Hours after the house blew up, people were still lining up three deep at the yellow rope, snapping pictures, having a look. Around the smoldering hole was a herd of Mississippi Gas trucks, two Minor fire trucks, cop cars, sheriff’s cars, a bulldozer.
We had to drive all the way up the hill to find a place to park. Our former house was now a tourist attraction. See The Smoking Hole In The Ground! See The Family Walking Toward The Smoking Hole!
Someone had already nailed plywood over the windows on the near side of the Logues’ house and all along the front of the Wagners’. Debris littered every yard on Buena Vista Drive. Dad winced when he saw all this secondary damage. In all his careful calculations, I don’t think he had ever stopped to think about the neighbors.
From out of the crowd came Ella Beecham, opening her arms to me. “Musgrove! We thought you was dead — and look at you, live as anybody!” She squeezed me hard about the ribs.
“Miz Beecham! What are you doing here?”
She sniffed. “Hmp. I stopped being mad at you when I thought you was dead,” she said. “But now that you ain’t, I’m going right back like I was.”
Arnita slipped up behind me, put her arms around me, kissed my cheek. “Hey you,” she murmured. “I knew you had to be okay.”
I was shocked all over again by how beautiful she was in her little white sleeveless T-shirt, cutoff jeans crisp against slender brown legs. There was not a flaw of any kind. What a miracle on earth I was ever permitted to kiss this girl, much less do what we did in my bed in the house that now lay scattered all around us. My heart soared to think she had been worried for me — she made her mother bring her out here to see about me! “I’m so glad you’re here,” I said.
“We were watching the news, and — oh my God,” Arnita said. “They said no sign of survivors, but I knew you couldn’t be dead. I would have felt it. I was so scared you got hurt or something. Are you really okay? Is your family okay?”
“Yeah. A little shook up, that’s all. Jacko’s in the hospital. I thought you might be mad at me because of — well, you left that morning without waking me up. . . .”
“Arnita was a little upset,” she said, “but I was okay. I could tell your mom didn’t want me to stay.”
People I barely knew were coming up to hug and congratulate us for being alive. I’d always thought of Buena Vista Drive as a friendless place, but among the crowd were dozens of neighbors, parents of kids from the school bus, two of Janie’s teachers, and the pastor of a Methodist church Mom and Dad had attended once.
I saw Mrs. Beecham talking to Mom, actually patting Mom’s arm. I was surprised Mom would let her do that. She didn’t normally like to be touched.
Dad stepped over the rope and headed toward the hole. Mom hurried after him.
I said, “I need to go with them.”
“Musgrove,” said Ella Beecham, “what did you do to your house?”
“I knew you’d blame me. Wait here, I’ll be back.”
Arnita squeezed my hand. “Go on. We’ll be here.”
At the edge of the hole was a cluster of firemen, cops, gas company men. One man detached himself from the group and came over to us. He was old — maybe forty — his face craggy from a case of long-ago acne. He was solid, built low to the ground. He wore khaki pants and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up.
“Mr. Musgrove, Miz Musgrove,” he said, with a nod for me.
“Do I know you?” said Dad.
He extended his hand. “We talked on the phone. Detective Sergeant Jeff Magill, Hinds County sheriff’s office?”
“Oh yeah, surely, right.” Dad shook his hand. “Well, as you can see we’ve lost our home.”
“I just need to visit with you a little while, get some information for my report. I’m sure you know all about writing reports, the business you’re in. Chemicals, isn’t that what you said?”
Dad nodded. “TriDex.”
“We know what bugs you,” said Magill with his nonhumorous smile.
Dad winced. “That’s the one.”
The name was familiar. Wasn’t there a Sergeant Magill involved in Arnita’s accident? I decided to keep my mouth shut.
“Were you storing any chemicals in your house, Mr. Musgrove?”
“I may have had some samples in the carport. Pesticides, mostly.”
Mom stirred. “My husband wasn’t here when it happened,” she announced. “He was at the hospital with our daughter, Jane. Daniel and I are the ones who were here.”
This was a bold thrust from Mom — a lie wide enough to drive a battleship through, completely disprovable ten different ways, including the fact that it was Dad who reported the “leak” to Mississippi Gas and Mom who’d never left Janie’s side at the hospital. I couldn’t imagine what she hoped to gain by telling this whopper.
I focused my gaze on Jeff Magill’s scuffed loafers.
He seemed not to have heard Mom’s remark. “You sure none of those chemicals was explosive?”
Dad said, “I’m in the ag division. We don’t handle those lines.”
“Because ordinarily, a gas leak will blow out your windows. Not level a house to the ground.”
Mom spoke up: “It was a bad leak. You never smelled so much gas in your life.”
He peered at her. “Ma’am? I’ll be with you shortly.”
Mom didn’t care for his tone. “But I told you, Lee wasn’t even here. Shouldn’t you be asking me the questions?”
“Oh I will,” he said politely. “Just as soon as I’m done with Mr. Musgrove.”
My heart banged away in my chest. Why was Mom acting so guilty? I wasn’t sure whether blowing up your own house was an actual crime, but if she wasn’t careful, somebody was going to jail. Maybe she thought she was protecting Dad or the insurance money, but I was certain this lie was a bad idea. I knew better than anybody how a harmless little lie could turn into a Lie, and take over your life.
Dad seemed unable to act. That left it up to me.
I said, “Mom, you weren’t here. You were at the hospital. You know Dad was here with me and Jacko. Did you take your medication today?”
Mom glared as if I’d just shown everybody a picture of her in her underwear. “What medication? What are you talking about?”
Jeff Magill’s eyebrows went up. “Y’all want me to step aside while you get your stories straightened out?”
“Come on, Mom, you’re supposed to tell him the truth. He’s the police.”
“I know who he is,” she said through clenched teeth. “You know perfectly well your father was at the hospital, and you and I were here.” Her smile for Magill showed the strain. “The child bumped his head in the explosion. They said he might have a mild concussion.”
“Aw now, Peggy Jean, honey, that’s not so,” Dad said gently. He’d caught on to what I was doing, and decided to help me. “She’s been down at that hospital all night with our daughter,” he told Magill. “She’s worn-out. This thing is a shock. She needs to lie down.”
“Stop that! There’s nothing wrong with me!” she flared.
“Miz Musgrove, I understand you’re upset, I know losing your home must be hard,” Magill said. “I just need to get this information for my report.”
“The boy and I came in and found the house full of fumes,” Dad said. “We got Jack Otis out — that’s her uncle, he’s crippled — and I called the gas company. They said get out of the house. We did, and it blew. It was so loud, it gave the old man a stroke. We’ve been at the hospital with him ever since. That’s where I was when I called you.”
Magill turned to me. “You’re Dan?”
“Yes sir. Daniel.”
“Is that what happened, Dan?”
“Yes sir,” I said. “Sorry, Mom.”
“I don’t know why I even bother,” she muttered.
“Any idea what might have ignited the gas, Mr. Musgrove?” Jeff Magill said casually, as if asking him to guess tomorrow’s weather.
“I have no idea,” Dad
said. “I reckon it wouldn’t take more than a spark, huh?”
“I reckon not. You having any kind of financial problems?”
“Nope. I ain’t rich, but we get along okay.”
“Everything all right with your job, your family, like that?”
“Couldn’t be better.” It would take only one phone call to find out he’d lost his job, but Dad seemed bent on bluffing his way through this. “Well, of course we — I worry about —”
Mom caught him indicating her with his eyes. “Why would you worry about me?”
A pained smile from Dad. “Not you, sweetheart.”
“Stop pretending there’s something wrong with me!”
“Nothing wrong with you, Peggy,” said Dad. “Everything’s fine. Calm down. We can get another house.”
“I assume you had insurance,” Magill said.
“Actually, this house didn’t belong to me,” Dad said. “I didn’t own it. My company holds the title. It’s one of our fringe benefits. I imagine they carried a policy on it.”
“But it’s not in your name?”
“Nope. Alls I got is a little State Farm policy on the contents.” Dad was cool under the steady gaze of Magill.
A spindly red-haired man came over to introduce himself as Bert Hinkle, the fire inspector from Minor. “Folks, I’d have to say y’all are mighty lucky to come out of that alive.”
“I agree one hundred percent,” said Dad.
Jeff Magill said, “What you thinking, Bert?”
“Obvious there was a break in the line, but I can’t say why. Musta been a leak somewheres, I’d guess the kitchen. Mis’sippi Gas says they had normal pressure, and I hadn’t seen any other indications. I got no clear source of ignition. Probably a spark from a thermostat, or some appliance. I’d have to say accidental, origin unexplained.”
“Well that’s what we’ve got, then,” Magill said. “I’ll make my report.”
Dad kept his poker face. He didn’t yell “Bingo!” or allow himself to look relieved.
I searched the ground for some recognizable fragment I could take as a souvenir. It all seemed to be splinters of Sheetrock, bits of foil-backed paper, rubbly brick — not a single object you could look at and say, that’s a pencil, that’s a fork, that’s one spoke off a beloved green Schwinn ten-speed . . .
I walked back to the rope line to find Arnita and Mrs. Wagner shaking their heads over the miracle of our survival. I told Arnita I didn’t care if the whole world blew up, I still wanted to take her to Sonny and Cher on Saturday night. Mrs. Beecham, having recently thought I was dead, was forced to give her permission.
I saw Mom waving me to come rescue her from the mob of well-wishers. “We’ll pick you up at six-thirty,” I told Arnita. “You be ready.”
She smiled and said she would.
I waded into the crowd. “Hey Mom, Dad says we need to get going.”
“Okay honey, I’m coming.” She turned for one last round of hugs. “Bless you, sugar, let me go now, we gotta get back to the hospital. We’ve got two in there to look after now.”
A man in a pickup truck followed us up the hill to our car so he could have our parking spot. It pleased Dad to make him wait, and wait some more, until Dad was good and ready to pull out.
We were halfway to town when Mom said, “I guess that went all right.”
“Yep, thanks to Mr. Largemouth Bass taking the bait.” Dad stuck his thumb back at me.
“You can say that again.” Mom grinned.
I sat up. “What are y’all talking about?”
“We knew you wouldn’t be able to keep your mouth shut,” said Mom. “You’ve been contradicting us since you learned to talk. The first word you ever said was ‘no.’”
I got that cold awful feeling that comes from discovering your parents are not quite as ignorant as you have always assumed. “Wait. You guys were doing that together?”
“Playing you like a fiddle,” said Dad. “See, Peg, kids always think they’re the ones that invented getting away with stuff. We were doing it long before you even existed.”
Mom smiled. “I knew if I told a flat-out lie, you wouldn’t be able to resist correcting me. And that would distract the man from what Daddy did. And sure enough! Thank goodness you’re so predictable.”
I was flabbergasted. I had bought their act completely, even played my assigned part in it. They had totally faked me out. It was like finding out your parents are secretly Bonnie and Clyde, robbing banks in their spare time. Dad fished a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it.
“What are you doing?” cried Mom. “You don’t smoke.”
“Shows how much you know. You want one?”
“What are those, Camels? Yeah, give me one.” She lit it with her own Zippo and blew smoke out the window.
“Can I have one?” I ventured.
“No!” they said in unison.
I coughed and rolled down my window.
Mom said, “Since when do you smoke?”
“Only out of town,” said Dad.
“Yeah, I don’t even want to think about what-all you do out of town. And you always nagging me to quit. You look so stupid with that thing in your mouth. You don’t even know how to smoke it!” She snatched the cigarette from his lips and tossed it out the window.
He grinned, and deftly grabbed her cigarette. “Ha!” He took one drag, blew the smoke in her face, and flung that one out the window too.
Okay, maybe this was love, some weird kind of “love” known only to them.
Dad found us two rooms at the Reid Motel, on Highway 80 on the way into Minor, just north of the Dairy Dog. The outside of the motel was homely and the rooms were even worse: hot, smelly, depressing. Dad said he had negotiated a dirt-cheap rate from the owner, Mr. Rashmi Patel. I said yeah, you get what you pay for. Dad said shut up, it was a fantastic deal. “You never had a pretty Injun lady coming to make up your bed for you at home, did you? You been whining about living too far out in the country. Now is your chance to enjoy city life!”
Mom set to scrubbing the bathtubs and putting out roach traps while Dad and I went to retrieve the boxes from the field on the hilltop above our former house. Down in the valley, we could see people still lining up at the yellow rope. It was strange how fascinated they were by something that wasn’t there.
After supper at Dairy Dog, we drove to the hospital. Every one of those glowing windows represented a sick person in bed. I had hated hospitals ever since that day in the emergency room in Pigeon Creek. “Mom, do I have to go in?”
“Don’t you want to see your sister? And Jacko?”
“I already know what they look like.”
Dad turned. “Am I gonna have a problem with you?”
“No sir.” I opened my door and got out. All day I had done a good job of saying “sir” and keeping my mouth shut. (Mostly.) I had passed up plenty of opportunities to say something smart. All I wanted was to get through this evening, get over to Arnita’s house somehow, and kiss her. Take her down to our place by the river.
“Don’t tell your sister about the house.” Mom’s heels clicked on the sidewalk. “It’ll be too big a shock in her condition.”
“I already told her.” I shrugged. “Sorry.”
“Largemouth Bass,” said Dad. “I told you, he can’t help opening his mouth.”
“Hey, y’all. Who does that look like to you? Over there.” I pointed to a concrete porch at the end of the building, where an old man slumped in his wheelchair, swatting at the bugs swarming around his head.
Mom followed the line of my finger. “Is that Jacko?”
“Looks like him,” I said.
“What on earth is he doing out here?”
“Good question,” said Dad.
We hurried across the grass. Jacko lay with his head on the armrest of the wheelchair. With his free hand he swatted at bugs.
“Jacko, what in the world?” Mom cried. “Who put you out here?”
“That nigger nurs
e.”
Mom was furious. How could anyone take a sick old man off his oxygen and dump him outside? “We’re going up there and find out,” she declared.
I held the door open while Dad maneuvered Jacko’s wheelchair into the elevator. Mom seethed all the way. “Unbelievable! What if we hadn’t come back to check on him? Would they have just left him out there all night?”
The elevator doors slid open on five. Mom marched to the reception desk, where the nurse with orange hair sat writing in a chart. She studied the chart for the longest possible time before letting her eyes roll up to admit the sight of us.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Mom said, “can you explain to me why I just found my Uncle Jacko off his oxygen, downstairs, and sitting outside?”
“Who?”
“This man.” Mom drummed the handles of Jacko’s wheelchair. “Mr. Jack Otis Bates, your patient. Who we just found, sitting outside the hospital, getting eat up by mosquitoes — and he tells me y’all put him out there! It’s a wonder he’s not dead!”
“He looks all right to me.” The nurse placed both hands wide on her desk and hoisted herself upright. “I’ll help you put him back in the bed.”
“No!” Mom yelped. “No ma’am. That’s not what I want! I want to speak to your supervisor!”
The nurse smiled. “Supervisor gone home. Mr. Jack, what you doin’ up out of yo bed? Don’t you know you need to stay in there in your bed and rest, and get you some oxygen?”
She was good. I was impressed by how jolly she seemed. She chuckled at us like we were silly white folks, making such a fuss over nothing.
“I can’t wait to hear what our lawyer is going to say about this,” Dad said.
“You got a lawyer?” she said. “How come, y’all been in trouble?”
“No!” said Dad.
“It’s a wonder, with that temper.” She commandeered Jacko’s chair, moving us briskly down the hall. “We done told Mr. Jack we don’t want him taking hisself outside, not when he ’posed to be in bed havin’ his oxygen! Ain’t that right, Mr. Jack?”
“Yassum.” Jacko’s eyes loomed wide — something like fear.
“Mr. Jack even done learned my name,” she said. “Hadn’t you, sir? Hadn’t you learned the proper way to speak my name?”