“You still feel the same about me, like I was your son in another life?”
Miss Mary stood up and hugged me. “Sure I do, Jalen. And you saved me like sons are supposed to. I can’t tell you how much that means. I hope when I have a son he’s just like you.”
We stayed hugging for a while and then she kissed me on the mouth. Her lips fireworked against mine and the pain in my hand seemed to disappear. I could smell her freckles. I could smell down to her bones. It was a quick kiss, just lips, but I got wood again. This time I tucked it up in my waistband to deflate it.
“We’ll bury her, I guess,” Miss Mary said, pulling away.
“You have that money?”
She nodded. “It’s buried where I said.”
“I’m glad you got that.”
She cut my legs free. I wondered what I smelled like. I sat back and watched as she dug out the money, which was in a brown suitcase covered in stickers. Then we rolled Mother Edna into the hole with the broken marker and filled it in. I hated to think about her buried with the bones of all those people who’d been done wrong. We tried to make her grave look like the rest of the cemetery, dry and hard, not freshly dug up. Miss Mary said no one would care that Mother Edna was missing and they wouldn’t look here anyway.
We walked to Sharecropper’s Pond. She tossed the shovel in and it sank down to the murky bottom. Miss Mary told me Mother Edna had tossed my pinky into the woods near the visitor’s center. She said it was probably too late. I’d also lost the binoculars.
We left in the van, the money in the back. I threw Mother Edna’s lion mask out the window when we turned onto 311. Miss Mary came up with a story that I’d been attacked by a stray dog. She dropped me at an urgent care clinic up the road in Collierville. I expected her to wait for me, but she said she couldn’t, not with her face messed up and driving Mother Edna’s van the way she was. She shook my good hand and said she’d come check on me. But I knew she’d disappear with that van, and I was right. No one else knew why she left like that, her car still parked at Audubon, her apartment paid up for the month.
I found out where Miss Mary’s place was the next day and broke in. She’d been there and taken some stuff. I went through what was left. In the garbage I found a few pairs of underwear streaked from her period. I held them to my cheek and then balled them up and put them in a plastic bag. I took scrunchies off doorknobs and books from her bed stand and painted rocks she’d lined up on the windowsill. I drank the rest of her good milk and made peanut butter sandwiches. I took her toothbrush; I still use it.
Grandma Oliver was very aware of me from then on. I never slept anymore. I’d stand in the kitchen and bounce a rubber ball off the wall. One night she put her hand on me like I was a dog she was done taking care of, a Pyramid hanging from her mouth, her oxygen tank rattling at her hip. It’s not hard to make someone who smokes on oxygen go away. Jefferson was passed out drunk when the fire ate them up.
These days I wake in a wormy sleeping bag and gnarl my way into unsteadiness. I’m etched with loss like some kind of crippled king. I’m twenty-four but I look twice that age. Miss Mary was it for me, with her smile and bright promise. My one shot. The hours I spent with her I knew all of life. Now I’m dirt. I ghost the town. Break in places for food. Steal from sheds and gardens. Cop cars spit gravel at me when I’m out walking. I’m the freak at the gas station missing a finger, the one who scrapes change for a short dog of wine, the one they say kills pets for food, the one whose eyes linger on your clean high school girl in her cheerleader skirt. Dirt. Even the Nation of Islam guys by the post office ignore me. I stay in a tent out in the woods near the slave cemetery. Sometimes I walk over there and I can hear the old bones singing about the meanness of the new bones and I know that’s the same meanness that chased Miss Mary through life. Me, I got broken by being so close to kindness.
Part II
Wayward Youth
Uphill
by Mary Miller
Biloxi
The RV park is nice and shady. The residents are mostly older and quiet, but the bugs are loud. There are all sorts of bugs and they are all so loud.
I’m sitting at the picnic table next to the trailer Jimmy has just bought, carefully avoiding the piles of bird crap while watching him fashion a wooden chute for the sewer hook-up. He’s impressed with himself, using nails he’s found on the ground and wood from a scrap pile. Every few minutes he stops to regard his work.
“Our shit travels uphill,” he says, looking at it admiringly.
“That’s amazing.”
He sits across from me and I watch him dig around in his box full of small tools.
Before the trailer he lived on his uncle’s boat, but he sunk it, and before that he lived in a van in his boss’s garage. When I get drunk, I yell at him and call him homeless and we don’t talk for weeks but then I find myself with him again — just a cup of coffee, just as friends — and the cycle repeats itself. We’re at the beginning of the cycle now.
“So I got this call earlier,” Jimmy says. His voice has the high, strained quality it takes on when he’s lying or asking to borrow money. “This friend who lives in Hawaii wants me to drive to Biloxi to take a picture of a lady.”
“A picture of a lady?”
“I haven’t talked to this guy in a long time.”
“Who is he?”
“He sells dope,” he says. “He’s a bad guy.”
A lot of his friends sell dope, but I’ve never heard him call any of them bad guys before. “He sells weed?” I ask.
“Huge quantities of high-grade stuff. Mostly legal.”
“That sounds like a bad idea.”
“Yeah, it’s probably a bad idea,” he says.
I’m surprised to hear him agree with me. He stops digging around in his box. I turn a page in my magazine. “How much did he offer to pay you?”
“He said to name my price. I was thinking a thousand.”
“A thousand? If someone tells you to name your price, you don’t say a thousand. Did you tell him you couldn’t do it?”
“I said I’d call him back.”
“Why didn’t you tell him you couldn’t do it?” If I wasn’t here, or we were in a fight, he would already be on his way down there.
“I’m not gonna do it.”
“They’re going to kill that woman,” I say, because I want to hear what it sounds like. I want him to say, No, they’re not, but he doesn’t. There she is — eating a tuna fish sandwich or watching a game show on TV, not knowing she will soon be dead. It’s kind of thrilling. I wonder what she looks like, if she’s pretty.
“I’ll call him right now with you sitting there and tell him I can’t do it. I’m going to have to make some stuff up.”
“Of course, make some stuff up. I don’t care.” I flip another page in my magazine, a Cosmopolitan from November 2002. I found a whole stack of them in his laundromat. “Wait,” I say. “Hold on a second.”
“What?”
“Let’s think about this for another minute.” This is not my life, or it is not the life I’m supposed to be living, and so I can pretend that it is. I don’t consider the actuality of my situation, which is that every day I live this life it becomes more and more mine, the real one, and the one I’m supposed to be living falls further away; eventually it will be gone forever. “Whether or not you take the picture, somebody’s going to do it and the woman’ll be dead, right?”
“That’s right,” he says.
“So either way she’s dead and all he wants you to do is take a picture. And you’re broke.”