He knocked on the door he thought was hers, but the laughing voice that answered was somebody else’s. The next down he found her. Even the words Come in were spoken with an imperiousness he hadn’t heard before. But he understood where it came from. The first time Mr. O had let him drive the horses — down the alley and across the road onto the circus grounds — he had felt like a king. This was the same thing. But that didn’t stop it from hurting. One hurt piled on another tonight; piled on all the others, he thought, as something twisted inside him, something acidic and sour. He entered the room with a sneer on his face.
She lay alone amid the fouled bedclothes, wrapped in an old silk robe that belonged to Miss Ellereen. He recalled it from years ago. Yellow silk with pictures of seagulls and sailboats stamped on it. “My mother wore a robe like—” he started to say, but she stopped him with a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she said. A yellow robe Miss Ellereen had given to Cappie and then taken back when she saw how she looked in it, back when Miss Ellereen was still one of the girls. That was the story about his mother Coolmist had told him as they lay in a foundling bed on a hot summer night that smelled of the creosote the city oiled the dirt streets with. He remembered the smell of the creosote and the story and his Coolmist crying tears of frustration. A yellow robe with sailing boats on it. No one else was in the room with her, not a man, not Miss Ellereen, not the Ghost, not his mother.
He placed the glass on the little parson’s table by the bed; hesitated.
“You can go,” Kattie said.
She was wearing lip rouge and her cheeks were powdered the color of cornmeal.
“No,” she said, “stay.”
“What you want?”
“Stay a minute.”
She pulled her legs up under her robe, indicating for him to sit on the bed. He let himself gingerly down on the lumpy mattress. She canted her face and looked at him with a bovine expression that dissolved and was replaced by pique. But not before he caught in her eyes the strangling disappointment and lonesomeness. Something in him that he hadn’t even paid attention to, something hard and ready to strike, whirled slowly.
“You never have anything to do, do you,” she said, “but hang around doing nothing.”
“I got plenty to do. You didn’t hear about what happened to that boy?”
She pulled the robe tighter around her. “It’s got all these women scared to death. Not just them.”
“And what about you?”
“I been shivering all day.”
“Me too,” he said.
She looked at the punch.
“I didn’t really want that. I just wanted you to come up here.”
“For what?”
“You don’t have cause to be angry.”
“That robe you’re wearing used to belong to my mother.”
“I know your mama worked here.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“What about me?”
“You working here? I’d rather you hadn’t started.”
“I’m middling about it. I don’t like it much, but I don’t mind it much either. I been doing it a while now,” she said, her voice wandering off, “and I don’t mind it much.” She fingered her lapels. “You want me to take this robe off?”
“No. Not right now.”
“Miz Ellereen give me this robe.”
“She took it back from my mama.”
The sense of shame he had suffered under since the boy’s battered body was brought in deepened. The unruly thing in him — hard as slate — began to slide under. He reached for it but he couldn’t pull it back up. He lay back on the bed. She raised herself and bent over him, looking into his face.
“I don’t even know you,” she said.
A crease ran down the center of her bottom lip. What caused that? he wondered. He turned on his side. Suddenly he felt like a man waking with fever in a room where nothing matched. He scrambled off the bed and stood up.
“I got to go.”
“You don’t really have to.”
He stared at her. “I’m glad you got that robe.”
“How come?”
“So somebody — so you’re walking around on the earth in it. I like it that it’s still lasting.”
“I don’t know how long I’m going to last.”
“You seen the Ghost?”
“That boy they pulled out from under the house? He wouldn’t come around here again.”
“Maybe he would.”
A silence then. Somebody down the hall was laughing in a high unhappy voice. The walls of the room were covered in flocked pink wallpaper. Small places in the paper bulged out like there was something behind it. Anything could be there. The hardness had slumped, drained. Who was he? What was it he was about to do?
He said, “I’d go crazy having to be in this room all night.”
“Why don’t you get out of it then.”
It was like a light flashed across the back of his eyes. So quick he wasn’t sure if he’d seen it or not. He got up, reached down and pulled hard at the yellow bedspread. He pulled it off and her with it. She hit the floor and rolled over and scrambled away from him.
“You get the hell out of here,” she cried. “Lola!”
He cast a look of scorn at her. Not at her, at what was in the world behind her and all around them. If he had a match he could burn the place down — the row, the whole city. He didn’t have a match. He turned and ran out and away.
On the way home a man he knew slightly from the neighborhood, a worker on road crews, called to him from the side yard of Boniface Tillman’s house. Boniface was a gangster man, a runner of liquor and drugs through the mountain traces.
“Come over here, boy,” the man said. He stood foursquare, half in half out of the tree shadow, waiting for him. “I want you to drop over get a jug from the chinaman’s,” he said when Delvin approached.
Behind the house men moved around a large fire burning in an open space among large oak trees, doing something Delvin at first couldn’t make out. Then he saw they were thrashing somebody on the ground with what looked like willow switches.
“I’d be glad to do it,” Delvin said, “but they’re looking for me at home.”
The man grabbed him by the wrist, quick as a snake, and tried to put two dollars in his hand. “You go get that jug,” he said.
“I would, but I can’t.”
“Damn rascal, you take this case cash and go.”
Behind the house the shadows flung their arms up into the heavy leaves and brought them swiftly down. Delvin broke away and ran down the street. Across the street, light from an open grocery shone on a big Bull Durham sign painted on a billboard. A boy stood in the doorway eating with a spoon something out of a tin can. Was that the Ghost down on the ground by the fire? Getting beat on? He told himself it couldn’t have been and ran on, but he was afraid it was, and afraid — knowing it — for the kind of boy he was for running away.
But it wasn’t the Ghost because when he returned home he found him back in the shed, stretched out in the empty stall asleep on his pile of hay. Delvin woke him up. “Where you been?” he wanted to know.
“I had to go see my auntie,” the boy said.
“If you’re going to see your auntie, why couldn’t you stay with her?”
“She’s at the jailhouse. But I knew she’d be worried about me, so I had to go ease her mind.”