Читать книгу Drifting South - Charles Davis, Charles Davis B. - Страница 8

Chapter 4

At some place outside of a dirty window that separated me from all of what I couldn’t stop staring at on the Trail-ways bus, I found myself drifting back to Shady Hollow, back to when I was free and running with the devil at my heels. I was young and fast then, but he was about to catch up to me as I tried to holler something back at Herbert. In that old memory, I couldn’t say a word, as naturally talky as I was back then, generally. I’d been quiet like that, too, around Amanda Lynn the first time I ever saw her, for a short spell anyway when she’d first cast her spell on me, and just the thought of her showing up in Shady so unexpected had knocked the wind right out of me.

I knew Herbert wasn’t trying to pull one on me because I’d never told him about Amanda Lynn or where I’d been taken the year before. After the elders had hauled me back to Shady, Ma told me to never tell nobody about going to Durham County because the elders had ruled on it. I never did because the last thing I needed was to get on the wrong side of the Shady elders.

But ever since they’d brought me back home, I never told Ma or nobody else that I’d been saving up to go back to North Carolina to be with Amanda Lynn one day. I couldn’t wait to get back there.

I always told folks in Shady Hollow that I didn’t have nothing but a bent slug dime, but I had a canvas sack full of real money, twelve hundred and fifty-seven dollars and change, most of it poker loot from the days when nobody knew I was lucky but was only just catching on to it. I’d saved all of it and kept it hidden under a floorboard that I’d pried up in my bedroom, and I had a ten-dollar bill hidden in my shoe at all times just like Uncle Ray had told me a man should keep.

My road stake was to go back and find Amanda Lynn when I turned eighteen, because that’s the day Ma had always told me I’d have my own way about things. And even though Ma wasn’t firm about much, she’d always been firm about that with all her boys. My eighteenth birthday was coming around soon enough, and that’s the day I’d planned to leave Shady Hollow.

A tugging part of me didn’t want to leave because I loved Shady, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d be moving up Hoke’s pool shooting ladder to play the bigger games. But I never ever figured that Amanda Lynn would come there, so I always figured I’d have to leave. It would be hard saying farewell to my ma and brothers and all my old pards, I dern knew it would, but the older I got, I felt that place shrinking around me. I was being pulled away from there a little at a time even before I met Amanda Lynn.

The biggest part of me was pulling harder to leave than the tugging part of me was to stay, is what it was. That bigger part wanted to see all the things I’d heard so much about from so many who came and went from Shady. The best thing I’d ever seen was out beyond those mountains and far from the cold river that ran shallow and fast along the rocky banks, but so deep and slow and silent in the pools.

I’d never told Amanda Lynn anything about me but a pack of lies. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of me or Ma or my brothers or Shady or nothing like that, because I wasn’t.

But I guess Aunt Kate was right, telling me upon my welcome to the flatland the year before, that to someone who hadn’t spent time actually living on the side of the Big Walker in a whorehouse called the Last Rebel Yell, there didn’t seem a way to talk about any of it right that would come out without grit and dirt and blood and other things not suitable for dinner table talk all over it.

But Amanda Lynn had come to see me.

I didn’t know how she’d found me or why she’d come, but I kept hoping it was for the same reason that I wanted to go back and see her. I kept hoping that with all my might.

Running as hard as I could up the brushy banks of the river behind all of the businesses while trying to dodge cans smoldering with burning trash, and getting bit by chained-up dogs that were there to keep drunks from trespassing behind those same places, my mind was filled with Amanda Lynn and the times we’d spent together on the plantation. All of those long nights and the laziest days that went by too quick. I didn’t long for nothing else when I was with her. Nothing.

I wanted to hold her again to me tight so bad that it made me hurt all over. I prayed to myself, hoping that she’d be able to forgive me for just leaving her like I did with no notice and not a word or look said between us. And I prayed more that she wouldn’t ask me why I left so sudden, because I still didn’t know the full answer to that.

I still didn’t even know the real reason why my Aunt Kate took me away in the middle of the night to go there with Ma’s permission, except Ma said her and Aunt Kate finally agreed that a summer in North Carolina would do me some good.

But it was clear to me by the forceful way Ma and the elders had brought me back before that summer was near over that she’d changed her mind about that. I’d never fought nobody so hard as I did the day the elders took me back to Shady for no good reason that they’d tell me, except the elders had ordered it was time for me to go back home and we had to be quick about it.

Since I’d been a little boy, Ma had always told me that the world outside of Shady Hollow was a dangerous one. She said I wasn’t yet ready to step foot in it whenever I’d get in a wandering mood. But after she’d let me leave Shady Hollow with Aunt Kate and I spent those short months in Durham County, it didn’t seem a bit dangerous to me.

She kept telling me that she’d fetched me back because she missed me and needed me around to make money to help her take care of my younger brothers, but I didn’t think that was the real reason as she kept saying it was over and over. I remembered how the elders looked so serious and loaded down with guns when they came and grabbed me all in a rush.

Whatever the real reason was, Ma’d kept it to herself, as she’d do with so many other things.

As I crept up the back steps to where I lived so Amanda Lynn couldn’t get a glimpse of me yet, all of those thoughts swirled in my head. The one thing I didn’t think about or realize was that the terrible danger my ma had always feared and I’d never understood, had come to Shady Hollow.

And it was looking for me.

Uncle Ray jumped off of Ma’s sofa just as fast as I’d thrown open the front door. If he’d been standing behind it instead of lounging with his feet up, it may have killed him.

By the time he said something, I was already in the bathroom pouring a basin of water.

I grabbed the cake of soap from the rim of the bathing tub and I rubbed and rubbed on it and finally got some suds going even though the water was cold. After I finished and dried off, I still thought I didn’t look as good as I could. So I reached into Uncle Ray’s shaving kit that he kept on the second shelf and I searched and found his bottle of fancy hair-oil treatment. I squirted a bunch of it in my hands, rubbed it through my black hair in a big fury and then slicked it all back away from my face and over my ears like he carried his hair.

I studied my new look for a bit from the front and then side to side, and noted how it made me look older. I thought I looked better, too. I figured if I ran into my brothers, they were sure to give me some sass about my hair all shiny, but I’d shut that up right quick.

I was more pleased with my new look than I could have even hoped for, especially at that important moment, so I took one long last look before I wiped my hands on my dungarees and went into me and my brothers’ bedroom. I searched the closet and dresser for the best shirt I could find.

I found my favorite shirt, which was a little past a little dirty. A person would have to get close to notice though, I figured. I’d just tell Amanda that I’d been working hard all day to make traveling money to come to see her, that’s what I’d tell her if I saw her looking too close at the shirt.

I was buttoning it up when I heard Ma’s footsteps. I tried to grab my stash hidden in the floorboards so I’d have money to treat Amanda Lynn to a nice evening, if she’d be agreeable to it. She was the only person in the whole world I’d spend that money on, but Ma peeked around the door too soon, still wearing her shiny red robe but she had on her old slippers now. There was no way I was gonna let her know I had a sack of money, so I kept a foot on the board.

“Did you get the food?”

“You won’t believe it, Ma. You know that—”

“Sugar, did you bring back the food?”

I shook my head. “You know that girl I told you about last year, the one I got to know in North Carolina?”

Ma stepped into the bedroom and her face looked like it froze on her. I wondered if it was over me not bringing back the steak dinner, but it was even a more serious look than she’d given me the couple of times that I’d gambled away her supper money.

I backed up from her look and the excitement fell out of my voice, but just a little. “Remember, the girl who lived on that—”

“I remember.”

“She’s here. She checked into the Alton House and I’m going down there.”

Ma walked across the squeaking pine floor for a moment and both her hands started grabbing at the robe where it draped her legs. She now just looked spooked.

“You mad I didn’t bring up the steak dinner yet?” I asked.

Ma rolled up her hair to the top of her head. She pulled a pin from somewhere in her robe and stuck it into the ball.

“I put the order in. I paid for it already, Ma. I’ll bring it back from Merle’s in a—”

She shut the bedroom door and stood between it and me. “Have you seen her?”

“Not yet. But Herbert saw her and said she was looking for me. It’s her. It’s Amanda Lynn. She told Herbert her name.”

“So she knows you’re here?”

“Yeah, Ma. He told her I lived here.”

“You can’t go see her.”

A long ugly quiet passed between us. Ma’s eyes were watery but never blinked.

“What?”

She started pacing again and wiped under one eye. “Find your brothers, right now. They should still be down at the falls…you tell them to stay until I come for them. Tell them not to come back here. Don’t you come back here neither until I find you. Do not come back. For any reason. Now go. Right now, Benjamin. And do not go to see this girl.” Ma tried to turn me toward the door with one hand on my shoulder, but I didn’t move.

“What’s going on?”

She started pushing harder. “I’ll tell you when I meet you at the river.”

“I wanna know now.”

Ma let go of me and starting pacing again, but this time a lot faster. She went to take a seat on the double mattresses that me and my brothers slept on, then she looked at me all of a sudden like she’d forgotten I was standing there. She shot back up.

“Go! And if you see any men you don’t know, don’t get near them. Run. Don’t speak to anybody, not even your friends. Now find your brothers. I’ll be there soon. And go through the woods to get there, don’t take the river trail. I have to go talk to the—”

“I’m gonna see Amanda Lynn.”

Ma took one long step and slapped me hard across the face. I mean real hard. “I said no,” she said.

I turned back to her. I was a lot bigger than Ma and had been for a couple of years. I’d never gotten so mad at her as I got the second after she laid a hand across my face for no reason. Before, she’d always had a decent reason for something I’d done. Not this time. I hadn’t seen Ma with the moonlight in her eyes in ages, and wondered if she was off in the head and that man she was with had given her something bad to drink or sniff or smoke like had happened before one time.

I stepped up full in front of her and she backed up from me. I tasted the blood in my mouth and wanted to hit back and hit back hard, but I didn’t. It was the first time I’d ever wanted to hit my own ma like I’d hit a man, being riled up as I was, and it shook me up even more feeling like that because I’d never felt such a dark thing before.

“Don’t ever hit me again,” I finally said.

When I went to leave my bedroom, Ma tried to grab hold of me. She pulled my shirt out from where I’d just tucked it, but I was walking fast toward the front door.

“Don’t let him leave!” she screamed at Uncle Ray.

I looked back at Ma knowing she was acting crazy now. I think Uncle Ray thought the same thing by the way he watched her. But he rose from the sofa, looking back and forth at us with his quick eyes. Ma was still screaming right behind me, trying to slow me down.

“Stop him!”

Uncle Ray went to grab me same as Ma did, and at first I tried to get his hand off me easy-like, but he wasn’t letting go. He was taller than me, but so thin and with his feet busted up, I just turned fast and shoved him back down onto the sofa as hard as I could.

He rolled onto the floor and I felt bad about what I’d done the moment I did it, because I knew Uncle Ray wasn’t expecting what I’d just done to him. He’d always been good to me and I knew from then on we’d always be different toward each other. Besides that, I was always a little leery of Uncle Ray the way he was so book smart and good with a gun and a razor. But I had to see Amanda and he was in my way of doing it. And now I just felt like I had to get away from Ma, too.

I yanked open the door and ran out with Ma still trying to hold on to me and yelling. When I looked back, an old man with hair sticking up everywhere was peeking out her bedroom. I stopped at the bottom of the back steps when she said all out of breath and shaky, “You can’t go.” She was holding on to the top railing with both hands when I turned to leave. “She may’ve brought trouble here!”

I walked back up one step and leaned forward, staring at Ma as hard as I could. “You don’t even know her. She’s the best thing that—”

“Danger may have followed her.”

“What danger?”

“We have to leave until I can find out if—”

“You’re talking crazy, Momma. I’m going to see her.”

“I forbid it!”

Ma drew a line in the dirt right there with those words and with her hands now all fisted at her sides. A line I’d never crossed that she’d ever found out about. She looked plain shook-up, standing up above me and staring down. I felt sorry for her all of a sudden for whatever was wrong with her with the shape she was in, but I had to go. I figured we’d work it out somehow when I got home. We’d probably worked out worse before.

“Come here,” she said, finally lowering her voice and trying to cover up more with the chill in the air.

I didn’t say anything else and took off around the side of the saloon to head up to the Alton House. Ma didn’t say or scream anything else, but I could hear her running through our apartment, yelling at Uncle Ray.

Just before I was out of earshot of her kitchen window, opened a crack, it sounded like she said, “They’re gonna kill my baby.”

I slowed, wondering if I’d heard her right. I did hear “kill” and “baby” clear enough. Ma tended to call all of her boys “baby”sometimes, even though none of us were babies anymore. But it wasn’t just what she said, it was the way she said it that sent a sharp chill through me. My legs were still trembling. It was the first time I’d stood up to her in such a way and flat disobeyed her like I just did. Something big had changed between us.

I stood on the boardwalk outside the open door of the Last Rebel Yell and tried to get my breathing back to normal and my legs still as all sorts of folks started to funnel into that place laughing and having a big time.

I paid no attention to them, even the ones bumping into me, and wished I’d have grabbed my green corduroy coat before I left, because the wind was starting to kick up cold off of the river. I shivered and tensed myself all over a few times and then leaned over an old rotten horse trough to see if my hair still looked all right in the reflection, but I couldn’t see nothing in the black water.

Then I looked up the street past the shacks and businesses as people were starting to go here and there, walking toward the gaming parlors and bawdy houses and restaurants and taverns. The sun was way over the mountains now, and Shady always came alive in the evening hours like the whole place was a bunch of vampires in a comic book.

The Shady keepers stuck out from all of them in their white bowler hats and black bow ties, making their rounds like they always did an hour or two before dusk, lighting all of the lanterns and turning on gaslights, and spotting potential trouble to report to the elders.

Amanda Lynn’s car was what I was looking for, and it was still parked in a dried mud lot off the side of the Alton House, right next to an empty lean-to with a tin roof where farmers would bring in country hams and homemade sausage and bushel baskets of things that come from the dirt to sell during the spring through summer months. In the fall and winter, those with nowhere else to go, drunks mostly, tended to find refuge under it.

After a minute or two, my legs were shaking a little less but still wobbly. I’d warmed up some but wished I’d snuck in a long drink of Ma’s beer earlier, or at least got a little of that chowder or a few crackers down in me.

I thought for a minute about going back to ask Ma about what had gotten into her. But if she was on a bad high, I didn’t want to be around her until she came back down from her visions. I was going over all of that in my mind when a blue dress caught the corner of my eye.

My full gaze turned toward the blue dress coming down the boardwalk on the other side of Alton’s. Even though I hadn’t seen her in months and months and she was a good fifty yards away, I knew it was her at first glance.

Amanda Lynn looked just like a dream I’d had over and over, always knowing deep down inside when I’d wake up that it would never come true.

But it had. She’d come to Shady, and I felt like I was in that dream.

I turned my body full toward her and, even so far away and with all of the other folks milling around, I saw her smile.

I wanted to run or walk to her or jump up and down or do anything but what I did there for a few moments—I just stood not able to move and kept watching her walk, getting closer and closer.

Finally, I raised a hand to wave after she waved at me, and I realized she really had recognized me, and I couldn’t believe how she was even more beautiful than I remembered. She’d changed in her face and body since I’d seen her last, fuller in places but just a little, and they were all real good changes by the looks of it.

I noticed, too, that I wasn’t the only one looking at her in her blue dress that fit tight against her in all the best places.

Something finally happened in me, and my legs moved a step at a time as I began walking past Phelps’s Grocery and The Oasis Lounge. Then all of a sudden, yelling and name-calling and some sort of ruckus spilled out of Chappy McGee’s Public House across the street. I took my eyes off of Amanda Lynn when it turned into a full-blown fistfight between two men as people from all directions swarmed in to watch it.

I had to look, too, because I needed to see if any in the fight were my brothers or pards, but they weren’t, so I kept walking. When I started to turn back toward Amanda Lynn, I saw a man less than twelve feet from that fight. Unlike all of the other folks gathering, he wasn’t watching the fight. He was staring at me.

Staring hard, too.

He wasn’t a big man but not small, either, and he wore a long overcoat and had a fedora pulled low on his head. When I stared back at him, he turned around and walked through the open doors of Chappy’s. He’d looked at me like he knew me, but he was a stranger. I’d remember a man with cold eyes like that stranger had. But then I thought I did know him. It was hard to tell who he was by the way he was all covered up in coat and hat, but he couldn’t hide those cold eyes. They looked just like the eyes of a man I’d met the summer before, a man who worked for Aunt Kate. I wondered if it was him, and if he’d driven Amanda Lynn to Shady.

I then turned and saw Amanda glance at the fighting, too, and it embarrassed me that she’d have to see such a thing on her first day in Shady. She veered away from it as far as she could on the boardwalk, and I figured it was probably the first fight she’d ever seen.

I sucked in what little stomach I had to raise my chest and look tall as I could when we got near, but then when we got close, the air went out of me like I was a leaky tire. I couldn’t say a word or touch her or anything, and that was a strange feeling after all of the touching and talking we’d done in the past.

I don’t know what came over me but I guess my arms just couldn’t stand it anymore, so they pulled her to me. I hugged her with both hands that ended up around her waist, and I felt all of her against me from my chest to way down my legs.

I soon had to back myself away from the feel of her a little bit, and when she pulled away from me, her eyes were wet and she was smiling. I just kept taking in the smell and look of her blue eyes and all of that blond hair. I went to kiss her and that’s when she put a folded piece of yellow paper in my breast pocket, and then she smacked me across the face harder than Ma even did. It was the second time in ten minutes that I’d been hit by a girl.

Then she grabbed me and pressed her face into me. I kept holding her, feeling the sting on my face and hoping her mood was changing and wishing I had on a cleaner shirt. After a long time, she pulled from me and said, “You promised you’d never leave without me.”

I didn’t know what to say back because it would take a whole day to explain, so I just wanted to say I was sorry for everything.

“I didn’t want to,” finally came out of me quiet.

She looked at me for a long time like she was really studying my face in a good sort of way, like I was doing to her, and then she looked past me at all the loud goings-on around us. Shady Hollow was definitely different looking and acting than the place I’d made up that I told her I was from.

I looked down at the fancy paper poking up out of my pocket and saw there was handwriting on it. I hoped that later she wouldn’t want me to read it out loud with her around because I couldn’t read and she didn’t know that.

“How’d you find—” I said.

I couldn’t finish my question because the fight across the street headed in our direction and the crowd was about to run us over. So I grabbed Amanda Lynn by the hand, looked around for somewhere to take her inside so we could talk and hopefully patch up. I led her up the street back to the Alton House, which was a fairly decent place to be at that time of the evening.

“Ben!”

I turned around and Ma was running toward me wearing her robe and old furry slippers, and Uncle Ray was trying to keep up, limping behind her. He didn’t even have his boots or socks on.

I gritted my teeth and wanted to yell or cuss or something but didn’t with my company. Amanda Lynn turned around, but I just kept hold of her hand and starting walking faster in the other direction as she started saying she had to tell me something.

Ma’s hollering cut off whatever that something was. She was carrying on like she’d completely gone off nutty and I just thought about the pure bad luck of it having Ma high as a hootie owl on the one day that Amanda Lynn showed up in Shady.

I finally went to turn around to yell at her, hoping Amanda Lynn wouldn’t catch on that she was my ma. That’s when I saw that man with the cold eyes again, his eyes staring into mine like they had earlier, but this time he was walking toward me determined and fast. He had a newspaper over one hand.

Ma saw him right after I did. I watched her grab Uncle Ray and point at that man, and Uncle Ray pulled out a revolver from his waistband and directed it at him.

I pulled Amanda behind me and felt like my heart had quit beating. When it started again, it pounded in my ears and was the only thing I could hear until Uncle Ray yelled.

“Stop where you’re standing, mister!” he said.

I’d never heard Uncle Ray say anything over a normal talking voice. He’d yelled so loud that most of the people watching the fight just down the street turned to look. And then a Shady elder who was watching the fight to make sure it didn’t get too out of hand saw Uncle Ray holding that black revolver, and he came running up the street, pulling two guns from hip holsters.

Uncle Ray kept hurrying until he got about ten feet from me, trying to get between me and the man I was almost sure was the same man who worked for Aunt Kate. That close to those eyes, there was now little doubt.

I even remembered his name. It was Mr. Charles. I didn’t know if Charles was his first name or last name, but that’s what Aunt Kate called him.

“Empty your hands!” Uncle Ray yelled at him.

I raised one of my hands to try to say something to stop whatever was about to happen from happening, and tell Uncle Ray everything was all right and to simmer down whatever it was that was boiling up in him.

“Drop that gun, Ray!” the Shady elder ordered.

Uncle Ray paid no attention to Elder Butch Sarver but kept his gun leveled on Mr. Charles. The odd thing was, Charles didn’t even act like he’d heard a thing or knew a gun was pointed at him.

I was turning to Amanda Lynn to see if she could figure out what was going on and do something to settle everybody down. I figured her and Mr. Charles had traveled up together. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw him walking toward me now even faster, so I turned back and in one quick motion, he raised the front of the newspaper he was toting a couple of inches, and two explosions came out of that paper so loud it sounded like cannons had shot from it, and the paper caught on fire.

Uncle Ray flew backward toward me and Amanda Lynn, and Ma screamed.

Charles dropped the newspaper and started leveling a silver pistol in my direction and I froze still like I was dead already. I was sure I was, looking down the barrel of that big gun. Then a shot came from behind him.

He turned and fired three quick shots and one of the elders, Butch Sarver, fell forward, dropping one of his guns. Butch tried to raise his other revolver from where he was lying and the man with the ice-water eyes, who I’d known the year before but only a little more than I could claim knowing a complete stranger, took a careful long aim with both hands and shot him again.

Butch’s face, or what was left of it, dropped into a mud hole and didn’t come back up.

When Charles turned back to kill me, I’d picked up Uncle Ray’s gun and I was already squeezing the trigger slow and steady, just like he’d taught me as I kept the front sight in the middle of Mr. Charles’s chest.