t see you volunteering.”
Em just looked at me.
“Yeah,” I finally said. “Well. He looks busy. I’m not going in. Drive on, Ralph Waldo. It’s just you and me tonight.”
Emerson, eying me suspiciously, drove on to the restaurant.
_________
Fumbling nervously with a serrated knife, Steinberger shook his head from behind the mesh screen. “We got only key lime left tonight.”
“Great,” I said. “We’ll have two slices.”
“You sure, Mr. S.?” Emerson persisted. “I had my taste buds all set to pecan.”
The old man leaned in close to the mesh. “Your friend,” he said, “ate me out of pecan.” He cut the two pieces and handed us our Styrofoam plates.
“Jimbo?” Emerson asked, not reaching for the plates. “Jimbo was here?”
Steinberger nodded.
I pushed past my brother for the plates. “Okay, well, thanks. You have a good night. Let’s go, Em. Big Dog here’s getting bored.” The golden looked up at me and grinned.
My brother ignored me—and her. “Was Reverend Riggs here too? With Jimbo?”
Steinberger turned his back to the screen, busying himself with the coffee machine. I watched him pour out a pot that smelled like he’d just made it, shaking his head, distracted. “Hard to say. Been busy tonight. So many coming and going.”
Emerson waited for more. More didn’t come.
Mollybird Pittman was there, her head for once uncovered. She sat alone—no surprise there—at a table in the farthest corner, nearly into the woods. In front of her perched a piece of key lime pie, still unscathed by the fork that hovered over its stiff meringue hat. We often saw her there—often saw most everyone on Pisgah Ridge at Hog Wild some time or another. But the sight of Mollybird tonight made my back ache again.
Because we weren’t with the whole Pack, we skirted past our usual spot. Shoehorning ourselves into a picnic table whose benches had been built too close, we sat with our backs to the dirt parking lot.
Footsteps on sawdust and pine needles make little sound. So we never heard the trouble that was approaching us from behind.
19 General Mollybird
Big Dog must have sensed something wasn’t quite right, because from underneath the table, she whined.
“Don’t cry to me,” I told her, bending to show her my pink soft drink can under the table. “You don’t like Tab, remember?” And as I sat up, the hand on my shoulder made me jump and drop my can. I turned to see Mort, leering.
Just behind Mort, Buddy Buncombe leaned over our table as Mort wedged himself in beside me and put his head close to mine. My insides clenched with the stench of tobacco dip and two-day-old sweat. I turned my head to the side and scooted away, but Mort pressed himself closer. “Just wanted to say, Turtle, Emerson, just wanting to let you know how we was hoping to help.”
“Help?” Emerson asked this, his voice hammered thin.
This time I knew to keep quiet.
“Y’all’s trouble,” Mort repeated.
Emerson shook his head slowly. “We aren’t in trouble.”
“We heard you was having yourself some trouble.”
“Thanks. But we’re not.” Em reached for his keys. “As a matter of fact, we were just leaving.”
But Mort and Buddy flanked us as we walked to the truck. “We heard,” Mort drawled, “that you was being forced to keep company with …” from his distended lower lip where he was dipping tobacco, he sent a stream of tobacco in a long arc just ahead of our steps, “the wrong sort of folk.”
“We reckoned,” Buddy put in, “me and Mort did, we should warn you to be shed of the wrong sort.”
“Anybody can make that kind of mistake.” Mort held his rifle with his armpit while he lit a cigarette. “Once,” he added, his lip curling up
on one side.
Em stepped past Mort’s rifle to make his way to the driver’s-side door. “Reckon we’d be just fine as we are. Don’t need any help; don’t need any warnings.”
“Unless,” I added, drawing courage by swinging myself into the passenger side, Big Dog at my feet, and slamming the door, “by the wrong sort, you’re meaning you.”
Buddy guffawed, then, his head always engaging in jerks and jolts, seemed to remember something he’d wanted to say. “Hey. We saw, me and Mort did, your pal Bo here tonight. Just him and y’all’s …” He looked to Mort to finish the sentence.
“Friend!” Mort spat, sending brown juice onto the cab seat, laughing when I flinched. But there was brown juice splattered on the truck cab now, and a general film of filth from the way he’d pronounced that last word, something far worse than obscene the way it came out of his mouth.
Mort held up his cigarette. “Y’all be careful now, playing with fire. Y’all don’t wanna get hurt none. And associating yourselves with the wrong type could put you smack in the middle of nowhere you wanna be.” He spread his fingers and let the cigarette drop to the ground, a snake of smoke rising from the sawdust and pine like it was charmed.
Mort and Buddy stayed where they were, beefy arms braced on each side of the truck cab. The cigarette butt in the sawdust and pine sputtered and hissed, then sparked into a flame. Mort bent down for a small pine branch whose end had caught fire.
Em had the keys up to the ignition, but Mort’s arm was already inside the driver’s-side window, the burning pine branch in Emerson’s face. “Sometimes,” Mort drawled, “playing with fire can get people hurt. And it’d be an awful shame, a real awful shame to see the two of you hurt.”
Em grasped Mort’s wrist to try and wrench the branch from him.
Buddy pointed to me, backed to the far corner of the passenger side, and he snorted. “At least Turtle here knows to steer clear of fire.”
At that moment, a voice shrilled from the other side of Steinberger’s hut, startling us all into frozen mid-motion. The voice didn’t bother itself with a name: “You, cousin. Come here, boy!”
We all looked at Mort Beckwith. Mollybird Pittman was his mother’s second cousin—all Pisgah knew that—which made him once removed.
“Yes’m,” he called back, not looking at us, but withdrawing the branch from inside the truck cab. He let it drop to the ground and, without looking down, stomped the last of the flame out with his boot.
“Boy, do you plan on bellowing at me from there to here,” Mollybird ripped into him, “or you plan on walking over here to me like something civilized?”
Mort Beckwith tucked his gun under his arm, and, grudgingly, lumbered her way. Em and I, and even Buddy, craned our heads back to watch.
“You and your daddy haven’t been to call on me lately,” Mollybird Pittman was saying, even before Mort reached her.
“Yes’m.”
“Not for years, would be my reckoning.”
“Yes’m.”
“And your momma comes only twice a year or so, bringing me a pie—like because I don’t have a husband I can’t bake one myself.”
“Yes’m.”
“You agreeing with that?”
“Yes’m. I mean no’m.”
“You as dense as you are big? You in school yet?”
“It’s summer.”
“Lord, it’s 200 degrees. I believe I know summer when I feel it charbroiling me, boy. I meant college. You planning on college?”
There was a pause. “I don’t rightly know. I got one more year yet to be figuring.”
“What’s that there under your arm?”
Mort looked under his arm like he was surprised to find anything there. “That’d be my gun.”
“Lord have mercy, I know a gun when I see it. What’s it doing here with you? You using the barrel to eat with instead of a fork?”
He lifted the rifle toward her, for her to admire. “I reckon I carry it with me sometimes.”
She knocked it away. “I reckon you can get that thing out of my face.”
When Mort retreated from General Mollybird, he marched straight back to his truck and sat waiting for Buddy, the engine snorting and ready to go. Buddy nodded goodnaturedly to Em and me, like he’d been paying us a friendly call, and he ambled over to join Mort.
I thought maybe I saw one more boy, small and wiry and awkward, crouched there on the hood of Mort’s truck, hunched in the middle like a hood ornament nobody thought to mount right. The hood ornament bore some resemblance, I thought, to someone I knew. And then as the figure scrambled from the hood and into the cab with Buddy and Mort, I thought maybe I’d seen wrong, its being so dark at the far side of the lot and our headlights facing away.
I scratched Big Dog on the head to keep my hands from shaking. The lights from Mort’s truck dissolved into the dark. We sat, not talking, Em and me. And then when the crickets’ calls to each other clattered against the quiet, I took a deep breath. “We better go.”
Em was staring out into the woods. “So the jerk was here.”
For a minute, I thought he’d spotted the same slinking figure on the hood of Mort’s truck. “You saw him too? Was it Welp?”
“What?”
“With Mort?”
“What’re you hallucinating about, Turtle? I’m talking about Bo.”
“Oh.” I understood. “Well, maybe they were hungry.” And then I wished I hadn’t said they. Em frowned at me and started the engine.
_________
We took the long way home, swung by the Look. The lights of the Valley blinked like fireflies suspended in black. I stopped myself just short of reaching to catch one. Em shut off the motor when we arrived at the edge of the ridge, and we crawled out on the rock that sat three thousand feet above the Valley.
“You s’pose,” I wondered to Emerson, “it’s as peaceful down there tonight as it looks?”
“From down there it likely looks peaceful up here. Reckon we know from personal experience wouldn’t either one of those be right exactly.”
I lay back, breathing in the clover and pine that had baked all day in the August sun.
“Hey, Em? You reckon you’ll live all your life here?”
“Not college.”
“Well, ’course not college.” We understood the bargain our parents had struck: that our father had allowed Momma to have us christened in the Methodist church, and in return we would be sent North to college. For our father, it was a kind of Faustian selling of souls—only to the opposite team. “I mean come home after. Later, I mean. After college.”
Emerson didn’t answer.
And I wasn’t expecting an answer, since I didn’t have one myself.
After a long while of sitting in silence, we stumbled several feet in the dark back to the truck.
“Em?”
He looked up from thumbing through his keys.
“Emerson, we gonna tell Dad? About Mort and them. And Seventh Street. And … everything. All the stuff we’ve kept saying doesn’t mean anything.” I asked this even knowing the answer, knowing we wouldn’t.
Em met my eye, briefly, then swung himself into the cab. “What do you think, Turtle?” he asked, not really asking.
“I think we just may be in a world of trouble, and it’s too late to start explaining ourselves to anyone now.” I pulled out the first tape my hand touched, Martha and the Vandellas, and we listened, not speaking, as we drove home.
_________
When Em and I reached our own porch, he side-hugged me goodnight, walked up to his room, and shut the door.
Still fully dressed, I climbed into bed and lay awake for what seemed like hours. I finally did fall asleep, though, which I knew for two reasons: one, my pillow the next morning was dam
p with drool. But second, I woke up still tunneling out from a dream: The Blue Hole was filled with bathing elephants and crocodiles and ringed with palms bearing coconuts the color of my hair. The rhododendrons were in bloom again like they’d been in late spring, but this time they weren’t pink but a brilliant, brutal red, like Mollybird’s roses—like the place had got set on fire. And there was Reverend Riggs in the midst of it all, wearing his ill-fitting suit—only it had gone white and the pant legs had widened so that they fluttered and flowed. Almost like a sheet.
20 Bruised and Broken
The next afternoon after we’d finished our work, Em, Bo, and I had piled into the pickup to gather the others, including Sanna. All through the day as we’d shoveled and weeded and hacked and trimmed, neither Em nor I had mentioned Mort’s warning, although I’m guessing neither of us managed to chase his words from our heads or the look in his yellow eyes for more than ten minutes together. I’ll confess this much: It occurred to me how much easier things would’ve been if I’d never suggested stopping for Sanna that very first day. But she’d become part of our Pack, and there was no changing that now.
Just after picking up L. J., Emerson called back to me, “Turtle, before Sanna joins us, tell these madmen about last night.”
I started with Steinberger’s and ended with Mort Beckwith’s driving away. And then I added: “And I think I saw Welp there too. Sitting on the hood of Mort’s truck, it looked like maybe. Although it was dark.”
“What was he doing?” Jimbo asked.
“Not even sure what I saw. Mollybird Pittman tearing into Mort like that had me a little distracted.”
Em shook his head. “On the other hand, Turtle here mighta been seeing things. Too much emotional stress what with those hyenas circling.”
I scrunched my nose at him. Then gathered my breath. “And also … although it’s probably not worth mentioning …”
The boys sat waiting for me to go on.
“Well, it’s just that the night I spent at Sanna’s, on our way back from the Dairy Queen there on the Pike … but really it was probably just one of those things.”
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