In Memory of Junior (14 page)

The boy was, you know, taken with the story, I could tell. Probably a good boy, under all that hippy stuff.

He tried to tell me a little bit about computers. Then I just figured I might as well go ahead and tell him I needed some help on the little project I had to get done right away. He had his driver's license and I didn't figure those boys were going to want to help me, you know. Might be some resistance. So I told this one, Morgan, I'd pay him a hundred dollars to help me do something.

“Okay,” he said.

“You don't want to know what it is first?” I asked him.

“Not especially. Either way.”

“We might not be able to do it in one day. What it is, is this: I need to dig my grave and I need some help.”

That backed him up a couple of steps.

“Look here,” I said. Then I told him how I ain't gone get hooked up on no tubes and all that with them foreign juices flowing in my body from no telling where, full of germs, little blip blip machines going off all over the place, people I don't know from Adam coming in sticking their finger up my ass and all that. You think I'm gone let myself in for that? Why hell no, why should I get stuck dying for eight or ten years. You don't really know how it is son, I told him.

But, why hell, I remember when I was sixteen like it was yesterday. Time has a way. But I just up and decided that I'm the one that ought to say how long, not some army of so-called doctors and nurses so overbooked and overstocked and, and so money hungry you have to sit on some sofa in some waiting room for half a day so they can get somebody to come get you and sit you in some little back room for thirty minutes and you sit there on some little hard-ass table looking at certificates and then they come rushing in and look in your ear and rush out and then get some teenager to come in and write a bunch of crap down on a clipboard, so what I'm going to do in the next few days is dig my own damned grave. That's one reason I'm in North Carolina. First things first. One thing at a time. I'm glad it's about my time to go. This country I been seeing since it was most wilderness and I said to him, I said, “I tell you one thing, son. It's going to hell. H-e-1-1. Hell in a breadbasket. Especially around here. I don't even recognize any of it. Look around at them ugly glass mile-high ugly buildings all over the countryside. Look at that socalled—what is it?” I asked him, “That TechComm thing we drove by coming in here.”

“TechComm Commons,” he says.

“TechComm Commons, with all them ugly buildings with windows that won't even open in the summertime. Hell, no windows, period. No
windows.
Let's go,” I say. “You got a car, ain't you?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“At least let me get out there and let's get started.”

“Right now?”

“I don't see why not. Your daddy's gone. You got a car. We got the time. I got the money honey if you got the time. Leave the boys a note and tell them you taking me around to some of my old stomping grounds.

“First thing we do is find some shovels and a pick. Then, after that, we go down to the corner of Third and James at the railroad tracks and get some help.” There's where, as long as I can remember, you could pick up niggers looking for work.

I got this eye that look off to one side. It's got more and more that way the longer I live, and I lived a pretty good while. People I don't even know draw back and say, “What the
hell
you looking at me for?” I say, “It just
look
like I looking at you.” See, my eyes is splayed off in different directions—I don't see with the one you think's looking at you. Except sometimes I do see with that one, but I don't understand how it work myself.

I come from my daughter's, down the tracks, to see I can get a little work, and I'm standing around with Melvin,
Duck, and Jo-Jo, and two I ain't seen before, when this car pulls up and stops. There's a boy driving, and this old man in the passenger seat. About time they stop, the old man say something to the boy, the boy rolls down his window, and the old man hollers, “Work!” and the boy jumps—scared him.

Jo-Jo walked over to the window and bent down, and listen, and then he come back and say, “Not me.”

“What?” I say. They still sitting there looking. The little old man yell again, “Work!”

“Digging a grave,” say Jo-Jo.

I walk over to the car. The boy he look spoiled, the old man kind of dried up. “What you paying?” I ask.

“Two dollars an hour,” say the old man.

“Shoot, man. That ain't nothing.”

“Hell,” the old man says, “there'll be three of us doing work for two. You'll get a lot of time off. And there's a bonus.”

“Three-fifty,” I said.

“I'll give you three.”

“I'll do it for three twenty-five.”

“Get in.”

I get in, and ask the old man, “What kind of bonus?”

“You'll see,” he says.

“What kind of grave? Cow or something?”

“Nope.”

“What you burying?”

“You ask a lot of questions. Me.”

“Me what?—burying
you?
Oh. That's what you gone do. You ain't feeling too good?” I said.

“No, I ain't. What's your name?”

“Bill.” Old white man figure he got him a nigger now.

At the graveyard, the old man—well, hell, he ain't too much older than me—lays out the grave. He's got a couple of picks, shovel, even a posthole shovel. And he was real particular about how he laid it out.

“My daughter says I'm senile,” he say.

I'm standing there leaning on a shovel.

“She says it when she don't think I can hear her. Hell, I can hear a cricket fart in a fast-moving train.”

I couldn't exactly figure what was going on, cause then he said he had this story about a dog. I wondered if maybe he was gone bury a dog out there. It's been done. Specially in fresh graves, where the digging's easy. “What about that dog?” I ask him. He was sitting on this rock wall.

“Just a story.”

“That's what I was asking about.”

“I used to raise dogs from the dead.” Then he tell this story about a man bring this little dog back to life with that mouth-to-mouth. Funny story. Then he says, “Dig.” Then he says, “What the hell you looking at me like that for?”

I explain about my eye. My eye goes a long way toward explaining why I ain't ever made no money.

This nigger—Bill—turned out to be a good worker. But it was taking too long, and so we drove over and got a buddy of Bill's and left them to finish up. Paid them good. Me and the boy, Morgan, had to get back so things wouldn't look fishy.

The boy done all right. Promised to keep his mouth shut. Nothing happens, and I can get me a coffin made, then tomorrow night is the night.

Looks like poor old Glenn will be out there too—in the graveyard. Poor old Glenn spent his last ten years inside the house. I don't know how he done it.

I never had nothing against Glenn. I feel sorry for that wife having to put up with them sisters, so forth and so on, but at least she didn't have to put up with his mama and papa for too long. Whew.

It would have been nice if somebody could have got a holt to that farm back when, and kept it up.

Me and the boy got back from digging before Tate and Faison got back from the homeplace. The boy changed his shoes. Since I was supervising, mine were mostly clean.
He showed me some more stuff about his computer. I made out like I understood. Four-Eyes, my daughter's husband, has got a computer. Beyond me. I asked the boy how he felt about his granddaddy. He said he'd never known him to be anything but sick. Shame.

I turned on a ball game in the living room and the boy went on with his computering.

When Faison and Tate come in they were both a little shook up. It was up in the air who was going to get the homeplace, looked like. Tate wanted to talk to—let's see—it would be his stepsister, but Faison wanted to hold off. They got to figure who gets the land, see.

That used to be a nice piece of land. I remember it well. Evelyn wanted to get off it and into town for some reason. Poor Evelyn.

Me and the boy went to the grocery store. I got us some corn on the cob, ham, and cabbage. Tate set up a little card table and a white tablecloth in his living room there and we all pulled up chairs. I was tired, and hurting some. It had been a good, long day.

“You don't like cabbage, boy?” I says.

“No.”

“No sir,” said Tate.

“I beat Junior's ass for not saying ‘sir,'” says Faison.

“We never knew not to say it,” I said. Then I says to Morgan, I says, “If you gone be able to out-fart me, you got to eat some cabbage.”

He looked at his daddy. “Out-fart you? I didn't know we were going to have a contest.”

“I'm sleeping in your room, ain't I?”

“I don't know. I—”

“You'll be sleeping in my room,” said Tate. “I'm going to sleep out here on the couch. It's a foldout.”

So I'm sitting there at a little table with a white tablecloth eating cabbage and ham with the family. Sitting with these boys I tried to half-raise—done grown, boys of their own. Well, one boy. Everybody else dead or gone. I had to decide what I was going to do. Shoot myself and get somebody to bury me? Wait and die? Run off? I was tired of hurting every afternoon. I didn't want to go through something like Glenn went through.

“You boys ever see Albert and them, anymore?” I said. “What's his name, over in Draughn?”

“Once in a while,” said Tate. “Not much.”

“Least they got a little piece of land,” said Faison.

“Well, it's a damn shame you boys could lose the farm. But listen to what I'm fixing to say. You got your health. Think about that—and you both got a job.”

“The land stuff should be settled by Friday,” says Faison, “but I'm going fishing anyway, come hell or high water.”

He said he was going down to McGarren Island, down there among some of them Outer Banks, where I used to fly to. Wanted to know didn't I want to go.

I had to tend to my business. One way or the other. I told him we'd see.

I suggested we get out the whiskey and drink a toast to the old man. We did, with the boy looking like he won't sure what was going on, and damn if Tate didn't start to crying. Hell, they don't have to be good to you for you to miss them. I told him to go ahead, it was okay, and things were a little shaky until we had another round or two and the boy got to giggling—course he won't drinking—about
something I said, hell, I don't remember what, and the next thing I knew I was telling them all about the time back in '36 when I got that load of pure alcohol on Bud Dumby's first run. Now that was the time. Pure alcohol and I didn't know it. I thought it was whiskey. But this was pure alcohol, stole from the government.

Well, what it was, I pulled in up there at Midway, this side of Savannah. I always stopped there and got a bite to eat. Knew the people well, you know, and they made some of the best biscuits in there I ever eat, and if they didn't have them hot when you got in there, they'd just slip them in the oven, see. And so I pulled up to the gas tank, and I said to the boy was with me on that trip, just a kid, Bud Dumby—you try to say it: Bud Dumby. We ended up calling him Dud. I says to him, I said, “Dud, ten to one our biscuits will be hot.” They were too.

This guy in there told me the location of my pickup in New York, and said it would all be in fifty-gallon drums and five-gallon cans. Nothing unusual about that. So we drove on through Washington and into New York.

We got up there, to the spot, and me and Dud was sitting there and it was almost dark and I seen this fellow come up out of the under park—you know, where they've got them trains all under New York. And when he come up out of there he had on a overcoat. I said, “There's the man, right yonder.” And sure enough it was. He walked on over to us, and he said, “Do you know anything about Boston Post Road?” And I said, “Yes, that's part of one of my runs.”

“Well,” he said, “we'll go out and hit the Boston Post Road. I'll lead you to the place.” This driver comes up in
a big black car and picks him up. I said to myself, This is unusual. But I didn't want Dud to know. This was his first run and all.

We finally pulled in behind that black car at Andy Reece's truck stop and the guy in the overcoat was already out of his car. Another man in a overcoat come up from somewhere and said, “Back it right down side the station here.” I was thinking to myself that if I saw we were about to get shot—for the truck, you know—we might have to make a run for it. It was a little tense there. This is when I seen this guy standing over here and another one over here, round there was another one—all in overcoats with their hands in their pockets. This was not at all what I'd been used to, you know what I mean.

Did I say this was Dud's first run? Well, it was. And when I said, “Dud, something's fishy here. We might have to make a run for it,” well, Dud started shaking. Just a shaking. I was thinking hard as I could the way to make a break for it—probably on foot, or once we got inside, out the bathroom window, or somehow, and I looked at him sitting there in the cab, and his knees were hitting together, his hands were shaking, and damned if his head won't jerking around and I'm thinking this is just what I don't need. This was his first run, young boy in the bootlegging business—his wife and kid had seen him off, kissed him and everything—and he looked like he was gone faint. So I said, “Son, you think you can hold still?” and he said, “No sir, I don't think I can.”

The first guy walked over next to the step-up and yells up to me, “Let's go in the restaurant and get us a steak.” Well, he might as well hit me between the eyes with a hammer. This kind of stuff just never happened.