Bone looked at Cutler and Cutler looked back at him and handed over the five hundred Bone had withdrawn from the Whitney that morning.
Cutler said, “There’s plenty more where that came from. Don’t even think about that reward, y’hear, honey? Put it out of your mind.”
Just in Case
For almost twenty years, as long as she’d had the grocery store, Momma had kept her gun right there on a shelf beneath the cash register. The old Colt revolver, a smaller version of the ones cowboys drew from their hips in the Saturday Westerns, was at the ready, just in case.
“In case of what?” I asked again and again with a child’s insistence.
The gun nestled beside a small square cigar box, the repository for each and every silver dollar that came sliding across the smooth wooden counter. When the box was full, Momma and I would, with great ceremony, take it to the bank, where the heavy coins were translated into numbers carefully inscribed in purple ink in my savings book. Both the cigar box and the Colt were off-limits to my small hands—and loaded.
“In case of trouble,” Momma said.
Before Daddy and I had come to town, Momma, who was my stepmother actually, had run the tiny corner grocery store in West Cypress, Louisiana—a burg in the northeastern corner of the state—all alone. She’d worked twelve hours every day but Sunday through the bone-hard years of the thirties and early forties. She’d opened for business early and never closed until after dark.
Then Daddy had climbed onto a Greyhound bus in New York City—Momma’s letters in his pocket, me, a baby squalling on his hip—and made the long trip south. My own mother dead since I was two weeks old, he was in need of another, and Momma’s hands itched for a baby girl. The two of them had reached a tentative understanding via the U.S. mail, and three days after Daddy stepped off that Greyhound into the heart of Dixie, the deal was sealed.
Daddy wasn’t great shakes in the store. He was shy. He was a Yankee. He stuttered. But even so, he provided relief for Momma, giving her time to rest a bit when she wasn’t looking after me.
They’d quickly fallen into a pattern: she’d open in the mornings, then Daddy would take over for the long middle stretch of the day. Come early evening, she’d close up, maybe keeping the door open a bit later in the summer when the days were longer, selling an after-supper ice-cream cone or two while she caught up on paperwork.
One such evening the summer I was nine found Momma sitting on the high metal stool behind the cash register, toting up bills. Daddy had gone downtown to play dominoes with his cronies. It was getting on toward eight, dusk falling, and the store was dim, but Momma hadn’t switched on a light yet, saving the electricity. I was doing some accounting too, emptying the cigar box of my silver dollars, stacking them in tens. Then I asked Momma about the Colt for the millionth-and-first time.
“No, there never has been any trouble. Not yet.” She answered slowly, as if she didn’t really mean it.
“But there could be?”
Momma shook her head. “You can never be too careful in this world.”
At that a cold hand gripped my guts, and I wished I hadn’t asked the question. Momma’s dark outlook weighed heavily on me. I was an only child. I didn’t want to be careful. I didn’t want to worry. I slipped out from behind the counter and twirled down the center aisle, then on through the front door, outside, into the world.
I stepped over a couple of crispy red worms that hadn’t made it across the burning desert of concrete earlier in the day. Then I looked to the right.
If the trouble were coming, it’d surely be from that direction. Not because it was north—though it was—but because that way lay the quarters. Colored quarters. That’s what everybody called the neighborhood that began just on the other side of the drainage ditch that marked our modern property line.
“You have to watch them, the colored,” Momma warned. “They’ll steal you blind.”
Why, I wondered, would people steal if they could just walk in our store without a dime and ask for what they wanted? A box of cornmeal, three yards of checkered gingham, two scoops of strawberry ice cream from the icebox so deep I couldn’t reach the bottom. Momma or Daddy would write up the purchases in the credit book with their name penciled on the top, and they’d pay when they could.
“
Who stole?
” I asked Momma. “
When? What’d they take?
”
Her mouth grew tight. “
Don’t dispute my word, Emma. I know what I’m talking about
.”
Out on the sidewalk the light grew softer, fading. The kerosene tank, with its sharp smell, made popping noises as it cooled. There was something about this time of day that made me wish I had a sister. Or a brother, an older brother. Someone to play with after all the other kids had gone home to supper. But I didn’t, and Momma said I wasn’t going to either. This world, she said, was such a terrible place that she didn’t want to bring another child into it. That’s why she’d wanted me, she said, because I was already here.
What was so terrible about the world, I wondered.
Then I made a quick run through the hopscotch grid I’d chalked on the sidewalk in front of the store. One, two, three boxes on a single foot. Both feet for the double box. A fourth single. I was about to twirl myself midair for the last double, the trickiest maneuver of the game, trying not to step on the lines, when I spied two little colored boys lollygagging down the road in my direction.
I’d seen these children countless times before, though I didn’t know their names. One boy was near my age, the other a year older. I knew that they lived in the very first house—small, unpainted, sagging porch—on the other side of the drainage ditch. Sometimes when I played with my friends among the blackberry brambles and paths that lined the ditch, I saw the boys, but we never talked. They went to the colored school, and we lived in different worlds on either side of that narrow strip of water.
“’Scuse me,” they said shyly as they passed by me, climbed the step, and slipped inside the store.
I stepped up and watched through the screen door as they headed for the big square red Co-cola box filled with not-quite-freezing water, but cold enough to make my fingers ache when I fished for a soda. Momma left off toting up bills to keep an eye on them.
Would she pull out the Colt and shoot them if they tried to steal something? I wondered. No, surely not. She’d just holler at them. Momma’s voice, even when there was no reason to be upset that I could see, always reminded me of a fire bell.
She was still watching the boys, who hadn’t made their choices yet. She stood and crossed the center aisle, hovering over them. “What do you want?” she asked. “Don’t keep that box open all night.”
The boys murmured words I couldn’t hear, and Momma reached in and fiddled out two wet bottles. One orange NeHi. One Delaware Punch. She didn’t mind the icy plunge. Momma was tough. She was always talking about how she’d had to learn to be, growing up on a farm. “
Life’s no tea party, Emma. The sooner you learn that, the better.
” The boys unknotted their coins, twisted into the corner of a handkerchief, and handed them over. Momma counted them, a couple of times, then her eyes followed the boys all the way out the door, past me.
It must be exhausting, I thought, being Momma. Always expecting trouble, ready to jump on it before it jumped on her. Just watching her made me tired—and uneasy too. Trouble, her posture said, her fingers scrabbling, poking, never soothing.
Trouble everywhere, just biding its time.
Like the mahogany-colored water bug with great ugly pincers scuttling across the other end of the step I’d been standing on, peering into the store. I’d seen these bugs stomped flat, their insides, like soft white cheese, revealed. I didn’t know which was worse, a live water bug or a squashed one, but I did know I didn’t want this one running across my toes, bare in my sandals. I jumped down. You can have the step, Mr. Water Bug.
Then down the street cruised a big green Buick, two-tone, light green and dark, with heavy rounded chrome bumpers, a parade of tiny portholes down its sides. I’d spent many hours out here in front of the store, watching cars, and the Buick was my favorite. When I was grown, I was determined to have one of my own.
I told Momma that, and she shook her head. “Why are you always wanting things that cost so much? You have to learn to save, Emma.”
I was saving. The bank had piles of silver dollars I’d handed over. Silver dollars with my name on them.
“Hey, girl.”
I turned to my left, startled. I hadn’t heard anyone coming. But there looking down at me were a pair of blue eyes pale and cool as the ice floating in the Co-cola box. Above them, a hank of long dirty-blond hair. The young man looked to be about the age of Momma’s nephew A.J., eighteen, nineteen, somewhere in there. But I’d never seen this young man before.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing.” I climbed up backward, onto the step again.
“Are you going in the store?”
“In a little while,” I said, “when Momma’s ready to close up.”
“Oooooooh.” He dragged the word out long. “I see, it’s your momma’s store. And you’re out here holding down the fort.”
I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but I knew that he was teasing because of that long
Oh
and the way he grinned. He had a mouthful of long white teeth.
The young man kept right on grinning as lightning bugs began to flirt behind his blue-jeaned legs. He wore a blue-and-white-striped short-sleeved shirt, the bottoms of the sleeves rolled to show large round muscles poised to jump like frogs beneath his freckled skin. There was an air of excitement about this young man. Much like my black-eyed step-cousin, A.J., he made something expand within my chest. Every time I saw A.J. when we went to visit his family’s farm, I felt crazy, like I wanted to jump out of the hayloft. I would float for a while, I thought, if I leaped high and wide—and then I’d land in A.J.’s arms.
Now I jumped flat-footed, back down the short step onto the sidewalk. “I’m not holding down any fort or anything else,” I said. Then I twirled in a circle as if I were wearing my tap-dancing costume with the silver top and short skirt of scarlet net instead of faded blue shorts and a yellow blouse.
The young man’s grin grew wider. “She sells Co-colas, this momma of yours?”
“She sure does,” I said, proudly. “Ice cold.”
“Then, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll buy me one.” He opened the screen, then paused and looked back at me, holding it wide, like a gentleman. “Sure you won’t change your mind about coming in?”
I already had.
Momma had switched on the light above the counter, its pull chain hanging down above her head. Dull red and blue coin wrappers were spread out on the smooth wooden countertop before her, the change from the register piled in short silver and copper towers. She’d looked up at the chiming of the brass bell on the door. The single light bulb reflected off her rimless glasses. “Hey,” she said to the young man, “can I help you?”
“Sure can,” he said. “This little girl of yours says you sell the coldest Co-colas in the neighborhood.”
I hadn’t said that, but I was flattered by his exaggeration.
“Well, I don’t know about that.” Momma smiled at me.
“Mind if I help myself?” The young man reached in the icebox, pulled one out, popped the cap, and sucked half of it down in one greedy swig, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “This sure is a nice place you got yourself here.”
Momma and I both craned around the little store. Six hundred square feet jammed with rows of canned goods, a long meat counter, the cold boxes for milk, soft drinks, ice cream. Bolts of fabric. Sacks of flour. A handful of fresh fruits and vegetables in bins in front beneath the two plate-glass windows,
Seventh Street Grocery
painted on each in careful gold outlined in black.
“Why, thank you,” Momma said.
“I love the store,” I said.
And why not? It was like having a real playhouse with real people who gave me real money I rang up on the old cash register with its elaborate scrollwork and keys with numbers printed deep into the ivory. I loved sitting on the high metal stool behind the register, where Momma was perched now. I especially loved the glass-topped candy counter at her left hand. Hershey bars with almonds were my favorite. Then there were Necco wafers, the black ones tasting of licorice, Tootsie Pops, Almond Joys.
“I always wanted to have me a store,” the young man said, taking a measured sip of Co-cola, slowing down now.
“Oh no, you don’t,” said Momma. “It’s awfully hard work. It might look easy, but it’s not.”
“I ain’t afraid of work.”
“Of course not,” Momma said. Then, “What do you do?”
We waited for an answer. Rodeo rider, I thought. Now that I’d had time for a closer look, he resembled a man I’d seen the summer before holding on for dear life to a bucking bronco.
But the young man didn’t say. He cocked his head toward the door in the back of the store, which led to our four-room apartment, and asked, “You and the little girl live back there?”
Before Momma could answer, I jumped in. “We do. Me and Momma and my daddy. But Daddy’s not here. If you want to see him, you’ll have to go downtown to the Trenton Street Bar, where he’s playing dominoes.”