Paperboy (20 page)

As we walked outside past Ara T’s cart I reached in and got Rat’s newspaper bags.

I wanted to look back through the open door of the red building but I wasn’t going to if Mam didn’t. Mam had done a needle story about a woman in the Bible leaving some bad city and when she looked back God turned her into a block of salt. I don’t know if the story was real but I wasn’t taking any chances.

Mam didn’t say the first word until we were on the Union Avenue bus by ourselves.

We’ll talk in the morning whilst the house is empty. You lay back and rest easy now.

I nodded but wasn’t sure I could do much resting. Mam held her handbag in her lap with both hands on top. She looked straight ahead.

As we got closer to our stop I remembered I had missed out on Mr. Spiro’s fourth word. That word was important to me. Whatever it was. And once I missed out on something like that I knew I hardly ever got a second chance.

I wasn’t surprised the back doorbell buzzed so early the next morning. I looked at my wristwatch that Mam had put on my desk. It was six o’clock. But it seemed to me that the Memphis police should have come to the front door.

The only people that buzzed at the back door were the grocery boy or sometimes Rat if he couldn’t see Mam in the kitchen. But six o’clock in the morning was too early for Rat to be back from his grandparents’.

I decided I would just stay in bed until the policemen came up to my room to handcuff me and take me and Mam to jail. I wondered if they would be in blue uniforms or if they would wear coats and ties like the two
Dragnet
guys on TV who always talked like they were reading out of a book.

The police would ask me questions and I would start stuttering up a storm and telling them I didn’t remember anything because I was so scared and maybe they would feel sorry for me and Mam and let us out of jail after a few days. Fact was I could remember everything about the stabbing like it was a movie that kept running over and over in my head.

I must have turned the movie into dreams because when Mam called up to my room it was after eight o’clock.

You gonna sleep to noon up there?

I smelled sausage frying so I put on clean shorts and a shirt and went downstairs.

Who was at the s-s-s-s-back door?

Nice man on a cycle.

Mam always pronounced it Sickle like in Popsicle.

He said he owed for the paper. Said he wanted to pay ’fore he left town.

Mam handed me the envelope from her apron pocket. I could tell it had more than coins in it. I folded it in half and stuck it in my back pocket instead of running upstairs to my room to open it. Mam always said I liked things to simmer a bit.

Mam poured a tall glass of cold milk to go with my sausage and eggs and biscuits. Mam usually didn’t make biscuits on Saturday morning but there was a plate heaping high on the table next to a bowl of sausage gravy. I hadn’t eaten anything since lunch the day before and Mam knew that her biscuits and sausage gravy would fill me up
if anything would. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the breakfast table in the chair across from me. She hooked her thumb around the spoon that always stayed in her coffee cup.

You eat and let me talks a spell.

I could tell that Mam had been thinking a good while about what she needed to talk to me about.

What happened last night shouldn’t have, Little Man. We’re going to talk about it this one time and then never again for all our born days.

She looked at me for a nod. I gave her one. And then I promised again with my eyes.

She went back to the beginning and told how she had known Ara T when she was growing up in Mississippi. He lived with a family who worked on the farm next to the one Mam’s family worked on. She figured Ara T was about five years older than she was and told how he was all the time getting into trouble by taking stuff that didn’t belong to him and picking on kids smaller than he was. Especially her brother. The two had gotten into fights and her brother always watched Ara T plenty close when he came around. She said most everyone was afraid of Ara T because he would fall into the fits without any warning. The only one who wasn’t afraid of him was Big Sack who lived on another farm near Coldwater.

On the night her brother died Mam heard a scream on Coldwater Creek that ran between her house and Ara T’s. Her brother had been to town to sell eggs so he could buy flour and sugar for her family. When they found him in the creek the sack of flour was
scattered up and down the banks but the bag of sugar was gone and Mam’s brother was dead.

Mam’s father always suspected that Ara T had killed his son for the bag of sugar but never could prove it. Later on Ara T left Mississippi to come to the city. Mam had been in Memphis almost a year before Ara T started coming around our neighborhood. She told him to keep away from our house but he said the alleys were his and he could go where he pleased because Memphis was a Free State. Mam said she had asked Big Sack to keep his eye on Ara T. Big Sack told her the day he came to our door that he had seen me hanging around Ara T.

Mam got up to get me some more sausage gravy from the stove.

Will the s-s-s-s-police come?

The Memphis law don’t pay much mind when harm comes to somebody like Ara T.

Why did s-s-s-s-Big Sack say that Ara T would never s-s-s-s-bother us again?

Big Sack is a man who makes things right. He’ll see that Ara T moves on. Ara T knows not to buck Big Sack.

Will s-s-s-s-people in the red s-s-s-s-building who saw what s-s-s-s-happened tell?

Some will talk in the devil’s places. But nothing will come of it. People know Ara T got what was due him.

s-s-s-s-Will you tell the s-s-s-s-police what Ara T did to your brother?

Mam explained how her people cleaned up their own messes and didn’t depend on white people and their police. She said her people
had always done it that way in Mississippi and then in Memphis and it always worked out best like that.

Mam told me to ask all my questions because when we got up from the table Ara T would never be talked about again.

s-s-s-s-Was Ara T the one who s-s-s-s-busted your face?

She nodded.

I caught him comin’ out of his alley shed and told him to keep away from you … and I told him I knows what he did to my brother.

s-s-s-s-When did he s-s-s-s-bust you?

I told him I’s going into his shed to find your knife and he spun me around and hit me. I gots in a couple of good licks but he bested me … that time.

I asked her if she thought she was going to die when Ara T had her slammed up against the wall with his hands around her neck.

I fear no man the likes of Ara T. No matter who has hold of me I know the Lord will protect my soul.

I had asked my mother one time after church to explain what a Soul is and she said we would talk about it when I got older.

s-s-s-s-What’s your soul?

Your soul is the part of yourself that nobody can see. But it’s the best part of a body’s life because God has control of it.

I had more questions about the Soul but I knew it had to do with the Bible and I was going to have to think on that more before I could ask the right questions.

I asked her how she knew my yellow-handle knife was in Ara T’s coat pocket. She said she had felt the Lord himself move her to the knife with a sure hand and she knew what had to be done.

Where’s the s-s-s-s-knife now?

Buried so deep the Hounds of Hell can’t dig it up.

I sat at the table while Mam sipped her coffee. My mind went back to the night before. I could see Ara T’s hands around Mam’s neck and then feel them squeezing my throat. I could see the yellow-handle knife slash and then go deep into his arm. I could see the blood ooze and then begin to spurt.

The tears started from deep behind my eyes without me knowing they were coming and then came gushing out like water out of a busted pipe. I never cried much but I couldn’t turn these tears off and stopped trying after a while.

Mam sat at the table with me until I emptied my eyes. She smiled when I wiped the last tears away.

You threw that bottle with a mighty heave, Little Man. Just like David.

I remembered Mam’s needle story about the boy who busted a giant with a rock from a slingshot.

I was glad I had a bottle to throw. I’m not as good with a slingshot.

Summer heat waves in Memphis usually end with thunder and lightning and rain that floods up over the curbs but the hot spell on the first Saturday in August broke a little after noon with a puny drizzle.

The breeze coming in my window was just how I liked it. I sat at my desk with the envelope Mr. Spiro had given Mam. I opened it to find three quarters and two dimes for the week’s
Press-Scimitar
. And the last piece of Mr. Spiro’s special dollar.

I opened my desk drawer where the night before Mam had put my billfold and all the coins and paper money she had brought back in her handbag. I took the three pieces of the dollar and put them together in the desk drawer so the breeze from the attic fan wouldn’t blow them away.

I took the fourth piece from the envelope.

Mr. Spiro’s dollar was complete. I was glad the word started with an
S
like I knew it would.

I found my cellophane tape in another drawer and taped the dollar bill to make it whole. The four pieces of the dollar bill fit together perfectly. I put it in under a flap in my billfold that was supposed to be a secret compartment. Most billfolds had them so it wasn’t much of a secret anymore.

The last thing in the envelope was the piece of paper I had typed my poem on. Mr. Spiro had written something on the other side.

I read the letter three times. I knew Mr. Spiro was trying to give me a clue to the four words on the dollar bill. Mr. Spiro’s leaving felt better because he had left me something to work on and because he told me when he would be coming back. I also liked that he talked about the Soul because I was going to spend a lot of time thinking about that.

The back door buzzer sounded and soon Rat came clomping up the back stairs.

He was tan without any sun lines on his neck or arms. Going without a shirt was another treat on the farm except at hay baling time and then you better have your shirt on or you would have to take a dip in the pond with the cows to stop the itching.

Rat told me about the dirt-clod fights with his cousins and trying to catch baby rabbits while his grandfather cut hay with the tractor. I listened and tried to think about what he was saying even though I was having a hard time keeping my mind on his stories.

How’d the route go?

Good-good.

Why don’t you throw the route with me today? We can each take a bag and I’ll walk instead of ride.

I didn’t want to disappoint Rat on his first day back home. Rat would be telling stories about the farm and I would try to be excited
with him even though I had an idea that stories about dirt-clod fights and catching rabbits wouldn’t be that interesting anymore.

When we reached the paper drop the bundles were already on the ground and carriers were loading their bags. Rat pulled out his double-bladed Barlow to cut a bundle cord.

Where’s your knife?

s-s-s-s-Lost it … somewhere.

Maybe you’ll get another for your birthday.

He tried to wink like he wanted me to know that he might be planning on giving me a new knife from his father’s hardware store. But he wasn’t very good at winking with one eye.