Safe from the Neighbors Page 5

I barely know what a basketball is. But Grandpa’s been teaching me to punt a football, though he’s no good himself and half the time he misses it completely. “No ma’am,” I say. “Like football, though.”

  “Well, I’m not supposed to play that because I’m a girl. But I’ll tell you a little secret, if you’ll keep it between you and me.”

  It won’t be a secret, and we both know it. My mother’s still sitting there. The boy’s over at the corner of the porch trying to prime the pitcher pump, and the girl has backed off a few feet and is watching her mother and me. “Yes ma’am,” I say. My face is hot, but I don’t know why. I never will, at least not for a long time.

  “I’ve got two brothers I used to play football with,” she says. “And you know what? I beat the tarnation out of them. They couldn’t catch me, and even if they did they never could bring me down. So just remember that if you ever need somebody to play football with.”

  I tell her I will, but by then I’d say anything to make her stand up and let me alone. Rising to her full height, she reaches out and musses my hair, at the same time telling Momma that she needs to go inside and buy some cheese and crackers and baloney and Dr Peppers for her husband and his dad, who are crawling around in the dirt at their headquarters setting the plows on a cultivator. Then Momma says she needs to go in and return my bottle, which she pulls from my hand even though there’s still a little drink left in it.

  As soon as they disappear into the store, I take off towards the steps, intending to bound down them and jump in the car and hide my hot face. But something happens and suddenly I’m flying through the air, starting to tumble, my ultimate destination the same mudhole my cousin ended up in.

  Nobody saw her trip me, but I don’t say a word, just lie there breathless on my back looking up at the porch where the girl with the cold black hair stands watching.

  More than forty-five years later, she was eyeing my phone, which lay on the table next to the paper sack that held the remains of my lunch. “You’ve got a message,” she said.

  It’s one of those black Nokia fliptops with a red light that pulses when somebody’s left you a voice-mail or sent a text. I opened it to find a missed call from Trish and a message, too. I keep the phone on silent when I’m at school, and the girls know they’re not supposed to call unless there’s an emergency, though for Trish that term’s broadly defined. I figured it was nothing, but you never know. “Excuse me,” I said, and put the phone to my ear.

  Whereas Candace rarely gets excited, her sister’s seldom calm. She spits words out as if they tasted bad, then strings clauses together, one after another, until you can’t even remember how the sentence started. And she was in classic form for this message.

  The “emergency” was her discovery that today was the last day students could buy football tickets at reduced prices, so she needed me to transfer two hundred forty dollars to the bank account she shared with Candace. That wasn’t in the budget Jennifer and I had agreed on for the month, though I’d figured the subject would come up sooner or later. It had taken until now only because Ole Miss kicked off the season on the road the previous weekend and hadn’t played a home game yet. Also, this was a Wednesday, when Jennifer had a night class and wouldn’t get home before ten. She’d kept that schedule for years, so it was probably no accident that Trish had waited until now to call. I’d have to decide without talking to their mother, unless I could reach her by phone, which wasn’t likely.

  “I need to call my daughter,” I told Maggie.

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No, you can hear it.”

  So I phoned her, but even before I could say hello she blurted, “Daddy, I’m sorry to bother you, because I know you’re at school and I’m not supposed to call unless it’s something serious, which in this case it is, since if we don’t get our tickets today—”

  “I’ll transfer the money when I get home.”

  “Couldn’t you do it sooner?”

  “Nope, sure can’t. We’re not supposed to use these computers for personal business.” I knew that before agreeing to this she’d make it sound as if I’d just told her we couldn’t pay her tuition and she’d have to come home and work at Wal-Mart, so I said “Bye now” and pressed END CALL.

  Maggie opened the plastic container she’d brought her fruit in and laid a banana peel, an apple core and a yogurt-streaked spoon inside it, then clamped the top back on. “Children are expensive, so I hear.”

  “Yesterday you told me not to ask if you had kids.”

  “Because I didn’t want you to.”

  She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t frowning either, so I forged ahead. “But why’s that subject off-limits?”

  “In other words, you’re ignoring my request?”

  “I guess so. You can tell me to buzz off, though, and I will.”

  She laughed. “Buzz off-—now there’s an expression I haven’t heard lately.”

  “Well, I teach history,” I said, “so I guess it’s normal that some of my terminology might sound anachronistic.”

  “You’re using terminology on me?” Somehow she managed to create the impression that her eyes had grown a lot larger, and they were plenty big to begin with. “Why, I don’t know what to think.”

  I figured she’d probably registered my stupid remarks the day before and decided it might be fun to coax me into making a few more. I was trying to come up with a suitable reply when Ramsey Coleman sat down at our table and opened his lunch box.

  The lunch box is actually an old mailbox that he attached a handle to. He loves putting discarded items to odd use. He once made a flowerbed out of a junked refrigerator, and he feeds his dog from a “bowl” that was originally a Loring Leopards batting helmet. Thus his nickname, Mr. Salvage, which sometimes gets changed to Mr. Savage when he loses his temper.

  “Mrs. Sorrentino,” he said, “how are you this fine day?”

  “I’m all right. And you?”

  “Couldn’t be better. Could not be better.” He pulled out a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and grinned at me. “What about you, Luke? Since those girls of yours took off for Ole Miss, you been whistling ‘Dixie’ or singing the blues?”

  The exchange with Maggie had left my face feeling flushed. “Mostly,” I said, “I’ve been writing checks.”

  “The check-writing blues? I believe that’s somewhere between mean and lowdown. Lasts a long time, too.”

  “You’re not doing much to lift my spirits.”

  He slapped me on the back. “I’m not your preacher. I’m your old pal, Buddy Black Man.” To Ramsey, nothing is funnier, or more serious, than race, and he put his sandwich down to chuckle at his own joke.

  After that, the three of us sat there together for a few more minutes, Ramsey asking Maggie how her classes were coming along and, at one point, trying out the French he’d learned at Jackson State. Then I told them I had to get ready for Local History class, and Maggie glanced at her watch and said she’d better be going, too.

  Leaving the lunchroom, I must have resembled those guys you see in the 20 K walk at the Olympics: stiff legged, moving as fast as I could, feeling the effort in my shins. I’d just put my hand on one of the swinging doors when Maggie said, “Luke, could you wait just a minute?”

  I stepped into the hall and held the door open until she came through, then let it swing shut.

  “I was wondering,” she said, “if you know anything about cars?”

  “A little. Why?”

  “This morning, driving to work, I saw a dashboard light come on but don’t have any idea what it means.”

  “What it means,” I said, “is a trip to Greenville.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nobody in Loring can fix a car like that. Whatever’s wrong with it, you’ll have to take it over there to get it worked on. There’s a shop on Eighty-two that can handle German imports. The closest dealer’s down in Jackson.”

  “But could you at least take a look after school and
see if you can tell me what the problem is, so I’ll know what to say when I call?”

  The bell rang and the lunchroom doors popped open, smacking into a wall already pockmarked by repeated impact. Kids began pouring out while she stood there looking at me as if the only thing that mattered in the world right then was my answer.

  “Sure,” I said, “I’d be happy to have a look.”

  In Local History that afternoon I reminded my students that the purpose of the class was twofold. “We want to examine the major events that occurred here in the Delta and around the state, looking at how they influenced our lives and then placing them in the context of events that unfolded nationally and internationally at the same time. Anybody here ever heard of James Meredith?”

  In a regular class, most kids wouldn’t be able to name our current governor. But these were honors students, and a number of hands shot up.

  “Rosella?”

  “He’s the man that integrated Ole Miss.”

  “When?” Who, what and where are easier than when. In the age of the Internet, everything is now.

  “The Fifties?”

  “Close—1962. And how did it occur? Did he just stroll into the Lyceum and register?”

  “No sir. There was a huge riot and some people got killed.”

  “Right again. A humongous riot. The president of the United States—John F. Kennedy—had to mobilize almost thirty thousand troops in order to safely enroll a single African American student at the state’s leading university.

  “Now, this event got attention all over the world—it was front-page news in all the major European papers as well as those in Asia and Latin America. Remember, in the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States constantly tried to convince everybody else that their way of life was superior, so this race war was a huge propaganda coup for the other side. What happened at Ole Miss might even have played a role in the Soviets’ decision to challenge us a few weeks later during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the same time, the Meredith event directly affected people right here in Loring. Do any of you know a gentleman named Charles McGlothlan?”

  They all knew Charlie, who was the man your momma went to if your older brother ended up in jail for dealing drugs and needed somebody to negotiate a plea bargain. One or two of them might even have known that back in 1967, not long after opening his practice, he led a famous boycott that got national attention when a crop duster dipped down over Front Street and sprayed pesticide over the protesters.

  “In 1959,” I said, “three years before James Meredith and the U.S. Army integrated Ole Miss, Mr. McGlothlan graduated from high school with straight A’s and applied there himself. Of course, back then Loring had a white school and a black one, and once Ole Miss got his transcript they could tell which one he’d gone to and immediately sent him a letter saying he was unqualified. His only options were the traditionally all-black schools like Alcorn and Valley State, so he enrolled at Alcorn. But when it came time for law school, as a result of what Meredith had done, Mr. McGlothlan was able to attend Ole Miss, where he became the second African American law graduate. He came back home, opened his practice and started up a community-assistance program that worked to reduce poverty and also helped people register to vote.”

  I often used Charlie as an example in my classes, knowing full well that the parents and grandparents of many of the white kids had given them a completely different version of the McGlothlan story—nothing more than an opportunistic troublemaker who’d exploited racial discord to make money. And as for Meredith, if they’d told them anything at all, it was probably that after championing integration and stirring up all manner of mischief, he’d changed his tune, turned into an arch-conservative, gone to work for Jesse Helms and become a supporter of the Klan leader David Duke. I could tell from their faces that some of them didn’t like hearing any of this. But teaching history often involves making people learn something they’d rather not know.

  The previous night, when I’d asked my father about Nadine Calloway, I knew immediately that he’d hoped never to hear her name again. What I didn’t know was why. Since like a lot of local people he wouldn’t discuss the Citizens’ Council, and since her husband had been in it with him, maybe it was nothing more than that. But I didn’t think so. He brushed aside my question by mumbling something about how unusual Nadine was, then changed the subject. In other words, he behaved exactly as he had when I finally got around to asking him about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  While Maggie watched, I slid behind the wheel of her Mercedes. The first thing that grabbed my attention wasn’t the soft leather seats or the wood trim on the dash and doors but the concentrated scent of her perfume. For a moment I lost track of my surroundings, as though I were drunk.

  I finally stuck the key in the ignition and turned it, and the next thing I knew Hank Williams was singing “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.”

  I must have looked shocked, since she said, “What’d you figure me for—smooth jazz?”

  “Yeah. Either that or classical.”

  “My father loved this music. I hadn’t heard it for years until I saw that CD at a gas station in Texas.” She gestured at the control panel. “You can turn it off.”

  I touched the button, and the music died.

  She leaned close to me, pointing. “It’s that light there. See, it says to check the engine? But the car’s running just fine.”

  “A check-engine light usually means it’s an emissions problem.”

  “Is that serious?”

  I started to say that on a car like hers, everything was serious. But then it dawned on me that if you could buy the car in the first place, probably nothing was. “Have you gassed up recently?”

  She nodded. “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “Where?”

  “At Mr. Quik.”

  That station’s strictly self-service, and Maggie wasn’t the type. I switched off the ignition, then walked around to the passenger side, opened the gas flap and checked the cap, which was definitely a little loose, so I screwed it down tight. “Keep an eye on that light,” I said. “There’s a good chance it’ll go off in a day or two. But if it doesn’t, you’ll need to go to Greenville and have them look at it.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”

  “No problem. Next time you pump your own gas, make sure you screw that cap down all the way. Otherwise, the computer will signal there’s a problem that doesn’t even exist.”

  “Right, and thanks again.” She started to get in the car, then turned to look at me. “The question about children? Well, back when I was still young enough to have any, I didn’t want to. I guess I was afraid I’d let them down. And by the time I realized I’d made a mistake, it was too late.”

  I waited to see if she’d say more. But instead she waved, got into her expensive car and pulled away.

  THE LORING PUBLIC LIBRARY has a number of quirks, chief among them its willingness, even now, to accommodate the requests of prominent citizens. When I was growing up, one such person was Clinton Finley, who owned the Chevrolet dealership and served as mayor from 1953 until 1975, when he died of a heart attack.

  At some point in either 1973 or ’74, he walked into the library and asked to speak to the head librarian. Nobody’s sure what he said, exactly, but the following morning he and his daughter drove over in a pickup and removed all the issues of the Weekly Times from the civil rights era. Nobody knows what became of them. And by and large nobody cares, because anybody interested in what the paper published during those years can go over to Ellis’s house.

  His living room has a picture window, and I could see him through it. He was sitting on the couch, nicely dressed as always, in a pair of charcoal-gray slacks and a short-sleeved knit shirt, deeply engrossed in a book. The air conditioner was droning away on a concrete slab near the corner of the house, so I couldn’t tell if he was listening to music or not, but I’d have to bet he was.

  As it happened, I was right, since
when he answered the doorbell I could hear the sound of a string quartet. “Mozart?” I asked.

  “Not exactly, but you’re close.”

  “Haydn?”

  “There’s hope for you yet.”

  He’d left the book open on the coffee table, next to a glass of white wine that stood on one of the ceramic coasters we’d given him a few Christmases ago. Noticing me eyeing the wine, he said, “My Lord, I’ve forgotten my manners entirely. Let me get you something to drink.”

  He disappeared into the kitchen, and I took a seat in the big leather easy chair at one end of the coffee table. I felt at home in his house and had for a long time. But whenever I sat down in his living room, I remembered how it affected me the first time I saw it. I was seventeen, and he’d invited me over for dinner, which he always did at least once for each of his interns. His walls are lined with bookshelves, and he told me later that when I walked in that night back in 1973, something happened to my face: my mouth didn’t exactly fall open, but it nearly did. I’d never seen so many books in anybody’s house. I didn’t even know an individual could own that many.

  And a lot of them were pretty amazing. First-edition hardcovers of Winston Churchill’s entire six-volume set The Second World War, leather-bound editions of all Dickens’s novels, the collected works of Robert Frost and a signed copy of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, into which had been tucked a note, handwritten on stationery from the Peabody Hotel: Mr. Buchanan, I enjoyed our conversation. The South needs more people like you. As does the rest of the nation. JKG.

  “You know him?” I’d asked.

  “I met him once,” Ellis said. “That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “Still.” Handling the book gingerly, I put it back on the shelf.

  “You’ve got them alphabetized, I see.”

  “When you need something, you want to be able to lay your hands on it.”

  “How come you don’t separate fiction and poetry from non-fiction?”

  He smiled at my question, which he later told me he regarded as evidence of a naïve bent towards compartmentalization. “A good book,” he said that evening, “is a good book. They like to be together.”