West of the Known Read online

  Her phone rings.

  “You settling in all right?” It’s her uncle, her father’s younger brother. His voice is tired but melodic, like he’s been singing too long.

  “Yeah, thanks for setting up the electricity.” She kicks at the herd of mosquitoes congregating above her ankles. “Hey, did you stop by?”

  “When?”

  “Today—tonight.” She yanks the sleeping bag over her feet.

  “Nope. I’m on the road.”

  “You don’t think anyone would come out here to steal something, do you?”

  “Someone out there bothering you?”

  “No, it’s— No, no one’s out here.” She pulls the sleeping bag to her chin. “I’m used to the city, I guess.”

  “You get you a gun like I told you?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not like I know how to use it.” Wind chimes sound from a distant porch, though she can’t see any other houses. Rufus sways up from the floor, creaking across the loose planks, and rests his soft black head on her toes.

  “And let your water faucets drip tonight so the pipes don’t freeze. I heard there’s a frost on.”

  “I bought a handgun. Should I have bought a shotgun?”

  “You planning on hunting?”

  “No way.” But maybe her uncle hunts. “I’m not saying I’m against it. If it’s done properly.” She waits, but he says nothing. “So, I’ll see you when you get back in town?”

  “You gonna come over Friday night, right?”

  “Yes, of course. I’m looking forward to it. Okay, safe travels then.”

  But her uncle doesn’t hang up. “There could be someone out there.”

  “Uncle Dee—what do you mean?”

  “Drugs are a problem in Greendale cause they ain’t no jobs. Gangs are everywhere nowadays. Could be some crackhead looking for something to sell.”

  “Well, I don’t have anything. I don’t even have a TV. I need a break from the news anyway.” She decides against asking what he thinks of the Iraq war. It’s a bit early in their relationship to get into politics.

  “Now your closest neighbor is Jim McGee. If there’s a problem, you go over and tell him you are Cliff’s daughter. He’ll scare off any suspicious characters.”

  “I don’t know that anyone’s actually out here. Also, wouldn’t I call the police?”

  He snorts. “Up to you.” He takes a drag off of his cigarette. “It’d be good for Jim to know you out there.”

  “Who’s Jim?”

  “I told you, Jimmy McGee, he the closest house to you.”

  “I mean, is he anyone to me?”

  “He knew your daddy.” Her uncle covers the phone for a second, mumbling something to somebody. “At one time, the McGees owned all that land round there. We worked for them.”

  “Did you tell him I was coming?”

  “Ain’t spoken to Jim in twenty years.”

  “And you’re sure he’s the guy I want to go to?”

  “They known our family a long time. He’ll help you if there’s trouble.”

  “I’m fine, really. I just got spooked.”

  She gets off the phone with her uncle, then takes the gun from under the chair. A stupid buy. The chances of her defending herself during a home invasion are statistically abysmal. But that night she sleeps with the dog and the sock by her bed.

  Lola

  Lola has come down from Memphis to visit Nana and it must be fate. She is sitting on Nana’s blue armchair, her favorite since she can remember, indulging in a can of Coke—she don’t keep this sugary shit at home. Didn’t she just have her teeth bleached? There goes $400. Cause it’s cigarettes, Coke, and BBQ once she’s back in the Delta. This is why her mother never comes back down here except for Christmas. Says it’s small-minded and broken, and that everyone who could fix it leaves, herself included. But for Lola, the stillness of the fields, the folks out on their porches, Nana’s crooked voice drowning out the radio, pretending like every black woman can sing, is love.

  Lola swivels the chair to the small kitchen where Nana is cooking in her housecoat. “How long has Billie been here?”

  Nana looks at her, a spatula in one hand. “Who told you that?”

  “Junior.”

  “That boy can’t keep a thing to himself.” Nana turns the burner low and lifts the pan, pushing scrambled eggs onto a plate. “I was told she got in yesterday.”

  “And nobody gone to see her?”

  “Nobody supposed to according to your cousin Dee.”

  “Why y’all listening to that joker?” Lola comes to the counter, taking her plate of bacon and eggs back to the blue chair. “What kind of family is Billie gonna think we are?”

  Nana cracks another egg in the pan, turning the burner back up. “Dee has his reasons.”

  “You think that’s what her daddy would want?”

  “Child, the dead don’t get what they want.”

  Lola picks out the most burned piece of bacon, then takes a bite of eggs. Only Nana’s chickens lay them this fresh. “It don’t sound like you, Nana, not to be welcoming somebody.”

  “Them folks always brought trouble on themselves and can’t nobody help them out of it. That’s the way your granddaddy’s side is.”

  Maybe Nana doesn’t have the energy to get involved. She’s definitely moving slower this year. But where’s the drama in saying hello?

  “Your teeth look good, baby.”

  Lola smiles wide for her. “Thank you, Nana.”

  “Your young man pay for it?”

  “Yeah.” Lola puts her fork down.

  “Pick up that bottom lip and finish your eggs.”

  “I’m full.”

  “Oh my goodness”—Nana turns back to the pan—“there’s nothing wrong with having a good man take care of you.”

  “It was a birthday present.”

  “A good man gives you walking-around money.”

  “You sound like something out of The Godfather.” Lola puts her plate down on the TV tray. “I hate to think of Billie out there on her own.”

  “She’s a grown woman. Let her make peace with her daddy’s ghost and move on.” Nana slips a fried egg onto a plate and turns off the stove, carrying the plate into the living room. “Get your behind up off my good chair.”

  Lola stands. “I’m gonna go get a Coke.”

  “What’s wrong with the Coke in the fridge?”

  “I drank it all.”

  Lola walks down the busted sidewalk, picking her way through the glass and trash gnarled around weeds. A column of smoke is pouring up into the sky; somebody burning leaves. The street looks wild and broken. Maybe it was always this broken, but now it looks like it has given up. She goes to the corner store, where she can smoke. Nana still doesn’t know. Doesn’t think it’s ladylike. Something she must have been told when she was a housekeeper for a rich white lady across the tracks because as far as Lola’s concerned if you’re black in the Delta you do whatever you can to make life sweet.

  She leans against the side of the store and lights a cigarette. Back when she was a kid and came down to visit, people used to be out. They’d be playing tag and kickball while folks sat on their porches gossiping. Now the neighborhood looks like everybody left and a few survivors of whatever apocalypse wander out every once in a while down the middle of the road wearing backpacks carrying everything they own. Maybe it’s foolish to want this place to be like it was, as if the past was better when as a kid she really just didn’t know all that was going on. But back then there was no minimum mandatory, no crack, more jobs, and not one of her cousins was in jail. Her uncles say that back then you always had a little money in your pocket. Now they barely got money for gas and the nearest catfish farm is an hour-and-a-half drive. She takes a last drag, then puts her cigarette out on the wall and pockets it.

  Inside, she wanders the tilted linoleum aisles where something is leaking and draining toward the front door. She steps over the thin brown stream and opens the refrigerator, taking out a two-liter of Coke. Behind the register is a framed photograph taken during a Mardi Gras parade, a black queen at the center, all tiara and white teeth. Bet she had braces and bleach, maybe even headgear. Or maybe that was just her.

  It’s only teeth her girlfriends say, that and her man is dead sexy. A phrase Lola can’t stand. None of them grew up with a man pleaser like her mother. With a stepdaddy who would say this is my house and you are a guest in it. You eating off my plates, using up my hot water, everything in here you treat with respect or you will feel my hand. A mother who didn’t say a damn thing, but just stood by, keeping her mouth shut, then comforted her afterward, when Lola couldn’t sit down.

  Whatever. What she needs to be focusing on is budgeting some kinda way. Yesterday she sent those evil-ass debt collectors a Cease and Desist letter to stop them from contacting her because they about to start threatening to break her legs. But the letter don’t do a thing about the debt. When they told her that they wanted five thousand, she almost laughed because they might as well have said five hundred thousand.

  Q: What does it mean that she, her family’s first college graduate, is living off of pasta and (sometimes dry) cereal so she can afford gas and rent?

  A: That she will pay interest for the rest of her life without ever touching the damn principal.

  Back out in Greendale or Baghdad or wherever, Lola relights her cigarette. She ain’t thought about Billie in a long time. Years and years ago, in that picture of Billie they showed on the news, her black curly hair was pulled up tight into a high ponytail. She had on a pink shirt and pink striped shorts with white tube socks pulled above her ankles—that was the style then. She was drinking a glass of water, turned to the camera but looking up at someone else with big brown eyes. She wa
s lost the news said, but even after she was found, Lola never saw her again.

  Billie

  Her first night in Greendale, she has a dream and in this dream she is alone in a small spartan room: bare floorboards, a single window. She is standing next to a gaunt man, pencil gray, sitting at a table looking down at his watch, then out of the window and up at the moon. The moon, in this dream, is small and silver-blue; it is glowing a hole in the sky. The man keeps looking from his watch to the moon, saying: It’s time. Then the dream begins again and each time she feels sicker because she knows that in a few minutes the world will end.

  There is a large moth battering the bedroom window. Rufus looks at her from where he lies on an old blanket.

  “Bad dream,” she tells him.

  Rolling off of the partially deflated air mattress, she shuffles into the closet-size bathroom, pulling on the light. The sink almost juts over the toilet and there is barely room for her knees when she sits.

  Upon standing, she encounters a puckered reflection. Her cheek is creased and her eyes have shrunk. She rubs at the glass but it has gone dim as if the real mirror were waiting behind a fog.

  In the bedroom, the orange-furred moth paces the screen. She unplugs the lamp, but the moth stays. There are no cars on the main road, no lights from distant shacks. “What does it want?” she asks Rufus.

  He gets up, makes a circle, and lies back down. She nudges the gun sock closer to the bed with her foot, then lies down on her side so she can follow the moth’s shuddering path over the dark glass. Maybe the moth is trying to tell her something, like birds sensing an oncoming storm.

  She sits up, feeling for the lamp, and plugs it in. Rufus flicks an eye open, spots her, then shuts it again. She drags the mattress into the corner, taking a book from her suitcase, and props her pillows against the wall. From somewhere across the fields, dogs howl. Rufus barks under his breath, then groans.

  “It’s okay, boy,” she says. “Hopefully.”

  When she had nightmares as a kid, she would go into her mother’s room, kneel by the side of the bed, and whisper: “I’m thinking bad thoughts.”

  Her mother would roll to her without opening her eyes and say: “Think good ones.”

  And just like that her mother interrupted the end of the world.

  In the morning, Billie dresses standing on her suitcase because the floor is fucking freezing. Not to mention the water heater is broken and she can’t warm up with a hot shower. She fills the tiny bathroom sink with cold water and spot washes like a scullery maid.

  Her neck is aching. She fell asleep tipped over her book with her mouth open. In the living room, the sun is pouring through cracks in the front door. Outside the sky is fairy-tale blue and the sun glosses the trees. She walks with Rufus through the woods and into the jubilant screech of birds.

  Leaving the dog behind, she cruises antique stores that double as bail bond companies and ends up at a Walmart on the outskirts of town where she buys an AC unit, minifridge, coffeemaker, and space heater. At the register, there is a flock of white women in pink camo. The cashier leans over the credit card machine to tell her that hunting season is over except for spring turkey (three per season), frog (up to twenty-five per night), and it won’t be squirrel until next month. In some godforsaken aisle, a toddler is shrieking.

  Billie calls her uncle from the parking lot. They haven’t spoken that much, and Jude thinks she should try and reconnect. “So is there any family left in town? Like my cousins—Lola and Aleisha and Junior and everyone.”

  That last summer, a bandanna round her head to hold back her mane, the strawberries filling her shirt stained her stomach. They all tried to make juice by stomping on them in a big plastic bowl like somebody saw on I Love Lucy. Grandmomma Ruby, Daddy’s momma, got mad at the mess so they went to live in the woods where they made slingshots and hunted squirrels and were trailed by bees.

  “All those kids moved on with they own families.” Her uncle coughs. “You might not recall but their granddaddy was your great-uncle Floyd and he died a while back.”

  “Are you driving?”

  “We can talk. Helps me stay awake.”

  In the parking spot in front of her, a mother with four kids gets out of a car from another era. The youngest three, near tears, all want to be picked up, the neon wax of whatever they’ve been eating burning around their mouths. The oldest one, already a little mother, picks up the baby and takes another by the hand.

  “What about my father’s old friends? Would any of them still be around?” His poet friends still call her sometimes from New York to get her to agree to a reprinting, even though she’s not the literary executor, her uncle is.

  “What, you writing a book?”

  She smiles as the oldest kid catches her eye. “No, but I’m here so I might as well meet somebody.”

  “He was close to Sheila. But she passed a little while ago. She was cool, though she married herself a hardheaded motherfucker—excuse my language—Jerry Hopsen. Naw, most everybody who knew Cliff is dead or gone.”

  “Including you.” She flips on the AC.

  “I’m never far enough from Greendale.”

  “You only live an hour or two away. Why not move across the country, like to California or something?”

  “Ain’t that the million-dollar question. I been all over this country. I been to France two times. But I always come back to Mississippi.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but I always do.”

  Somewhere between mobile homes and wraparound porches, there is a neighborhood of modest cottages where the streets are named after trees. Billie pulls over in front of a row of mismatched furniture set out on the lawn of a burnt umber house, the only one on the block whose screen door and windows have bars and a little security sign stabbed in the grass by cement porch steps. A dark gray Cadillac is brooding under a low wooden carport built over the driveway with a sign nailed to its front: posted keep out. Looks like hardheaded Jerry Hopsen is having a garage sale.

  A goateed man in his sixties who is probably Jerry is wheeling a trash can crammed with weeds to the curb. He stops and wipes his hands down the sides of his khaki shorts. “How you doing?”

  Rufus jumps down from the backseat and Billie shuts the door. “Good, thanks.” There is no shade on the street. The trees in the neighborhood are too thin, though his neatly trimmed grass is violently green.

  “You looking for something in particular?”

  “Not really. I just moved to town.”

  “Well, welcome to Greendale.” He leaves the trash can and walks over. “Where you coming from?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “Mississippi?”

  “No.” She smiles. “The other one.”

  “What brings you here?”

  She wanders over to a velour floral armchair. “I inherited a house. Well, the remains of one.”

  He checks the Victorian pedestal mailbox that matches his house, a Pony Express design on its front and hopsen glued on in black letters. “That there was my wife’s. She passed last year.”

  Sheila’s chair. “I’m sorry.” Maybe her father sat in it. “How long have you lived in Greendale?”

  He pulls out two letters and a grocery circular, thumbing through the mail. “All my days, child, all my days.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever leave?”

  “Nope. So whose mansion you inherit?”

  “I think you know him: Clifton James?”

  Hopsen looks up. “Cliff James? We were in school together.”

  “I know. I’m his daughter, Billie.”

  “Isn’t that something,” he says, walking up to her. “I see him in the eyes. But now you know who you look like is your mother.”

  They shake hands. He is standing too close. Not so close that they might touch but so she can’t comfortably look into his face.

  “I met your mother a time or two when she come out here. But she ain’t ever stay long. You know how it was. People weren’t comfortable about the races mixing. Some folks still ain’t.”