each piece wrapped in a bra or slip, as he lifted out the things his mother had spent her lifetime accumulating, Silas stepped away and looked along the shelves and cluttered rows at what people were willing to give up when the chips were down. Fishing rods, rifles, pistols, a dirt bike, television sets, record players. He looked at his mother where she was shaking her head at the low price all her things would bring.
They got out of another bus later that night in Jackson, Mississippi. The driver, a heavy white man, helped Alice lug their last two suitcases to the curb. Downtown Jackson seemed quiet after Chicago and Memphis, quieter without the trains he’d grown up hearing and the sirens and car horns. It was 10:00 P.M., the streets deserted except for a few people lurking in shadows, passing bottles. Against the sky, two or three tall buildings and a silhouetted bridge over some cold river. The bus driver stood there in front of the bricks, sweating despite it being January, his blue uniform shirt untucked at the back. He took off his cap and put it back on.
“Where you folks off to now?” he asked.
“Just find a motel,” she said.
He eyed her suitcase, the big one, part of a set taken from Oliver.
“It ain’t no motels for a stretch,” the driver said. “Just your nicer hotels. The Edison Walthall, half a mile yonder ways.”
“Nicer,” she said. “You mean won’t take black folks?”
The man pulled at his blue Greyhound lapel. “No. I mean their rooms are real expensive. I sure couldn’t afford to stay there.”
Alice looked up the street.
“Tell you folks what,” he said. “I’m about to get off my shift here, and I got my truck parked over yonder. If yall can wait I’ll give you a lift.”
“You ain’t got to do that,” Silas heard his mother say.
“Ain’t no bother. Just don’t go nowhere, and I’ll be back directly.” He turned before going inside. “Why don’t yall wait in the door yonder. It’s no loitering after hours, but I’ll tell Wanda there.”
“We be fine,” his mother said.
The driver looked dubious but went on inside.
It was cold, waiting.
“We going with him?” Silas asked.
She was looking up the deserted street. Across was a dry cleaners, closed, and beside that a bail bondsman. A white man watching them from the steps, smoking a cigarette. No restaurants in sight.
“Momma,” he said.
She was leaning, looking. She wore a blue coat and a scarf. A car drove past and the driver, a black man, looked too long at them. Silas glanced back into the bus station where the heavy driver was writing something on a clipboard. He saw Silas and smiled.
“Momma,” he said again. “Where we going?”
“Silas,” she said, watching the road. “You shhh right now.”
“Momma? We going with that white man?”
“I said shhhhh.”
“Momma-”
She turned on him so quickly he never saw her hand. She’d hit him before, but not like this, out in the open. First thing he did was look to see if the driver had seen. If he had, he wasn’t looking now. Silas’s next instinct was to run. He turned to go but she had him by the wrist.
“Don’t you dare run,” she said, “from the one person in this world who love you.”
He snatched his arm away.
“You don’t know where we going,” he said.
He saw in her eyes that she was nearly crying. He knew he should stop but couldn’t. “I’m cold, Momma, I want to go back.”
“Back to where?”
“Home.”
“Quit it,” she said, not looking at him.
Then the bus driver’s pickup pulled up and the big man was out, wearing not his uniform jacket but a blue denim coat and a baseball cap with a red bird on it. A Cardinals fan. Bob Gibson.
He’d left his flashers on and grunted, lifting her suitcase into the back. “You transporting rocks?” he asked.
Alice’s smile trembled.
“I’m Charles,” he said.
Alice said her name and Silas’s.
“Good to meet you, Silas.” Charles extended his hand.
“Silas,” his mother said.
Silas shook the man’s beefsteak of a hand while his mother went around and opened the side door and waited for him. Instead, avoiding her eyes, Silas threw his backpack over the truck rail and jumped in behind it.
“Boy, it’s too cold to ride back there,” Charles said.
“Silas,” his mother said, the half-coaxing, half-threatening tone. “Get up front.”
The driver clapped his hands. His breath leaked out in a thin white line. “Boy, do what your momma says.”
“Silas.”
But he was dug in. “I ain’t riding up there,” he said. He didn’t dare risk a look at his mother and sat enduring her embarrassment as they watched him.
Finally he heard Alice say, fake mirth in her voice, “Well, we from up at Chicago. I reckon this Mississippi cold ain’t cold to him.”
Before he closed his door, the driver said, “Now if you get too cold, boy, just bang on the window.”
He sat against the back and pulled the suitcase and his backpack against him as Charles drove the truck onto the empty road. He considered jumping out when the white man slowed to turn. His teeth began to clatter and the truck bounced. He stole a look over his shoulder and saw his mother as far over the long bench seat as she could be, against the door. He could tell from the way Charles’s hand moved, pointing at things, that he was talking.
Silas knew what the bus driver wanted with his mother, and he thought how he, Silas, was in a way an impediment. Without him here, she could do whatever she needed to, without witness, to get through this cold night, to get wherever she was going. He knew his mother was beautiful.
He thought about jumping out again, the next time they slowed to turn. He’d heard a train whistle a moment before and thought he could ride the rails back north, like the old men who used to gather in the alleys in their neighborhood would tell about, a fifty-five-gallon oil drum with a fire in it and the men speaking fondly of the world seen from a boxcar, drawn by in a never-ending, living mural you tipped your can of malt liquor to.
It was almost ten-thirty now, and Silas hugged himself tighter. They came to a traffic light and the truck stopped all the way. Silas looked left, past the backpack he’d been using to block the wind, and saw a line of neon signs. Surely a motel in there among them. He looked to the right where streetlights led down a lonely road.
And yet this was the way they were turning. Up ahead the road was dark. He leaned up and looked at his mother’s profile as she smiled, listening, to the bus driver who had one hand on the steering wheel and the other flapping, some story his mother was supposed to laugh at. And Silas knew without looking at her that she would, because it was polite and she lived in a world where she had to be polite all the time.
It was a world he wanted no part of. He wanted no part of her. He was already up, backpack in hand, and over the sideboard and gone. He’d catch that northbound and hobo it all the way home. He ran back toward the lights as behind him Charles’s brake lights came on. He turned right between two dark buildings and ran down this alley and over a dark street toward another with a few streetlights. He crouched in an alley behind a garbage can as Charles’s truck slowly rolled by, then the white man and Silas’s mother were out and yelling, his mother’s voice so panicked he nearly rose toward it, but instead he turned and plugged his ears with his fingers and ran down the alley.
He didn’t know if ten minutes had passed or an hour, had no idea how far he’d gone, and was starting to feel panicky when someone pulled him behind a pair of metal garbage cans, his backpack stripped away and his coat wrenched off, somebody’s hand in his pants pockets, taking his pocketknife, his forty cents. He tried to yell but another hand clamped over his mouth and somebody was pulling his Nikes off. He fought and bit the hand and when
