Devil on My Heels

  I toss the milk carton in the trash and close the cabinet doors. We need food. Delia has always done the grocery shopping for Dad and me. But I figure this is one thing I can do on my own. I dig through my purse, pull out my wallet, and count out three dollars and seventy-two cents. All the money I have in the world. I pull a scrap of paper from my purse and scribble down a few items.

  Rosemary is trying to get Eli to drink more water when I come back to the bedroom. It dribbles down his chin, soaking his chest and shirt.

  “I’m going over to the Winn-Dixie for groceries,” I tell her. “When I get back, could you go get my duffel bag? I left it at Luellen’s.”

  “You thinking of staying here?”

  “Eli needs somebody to look after him and I need a place to stay,” I say. “You got any better ideas?”

  22

  The sun is setting by the time Rosemary gets back. She sets my duffel on the couch and plunks down an old beat-up brown suitcase next to it.

  “What’s that?”

  “My things.”

  “Rosemary, I can take care of Eli by myself. You don’t have to do this.” The truth is, I’ve been worried sick about how I was going to nurse Eli on my own. I’m so grateful for Rosemary’s help, I could cry.

  “It’s either stay here and help you or find space even a sardine couldn’t fit into in my folks’ trailer.” She takes stock of the situation, going from room to room, like I did earlier. “I’ll sleep on the couch. You can have that other bedroom.”

  “What happened? What about your job?”

  Rosemary goes to the kitchen and looks through the grocery bag on the counter to see what I bought at Winn-Dixie. “You forgot coffee.”

  “I got instant.”

  She makes a face. Then she lowers herself onto one of the kitchen chairs. A sorry wad of stuffing peeks out of a split in the plastic seat cover. “Luellen said it would be better if I went back to live with my folks, seeing as how there’s people sending me messages by way of her shop window in the middle of the night. She says I’ll be safer with Ma and Daddy. What she means is she’ll be safer with me not there. And her customers won’t be scared off.”

  “I’m real sorry.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  We spend the next half hour heating Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and taking turns trying to get some nourishment into Eli. He doesn’t seem to know who we are, and that’s got us worried.

  While Eli kneads the sheets with his fingers in a restless sleep, we make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sit down on the lumpy sofa. The cockroaches in this place know no fear. They creep along the baseboards, scoot across the kitchen floor, up and down the cabinets, and across the counter, even though the lights are still on. We have given up pounding them with our sneakers.

  Rosemary gets up to shift the rabbit ears on Eli’s old TV. She tries them every which way she can. But all we can get is one fuzzy station out of Miami.

  Being with Rosemary isn’t anything like being with Rayanne or Jinny. We don’t talk about boys—well, Gator’s name has come up a few times, but I’ve never told her much about Chase and me. We don’t talk about clothes or music or who’s going out with who and what they’re doing. It’s different. Even though she’s only a grade ahead of me, Rosemary seems a lot older sometimes. It’s a little like having a big sister. But other times, like the afternoon we skipped school, she seems kind of fragile, younger. I just don’t know what to make of her.

  I brush the sandwich crumbs from my blouse. “We got ourselves a problem,” I tell her while she’s working those rabbit ears.

  She looks over her shoulder at me and raises her eyebrows. “I think we got us a whole shit pot full of problems.”

  I about choke on my sandwich when Rosemary says this. I’ve never heard her use words like that before. We look at each other and suddenly we both burst out laughing. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but we can’t seem to stop. I’m laughing so hard my side aches.

  Rosemary flops down on the couch next to me.

  “Okay, I’m being serious now,” I tell her. “All I have left is ninety-three cents.”

  “I’ve got a little money. It’ll be okay.”

  “But we can’t stay here forever.”

  “I’m not planning to. As soon as Eli’s better, I’m gonna look for another job. If I have to, I’ll go back to picking.”

  “What about school?”

  She shrugs and gets up to give the rabbit ears another try. I get the feeling there have been plenty of times in Rosemary’s life when she didn’t go to school because she had to help her family out with the picking.

  At least Rosemary has a plan. Every time I let myself think beyond the next minute, I stop breathing. It’s like having an elephant sitting on my chest.

  You don’t sleep very well when you don’t know if tomorrow you’ll have a roof over your head or enough money to buy so much as a loaf of bread. This is why I am still wide awake at two in the morning when a rumble of car horns suddenly thunders down the highway and onto the dirt road by Eli’s house.

  At first I don’t think much about the noise. Just some folks coming back from a wild Saturday night at a juke joint, probably. When the racket doesn’t let up any, I stumble out into the living room. Lights from outside are flickering through gashes torn in the shade.

  Rosemary is hunkered down below the windowsill. She waves her hand, signaling for me to get down. I crawl across the floor.

  “What’s going on?”

  Rosemary is shaking so bad, she can hardly talk. “I don’t know,” she whispers.

  I lift the corner of the shade and peek out. A whole caravan of trucks and cars is weaving through this little colored village, blowing horns and flashing high beams.

  The pickups and cars creep down the dirt road two by two, so nobody can pass them. Anybody coming from the other direction would have to either pull up onto somebody’s front yard—there being no driveways— or back up, because there is no getting by these folks.

  The horns are so loud, I put my hands over my ears.

  When the silence finally comes, it’s like being under water. I can feel the pressure building.

  A voice thunders through the night. “Get out here, you worthless old nigger.” The voice belongs to Travis Waite. Rosemary and I exchange panicky looks. We both know it’s the Klan out there. And all I can think is that my dad and Chase must be with them. I’ve been gone since before dawn, although my dad probably doesn’t know I left that early. What he does know for certain is that I didn’t come home tonight.

  “What do they want with Eli?” I ask.

  Rosemary has started to cry. “They probably think he’s part of the slowdown, him missing work and all.”

  “The what?”

  “The slowdown. It’s what I started to tell you this morning, about Travis maybe coming after Eli.”

  “That’s what Gator meant last night when he was talking about the pickers not showing up for work for a few days, isn’t it? I thought he said it was just talk. They weren’t really doing anything yet.”

  Rosemary shakes her head and wipes the tears from her face. She puts her hand on my shoulder. Her hand is soaking wet and clammy. “It’s been going on for a few weeks now.”

  “What? But—”

  She shakes her head and waves her hand at me. “Not now, Dove.”

  I lift the corner of the shade again.

  The trucks and cars behind the two lead pickups have all turned their headlights toward Eli’s house. Some of the men are standing outside their cars, hanging around talking and smoking. It’s hard to tell if any of them have been drinking. If they are liquored up, things could get real ugly. Nobody is wearing white robes or hoods. They are dressed in their everyday clothes, like normal folks. Only there isn’t anything normal about what they are doing here.

  A cockroach skitters across my bare foot, but I don’t let go of the shade.

  Travis Waite stands in front of his pickup.
He is nothing more than a dark silhouette. But I know it’s him. I see the skunk tail hanging from his antenna. He sends a stream of tobacco juice right onto the base of Eli’s lemon tree.

  It’s hard to pick out the other faces with all those bright headlights shining in my eyes, which I guess is the point. Headlights. White hoods. Same thing. Klan folks manage to scare people half to death and hide their identity while they’re doing it.

  But in spite of those glaring headlights I can still pick out Willy Podd, hanging around the back of Macon Podd’s pickup. Macon Podd is Willy’s dad. There’s no sign of Earl, though, which surprises me. I drop the corner of the shade, afraid of what other faces I might see.

  “You come on out, now, ya hear?” The voice belongs to Spudder Rhodes. “Nobody’s going to do nothin’. We just got us a few questions.”

  Rosemary is hunched way over with her arms covering her head. I tap her on the shoulder. “I’m going out there and tell them Eli’s sick.”

  She grabs me and digs her nails into my shoulders so hard I flinch. “Ow!”

  “You can’t go out there. They can’t know we’re here. If they find out, they’ll go after Eli.”

  “We’re nursing him is all.”

  Rosemary still has a grip on my shoulders. “Two white girls in a colored man’s house. You know what they’ll do to him?”

  I don’t want to think about what they’ll do. It suddenly occurs to me that Willy might recognize the Green Hornet, although I don’t remember Rosemary ever driving it to school. “Where’d you park the car?”

  “Out back, behind the house.” Rosemary is wearing a thin nightgown. I’m still dressed, but I’m not wearing shoes.

  “Get dressed,” I tell her. I slip back to the bedroom and put on my sneakers.

  Rosemary is pulling on her Bermuda shorts when I come back to the living room.

  “Get your things.”

  She gives me a worried look. “You’re not thinking of leaving Eli, are you?”

  “Rosemary, you said it yourself. He’s going to be in a lot more trouble if the Klan finds us here.”

  “But they’ll break in here. They might hurt him.”

  “Chances are they’ll see he’s sick and let him be.”

  Rosemary throws a fit. She stomps her foot like a stubborn child. “No! We can’t do that.”

  I leave her in the living room and look out the kitchen window. There is a semiwooded area about fifty feet away. If we can get that far, we can hide till the men are gone. Sooner or later, they’re going to have to go home.

  This is what I’m thinking when I hear a soft tapping at the back door. It’s a polite sort of knock, but urgent. It doesn’t sound like somebody is trying to break down the door. My first thought is that it’s one of Eli’s neighbors come to help. But more than likely they’ve all bolted their doors and are hiding under their beds.

  I peek through a cracked pane of glass in the back door and find myself looking right into Gator’s face.

  I yank the door open. “Are you crazy, coming here?” I tell him. “Didn’t you see half the Klan members in the county parked in Eli’s front yard?”

  “Where’s Eli?” Gator bolts past me. I’m right on his heels. When he spots Rosemary, he stops so fast he almost tips over. They stand there looking at each other for a few seconds; then, without Gator ever saying a word, Rosemary points to Eli’s bedroom. Gator ducks through the door and returns with Eli slung over his shoulder like a heavy sack of potatoes. Rosemary and I follow him to the back door.

  “Stay low. And keep quiet,” Gator says. He points to scruffy thickets of saw palmetto scattered around the back of the house, then points to the woods. “And stay close to the shrubs for cover.”

  We make our way in between the palmettos as fast as we can. The horns have started up again, blaring their eardrumshattering honks. And the last thing I see, when I look back, is Eli’s lemon tree going up in flames.

  23

  Julio Gonzalez’s wife, Louisa, is bathing Eli’s face with a rag she dips in a rusted coffee can filled with water. Louisa’s hair is woven into one dark braid that curves along her spine as she bends over Eli. The room is suffocating, hot and cramped.

  Another family, the Lopezes, with their five children, shares this place with Julio, Louisa, and their five-week-old son. Two of the Lopez boys, barely school age, sit on a bed with their backs pressed to the wall. They watch Louisa care for Eli. Small clumps of mattress stuffing lie on the floor beneath their bed.

  Rosemary sees me staring at the clumps. “Rats,” she whispers. “They make nests with it.”

  I cringe and look over at Julio’s baby. He sleeps in an orange crate, nestled in threadbare blankets.

  “¿Está muerto?” one of the boys says. He points to Eli.

  “Está enfermo,” Gator tells him. Sick, not dead.

  “I’ll get some water for Eli to drink,” Rosemary says to Gator. She looks around the room, finds an empty jar, and signals me to follow her.

  The nearest water tap is next to the camp store. “They’ve only got three water taps for this whole camp,” Rosemary says. “It’s downright shameful.” She bends over and holds the jar under the faucet. “No hot water at all.”

  “How did Gator know to come to Eli’s?” I’ve been wanting to ask her this since we got here, but I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others. “How come he showed up when he did?”

  Rosemary straightens up and looks over at me. “You think these people don’t know what’s going on around here?”

  “What exactly is going on?” I’m still not sure. “And why did those men come after Eli tonight? He hasn’t done anything. Somehow I don’t think not showing up for work for two days would bring the Klan pounding on his door. Travis, maybe. But the whole Klan?”

  Rosemary heads back to the Gonzalezes’ room. I follow her.

  “They probably thought he knew where Gator was.”

  “Gator was here, wasn’t he? Why didn’t they just come looking for him here?”

  “He hasn’t been here since Friday night. After we left the camp.”

  “Where’s he been?”

  Rosemary stops walking and looks at me. “Hiding. I’m not sure where.”

  “Why would he hide?”

  “Because the Klan’s after him. That’s what that meeting you saw was about.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We just do, okay?”

  After all we’ve been through, I can tell Rosemary still isn’t sure whether she can trust me. I don’t ask any more questions.

  When we get back to the room, she hands Louisa the jar of water. Louisa lifts Eli’s head and tries to get him to drink. She dips her finger in the water and runs it over his cracked lips. Eli looks even worse than he did when we first found him. The only doctor I know is Doc Martindale, our family doctor. He’s one of those doctors who has two entrances to his office, so I know he treats colored folks. But if I show up at his door in the middle of the night, especially if Dad has the whole town looking for me, the last thing Doc Martindale is going to do is come with me to this camp. Plus there’s the problem of how we’d pay him.

  I feel totally useless. Discarded mattress stuffing has more purpose than I do right now.

  Gator sits at the foot of the bed where Eli is fighting for his life. I can’t just stand here doing nothing.

  “Gator?” I tap him on the shoulder. “I’ve got someplace you can hide. Someplace the hounds won’t be able to track you down. It’s not far from my house.”

  Rosemary watches me from the bed where she sits with the two Lopez boys. She doesn’t say anything, but I can see she’s got her guard up.

  “Why would I hide?” Gator says. He keeps his eyes on Eli.

  “Because the Klan’s after you.”

  Gator shoots a look Rosemary’s way. Her expression doesn’t change one bit.

  “It’s two miles back to Benevolence, and then you still have to get to your place,” she says
to me. “What’s that, maybe another two miles? Can you get there before the sun comes up?”

  “If we run.” I look over at Gator. “Nobody knows this place,” I tell him. “I used to play there when I was a kid. It’s an old abandoned shack in the swamp about a half mile or so from my house. Nobody ever goes there.”

  Gator is still looking at Rosemary.

  “You should go,” she says. “They’ll be here soon.”

  “Come with us,” Gator says.

  She shakes her head. “I’ve got to get back to Eli’s and get my car. We may need it.”

  “They’ll be checking all the cars coming and going from around here,” Gator says. “Probably set up roadblocks.”

  “They can’t keep them up forever,” Rosemary tells him.

  From the distance we hear the sounds of honking horns. The Klan has left Eli’s. They’re coming here. “Leave now,” Rosemary says.

  “They can’t find you here,” Gator tells her. “A white girl in a migrant camp for blacks. You know what they’ll do?”

  “I’m going back to Eli’s,” she says again. “Go on. Go with Dove.”

  They look at each other from across the room. I can feel Rosemary’s heart beating in my own chest. She is in love with Gator. And Gator loves her. I can’t pretend anymore that they are just friends, that I haven’t known this from the first time I saw them together, talking across from the movie theater. I think of Chase and what it was like with us before I found out he was in the Klan. Maybe it’s like that for Rosemary and Gator. Only the rest of the world isn’t going to see it that way. All they’ll see is a colored man and a white woman together. And around these parts, that’s just asking to get yourself beat up or maybe even killed.

  I turn to Rosemary. “I’ll look out for him,” I tell her. “I promise.”

  We slip out the only door and head for the woods. We have to get to the highway and keep as close to it as possible without being seen. We will follow it back to Benevolence, and from there to my dad’s groves and beyond to the swamp. A swamp so big people have been lost there and never found.

  It has been almost five years since the last time I went to that old shack, a place I first discovered back when I was in third grade. I don’t know what we will do if I can’t remember the way, or worse, if the shack has crumbled to a heap by now.