Solemn Read online

  SIX

  Just in time for the holidays, the Route 17 gas station achieved a liquor license. Rumor had it there was to be a renaissance of Tudors on the nearby scrapyard’s and oil field’s abandoned acres, for corporate executives of Jackson to upgrade upon and Southern natives to flock into. The building was to take a few years. The journeymen would like to drink on the job before drinks after work. Pearletta took advantage and started with six-packs of beer. She figured the walk to the gas station to get it and back home would help manage the pouting belly it soon produced. The little girls on pink and yellow bikes with tassels on the handlebars did not bother her. Nor did little boys racetracking twigs and rocks and cat’s-eye marbles. Nor did the growing boys who hinted she could buy them beer. It was grown men’s pickup trucks careened in and out of the entrance with ample slowdown for her, and women with brown bundles balanced in their arms, and packs of teenagers with phony, immature whispers.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hassle … How you doin’ out here in this heat?”

  None of them ever knew her first name. Only his last one.

  “I’m fine … how you?”

  “Good. Have a nice day, Mrs. Hassle.”

  At home, the Sydney Olympics occupied her—least the part including a muscular Marion Jones, a cornrowed black gal to root for. When the games ended, Pearletta fell in love with Bruce Lee, on DVDs the gas station rented now. She loved to see the young man from Hong Kong drop-kick his assailants and sneak out of hidden corners by early dawn, grunting and shouting and intimidating. Sometimes, with the blinds drawn, she followed him and replicated his moves, like he was an aerobics instructor at a YWCA her mother was devoted to. At the ends of her unpolished toenails were the faces of Gilroy, cops who looked past her when she talked, best friends who forgot her, old flames who burnt out, neighbors who did not hear the spitting and the choking and the gurgling. Sometimes, there was the little family up at top of the heap with a trailer much bigger than hers, daddy and mama and son and pretty girl inside. She drop-kicked all of them and chopped their heads off with her bare hands.

  One day, near Thanksgiving, the man called Redvine pulled in with his family. Pearletta was about to cross into the bend of their shared acres long after he would have cut a soft left to head home. His beige Malibu appeared against the dusk sky and gravel road undulated to firmament. The car seemed to be waiting for her, only no one called out to tell her. This was the difference now. People stopped, stared, hesitated, and seemed to have something important to say. But it all wound around the same topic, so there was nothing. She was on Singer’s grounds and she was not barefoot with heels hanging from her hands. She was near home. She knew her place.

  There car trouble? Pearletta wondered. She slowed down with the sweaty plastic bag of beer pinching into her wrist. She sped up, wished to offer her help if there was any to offer. To be useful, preoccupied and snatched into sorts.

  But as she got closer to the one opening of Singer’s, the husband’s and wife’s smiles caricatured against leafy shadows upon their windshield. Pearletta stood still. Then, the wife nodded at Pearletta. To pass. The back of the teenage boy’s head beed and bopped to the side. Rap music in the waxed Malibu. The little girl gripped the half-down window on her side, without moving her head, watching Pearletta walk through the gate. The husband and wife waved. The girl stayed propped, unmoving when the sedan’s front wheel sank into a pothole they all usually remembered to drive around. Since the family hadn’t asked her for a ride, Pearletta didn’t know what to do with their courtesy. She was a grown woman. She knew there were questions in the air and connections she had made, which she accepted. He didn’t look like a man who beat his wife or kids. They always looked up to him when they talked. The family drove away. She could have run into the pond and whisped down under the connection of lily pads, without them even swimming after her, like nobody swam after her baby. Then, for the first time but not the last, Pearletta splashed warm beer on an empty stomach before she got home.

  She rejected the sisters from church who claimed they were praying for her but wound up speaking in tongues about hobbled parents finally succumbed. The social worker misplaced her with women whose teenage babies were gunned down in spaces between the tin-roofed houses. It wasn’t that her relatives did not know or care. They just hadn’t known the child. They barely knew her. Her name once switched from Pearletta to “On that stuff.” She and her child were as good as apparitions to her sparse schoolgirl friends she neglected to invite to the civil ceremony, her parents who stopped mentioning her, her nephew who forgot her voice, her sister who couldn’t stand the man. She had been on her own with her household and was on her own, now, without it.

  Proximity to the only phone cable line within miles had been one reason Gilroy sold her on her life savings required to pay off his trailer and rent the plot. Had it not been for Gilroy and his popularity, which initially intrigued her but soon subordinated her, the clunky beige phone at the head of their bed would have remained dormant. Now that all the calls of concern and necessities ceased, it barely rang. Pearletta found a purpose for it, however. She would coordinate her new life. After a while, cops were the only folks she talked to. No one else was obligated to hear.

  “Well, I could use some help packing up and moving out the trailer,” she told Bolden. He took the call for her latest “emergency.” It was her fourth in a week. The first two times, she thought a masked man was in her trailer past the panel over the bedroom. The third time she wanted to get information about her “case”: the State Attorney’s name, the judge’s visiting hours, whereabouts of a death certificate.

  “Mrs. Hassle—”

  “Pearletta. I’ll be soon divorced.”

  “Yes, um, Pearletta.” Pearletta heard papers shuffle back and forth. “Have you talked to any of your friends and family about helping you relocate?”

  “I can’t find too many numbers. I used to know them by heart, but … well, lot on my mind these days. My address book is gone … think somewhere in a cabinet. There’s the guest registry … I don’t think the funeral home ever gave it to me tell you the truth.”

  “Start with getting the registry from the funeral home. People give their names and numbers for very reason to be called on,” Bolden said. He scribbled away departmental ink. Downturned hearts fashioned into faces, dollar signs next to them. “I can definitely understand why you wouldn’t want to stick around there. Might be nice to make a fresh start, you know? I know you and Mr. Hassle ain’t on best of terms, but he gotta have some pals with vans or flatbeds to help you out of there. What about the people you gonna stay with? Or you staying with anybody? You gotta place of your own? Any landlord got plenty of fellas wanna get a day’s work helping a nice lady move. Maybe even for free, considering you been through so much and all. There’s the Red Cross, too. Catholic Charities. Social service office, on Fairground Road, I think. We can definitely point you in some directions, but I’m not sure the department would allow its officers to … Well, you know, we on call at all times, Pearletta. Pearletta? Pearl—”

  * * *

  It was dull behind four round-edged windows with the blinds yanked down months before, a sliver of indoor parts viewable between the slats. Smith & Wesson cocked, Bolden gave Hanson the signal to pound the panel door. They called Pearletta. They got no call back. Both men lunged against the door. A few porch lights came on from the racket. One resident some feet away appeared on his slash pine deck, a sawed-off shotgun in one hand and a Hohner harmonica in the other. He saw a cop car and a white man, so he excused himself back inside—but not before he buzzed through the instrument’s reed. Just as the mosquitoes and moths around Pearletta’s porch light began to take their distracting toll on the cops, the latch clicked. She opened.

  “Well, I’m not ready to move yet,” she said. “I haven’t packed a thing.”

  She slurped the remainder of a bottle of cognac.

  “Mrs.… uh, Pearletta,” Bolden said, “you disappear
ed from your call to us.”

  The men peeked inside. They heard a blues on a radio, smelled a spiced and citrusy sweet. There was no danger, threat, or hostility here. Only a hollowness.

  “I was gonna call back,” Pearletta answered. She fussed with the ties of a burgundy terry cloth robe … Bill Blass, her father’s it had been. She swept aside her bangs, pressed and curled, for nowhere to go.

  “Mrs. Hassle…” Hanson started.

  Bolden put up his hand. “Pearletta,” Bolden said, “when you call nine-one-one to be connected to your local police station and we answer, but you jump from the line, it’s an emergency. By law, we gotta come on out here. Now, I’m glad you all right. But we gon’ have to come in or you gon’ have to come out so we can do a report.”

  “It’s something mean about your eyes, like you was spoiled.” Pearletta glared. “I bet you gave your mama a lot of trouble. Hope you paying back your allowance now.”

  “Hanson,” Bolden directed, “I’m gonna need an incident report.”

  “Be right back.”

  “Pearletta,” Bolden said. “I’m sorry we won’t be able to be your movers. But I really want to encourage you to move with people you’re close to.”

  “If I had people I was close to, I wouldn’t have to move,” Pearletta answered.

  “Well, I’ll ask around and see if any of the guys have some friends or relatives who wanna make some extra cash, or help a woman out.”

  “I have money,” Pearletta said. “It’s in Junior’s cookie jar. He couldn’t reach it”—she laughed—“and that’s just how I liked it. His tantrums about it was something to witness, I tell you. I got one thousand, two hundred, and sixty-two dollars, cash, checks, money orders, after the burial. I think Humbert sneaked out a few dollars himself, but what you gonna do? He’s the only one who’ll bury us round these parts, so he gets away with it. I could’ve asked my folks. But, they can be snooty. I got too much on my mind to deal with the wrath. Don’t think one thousand, two hundred, and sixty-two dollars is quite enough to get me one of them new Tudors. Or is it? Down payment maybe? I’m sure my folks’d chip in, if I promise to wear white and stay in church…”

  “Pearletta, you had any medicine or pills with your cognac tonight?”

  “Baby, I am fine. I’m a grown woman.”

  Hanson marched back with carbon copies in his hand. Pearletta noted her name and address. She provided her Mississippi State driver’s license for identification. It still had her parents’ address on it, in Jackson. She confirmed she was alone and unhurt. She declined medical treatment. She took her copy.

  * * *

  Finally, she felt like she needed another time of at least one time her breastbone unhinged so she could breathe right. The Singer boy was kind, to come on out to see about her. She knew he was just trying to find out how many more Gilroys there could be, even if it was just the one she congratulated herself for not letting back through the door of his own trailer. The Singer boy understood her grief, why she had to break into the bottom of an unsmooth Mississippi mud pottery vase where Gilroy kept stuff. But the white man didn’t cringe when he caught her. He shared. More important, he listened.

  That night, Pearletta Hassle showed off the vase to Brett Singer.

  Made it myself, she claimed.

  Get outta here, he said.

  She assured him she had parents, had a big house in Jackson and they bought her things, schooled her well. He agreed that was the case for him, too. This, after a baby on her back with all others, started the laughter between them. She put her creativity to good use. She made a pipe out of foil and an empty root beer can, two slits in the side to finger air to the flame and one to suck out the smoke. They laughed. He told her about the cabin at the lodge his family owned and they could catch their own shrimp, boil and butter it. She gave him beer and cheese grits. That level of it all was the only kind of treatment she could stand now. Bolden or any other cop never heard from Pearletta again.

  * * *

  Prior to all this, when I could get the frequency clear, I was practicin the radio. With more time and practice, maybe some prize money in a contest, I figured I’d be closer on my way out of Bledsoe in general and Singer’s trailer in particular. The North, hah, like the slaves had to run to. Harriet Tubman. You turn back you die. Funny. My microphone was a hard brush Landon left behind for his Afro pick. I looked at myself anywhere I could find: car windows, my shadow in a camper window, the rain puddles, and on back of spoons. Mama wouldn’t let me watch Soul Train or Showtime at the Apollo or Video Soul. It was contaminating, and women shouldn’t move like that.

  TV show me more. The commercials explain magic liquids and gels we could buy to get past scrubbin the laundry until our elbows ached. The jingles kids sung showed white teeth couldn’t have got that way with the baking soda and rag and Listerine I got. Brady Bunch girls never sewed a tear in they dresses and nightgowns. They never cut the feet out they onesie pajamas to fit in a couple new inches. And if people worked, the TV didn’t show it. What I wanted spritzed onto me from the heavy floor model Mama seemed hypnotized by but then kept me from, like a hypocrite.

  But my teachers at Miller’s Lutheran Day don’t see me like I’m a star. They just think I’m intendin to get shit started, always pickin on me out of the eighty or so we got in the whole school. Starin into space, losin my place in the passages, answerin, “Huh?” when they say “Solemn, I’m talkin to you.” Truth is, I could barely see the boards. I wasn’t gonna make a fuss about it though. We ain’t have no money and glasses expensive, Mama said. I had mine inside my jewelry and music box, my unicorn on top, the bottom only I knew how to rip and put back. I had to have had more than anybody I knew my age, at school or runnin round Singer’s. This was part to a solution, maybe not the whole. But part. I even mistook buttons for coins and wrinkly gray socks for dollar bills. If it was money it could take us somewhere, like a thin but sturdy raft.

  * * *

  Even if she had been asked (and she never was), she couldn’t explain it: the moment “the funny places” started. In the funny places, new things looked deformed, smelled too strong, appeared too large, focused too clear (or not), sat before her in three dimensions with a flat backstory she sensed. Whatever it was, specialists, education, experience, and wisdom were uncertain in its naming. There was no social worker or nurse full-time at the school. The preachers, though loved, were not trusted to talk alone with girls her age. Solemn got accustomed to it, these pop-ups in her world. She even named two.

  Her hauntings from The Man at the Well and That Baby caused her to submit to where they had all collided. The well pulled her, tugged at her heartstrings, pointed her feet, preoccupied her mind and thoughts. It was the compass for her longings. It excused her disappearances. It turned her mind away from saving money for her great escape out of Bledsoe, and onto a reason to just stay right on there, to investigate the mystery of why she had been destined to such bad luck. If she turned around in bed in middle of the night to be struck by a form not there, but that she was certain of in its broad chest and stringy hair, then she visited the well the next day. If sight of great northern beans tumbling around one another and over ham hocks challenged her, because they all seemed too alive, she left her plate on the table and darted off to the well. When she mistook a jumble of extension cords for a woman’s wig with nobody’s head underneath, she ran outside to the well. If she heard an echo to her words but she had not spoken, she flew out the door there, too. It came to be she could arrive there much faster and in no time, due to familiarity and purpose, like the same walk to work after decades. She was automatic and brisk. Sometimes she counted the crows flocked at its rim, more as the winter set in.

  As one of her mother’s straightforward kin may have summed it, Solemn was “messed up.” Was there one man or two? Was there one baby or many? Did it cry? Was there a face in the window of this one or that one or not? Did the well crack earth and make it go quicker, snatch the child? W
as I there? Am I here now?

  With no one using it, the well water grew stagnant and the steel bucket reeled to the pump began to rust. Like an old cow or a mare with a weaned foal, it dried up to grout. Men once came to the well with lunch bags full of fried smelts, hogshead cheese in rolls, or liverwurst fit between crackers. Now, no bones or crumbs fell. Groups of owners stopped talking for miles and miles of time while they dug into oily plastic bags of a whole fried chicken, spitting snuff and shooting shit. With its benevolence quenched, the wonderland around the well screeched to a halt, too. Insects crusted onto its screen. The squirrels and swamp rabbits that once floundered around it no longer darted near. When the leaves of the overhead beeches and cottonwoods slenderized or plumped depending on the rainfall, the disposition of sunrays struck through to the well’s cobble casing appeared fierce one day. Lonely the next. When a fall heat wave hit, the dried leaves hung like witches’ faces with long noses and scraggly hair. Next they fell. Both the scavengers and daintier birds ignored the well’s perimeter, too. The rare eagle that pierced his talons around the well’s mouth every once in a while eventually found new preferences. With it so abandoned by human and beast alike, only newborn toads remained, flipping and flapping on top of the distribution line, in the well’s bottom where Solemn loved to stare.

  Did you play with him? she asked.

  The police car snuck behind her like a switch. Solemn didn’t recognize the cop in his unusual look, white Impala with blue trim. He had a new white man with him now.

  “Hey, I remember you,” Bolden said to her. It had been dark, and puzzling, for them both. The night after he dropped her off, he dreamed of red nooses around unattached throats. And he wasn’t even drunk. The next morning, he pulled up Redvine’s name and met a grinning young boy once framed over obstruction of justice. Then, he went to a stack of files in the corner of Sergeant Nichols’s desk. Pearletta Hassle’s had sunk to fourth or fifth in the “TO DO” ladder. Bolden flicked through it to the intake report. He affirmed his recollection that her husband had possibly worn a red paisley print scarf when she said she saw him last. That night, a red cloth hung from this girl’s hand, like a rag doll or security blanket. He honestly didn’t even know what he was doing at the well now. For now, he reminded Solemn, “I brought you home one night, ’member? How you getting along?”