That’s when I saw it for the first time. Adrian went dead still, face blank as the walls about us.
“You got somethin’ to say to me back there, tattoo man?”
Briefly the server’s eyes met Adrian’s. Then he cast them about like a fisherman’s net. Being in control of mashed potatoes and lima beans wasn’t going to help him much. Nothing was. Not even his tattoo.
“Sorry,” the server said. “Been a bad day. You know.”
“Ain’t they all?”
We moved along the line.
“Motherfuckers call themselves a brotherhood.”
“White supremacists, you mean.”
He nodded. “They be getting in touch witchu soon enough, I reckon.”
“Damn,” I said, trying my best to sound like Adrian. “All kind of scum in here, ain’there?”
He laughed. “There is, for sure.”
It was a couple of weeks later that they came for me, two of them edging out around the massive dryers on a day I’d been assigned laundry duty.
“You and big nigger been gettin’ on all right?” one asked. He had to shout to be heard above the dryers. From talk on the yard I knew him as Billy D. Barely topping five feet, he looked like steel wire braided into human form. Sleeves split to give biceps room.
Anything you say in these situations usually serves only to make it worse, so I didn’t answer, just stood waiting. See how it comes down. Four or five more of what I assumed to be sworn members of the brotherhood shuffled into place. Two behind Billy D, two or three behind me.
“You’re a white man, Turner. One of us.”
I watched him, waiting for the body shift, the change in posture or expression that would signal we were taking it up a notch.
“Maybe you like that big dick of his so much, you just plain forgot that.”
Then: “Not much for talking, are you?”
Inmates were expected to cringe in fear at Billy D’s approach. That I hadn’t, that in fact I’d shown nothing at all, unsettled his lackeys. Seeing that, he knew he had to lean in hard.
“You join us, Turner,” he said. “Here. Today.”
“No thanks.”
Above and all about us, dryers rumbled. They were the size of the tumblers on cement trucks.
“What, you think you have some kinda choice?”
“Like you say, he’s not much for talking.”
All heads turned as the speaker stepped into the space between Billy D and myself. I knew him from talk on the yard. Angel. Looking around, I saw that each of Billy’s lackeys by the wall had been flanked as well, two by blacks, one by an elegant Thai called Soon, three others by the 300-pound Samoan whose name seemed to be composed entirely of L’s and gulps.
“We all got choices, white bread,” Angel said. “How yours lookin’ to you right now?”
Currents of fire and ice slammed back and forth. Ice won. Nodding, Billy D backed off a few steps, turned and left. As he did so, his men faded away too, then Angel’s. Within moments I stood there alone.
“It’s not over,” Adrian said later when I tried to thank him. “You know that. May take a while, but they’ll be back.”
The day the guy came at me in the shower with the knife, I knew he was right.
Chapter Twenty-three
“I told Daddy I got it playing Softball.”
“And he believed you.”
“Probably not. He did ask when I’d started playing softball. He. .. Well, you’ve gotten to know my father, you know it would take a lot for him to-what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Trespass?”
“I guess.” For the first time, her face met mine straight on. “How bad does it look?”
“Purple’s on your color chart, right?”
“I feel so…”
“Ashamed?”
“Stupid.”
“You know you shouldn’t.”
“Of course I do.”
A kid’s face appeared in the window. Pushing against the glass, the boy pugged his nose, stuck out his tongue so that it too flattened, and crossed his eyes. Without benefit of the window, June returned a remarkable likeness of his caricature. He grinned and, mounting his skateboard like the Silver Surfer, sped away. I had the sense they’d done this before.
“Anyhow, he’s gone,” June said.
“This is someone you cared for?”
She nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
I fought your impossible war, America. I came back from it and for eight years as a cop, day in and day out, I witnessed the worst you and your citizens could do to one another. Then for almost as long I lived in the heads of some of those we-you and I-had most damaged. When I say her smile would break your heart, I mean it.
“I miss him,” June said.
The phone rang.
“Sheriff’s… Yes, ma’am… That’s out by the Zorik place, right?… Right… We’ll send a deputy right out.”
Putting the phone down with a shrug of apology, she picked up the radio mike and keyed it on.
“Don Lee, you there?”
Ten-four.
“See the woman, third house off the gravel road half a mile past Fifty-one and Ledbetter.”
Near the old Zorik farm. Pecan orchard?
“Right.”
Complaint?
“Says her boy’s back. Been snaring and killing her chickens for food but won’t talk to her or let her get near him. ETA?”
I’m halfway there already, out by the town dump. Twenty minutes, tops.
“I’ll call back, let her know.”
“When I was a kid,” I said once she’d done so, “my first real girlfriend, her family had a cousin living with them. From about twenty or so, life had turned into this steep downhill slide for him. Started out as assistant manager for one of the biggest clothing stores thereabouts and wound up doing janitor work at the elementary school-till he got fired from that. His own family threw him out once they found him in the baby’s room standing over the crib. My girlfriend’s mother took him in. Cissie and I’d be sitting watching TV, look up, and there he’d be, standing by the stove talking to it, or following the cat around the house from room to room for hours.”
“Velma’s boy hasn’t been right since he turned twelve. Court keeps sending him away. Halfway houses, training schools, the state hospital. Sooner or later they let him go, or he runs off, and he shows up back here. Lives up in the hills mostly. Has to be all of thirty-five, forty now.”
“None of us ever get too far from the cave.”
“What happened?” June asked after a moment.
“Just what’s supposed to happen. I went off to college, wrote long, passionate letters back almost daily. By the second semester I noticed I was getting fewer and fewer, ever briefer responses.”
“I meant with the cousin.’’
“Oh… Well, one night, Ben was his name, one night Ben managed to get the latch off the porch door and wandered away. Next morning my girlfriend’s mother was backing out of the drive, looking around hoping to see Ben or some sign of him, and ran over her infant son, my girlfriend’s little brother.”
“He make it?”
“Depends on your definition. He lived.”
“Are you always so upbeat, Mr. Turner?”
“You caught me on a good day.”
“Lucky me.” She leaned forward to turn the radio on. Something ostensibly country, but worlds away from Riley Puckett or Ralph Stanley. “Get many dates, do you?”
“Enough.”
“Out on the limb here, I’m gonna guess they’re mostly first dates.”
We sat together quietly. The phone rang. June answered, listened a moment and hung up. I’ve looked and looked in all the bars, all the old places -from the radio, spearchucker guitar behind.
“Sarah’s a fine-looking woman.”
“She is.”
“You see anything happening there?”
“Happening?”
“Between the two of you.”
“A little late in the game for that. When you’re young, every chance encounter holds a bounty of possibilities. Pay for a six-pack at the 7-Eleven and this spark jumps up between you and the woman behind the counter. You think that’ll go on happening forever.”
June nodded.
“It doesn’t. Before you know it, that’s become the fantasy it always was, really. Someone’s pulled the drawstring on the big grab bag. Everything’s turned to wallpaper.”