A grumbling exhale from Rollins’s end. The chair squeaked as his body settled back into what Ebenezer assumed to be its original uninterested posture.
“You know it’s a federal offense to transmit wrongful information to a law enforcement officer, don’tcha?”
Ebenezer shut his eyes and rested his head against the phone booth. He should have practiced his story.
“I’m not lying, Officer.”
“What’s your name?”
“Julius.”
“Uh-huh. Julius who?”
“Julius Thriftwhistle.”
“Well then, Mr. Thriftwhistle, why don’t you haul your ass down to the station and fill out a report for us? Then we can get to work sorting your story out.”
Ebenezer wasn’t going to any police station. Not in his state—not at all. They would ask for his ID. They might even run his fingerprints, and that would be very bad indeed. Ebenezer and the authorities were on less-than-jolly terms with each other.
“Or why not tell me where you are and I come to you? Pretty sure I heard a big truck blast by a minute ago on your end, so I’d guess you’re at a pay phone along the interst—”
Eb hung up. Bloody hell. That had gone poorly. He gazed into the diner. Pure undiluted Americana: bright linoleum and shiny chrome and the smell of delicious starches fried in oil. After a momentary debate, he pushed through the door. A bell tinkled. A father and mother and their young daughter sat in one booth. A traveling-salesman type occupied the counter. Pearl was dishing up them vittles.
He sat on a padded counter stool. He flipped through the miniature jukebox mounted beside his elbow. He slid a nickel in and punched B6. “Stand By Me,” by Ben E. King. Eb was surprised to find a black man’s song on the jukebox. The waitress approached with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.
“You okay, Mister?” Pronounced it as misser.
Eb smiled winningly. It probably didn’t help. “Tip-top, my dear. Thank you for inquiring.”
She set her order pad down and watched him carefully, the way you’d watch a small but vicious dog that had slipped its leash.
“What kinds of pie do you serve?”
“Sweet potato, blueberry, lemon, shoofly pie—”
“Shoofly?”
“It’s a northern thing,” she said. “Molasses pie. Our baker came down from Pennsylvania Dutch country. He brung the recipe with him.”
“Molasses, mmm? Sounds like treacle pudding. I ate that as a child in England.”
Flo clearly did not give a tin shit what Eb had done back in Merry Ole. She tapped her pencil on the order pad, wanting him to eat, pay up, and leave.
“How much?”
“Forty cents.”
“Sold! And a cup of coffee you can stand a spoon up in, if’n you please.”
“We don’t make that kind of coffee.”
His smile widened. “I’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
Eb closed his eyes and dropped his skull to the countertop. The ceramic was cool on his forehead. Lovely, such small pleasures. He ruminated. What were his options? He could keep going. That was good, and it suited his temperament. He’d promised them he’d call the police. Well, he had. That shitkicking detective gave him the gears, all because Eb had a funny way of talking. He wasn’t going to the police station; he’d wind up in a cell. What more did he owe, for Christ’s sake?
You’re scared, Ebenezer.
It was his aunt’s voice in his head. His aunt Hazel, dead nearly two decades now. But Hazel practically raised him. Eb’s father did what plenty of rot-ass fathers did—went out for a bottle of milk and a pack of Mayfair cigarettes one fine afternoon and never showed his face again. Not even to bring that tossing milk home. His mother was a sensitive type, prone to bouts of the nerves, as they were known in those days; as such, his rearing fell mainly to her older sister, Eb’s aunt, Hazel Coggins. Hazel was unmarried—“Men are as useful as a chocolate teapot,” she was fond of saying—and worked at the local butcher shop. A big, handsome woman, and a dab hand with a cleaver: she could draw and quarter a hog faster and cleaner than anyone. Hazel was a hard woman: eyes, body, outlook. Life was eat or be eaten, according to her, and better to be hunter than prey.
But as a primary school student, Ebenezer had too often been prey. The first-form boys would surround him in the sandlot after school—eight or ten boys, all of them white—to throw insults and, soon enough, fists. When Ebenezer returned home bloody-nosed on a third consecutive day, his aunt took action.
She was still wearing her butcher’s apron, wet at the hem with hog’s blood. She took it off, wadded it up, and—while Eb struggled—pressed it over his mouth and nose.
“Smell it!” She shoved it into his face as he choked on the sodden fabric. “Are you a hog, boy? Are you meat?”
She let him loose. He sucked in a great breath and stared at her warily, suspecting she’d spring on him again.
“Or are you made of sterner stuff, Ebenezer?” she asked. “You have to be, or you’ll never make it through this life.”
“What do I do?” he asked her.
“Tomorrow, you fight back. Until you can’t stand, if that’s how it must be.” She took his face in her callused palms. “If you bend to them now—if you let them cow you—then you’ll get used to the feel of the yoke around your neck.”
The next day when his tormentors assembled in the sandlot, Ebenezer said: “Well and good, lads. Let’s tussle.” He had nobody on his side; his teachers must have known of this abuse by now, but none of them stepped in. If nothing else, this solidified in Ebenezer the fact that his lot in life was to be a man alone—and if his isolation was to be an ever-present part of existence, he’d better learn how to function within that cold circle.
The first boy who rushed at him was a fat and beery-faced son of the local banker. Ebenezer curled his hand into a fist and struck back—and he was shocked to discover he was quicker and much more powerful than his antagonist. The boy’s fist struck him with the sting of a mosquito bite; meanwhile, his own fist hammered into that porky, satisfied face with a meaty smack. The boy reeled away with a strangled cry. Ebenezer pressed his advantage, throwing venomous punches at the boys ringing him—even the boys who had never struck him, who had only thronged him for the sport of it. You trifle with the bull, you get the horns, he’d thought, swinging vicious roundhouses at the wide-eyed white faces flocked around him. In time, the boys began to hit back—he was hammered hard, repeatedly, but this time, instead of turning tail, he’d hit back, again and again, giving almost as good as he got and relying on his ability to continue sucking up punishment while his adversaries lost their gumption, one by one, and fled.
That night he’d staggered home. His eyes were swollen shut, his nose broken, several knuckles crushed. He did not go to school for days. His aunt nursed him back to health. Even she seemed amazed at the punishment he’d taken. But when he returned to school, the torments ceased.
“You will never be scared again,” Aunt Hazel said proudly. “You’ll never be the hog.”
And he hadn’t been. From that day forward, he’d been the butcher. That had persisted until the night, only days ago, when he’d seen the boy with the slug-gray eyes all covered in roaches. Then—for the first time in over twenty years—he’d felt the blade on his neck. He was the hog again, his heart filled with that quailing, weak-kneed fear he’d fought so hard to push from his soul.
You were scared, Ebenezer, his aunt spoke inside his head. Come clean.