Drifting South. Charles Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ Both of us knew I was dead serious about the business I’d spoken of. It was the same business I’d figured that assistant warden didn’t have any business knowing a few hours before when he’d asked what my plans were when I got out. Assistant Warden Theodore Donald O’Neil the Third had seen it in my eyes though, sure enough.

      Her head turned sideways and then almost upside down, which made a big mop of red curls fall over her face. She was leaning so far out of her bus seat that when she took one hand to move her hair, she fell into the aisle. Her mother and baby brother didn’t notice the commotion, or her holler, as they kept sleeping while she climbed back up, situating herself for more room. It worked and she got a little bit. Her ma put an arm around her again, I guess out of instinct the way she looked sound asleep when doing it. The little girl soon moved it again without much notice.

      Looking out the bus window, I kept feeling a strange peacefulness trying to come on me as I stared at a landscape that went on in all directions to the sky and that had no fences, or at least they were ones a man could jump over without effort. I hoped the busy little girl would soon find something else interesting to help pass the miles…besides me. We were the only two people awake on the bus. I kept seeing her out of the corner of my eye leaning toward me, even after I cleared my throat loud to wake her momma.

      She’d been studying on me for some time. Something about my hands had caught her attention not long after the last stop, and even after I moved them to where she might study on something else, she kept trying to get a good look at them.

      I finally closed my eyes, and my mind was still drifting south to thoughts of home when I felt the bus seat move a little and felt a small finger touch my left hand. I pulled it away.

      “You get on back to your seat now,” I said.

      She looked up at me and smiled. “What’s that on the back of your hand?” she said.

      “None of your business,” I said. “Now go on back with your momma.”

      “My name is Grace.”

      I turned to look out my window.

      “What’s yours?”

      I tried to give her a hard look and then said, “It don’t matter none is what my name is.”

      “‘It don’t matter none’ isn’t a name, silly goose.” She started to laugh at her joke but stopped. “My dad used to have an ink drawing on the back of his hand.”

      “Grace, leave me be like I’m telling you.”

      “Momma likes men with tattoos. Frank doesn’t have one on his hand like Daddy did, but he has one on his arm.” She grabbed one sleeve and pulled it up to her elbow and pointed at the place Frank has a tattoo. “He’s meeting us at the bus station. We’re moving in with him. He’s got a house and a car but it doesn’t run right now.”

      “Hopefully he’ll get it running soon. Go on, now. I need some sleep.”

      “You haven’t been sleeping like everybody else, just watching what everybody is doing and looking out your window like me.”

      I grabbed her by a shoulder easy as I could to move her toward her ma when she turned back toward me. “I just want to know what that picture is on your hand.”

      I cleared my throat again loud, this time waking the old woman up in front of me, who turned around shaky with a scared sneer, and then I decided I best show my hand to the little girl if I was to get back my quiet. I turned it the right way so she could tell what it was and said, “It’s a big oak in the middle of a field.”

      “Why do you have it there?”

      “Something nice to look at from time to time, I reckon.”

      “Frank is a war hero. His is an army picture of a parachute with wings. Momma said Dad was a drunk. He had Momma’s name on his hand, though.”

      “Frank sounds like a fine feller and sorry about your daddy. Now go on. I need the rest.”

      She slid down and as she took a step across the aisle and jumped back on the seat beside her ma, she said, “He’s not nice but Momma keeps saying he’s got a job and a house with a big yard and a dog, and lots of other stuff.”

      I looked at her ma, who was still sleeping while trying to hold on to a baby boy on her lap through the whole conversation. She looked like a woman who could use a house and a big yard, and especially a lot of other stuff, minus Frank most likely, as her daughter pulled out a pad of paper and coloring sticks from a sack.

      For a good while the girl kept asking me questions and telling me things about her and her ma and brother and her dead daddy and Frank, and drawing pictures and wanting to show them to me. I kept playing possum with my eyes closed through all of it. I didn’t want them closed, I wanted them open to see what I’d been missing all of those years out that window. But I did feel safe that I could close them without worry of harm, because I’d studied every set of eyes at every stop that bus made and never saw a threat. And I could always tell the blazing look trying to be too still, or almost always.

      I did notice, watching everyone on that bus earlier that evening, that I was different in ways I hadn’t figured on, even when so many seemed not to be much more prosperous than I was, like that little girl and her family. But not so different. So much had changed, but some things surely hadn’t.

      I guess Frank was waiting for Grace and her family in Carlisle because that’s where they all got off in a hurry, but not before she laid a picture on the seat next to me. It was a nice colored drawing of a green tree in a yellow field. I ignored it at first but then gave it a good look over after they got off, and then I put it careful in the paper sack with the rest of my things.

      With no more commotion beside me, I was able to not pretend I was asleep anymore. On the half-hour stops in Hagerstown and Chambersburg, I did a lot of walking around and spent over five dollars buying Coca-Colas and Zagnut candy bars. Things I hadn’t tasted in quite a while and they tasted so good I couldn’t get enough of them.

      Between the stops and just looking out my window and trying to figure how I was gonna fit in any of it, I had a lot of time to think about Shady while watching the quiet miles of highway go by and drinking my odd-looking bottles of Coca-Cola. The pop tasted the same, maybe even better, at least to me, but the bottles and machines they came out of were a lot different.

      For some reason all of the new around me made me not think about what was to come and all of the things I was gonna do; it made me do a lot of remembering on being a young’un and growing up in Shady Hollow, and the bad that happened there on a nice Sunday evening, September 28, 1959.

      September 28,1959 was the last day before my life ended, and I never saw it was coming.

      Ma did, though.

      Chapter 3

      “What’s for dinner?”

      “Your momma’s gonna be busy for a while,” Uncle Ray had said.

      “How long?”

      “All-nighter.”

      “You eat yet?” I asked.

      “Not hungry.”

      Uncle СКАЧАТЬ