Solemn Read online

  For now, Bev was worried. Bev wasn’t so worried about Solemn disappearing into Singer’s vortex of speckled porch lights and absolute quiet. No. Here someone would see and hear her child. Bev was more worried at the nerve. The absolute nerve. Here she was—the only one who was actually in the house, attending to the results of others’ lives in that house—and every other body in that house was out in the world doing exactly what they wanted to do without even telling her where they planned to do it. Hmph. Yet had she done the same thing, the others would have had a fit.

  What we supposed to eat? Mommy, where you been? Mama! Mama! Man, where she at? I need … Oh, well, I came by and you weren’t even there … Yes, sure I can come back … Can you tell me when your mother will be home?

  Bev simmered, to finish her husband’s cigarettes and plan to pray the pack away next Communion. Was this her family and her life, or her prison and its guards? Was this the ceiling of regard at the end of her rainbow? If she was outside still at midnight to hunt down her own child she brought into the world, was she out of her place?

  She stood outside her home and swirled dirt up between her toes, like Solemn liked to do. She flung a mental note up to the sky, hoped her daughter would catch it: I’m sick of this shit. She was going to be making some needed changes in her house—soon.

  FOUR

  As usual, before he left, Justin Bolden rejuvenated the coffeepot in corner room 106-B. Then he jotted case notes about situations or customers to tend to the next day. He returned people’s telephone calls about their cases and conflicts only if necessary. For him, that meant any brown or darker face the others didn’t want to see crying and carrying on. He sharpened a pencil he set down on his notes atop the desk he shared with Hanson: younger than him, white, already at the desk it had taken him a couple of years to scoot up to. His reward for all this drama was an undeniably red 1998 Buick Skylark with an arrogant hood and capable trunk, one of the last of a final production. He was proud of this detail. It impressed ladies. When he drove around to his people, he got slapped on his back about it. He was the fancy one with the good job, the legal gun, the white man’s respect, the work desk, the thick wallet.

  “You think the old man’s gonna show back up there tonight?” Hanson asked.

  “I hope so,” Bolden said. He snatched up a few of his coworkers’ cigarette butts from the ashtrays strewn about. “If not, lady’s gonna be back in here and I’ll be having nightmares about babies. Just what I need, right?”

  And the babies would be black. Many of the pink, white, creamy people wouldn’t even talk to him. If they did, even in this day and age, they still called him “boy.”

  Bolden left through the back door. He walked around to the front where he parked the Buick, unlocked, in a handicapped spot everyone knew he borrowed.

  The esoteric outbacks of Kosciusko had the best bars. Their rain-pelted and toughened awnings outstretched against the plains. They begged for attention. They relied on heavens-high sweet gums and elms, postured branches in a wicked assortment of poses, to play well against a wet brain’s imagination. It called more folks inside that way. Pearletta Hassle put Bledsoe back on Bolden’s mind. A playful den of iniquity named “I’ll Be Good” leaped to Bolden. It was somewhere obscured in the crook of Natchez Trace Parkway, encircled in or near or around Bledsoe, a little different from the rest and still the same. He would find it. First time Bolden had happened upon the spot was with a cousin visiting from Tampa. A gap-toothed smart-mouth named Tammy tended bar there. He believed she flirted with him. He emptied his pockets and stayed until 4:00 a.m. He tried to get her number. Didn’t matter how long he had stuck around. She said, “No.”

  It was a long time since then. Little waited at Bolden’s apartment but utility bills in the mailbox, a dozen tropical fish in an aquarium he always forgot to scrub, a GE clock radio with a neglected off knob, a few voice-mail messages from a gal he was trying to shake, his job, and his parents. His father wanted to be sure he would be there in the morning before work, for their fifty-push-up and thirty-minute-walk daily commitment. He was sick these days, so visits from his son were more powerful than prescriptions. He already knew his mother wanted to know if he had gotten her message … about getting her message. If he could have rewound it all he would have been an astronaut. It was too late.

  On his way to interstate MS 12, Bolden passed the Attala courthouse on Washington Street, the joints where the high schoolers drove in circles and crazy eights, a few gas stations, the drugstore, a new Chinese buffet he thought to use for the next date when he was inspired to one, the dollar store where he once bought little cheap gifts for his daughter’s mom before he grew to buy real gifts for his daughter, and a few railroad tracks with no mechanized guardrails to alert casual walkers and slow drivers. This was a part of the world somebody just had to know, or not. Bolden stopped at each railroad crossing, squinted for a light point from a distance he didn’t chance to second-guess.

  He had never been summoned to a railroad crossing to take care of a gnarly, twisted, unforgettable scene beyond comprehension and his own needs for bravery. He never had to rush to a far-off creek or secret basement or unbeaten path. The turbulence of their lives crashed down in the ordinary and presumably friendly places—bars, parking lots, bank accounts, park houses, picnics, barbecues, bonfires, road trips gone awry, a night somebody left the party too late, the day somebody got home too early.

  He was never off. He only took breaks. As luck would have it, he graduated from the police academy in late summer and started the Central Mississippi force at the bottom of April 1992. Same day he reported, shoes polished and high-top fade fresh and badge pinned perfectly, the cops who beat Rodney King got off and L.A. got mad. The government council told his force to brace for the worst. Bolden was stuck at a job with men who originated in schools and a church and a neighborhood where every context of the blacks held such a sentiment: to brace and prepare, for they were incapable and knew not what they did, and they did not even look like real people. This included him.

  So, the Adams Street sheriff’s office placed Bolden on the front line of the guard that evening. He had never shot a man before. They told him not to hesitate. And they rode around the county looking like school principals ready to paddle, with adrenaline run through their haunches and excitement under their skins, to no incident. Instead, they saw subdued and stricken black faces on these streets. No riots. No bloody bacchanals. Just more people than usual out on the porch, a few less hunched over in patches of cotton to tackle what machinery left behind. He heard stirring words from somber assemblages come from under the church steeples hidden inside the backwoods swamps and glens. Into the night, stereos blasted loud, but no one made a noise complaint.

  And that was when Bolden changed. He saw his job less as a purpose and more as an appointment: to daily drive on and on in a stupor, to wonder nothing at the houses or places or people or things around him, to think only of his paycheck and not the job for which he was paid, to curse his start time every day and Pearletta Hassle and her husband and her problems and all those like her. And he had seen it all get better. His uncle even joined a club in town—only way to join was for every black man to have a white friend join, too, and vice versa. The younger kids didn’t seem so weary or alert. It was hard to say if that was because they were better or they were young.

  By the time he arrived at MS 19, ten miles to go to I’ll Be Good, he had wandered farther down the greasy radio dial. Then, he saw the roadkill.

  Damn.

  It would take five minutes for him to describe where he was to the nonemergency line; the freight line provided some crossroads, but the landmark itself was sketchy at best, really not one at all. The night was clear, at least. The work, itself, might be swift. It would take five minutes for that nonemergency line clerk to understand why he called. It would take ten minutes for the responder to wake the Animal Control officer out of a Tonight Show trance or a nap. It would take about twenty m
ore for a truck to come with the men who would take care of it. It was a lot of work for an animal Bolden had not hunted himself. If it still had a pulse he would have to finish it off.

  So with all those things considered and the nearest pay phone at least five songs back and his radio putting him right back at work should he use it, Bolden pulled over to handle the matter alone. He kept the headlights on. He remembered he had a few bottles of Guinness to rinse his hands with. He could splatter cologne to get rid of any blood smell. He imagined it would be easier to drag than sling over his shoulders. Before he stooped, he knew it was down and not worth it to check first. It didn’t look like a thing that could kick his eye out or pack an interior bruise next to one of his two known ulcers. He walked alongside the grass edge dipped down from runoff of the decades; the tree roots unburied in skinny tangles looking like lady dancer’s legs curled wildly around one another.

  At just that time Bolden was a few feet away; there was a gentle wind across the plains and a breeze through his receding hairline. An improv of white fabric, dark pigtails, and shredded gray shoelaces danced before him. A finger, or so it appeared, circled around or near or attached to red cloth. He stopped, squinted, tiptoed closer, stopped again, took a breath, and then rushed forward when his fawn tried to get up, a firm palm in the gravel and ankle pointing up. It wasn’t a fawn. It was a little girl—black—prostrate in the middle of the road, with a pickle jar of suffocated fireflies in her other palm, her panties exposed and her eyes curled back into their own thinking place. When Bolden put the tip of his black low-rise Doc Marten at the crown of her head, their eyes met.

  Neither one knew what to think.

  * * *

  Solemn had her address, down to the nearest milepost, memorized like an Easter speech—enunciated and praiseworthy. The address was just a couple miles away from where Bolden himself had stormed out of, until he ran into the police academy. Down the road, matter of fact. In Bledsoe. Solemn bit down on the temptation to tell the policeman what gripped her to the ground. Or who. Anyway, she was unsure. The quivery but calm cop—beer on his breath—brought her back to her trailer, plastic and drained and silent.

  Wrapped up in thanking God, Bev misheard the cop’s part about finding her daughter in the middle of the road, waiting to be roadkill.

  Redvine ripped open their flimsy door ten minutes later, frenzied, on edge, tense.

  Solemn was home.

  And a police officer was in the living room. No. Nothing happened. Solemn just wandered too far and lost her way.

  When the men first came face-to-face, there was a reflection of each other. So small the area was, they could have been related. Somehow. Redvine shook the officer’s hand to start small talk.

  “I live in Kosciusko, not too far from the courthouse,” Bolden told Mr. Redvine. “I like to sleep in when I get off from all this, so it makes things easier.”

  Bolden leaned back on their convertible couch-bed. Mr. Redvine extended an Old Milwaukee can, top already pressed in. Bolden shook his head no. Technically, two hours after his salary and shift had ended he was still on the job. Mr. Redvine took a strong slurp from the can instead.

  “It’s definitely easier to get to work when you ain’t going that far,” he said. “I can say the same. I take the work I want to take when it’s convenient for me. Mostly I’m called in to the electronics plant, if they need me.”

  The two men were unusually tired. Finally: “Where you find my little girl?”

  “Not too far off from here, at the train tracks headed to the Trace.”

  “That’s far, for her. For us. I didn’t know she ever walked out that far.”

  “Well,” Bolden said, “she did. If I hadn’t been fearing for a freight turning my Buick into a tin can I might have run her over. She was in the middle of the road, just … layin’ there. I keep my pistol loaded. I ain’t scared of no animal in the middle of the night. I thought that’s what she was. But she wasn’t.”

  “Well, Officer,” Mr. Redvine said, “I’m glad she wasn’t that. We take good care of our kids. They don’t run off like that. We love ’em.”

  “I can see,” Bolden answered. “Took her awhile to talk to me. But she knew where she was coming from and where I needed to take her. She wanted to get home.”

  Bolden wondered where Pearletta Hassle lived throughout here, if she was even back. It had looked like she could use a few stiff drinks last time he saw her. He could have asked Redvine about the woman, the man, the baby. But he would be back at work. And probably for nothing. Most didn’t even call back to say Oh, it all worked out fine.

  Solemn was in the one-person bathroom with Bev, getting yanked out of her dress, scrubbed with a cloth, and oiled up with Vaseline. Bev was cautious to enter a room where men talked. Solemn intuited she should feel the same. Solemn thought she had just a little slit in her knee, from her fall, starting to chase a lightning bug and ending with what, she was unsure. It was really a gash. A quarter bottle of peroxide, a singe of alcohol, and two cotton patches later, it felt like hope. Bev extended the cleanup until she heard a slight tap of the front screen door and the howl of a Buick.

  * * *

  Our part of the world was less than quiet that night. Without tellin what The Man at the Well did or how he darted to me after he did it or how I heard the splash but knew I cain’t swim or how I ran from the man after, I just went to my room, off the kitchen with a shelf fit for my dolls. I woke up in middle of the night. The slit in my knee, from my fall early with the firefly, itched me into scratchin away the scab. I cleaned the blood off my fingers with my tongue. When I turned round in the bed it was three men standin shoulder to shoulder in my little room.

  A snake or a bullfrog hissed underneath the trailer. Dandy shuffled from the closet and flashed her eyes at me. Branches clanked and clacked against the roof. A leaky faucet was in the kitchen. I sweated. I looked, buck-eyed and wondrous, at what men could have entered to find out something I ain’t know nobody needed to find out. I crisscrossed my mind for my secrets and got ready to offer one. A breeze whished through the window and nudged my rhinestone music box of money from the windowsill down to the floor. If not for fact my room had carpet, I bet it woulda broke. The unicorn horn chipped though.

  But my coins and bills flew out the underside down to the floor. Seem like money always supposed to be stolen or gone. I figured it was time for a robbery. But no. I forced myself to look again. Them men was just one of my dresses hung on a coatrack turned into my dress rack. What I thought was one of them men’s long lyin nose was just a hook of the rack. Hah. It poked through the sleeve of my white dress I wear when we got to go to a special supper or church service. What I thought was the man’s beret was one of my starched collars, pointed up high. How silly, Solemn, feel like my mama say. All that jerkin and freezin for nothing but a trick.

  “Get on out from inside me,” I told the secret. “Go on now.”

  * * *

  She knew she wasn’t so special. Had to have been the secrets somebody chased, and not herself in her own body. Until now, with this night when figures in the distance turned round and round before her very eyes, trying to gouge out what was inside, no one cared to know her. She heard the toilet flush, but couldn’t tell who did it. They all had a different way. Bev held it down, to make sure. Redvine just slapped it a bit. Half the time, Landon forgot. She herself did it twice, to pass time. She wasn’t at wits. Now there was a rim of dark under the bottom edge of the door, blacked out, slit in two parts. She hadn’t heard anybody walk to it, nor did the trailer shake close to her way. She dreamed the knob turning. Solemn awoke the next morning to a bowl, Cheerios, and a glass of milk on a small stand next to her small bed. A belt hung on the doorknob: a reminder she shouldn’t leave the house again with no notice and she definitely shouldn’t return in a dirty dress.

  * * *

  Beyond any man Solemn saw suited up in pretend good use, or spaced out in the pews of Battle of the Cross Pentecosta
l Church, or flung out a passenger side, her brother was actually okay and forgivable. Solemn always discovered his better uses. She used to tag along with him whenever she asked, to catch the ball for his new beard and lank-armed friends. Lately, his boys drove up in haggard cars and trucks to carry him where she could not go. She speculated she could be just as self-absorbed and clandestine when she was many years taller like Landon. He was a D/C student at the high school in Kosciusko, but nobody minded or pressured more. When he got the diploma, he would do better than Redvine had with a GED. The dining room, a harried nook of a round maple table between two partitions with built-in shelves for records and books, smelled sharp like lemons and menthol. Landon’s eyes were a rheumy pink. Solemn saw a spray of pink ovals around his mouth, more along the boat rim of his T-shirt.

  But the cicadas ain’t here yet … she wondered.

  “What’s that smell?” she said.

  “I stopped at the drugstore and messed around the cologne samples … Police was here last night?” Landon poured himself cornflakes with last of the milk. Then, he slurped last of a beer his father left undone. Solemn leaned her elbows on his thigh and rested her chin in her hands. She rocked back and forth.