“Spit it out, boy. Just go on, goddammit, and spit it out.”
But Bub couldn’t. The word hung up somewhere between his brain and his tongue, trapped in a molasses of frustration and pain. Goddamn, when would he learn to talk like a man?
Bub was twenty, a thickish, sluggish young man, who had worked as an assistant carpenter at Wilton’s Construction in Blue Eye until he’d been let go because he’d never quite got the hang of it. He had grown up totally in awe of his older cousin, who was the best running back Polk County had ever produced and had hit .368 his senior year at Polk High and could have gone either to the minor leagues or the University of Arkansas, if he hadn’t gone to jail instead.
But today Bub was more than in awe: he was possibly in love. For Jimmy’s golden power seemed to fill the air, radiating the magic of possibility.
“Go on, boy,” yelped Jimmy, his face alight with glee, “find me some music. None of that nigger shit. No hillbilly shit, neither. No sir, want to hear me some rock and roll, want to hear me ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ by Mr. Bill Haley and his goddamn Comets.”
Bub hunted, earnestly sliding the radio dial left and right, seeking a powerful Memphis or St. Louis station, but for some reason the gods weren’t cooperating, and exactly the kind of shit Jimmy didn’t want kept coming up loud and clear, KWIN out of Little Rock or that nigger beam KGOD from Texarkana. But Jimmy wasn’t angry. He was enjoying Bub’s struggle and gave him a little pat on the shoulder.
Jimmy was driving. Where the hell had he got a car? Well, goddamn, Bub was so overwhelmed with love when he arrived at the jailhouse in west Fort Smith, he just hadn’t bothered to ask, and Jimmy hadn’t explained. The car was a goddamned beauty too, a sleek white Fairlane with Fordomatic gearshift, a convertible no less, looking brand spanking new, as if it’d just been driven off a showroom floor. Jimmy drove it like a god. He whipped out Rogers Avenue, zooming in and out of traffic, blowing by the slower vehicles, honking merrily, waving with a movie star’s sexy confidence whenever teenage girls were glimpsed.
The girls always waved back and this was one thing that left Bub a little confused. Jimmy was married. He was married to Edie White, who was Jeff White’s widow’s daughter and a legendary beauty. Why would Jimmy want to go and wave at strange girls? It was all set up, it was perfect. Mr. Earl had gotten Jimmy a job at the sawmill in Nunley and Jimmy and Edie was going to live in a cottage outside Nunley on the late Rance Longacre’s cattle ranch; Miss Connie Longacre, Ranee’s widow, had said they could have it for free if Jimmy pitched in at driving time. Meanwhile, Jimmy would learn a trade at the sawmill. He might even become a manager. Everybody wanted it to work out.
“Lookie them gals,” said Jimmy, as the car sped by a Pontiac station wagon. Four pretty blond girls who looked like cheerleaders smiled as Jimmy shouted, “Hey there, pretty missies, y’all want to git some ice cream?”
The girls laughed, for Jimmy was so handsome and outrageous they knew he meant no harm, though it was Bub who noticed that he had crossed the centerline and that a truck was bearing down on them.
“J-J-J-J—”
“Or how about a drive-in movie, we could go to the Sky-Vue and see
The truck was—
The truck honked.
The girls screamed.
Jimmy laughed.
“J-J-J-J—”
With just the flick of his wrist, Jimmy jiggered the wheel and stepped on the gas and with his athlete’s coordination shot into the tiny space left between the station wagon on the right and the rushing, honking, squealing truck just ahead; the car dipped and swooped ahead.
“Whooooooie!” sang Jimmy. “I’m a goddamned free man.”
He took the next left, fishtailing in a spray of gravel, and headed back downtown.
“You find me some music, Bub Pye, you old dog, you.”
Bub caught something familiar, with at least the kind of banging rhythms he had figured his cousin needed.
“That’s a nigger,” said Jimmy.
“N-n-n-n-no,” finally Bub got out. “That’s a white boy. He sounds like a nigger.”
Jimmy listened. It
“What’s that white boy’s name?” he wanted to know.
Bub couldn’t remember it. It was something new, some name he could never remember.
“Cain’t ’member. Goddamn,” said Bub.
“Well, you ain’t no damn good, then,” said Jimmy with a big old smile, in the way of saying in code, it don’t matter a damn.
Jimmy looked at his watch. He seemed to know where he was going. Bub had only been up to Fort Smith a few times before; he had no idea.
Pretty soon, Jimmy pulled over.
“Just about noon,” he said.
They were on a busy street, Midland Boulevard, across from a big grocery store. “IGA Food Line,” it said on the sign. It was the biggest grocery store Bub had ever seen.
“Goddamn,” said Jimmy. “Lookie that, Bub? Lookie all them people in and out a place like that. All of them with their goddamned money just spent on food. Hell, boy, must be fifty, sixty thousand dollars in that place.”
Bub wondered what the hell Jimmy could be talking about. Something he didn’t quite like about it.
“J-J-J-J-J—”
But goddamn, Jimmy’s luck was good.
One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK,
five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock ROCK,
nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock ROCK,
We gonna ROCK around the clock tonight!
We gonna ROCK ROCK ROCK ’til the broad daylight!
The unleashed dogs found her. Earl heard them baying wildly, their voices a-gibber with excitement.
“Them dogs won’t—”
“Won’t touch a goddamned thing,” said Pop.
“Over here, over here,” shouted Jed Posey. “Goddamn and a half, over here!”
Earl, breathing hard, struggled uphill through the trees and saw brier and broke into some kind of clearing, where, the shade vanished, the full, killing force of the heat struck him.
Earl saw Jed standing, his chest heaving, next to a shale wash, where the earth was stony and broken, the sun harsh. On the other side of the wash, the three dogs sat obediently, barking to drive the devil away. But the devil had already been here and done his work.
Shirelle lay on her side, her pink gingham dress crunched up around her hips, her panties gone, her blouse ripped off. She was beyond shame. Her eyes were wide and lightless. Her skin was gray, almost colorless, sheathed in dust. Her body was fat with bloat so that she seemed some balloon version of herself, and the left side of her face was swollen into a massive yellowish bulge crusted with a fissure of gore, where someone had smashed her with a rock. A yard away, the rock lay stained with black.
“You can see her cooze,” said Jed. “G’wan, look everbody, you can see her cooze.”
You could, of course, and Earl looked and saw what appeared to be a black gruel of blood on the child’s privates and what looked like contusions and abrasions. The buzz of flies, the stink of rot.
Earl had seen death in all its forms over three major island invasions. He’d done more than his share of dealing it too. But the girl looked so broken and thrown away, so blasphemed by the gases that filled her, then abandoned on the side of a rough hill, it broke a heart he thought would break no more after the long walk through
