Delvin said, “I used to cut down through the alley back there looking for my friend Buster Moran.”
“The Morans, sho,” one of the boys said. “They moved away.”
“Old Moran was a pipefitter, I believe,” said the old man. “Out here to Cranley’s. On the colored shift.”
“I believe he was,” Delvin said.
Mr. Dandes talked about his farm out toward Scooterville, passed down in his family since it was deeded to them just after the Civil War.
“We been out there all summer,” the lively girl said. “That’s all we do in the summer — just farm, farm, farm.”
“Whoo, you don’t do nothing,” the older boy said, Harley. He had a riotous bush of shiny hair. “And sit under the arbor writing letters.”
The girl blushed. Delvin could see the blush on her light skin, feel it, as if the heat traveled, on his own face.
“What kind of letters?” he asked because he wanted to know and wanted her to speak to him.
“She writes to the government,” the other boy said.
“What about?’ Delvin said.
“About their shortcomings and about their longcomings too. I ask them if they are trying to be as helpful as possible.”
“She’s a complainer,” the lopsided twin said.
“I wrote the president a letter when I was a little boy,” Delvin said. This was true.
“What happened?” Harley said.
“He wrote back.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he was enjoying himself — I’d asked him about that — and he hoped I was enjoying myself too.”
“Were you?” the girl — more than a girl — asked.
“I was at the time.”
As he spoke to her — this, what, sixteen-year-old girl, seventeen maybe — he experienced a bluster and yank of feeling, something slung onto a pile of odds and ends, an accumulation of breached and disordered living, messes and blunders and crushed years and thoughts too sullen and miserable to do anything about, packed against clotted falsities, outright lies, hopes packed hard into sprung joints — useless dumb hopes — stuffed with the knotted eccentric sadness of the jailbird; slather of meanness and repudiation and scarcity. He hurt in his gut and the ache like a fresh malarial sickness sucked into his bones and filled his mind with confusion. He wanted to lash these ignorant people with sarcasm and bitterness, to humiliate them and leave them with pictures in their minds that would haunt and hurt them.
Excusing himself — forcing the polite words out of his mouth — he got up and walked away from the table.
He made his way out into the alley and stood in the ample dark, letting pain rush unhindered through him. He was not here, but he was not any other place either. He sat down, unlaced and took off his boots, removed his socks, stood up and walked half a dozen steps in the soft sand that covered the alley. He stretched out his hands like a man sleepwalking in a cartoon. He reached for the air and for whatever was in the air or might be soon. He could smell the hot lard. He could smell the smoke from the fire, birch wood and chestnut, he recognized them, still did. The chestnut trees were dying all over the country, a blight, come from where nobody knew, no way to cure it, the trees just died. He could smell something else, apples, yes, cut apples, a sweetness, unrevisable. Some said that doesn’t ring a bell, but for him everything did. Bole and bunch, dry squeak of old runner carpet, a cracked vase painted blue, a white shirt on a hanger hooked on a bedroom wire, smell of liver frying in the morning. The world a checklist of old favorites. He turned and walked slowly back, running his toes through the sand, taking his time. He smelled the roses on runner loops hanging over a fence. He went over and stood close to them. The blossoms were white and flat-faced and sweet. He touched a flower along the back of its face, feeling the swell of the bud it came from.
“It’s a cherokee rose,” a girl’s voice said from behind him.
He turned. The young, dark-eyed girl stood there. She too was barefoot.
He made a tiny sound, as hard to hear as a dog whistle.
The girl moved up and stood silently beside him.
“Indian roses,” he said. “I knew a Indian once.”
“We are part Indian ourselves — at least that’s what Daddy says. But he likes to make things up.”
She laughed a small, crackling, unrueful laugh, a slender girl with high-flown wiry hair.
“Would you like to take a walk?” he said.
“All right.”
They walked past quiet houses, secret lives alit in windows or concealed by the dark. In one yard a tire swing, the tire painted white. In another an old car up on a homemade lift, doorless, hood up, wheels like tilted snaggle teeth. At the next, on a back porch, two women sitting at a round table whispered furiously. They looked up and the whispering stopped, started again as they passed. Leftover summer frogs made clicking sounds. A nightbird issued the early version of its song. The two of them, man and girl, man and woman, boy and woman, boy and girl, walking, not touching, Delvin still barefoot carrying his boots, feeling sand and leaf, a stick, grass, round pebbles, a flat slab of rock under his feet, the girl close beside him, barefoot too; neither speaking.
They reached the end of the alley and stood in the opening that spilled a fan of pale sand like a little river mouth into the faintly lighted street. A tall shuttered house that had belonged to a traveling preacher reared just across quiet Silver road. The night was warm but Delvin could feel the coolness underneath, a coolness that carried winter in its arms. Other nights, feeling this, he might shudder for what was coming, but not now. The warmth was strong enough to keep them safe, for a little while. The silence extended between them until Delvin didn’t know how to break it or if he could. Just then she spoke. She asked him who he really was.
“I’m uneasy about answering that,” he said.
“I guess that’s an answer.”
He sensed that already she was trying to catch something that eluded her, catch her footing. He sensed a sadness in her and an energy that was not all straightforward, and a roughed-up gaiety. Her hands were long-fingered, strong-looking, almost as large as his.
“Are you timid?” she said.
“Vigilant.”
“What are you looking out for?”
He figured that she knew. “Goblins.”
“Plenty of them around this place.”
He was silent. With Minnie he had been let alone to grope his way; both of them groped. Now he sensed he was in another confabulation. He didn’t think he could keep up. Maybe it wouldn’t matter.
“I feel like asking you a hundred questions,” she said.
“Cause I’m a puzzle to you?”
“Yes — but everybody’s that — just some people you want to go ahead and put the questions to them, get on through the whatever it is keeps them off to themselves.”
“Lots of situations’ll do that.”
“Lots of reasons to build hideouts.”
“Sholy.”
“But they don’t matter.”
“How come?”
“Cause if you got to ask the questions anyway, you ask them. And then the other one, the one you asking the questions to, why, he has to decide for himself whether he’s going to answer them or not.”
“Maybe he can’t.”
“If he can’t, then maybe that’s the answer to all of them.”
“That’s a lot of weight,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Let me ask you something. Why do you want to know so much about me?”
“I can’t help it.”
The world seemed to have gone off in all directions. Every day he’d been free had been painful to him. It hurt to decide things. Soon as he could he’d latched on to a woman, Minnie May, sturdy and forbearing, owner of her own house, a small house on a quiet street, a woman away much of the time, grateful for what he might give her. Let her decide things. But what she decided scared him. And it scared him that Mr. Oliver was feeble — dying, he could see that, the future drying like a bubble of spit on his long lower lip. Out here everything was important, everything was too much: flake of soap on your wrist, smell of a bakery, somebody asking the time — like asking if you had the answer to their secret dilemma. It was all he could do not to turn himself in. Not to flee into some kind of drunkenness. Some other accelerating dark. But he had somewhere to go. Something to do. He had to hold on to that.