A few days later,
I show up at her door again. I am laughing when she answers the door wearing a soft sundress. I suck in my breath.
“Hi. What are you doing here?” she asks quietly, leaning her weight on one hip. I can hear the sound of her building reverberating, a crying baby a few floors up, a vacuum cleaner somewhere below us, the smell of a beefy stew in the air.
“This is for you,” I say, handing her a flier I found tacked to a telephone pole yesterday morning. “Your official invitation to the best hoedown east of the Mississippi.”
Before she can answer, I hand her a box, a white cardboard thing with a pink bow wrapped around it. She takes it and smiles.
“Carmine…” She opens the box. It’s a wicker cowboy hat.
She chuckles out loud, and I smile broadly. I got her, I think; I managed to shock her in the right way.
“This is so…” She doesn’t complete her thought.
“Corny. Yes, I know, but why don’t you put it on and go heehawing with me?”
A half hour later, we walk out to the street. The sundress she’s wearing flows playfully to the middle of her thighs. I’m glad she didn’t change. The print is innocuous enough: round sunflowers, inches from one another, covering the palest of white material. The straps barely hold up the fullness of her breasts, and I try not to stare. Under the hat, her face is flawless in just lip gloss and mascara.
There are people on the street. A young mother with a toddler walking slowly beside her, an elderly man with a small dog; we watch them as they watch us.
It is a warm day, with soft winds and smells, and she keeps her window down in the truck as we drive back to the country.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask her, merging onto the highway back toward Eton. I fiddle with the radio, searching for neutrality, suddenly feel off-center.
“Oh nothing,” she says. “I’m just wondering why you have such a big truck.” She laughs and turns up the radio.
* * *
The Chatsworth jubilee is big and full, even by Dallas standards, and the crowd rests on top of a hillside not far from Eton; there is a scent of lavender in the air. There are people everywhere, upon the hills, laying in the grass, babies and seniors, families and singles; it’s a melting pot.
I’ve managed to pull it together for us this time. I have a blanket, a cooler full of beers, a handful of wildflowers for her. I sigh as I pull it all out of the bed of the truck.
“I’m impressed. Your mama did teach you something, I see.” Her eyebrows raise with her words.
“Yeah, I manage okay, some of the time,” I say as I find us an open spot under a small tree. In the distance, the band has started, sounds like Juice Newton performing “Ride’Em Cowboy.”
The night unfolds much like the song, literally, piece by piece, lyrical at times, sometimes fast and sometimes too slow. We hear the nuances of the fiddle as the clouds begin to cover the sky, the smell of barbeque, kids out of breath and laughing; there is no place but here.
At some point I pull her up off the blanket, wrap my arms around her, and show her how it’s done. I don’t remember ever being this playful.
“Let me show you the two-step, darlin’,” I say as I swing her around. Her head falls back in laughter, and I can’t believe how easily she’s letting me push her around the grass, pushing her feet in the right direction with my knees.
A few hours go by and we dance, laugh. I teach her the words to the craggiest of country songs, and she pretends not to like it, says they’re all depressing, all about lost wives and horses, sound like broken washing machines, she says. I don’t think about Ma even once, or Pa’s raspy breathing, not even the Dallas skyline or the money I could be making right now, or what the next day might hold.
After the last song of the night, we fall breathlessly onto the ground, and I reach over and cover her with the side of the blanket, move in closer to her, hand her a cold beer. The sun has fallen behind the hills, and the air has a chill to it now.
I love the way her skin smells, so ripe and sweet, so soft; I try to hold myself back. My face is just a few inches from hers; our eyes meet for a second, I turn away. The magnetism is strong. Playfully, she pushes my hat over my face. I take it off and push hers off, lean forward and whisper into her ear, “I’ve been here with you a million times.”
“You’re all right by me,” she tells me, meeting my eyes again for a second longer this time before looking up at the sky, playfully pushing me away.
We stay for a while longer, watch as the crowds thin and people leave the hills and head home.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say as I lean closer and brush her lips with mine.
She nods.
On the ride home, we don’t talk much, my eyes focus on the lines of the road, one dashed line at a time. She rolls down her window and lets her fingers flutter in the wind like she’s playing music.
When I park the truck in front of her building, I follow her up the stairs to her apartment, hover near her as she fumbles with the lock on her front door, feel her begin to shake as I slide the straps of her dress over her shoulders.
As soon as the door pushes open, I take her face in my hands and just breathe with her for a few moments. The apartment is cold and dusty and dark. I’d imagined just how this might unfold, making love instead of screwing, intimacy instead of flight, but animal instincts must be forgiven and I push forward.
My hands reach under her dress and slide up and down her; she seems to melt, finds my lips and presses her mouth so hard I can barely breathe. We fumble with clothing as we stumble to her bedroom, forgetting about lights or sounds or anything else; it’s momentum.
She unbuckles my belt, pulls me closer, leans down and hovers over my waist before pulling my jeans down. I roll my shoulders back and take off my shirt. I stand there for a minute before I pull her up to me, touch her face, bury my head in her neck and take her in.
I throw her onto the bed and crawl on top of her, my hands roaming her body. I push my weight onto her so she can feel me. I hear her moan beneath, wrap her legs around me. I take her thighs and open her up.
* * *
“Is this what you imagined it would be?” she asks me late one evening after we’ve been on the phone awhile. She’s been coming to Eton the weekends; I’ve been driving to Atlanta to have dinner with her in the middle of the week after she gets done at the club. We take turns cooking.
I think about my answer for a while. “I could never have come close to imagining this,” I tell her, and it’s true. “When you have lived your whole life in the dark, you don’t even know what light is.”
She gets quiet on the other end of the line, but I can hear her breathing.
“Well said,” she says and laughs. “You surprise me all of the time, Carmine, you really do.”
“I surprise myself, too.” I tell her about all the things Ma and I have been up to around the house and how we’ve been sharing these big, potluck meals, how I’ve been taking walks with her in the morning, trying to keep her energy levels up. I tell her that I got a repair book from the library and how I’ve been making upgrades to the old beast of a truck, new spark plugs and engine mounts, even a bed liner. I tell her about the time I took Ma dress shopping, the awkward moment in the lingerie section, how I wasn’t able to change the hot water heater at the house, but that at least I was able to find it.
But I don’t tell her that at night I still think I hear Pa’s screams reverberate through the house, how I still feel the itch in my feet to run, how I watch the stock market, count my money, apply for jobs overseas, that I still cringe when I pass the “Welcome to Eton” sign on the way to the grocery store.
* * *
When I step out of the church just before dusk, the sky is a purple pink and it stretches from end to end, as far as I can see, and I feel light on my feet. I’ve gone to see Pastor Stanley again. Some of the basics are still so hard, turning wrong into right, traveling new paths when the grooves in the brain call to others. I keep thinking of Pa’s body in the ground, and it sends waves of panic through me. Being with Z takes so much presence. Sometimes it’s a real struggle just to be willing.
“It’s a choice you make every moment, Carmine; it’s that simple. Continue to choose love and peace, and love and peace is what you will have. But it’s not always gonna be easy.” He’s grown a mustache, and his bald head still shines. We drink coffee in paper cups and nibble on day-old muffins.
“Yes, but why can’t it be easy? Why do things have to be so hard?” I look at him pleadingly. “It was so much easier to be a bastard than to do the right thing,” I say.
“We make it hard; it is supposed to be easy. We imagine fear instead of love because we think we’re so vulnerable. Essentially, it’s a lack of faith in ourselves, in the world, in God.”
“But we
are
vulnerable, aren’t we? I’ve felt that way my whole life.” I look at him for a long time. His eyes are black and wet, but so full of peace.
“Let the fear go, let the guilt go, and you’ll be free,” he tells me.
An hour later, I
walk toward the old railroad tracks slowly. I wind up and down streets I don’t remember much about; I look at the old ridges of the mountains to the east; I go toward my future. I run Pastor Stanley’s words over in my head; I want to know peace, and this has always been in the way.
I hear him again and again as I walk the path toward Eric’s house; I remember his name, his family from the day’s gray newspaper. I see his face when I look up and see the remains of the old dilapidated warehouse; it leans and has holes in it, the aluminum thinning, even the old silver light poles lean.
I sit on the curb, and my mind wanders back to that inky night, the humidity in the air, the cool breeze that stretched down from the ridges of these mountains, the locusts—they were singing, it was late July.
It’s hard to imagine myself as ever being a child, soft elbows, lilted voice, spitting tobacco into old Campbell’s soup cans. It all must have been a movie I saw once, even the hard calluses on Pa’s hands, Ma’s soft cry, all set against a fake Gulf of Mexico, so easy to imagine that none of it was true.
A school bus stops a block up the road and some black children step off. I see their school uniforms, white shirts and khaki pants and braids moving on top of their heads as they walk; there’s a chatter among them, a vibration. They spot me sitting on the curb and slow their paces.
I stand up and run my eyes over the silver of the new tracks lining the road across the street, hear the whistle of an oncoming train, turn around and search the house numbers to be sure I’m at the right place.
I look down and my shoes are untied. I clear my throat for fear that my voice will squeak like it did then.
I run a few words around in my head. Tap my foot with each syllable, practice the inflections. “I saw your boy get killed. I didn’t try to stop it. I am sorry.” It has to be simpler than that. It’s too much. I feel like that heavy rock is in my hand instead of theirs, that I’m using it to gouge his head, think his mother will spill out onto the sidewalk and blame me for it all anyway.
I think all of this so silly and unnecessary, and I start to turn around. These old wounds are just that, old and stagnant. What can be the benefit of opening them up? Can’t peace still get in?
The kids from the bus get closer to me and then stop; their chatter takes on a heavier tone. They’re young, almost teenagers, but not quite. The sun is in the middle of the sky and it leans down heavily; they look at me, smile, some glare and then look away. I study their round bodies, remember my gangly limbs, search their faces for what I might mean to them.
“I’m sorry,” I yell to them. “Some of us are like me, like I was, but not all; we just don’t know any better, we don’t know anything.” They look at me strangely, but a second longer than they want to.
I lean down to tie my shoes and they walk past me. I zip up my jacket and jingle the change in my pocket. If this is the right thing, why does it feel so bad?
I turn around and walk two doors down to 301. The house is quiet. The welcome mat has hummingbirds on it and says, “Life is short so come on in and stay awhile.” On the porch, an old swing sways with the wind, a plant hangs from the two posts holding the porch roof up; inside, a TV vibrates.
I pull open the tattered screen door and knock on the wooden door softly; there are three small windows on it, but I don’t look in. When I hear footsteps shuffling across the floor, I hold my breath and wait.
She’s wearing small pearl earrings, her hair has grayed, but her skin and face are just as smooth as nearly twenty years ago. I remember seeing her through the school bus window, at school functions; sometimes we’d see her at the grocery store. Her body is soft and round, and her voice is so tender, so tender, I shake. She sounds like Eton.
“Can I help you?” She puts her hand on her hip and looks at me hard. She reminds me of my own ma; they are close to the same age, I don’t hear anyone in the house, and I wonder if she’s alone. A TV blares a familiar talk show host’s voice, laughing and jeering; I can see why people watch.
“Hello. Are you Mrs. Clemsy?” I shift on my feet, try to push everything but this moment out of my mind.
She nods and pushes a straight pin back in her hair at the nape of her neck. “Yes, I am. What can I do for you?”
“Ma’am, you don’t know me, and I should have come a long time ago, but I know what happened to your son.”
Her face changes. The shallow lines grow deeper and darker; her eyebrows turn in. She takes a deep breath but doesn’t say anything, holds a lot in, her lips pursed. The TV in the background grows louder when a laundry detergent commercial comes on. A school bus passes in front of the house with a big whoosh.
I step out of the present for a moment, back then, to that night, how I considered stepping in front of that train, its sea of light like what the gates of heaven must be like. I can even feel the old rock-band shirt I was wearing, its soft cotton sticking to my chest.
“Ma’am, I just wanted to… I came here to… see, I’ve been living my whole life with this. I’ve been tortured by it, same as you, and I’ve got to be free, and I thought if I could set you free and be free and I could come here and tell you the truth finally and ask your forgiveness and it could be better and…”
She straightens up her body, and her words come out heavy and firm.
“Now you listen here, son. You got something to tell me about my boy, you say it and you say it now. Otherwise you get off my porch right now.” Little beads of sweat form on her forehead. She pushes the screen door open and steps out onto the porch, stands close to me.
I don’t turn around, but I can hear the kids behind me, the scuffs of their tennis shoes on the pavement, their chatter about what this white man is doing here and what he come to say and why he’s bothering old Mrs. Clemsy. I hear the toy phones open and close, bubble gum pop on their lips; in the periphery I see a young man smooth the hair on his head.
“I saw them do it, me, ma’am; I saw them kill him. I sat there across from those tracks and I watched them do it. I never said a thing, didn’t try to stop them… It was some kids from school that did it, ma’am, just a bunch of kids from Eton High messing around and it was wrong, and I…”
The world goes black when I feel the sting of her hand on my cheek. I feel the bottom of the door hit the tips of my boots and push me back. I stagger a few feet, stunned, fall to the bottom of the stairs.
I open my eyes a few seconds later, and she hovers above me.
“Why this? Why now?” she asks me, her chest rising and falling.
I stand up a few feet from her, hear that old train in the distance; it sounds the same. I want to feel its wind rush past me again.
“I should have come to you back then; I should have tried to help him…” I wave my hands in front of me, as though I’m holding two white flags. I look at her pleadingly.
“I know who you are. You and your family ain’t never done any good in these parts.” She turns away and starts walking up the stairs.
I go to the end of the stairs and stare up at her. She stands on her porch, hands on her hips.
“My boy’s been dead a long time, a long time. The police never did spend any time with it. Besides, there weren’t no mystery to it anyway. Everyone knew how it went down. You should not have come here.” She wipes something invisible on the apron she’s wearing, looks up the street. The sun climbs behind the clouds and the air is cooler.
“Ma’am, I haven’t done much right with my life; I’ve caused a lot of hurt, but nothing was worse than what I did that night, turning the other cheek. And I’m sorry, ma’am, very sorry for that. That’s why I came. Your boy deserved better than that.”
She sighs deep, circles her neck a little; her body falls into the porch a little. She looks at me for a long time, as though waiting for the real truth to fall from my lips.
“You should have helped my boy, God, should you have helped him…” She starts to cry, holds back, uses the apron to wipe her eyes.
“But the past is already gone, and there’s nothing we can do about that.” She straightens, stands up tall, points her finger at me.
“So, you, you get on out of here.” She doesn’t blink once as she says it, an older anger rising up in her cheeks. “I mean it,” she says.
I look at her for a second longer and then turn the other way. I walk two blocks down the road before turning around one last time. She’s still standing there, looking my way. I wave a little, shove my hands in my pockets, and walk on home. It’s the best I could do.