Sugar Baby giggled in Jinx's ear, "Now this stuff is horse piss, I bet you and Jinx started to gag.
But they'd outfoxed their smart momma. Smartest momma of any they knew but they'd outfoxed her 'cause naturally they came back to Peach Tree Creek to play, year following year... wasn't any other place.
Shit or no shit, thinks Jinx Fairchild, it's ours.
Mr. Hannah, tenth grade math, is gently chiding Jinx Fairchild for messing up his geometry test. Was he daydreaming? during the actual test? like his brain didn't know what his hand was doing?
Jinx Fairchild mumbles no.
Jinx Fairchild mumbles no, sir: tricky little courtesy his momma has instilled in him so now it's habit, almost.
How then, Mr. Hannah asks, can Jinx account for the fact that he worked problem number eight flawlessly but made the same glaringly obvious error on number three that every dumbbell in the class made?
Jinx Fairchild mumbles he doesn't know, takes the red-inked test paper in his fingers, and stares at it uncomprehending: 84 percent isn't a low grade but, yes, it's low in this case; ordinarily he'd be puzzled and embarrassed but not today; he's thinking how he did the test last Friday in a haze like a dream, blacked out, and didn't remember a thing of it afterward.
Mr. Hannah has favored Jinx Fairchild all year above even the majority of the white students in his class. He's a white man, Jinx has thought, who favors certain selected Negroes Negroes easy to like as a means of demonstrating it isn't anything racial, certainly can't be racist, the way he dislikes the others.
Hates fears loathes the others.
Says Mr. Hannah as Jinx turns to leave, 'A mistake like that isn't like Jinx Fairchild, was the thought passed through my head," and he means it half teasing, like most of the teachers at the high school he takes himself very seriously, so Jinx nods, backing off; his eyes too hooded and achey to meet his teacher's, he says in parting, "Guess if I did it, Mr. Hannah, it is me." Just the slightest edge of defiance in his voice.
Which Mr. Hannah, who favors Jinx Fairchild, doesn't exactly hear.
Everywhere he goes, through every hour and day, he's carrying these hands of his... there's a shyness in the glance he gives them, like he's in the presence of something with its own thoughts and its own unknowable consciousness of him.
Jinx Fairchild's hands. That have administered Death.
Long skinny fingers he'd thought he knew and owned. Like his penis that isn't always his exactly... charged with blood, flexing like a fist... and that blood too not his. The most important part of that blood not his.
I have dealt Death. With these hands.
In school, at work, riding the city bus, drifting off to be by himself, Jinx Fairchild steals these quick shy glances at his hands.
It's as if he has never really looked at them before. The dark brown skin with its faint oily-red sheen, the pinkish palms, light nails.
Such moments, he's fascinated to realize that being brown-skinned is an ambiguous thing, as if his skin's color could fade or wear out.
He's a long way from black.
Jinx Fairchild's finger span is such that from the tip of the smallest finger to the reach of the thumb he can grip a basketball in his right hand; can't quite manage it with the left. Ten fingers holding a ball as it flies from him, chest level, seemingly without effort, all nerve endings, quick as a cat's eye. Since sixth or seventh grade Jinx has had a strange fantasy of being on the basketball court blind, stone blind, but outplaying the other boys, his fast hands and fast feet doing it all for him. And the bleachers erupting in cheers, the gym a solid vibrating wall of applause.
This past season, when he'd played so well, much of the cheering in fact for him, it hadn't seemed altogether real. Not heart-pumping real like the fantasy. There Jinx Fairchild is standing tall and loose-muscled and relaxed-seeming behind the foul line in his sweat-soaked green and white Hammond T-shirt and shorts, and his eyes are on the basket and the ball's moving in his hands like a dreamy spinning globe while the pretty white girls in their cheerleaders' jumpers toss themselves crazy Gimme a/ Gimme an I!
GimP te an !"I£' Gimnie an X£' __and a part of his mind detaches itself from him, taking up residence with certain of the older black boys leaning against the wall, boys who aren't at Hammond any longer, never did graduate, it's clear from that angle of vision that if Jinx Fairchild sinks the foul shot the crowd's going to love him and if he misses they're going to see him for what he is: just another nigger-boy.
Most of the time, Jinx Fairchild doesn't miss.
And every basket he sinks, all the points he racks up for the team, the sensation gets stronger... everything more unreal.
All he's doing is forestalling the time when the cheering stops and they see him harsh and clear as he sees himself.
Yes, it's true: Jinx Fairchild's brain didn't know what his hands intended.
Picking up a piece of concreteor was it a rock, twice the size of his fist bringing it down against the other's head... not once, to stun him, but again, again, again... to kill.
Sure, Jinx Fairchild knows the brittle softness of the human skull, like a sheet of ice that feels hard but, once it shatters, shatters.
Yet somehow he'd been a party to smashing it. Administering Death in one! two! three! four! five! frenzied hammer blows.
After that, he doesn't remember.
Remembers the girl. The white girl. That floating white-petal face.
Remembers the weight, the heft, of the body... remembers the water slapping against the shore.
Remembers, much later, burning his bloodstained sweatshirt in the dump off Peach Tree Street, trying to wash the stains out of his jeans and off his hands.
These things he remembers like flashes of dream that don't connect, but he doesn't remember the person who links them, can't call back any continuous Jinx Fairchild except to know it's him and was him all along. Run on home, he'd told the girl, get on out of here, and she'd hesitated stunned and blank-faced as if Jinx Fairchild had struck her too; she was about to speak and he advanced upon her grinning wild like a Halloween pumpkin the little kids have carved out but carved out crooked: Go on, run! Get thefuck away! You got no business here, bitch."
If that was Jinx Fairchild speaking, Minnie Fairchild's younger boy, her heart, her hope, her light-of-my-life, it was no Jinx Fairchild anyone had ever heard before.
In New York State it's the electric chair. Jinx has learned that electricity flows in circuits: if the circuit isn't looped electricity can t flow. When they electrocute you the circuit is looped by the human body. It's Death that flows through you.
They say, in the electric chair, all that voltage crashing through you, you're dancing around like you're being whipped. Raw flesh is being cooked so there's that smell, and a steamy smoke rising out of your head. Jinx knows from the movies there's a hood over the condemned man's head but in his wide-eyed dreaming, these nights, he sees Jinx Fairchild in the chair with the clamps and straps and electrodes, bare head exposed.
As Sugar Baby observed, a few months ago, when headlines were of the "rapist murderer" Tyrone Tilley who was electrocuted at Sing Sing this weak-minded Negro from only sixty miles away in Buffalo the defense attorneys claimed couldn't remember what he'd done back beyond a day or so, let alone what he hadn't done "Sure do like to fry niggers in this U.S. of A.! Hot diggety!"
"You sick? Verlyn?"
Minnie Fairchild is looking at her son, her sixteen-year-old, slouch-shouldered in the kitchen doorway as if he'd just wandered in from some other world. His mouth is working like he's chewing the inside of his lips, his hands are half hidden at his thighs but peeking out... and it almost seems he's peeking down through his eyelashes at them.
Quick as the flash of Minnie Fairchild's Singer sewing machine needle comes the unwanted thought that her beloved Verlyn is going to take after his father after all, not after her: her brains, her common sense, her decency, her dignity, her ambition. But quick too as a flash the thought is gone. "Been acting so sad-hearted these past few days, Verlyn, it just don't seem like you," Minnie says, half tender and half accusing. She's easing in the direction of what her sons call Momma-talk: don't instead of doesn't, old honey inflections the woman can summon back at will like Eartha Kitt purring baby talk to seduce her man.
Minnie Fairchild's four children know that the Momma-talk is just what comes first; if it fails to get results, and fairly immediate results, Minnie-talk will resume.
So Jinx rouses himself, makes an effort to straighten his backbone, smiles at his mother, and tries to speak and can't think of a word.
.
. just stands there staring.
Minnie is cleaning fish at the sink. Large-mouthed bass Mr. Fairchild caught that day, fishing on the Cassadaga. Chop! go the heads.
Chop." the tails. With a rubber-gloved hand Minnie reaches in expertly to drag out the guts. The kitchen is rife with fish smells; it's the river lapping right up into the house. Jinx is maybe thinking of this or maybe he's thinking of nothing at all, stymied by his mother's energy, which almost crackles off her though she's come home late from the white doctor's far away uptown where she works and hasn't changed out of her nylon uniform and shiny-pale stockings...
but she's taken off her white shoes with the firm Cuban-style heels and put on her old comfortable around-the-house corduroy bedroom slippers with the toes cut out. Still girdled up tight, though, tidy and seamless as a sausage. Minnie Fairchild is forty-four years old, an exact two decades younger than her husband Woodrow, short, plump, good-looking, with a rich warm brown skin of the hue and luster of horse chestnuts and fastidiously straightened hair that resembles a black-lacquered cap. She has a smallish bulldog face, a full nose, white teeth without a single flash of gold, and she wears bright maroon lipstick day and night.
At her sink Minnie always runs the water loud and hard, so she has to raise her voice to be heard over it, as she does now. "So slowacting, I just hope you aren't comin' down with some nasty old spring flu," she complains. It's the honey inflection. Jinx feels his heart being fingered.
Jinx means to say, No, Momma, I'm not sick," but he hears himself say, quiet and frightened, "No, Momma, it's not the flu."
Chopping fish heads and tails, brisk, no-nonsense, squinching up her face as if she hates the smell but showing by her posture and the pistonlike motions of her chopping arm, that, yes, there's a pleasure in this, chop! chop! chop! against the old weathered bloodstained breadboard, Minnie doesn't quite hear. She says two things so rapid-fire Jinx might almost not know which comes first: "Well, it better not be," and, "Make yourself useful, boy, get some newspaper and wrap up this offal and haul it out back; if there's one thing I can't stand more'n the stink of fish and scales all over everything it's the fish-eye starin' up at me like I'm the one to blame."
Minnie's high delighted laughter crackles like twigs burning.
So Jinx Fairchild, prodded into action, does exactly as he's told.
Grateful for something to do with his big skinny bonyknuckled murderer's hands.
At such times Minnie Fairchild bustles around her kitchen making slamming, thudding, scraping noises... tsking at the time, which is always later than she'd like. You'd think, hearing her, the woman resents preparing meals, preparing these good nutritious vitamin-rich meals-her idle old husband Woodrow at the bottom of the garden playing checkers with himself won't come for supper till somebody yells for him and then he's ponderous-slow, deaf in one ear and can't hear in the other, as Minnie complains with her high harsh laugh but in fact Minnie loves this hour of the day.
She loves working in this kitchen (four-burner gas stove and oven, full-sized Kelvinator refrigerator, decent sink, faucets) because she recalls with painful vividness the first kitchens of her married life, let alone the kitchens in which her mother prepared meals for her entire life; she loves her house, which is one of the three or four nicest houses at this end of East Avenue-a wood-frame bungalow, painted brown, with five rooms, an attic beneath the roof's peak, a front porch, a half-acre lot so that, in summer, she can have a garden though in truth Woodrow is the one who plants and tends the garden; he's got the time for it, and the slow patience and faith.
Minnie Fairchild's pleasure in her property is a fierce matter her children have learned to respect, if not share, not even Verlyn, who's the most sensitive, not even Bea, who's old enough (Bea is twenty-five) to remember how things were back in Pittsburgh and to recall the fresh tales of how things were in South Carolina where Woodrow Fairchild was born.
You have to know where you've come from to know how far you've come, Minnie says.
And Minnie says, You don't get a house like this by sitting on your rear.
And Minnie says, You don't keep a house like this by sitting on your rear.