Читать книгу Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League - Jonathan Odell - Страница 10

1949

Chapter Three

A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

Billy Dean Brister was chugging to the top of Redeemer’s Hill, and he wanted it all to himself. After honking twice, he butted his rattletrap Ford up against the tailgate of a gin wagon that was hogging the gravel road. The colored driver swung about, but when he saw the two white men, he smiled weakly, touched his hat, and popped his mules smartly with the ends of the reins.

Nothing was going to hold Billy Dean back. He was determined to have clear sailing on the downslope. Though blind to oncoming traffic, he swerved the car toward the far ditch and held his ground.

“Wait on it, you hear?” his uncle said. “They ain’t enough road for you to pass.”

Billy Dean grinned. He drove the left tires into the ditch and straddled the road ledge.

“Dammit to hell,” his uncle muttered.

Billy Dean had no doubts. Good luck had finally shifted to his side of the road. Billy Dean Brister, once destined to take his place in a long line of white-trash Bristers, was going to break from family tradition. Come fall, Hopalachie County would be his for the taking, and nobody could keep him from grabbing ahold of it with both hands and a knee to the throat. No matter if he did have to make a deal with the devil to get it.

With two tires on the road and two in the ditch, dirt and rock slinging out from the rear, he drowned the wagon, its colored driver, and his two brown mules in a storm of dust.

Billy Dean jammed the Stetson tight on his head, reared back in his seat, and mashed the accelerator flat to the floor. The truck, propelled as much by gravity as by gasoline, sailed down Redeemer’s Hill, the final belly-dropping descent from the bluffs to the flatter-than-flat Delta. There was nothing ahead now but miles and miles of cotton plants studded with pink-and-white blossoms.

Billy Dean’s uncle pulled up in his seat again. Furman was a big man with a nose that resembled raw hamburger. “You driving like a blue-assed fly,” he said, “Ain’t gone live long enough to win no ’lection.” He reached down to the floorboard for the fruit jar.

Billy Dean tipped back his Stetson with his thumb. He knew better. The bargain had already been struck. That primary was his for the taking. Senator told him that it didn’t matter that Billy Dean hadn’t yet had his twenty-first birthday: “In this county, I decide how old folks are. Why, when it comes to the voting, I get to decide if they’re dead are not.” Even the election flyers they were posting today were a waste of time, yet the Senator had insisted they make a good show of it.

“Where’s the next stop at?”

With two fingers pressed against his lips, the old man turned to the window and spit, finessing a brown trail of tobacco juice clear of the rear fender. “You gone take a right about a mile up ahead.” Furman unscrewed the top of the jar, took a sip, and swallowed hard. “Hodamighty!”

Billy Dean took his turn at the jar while keeping an eye on a horizon that never seemed to get any closer no matter how fast he went. He hadn’t known how big Hopalachie County was until he decided he was going to be sheriff over all of it. Then it got mighty big.

There was this, the Delta part, with its thousands of look-alike acres of nothing but cotton hiding tiny crossroads settlements built around gins and country stores. Farther west there were the swamps and bayous with little clusters of cabins and fishing shacks raised up on stilts. At their backs, where Billy Dean and his uncle had just come from, were the bluffs.

Perched up there in those bluffs was the uppity little town of Delphi, looking down like an old powdered woman on the whole shebang. That’s where Billy Dean was going to settle when the devil paid him his due. He was going to be high sheriff and move to town and live in a big white house with the rich folks. The same ones that had shamed his daddy and their kind ever since Noah. They’d soon be calling him “sir.” All he had to do to make that happen was to marry the ugliest girl in Hopalachie County. Billy Dean took another drink.

The gravel had nearly given out, and the road became like a ribbed washboard. They were coming up on the Hopalachie River. Shaking wildly, the truck began to drift off in a sideways direction. Uncle Furman reached down for where a door handle once was and then crossed his arms over his face instead. “Boy, what’s got into you?” he shouted with a mouth full of chambray. “You tempting the devil?”

Maybe he was. But at that moment, Billy Dean’s future seemed to be laid out before him as sure and straight as one of these Delta plantation roads.

The Senator and him had shook on it. The next day Billy Dean went to Delphi and bought himself a Stetson and a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots, the kind he had dreamed about since he was a barefooted boy of ten.

Pointing on down the road, Uncle Furman shouted over the rattle of the truck, “There it is. Slow down, you hear?”

The general store sat on a bare island of packed dirt surrounded by cotton plants that lapped right up to the back door. According to the thermometer nailed to the front of the store, the temperature had already hit ninety-three in the shade, and it was still early morning.

As the dust settled around the truck, Billy Dean opened his door and turned himself sideways in the seat, giving his legs an extra-long stretch. The place was dead quiet. Looking around, he began to recollect where he was. He had bought shine here one time. After dark. It had been a couple of years. He was starting to remember.

Off in the distance a silent cloud of dust was rising above the green horizon, heading their way. As it neared, Billy Dean could make out the deep-throated hum of a car with a substantial engine. Finally a dark green Buick, old but well tended to, came into sight, drawing the cloud behind it. The car turned off into the yard and rolled to a careful stop.

The colored man who got out was taller even than Billy Dean and all dressed up in an old-fashioned baggy suit with a gold watch chained across his stomach. He leaned down to the open window and said a word to the three children who remained in the car, a boy in the back and a young girl clutching a baby in the front. Then the man headed toward the store.

Coming up on Billy Dean and his uncle, the colored man removed his felt hat, nodded respectfully, and said, “How do, sirs?”

After he had gone into the store, Uncle Furman got out of the truck and shambled over to the Buick. “Boy, that chaps my ass!” he said. “How many white folks you know got a car this good?” He aimed a stream of tobacco juice at a shiny hubcap with expert precision.

The boy who sat in the backseat glared at Furman with all the ferocity a child could muster. He wore a red straw cowboy hat with a yellow star painted on the crown, the drawstring pulled tight under his chin.

Billy Dean clenched his cigarette in one side of his mouth and spoke out the other. “Them nigger preachers sure know how to spend the Lord’s money.”

“Sho!” Furman said. “That’s what he was, awright. Wearing a painted tie as wide as your Aunt Beulah’s butt. And did you see that watch chain on his belly? Looked a hunnurd percent karat gold.”

The girl in the front seat didn’t look old enough to be a mother, just a little older than the boy in the back. She was studying Billy Dean’s face hard, and when she saw him looking back, she swung her head toward the store again, whipping her plaits over her shoulder. Even though it was boiling hot, she pulled the baby closer.

Furman noticed the girl, too. With his hands behind his back, he crouched down and peered through the front window at her. She was dressed in white from head to toe—a white ruffled dress, white shiny shoes and cotton socks, white satin ribbons tied to the end of her plaits. “Hey, Billy Dean, looks like we got the Cotton Queen in here!”

The girl didn’t flinch. Instead she kept looking straight ahead, into the smug face painted on the shiny new screen door. Little Miss Sally Sunbeam, with her cornsilk hair and baby-doll blue eyes, seemed to be smiling back at her, all the time holding a slice of light bread up to her mouth. Miss Sally didn’t appear to be worried about a thing.

Gripping the back of the front seat, the boy in the straw hat pulled himself forward. He gave Furman a steely look that defied the old man to touch his sister. “Lookie here, Billy Dean.” Furman pointed to the star on the boy’s hat. “This’n wants to be sheriff, too. Think you can beat a nigger boy come the primary?”

Billy Dean grinned. “Might be close.”

Furman’s gaze shifted to the baby in the front seat holding tight to the girl’s plait. “Gal, who’s that baby belong to? Ain’t yours, is it?”

“Yessuh,” the girl answered, squinting hard at the screen door as if willing her father’s return.

Furman studied the baby for a moment. “That don’t look like no colored boy to me. Pass for Eye-talian. I reckon some white boy been sneaking around her woodpile late at night.” Turning back to his nephew, Furman asked, “Who you think he takes after?”

Billy Dean examined his boots, but sneaked a look at the baby when his uncle turned back to the car.

“How old are you, girl?” asked Furman.

“Fo’teen, suh.”

“You hear that, Billy Dean? Her baby can’t be but a year. Maybe two. Jesus! They born to breed, ain’t they?”

Billy Dean did the math. “Shit,” he muttered. He fixed his eyes on the baby. “Get me that ball-peen hammer out of the back of the truck,” he told Furman.

The girl’s eyes grew big again. She put her hand on the window crank, thought better of it, and tightened her grip on her baby instead.

While Furman rattled around in the truck bed, Billy Dean pushed back his Stetson and leaned into the girl’s window. “You—”

“I ain’t said nothing about what happened.”

“Shut up!” Billy Dean spat, low and harsh. He studied the child next to her. She wouldn’t have to tell nobody. The baby’s face would tell the deed.

Billy Dean took the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it into the car. The girl sat stock-still, clutching the boy, while the smell of scorched cloth filled the car. In the backseat, her brother made a move for the cigarette. Without turning around the girl said in a panicked voice, “Willie! Leave it be. Don’t do nothing.”

He slowly eased back in the seat, his eyes not breaking from Billy Dean’s.

When Furman returned with the hammer, Billy Dean took it and slapped the head into the palm of his hand. The baby started to whimper, yet his mother resisted looking down at him.

Just then the screen creaked open and the girl’s father stepped onto the gallery carrying his sack of groceries. Seeing the two white men over by his daughter, he moved hurriedly toward the car. “Yes, Lord! Going to be a hot one, ain’t it?”

The colored man opened the rear door and put the groceries in the backseat. “Too hot to be out of the shade for long,” he went on. “Nosuh. Maybe the good Lord send a little shower thisa way. Look like it’s coming up a cloud down off yonder.” He nodded toward the distant north, but didn’t take his eyes off the ball-peen hammer.

“Yessuh. Be nice to get a little rain to cool things down. Settle the dust some.” He opened the door on the driver’s side and casually brushed the smoldering cigarette onto the ground. Then he removed his handkerchief from his coat pocket and laid it out over the burn.

“Well, I best be getting on to home. You sirs have a fine day, now.” Tipping his hat to the men, the preacher pulled out into the road, departing faster than he had come.

Furman spit. “Crazy preacher.” He grabbed a handful of flyers from off the truck seat and joined his nephew up on the gallery. He held one of the flyers flat against the gray weathered wood, right between a faded war bonds poster and the Garrett Snuff sign. Billy Dean hammered a nail into each of the four corners.

Furman took a step back and said, “Looks just like you.”

Billy Dean spun around. “Who looks like me?”

His uncle nodded at the flyer. “Yore picture there. Good likeness, don’t you think?”

He studied Furman for a moment and then turned back toward the flyer. “Yeah,” he said. “Reckon they caught me.”

“Odds say you gone win that primary easy, Billy Dean.”

“Better,” Billy Dean said darkly. “The Senator done had all my competition paid off or scared off.”

“Aw, hit’s OK,” Furman reassured him. “The Senator only doing what’s best for his little girl. She gone be the wife of the next high sheriff if it costs him half his plantation.” Furman spit over the railing. “Boy, howdy, are you a lucky shit.”

“Yeah, well,” Billy Dean said. “Everything’s got its price.”

Furman put his hand on his nephew’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. She ain’t that ugly. Anyway, you and Hertha’s young’uns probably take after our side of the family. Brister blood always wins out when it comes to looks.”

“Seems to,” Billy Dean said under his breath, staring down the road.