He walked almost to the corner, near where they placed the historical marker on the Belcher-Nixon Building, and waited. He wondered what it was like back when the streetcars used to come through and all the black folks would unload. The housing projects were gone, replaced by some new Hope VI housing. It was clean and newish and modern. Maybe they got some hope now, he thought. Yet nothing felt much different, even though he’d driven by the sign of some smiling city councilman touting the changes that were happening.
When Mr. Gradine rounded the corner like he had at lunchtime for as many years as Colesbery could remember, he came face-to-face with Colesbery, almost walked into him, and stopped. He was shorter than Colesbery remembered, and his face was lined with age and his eyes looked tired.
“You remember me?” asked Colesbery.
“I don’t know where she is.”
“I don’t care about her.” He had the pistol now in the waistband in the front of his pants, and raised his shirt, then placed his hand on the handle. “I’m here for you.”
Mr. Gradine looked around, over Colesbery’s shoulder, then to the right toward the KFC. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“Need you to know when you made her get that abortion, the child you—”
“What are you talking—”
“—killed was mine.”
Chelsea had tracked Colesbery down and told him. When he told her about what he saw that night outside her bedroom, she said that was the first time her daddy had done that in close to eight months, that she knew she was pregnant before that.
“I didn’t kill any child.” Mr. Gradine’s face scowled into indignation. “Back then I thought you were just a ni—”
The shot was not loud. Mr. Gradine seemed more startled than injured. He put his hands on his chest, then wavered left till the bricks caught him, held him up for a moment. The stain spread down his white shirt from beneath his hands. He slid down the wall, the whole time staring with disbelief at Colesbery.
Colesbery stepped closer, and as he was looking down into Mr. Gradine’s eyes, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a playing card. When he first thought of this moment, he envisioned leaving behind his dog tag, a spent cartridge from Afghanistan, and his Airborne shoulder patch, but he’d changed his mind; he would not end his life here. He’d decided this moment, if he got away, would be his beginning. The playing card was white, and it said JOKER in black in opposite corners. In the middle of the card hovered a jet-black figure, a dancing joker.
Colesbury pinched the card between his index and middle fingers, then flicked it. The spinning card flew in an arc and landed on Mr. Gradine’s chest, just above the growing bloodstain.
“What’s that for?” asked Mr. Gradine through the blood and spittle gurgling out of the corner of his mouth.
“I’m playing my race card.”
Colesbery waited till death claimed the eyes, then turned and walked away. He heard no sirens, no screams, nothing. Things would be different now, he told himself.
All the Dead in Oakwood
by Marlin Barton
for Wayne Greenhaw
Montgomery
His name was Hiram. The moment she met him at the songwriters group she knew who he was named after. He’d right away told her no, he did not go by Hank as the man himself had done. If he looked his age, she put him at twenty-nine. When she asked, he nodded. She knew people thought of thirty-three, her age, as their Jesus year. “So is this your Hank year?” she asked. He only stared at her, and when he did, he looked way past twenty-nine, and she wondered, fleetingly, if that look was the only way he’d ever reach past the age Hank had lived, then dismissed this thought as the kind of dark notion she was prone to, dismissed it until later when she learned he’d done time for assault, twice, and after he told her the stories, she suspected the second time he’d meant to kill the man.
“Polly,” she told him when he asked. It was a name she’d hated as a girl, thought too plain, simple, old-fashioned. But at eighteen, after she’d learned to play guitar so well that her parents bought her a Martin D-28, she first heard the song “Pretty Polly,” and the beauty and tragedy of the hundreds-year-old murder ballad, its very intensity, made her hear her name in a new way that weighed heavy on her in a way she liked, felt connected to.
That first meeting had been eight months ago, though it seemed much longer. Now she was in the cab of his truck, their guitars stowed in hardshell cases in the bed, where they’d put them after playing at the bar on Fairview, and she wondered, not for the first time, if names could be destiny. Another dark thought. She knew their source, but that never made them go away.
They were headed again to the place they’d ended up that first night, Oakwood Cemetery, at the top of the hill where Hank was buried next to French pilots killed in training at Maxwell airbase during World War II. She remembered now, because she couldn’t not, the feel of the cold marble slab against her ass as they fucked over Hank at four in the morning. Even as she heard the slap of his body against hers she realized he knew what a younger man didn’t, that every stroke of his dick was a stroke against death, a futile one. Afterward, when they pulled their jeans back on, she told him about the French pilots, and that the French word for orgasm meant little death. “So did you die?” he asked. “Many times over,” she answered. What she didn’t say was that she’d been dying, many times over, for years.
When the light changed, he pulled off Fairview and onto Perry Street. He’d once joked about their moving into one of the big houses there, maybe next to the governor’s mansion, when he sold a song that ended up a hit. She noticed he’d talked about his success, not hers. So far, none of their group had sold anything to a Nashville publisher, which is why he’d said they should call themselves Songwriters Anonymous.
He reached toward the dash and turned off the Steve Young song, “Montgomery in the Rain,” that had been playing. Hi, as she often called himbecause she didn’t want to disparage Hank’s true namehad claimed Young was Hank’s heir. After the silence between them had replaced the music, he said, “You don’t have to do this.”
Her first thought wasn’t about his pleading tone, nor about the sound of too much whiskey mixed in his syllables, but rather how horribly predictable and unoriginal he sounded. He’d never allow such a line into one of his songs. That he thought he knew what she wanted did not surprise her. She’d counted on it. She had her ways of handling him, not the least of which, this night, was singing her harmonies off-key on every song, and that was a hard thing for her to do, took great effort, and he knew that too.
“I don’t understand why you did it. On ‘Seven Bridges Road’ you sounded like you’d never sung it before, never even heard it, when you know it backward and forward. Hell, you even know the road it’s about, know it like absolutely nobody else does, I’d say.”
“Fuck you for that last remark. Just fuck you.” They were passing the governor’s mansion now, heading up the hill to the bridges over I-85, which came to its end a mile farther down. “And I keep telling you, the song’s about a mythical road. That’s the only reason I can sing it at all.”
“How many bridges does Woodley Road have south of town?” he said.
“Seven.”