Solemn (37 page)

“I take care of things in the immediate time but sometimes beyond it,” he said. More and more he was putting days off on his parents and his child, like today.

“I never talked to a grown man by myself,” Solemn warned him. “'Cept for my teachers. And the principal, I guess.”

“I tell my own daughter to keep it that way,” Bolden said.

“You seen my mama and daddy around town?”

“No.”

“Oh. I thought they'd be the only ones come visit me here. Maybe my brother and his wife.”

“Yes, Landon and Akila. I remember them.”

“Why? That's your job, too?”

Her hostility made more sense than a warm welcome. His order of business had once been to make a change, yet he was part of a system where all he did was change what lies he accepted or told. Rarely was there justice or peace. Only the next day and maybe a moment of conversation where the truth was at least thought, if not said.

“Coming here ain't my job,” he said. “But I could go see about your parents, if that's what you want.”

“Okay. They comin' to see me soon.”

“That's good to know. It seem like they like you around here,” Bolden told her.

“How you figure that?”

“I have ways of reading people. That is my job.”

“Oh. Well, I'm gonna think about being a police officer.”

“Well”—Bolden laughed—“I think that would be good. You know, sometimes, the women don't want to talk to men. The whites don't want to talk to blacks. So, you could really make some sense to more people. I could see you in uniform.”

“But I really want to be a singer, in the big city,” Solemn admitted as they sat on the bench. “The police job just would be to make sure I stay on my feet and have a lot of money before I get big.”

“That would be smart. Make my job your day job, happier one at night.”

“Well, if I get on
Oprah
I'm gonna have to perform in the day. I'm gonna be flexible.”

“You young enough to make it happen.”

“But I should go to college, too.”

“That's a way to make much more money than I do,” Bolden said. “For the work I have to do. It's not a lot to make up for it.”

“You ain't got to wait for nobody to call you to work, or tell you no.”

“I see things I don't like. A lot of things.”

“I do too. You have to learn to like them.”

“I can't.” Bolden smiled.

“That's not your job?”

“No ma'am. When and if I start liking any of the shit I see, it's time to quit.”

Fanny's stuffy décor and air sat behind Solemn to remind her she was only having a free pass for a while. Best not to get too comfortable. While she drank her cola and Bolden slurped his coffee, she knew he had never thought she was a witch. The window of opportunity passed for him to even think of asking the girl to stand up to her father, go against him in any way. He didn't like it, but the Redvines were family. And a black girl in Mississippi would go back to that family for all her life, always a refuge from stiff minds and dead-end roads and gas station clerking and top-floor corner apartment dalliances for pay. She had a family, at least, and that always meant one last chance to start over from the bottom of any rock.

*   *   *

Solemn broke that one sin again. She took just a few pages of sketchbook paper to start jotting down the secrets she could have told the brown cop. Words were boring, though. Trite to write. She wondered if Bolden was married. Fancy-doodled his name down a few times, to think of him. Oh yes, he said he had a wife. Married. She'd never thought about it. But she thought and thought about dark girls on mattresses with no sheets. Big pretty beds and hair and stone jewelry even. She wasn't much of an artist, no. But there was the attempt on the pages stolen to record what was hidden, to always keep it so she could spotlight it all once more, when she needed it. And she fell asleep in the room this way. Not even Majority huffing like a dragon could pull her out of it.

And after breakfast, with Jamiqua and Henrietta and Concepción and Tina who couldn't read fighting over the channels and the gals braiding hair and the staff talking among themselves until they spotted an offense to correct, Solemn zombied in the group room. Channel 7 was always safest in turmoil. She curled on the uncomfortable couch with the pillows from the end, a shield to her gut, in wonder as to why the brown cop came all the way to see her. No questions. No guns. Just talk.

Majority came near.

“You got you some fine man coming up here for you, honey,” the girl said, hazed about before Solemn, with her eyes barely open.

“I saw him. Who was he? Don't be shy.”

“Nobody,” Solemn told Majority.

Majority twisted her face until Solemn had no choice.

“He a police officer from where I come from.”

“Yas look like y'all was tweaking.”

“We were not.”

“That's what you say … He was old, honey. Like your daddy or something.”

The trumpets blared to announce the newscast. Majority didn't stop.

“Solemn like old men, y'all.” She held crinkled brown paper in her hands. She had been in Solemn's stuff, snooped through the mindless jibberish to find the name: “Officer Bolden.” In one of the three pairs of jeans she had and a flower shirt, too small, Majority waved the papers in front of Solemn. When Solemn reached, Majority ran.

It was just enough to get the rest started. A ruckus to concern the girls, with Day Staff off joking. A reason to get Dr. Givens out her office or off her smoke break. The snickering and laughing and chanting spread, until a dozen or more pointed at Solemn.

“Solemn like old men, y'all.” A few of them said it, laughing at her with squiggly funhouse faces. “No wonder we can't get her,” some of the boys said. “She probably oochie-coochie in the bathroom with the staff, y'all, ha-ha!!!”

Solemn balled herself up. Majority continued, jiggling Solemn's shoulders. Solemn ran to the TV, to stare at it and block them out. Over the noise she listened to the television, heard, watched, listened more, and heard again.

Of her very own Yockanookany River, just past Ethel, in her county: Attala. And the woman from the television back on now, seated on a couch in front of a cream wall this time. In “Jackson,” it said. And the “victim” bound and gagged and here now and naked and unseen for two years, the woman was. Or had been.

Her barefoot and poor Pearletta. It was.

Then, Solemn knew, with the jerking and juking clowns taking the joke too far, and her guts blown away like chalk, there was really no such thing as magic after all.

It was nothing even to cry about. It was much more for her to scream about.

*   *   *

Then, Solemn was back home in Bledsoe, Bev keeping watch. Or maybe Red. Could have been Akila. Mrs. Longwood too. She spoke all their names at points.

Such thinking was normal. “Rest and time away from the rest of the hopeless is what she need,” Miss Bernadine said. They already knew the rule about this one, to go easy on her, privilege and special and good home and all the rest they never heard. Dr. Givens was spare with the meds. Fanny O'Barnes was no psychiatric facility. Not at all. But sometimes, in sagacious caution and care, she made that call. It really wasn't too good at all for Solemn Redvine to fit it too right in her mind where she was and what surrounded her, or how she got there and why. Because she really didn't belong there.

“Hey, baby,” Redvine said, duffel bag at his shoulder and good hair smelling like bergamot and The Man at the Well too afraid to come past him. “I never knew that woman. I ain't put no babies in no well. Your mind just playing tricks. Go to sleep.”

Ativan on hand with Vicodin.

Orange juice with ice. Swallow swallow swallow.

 

THIRTY-ONE

There had to be a way to wash memory like silk: best done quick, under a cold tap, soft rub, hung high to let untampered air take control. Not a wrinkle or crease should make it through that way; good as new and almost never worn it can be. The ones who had met Pearletta Hassle with him—Nichols and Hanson—were gone. He called first, to the Attala County Coroner's Office, where he took over a bathroom so water from the cold faucet could wash him up first. For just a few minutes, some mouthfuls in his hands and splashes to his face. When he came out, in uniform and steadiness, he got right to it.

“Oh, Justin! How you?” the cupcake at the desk asked him. He wasn't sure why. Then she reminded him they had gone to high school together, a few years apart.

“Forgive me,” Bolden said. “Right. Rita. Good seeing you.”

“No apologies necessary.” Past the jacket and makeup he knew the smile more than the face. He soon recalled she had been a friend of his daughter's mother, one of the faces around her in the lunch room. “Up in here, we don't expect too-right minds. Glad to see you still doing the police thing. What is you, a detective now?”

He could have filled out the form she passed with his mind wandering.

“Something like that,” he told her, grabbing the pen affixed to the counter.

“Gotsta be better than chasing these fools. These drugs got so bad round here.”

“It's working out,” he told her. “Never saw you here before. How long…?”

“I was in the incinerator,” Rita said. “Ten years. You wouldn't have seen me.”

“Oh,” Bolden said. On the line by “Decedent,” he wrote: “Pearletta Hassle.”

“First opening on front came up, I went for it,” Rita told him.

“So guess that means we'll be seeing each other more often, then?” he said, a smile added to the good note of the coincidence.

“Let's hope not too much more often,” Rita told him. She worked her burgundy silk-wrapped nails across his authorization request. “So, Pearletta Hassle. Oh, right. Yes.”

“Me and my partners was first on it.”

“How's her family? That woman … her mother. I tell you. We remember.”

“Haven't talked to them. Yet.”

“So, looks like it's been less than twenty-four hours. Preliminary done, autopsy pending, sometime today. Maybe tomorrow. Either way, you should be fine to take a look.”

She slipped back to a corkboard and grabbed a key few wanted.

“They should have masks and VapoRub down there. And you need scrubs?”

“No.” He was smoking now. As he walked to the elevator to get to the basement, he snapped the filters off two menthol Newports and put them inside his nose.

*   *   *

Past the Mexican security guard, Pearletta rested in a room without instruments or windows. The thin and pale technician passed Bolden gloves, then stood by with his cell phone set to Solitaire. Bolden zipped the dark-gray body bag down a foot. He was pleased to see Viola Weathers would recognize Pearly's face. At least. Despite two front teeth knocked out, the records of the dental work her parents started to give her a better life were kindest to her at death. Shock's din was undramatic and someplace else. Hers wasn't the first undignified corpse he had seen. It was just the first he had known alive before. She wasn't shriveled or mummified, just cloaked in moist grave wax from whatever time in the river. It hadn't been that long, he could see. She was still formed, however loose. He zipped down farther past her breasts and the arms bent back with what looked like clothesline. Looked like she had broken her hand, probably set back at the scene but flailed now with the disturbance. He turned it back inside with the other grazed up her side. The darkest part of her was her forearms, her own doing, he was sure.

“Toxicology already back,” the man said.

“And?” Bolden asked.

“Usual.”

The bruising began on right side of her jaw and kept on around her neck, at tip of her shoulders, and around her areolas. Without any bullet holes or jagged entrance wounds defiling her upper body and torso, there was no need for him to zip down past her privates. It had been neat, clean, a strangle, a beating, an accident perhaps—the final result at least. He would have paid good money right then and there to know whom her fingernails told on, the pet names her vagina spoke, whose hair blended with her own.

Right around here she was, must have been. There was no way for any
Have You Seen Pearletta Hassle?
to work if she didn't look like herself anymore, where it probably went after a while. Had there been a relationship, a real one, that is, it would have been known before three years. Wasn't no way a rich white boy could have managed that this long. But even if the boy had only been the catalyst who helped skedaddle her off in vertiginous addiction, make her forget who and what she was, sent her off to others who took her sex and hunger before she was tossed off somewhere else, there was that part played. Couldn't discount it. “It's a shame,” the technician felt obliged to say, as anyone bypassing the hospitals and hospice to come to them had to be. “Any suspects?”

“Don't know,” Bolden said. “I'm gonna sit this one out. I just wanted to see her.”

*   *   *

The great majority of the people at Singer's had always been kind, that common piece in the waned force that had attracted them there. Even if, at four in the morning, any one of the weary was awake to go for a cigarette or cry in the dark about one thing or another, they would have kept it secret they saw one of their own fucking with that well, not even asking nobody what they wanted or thought. Car lights off. Racket.

And since the plot rents rolled on in and the scandals rolled on out, nobody outside the gates came out there anymore anyway. Nobody who had better to do thought about them, anymore, a season of cicadas and hot mess passed. White folks showed up to marvel, camp for a night or a week, go on, and remark how friendly every single good Negro they met there was. Either way, murmured by next morning and hallelujahed into common knowledge across forty acres by end of the week, every last one of them was glad somebody finally sawed through the heavy hemp rope, unbolted the rusted crank, chipped off the rotted head, and put a thank-God perfectly fit steel rim over that goddamned outdated and wealth-smirking and witch-alluring well.