by Bret Lott
I’d just sit with her and watch. And wait.
But for what?
We headed down Remount and through that hellhole of an intersection at Rivers, eight or nine lanes plus the freeway off-ramp converging on one set of lights; next we passed the Aquarius Social Club, a cinder-block building with no windows, painted a dull turquoise, next the New Life Congregational Church. Then we turned right onto Attaway, went down the rows of houses just like ours: a short concrete driveway that led to a separate garage at the rear of the lot, concrete steps up to the front door, metal awnings over the porch and the two windows out front. They were all painted pale colors, all of them different shades of green and yellow and blue. Some of the yards were overgrown, some too neat. All of them just there, along with a couple of bushes, oil stains on the driveway, room air conditioners plugged into the windows.
Where we lived.
The first night we moved out here to Liberty Hills, Mom and I set up in that square house, the few things we had still in the boxes, she came into my bedroom and woke me up in the middle of the night, wanting to know if I’d messed in my pants. Me, eight years old. But she was right: the place smelled like maybe something had shit somewhere.
We looked all over the house, all the lights on, searched for where maybe some animal’d snuck in, laid a pile maybe in the corner of a closet or in the cabinets. But I remember thinking it didn’t smell exactly like shit. Something else, but close enough.
Finally she opened the back door, and the smell jumped at us. I remember standing next to her, Mom in a thin white nightgown, the same one she’d worn my whole life so far, and looking out to the fence, and seeing above it and above the rooftops of all these houses the dull gray glow of lights way off, like a gray cloud sitting way off in the black. And poked up into the middle of it a smokestack with blinking white lights on it, a cloud of white coming up off it.
“It’s the paper mill,” Mom whispered.
I looked up at her. She was still a moment, then her shoulders started moving up and down, quick and hard. The kitchen light was on behind her, and I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she was crying. She breathed in quick breaths all in a row, let out these hisses, afraid to cry in front of her kid.
I was only eight, and I remember I grabbed hold of her nightgown, bunched a fistful up, and said, “Don’t cry about it.”
But she went right on.
That was our first night away from Hungry Neck Hunt Club. Our first night living in North Charleston. Only a year after Unc’d moved into the trailer, nine months after Dad’d left us.
Our new life.
Now I had friends inside some of these houses, people a lot like me, which meant they didn’t really give a shit about everything you were supposed to give a shit about in high school. We weren’t in band or on any of the teams. We didn’t belong to any clubs, didn’t all sit together at lunch and smoke or toke out to the back fence.
Truth was we didn’t even like each other. More like a group that didn’t belong to any group, even its own group. And if I wasn’t with them or out to Hungry Neck, I was in my room, reading.
Because I had a plan. I wanted to go to college. Duke, maybe. And I read. I read my way through the Harvard Classics, for one thing, Mom subscribing to that book club from about the time we got out here, though some of that stuff was so dull and dry getting through it was like trying to breathe sand. That’s what I thought of Milton, for one, Spenser for another. Shakespeare was fine, as was Chaucer. I’d read everything C. S. Lewis put out, everything by this guy Mircea Eliade, too. And there was Moby-Dick, which every clod in my English class threw up over but me, and which I even laughed at in places, it was so funny, like when Ahab is going over to the other ship for a little meeting, and he’s standing up in the rowboat, and everybody rowing is wishing the hell he’d just sit down so that they didn’t have to worry so much about timing their strokes with the waves so he wouldn’t fall down and embarrass himself.
At least I thought that was funny.
Sometimes we all hung out together out where the railroad tracks turned toward the paper mill on the other side of Storie Street, there under the Mark Clark Expressway. Just us: Matt, Jason, Rafael, Tyrone, Jessup. And the girls: Trina, Roberta, Polly, LaKeisha, Deevonne. We’d sit and pass around five or six bottles of Colt 45 somebody’d gotten, and talk about what shits everybody was. Even ourselves.
Blacks and whites. Good grades and bad grades. Stupid and smart. None of us had nipple rings or tattooed chains on our ankles. None of us was failing.
Just us. Just nothing. All the more reason to see Hungry Neck as my home, and not here. North Charleston was only where I slept, kept most of my clothes.
But as we turned left on Sumner and passed the C&S Grocerette and McTV Repair, then turned right onto our street, Marie, I was hoping I’d see somebody. Anybody.
There was nobody, everyone still in bed and asleep this Sunday morning, all of them oblivious to what I knew.
We moved along Marie, and I could see the Mark Clark Expressway down where the street dead-ended, high up on huge concrete pilings. Then we were home: pale yellow, brown trim, the awning brown too. The yard neat and trimmed—I mowed it every Wednesday—the oil stains the Luv left on the driveway.
We pulled in, the chain-link fence gate open, ready for us, and back to the garage. Mom put the car in park, and I started to open my door, go pull up the garage door.
But she put a hand to my arm, like she used to do when I was little and she slammed on the brakes for traffic or whatever. Protecting me.
“No,” she said, and I looked at her. “You have to take it easy.”
Her lips were together, her eyebrows knotted in the smallest way. She had on the makeup, the nice clothes, her hair done. Nothing any different from when she’d walked into the hospital room this morning.
But everything different.
We sat that way a few seconds, her hand on my arm, us looking at each other.
Then I climbed out, opened the door.
The kitchen table was set for one: an empty plate and juice glass, a knife and fork and spoon. On the stove was a half-empty bag of grits, a pan, and the skillet.
I sat down, watched Mom move around without looking at me. She hooked her purse over the back of her chair at the table, pushed the sleeves up on her blouse, pulled from inside the pantry door her yellow plaid apron. Then she went to the fridge, pulled out bacon and two eggs.
“How do you want your eggs?” she said. She didn’t look at me, only set the eggs and bacon on the counter, took the pan to the sink and filled it.
She finished with the water, headed for the stove.
“Well?” she said, started peeling off bacon into the skillet.
“Stop it,” I said.
She paused a second, held a strip over the others. Then she went right on, dropped a last piece in, tore a paper towel from the roll underneath the cupboard, wiped her hands.
“I said stop it.” I took a step toward her, put my hand to her shoulder like Unc did to me all the time.
But this was my mom. I’d never touched her that way before, in comfort.
She gave way, her shoulders heaving, and I turned her to me, put my arms around my mom, felt her face on my own shoulder. Slowly she put her arms around me, too, and for a second that first night here came back to me, us finally finding the source of that smell we’ve grown used to over all these years: the paper mill.
Don’t cry about it, I’d said then. But I’d been wrong. Crying, I saw only now, was about the best thing anybody could have done.
“You cry,” I whispered. “You go ahead and cry.”
Slowly she nodded, her face still on my shoulder, and she cried, hard and long, the two of us alone in the kitchen.
I lay there in bed, thought I heard the tapping in a dream, but then heard it for real, right there at the window: tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.
I sat up, felt the cool of the room through my T-shirt; Mom turned the heat
down at night to save money, and for a second there was in my head the idea of Mrs. Constance Dupree Simons floating into this room here, tonight, and I thought again of the paperweight, remembered it was in the pocket of my jeans, on the floor in front of my dresser.
Then, tap tap tap.
Matt or Tyrone or Jessup, I thought. Somebody’d seen something on the news, figured out maybe it was my uncle’s place all this was going on at and was over here to bug me about it. And my bed was next to the window, after all, for exactly this reason: easy out and easy back in whenever we felt like going over to the tracks.
I pulled back the curtains, gray in the dark.
It was a black person, just the head and shoulders at the sill, and for a second I thought, Tyrone. Then I saw the long hair down to the shoulders, a white hairband holding it all back, and I thought, LaKeisha, or Deevonne.
The only light out there was the same old dull gray cloud up above the blinking smokestack of the paper mill, and I saw it wasn’t LaKeisha or Deevonne.
It was Dorcas. Miss Dinah Gaillard’s daughter, Benjamin’s sister, looking in at me.
I’d seen her last just yesterday morning, when she and her momma’d cooked up breakfast at the hunt club. I’d known her all my life, this black girl who couldn’t talk or hear, but I’d only known her out to Hungry Neck.
Now here she was in North Charleston and looking in my window, and it made me inch back and away.
She looked behind her, like maybe there was somebody watching her, then lifted a hand up, and I could see something in it, white and square.
She pressed it to the glass: a piece of paper, writing on it, but it was too dark to read.
She moved the paper up and down, quick: Read this.
I finally stood from the bed, held the quilt around me like a cape for the cold and the fact, too, I was just in my underwear, and I went to the dresser, pulled on my jeans, and found in the top drawer the pocket flashlight I kept in there. I looked at the alarm clock on the dresser, saw by the pale hands it was a little after one.
I went to the window, cupped my hand over the flashlight, held it just below the piece of paper against the glass, and clicked it on.
Leland is with us, it read. He isn’t aware of my being here to get you, but I can tell he needs your help, whether he likes it or not. But we need to go, now.
It was printed, the letters perfect, and I clicked off the light, let my eyes adjust for a few seconds. The paper was gone now, only Dorcas there, looking at me.
I nodded, the decision made just like that.
She took a step away from the window, then crouched, made her way across the backyard to the trees at the fence.
This was what I’d been waiting for.
But Mom was in the next room, asleep.
What would happen when she got up tomorrow morning, found my bed empty? She’d know I was out looking for Unc, and she’d kill me whether I found him or not, but first she’d break down worse than this morning. She’d break, then get royally pissed at me, maybe burn my clothes out in the yard for all I knew, and then there’d be even more hell whenever I came back.
But it was Unc I was after.
I went to the closet, dug in my bookbag for some notebook paper, tore out a sheet quiet as I could, then found a pencil at the bottom of the bag.
School tomorrow. Monday, the day after Thanksgiving vacation. The least of my worries.
I went to the dresser, wrote as best I could in the dark, I love you, Mom. But I’m going to Unc and help him out. Don’t worry. I stopped, wondered what else I could put. That I knew where he was? What?
But I only wrote, I love you, Mom again.
I threw the quilt back on the bed, tried to straighten it out, and set the paper on the pillow. I pulled out a flannel shirt from the closet, and my Levi’s jacket, slipped on a pair of wool socks and my duck boots, then I was out the window. I dropped to the ground and pulled the window closed.
It was colder than I’d thought it would be, my breath an empty pale cloud, and I squatted, afraid even that cloud of breath might give me away.
And I smelled it: the paper mill. A smell, it only occurred to me then, a lot like the smell of that body once we’d come back to it, flies on it, the sun starting to work it over.
I heard a finger snap at the back fence, and I ran.
She was crouched behind the row of redtips back there, and had on a jacket, white tennis shoes, and jeans. She lifted a finger to her lips, made the shh sign.
My hands were already freezing, and I rubbed them together, made to blow in them, but then she was up and over the five-foot chain-link fence that separated our yard from the house behind us. She hadn’t made a sound.
I was just to follow her. Just shut up and follow.
So I climbed the fence and fell flat on my ass on the other side, gave out a grunt I thought you could hear for a mile around, and then I was up and running through the Pinckneys’ backyard, headed for the sidewalk at the foot of their drive where Dorcas now stood, a hand on her hip and waiting.
I made it to the sidewalk, and Dorcas turned, started away, me expected just to keep up.
We were headed now down Pennsylvania Drive, toward where it dead-ended at Storie, past that the tracks beneath the Mark Clark. These were houses just like ours, the street just the same.
We walked, walked like it was all we’d ever done: taken a stroll at one in the morning, and then all the questions started coming to me: How did she know where I lived, if Unc didn’t send her? How could she know which window was mine? How did she get here, and where were we going?
Then, up at the corner, I saw light on the pavement and against the green weeds across Storie: a car coming.
Dorcas looped her arm in mine, pulled me close to her. She was a little shorter than me, leaned her head against my shoulder, kept walking.
The car started around the corner toward us, and Dorcas quick turned me so my back was to the headlights, put her arms around me, brought her face right up next to mine.
Then she kissed me, full on.
The car went by us before I could even get my arms around her for my part of this disguise. They didn’t even slow down.
Her lips were warm, her arms tight around me warm, too, though I knew I couldn’t really feel anything through my jacket.
Dorcas, kissing me.
Soon as the car passed, her arms were down, and now she was running up the street.
We crossed Storie into the weeds, then came the crunch of our feet on the gravel beds that lined the track, the only other sound the whine of tires from the Mark Clark forty feet above us. I had a hard time keeping up with her, now already into the trees on the other side of the overpass, headed off toward the neighborhood over there, Lancaster Park.
All this was going on in the dark, and I was still feeling that kiss, and feeling the pinch of this cold air in my lungs, me running in the middle of the night through woods, hoping this would all end up with Unc.
I saw her jump a few yards ahead of me, and I wondered what that was all about in the same second I fell into the ditch, maybe three feet deep.
I landed on my knees, felt cold and wet weeds right in my face and beneath my hands. I struggled up, climbed out of the ditch, the front of my pants soaked through.
I ran, crashed through and crashed through weeds, until I was out in Lancaster Park, standing on a street no different from Storie, no different from any of the houses that trailed along the freeway in this part of North Charleston.
Dorcas stood on the sidewalk, a few houses past her a streetlight, so that she was lit from behind. She was bent over, hands on her knees. I could see her shoulders shake, like she was crying.
Then she stood up. She put a hand to her mouth, her shoulders still shaking, the other arm pointed at me.
She was laughing at me. No sound at all.
I looked down, saw in the weird purple light from the streetlight my pants wet from my crotch down to my shins.
I loo
ked up at her. Now she was pointing down the street from us, her eyes on me.
There, just past the streetlight, was the Luv.
We climbed in, me on the driver’s side, like we’d planned it all a year before. She gave the door over there a hard pop with her fist, too, the way you had to to get the thing open, her move so quick and perfect I realized right then she’d ridden through more miles on this thing than I ever would, and for a second I pictured Benjamin Gaillard driving all around the Lowcountry with his deaf-and-dumb little sister, running for groceries, say, to Hollywood, or to the Solid Rock I Stand AME Church out past Gardens Corner, or just out to one of the roads that ran along the Ashepoo.
She reached into her jacket pocket, pulled out my keys. I nodded, put out my hand, and she dropped them. Our fingers never touched, and we looked at each other a long couple of seconds. Then she looked away, sort of pushed herself into her seat a little deeper. She put her hands together and between her knees, her shoulders up: she was cold, all movement and silence.
The engine turned over the first time, like every time. I patted the dash, and she smiled. Then I turned on the headlights, and she nearly jumped, quick opened the glove box. Before I could even put the truck into gear, she’d pulled out a small tablet of paper, peeled off the top sheet, held it out to me.
I looked at it in the pale light from the streetlight, made out the words Leave off the lights until we’re at least two blocks from here. Take surface streets as far as you can. She’d written this out in the same perfect printing before she’d come for me.
I turned off the headlights, nodded at her. But she’d already pulled off the next sheet, held it out to me.
Don’t drive as though we’re in a hurry to get anywhere. We don’t want to be stopped by anyone. Once we get to the railroad tracks at Hungry Neck, I’ll tell you which turns to make.
She was faced forward again, hands between her knees again.
I knew where she lived. I knew: the haint purple half trailer, half shanty up on Hutcheson Road. I knew that.
I motioned to her for something to write with.
She stared at me a second, then let out a hard breath, reached into the glove box, and pulled out a pen. But instead of handing it over to me, she started writing on it, hard and fast. She tore off the sheet, pushed it at me.
