I try to picture the man. “You never told me.”
“Eighteen bucks even, ma’am,” the attendant says, startling me. I give him a twenty. My hand shakes.
“Didn’t I? Then maybe … I don’t know … maybe I’m dreaming — ”
“Oh hell, it doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s just an old ghost to me.”
“A ghost who won’t leave you in peace.”
I admit to her I put a call in to Huntsville, requesting a visit with Elias Woods. The official I reached said he’d get back to me. He was afraid I was a journalist. “No more death row interviews, all right? You goddam liberal writers always make us out to be monsters. We’re only doing our jobs.”
The attendant returns with my change, and we’re off again, through pecan groves and scrub oak, dewberry fields, gnarled old magnolias, moss-covered, leaves applauding in the wind. The air smells of mint. Just off the highway a drive-in movie screen looms in a field, an immense sheet hung out to dry. Bitter took me and Ariyeh to a drive-in once when we were little; I remember thinking, “Bitter’s the only dad I have”; remember popcorn and Cokes spilling over our dresses; remember Bitter sighing. I even remember the movie because I saw it again years later, this time in a suburban Dallas theater, a second-run place, with an all-white, upper-class audience. The film was Pinky, about a poor mulatta who decides not to “violate her race” by marrying a white man and inheriting a wealthy plantation; instead, she chooses to remain a Negro and opens a school for dark-skinned kids. The drive-in audience, mostly young, mostly black, howled with derision at the melodramatic, sentimental plot and at the woman’s stupidity, passing up the good life. Years later, the white audience in Dallas wept at the young woman’s selflessness. I recall glancing at Mama, who sat impassively beside me as Dale and her new white friends dabbed their eyes, careful not to topple soft drinks into their laps. (What was she thinking? Was the movie a surprise to her? Would she have gone if she’d known what it was about?) And I recalled the low, dark chortles in the night from long ago, the smells of sweat and food and sex (though I didn’t know that’s what it was, then) rising from the cars, the smell of the nearby bayou, rotty and dank, frog chirps competing with actors’ voices from the scratchy drive-in speakers, and I wanted to return to the noise and the stink and the mess, to real life (my lost daddy’s home), which seemed to me buried now under Mama’s department store catalogs, bedspreads, and furnishings. Her scented toilet paper.
“Yeah, I remember that drive-in,” Ariyeh says now. “It’s the first place I saw people fucking, though I thought they were hurting each other or something. I think Daddy wanted us to see it. Sex education.”
“Right.” I laugh. “When I was twelve, Mama took me to a series of films at the YWCA. Each week, cartoon cutaways of uteruses, penises, gumdrop sperm. No one said a word, all these mothers and daughters sitting stiffly in cold folding chairs. And in the car, on the way home, she kept her eyes pinned to the road. When I asked her what in the world we’d just been watching, she’d say, ‘Why don’t we get some ice cream?’ Or she’d stop and buy me comic books — Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four, these boys’ books, you know, that I didn’t have the slightest interest in, though they weren’t any more outlandish than the sex-toons — and I’d wind up gorging myself at Baskin-Robbins. To this day, I associate conception with the taste of chocolate-chocolate chip.”
Ariyeh cracks up, and we recall all the places we sneaked off to as girls to talk about boys. The mud-dauber shack. A spot along the bayou, where someone had tossed an old stove and it lay rusting in the mud, tangled in poison ivy and tree roots. And of course, our favorite, the Flower Man’s house. Sometimes we’d see him nailing up a new treasure — a child’s tutu, a clay butterfly, a G.I. Joe doll — on the outer walls of his home.
“Is he crazy, the Flower Man?” I ask.
“Who knows? Maybe he’s just got a genius for junk. Like I do for lunch. Can we stop soon?” She smiles, embarrassed. She was always the first to get hungry.
I pull off near a billboard advertising mysterious ancient caves. A cow watches us unwrap our sandwiches. We sit on the hood of the car. “A developer’s dream,” I say, gazing at the fields. “I try to remember what it was like to enjoy nature’s beauty. Surely, at one time, I could just soak it up. Now, I can’t look at any place without imagining feasibility studies, cost estimates …”
“Do you like your job?” Ariyeh asks.
Sparrows gossip in the trees. Diesel smoke in the wind.
“I’m good at it. Is that the same as liking?”
“I don’t think so, sweetie.”
“I have an aquarium at home. The catfish always stays at the bottom, cleaning up the others’ leftovers. They’re darting around at the top, picking food off the water’s surface. He’s catching whatever falls between the cracks. I call him Hoover.”
“You feel like him, is that it?”
I waggle my head, neither yes or no.
“Sounds like he works too hard. Like he’s trying to hide.”
I open the potato chip bag. “You?”
“Jesus. Me? I’m a Band-Aid stretched across an open chest.” A rueful laugh. “We don’t have enough resources to give these kids a first-rate education. Or even a third-rate one. They’re going to wind up on the streets, killing each other, most of them. We all know it. The kids know it, too, so they don’t even try.”
“Are there any whites in your school?”
“Only a handful. Busing’s been repealed.”
“You’re very brave. You and Reggie both. I told him that.”
She nibbles her bread. “Daddy thinks we’re crazy, trying so hard to improve things. We fight about it all the time, and he and Reggie can hardly speak to each other. He says he’s lived long enough to see most ideals wither and die. ‘Pie in the sky don’t do black folk no good,’ he tells me. You know the way he talks. I admit, sometimes I think he’s right. I get so tired.”
I hug her. She sags, and I realize how tense she is most of the time.
“Well. We’d best get to this gloomy old field of yours,” she says, falsely bright.
“You sure?” I say, rubbing her back.
She nods, narrows her eyes. “I’m sure. It’s Saturday, for God’s sakes. What am I doing worrying about work?”
She’s done talking now. I won’t push her. I learned a long time ago not to do that. “Okay. Let’s see what we can see.” But I’ll watch her closely the rest of the day.
Just east of San Antonio I take a cutoff onto a narrow gravel road. My directions are makeshift, a slew of landmarks and locations from various historical sources, all incomplete, testifying to the fact that nothing remains to distinguish the hanging field from other meadows. In all likelihood, I won’t even know it if I see it. We bump over ruts and rocks. Billboards for foot powder, insecticide, Yankee Motor Oil. Hillocks of hay. Jutting stone. To the west, a line of pines, stiff but somewhat crooked: sloppy troops at parade rest. Behind them, sloping down the barest suggestion of a hill, mesquite trees tangled in dewberry vines. “This is it,” I say uncertainly. My face goes hot. “I think this is it.”
Ariyeh looks at the field, boredom in her eyes: a child disappointed at the fair. At least she’s forgotten her own troubles for now. “This? What makes you think so?”
“Those trees. That little hill. It’s got to be.”
“There’s nothing here.”