“Yeah?”
“Every one of them died.”
Jimbo patted my hand. “Let’s us just put Turtle here in charge of something besides cheering us up. Turtle, how ’bout you lead the band in ‘A Hundred Bottles of Beer’?”
The chumminess in his voice was back, and whatever else had been there with me—us alone in the back of the truck an eternity or so earlier that evening—was gone, and I wondered if someday, a much later someday way far away, I’d be able to say that was just like things ought to be.
Bo raked fingers through his hair, and I could see his big hands trembling.
Sanna’s parents sat silent, stiff as cadavers. She sat beside them, and though her gaze sometimes rested on one of us, she seemed not to be listening to anyone. She relit the candle and watched its white wax spill onto the floor.
At one point, Jimbo crawled on all fours to her side, drew his big feet up and under himself, and touched her forearm lightly. That was all. No words exchanged. No touch other than that.
And Farsanna looked back into his face. I’ve no idea what she said to him with her eyes. I understood enough only to know that I wished I hadn’t seen. And to see that her mother saw too.
“East!” said Jimbo’s daddy, retreating to the kitchen. “I must be for certain. For certain, which way is east?”
Jimbo pointed. And L. J., who liked to think he knew the world, adjusted Jimbo’s hand slightly—for accuracy.
Jimbo’s daddy knelt on the linoleum floor and held out his hand to Mr. Moulavi, who looked doubtfully at him, but then took his hand and joined him. Mr. Moulavi hunched down over the stone that had shattered far more than just his window. Reverend Riggs hunched there beside him.
And me, I sat wondering what to do. Momma would’ve served sweet tea and brownies and asked everyone how they, bless their hearts, were feeling. And Jesus, maybe, would’ve faced Mecca and prayed along with the rumple-suited Baptist and the Sri Lankan invader—though I wouldn’t know.
But I just sat there, feeling stupid and rattled and very much in the way.
Without warning, Reverend Riggs stood, then gripped the back of a chair for balance. He seemed to have heard or seen something somehow that we didn’t.
“Well, children,” he said, a good half-octave higher than usual. “It looks like company’s coming.”
From out the front window, we saw something leap into flame. And around it, white figures flapped like moths around the light they’d called into creation.
36 The Boys in the Bedsheets
The cross on the Moulavis’ lawn looked to me twice as big, twice as white, twice as fearsome as what had been set at my house or at L. J.’s. This one writhed, a frenzied belly dance of flames reflecting in savage yellow-blue shards of the plate-glass window.
Mrs. Moulavi crumpled in one corner of the kitchen. She cried in words I could not make out.
“Tamil,” L. J. mouthed to me.
Then she lifted her head and wailed to her husband in English, “Why? Why must we come here?”
Emerson was watching the fire as he spoke: “Where’s a garden hose?”
Mr. Moulavi covered his face. “We don’t—”
Farsanna took charge. “We have no hose. Something else … in here.” Her hand paused on the kitchen light switch.
Reverend Riggs nodded at her. “Not much use walking in darkness now.” He shed his suit jacket to the floor and like a speedway’s checkered flag going down, the jacket set us to motion.
Ransacking the kitchen cabinets, Farsanna tossed out a bucket, a plastic pitcher, some metal pots and pans to the middle of the floor, and as fast we found them, Jimbo’s daddy filled them at the kitchen sink. Carrying as many containers as our arms would hold, we began running, slipping, across the wet linoleum floor, across the glass carpet, falling, gashing our knees. Blood ran freely down our legs.
“Please, ma’am, stay here!” Jimbo shouted to Farsanna’s mother, curled in her corner of the kitchen but preparing to rise. “Stay where you’re safe!”
That word safe rang in my ears as I waited for my pitcher to fill, a word already flung out in this place a few times too many, and never anything but a curse. I pictured the strung-up stray dog, and our cutting him down with Welp’s knife.
Welp. Was he out there with the billowing smoke and the bedsheets?
Farsanna stopped and shouted to her mother what to me was nothing but sound—maybe it was Tamil or Sinhalese, or maybe English mangled by fire—and she heaved up her filled bucket and ran.
And then Farsanna was out in the yard at the base of the flames and the falling cross.
A couple of the figures in white had already run for their trucks—all pickups, and one orange Gremlin. One of the figures in white raised his hands over his head and was bellowing, “One race reigns supreme. One race made to rule over the others. God has ordained that the white man keeps himself pure from the muddying stain of miscegenation!”
Which was when Jimbo charged out of house toward the fire. A couple of Klan members leapt to intercept him.
But one of them lunged towards Farsanna. I saw him grab her by the waist, his hands moving on her. And through the holes in his white, I saw his eyes, hungry and yellow and swollen.
And I saw her elbow swing up to his eyes, catch him hard across the bridge of the nose. Heard him scream. Heard myself screaming too. And I watched him writhe, his hands rubbing his eyes frantically.
Me, I couldn’t move. I stood there at the front door, each of my hands carting water that wasn’t getting where it needed to be.
And this has not left me, not for a day: I stood at the door and I watched. I watched it happen. I did not move. I had overheard Mort—and he was here even now, hiding in white. But I hadn’t said what should’ve been said on the first day, and now couldn’t do the only thing left to be done.
I recall seeing Farsanna, free of Mort’s grip, grabbing a bucket and tossing its contents at the fire. I saw, from my place at the Moulavis’ front door, past the arc of Sanna’s water, that someone had jumped from the cab of one of the trucks.
And that he was very short, with holes in his jeans.
Bobby Welpler was not wearing white, no hood and no robe.
But still, he was with them. Bobby Welpler was with them.
37 A Geyser of Fire
Through clouds of gravel dust and smoke, I could see that Welp had grabbed one of the bedsheets by the shoulder and whirled him around. But he was knocked to the ground.
Welp scrambled up, shouting for Jimbo. And he was pointing. “The car!”
He pulled from his pocket a flash of silver, the knife he’d used to whittle, to slit his pathetic jeans. The knife we’d used to cut down the dog.
And then Welp lunged, knife in hand, at a bedsheet who was skulking away toward the house. Welp’s tinny voice shrieked, “Wait! Stop!”
Jimbo hurtled across the lawn. And to this day, I couldn’t say if he was diving for Welp because he’d been with the bedsheets, or because Welp had his knife out and was leaping to use it.
Bo dove for Welp, and Em running too, and the flaming, falling vertical post screamed softly and sputtered where it fell, its horizontal piece collapsing with it.
Some of the bedsheets leapt back. But one—maybe the one Welp had been after—fled, cradling something in front of him as he ran toward the carport.
“Let me up!” I heard Bobby shriek from beneath Jimbo. “You don’t know! You don’t know what they’re going to—!”
The boys were rolling on the ground, Bobby’s blade flashing firelight at each revolution. I saw as I ran—I could finally move—there was blood on the knife.
I’d almost reached Jimbo and Welp—Sanna and Em were already there—when the bedsheet reached the carport. His white arm whipped back and somet
hing flew from his hand at the Moulavis’ parked car. As the object flipped end on end through the air, I saw that it was yet another rusty gas can—empty now, its contents having been dumped all over the carport. From another man’s hand, a still-burning piece of the cross flew into the carport after the can.
The bedsheets were running, were diving and covering their white-hooded heads, before the lit wood hit the soaked concrete floor of the carport, reeking of gas.
Then a geyser of fire ripped into the dark beside the red brick rectangle house. For an instant, we were slammed, all of us, into a blazing white, blinding chaos. And I wondered if this were the end of the world.
The Moulavis’ only car, their station wagon, had sat alone in the carport. And when it exploded, it blew out one wall of the kitchen and engulfed the whole roof of the house in flames.
38 Ashes, Ashes
The station wagon’s steel frame still smolders sometimes in my dreams. But those aren’t the difficult nights.
On difficult nights, I replay in my sleep Jimbo’s sprinting for the house, Sanna’s beating him there. I see all over again Mr. Moulavi knocked unconscious where he stood at the sink, Sanna dragging him a good forty feet into the yard.
And I see Mrs. Moulavi, her beautiful hair on fire along with the hijab, her skirts, too, in flames—beneath the burning body of Jimbo Riggs, who’d seen the kitchen wall falling and had dived to cover her from it.
Jimbo’s daddy had snatched a blanket off Sanna’s bed, already iced in white ash and debris, and threw it over both bodies and then himself on top of that to smother the ravenous flames already devouring the stove and the table and human flesh, even before the kitchen roof had completely caved in.
The smell of the hair and the skin and the gas all on fire knocked me in half. I knelt right there on the lawn between the cross and what was the Moulavis’ kitchen. I knelt, but I didn’t pray. Instead, I threw up my insides. That’s what I did. That’s how I helped.
And that’s all I see in my dreams—which, I reckon, is a kind of a mercy, given all that came after.
I don’t much recall the whole lifetime before an ambulance arrived from the Valley below, or the endless days that followed: the waiting, hour on hour, strung like fake pearls, all exactly alike and none of them precious, outside the intensive care unit, the living on Heath bars and Cokes from the waiting room machines, the trying to read, and trying not to look at the skin of Jimbo Riggs’ legs, far darker now than the brown ones that had swung up that first day over Em’s tailgate. Bo’s legs were black and buckling like old paint, the skin of his arms and his chest the same.
Sometimes I still see in my dreams Mr. Moulavi down on his knees and finding the east-facing waiting room window, his face to the floor and both arms splayed on the ICU waiting room tile. Sometimes I still hear Bo moan in his sleep, or see his school picture posted above his hospital bed at the nurses’ request so they could remember the carcass was human, or watch Bo’s daddy holding his hand, refusing to budge from the side of Bo’s bed, refusing to eat and sleeping only hunched there in the chair as the hours limped by and collapsed into days.
Sometimes I can still smell the stench of charred flesh and infection, and watch all over again Em lifting Bo’s head and cranking the volume of the hospital’s TV so that the unruly mob of a Sox game might shout down the horror around us. I can hear the gurgle and hiss of tubes and machines as Em put his head down beside Jimbo’s, Em’s tears wetting the white of Bo’s bandaged cheeks. “It’s Ted Williams to bat, Bo. It’s Williams. Don’t you go drifting off again on me, you hear? The Sox can win yet. You hear me, Bo? Don’t you go giving up yet.”
That was the day Bo used the pen we always left by his hand—because it hurt him to speak—to scrawl this on a notebook: “Not me. Don’t YOU give up. On anyone.”
The words we tried to trade in the molten center of those days were no good—like they’d been maimed too and never would heal. We knew, those of us who’d been raised there, how to be nice—and that was no good anymore. Whatever words we made then were the same: just debris. Like the litter, the beer cans middle-aged men tossed off the Look. Words worth no more than that.
When Mrs. Moulavi, her gorgeous hair shaved flat to her head, but then scarved, recovered enough to move from the hospital, the doctor discharged her and her daughter to go home—forgetting for a trip-over-truth moment what he knew all too well: that there was no home for them on the Ridge.
That had been the point all along.
And sometimes I still see in my dreams the day we huddled by the side of Bo’s bed, his dimples only a memory to us, his face bandaged and contorted in pain. The day we saw whole worlds of agony in his eyes and prayed he would die. All of us held on to each other, Sanna beside me, both of us trembling, the whole Pack of us—all but Welp—having cried ourselves sick. And Bo’s parents there beside us.
“If,” Sanna said that day, “if I’d never come….”
Regina Lee Riggs, at Bo’s head, lifted her eyes, red and glazed over with grief, but said nothing. She lowered her head then, and her hair, not brushed for days, fell over her face.
But Bo’s daddy turned from his place by Bo’s side. He held out his hand to Farsanna and pulled her close by his side. “No one,” he whispered, “no one blames you for this, child. There are plenty enough to blame for it, me at the top of the list. Me at the top. But that won’t undo what’s been done here. And you, child, you aren’t to blame.”
We stood there together and rode the ebb and flow of Bo’s moans. Then something changed in his breathing.
Bo’s daddy looked up at Sanna, and his voice came out clogged and uneven. “Maybe … maybe it’s time we told him good-bye.”
Sanna bent then and left a kiss on the bandages that were Bo’s face.
L. J. bent over him next and then Em, all of us kissing him on the unmarred patch of forehead where his black hair stuck up straight like he’d just raked his hands through it.
“‘One short sleep past,’” Em said softly as he knelt beside his best friend, “‘we wake eternally, And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!’” He swiped at tears with the back of his hand. “So don’t you think for a moment, Bo, that we’ve seen our last Sox game together. You got that?”
I hunched over Bo last and held tight to his one unbandaged hand. “You can’t,” I whispered to him, “you can’t go. You can’t go without us. I dreamed about you last night, and you were dancing on the top branch of the sweetgum and James Brown and Ray Charles were playing their tunes at the foot of the tree, and you had a gun and were shooting up at the stars, and they were raining down light. And your daddy, Bo, your daddy was right there beside you, and so were the boys from down in the Valley who came swimming that day. We were all there. And I woke up thinking the dream meant that you’d live. I knew it meant that. I told Em. And Sanna. And L. J. I told the nurses, told them all today you would live. And I told your daddy, and he squeezed me till I couldn’t breathe. Bo,” I begged. “Bo, you can’t give up now.”
My brother took hold of my shoulders and gently pulled me away. “Shelby,” he said, holding me as I sobbed. “Jimbo hadn’t ever given up on anything in his life. Or anyone. You know that. And he’s not starting now.”
I lifted my head in time to see Bo turn his face, briefly, toward us. He lifted his good hand, which all of us reached for and clung to.
For a moment, but only a moment, his green eyes crinkled as if he were smiling. And then his eyes closed.
39 Fools
The Moulavis left on a Greyhound just after Bo’s funeral, bound for Washington, D.C.
Maybe, I recall thinking, Sanna’s father hadn’t quite given up his dream of America, and would go searching for it at its diseased but still-pumping heart.
We cried, the new girl and I, and even Emerson and L. J. We’d smelled too many
lilies in hospital cells, too many fumes, seen too much skin in black flakes and arms bloody as raw beef beneath and hair turned to brittle black threads. We’d been burned on the insides, by the smoke and the fumes and the cross-frenzied red. And we cried because we’d been welded together somewhere in the flames, somehow part of each other, and yet we never wanted to see each other again. So we circled our arms across shoulders and cried because there was so much and there was nothing to say.
Em made one final map with his hands; Farsanna put her hand over his and squeezed it.
_________
It had been Emerson’s idea that Jimbo’s ashes—that was nearly all that was left even before the morticians got hold of him—should be laid to rest at the Blue Hole. I’ve always loved my brother for that. Bo’s funeral was packed, the Baptist church-belly swollen and heaving and sick, this time with grief. For the burial, the whole part of the town that could walk, teenagers and children and grown people, they all kicked off their shoes and made the climb down to the Hole.
Welp wasn’t there. Not that I saw. And neither was a single one of the Beckwiths. But Mollybird was. And Mr. Steinberger, and both of his daughters. And a whole town of mourners who slid their way down to where we laid Jimbo’s ashes to rest, by the side of still water that wasn’t in any way blue.
It was my idea to transplant the pink rosebush that in some cruel kind of trick survived the explosion, singed but alive at the roots. Having come from Mollybird Pittman to Emerson and Jimbo’s landscaping business, and from Jimbo to Farsanna, and somehow living through the blast, it struck me as fitting, somehow.
It was L. J.’s idea to take two seared rafters from the Moulavis’ kitchen and make a cross out of them for the grave—not a white one, but scorched and half-eaten by flame. And it was the idea of the good Reverend Riggs to take another two charred, broken beams from the site and replace the hanging white cross in the Baptist church sanctuary. They tell me it’s still hanging there, the cross so falling apart that when the organ moans out of too many pipes, the cross sheds charcoal and bits of wood onto the choir.
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