A Fine Dark Line

Chester wailed for God to come down from the heavens and save him, and though God didn’t show, Mom and Callie did.

Fearing Daddy would really lose it, turn his hitting into something more serious, Mom and me and Callie pulled him off. Daddy called Chester a sonofabitch while Chester limped for his car, his face red from slapping, his greasy hair hanging in front of his face, his ducktail mashed flat against his neck, the ass of his jeans dripping grass. His blue suede shoes still looked pretty good though.

“I told you not to come back around here,” Daddy said. “Ever see you again I’ll kick your ass so hard you’ll have to hire a goddamn winch truck to crank it down so you can shit.”

Nose bleeding all over creation, Chester got in his old Ford and gunned it out of there, the tires tossing gravel.

“What in the world has gotten into you?” Mom said to Daddy.

Daddy burned a glance at Callie, said, “It’s what’s gotten into Callie that matters.”

“Stanley,” Mom said.

Cops came around later. Daddy took them aside and talked to them. I heard one cop laugh. Another slapped Daddy on the back. And that was the end of it.

No one really liked Chester anyway, so it ended up he just had to take his beating and enjoy it like it had been a Christmas present he always wanted.

These were the kinds of things going on, and I didn’t have a clue what they were.

———

THAT NIGHT, before going to bed, I started a book called Treasure Island. I had read pirate books before, but never anything like this. I read half of it before I fell asleep, but next morning, having read about that treasure, I was reminded of finding that rusty old box out back of the drive-in, and after breakfast I went to the shed to open it.

I found a crowbar, and by standing on the box, planting the bar in the loop of the lock, I was able with much huffing and puffing, and with the assistance of Nub barking and leaping, to snap it.

Inside there was a leather bag. In the bag, wrapped in what felt like a piece of a raincoat, was a bundle of brown envelopes tied up with a faded blue ribbon.

This wasn’t what I had hoped for.

Disappointed, I replaced them in the box, took the box to my room, closed the door, sat on the bed with it.

I was a little nervous about that. One water balloon had really gotten Callie in trouble. I wondered what my fate might be.

I opened the box, removed the bundle from the bag, tugged the ribbon loose, took hold of the envelope on top. It was not sealed. I reached inside and pinched out what appeared to be a letter.

I read a bit of it and my heart sank. It was written by some girl and it was all moony-eyed stuff. I opened the other envelopes, skimmed the contents, put them all back in their place, closed up the box, pushed it under my bed.

———

ABOUT A WEEK LATER Daddy hired a big colored woman named Rosy Mae Bell. She was big and fat and very black, wore clothes that looked to be made from my mama’s curtains, colorful rags around her head that she tied up front in a little bow. She looked a little bit like Aunt Jemima on the front of the same-named syrup. Or as we called it: surp.

Her job was to clean and dust and cook. This came about because of the drive-in work. Mom felt if she was going to work all night at the drive-in concession, and mess with me and Callie during the day, she ought to have some help doing the cleaning and cooking.

At cleaning, Rosy Mae turned out to be so-so, but when it came to cooking she had the skills of an angel. God’s own table could not have been as blessed as ours. I could tell my mom was actually a little jealous of Rosy Mae, and when we sat down to an early supper—the drive-in opened at eight on summer nights, which meant we’d start real preparation about seven—she’d always find a small complaint to make about the biscuits or the gravy. But it was halfhearted, because Mom knew, just as we all knew, and as Rosy knew (though she always pretended to be in agreement with Mom), it didn’t get any better.

Me and Rosy took to one another like ducks to june bugs.

During the day when Rosy was supposed to be cleaning, she often spent time with me telling me stories or listening to me tell her things I’d never even mention to my parents. A lot of the time she sat on the living room couch and read romance magazines. She could get away with this when Mom was running errands and Daddy was out front mowing the grass or out back picking up cups and popcorn bags and the like that patrons had thrown out their windows.

Along with that trash, another item that began to appear with some regularity among the toss-aways were those strange clear balloons like the one that had been found in Callie’s room.

It was my job to sweep out the concession and the little porch veranda in front of it, and I would watch Daddy pick up the trash with a stick with a nail in its tip. He’d poke stuff and put it in a bag, but he always seemed to poke those balloons with a vengeance. It slowly began to dawn on me that those particular balloons had about them a mysterious, perhaps even sinister quality that I had not previously suspected.

Rosy Mae and I had a kind of deal. I’d keep watch for her when I was sweeping the veranda, or when I was inside the concession and could see Daddy out the windows. I also had such good ears Rosy Mae called me Nub’s big brother. If I heard Mom coming home or saw Daddy finishing up, I’d step inside and call her name in a tone that meant she should get up, stash her magazine, grab a duster, start moving about.

And she was quick at it. The magazine would disappear inside the big paisley-colored bag she brought every day, and she’d start flouncing about with that duster. And to see that big woman flounce was something. She looked like a bear dusting her den.

———

ONE MORNING, Rosy Mae’s day off, a Saturday, I was out on the veranda sitting by my daddy in one of the metal lawn chairs as he whittled on a stick and talked about the new Jimmy Stewart movie showing that night, Vertigo. He said that he wouldn’t really get to watch it because he had so much work to do, and he hated that because he loved Jimmy Stewart, and thought on Sunday he might just show it for the family and have friends over, but Callie couldn’t have any of hers. She could watch, but her fun was to be limited.

I listened to this, liking the idea, especially about Callie not having friends over. I was really enjoying her punishment. I was also envious that she made friends easily. In the short time we had been in Dewmont, she had made a lot of them. She was so pretty, so fun, all she had to do was show up and the boys were falling all over her, and the girls, though maybe jealous of her at first, soon warmed to her as well.

Well, most of them.

“Can I invite a friend?” I asked.

“Sure. Who?”

“Rosy Mae.”

Daddy turned to me, said, “Son, Rosy Mae’s colored.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He smiled at me. “Well, she’s all right. I like her. But white people don’t spend special time with coloreds. It’s just not done. I haven’t got a thing against her, you see. She’s all right in her place, but if I invited some of our friends over, I don’t think they’d want to sit with a colored and watch a movie.”

“Why not?”

“Well, coloreds are different, son. They aren’t like you and me. Good upstanding white people just don’t spend a lot of time around niggers.”

This was all something I should’ve known, I suppose, but in No Enterprise I had been sheltered. There, the only coloreds I had seen were those driving mule-drawn wagons with plows in the back.

And there was Uncle Tommy, who sharpened knives and fixed household goods. He lived down by the creek in a one-room shack with an outhouse out back. I knew the colored people I had seen were poor, but it wasn’t until that moment I understood they were different, considered inferior to whites. And though I had heard the word nigger before, I realized now that it could be said in such a way as to strike like a blow, even if spoken to a white person.