Southern Discomfort

He hates lectures. And smart as he is, he's never caught on to that's how John Claude and I avoided answering some of his questions.

So Carver Bannerman was 'sort of married,' was he?

I wondered if Cindy McGee knew? *      *      *

'Married?' Annie Sue was stunned when we met at the WomenAid house that evening. 'But he wasn't wearing a ring. We looked.'

She handed me the long stud drill from a bin inside the van and got out carrying a looped extension cord on one shoulder and a coil of heavy duty wire on the other. Hand tools dangled from the leather utility belt around her sturdy waist.

'Cindy's going to just die! She said he was so sweet once they were alone. And gentle. None of that macho raunchy stuff. Oh, golly, Deb'rah! She gave it to a married man? She'll flip. She'll absolutely flip.'

Distressed, she followed me across the grass. We had a couple of hours of daylight left, but the interior of the skeletal house was darker than I'd expected because someone had worked there that day and nailed on rigid sheets of silver-backed foam insulation.

Mistake.

As we stepped onto the porch, we heard running footsteps inside. Believing that only the wicked flee when no man pursueth, I instinctively raced through the house in time to see three kids disappearing into the underbrush at the rear of the lot. They couldn't have been more than eight or ten years old, but whether black or suntanned white, male or female was impossible to tell because they had dark hair and wore the summer uniform of pre-adolescence: shorts, T-shirts and sneakers.

From behind me, Annie Sue was fuming. 'Look what they did!'

All along the back wall, big holes had been punched in the insulation. Yes, the sheets were rigid; yes, they had a high R-rating. Nevertheless, they were as fragile as a piece of paper and were supposed to be protected by siding soon after installation. Even a baby could put a fist through them, and the kids I chased had been long enough past infancy to know right from wrong.

No one answered my knock at the house diagonally across the street or next door, so I walked on down to the convenience store, where I borrowed their phone to call Lonnie Revell's office. I don't have as much confidence in Dobbs's sheriff as I do in Bo Poole, our county sheriff, but these things have to go through channels.

'Say you want somebody to do what?' asked their moronic dispatcher.

Patiently I again described the minor vandalism and how it would be nice if this street were added to the nightly patrol route. My words wouldn't penetrate his lead-shielded brain. Exasperated, I called Lu Bingham over at the WomenAid shelter, explained what had happened, and sicced her on Lonnie's dispatcher. She'd get some action.

'Bet it was those Norris young'uns,' said the store clerk when I thanked her for the use of her phone. If people didn't want other people to hear, they'd use the pay phone outside, right? That was Patsy Reddick's sensible attitude. She was the same teenager who'd relayed Nadine's message to Annie Sue Saturday evening and she didn't pretend she hadn't listened to every word I said. 'Were they white?'

'They might have been,' I answered. 'Who are the Norrises?'

Patsy glanced around. Even though the store was empty, she lowered her voice. 'You won't tell anybody it was me that said it, will you?'

I promised.

'There's three of 'em. Their mother's Kimberly Norris. I heard that when Miz Bingham and them were studying who was going to get the first house, it was almost a tie between her and BeeBee Powell, only BeeBee won. Kimmer's helping work on this one so she can get the next one, but her kids were mean-mouthing here in the store Saturday that the only reason BeeBee got picked first was 'cause she's black and Kimmer's white.'

The same old same old. *      *      *

When I walked back to the WomenAid site, Annie Sue had already drilled a bunch of holes as big as my thumb through the studs and ceiling plates. I told her what I'd done, then fetched a fifty-foot tape from the truck and helped measure off lengths of the flat white electrical cable that would run from the main breaker panel to all the outlets and fixtures.

It wasn't very long before Lu Bingham came by to survey the damage, followed shortly thereafter by one of Lonnie Revell's men. I repeated my vague description of the children but didn't mention the name Norris till after he'd left.

'Do you think the Norris kids are capable of this?' I asked Lu.

'Capable? Of course they're capable,' she promptly replied. 'That's why they were my personal choice this first house.'

Vintage Lu. Put little vandals in a nice house?

'Sure. Give 'em something to be proud of. They'd take care of it,' she said and explained that the Norris woman and her children live over in what's called Seaboard City, a handful of dilapidated, cold-water trailers strung along the railroad track less than a quarter mile from where we stood.

'They're at such risk,' said Lu. 'Another year may be too late for them. The Powell children are living all squashed in with their aunts and cousins and BeeBee certainly deserves better as hard as she works, but at least they're in a caring environment with relatives who love them. The Norris kids have nobody but their mother and she's working just as hard as BeeBee to make a better life for them.'

Despite her impassioned pleas, the WomenAid board had decided that a black woman and her better-behaved children would be a more persuasive advertisement for further houses.