It was hard to breathe, gunstock slick in my hands, as I walked to the kitchen door in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, hearing nothing but the air-conditioning unit humming away and dripping outside on the concrete platform.
I unlocked the door and pushed my way outside. The light a purplish black, the air conditioner even louder outside, the warm summer heat being sucked into my lungs as I walked backward in the yard and looked up to the chimney.
I saw the inky figure of a man.
I crept back.
He turned and looked to me, his face nothing but a shadow.
Without thinking, I pulled the trigger tighter and the shotgun hammered into my shoulder. I heard feet skidding and then a hard thud, and I raced around the side of the house, my face slick with sweat, blood flushing through my ears, and crossed the front of the house just in time to see the car door close to an old Pontiac with both brake lights busted. Two men in the front seats.
The Pontiac skidded out from my house, something flying loose and free from an open window.
I heard the laughter of the men as they turned quick down toward Crawford Road and disappeared.
I walked toward the road and stared down at a dead black puppy with a soft white chest. Its neck had been broken, but its eyes were open and glassy, staring out with hope.
As the sun broke over the backyard creek, I buried the animal, listening to every sound from the house, praying to God that my children wouldn’t wake up and see the dirt and blood on my hands.
“I DON’T KNOW ANY YOUNG GIRL WHO ANSWERS TO THAT name.”
“She lived here,” Billy said. “In the projects.”
“Where?”
“Never mind.”
“What does this girl look like?”
He stood across from the woman who hung laundry on wires stretched between two T-shaped metal posts. She’d placed a radio on the window, and it reported a storm coming in from Montgomery and then broke into some old-fashioned gospel music.
“She’s about my height,” Billy said. “Maybe a little shorter.”
He made a motion with the flat of his hand.
The clothes on the line, the beaten, worn denim and gingham print and large, old-woman drawers, picked up in a bright spot of wind and began to flutter like flags. He wiped his nose. The woman kept the wooden pins in her mouth, her silver hair breaking through the black like wire.
“Her hair’s black and her skin is real white. She cuts her hair across like this.” Billy worked his middle and index finger over his eyes like a pair of scissors.
“She have blue eyes?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Real blue? Kinda light?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And what is she calling herself?”
“Lorelei.”
The woman nodded and nodded, placing more old, fat-woman drawers on the line and a coverall suit and two threadbare dresses. She looked off to the west, shielding her eyes from the momentary white-hot streaks of sunshine breaking through the gray.
Some children played with a football in the narrow shot between the rows of cheap brick housing. They screamed and yelled. One of the boys called the other a damn cheater.
“I know the girl.”
His face broke into a smile. “Can you tell me where to find her?”
“I just heard where she worked, is all.”
The woman told him and he was off before she could ask or say more, and Billy followed Fourteenth Street up through a cavern of brick storefronts: the Riverside Cafe, Davis’s Pawn Shop, the Oyster Bar, Manhattan Cafe, Silver Dollar, Yarborough’s Cafe, Blue Bonnet, Boone’s, Haytag, the Coffee Pot, and the Golden Rule. The doors open and the joints empty, listless men standing outside and watching a boy running uphill from the river, weaving through the guardsmen strolling along with rifles strung across their backs.
On a quick turn, he made his way past Central High and more service stations and motor courts and cinder- block barbecue joints, and soon onto the road to Opelika, nearly stepping in front of an Army jeep that crossed his path, but he was moving now, breathing and pumping his legs, and finally slowing into a smooth curve and down past Kemp’s Drive-In and into a pocket of more joints and motels, and finally stopping just as the first spit of rain dampened the blacktop.
Rain dented the dust of the crushed-gravel lot of the old motel that he’d known immediately when the old woman said the place looked like the Alamo.
Only they didn’t call the old place the Alamo, even though it had probably been there since before they invented cars. The neon sign read CASA GRANDE. Rates hourly, nightly, weekly.
It started to rain harder, as if the whole bottom of the sky had dropped out, the sky darkening almost to night, and Billy found shelter under a crooked, long roof, leaning against the old stucco wall and catching his breath.
The walls of the Casa Grande were stucco, and the roofs of the main building, the one that looked like the Alamo, and the little cabins behind it were made of red tile. The place seemed like some kind of half-remembered dream to Billy, and as he walked down the rows of the little cabins, getting wet but not minding it, he tried to recall what picture show that this place seemed out of. He thought maybe the
He sank to his haunches and pulled off one of his sneakers, draining the water from it. He unlaced the other shoe and then wrung out his socks. Billy sat there for a long while, scared that maybe the manager would come out and try to run him off, but when he looked into the little sign-in area there wasn’t a soul around.
Billy sat back down and waited, and it seemed an hour before the blue Buick rolled into the motor court and killed the lights. Not on sight, just from the sound, he knew it was his daddy’s car. And Reuben wasn’t the man who would whip him for getting lost for a while. In fact, he kind of half expected his kid to find something to do besides lay around the house at night. But Billy knew Reuben had come for him, maybe because of the rain, but maybe because someone had seen him running this way and maybe Reuben had been drinking. Really, the drinking was what caused the whipping, not the sin of not coming home.
But when the car opened, it wasn’t his father. It was Johnnie Benefield, with his thin, greasy hair and skull head and protruding teeth, wearing a loud pink cowboy shirt and carrying a bottle in a sack. He knocked on the second cabin from the road and a little light flicked on the tiny porch.
The door opened and out walked a girl, who pressed close to skinny ole Johnnie, raising up like a child on her tiptoes and locking her hands around his neck.
Billy’s breath caught in his throat, the rain falling harder.
He was soaked, walking through the rain without a thought, a car leaving the motor court sweeping its lights across his eyes, blinding him, and then readjusting as he walked to the little cabin. He wiped the light and water from his face, shoes soaking again and crunching on the gravel. The back of the Casa Grande loomed above the boy like a Hollywood set as he found the window, just one, with some dead shrubs planted underneath, stunted and brown.
He stood just a foot away and saw nothing, the sound of rain muffling all else. He watched the thin shadow of a man, and then the pink shirt fell away and he saw a small white hand on each side of Johnnie Benefield’s lower back with painted red nails almost like bloody talons.
And then the scene flipped, both figures framed in the window, and Billy tilted his head the way a dog does when hearing a high-pitched sound and none of what he saw seemed to register. There was a girl, with white skin, milk-colored, and that raven black hair. But it was older, all of it, the outfit, the hair. She wore it done and teased, her lips painted the same bloodred as her nails. Her eyes covered in thick, heavy eye shadow.
