“What else,” Cindy said, “that ain’t about baseball?”
He told her how the snow sometimes covered cars entirely, and about his neighborhood, how the old black men would gather in the back alley around a fire in the trash drum and pass a bottle of Jim Beam and tell stories, outdoing each other, he told her about hopping the turnstiles and catching the el train, going to blues bars where the musicians smoked weed in the alley between sets, the endless honking traffic, freezing Lake Michigan glittering under the lights and buildings blocking the sky. Chicago pizza was the best, a thick pie of it, and burritos were as big as your head.
“They got shows, ain’t they?” she asked.
“Like movie shows?”
“No.” She puckered and frowned but kept walking. “Like Broadway. Plays.”
“Yeah.” He remembered seeing their titles in the
“That’s what I want,” she said.
“You mean be a actress?”
“No. To be able to see them shows. You can’t see shit here.”
“You could be a actress,” he said. “You pretty enough.”
She gave him a sad smile like he was a simple child. She went on talking, though, said how she couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Mississippi, away from Cecil and her mouse of a mother, and as they walked along the road, no houses now, a field with cows following them along the other side of the fence and his cleats clicking on the pavement, a passing car slowed and the white man behind the wheel glared out his window.
“You okay?” he called to Cindy. “That boy bothering you?”
“Mind your own business, doofus,” she said and flipped him off. He sped away shaking his head.
“Hey,” Silas said, looking back. “I best go.”
“Suit yourself.”
He kept walking alongside her.
“Your stepdaddy like it you walking with a black boy?”
“What you think? He’s ignorant as a damn weed. Won’t even try to get a job. Say he hurt his back at the mill.”
Another car, the woman behind the wheel turning as she passed to stare.
“You ever kissed a white girl?”
“Naw,” he said. “You ever kissed a black boy?”
“Sure,” taking his hand, leading him down the embankment and into a stand of trees.
From there, notes passed at school, their secret meeting place in the woods behind the baseball field. He was a virgin but she wasn’t, and on their blanket spread over the grass they became lovers and for the second half of his junior year he’d never been happier, a great season with an average just over.450 most of the time and a secret white girlfriend watching from the bleachers. A lot of people came, he knew, to see him, the sense he was going places, even old Carl Ott sometimes.
Cindy liked beer and Silas drank with her and they hid their relationship from everyone else, Silas not even telling M &M, knowing if anybody found out they’d have to give each other up. Slipping away from his friends, from hers, like the haunted house that Halloween, the one where Larry came and brought his mask, the two of them leaving separately but meeting later, in her mother’s car or in his mother’s, whoever could borrow one. Going to the drive-in, her driving and letting him off by the road, him sneaking through the trees to where she parked in the back corner, the thrill of being discovered a thing she seemed to like, Silas terrified but unable to resist the hot vacuum of her cigarette breath, click of their teeth, her soft tongue, her perfect breasts, the patch of secret hair in her jeans.
Once, as they lay on a blanket on the ground, Cindy told him she’d started liking him when he came out of the woods and stood up for her when Cecil was pulling off her towel.
“He does that kind of shit all the time,” she’d said. “Trying to see me without my clothes, come stumbling in the bathroom with his thing in his hand. Does when he’s drunk, acts like he don’t remember when he sobers up.”
“What about your momma?”
“How you tell your momma she married a slime? Sides, she always takes his side over mine. She, kind of, believes the worst about me. I always been trouble for her. I don’t guess I help none, cussing, smoking, messing with boys.”
“Messing,” he said. “That what we doing?”
“What else you gone call it?”
At school one day Silas walked up to her in the smoking area, and she said he’d slapped her. Cecil. Said she was a whore. Off fucking boys.
Standing all casual so nobody would notice them.
“Your momma let him do that? Slap you?”
“She wasn’t home. But now he won’t let me leave the house cept for school, says he’ll tell her I been trying to come on to him, like I ever would.”
“Your momma believe that?”
“If he said it she probably would. They’d throw me out.”
She’d always caught rides to school with her friend Tammy and now Cecil had decreed that Cindy had to come home right after school, that if Tammy couldn’t bring her, Cecil would come get her himself.
“I told him, ‘You ain’t even got a car, fool,’ but he said he’d get one if it meant keeping me away from-”
“Me,” Silas finished.
When he went home a few nights later, their trailer in Fulsom, his mother was waiting up in the dark living room, sitting rigid in a kitchen chair, her old tomcat, now half blind, purring in her lap.
“Silas,” she said.
“What?”
“Son, you got to stop with that white girl.”
He had no idea how she knew.
“Momma, what you mean?”
“Silas, don’t lie to me.”
“We just friends.”
“Son, nothing good ever come out of colors mixing.”
“Momma-”
“Such and suching like you doing would be dangerous enough in Chicago, but you in Mississippi now. Emmet Till,” she said, “was from Chicago.”
“You the one brought us down here.”
He went to the refrigerator and opened it and got out a carton of milk.
“Silas, baby,” getting up, holding the cat to her chest, “you all I got. And you all you got, too. Please tell me you gone stop. Please, son?”
He said he would. Promised he’d focus on his ball, work on his grades for that scholarship to Ole Miss. He didn’t mean it, though, knew he would keep seeing her, this girl who would fall asleep on their blanket in the woods, how her lips opened and he’d lean in and smell her breath, sweeter to him for the cigarettes and beer.
It was Cindy who’d said she had a plan to see him that last weekend. If he could get his mother’s car, she could outsmart Cecil. On Fridays Alice worked until seven at the diner, then came home and, tired from a twelve- hour shift, went to sleep in her chair by the television. Didn’t even eat. He took the car without asking.
NOW, IN PIZZA HUT, the slice on his plate had gotten cold. The Braves had lost and a movie started and the waitress brought another pitcher of beer. He finished his and poured himself another, topped off Angie’s glass. She’d been watching him with her eyes growing narrower as he talked.
“I didn’t know,” Silas said, “it was gone be Larry that brought her.”
Angie said, “How’d she get him to bring her and drop her off?”
“Told him she was pregnant.”
“Was she?”
