To flush the memories out we took to hard work. Manual labor has a way of sweating out impurities. Both physical and emotional.
We finished up the surface flooring late one afternoon and took what scraps of lumber were left over, and went to see MeMaw, dumped the stuff in her yard and made a pledge to patch her porch.
She was agreeable and very grateful. She told us how much Jesus loved us and took us inside and showed us our snapshot. She had pinned it on the wall near the snapshot of her youngest son, Hiram, who she said Leonard reminded her of. She said her boy would soon be home for a visit. When she said it, her entire face brightened and she looked no older than seventy-five. OK, eighty-five.
I looked at the snapshot of her son and the one containing me and Leonard. Well, Leonard and her son were both black, that much was similar.
We had to eat some homemade bread and preserves before we were allowed to consider leaving. It wasn’t a difficult task. We insisted she let us do a few chores for her as well, then we left out of the kitchen and shoved the lumber under her porch and vowed to be back to do the work in a day or two.
Back at Uncle Chester’s, just as the sun faded, Leonard put some water in a pot of yesterday’s pinto beans, dropped in a fresh strip of ham hock, and peppered it. While it stewed, I drove my pickup down Comanche Street to the East Side Grocery for a few supper items. It was a beautiful death to the day, and in the red and gray time before the dark, the East Side took on a sort of fairy brilliance. A lot of walkers had disappeared from the streets for supper, and those who had jobs were back from them and settled, so the streets were near empty and stained with the blood of the sun.
East Side Grocery was a center for more than commerce. It was where the old men gathered to rattle dominoes and cuss and tell about how they used to do this and used to do that. A bunch of them were sitting out front of the grocery, to the right of the door on the concrete walk, underneath an overhang with a tin-capped light that was already on and already swarmed with bugs. They were sitting on old metal lawn chairs playing dominoes on a fold-out table, laughing and drinking beer out of paper cups.
Behind them, stapled on the store wall, there were ads for great black blues musicians, like Bobby Blue Bland. Guys like that played the East Side often, and the white community never even knew it. There was also a colorful poster announcing East Side’s Summer Carnival, August 27th, the “Only All Black Sponsored Major Carnival In East Texas,” if one were to believe the poster. In addition, there were a variety of church and community project bulletins.
I nodded at the old men when I went in the store. They nodded and grinned amiably enough, but even though I had been here a lot of late, there was the usual suspicion on their faces, the unasked questions: Who’s the white guy? What’s he doin’ here? Why’s he keep hangin’ around?
The store owner had been at the domino table, and he reluctantly followed in after me and got behind the counter and waited. I picked up some bread and eggs and cornmeal mix, a six-pack of beer for Leonard, and looked for some nonalcoholic beer for me but didn’t find any. I got a six-pack of Diet Coke instead.
I took my stuff to the counter, plucked a couple of jerky sticks out of a box up front, threw them down with my purchase, and watched some hot links on metal pins turn and sweat and drip inside a humidity-beaded glass enclosure.
The owner had a lot of belly and a lot of gray hair and a sun roof that revealed a dark bald spot. He might have been five two. He appeared to have all his own teeth, and one of the front ones was gold as Rapunzel’s hair. He said, “That do you?”
“Yeah. How’s the dominoes?”
“I’m losing,” he said.
He tallied up my goods on the adding machine, and I continued to look around. I examined a frame on the wall behind the register containing the first dollar the store had taken in, and noted the dollar was play money. Below that, on a shelf, I saw something that startled me. Next to a jar of pickled pig’s feet was a larger jar stuffed with little slips of paper. It looked like one of the jars at Illium’s.
I said, “That jar with the coupons in it? That is coupons, isn’t it?”
He was bagging up my groceries; he stopped, glanced where I was indicating. “Yeah.”
“I’ve seen that setup a couple times,” I said. “The jars, I mean. There something to it besides you saving coupons?”
“That’s the church’s,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“Reverend Fitzgerald, he’s got him a deal with all the businesses in town. We cut coupons, we see them. Folks bring them and donate ’em. Fitzgerald saves them coupons for his youth programs. You know, take the soccer, baseball team out to eat. He’s got this deal with damn near everybody in the city. Even if the coupons expire, they let him use ’em. They gonna make money anyway, discount or not, him bringing in ten, twenty kids at a time, and often. He’s got more coupons than he can use. Illium done told us he gonna stop picking up for a while, he gets this batch. He says they done gettin’ yellow, they got so many. They could take soccer teams out for the next ten years and not run out of coupons. He done s’posed to got this here jar, but he ain’t showed. I reckon he’s been sick.”
Yeah, I thought, real sick.
“Mr. Moon’s the clearinghouse?” I asked.
“You know him?”
“Not really. Know who he is.”
“Yeah, he runs all manner errands for the church. He’s a real do gooder, that Illium. That sonsabitch dies, he’s gone sit on the right side of Jesus, and Jesus gone give him a juice harp, personal like, let him play a few spirituals.”
I figured Illium was probably twanging out a rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross” even as we spoke. I thanked the old man, paid up, and started back to the house, thinking about Illium, the church, Reverend Fitzgerald, and all those coupons, the connection right under our noses all the time.
Next day. A Saturday. Hot. Me and Leonard and Florida and Hanson, out at the lake near my old house, standing on the bank, shadowed by drooping willows, casting fishing lines in the water.
The fish weren’t biting, but the mosquitoes were. They were bad here because of the low areas where the water ran out of the lake and gathered in pools and turned torpid beneath the shades of the willows and gave the little bastards prime breeding grounds.
Florida, dressed in blue jean short-shorts, a short-sleeved blue sailor-style shirt, low-cut blue tennis shoes, and one of those stupid white fishing hats with a big brim that turns up in the front, was doing more slapping than casting.
“You should have worn long pants,” I said. “I told you.”
“Well, damnit, you were right,” she said.
Hanson slapped a mosquito on the side of his face, hard. He looked at his palm. In the center of it was a bloody mess protruding broken insect legs. He wiped the palm on his pants.
“Boys,” he said, “this is just peachy-keen fun, but you didn’t invite me out here to fish. I can tell way you keep looking at each other, so don’t fondle my balls – sorry, Florida.”
“It’s OK,” Florida said. “I’ve heard of them.”
“Get on with it,” Hanson said. “And next time, skip this fishing shit and take me to a movie.”
“I don’t know you’re gonna like this,” Leonard said, “’cause, you see, what we want to do is make some kind’a deal.”
“I don’t like deals,” Hanson said. “It always means some guilty asshole gets off with less than he deserves.”
“We’re not guilty of anything,” Leonard said.
“Except withholding evidence,” I said.
“Yeah,” Leonard said, “there’s that.”
“All right,” Hanson said, reeling in his line, “that’s enough bullshit… You in on this Florida?”
“Nope,” she said. “I’m just a humble fisher girl. And their lawyer, if they need me.”
We all took a moment to slap at a black cloud of mosquitoes. Hanson said, “Let’s go someplace we can talk without pain. Few more minutes of this, I’m gonna need a transfusion.”
We walked back to Leonard’s car, which was up the hill and in the sunlight. The mosquitoes weren’t
