Solemn Read online

  “Can I see it?” Solemn asked Akila, thinking she alone had conjured the trip.

  “No,” Akila told her. “You don’t need to look at this.”

  “When we going to look at dresses?” Solemn asked.

  They both talked about the thing they really didn’t want to talk about. To them this felt like best behavior when it fact it was just maturity. Akila’s heart begged to know: Your daddy know Pearletta Hassle? She had flip-flopped how to put it to Solemn many times, Bev even. Any practice left her tongue belly-up. The Redvines were good to her. They never judged her. Maybe even respected her. The churches and public aid offices felt like salt in the wound, but the Redvine place put her in cool waters. Solemn wanted to know if Pearletta Hassle was one of the nasty ladies: money on the dresser, mad woman at the door, curly panties on the floor, necklace between the teeth. She wanted to know if their babies should die and nobody should look for either one of them. She wanted to know if Akila would ever throw Landon’s baby down into wells.

  “Soon,” Akila answered. Having Solemn with her certainly helped in case she got lost. It could explain away any delays (I took her to a restaurant and arcade…) and calm suspicions from people who weren’t used to seeing young black girls just driving around their avenues. She was fairly confident they were on the right track, going south down the Trace and west at some point to glide into Vicksburg, so she went with her instincts. Akila drove with no driver’s license. In Bledsoe, no one cared.

  Akila’s nerves primarily tingled with wonder at what exactly she was going to find when she came to Vicksburg and why it mattered. She had not known Pearletta for more than twenty minutes and an afternoon. She never went back to the motel, her job. She pretended to be sick for a few days. She told her family to hang up on any employee who called for her. She saw, like everyone in Bledsoe did (“Mmm-mmm-mmm … such a shame…”), the bland announcement of a gal last seen in Home-Away-from-Home: black, female, drugs and drug paraphernalia found in the room, dishevel, outstanding tab. There was nothing printed about Pearletta herself: who she was and what she could have been.

  There was an hour to go to Vicksburg, with Akila lost in thought and Solemn thoroughly asleep, content to be with her imaginations of an older sister, satisfied to see a stretch of life beyond her part of the world, eager to know what awaited them in a different place, totally unaware how she was being used as a cover for those who might ask questions back home and out there. And Akila enjoyed her company as well.

  Solemn awoke to an Outkast song on the radio. Akila’s abrupt careen off the Trace headed into Vicksburg. The greenery stood high along the road. Akila seemed focused and urgent. She pulled into the first gas station of Warren County, to fiddle with her map. She tuned out Solemn to see if the gas station had a lottery.

  We should play it, Solemn thought. She grabbed up quarters from the car’s console. The lottery was something she had heard everyone talk about, watch the TV news for, laugh about while they guarded liquor and ate birthday cake, make faint mumblings while on their knees at church. She knew the folklore of her home at Singer’s began with Redvine’s lucky hit at the lotto. He couldn’t have bought the trailer otherwise. At the very least, maybe some winnings could be her chance to stick out on the road a little longer with Akila. The lottery line was far too long. On top of it, the automatic crane in the better toy machine was jammed. The little dime-slot red horse outside was out of order. Solemn came back to the car with three pink gumballs and a spider ring encased in a plastic cylinder, from the cheaper game machine inside.

  “Well, we gotta make a little bit of a stop before we go shopping for dresses.”

  “Where we gotta go?”

  Akila pulled off.

  “Well, Solemn, you probably too young for anybody to talk to you about all this kind of stuff. But there was a woman I met. Had a lot of problems and issues and just, well, stuff going on. She’s that girl everyone’s been talking about, Pearletta Hassle…”

  Solemn rolled the gumballs round her tongue and thought about Pearletta Hassle, hurt bad—her mama said. And, yes, she had helped. She never told. She watched cows in pasture appear to flurry by, but she was really the one moving. Then, she pictured Desiree: retreated into something unfamiliar and unfriendly. Leaving her alone and absent of reflection and affection, once again dependent upon her mental enterprise alone, left to imagine discarnate beings waving at her in the clouds and sky.

  “… and, well, there are just people in this world who sometimes do bad things. Or, even if they didn’t do a bad thing, they have their hands in the bad thing. And they don’t have to pay for it. Or worse, no one even knows they did it. But, sometimes, you can do something about things. You can stand up, or at least you can do your part. Like now.”

  Akila pointed a finger past Solemn, onto the far-up road at Solemn’s left. Two girls sat up ahead: one balanced on side of a square gray suitcase and the other leaned atop a lumpy gray potato sack. No more than fifteen, sixteen, for sure, they could not have been. One black. One white. Solemn cringed, just getting around to enjoy the breeze along her cheek and unsure if she was capable of an apposite demeanor for new folks. At sight of a slowed-down vehicle, the hitcher girls leaped and pulled their belongings up. Akila parked and stared. Yes, female they were, yellow and brown and pigtailed and pimple faced. A number of vehicles whooshed past and rocked the little car a bit. One girl quickly squeezed in behind the passenger side; Solemn’s door was unlocked. The other appeared at Akila’s window and reached her long arm for the door handle, to find it locked. Akila lifted the knob for her.

  They looked a bit younger than Akila and a bit older than Solemn, like right in between, perfectly. They brought smells of dank denim and cigarette smoke with them. They explained how far they had come (“so far”), what led to their circumstance of sitting on side a lazy road (“families left us”), what led to the opportunity to jump in here (“I can offer you a pack of cigarettes for gas money,” before “We don’t smoke”). One girl sat atop her suitcase. The other held her potato sack between her legs, behind Solemn, pushing into the back of her seat. Their sandwiches seemed pulled from a magician’s hat, so quickly they appeared. Tuna, sweet relish, mayonnaise, onions, pungent, sloppy. The hitchers—Shana and Law Anne—offered Akila and Solemn torn-off portions. They asked for water. There was none. Akila did not ask the girls where they wanted to go but other things: “You ever jumped out a window?” “You know how to choke a chicken?” “Can you drill a hole in concrete?” “Can you run five miles without stopping?” “Je, wewe ni bikira?” “No,” Shana and Law Anne answered. “Too bad,” Akila said. They drove on. Solemn thought they went further than they needed to.

  The radio music was interfered with. Verdant plains around the car gave way to a chalky mist and slight drizzle, to bring gray kelpies face-to-face with the windshield like a drive-in movie screen tumbled down. The front bumper marked straight to a line of vultures and buzzards and cygnets crossing red sand road, who did not fly when the earth trembled with the approach of the Mustang, but they lay down under it in time. Solemn looked back to make sure. The birds arose into a line of naked and bald black girls and women holding hands and waving the car to please come back, as the earth trembled far behind them, but there was no hint to know what would come next. They carried secrets out loud and not silent in their mouths. They called at her to join them, but Solemn was going to stay where she was and knew she belonged. And there was just no room for all of them, so the car moved on down a road with no signs now, only what looked like coffins in a long-standing droke. Shana and Law Anne poked Solemn in back of her head. Akila drove on, laughing, snapping her fingers, so happy on her trip from Bledsoe. A gray unicorn ran alongside the car with its horn spilling its coins and dollars, from the energy of its frantic pace as well as the wind rocking the car now. The unicorn stayed until it flew into four-hundred-foot trees grown in seconds. Akila turned the radio down, to keep on talking to Shana and Law Anne—about their boyfr
iends and sugar daddies and old men and the bad guys. The unicorn told Solemn to tear the lottery ticket between her teeth to swallow its pieces down. The pastures along the road, once a highway, now turned a red carpet of veins, held the carcasses of cows with leaking udders and draining mouths and vulnerable eyes. Shana and Law Anne talked on and on and on, about the men whose faces they slashed and the women whose breasts they cut off and the town in middle of a desert where it was time for Akila to take them to right now—with no choice.

  Shana or Law Anne pulled out a pistol to aim at their driver’s head, while Solemn ate chocolate cake and spaghetti they slammed into her face. Then Solemn awoke to an Outkast song on the radio. Akila’s abrupt careen off of Natchez Trace Parkway headed into Vicksburg. The greenery along the road was high. Akila seemed focused and urgent. Solemn clenched a sticky pink gumball in her hand and saw a plastic black spider on her pinky finger. Desiree was not there to give the word-for-word and bit-by-bit account to. The sky was fine and dandy, and there was no one in the backseat of the car.

  * * *

  On guard now, and again, Solemn protested leaving the car.

  “I need to stay in,” she told Akila. But she didn’t know if she would doze off and drift again into visions; they had multiplied since Easter Sunday.

  “Nope,” Akilah said. “Too hot. Mr. and Mrs. Redvine ain’t gonna have my head if you die of heatstroke. Come on here, girl.”

  Solemn stared into the jewelry shop they passed. Beside were a mom-and-pop record store, Dollar General, a tobacco shop, and a tax accounting service, closed until winter. Akila led the way beyond the parking lot and inside the air-conditioned office. Bells jingled as they walked in. No one sat at the desk behind a countered partition in the small office. A few chairs sat in a waiting area with a magazine rack, water cooler, and coffee table decked out with vased azaleas and a shiny tissue-paper holder.

  “What we doing here?” Solemn asked. She read Singer’s, where she lived and what it told her to be.

  “Just sit down,” Akila told her. “Get a book.”

  Solemn picked up a Smithsonian. Akila looked around. Right next to a tusk crucifix was a moose head, its snout right above her and its lifelike eyes directed to the clock behind the desk, keeping time and revenge fantasy at once. Framed certificates of ownership, compliance, and professional membership ran along the wall. So did news clippings: Singer Real Estate Distinguished Community Service … Singer Real Estate Breaks New Ground in Abandoned Area … Singer Real Estate Donates $100,000 to Establish Local Vicksburg Development Projects … Singer Real Estate Renovates and Opens Trailer Park in Bledsoe. The family helmed the wall of their office—a larger portrait of a bald man, swan-necked woman, two sons. Twins, it appeared. Then, underneath this twelve-by-twenty-four cherry frame was the less formal narrative of their lives: sweet little boys in Boy Scout uniforms with checkered socks, beach-day faces turned away from the camera and onto an ocean most of their tenants had never seen, school pictures with bright bow ties pressed, commemorations of the boys’ race-car and thoroughbred mountings. As Akila was about to look closer at the faces for some recollection of anyone she had seen before, the secretary finally acknowledged her: “Kin I help you?”

  “Oh yes,” Akila said. She had something rehearsed to say but forgot it.

  “I’m just looking to apply to an apartment,” she said instead.

  “Applications at edge of the counter. Clipboards right next to ’em. Pencils in the jar. I make a copy of your ID when you done.” The secretary snapped a button on one of the telephones on her desk, stacked to the top with papers, manila folders, receipts, calculators, carbon copies, and Enquirers.

  “Hold on, Shelly. I gotta gal here.” The woman snapped another button on her big brown phone. She looked at Solemn: “All kids extra. You can bring they birth certificates back.” Then, “If you on public aid, we need your social worker’s direct phone number.”

  She snapped a button on the phone again and started to talk.

  Akila took a seat and looked over the paperwork. A form for the employer or public aid. A sheet to list where and what of check stubs. Explanation of rules and regulations. Brochure for Singer’s Real Estate. She slipped the pamphlet in her pocket and pretended to write, with mighty and tender hopes, a need to act rather than just exist.

  “We trying to get an apartment?” Solemn asked Akila. “We moving?!”

  “Yeah, we are,” Akila said, and she jammed her elbow into Solemn’s skinny ribs.

  The woman behind the counter looked up for a second. Well, she concluded, that’s for the social worker to handle. Not my job …

  “So, Barbara and Phillip got back together yet? Last part I saw, she was stuck on the yacht with the kidnappers. Phillip got in a motorcycle accident on the way…?”

  The doors swooshed open to the hot air. A man walked in. He wore tight beige pants and a wrinkled pink shirt and a Stetson. Akila noticed a name tag: Bruce Singer. The woman behind the counter catapulted from her seat. “Yes, we will return your call.” She snapped a button on the telephone and slammed it down.

  “How you doing today?” the man shouted in Akila’s direction.

  “Very well, sir,” Akila answered back, her eyes pressed upon what she registered as part of what she sought. Solemn shut the magazine.

  “Mr. Singer,” the woman behind the counter said, “Alderman Hansley called. And so did Missus Turner ’bout the plumbing lines over her border on the Maple Street property, and the caterers for the lunch on Friday. Oh, and your ma.”

  “Thank you,” Mr. Singer said, his eyes over the slips of pink phone notes. He was oblivious to Akila’s stares. If this was any relation, he’d cleaned himself up since the last time he took a picture with some black gal. And he had gotten rounder. But, the face was the same. As was the thick red mound of hair Akila saw sprouting from the nape of his hat. Couldn’t tell if there was gray or not. He was rounder than she remembered, but it was the summer now. Something about festivals, picnics, barbecues, and heat made people eat. But the green eyes, cat eyes, looked the same.

  Hmmppphh … Akila thought, as the man went past her to enter the back offices.

  “Are you … you Bruce, or Richard, Singer?”

  The man stopped. Boy, really. Baby face, despite the business attire.

  “I heard about your real estate company. Best in town, huh?” Akila asked.

  “That’s what we hear. But it’s not my company. My father owns it. I’m just a worker as far as he’s concerned. Bruce.” He extended his hand.

  “Nothing wrong with a little work for your father,” Akila said. She fingered the pocket of her sundress. “Well, I came here to look for an apartment … my friend recommended me. She rented from you-all,” Akila said.

  Solemn had never seen any of them have too much conversation with a white man outside the doctor’s office, hospital, school, and police station. Never in real life.

  “Oh, really? Well, we let to a lot of people…” Mr. Singer started.

  “Pearletta Hassle. You seen her around?” Akila asked him.

  “Mmmmm … doesn’t ring a bell,” the man answered.

  “Oh, why would it?” Akila turned and pretended to write. “She had her baby thrown down a well in the trailer park y’all own.”

  The man blushed. He rubbed his nose with his thumb stuck out from a crunched fist. “Well, I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  He looked at Akila, and Solemn, and then back at Akila.

  “If you’ll pardon me. Good luck on your application. I hope to see you in the family.”

  “Here,” Akila said. “If you wanna know more or see if you remember.”

  The man took the crumpled “Have You Seen Pearletta?” flyer, with its bled ink.

  “Oh-oh-,” he stammered. “Well, thank you. Appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” Akila told him.

  “Did you remember you have a two o’clock with your pa to go over what to do about all the delinquencies?”
the woman behind the counter shouted to Bruce Singer’s back. Then, he broke eyes with Akila. In his eyes, she looked ashen and pitiful and hopeless and exactly what his family told him needed their consideration and mercy. The ones they were to help. He started to the back door of the small office. Akila watched him slam the door shut. She heard it click. A fever crescendoed onto her forehead. She threw the clipboard and papers at the counter. The woman called out, “Hey, I’m gonna need your ID or I can’t process this…” Akila ignored the woman and grabbed Solemn, so they could finally talk about the thing they both, in fact, wanted to talk about: “Now we can go look for a dress.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Guests would forget the preacher’s sermon quicker than the bride’s slightly dingy dress, or her purple-and-peach morning glory bouquet that made up for it, or the groom’s gleaming Stacy Adams, or the baby ring bearer’s screeching hesitation and flop-out, or Alice Taylor’s overdone solo, or three modest lemon-and-butter-cream sheet cakes Bev was relieved the half oven could manipulate.

  Orchestration of the day included Redvine’s ten car trips to transport metal folding chairs and tables from basements of a church alliance in Kosciusko back to Singer’s, at the foot of the steep, near the pond. There were pleas to Bev’s great-aunt for a patch of her garden, blackmail to card-party friends and bar mates for donated dishes and silverware. BYOB was emphasized, unheard. But there was no way Akila’s mother bought into the potluck twist Bev suggested. Instead, she contributed to the otherwise: three days of cooking and freezing and uncanning and tinfoiling until both mothers nearly nodded off in the pews soon as they sat down.