“Not Rodney Lee.”
“No, Mr. Midget got wind of it and came by, real chivalrous and neighborly like, and . . .”
Scotty’s back, pressing a glass of lukewarm water into her hand.
“Here you go, Mrs. Hunter.”
She ignores him, prodding Mason. “Mr. Midget came by, and . . .”
“Yes, ma’am, and when he saw the mess in the kitchen, he said—”
“Sorry to interrupt, but you might want to drink some of that water,” Scotty advises, pushing the glass into her hand. “You’re looking awfully flushed.”
“What did Rodney Lee say?”
“Said you got real friendly with a Negro from out Barrow way,” Mason tells her, “and that he might’a done something awful to you.”
“He’d never hurt me!” she screams, plunking the glass onto the end table, and missing. It crashes to the floor and shatters into a storm of glistening daggers.
She hears her mother cry out beyond the window screens, and her father calls, “Everything all right in there, Duke?”
“Just fine, sir,” Mason calls back. “Just a little mishap here, is all.”
“So there is a Negro man? Why didn’t you let us know?”
“Let you know what?” she asks Scotty.
“That this no good n—”
“Officer Jackson,” Mason cuts him off with a warning look, and turns to Melody. “Mrs. Hunter, if someone’s been bothering you, especially while you’re pregnant and alone here with your husband away serving our country, we’d want to—”
“No one’s been bothering me!” Melody’s heart pounds along in time with the baby’s fists. “Where on earth would you get that idea, Officer Mason?”
“Like Rodn—uh, Mr. Midget said, these people have plumb gone crazy, torching and looting every—”
“Do you see any torching and looting here? Do you?”
“Well, now, ma’am, your kitchen sure looks like it’s been looted,” Mason says, “and there was blood all over the—”
“I cut my knee when the drawer fell! And then I went out!”
“Dressed like that? Without pickin’ up all that mess, or at least wipin’ up the blood?” Scotty shakes his head.
“Where’d you go, Mrs. Hunter, that you were in such a hurry to get out of here that you couldn’t even get dressed?”
“For a walk!”
“You were driving,” Mason points out.
The truth would have been so simple.
I heard about the assassination and I went to visit a friend.
“I drove to the beach. I walked on the beach.”
Duke says, “Seems to me a woman in your condition shouldn’t really be walkin’ around on any beach. And in a nightgown.”
“Let’s get back to the Negro,” Scotty suggests. “He put you up to this?”
“Did who put me up to what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You said he wouldn’t hurt you—so you do know Cyril LeBlanc?”
The name hits like a razor-sharp shard.
She thinks of Rodney Lee in his car on that February night when she was on her way to her parents’ house. “Someone’s been putting crazy ideas into that pretty little head of yours.”
She’d read that dog-eared handbook in Travis’s drawer. Read all about sacred duty to the brotherhood, and the oath to protect the sanctity of womanhood, the American home, and patriotism.
“Mrs. Hunter? Do you know Cyril LeBlanc?” Mason gazes at her, forefinger propped on the tip of his mustache. “He works behind the counter over at that colored meat market—Morrison’s.”
“I don’t shop there.”
“I wouldn’t expect that you do. But you know him?”
“No. Now I’m going to ask you gentlemen to be on your way.”
“Ma’am—”
“I’m sure you understand. All this fuss isn’t healthy for a woman in my condition. So if you’ll excuse me . . .”
She sails out of the room, closes the bedroom door behind her and turns the lock. Then she leans back against it, shaken, eyes closed, thinking of the white hood in her husband’s drawer and the scars on Cyril’s face.
Weary after a milk delivery shift that had begun in the wee hours and then all the excitement over at Travis’s place this afternoon, Rodney Lee pulls up in front of the low stone block house he shares with his mother.
She’s not home. On Fridays, she goes from her waitress job at the luncheonette to the bartending job she’d started a few weeks ago. This one is at a joint where Rodney Lee always liked to shoot pool with his buddies. Now that she’s behind the bar, he stays away, even on nights when she’s not working. No man wants to see, or even hear about, his mother falling all over the patrons, and none are off-limits when Ruth Ann Midget starts sampling as much as she’s pouring. He’s gotten into more than his share of skirmishes with guys his own age who think it’s funny to tell him they’d messed around with his old lady.
Before he throws the first punch, he always says, “Take it back, or I’ll kill you.”
Some do, right away. Others hold out a little longer.
In the end, they all take it back. Even when it’s the truth.
He parks the Impala at the curb and goes to the mailbox. A letter from Travis isn’t the only thing he’s looking for, but the other evaporates from his thoughts the moment he sees an envelope with the familiar red-and-blue-ticked border right there on top of the stack.
He opens the door, and his mother’s cat pushes out past him. It brushes against his legs, and he kicks it.
“Whole damned house smells like your piss,” he calls after it as it scampers into the weeds and disappears over the chain-link fence.
He slams the door and dumps everything but the letter onto the pile of unopened mail on the hall table. The heap topples, scattering envelopes—mostly overdue bills and collection notices—all over the floor. No draft notice today.
But it’s coming. The first week in March, he’d been summoned for his armed forces physical. Stripped down and funneled along with hundreds, maybe thousands of fellow underwear-clad healthy specimens, he wondered how many would be dead in a year’s time.
He’d passed the physical examination. And then he passed the mental aptitude tests that had tripped up his pal Buddy when he’d attempted to enlist right out of high school.
“I thought they were looking for soldiers, not geniuses,” he’d complained after being deemed mentally unfit for the army. But Buddy has a second chance, now that the Pentagon lowered the recruitment standards. He reports to basic training in a couple of weeks.
Rodney Lee’s Statement of Acceptability arrived in the mail before the month was out. It’s just a matter of time before he’s called up as an infantryman. He’ll do his patriotic duty, just like Travis.
“I wouldn’t say he’s fighting for our country,” Melody Hunter had the nerve to tell Rodney Lee the night he’d stopped to offer her a ride. Then she’d gone on to criticize President Johnson.
Until then, Rodney Lee hadn’t believed the gossip about her, even though he’d heard she’d been driving Travis’s car around Barrow Island last summer. He’d figured there was a logical explanation for that—maybe dropping off a housekeeper, some such thing.