Drifting South. Charles Davis
I looked at all of it, and then at Herbert, and then flew out the double doors. I didn’t even think to pick up the four cents change she’d left on the napkin.
“Who is she?” Herbert yelled, as I took off out of Merle’s like the place was burning down around me. I didn’t know right then that it may as well have been.
I’d never see that place or any of those folks ever again.
Chapter 4
At some place outside of a dirty window that separated me from all of what I couldn’t stop staring at on the Trail-ways bus, I found myself drifting back to Shady Hollow, back to when I was free and running with the devil at my heels. I was young and fast then, but he was about to catch up to me as I tried to holler something back at Herbert. In that old memory, I couldn’t say a word, as naturally talky as I was back then, generally. I’d been quiet like that, too, around Amanda Lynn the first time I ever saw her, for a short spell anyway when she’d first cast her spell on me, and just the thought of her showing up in Shady so unexpected had knocked the wind right out of me.
I knew Herbert wasn’t trying to pull one on me because I’d never told him about Amanda Lynn or where I’d been taken the year before. After the elders had hauled me back to Shady, Ma told me to never tell nobody about going to Durham County because the elders had ruled on it. I never did because the last thing I needed was to get on the wrong side of the Shady elders.
But ever since they’d brought me back home, I never told Ma or nobody else that I’d been saving up to go back to North Carolina to be with Amanda Lynn one day. I couldn’t wait to get back there.
I always told folks in Shady Hollow that I didn’t have nothing but a bent slug dime, but I had a canvas sack full of real money, twelve hundred and fifty-seven dollars and change, most of it poker loot from the days when nobody knew I was lucky but was only just catching on to it. I’d saved all of it and kept it hidden under a floorboard that I’d pried up in my bedroom, and I had a ten-dollar bill hidden in my shoe at all times just like Uncle Ray had told me a man should keep.
My road stake was to go back and find Amanda Lynn when I turned eighteen, because that’s the day Ma had always told me I’d have my own way about things. And even though Ma wasn’t firm about much, she’d always been firm about that with all her boys. My eighteenth birthday was coming around soon enough, and that’s the day I’d planned to leave Shady Hollow.
A tugging part of me didn’t want to leave because I loved Shady, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before I’d be moving up Hoke’s pool shooting ladder to play the bigger games. But I never ever figured that Amanda Lynn would come there, so I always figured I’d have to leave. It would be hard saying farewell to my ma and brothers and all my old pards, I dern knew it would, but the older I got, I felt that place shrinking around me. I was being pulled away from there a little at a time even before I met Amanda Lynn.
The biggest part of me was pulling harder to leave than the tugging part of me was to stay, is what it was. That bigger part wanted to see all the things I’d heard so much about from so many who came and went from Shady. The best thing I’d ever seen was out beyond those mountains and far from the cold river that ran shallow and fast along the rocky banks, but so deep and slow and silent in the pools.
I’d never told Amanda Lynn anything about me but a pack of lies. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of me or Ma or my brothers or Shady or nothing like that, because I wasn’t.
But I guess Aunt Kate was right, telling me upon my welcome to the flatland the year before, that to someone who hadn’t spent time actually living on the side of the Big Walker in a whorehouse called the Last Rebel Yell, there didn’t seem a way to talk about any of it right that would come out without grit and dirt and blood and other things not suitable for dinner table talk all over it.
But Amanda Lynn had come to see me.
I didn’t know how she’d found me or why she’d come, but I kept hoping it was for the same reason that I wanted to go back and see her. I kept hoping that with all my might.
Running as hard as I could up the brushy banks of the river behind all of the businesses while trying to dodge cans smoldering with burning trash, and getting bit by chained-up dogs that were there to keep drunks from trespassing behind those same places, my mind was filled with Amanda Lynn and the times we’d spent together on the plantation. All of those long nights and the laziest days that went by too quick. I didn’t long for nothing else when I was with her. Nothing.
I wanted to hold her again to me tight so bad that it made me hurt all over. I prayed to myself, hoping that she’d be able to forgive me for just leaving her like I did with no notice and not a word or look said between us. And I prayed more that she wouldn’t ask me why I left so sudden, because I still didn’t know the full answer to that.
I still didn’t even know the real reason why my Aunt Kate took me away in the middle of the night to go there with Ma’s permission, except Ma said her and Aunt Kate finally agreed that a summer in North Carolina would do me some good.
But it was clear to me by the forceful way Ma and the elders had brought me back before that summer was near over that she’d changed her mind about that. I’d never fought nobody so hard as I did the day the elders took me back to Shady for no good reason that they’d tell me, except the elders had ordered it was time for me to go back home and we had to be quick about it.
Since I’d been a little boy, Ma had always told me that the world outside of Shady Hollow was a dangerous one. She said I wasn’t yet ready to step foot in it whenever I’d get in a wandering mood. But after she’d let me leave Shady Hollow with Aunt Kate and I spent those short months in Durham County, it didn’t seem a bit dangerous to me.
She kept telling me that she’d fetched me back because she missed me and needed me around to make money to help her take care of my younger brothers, but I didn’t think that was the real reason as she kept saying it was over and over. I remembered how the elders looked so serious and loaded down with guns when they came and grabbed me all in a rush.
Whatever the real reason was, Ma’d kept it to herself, as she’d do with so many other things.
As I crept up the back steps to where I lived so Amanda Lynn couldn’t get a glimpse of me yet, all of those thoughts swirled in my head. The one thing I didn’t think about or realize was that the terrible danger my ma had always feared and I’d never understood, had come to Shady Hollow.
And it was looking for me.
Uncle Ray jumped off of Ma’s sofa just as fast as I’d thrown open the front door. If he’d been standing behind it instead of lounging with his feet up, it may have killed him.
By the time he said something, I was already in the bathroom pouring a basin of water.
I grabbed the cake of soap from the rim of the bathing tub and I rubbed and rubbed on it and finally got some suds going even though the water was cold. After I finished and dried off, I still thought I didn’t look as good as I could. So I reached into Uncle Ray’s shaving kit that he kept on the second shelf and I searched and found his bottle of fancy hair-oil treatment. I squirted a bunch of it in my hands, rubbed it through my black hair in a big fury and then slicked it all back away from my face and over my ears like he carried his hair.
I studied my new look for a bit from the front and then side to side, and noted how it made me look older. I thought I looked better, too. I figured if I ran into my brothers, they were sure to give me some sass about my hair all shiny, but I’d shut that up right quick.
I was more pleased with my new look than I could have even hoped for, especially at that important moment, so I took one long last look before I wiped my hands on my dungarees and went into me and my brothers’ bedroom. I searched the closet and dresser for the best shirt I could find.
I found my favorite shirt, which was a little past a little dirty. A person would have to get close to notice though, I figured. I’d just tell Amanda that I’d been working hard all day to make traveling money to come to see her, that’s what I’d tell her if I saw