“Turned her out?”
“Made a whore of her.”
“Her own daughter? She did that?”
“Winnie thought she was passin’ on the family trade, Stan.”
“Margret was just a girl!”
“Lot of men like that. Little girls, I mean. They sick sons-abitches in the world, Stan. Margret was a real moneymaker, her mother said. But she didn’t like the life and wanted to do more with herself. Thought she could run off to Hollywood and be an actress, ’cause she was so pretty. Winnie said she tried to tell Margret she wasn’t good for nothin’ else but what she was doin’.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It is. But she’s tellin’ all this to me with tears in her eyes. She loved her daughter in her fashion, but she just doesn’t have any bottom to her, Stan. She couldn’t see her daughter doin’ any better than her, makin’ anything of herself. Said how irritated she’d been that the girl wanted to go to school, and she didn’t want her to. This what a person does when they really love themselves better than they own child. Don’t want them to improve.
“Finally Margret did quit, started picking up jobs here and there. Savin’ for goin’ to Hollywood. Mother called it pissant labor and sneered, like what she was doin’ herself was some kind of scientist work.”
“This is hard to understand,” I said.
“Come from a family like yours, it is. But Winnie was worried Margret wouldn’t take to whorin’. Then she found out Margret was different. Said at first it made her mad, then she thought it might be a way to make some unexpected money. But then Margret got killed.”
“What does she mean different, Buster?”
“When Winnie said that, things in the letters clicked. J ain’t James. It’s Jewel.”
“But she’s a girl.”
“Uh huh. Sometimes it goes that way.”
“You mean . . .”
“Yep. That’s different.”
“A girl can make a girl pregnant?”
“No, son. That requires a man. Or a boy. Like I said, don’t think it was Margret that was pregnant. Mother might not know for sure, of course, but from them letters, and what I learned, I think Jewel Ellen was pregnant, and Margret was talkin’ about the two of them raisin’ the child after it was born.”
Buster looked at me, saw I was bewildered.
“Growin’ up, just full of confusion, ain’t it, Stan?”
“I’ll say.”
“Question is this: Who is the father of Jewel Ellen’s baby? We start from that idea, even if it’s just an idea, and we see where that leads us. Thing I’m thinkin’ is this: If Jewel was funny for Margret, then maybe she’s not wantin’ a man. Or maybe she wants both. It happens. That ain’t it, it means some man could have raped her? If that’s the case, who done it? So, that’s where we are.”
“Wow.”
“One thing I didn’t mention, Stan, was I did end up buyin’ me a little bootleg liquor from Jukes before I went out there. Took it with me, and in the bedroom, me and Winnie shared it. So she talked a lot. About all manner of things. But wasn’t all that much of it about her daughter. She gave me the letters back a second time, said for me to do what I wanted with them.
“She was gettin’ a little tipsy, so I said, ‘You sure you don’t know this James Stilwind?’ She said she’d never met him, but her old man—meanin’ her husband, pimp—had taken some money from James’s daddy. I asked her why, and she said, ’cause he wanted them to be quiet.”
“About what?”
“About her daughter knowin’ Jewel. Said it was a lot of money Old Man Stilwind gave ’em and she hadn’t said a word about it until now, because she didn’t think it mattered. She figured they didn’t want Jewel Ellen’s memory sullied by her sayin’ she was queer. Bottom line is, Winnie misses her daughter in her own way, but she was willin’ to take money, be quiet, not talk to the police, even if it meant not solvin’ her daughter’s death. Money was more important to her.”
Buster settled back and sipped the last of the pop he was drinking.
“That’s all?” I said.
“I had ten minutes left on my ten dollars, and I used them.”
“Oh.”
“One thing I’ve learned over the years. Don’t waste your money.”
———
BUSTER SAID he was going home to sleep for a while. I decided to actually buy comic books. I walked along as if in a dream. The world was certainly turning out to be a peculiar place, and I was becoming one perplexed little boy.
Jewel and Margret? Girlfriends? Real girlfriends?
I went over to Greene’s and looked at the comics. They had three long shelves and they were full of comics and other kinds of magazines. I found several that looked good, checked to see how many dimes were in my pocket. I had a dollar’s worth.
I bought an
I checked the back of the store where the five-cent comics were. The ones with half the cover cut off. Some of them were fairly recent, but many were old. Maybe as much as two or three years. I guessed everyone but me and Richard Chapman were picky about the state of our comics.
I picked out three or four, including a dust-covered one called
I bought the comics, and an RC, went out to sit on the curb and read.
It was warm out, but not uncomfortable. A light wind was blowing and there was the smell of honeysuckle with it.
After a while, the comics did the trick. They took me out of the world I lived in, which had within a matter of weeks become more baffling than I could have ever imagined. At that moment, I preferred the world with bright color panels and superheroes.
By the time I read two of the comics, the real world had drifted back in. I thought of Margret and Jewel.
I had been flustered enough about male and female relations, and now this. I’d have to ask Callie about it. She seemed to be a fountain of information. So was Buster, but sometimes his fountain gushed a little too powerfully for me.
I heard a car horn honk. Looked up. Near the curb was a fine-looking blue Cadillac. It had fins like a spacecraft. The window on the passenger’s side was rolled down, and Callie, in her ponytailed exuberance, was leaning out of the window yelling at me.
I thought: Think of the devil.
Drew Cleves was at the wheel.
“Come ride with us, Stanley,” Callie said.
I gathered up my comic books and pop bottle, went over to the car.
“You got to watch that pop,” Cleves said. “My father’s car. He’d kill me if I got anything on the seats.”
“Sure,” I said. “One minute.”
I drained the RC, took the bottle into Greene’s store, traded it for two cents.
Outside, in the Cadillac, Callie said, “Isn’t this divine?”
“Daddy says it’s like driving your living room,” Drew said.
It was the biggest, most luxurious car I had ever been in. The seats were soft leather. I was tempted to stretch out and go to sleep.
Callie said, “We’re driving out to the lake.”
