K. D. looked from Arnette's neat shirtwaist dress to the bangs across her forehead and then into her face-sullen, nagging, accusatory-and slapped it. The change in her expression well worth it. Somebody said, "Ow!" but mostly his friends were assessing the screaming tits closing in on them. Arnette fled; Billie Delia too, but, like the good friend she was, looked back, to see them forcing themselves to look at the ground, the bright May sky or the length of their fingernails.
Good was finished. Her belly hair could stand a light clipping-its knots were otherwise impossible-but she was beautiful. K. D. started on Ben's coat, rehearsing his line of defense to Arnette's family. When he described the incident to his uncles they had frowned at the same time. And like a mirror image in gestures if not in looks, Steward spit fresh Blue Boy while Deek lit a cigar. However disgusted both were, K. D. knew they would not negotiate a solution that would endanger him or the future of Morgan money. His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason. And their family had not built two towns, fought white law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather, to see ranches and houses and a bank with mortgages on a feed store, a drugstore and a furniture store end up in Arnold Fleetwood's pocket. Since the loose bones of his cousins had been buried two years ago, K. D., their hope and their despair, was the last male in a line that included a lieutenant governor, a state auditor and two mayors. His behavior, as always, required scrutiny and serious correction. Or would the uncles see it another way? Maybe Arnette's baby would be a boy, a Morgan grandnephew. Would her father, Arnold, have any rights then that the Morgans had to respect?
Fondling Ben's coat, picking burrs from the silky strands of hair, K. D. tried to think like his uncles-which was hard. So he stopped trying and slipped off into his dream of choice. Only this time it included Gigi and her screaming tits.
"Hi." She cracked her gum like a professional. "Is this Ruby? Bus driver said this was it."
"Yep. Yeah. Uh huh. Sure is." The lounging boys spoke as one.
"Any motels around?"
They laughed at that and felt comfortable enough to ask her who she was looking for and from where she had come. "Frisco," she said. "And rhubarb pie. Got a light?"
The dream, then, would be in Frisco.
The Morgan men conceded nothing but were uneasy at the choice of meeting place. Reverend Misner had thought it best to serve protocol and go to Fleetwood rather than season the raw insult done to the family by making the aggrieved come to the house of the aggressor. K. D., Deek and Steward had sat in the parsonage living room all nods and conciliatory grunts, but K. D. knew what his uncles were thinking. He watched Steward shift tobacco and hold the juice. So far the credit union Misner had formed was no-profit-small emergency loans to church members; no-penalty payback schedules. Like a piggy bank, Deek had said. But Steward said, Yeah for now. The reputation of the church Misner had left to come to Ruby floated behind him: covert meetings to stir folks up; confrontations with rather than end runs around white law. He obviously had hope for a state that had once decided to build a whole new law school to accommodate one student-a Negro girl-and protect segregation at the same time. He clearly took seriously the possibility of change in a state that had also built an open closet right next to a classroom for another Negro student to sit in by himself. That was in the forties, when K. D. was a nursing infant, before his mother, her brothers, his cousins, and all the rest left Haven. Now, some twenty years later, his uncles listened weekly to Misner's sermons, but at the close of each of them they slid behind the steering wheel of their Oldsmobile and Impala and repeated the Old Fathers' refrain: "Oklahoma is Indians, Negroes and God mixed. All the rest is fodder." To their dismay, Reverend Misner often treated fodder like table food. A man like that could encourage strange behavior; side with a teenage girl; shift ground to Fleetwood. A man like that, willing to throw money away, could give customers ideas. Make them think there was a choice about interest rates.
Still, the Baptists were the largest congregation in town as well as the most powerful. So the Morgans sorted Reverend Misner's opinions carefully to judge which were recommendations easily ignored and which were orders they ought to obey.
In two cars they drove barely three miles from Misner's living room to Fleetwood's house.
Somewhere in an Oklahoma city, June voices are doubled by the sunlit water of a swimming pool. K. D. was there once. He had ridden the Missouri, Kansas, Texas line with his uncles and waited outside on the curb while they talked business inside a red-brick building. Excited voices sounded near, and he went to see. Behind a chainlink fence bordered by wide seamless concrete he saw green water. He knows now it was average size, but then it filled his horizon. It seemed to him as though hundreds of white children were bobbing in it, their voices a cascade of the world's purest happiness, a glee so sharply felt it had brought tears. Now, as the Oldsmobile U-turned at the Oven, where Gigi had popped her gum, K. D. felt again the yearning excitement of sparkly water and the June voices of swimmers. His uncles had not been pleased at having to search the city's business district for him and chastised him on the train and later in the automobile all the way back to Ruby. Small price then, and small price now. The eruptions of "How the hell you get in these messes? You should be with people your own age. Why you want to lay with a Fleetwood anyhow? You see that boy's children? Damn!" — all of them exploded without damage. Just as he had already seen the sparkly water, he had already seen Gigi. But unlike the swimming pool, this girl he would see again.
They parked bumper-to-bumper to the side of Fleetwood's house. When they knocked on the door each man, except for Reverend Misner, began to breathe through his mouth as a way of narrowing the house odor of illness.
Arnold Fleetwood never wanted to sleep in a pup tent, on a pallet or a floor ever again. So he put four bedrooms in the spacious house he built on Central Avenue. Sleeping arrangements for himself, his wife and each of their two children left a guest room they were proud of.
When his son, Jefferson, came back from Vietnam and took Sweetie, his bride, into his own bed, there was still the guest room. It would have become a nursery had they not needed it as a hospital ward for Jeff and Sweetie's children. The way things turned out, Fleet now slept on a hideaway in the dining room.
The men sat on spotless upholstery waiting for Reverend Misner to finish seeing the women who were nowhere in sight. Both of the Mrs. Fleetwoods spent all their energy, time and affection on the four children still alive-so far. Fleet and Jeff, grateful for but infuriated by that devotion, turned their shame sideways. Being in their company, sitting near them, was hard. Conversation harder. K. D. knew that Fleet owed his uncles money. And he knew that Jeff wanted very much to kill somebody. Since he couldn't kill the Veterans Administration others just might have to do. Everybody was relieved when Misner came back down the stairs, smiling. "Yes. Well." Reverend Misner clasped his hands, gave them a little shake near his shoulder as though he'd already knocked the contestant out. "The ladies promise to bring us coffee and I believe they said rice pudding later. That's the best reason I know of to get started." He smiled again. He was very close to being too handsome for a preacher. Not just his face and head, but his body, extremely well made, called up admiring attention from practically everybody. A serious man, he took his obvious beauty as a brake on sloth-it forced him to deal carefully with his congregation, to take nothing for granted: not the adoration of the women or the envy of the men.
No one returned his smile concerning dessert. He pressed on. "Let me lay out the situation as I know it. Correct me, you all, if I get it wrong or leave out something. My understanding is that K. D. here has done an injury, a serious injury, to Arnette. So right off we can say K. D. has a problem with his temper and an obligation-"