Wise Men: A Novel Page 10

  “And if it were Lem,” she said, uneasy in her seat, edging closer to the open window, still giddy, I suppose, that she’d gotten here to Bluepoint at all, “I guess I’d have ducked and turned around.”

  “So you came here for me?” I asked.

  “I hope that’s all right.”

  “It’s so late,” I said. Beside me, in either direction, the path dissolved into darkness. Wind against the dry leaves in the bushes made an anxious chittering noise. When she stopped the car, the water once again became the loudest thing. Far off, there was no evidence of traffic on the county road. We were alone, but still, I hated to think what would happen if someone discovered us.

  “I didn’t want anyone to be awake,” she said. “That’s why I left so late.”

  “Did you get lost?”

  She pointed at the map. “I can read a map.”

  I tapped the roof of the car. “Is this your father’s?”

  “He bought it new,” she said. “In Birmingham. Said they’d told him he was bound for Milwaukee. He’ll probably lose it soon in some card game. But yeah, it’s his.”

  “Milwaukee?”

  “The big league. The Majors. The Milwaukee Braves.”

  “Why didn’t he mention that?”

  “He threw nine pitches, that’s why.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They called him up. He threw nine pitches. And then they cut him.” She shrugged, as if this were something I shouldn’t find as sad as I did. “He says if he’d known how it’d turn out, he’d have bought something used. Something cheaper.”

  There was rust over each wheel well. Both tires were missing their hubcaps. The interior handle on the driver’s side had been cracked and was held together with what looked to me like fishing twine.

  “It’s dangerous to be out right now,” I said, “isn’t it?”

  “For you? Not so much,” she said.

  “You know what I mean, Savannah.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess.”

  “You shouldn’t have done this.” I pointed at the clothing. “I gave it to you because I wanted to.”

  “I thought you brought it all over because you didn’t need any of it.” She put one hand on the clothing. “I thought you said that your folks just shop and shop and shop, and they don’t even know what they’re buying.”

  “I did,” I said. Then I shook my head. “They do.”

  “Well, I came to thank you.”

  “Totally unnecessary,” I said. “I didn’t do it to be thanked.”

  This made her smile. “Please.”

  “I wasn’t flirting with you.”

  “You weren’t?” she asked. Her feelings seemed to be hurt.

  “Unless—”

  “Just because I live where I live doesn’t mean I can’t recognize a boy being sweet on me.”

  “Being sweet on you,” I said, smiling. “Is that what I was doing?”

  “Listen,” she said. Again, she seemed to test her thoughts before uttering them. I could almost watch them flash and fail in her. Finally: “I just think I acted badly. I guess I’m not good at accepting all this charity.”

  “No,” I countered. “I shouldn’t have come over. It was wrong of me. I should have asked if you needed anything.”

  “Who would you have asked?”

  “Lem?”

  She laughed. “My father was right. He thinks it’s his job to look after us.”

  “Maybe I could have asked your father,” I said.

  She scoffed. “I think you know how’d he have answered you.”

  “I’m going to buy him his fishing rod,” I said confidently.

  “Please don’t,” she said.

  “Why? That rod he has is broken. He’ll never get it to work.”

  “I hate fish. If you get him a new rod, all I’ll have to eat is fish. Every day.”

  “You’re living in the wrong place if you don’t like fish.”

  “Believe me,” she said, very seriously, “I didn’t want to come here. I fought it the whole time.”

  I stepped closer to the car. Now my whole side was pressed against the passenger door.

  “Where were you before this?” I asked.

  She shook her head again. “I’m not getting into my whole life story with you.”

  “OK,” I said.

  She touched the clothing again. “Thank you, Hilly.”

  “It was nothing. Really. It wasn’t anything big,” I said.

  “But it was. You saw our house. It’s not even a house. We had a house once. That’s a cabin. A shed, really. Not even a shack. You saw. My dad keeps saying he’s gonna get it fixed. It’s embarrassing even to have Lem see us that way. He’s got it made out here. But then you had to come with him.”

  For a few moments I was quiet. What happened now, I wondered?

  “You never answered me,” she said quietly. Her voice had changed. I realized that it was the sound of her being nervous.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is it all right that I came?” she asked. “Are you glad?”

  It had been Savannah’s idea to sleep in the Packard. I told her it was risky. Not only because my father would have tried to kill us if he caught us—me first, Savannah second—but because he’d notice my absence in the house at some point the next morning. He would notice everything, however damaged and bruised and bloodied Robert had left him. Savannah, though, was adamant. It was near two now. She was exhausted, and so was I. The drive back to the Emerson Oaks at this hour was sure to attract notice. A black girl driving without a license at midnight without getting stopped was lucky enough. And at my suggestion that we sneak into our house, or into Robert’s house, she insisted that it was safer to park the car beneath a tree somewhere on the property and sleep until the sun rose, at which point she’d drive home. The car, she told me, was big enough to hold both of us. “I sleep in the back,” she said. “You sleep up front.”

  We parked at the end of the path to Lem’s apartment, where a copse of tall firs provided a decent semblance of privacy. She wanted to see what the water looked like at night, she told me, and she grabbed my wrist, her shoes in her free hand, and walked barefoot across the tall grass. The only sound was the lapping crash of the ocean. When we reached the one large tree in the clearing west of our home, a hulking bent birch, its bark peeled and encased in wind-sprayed salt, she stopped me, her hand flat against my heart. The moon was still covered by clouds, and the surface of the water was dark, murky, shapeless. When she took her hands away, I felt cold.

  “Don’t,” I said, taking her hand.

  “You’re sleeping up front,” she said again. “I’m sleeping in the back.”

  “But we’re not going to sleep now,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re going to get me in trouble,” she said. She was smiling so broadly. And so was I. For a moment I dared myself not to look away when she looked at me. I wanted just that small thing, to not flinch, but I couldn’t. When she looked my way, I pretended to look out at the water, to find something interesting out in the waves.

  “You bored?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “not at all.”

  “Boys always seem to get bored around me.”

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  She sighed. “It’s true. Most of the time, at least.”

  “Boys you drive all the way out to beach to see? Those boys always seem to be bored?”

  “Now you’re flirting with me,” she said, laughing. “That, I can tell.”

  “I made you cry earlier,” I said.

  “Oh please. Let’s not talk about that. About me crying. Let’s talk about this house of yours.”

  We both turned around to look out at the house. We were down at the edge of the beach. Weeds poked up through the sand. The way we were standing there on the beach, it was like we were spies, or burglars, getting ready to ransack the place.

  “When this is all yours,” she said, “which
one will be my room?”

  “Oh, you want to play that game?”

  “I like an ocean view,” she said. “That’s something you might want to know.”

  “That’s fine. I can handle that.”

  “I can’t believe you just live there like this,” she said. “That you just wake up every day and the beach is here.”

  “It’s not bad,” I said.

  This made her laugh. “Hilly, this is amazing.”

  When she turned back around, I lingered for a moment. Looking out at the house, I wondered when my parents would go home, when Robert would return, even when Lem might discover us.

  “How about I show you something?” she said, and then she pulled a sewn doll from her purse. It was near six inches long, woven in white and cream colored yarn, with a round face, a jagged stitched mouth, a floppy-brimmed blue cap, and two black flecks of stone for eyes.

  “What do you think, Mr. Wise?” she said.

  “Did you make this?” I asked.

  “With my mother.” She shrugged. “She made these when she wasn’t washing up at the Emerson. She wanted to get good at it, maybe sell them to a toy store on commission.”

  “On commission?” I asked.

  “It’s when you sell the store something, and then the store sells it to customers, and you get a cut.”

  I had the doll in my hand. I wiggled its small head in Savannah’s direction. “I know what it is,” I said.

  “Then why’d you ask?”

  “To hear you talk,” I said.

  “Oh gosh. Can you stop being sweet on me for one second?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Lem is my mother’s brother,” she said quietly. “Or he was.”

  “She died, didn’t she?” I asked.

  She nodded and then reached for the doll. By the way it flopped in her hand, it seemed as if it were struggling as she took it. “This was one I tried to do myself. It’s got a messed-up mouth. I’m not good with my hands. Not like her. She was so good. She could just do this so easy. So quick.”

  She dug into her bag and retrieved two other dolls. These were perfect, clearly done by a person with skill, and I saw nothing to distinguish them from the dolls sitting on the shelves of the toy shop in Wellfleet.

  “You just carry these around?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “sometimes. My mom kept them in a box in the house. The box was the only thing that didn’t burn up in the fire,” she said softly. “It was weird. It was just there, not a thing on it. After the fire department left, I went in, and it was basically the only thing of hers I got back. These little guys.”

  “I didn’t know it was a fire,” I said.

  She made a small, disappointed noise. “Lem doesn’t tell you anything, does he?”

  “No,” I said. I had three dolls in my hand now, surely the first and only three dolls I’d ever had in my hand. “I guess not.”

  “It was awful,” she said. “Fires are awful.”

  She smiled at me. The clouds were above us and there were no stars and I felt perfect to be there with her.

  “Do you like them?” she asked.

  “They’re nice,” I said.

  “Nice for a doll. That’s what you mean?”

  “No. There’s nice because they’re yours,” I said. What I didn’t say was that I loved hers the most. Hers was beautifully imperfect. Perfection was boring.

  “You like living here?” she asked. “In this place? This town? Sounds to me like ya’ll are always arguing.”

  “Lem tell you that?”

  “I think he tells me more than he tells you.”

  I thought of the letters and wondered what this meant.

  “My father is busy. And anxious about things.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s this law firm. They want to hire my dad. But he had this other case, this guy without a foot, and that was sort of taking up his time.”

  “A guy without a foot?”

  “He got it cut off by a train.”

  “That’s nasty.”

  “Well, everything sort of went wrong. Now everyone’s angry.”

  “Sounds fun,” she said.

  “I guess.” I took a deep breath. “It’s pretty here, but I like the city more, I think. It’s slow here.”

  “I am making you bored,” she said. “See?”

  She leaned forward. She wore a simple silver necklace, and as she moved, it tapped against the skin on her clavicle.

  “You ever see anybody famous in New York?” she asked.

  “Once I saw Clark Gable.”

  “Oh,” she said. Obviously she wasn’t a fan. “Nobody better?”

  “I don’t know. My mother thinks she sees people all the time. Like, she thinks she’s always seeing Judy Garland or something.”

  “I love Judy Garland,” she said.

  “Yeah, but it’s never her. It’s always someone regular. Some ordinary woman walking her dog.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “My father knows famous people. But they’re usually lawyers and people from the government.”

  “How about any musicians? Or painters? Does he know anyone like that?”

  “Well, I know Lem Dawson. He’s a painter. You ever hear of him?”

  For a few minutes we sat down on the edge of the beach and watched the water and the moon. I felt brave enough to put my hand on her hand, and then she put her hand on my leg. For a moment I thought she was going to kiss me. I was sure of it, and I thought she was sure of it, and then, either because she got scared or because she thought I was scared, she got up and started walking back to the car.

  She began to talk: “My mom, it was like nothing bothered her. She’d go to work at that awful place, the Emerson Oaks, and she’d be hauling the laundry and hauling the trash, and she’d be polishing the dining tables, and the whole time she’d have these guys from the city coming on to her, or squeezing her on the backside, or walking up and whispering some crazy shit in her ear, like, ‘Oh, I like the taste of chocolate.’ And you know, she just shrugged it off. Every time. Me: I’d have stabbed somebody. But her? She just came back home, made me dinner, acted happy. She had to make two dollars for every one, just ’cause she knew my dad would gamble it or waste it somehow. I just thought we were on our way out here. You know, everybody gets a bad move. A mistake. Coming here was ours. Lem told my mom there was work to be had. That the people’d be better here than they were in Savannah, or in Atlanta.”

  She stopped and looked back at me. “Are they?” I asked.

  This was the loudest I’d heard her laugh. “Dumb people live everywhere, Hilly.” She kept walking. We were almost back to the car. “Her whole life she just kept following my dad around. Go to Macon, watch him play ball. Go to Birmingham, watch him play ball. Go to Richmond. Go to Cincinnati. Go to Cape Cod because her brother told her to. She just never did anything she wanted to do. Then, boom. Fire starts in a dining hall. That’s it.”

  We were going through the brackish beach weeds. She had her shoes in one hand, the hem of her skirt in the other. Her hair wasn’t much longer than mine, but she’d tied white baby’s beads to the ends of her ponytail, and as she ran they clapped against her neck.

  “You wanna know a secret?”

  “What’s that?” I whispered.

  She got to the car first and leaned up against the door. She waited until I was next to her before she answered me.

  “You have to promise not to tell,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said. “I promise.”

  “No,” she said, all the easy joy in her face suddenly gone. “Seriously. I’ll come and find you. I’ll hurt you.”

  “Oh, will you?” I said. I felt brave enough now to put my hand onto her shoulder without much of a thought. Her eyes narrowed with amusement as I did it.

  “You’re a bad flirt, Hilly Wise.”

  “I think every girl in my school knows that. This is well established.”

&nbs
p; She laughed. “What kind of stupid name is Hilly, anyway? Whose dumb idea was that?”

  “It’s short for Hilton.”

  “Still,” she said, “it’s kind of dumb.”

  “Don’t Southern boys have names like that? That’s what my dad always told me. That people would hear my name and think I was from the South.”

  She still hadn’t moved. Her body: long and brown and gold. “They teach you rich white boys about the South in your fancy schools?”

  “They teach us some,” I said.

  “I can’t even imagine,” she said. “I bet it’s all just peach trees and horse races and funny accents.”

  Of course, what I wanted to say was that we learned about slavery.

  “What’s your big secret, anyhow?”

  She turned and opened the car door. When she answered, she was facing away from me, and her voice was quiet.

  “I’m gonna run away,” she said.

  “What? When?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Soon. Me and Lem.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Really.”

  “Tell me when. I’ll come.”

  “You will, huh?”

  “Well,” I said, trying to be funny, “I guess it depends where you’re going.”

  “Who knows? Somewhere else. Somewhere nice.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. I kicked at the dirt. “Not at all.”

  “You don’t believe it? Or you don’t want to believe it?”

  I couldn’t think of how to respond to that. She was sitting on the passenger’s seat of Charles’s car. Her bare feet were on the sandy ground. The door was open. Bugs were bouncing off the glass. A thin sheen of sweat had emerged on her forehead. Even though it was night, it was warm and muggy, the weather over the ocean stalled. She looked down to her shoes, hanging by their straps in her hands, and then up at me defiantly.

  “I like being with you,” she said.

  What a thing to say! Somehow she had the confidence to utter this. There was no one around, not a soul within earshot, but still I swiveled to see if anyone had heard her. She laughed at me.

  “Anyone ever say that to you?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Any female?”