Lunch-Box Dream

“Marion!”

  Bobby looked at the back of his mother’s head. She made a sound on her tongue and slowed. “All right—”

  “We don’t have to go here, Mom,” Ricky said.

  “I’m here,” she said. “I’m already here!”

  Farther down, the road wound even closer between buildings on one side and a link fence on the other and led directly toward the crisscrossing tracks.

  “How do we get out of here?” asked Bobby.

  No one answered. Of course not. Why talk to him? His mother hunched over the wheel, looking out the windshield to the left. What was she looking for? Had they gone down the wrong road? Maybe they’d made a bad turn off the main street. What was wrong with the maps? Had the street sign been twisted? Bobby remembered that maybe it had been. Maybe it was pointing the other way and they’d made a mistake. Maybe it was done to trap people. Isn’t everyone down here against you anyway?

  “It looks wrong,” Bobby whispered, half to himself. He searched out his side of the car, then the back window, then the other side, knowing his words sounded odd after so long a silence, but hoping this mix-up might allow him a way to start talking to them again.

  Then the pavement stopped, and the road was packed dirt and narrower still. Maybe it wasn’t even a road. There was no place to turn around. The way ended near a couple of low wooden buildings that might be storage houses. A car was parked next to one of them.

  Dust flew up when they passed a warehouse leaning at the road, and then, in the gap between the buildings, standing up on a hill behind them, they saw a dead house in a field of high grass.

  Twenty-Two

  James

  “What do you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Then what are you looking at?”

  “Car.”

  Jimmy’s brow was wrinkled at what he saw going on out the window. One suspender dangled loose below his belt. He held his tie in his hand. I knew he had to leave.

  “Who’d think anybody would come here and block up our road?” he asked. “I have my job to get to.”

  “So go out and help them,” I said.

  “Who would come here?” Jimmy said.

  “Northerners,” I told him, pushing my chair away from the table and smelling now the steam iron from the other room. “Coming to see their Yankee house up the hill. You know that.”

  “They’ll hit my can,” he said, leaning both hands on the sill.

  “I’ll hit it,” said a sweet voice from the other room.

  “My ash can,” Jimmy said over his shoulder.

  “I’ll hit that, too!” said the voice.

  “Aw, honey.” Jimmy shook his head, then looked more closely out the window. “Driving all over creation to see their Yankee houses.”

  “So go out and help them,” I said. “Or I’ll go.”

  “We can’t go out there, Dad,” he said. “They’ll say we robbed them.”

  “Yeah, and you got dressed up for it, too,” I said, pulling the back of his shirt down from where it bunched under the suspenders. “Look, Ohio plates. Told you. They’re just lost.”

  “Lost? Then why’s she driving so fast?”

  I laughed. “To see the Yankee house!”

  “Can’t they see it’s a ruin?” Jimmy said, flapping his tie around his collar. “Atlanta wants to forget that war ever happened.”

  “Lincoln happened,” I said to him, feeling clever for having thought of it. I liked the way it sounded.

  “Aw, Dad,” he said.

  “Lincoln happened,” I said again. “And just see how good off we are!” I waved my arms around the room and laughed and heard Jimmy’s wife chuckle from behind the door. With that, I was done and sat down.

  Jimmy grunted to himself, watching from the open doorway now, and said over his shoulder without looking away from the dust coming up the road, “Lincoln died of a hole in his head and that war never happened and she’s going to hit that can!”

  Twenty-Three

  Bobby

  The dead house was surrounded by wild trees. The bottom-floor windows were boarded up, the upper windows shattered open. Paint on one whole side of the house was worn to the wood. A couple of smaller buildings nearby were leaning and roofless. The grass in front of them, growing up the hill from the roadside, was two feet tall. There were a few rounded, tilted heads of grave markers lost in the weeds. The air smelled of tar and pine needles and coal smoke.

  “That’s it?” said Ricky, holding open the guidebook, almost snorting disgust like his father. “That’s the Union headquarters? That’s the cemetery for the Union soldiers? It looks haunted.”

  “Maybe it is,” said Bobby, his first words to Ricky since the bullet on Lookout Mountain.

  “Look how they ruined it,” Ricky said, but not to him. “They hate the North here. Nobody likes us. Did you notice that?” He said this to their mother, almost angrily, like their father might have. “Look what they did to the place.”

  “Who?” said Bobby. “The chocolates?”

  “Bobby!” said his mother. “You are really asking for it.”

  Ricky made a noise in his throat. “Not them. The regulars. They hate us. Negroes don’t hate us. We freed the slaves.”

  Negroes. His brother said Negroes.

  “We did?” asked Bobby.

  The squeak of an opening door hinge behind them. Bobby turned. The door on the building near the road was swung wide. A black man was coming out. He wore a white shirt and a tie.

  “Oh, my God,” his mother said, looking at the outline of the man in the doorway. “Get back in the car.”

  “Ma’am…”

  “Just get in—”

  They climbed back into the car, and she started up, shifted into reverse, and gunned the engine. The tires spun in the cinders, scattering them against the undercarriage of the car. When the tires grabbed finally, the car jerked back into the garbage can at the bottom of the steps, knocking it over, crushing it, and flattening two fence posts that held up no fence. “Oh, my God—”

  “Puppa’s car!” Grandma said.

  A louder voice from the house. “Hey…”

  Electricity shot through Bobby. “Mom—”

  “Marion!” said his grandmother.

  “Quiet, both of you!” said his mother.

  Grandma’s mouth dropped open as if to say something, but nothing came out. Her eyes were fixed on the black man. She crossed herself. She said something under her breath, biting her lip.

  Two men were coming toward the car now. The one in the white shirt was younger. The older one wore gray pants. Were they angry at them for crumpling their ash can? Bobby’s hand reached for the window crank, jammed it around until the window was closed, then held it fast. The men came down two steps toward the car, and Bobby and his brother shared a frantic look.

  “Mom—” said Bobby. “They’re getting closer—”

  “I know! I know!”

  The right front of the car slipped off the road and into a fence. A loud pop.

  “Oh, my God!” said their mother, the car moving forward only slightly, swaying, but she didn’t release her pressure on the gas pedal. “The tire—”

  The men’s faces were clearly visible now. Bobby saw eyebrows crinkling, eyes squinting. One said something he couldn’t hear over the noise inside the car. The older man raised his hand at them and said something else. His palm was light, almost pink. Bobby’s mother tried furiously to get the car back onto the road, jamming her foot down, moving the wheel back and forth, cursing, pumping the pedal, trying to escape before the men came too near. He imagined how absurd they must all appear, the crazy scrambling inside the car, while outside the Negroes were able to just walk up to it. The car did not move forward, but slid sideways, spitting up cinders behind it, as if stuck on something. Were they hooked into the fence?

  “This is ridiculous!” his mother said. “Totally ridiculous!”

  Bobby remembered with horror the sandbank on the bri
dge and wondered if the car was cursed to get stuck in things. What if they’d have to get out to dislodge it? The engine whined and the wheels spun as the men approached his window, motioning to the back of the car. The old one’s face was heavy with folds. His lips were strangely wet and alive and moving, but the car noise was too loud to hear what he was saying. His eyes were pinched nearly closed because of the dust.

  “Mom—” Bobby said. “Maybe he just wants—”

  “Keep quiet!” she shouted. “My God, keep quiet!” The younger man was right up at the car now. Then he shouted something and started kicking at it. Bobby’s mother screamed, hit the gas, and cranked the wheel one more time. The car lurched forward out of the ditch, taking a section of fence with it, bounced onto level road, then coughed and stalled. Their mother forced the stick on the steering column to the left. “Oh, my God—”

  “Mom, maybe he was unsticking us—”

  “Bobby, shut up!”

  The older man was there again, still speaking. He reached his hand to the window at Bobby’s face, his pink palm moving at him. The car raced suddenly and the man with the tie jumped back with a shout. Did he swear at them? The other tried to knock on the window.

  A sharp gasp. “Oh…Marion!”

  His mother cursed, then revved the engine loudly and tore off, leaving the older man with his hand raised to his face, the other still yelling out indecipherable words. The engine raced as if it would whine off into space, and they stuttered down the road on one burst tire, dragging a length of metal fence. Bobby looked out the back window. A figure was moving in the open doorway of the house now. He saw a flowered dress. And a silver glimmer. An iron? There was a woman in that tiny house? A woman? She turned away from the car and was back in the shadow, while the two black-faced men, voiceless, stood next to each other, staring, arms moving up and down. Were they waving away the dust or calling out to them?

  The Chrysler twisted swiftly along the narrow road, finally giving up the fence it had dragged hundreds of feet, but nicking the walls of buildings over and over, until it bounced out on the main street, flopping on its one airless tire, toward a truck turning from the other lane.

  Ricky yelled, but their mother had been going too fast to safely turn the wheel. She jerked it once and slammed the brakes hard, so the car struck the curb full on. A second tire burst, and the car lurched up hard into a chain-link fence and a telephone pole, cracking it—the pole fell across the fender, and steam exploded from the buckled hood. For seconds everything stopped.

  “Who’s hurt?” said their mother. “Is everyone okay? Mom?”

  “I’m not hurt,” Ricky said. Grandma’s forehead had struck the dashboard, but lightly. It was dull red, not bloody. The truck had already gone down the street. A dented car with a black face at the wheel drove slowly past, its driver leering openly at Bobby, but not stopping.

  Bobby released the window crank, his fingers strained and white.

  “I’m okay,” he said.

  Friday, June 19

  Twenty-Four

  Cora

  It was fiercely hot this morning. Of course I didn’t sleep all last night. But as tired as I was, I was stark awake by the time I saw the tracks at Dalton center. Everything was silver in the heat coming between the buildings. I passed by the stand on the corner and pushed open the door of the store and went between the dress racks all the way down the corridor to the office where I knew that telephone was, and I stood there. When the man put down his pen, he raised his face and made a big smile as if nothing in the world was wrong.

  “Hello there, Suzie. Early today. Where’s little Jacob this fine morning?” he said.

  I waved my hand in the air because I wasn’t ready to say that. I told him that my name was not Suzie, that Hershel is the brother of my sister’s husband, and I needed to call him in Atlanta. The man motioned his hand at the chair across the desk for me to sit down, and I did.

  “I know it, dear. I know your name’s not Suzie. I’ve seen you,” he said.

  I can’t pretend to know what he was thinking, but he looked my face all over, then shifted in his seat and picked up the telephone. I am fifteen. He was large with brown and gray hair and stains on his shirt and had a face like a fat pink balloon, but he didn’t dare say anything nasty, since the store manager, his employer, is a Negro known to my father, and it was them together who fixed it for Jacob to use the telephone. What made an old white man come work at a Negro store anyway? He smelled like a saloon, so I guess he was happy to have this job. Nobody else wanted him. If he was in church maybe he should be up with us. That’s the kind of thing that I know would make Jacob laugh. Only when I thought of that I got scared.

  The man pressed his big pink finger up and down on one of the two black buttons at the top of the telephone. He held the telephone to his ear. While he did, I breathed slowly, trying to remember what I was about to say and how to say it.

  “Ya know,” he said, “there are some say your people don’t mind where they’re at. We take care of the Nigra pretty well. No need for boycotts and sit-downs and such. Now, I ain’t saying—”

  I looked at my hands in my lap, and he stopped talking or I stopped listening and then he stopped talking. Momma taught me never to speak to a white man about that, that there was no good answer to it. And you never meet their eyes. He held the telephone for a little time at his big pink ear, then he handed it to me.

  “Hello?” I said into it. “Hello, is that Hershel?”

  “No, no. You have to dial the number, Miss,” he said. “It’s Miss Cora, isn’t it?”

  He knew that, he must have. I nodded. “Yes, sir. Cora Baker.”

  “Well, Miss Cora Baker, you have to dial his number,” he said again. “Everybody got his own number. On that paper you got there. You ever done this before? Jacob done it twice hisself already. Where is little Jacob today?”

  I looked at the scrap of paper Momma had given me. I didn’t understand what the man wanted me to do.

  He reached his palm to me. “Show me the numbers and I’ll dial them, dear. I did it for Jacob this way before he did it for hisself twice already. I like the Nigra people, you know, like ’em lots. Then you listen. And someone will talk. Then you talk. No, just the paper, you keep the receiver. Now you hold it up to your ear. Yes, that’s right. Wait a few seconds.”

  I held the telephone to my ear while he looked at the numbers on the paper and pushed his fingers around the dial on the telephone. He did it quickly. He does it all day long, I thought. At first nothing happened, then there was a faraway sound of clicking, then nothing, then clicking again. It was the first time I had heard a voice so far away say, “Hello?”

  It was a man. “Hello?” he said. “Is this Jacob?”

  “Hershel Thomas?” I said.

  “No, he’s my stepson. This is Ellis Vann, his stepfather. Who is this?”

  “Please let me speak,” I said, running the words over in my mind and trying to get through them and determined not to cry in front of this man.

  “Shall I get Hershel on the line? Hershel!” the man said, sounding farther away.

  “You will want to know this,” I said, starting in as I had memorized it. “Your boy Jacob has been missing since yesterday evening—”

  “What?” the man said. “Little Jacob? Our Jacob? Hershel! Get in here!”

  “Jacob,” I said, “is missing.”

  There was clicking on the phone, then the man said, “What?”

  The man with the pink face, his mouth dropped open.

  I said into the telephone, “We have tried, Olivia, your sister-in-law, has tried to find him, and your brother Frank, but they have had to go to the Dalton police and tell them he is missing.”

  “Is this Cora? Put Frank on the phone.”

  “But the police say he is a Negro boy and anyway has not been gone long enough to look for. Perhaps you will want to come here to Dalton to your sister-in-law Olivia’s house.”

  “Cora!” he
said. “You’re saying Jacob isn’t with you?”

  It was strange to hear my name.

  “Yes,” I said. “This is Cora. Thank you.”

  That is what I said, and that was all I could say if I was not to cry. I handed the man back his telephone and got up and went down the corridor. Then I turned back and said, “Thank you,” to him, and his mouth was still open. Then I walked back through the racks to the door and ran home. I knew his eyes were on me all the time I was in the store. You think I’m brown, you think I’m a Nigra? Well you’re white and work in the back of a Negro store.

  The way home was long. My shoes and feet were dusty when I walked up the steps into the house. For some reason I remembered that pillbox hat and the church and Jacob whistling and then us laughing at the fat white men together and again Jacob whistling at cars, and then I grew really afraid.

  “Anything?” said Uncle Frank. His eyes were red and wet.

  “I did what Momma Irene told me,” I said. I had done what I was told to do and that was that. Now I could cry, too.

  They were all running around, mad and screaming, and wouldn’t stop. I knew it then. Everything was different now.

  Twenty-Five

  Ruth

  We were all behind the house when the call came, except for Weeza who was out for groceries. We heard it from Ellis, my husband. He was shaking when he pushed open the back door with his cane and stood there.

  “They can’t find Jacob—”

  One of us said, “What?”

  “Jacob’s missing in Dalton,” Ellis said, coming down to us. “He was to the…I don’t know. He’s not where he’s supposed to be. He didn’t come home. That girl couldn’t tell me anything—”

  “What the hell are you saying?” said Hershel, his face bunching up and rushing over to Ellis. I went between them.

  I am Ruth, Hershel and Frank’s mother, and all kinds of thoughts went through my mind then. Jacob out there somewhere?