Treeborne Page 4

  just trying to feel alright. But soon enough

  they both run out, and I am left without a doubt

  that there ain’t no substitute for you.

  Lee shook these words out of his mind. “Reckon how the Conquistadors’ll do this year?”

  Ricky said nothing. Hands resting on thighs, finger yet pointing, clutching the peach so tight, Lee knew, he’d bruised the delicate red and orange innards.

  Lee rubbed at a coffee-cup stain on the desk he didn’t need in the office he didn’t need in the cabin where he’d been raised after his momma momma stepped on a nail poking out from a rotten board in the yard and, later, after her foot swoll like a water-filled carnival balloon, died. No government folks around to carry off an orphaned nigger those days, but a white couple calling themselves missionaries, who prayed straight to a crucified Jesus hanging on their wall, brought Lee the boy out of Freedom Hills and into the far western reaches of Elberta County. Momma Pat and Mr. Robin were against plenty kinds of fun, but not against singing and guitar-playing—so long as it was for God’s glory. Lee hisself never came around to this way of believing, to becoming what the church folks called a True Believer. Neither did Mr. Prince. Once, after Lee’d started working at The Peach Pit, he asked Mr. Prince if he ever felt guilty for faking in church. “The joy I get is real,” Mr. Prince said. Same with Lee and music, with Mr. Robin teaching Lee the boy how to hunt the woods, with Momma Pat teaching him how to grow a big giving garden, how to cook what you grew in any season so it tasted better than just something you could simply stomach. The joy was real. For this, and for a gapped roof over his head all those years and now, Lee Malone was grateful—even if hunting wasn’t the same anymore, and he had nobody to cook for but hisself and the fool dog panting ninety-to-nothing underneath the cabin, and he hadn’t picked up his guitar Rosette since Maybelle died almost three months ago. The only place other than church where a black man was welcome to play and sing anyhow was a decommissioned riverbarge turned beer joint called Roger’s Lounge.

  “That Snell kid’ll be running it this year,” Lee said. “Big-old boy. I remember his daddy too.” Conquistadors football could always draw Ricky Birdsong out of his moods. The sport had ruined but also made him—and here you were nothing if not what you came from. “Well, maybe they’ll be alright,” Lee said then took a long drink of coke-cola.

  Out the window he could see a picker hacking at briar and beggarweed. The orchardfield could grow over fast. Another picker toting baskets down at the fruit stand, where a box truck was backed up to the loading bay. Lee had worked up an agreement to deliver fresh peaches to a grocery store down in Bankhead next season. The box truck an investment on this deal, which he hoped would yet hold up. Feared it would not after his recent stint in the Elberta County Jail. Don’t ever give them a reason, his momma momma used to say. And look here what Lee Malone had done. Whole town talking. There was no changing what he’d done. Like Lee told the sheriff, he wasn’t fixing to just leave Maybelle’s body out there in them woods.

  Down by the road stood a giant fiberglass peach Lee had put in before last season. Folks loved making pictures with the peach, hugging the big-old sucker best they could reach around it, especially during the Hernando de Soto Peach Days Festival, when a parade brought oodles and oodles of folks out to the orchard and fruit stand. Beach traffic had been good this year too. None of those folks knew Lee Malone’s personal business. They bought baskets upon baskets of ripe Elberta peaches to eat on the sugar-white sand rimming the Gulf of Mexico. There’d be one more rush of tourists come Labor Day. Maybe his last.

  Lee was surprised how many folks came to The Peach Pit after what happened during this year’s Peach Days parade. Or so Ren Treeborne told it when he came by the jail with a sack of banana-and-mayonnaise sandwiches. They ate and listened to Pedro Hannah. His report didn’t mention Tammy, what she’d done, only Lee Malone’s arrest on suspicion of foul play in the death of Maybelle Chambliss Treeborne. Doc Barfield had been by to tend Lee’s ear, which felt like somebody had gobbed it up with honey. The gunshots so loud. Time Pedro was ready to go off-air for the night, Ren nearly had Aaron Guthrie convinced to let Lee leave under house arrest. Seemed like the sheriff didn’t truly believe Lee would hurt Maybelle either. But he worried what the Times-Journal would say. Outside a reporter lurked. Ren hung around till morning light, Lee telling him to get on and rest. But go where, rest what for? Ren had troubles of his own. Lee hated seeing a young man thisaway, especially one as good as Ren Treeborne.

  “Well,” he said to Ricky, and took another drink. The coke-cola made him thirstier. He wanted to splash whiskey into it, but he wouldn’t drink that stuff in front of the boy. It wasn’t right to think of Ricky Birdsong as a boy. But Lee did. A dirt dauber landed on Ricky’s hand, hunting the peach in his fist. Lee reached into his shirtpocket and adjusted a dial on the little box till he could hear the dauber’s shiny buzzing wings. “Hotter than Hades,” he said, a little too loud. Then quieter: “I don’t reckon it was so hot this time last year, was it?”

  Ricky said nothing. Like talking to a wall, Lee thought, remembering his momma momma saying the same exact thing about his daddy. That and, he knew I couldn’t stay mad no more if he banged on the piano, the sorry-ass devil. The instrument was still in the house when Lee’s momma momma died from the rusty nail, when Momma Pat and Mr. Robin came for Lee the boy. In good condition too for an instrument from before the war. Lee had no memory of how the piano came to be. Far as he knew it had always been—just like the bald bluff that gave Freedom Hills its name. The piano stood tall and upright against the newspapered wall. Lee the boy begged Momma Pat and Mr. Robin to bring it. Instead Mr. Robin carved the boy a guitar and strung it with dried animal guts. Lee the boy had never touched a guitar, but his hands knew where to go, like a piglet knows how to find a sow’s hard plum-colored teat. One Sunday service the True Believers got so touched by the Lord they fell upon Lee the boy playing his homemade guitar at the altar and broke the instrument into a hundred pieces while hollering hallelujah-glory-be-hallelujah-to-the-Lamb. When the service ended Mr. Robin glued the pieces back together, prayed the instrument dry, then restrung it.

  A few years after he’d been taken by the white couple Lee the boy returned to the four warped walls between which he’d been born. The house had been plundered and smelled like old piss. A small black turd lay curled on the floor where Lee the boy used to play with the cornhusk dolls his momma momma tied—way she did for herself and her siblings as a slavegirl in Marion. The piano, Lee discovered, had been busted and burnt as kindling. Its ivory keys and steel strings toted off. He found a fake jade comb melted in the cold fireash. Knocked the comb against his britches a few times. His momma momma used to brush his hair with it in quick short yanks that made him shiver all over. Momma Pat now kept Lee’s hair shaved down to the itchy scalp, and Mr. Robin would play at using the boy’s head to clean mud off his boots.

  Lee watched as Ricky Birdsong slowly raised his sticky fist and bit into the peach it held. Juice trickled down his chin as he chewed like a bored steer, considering whatever it was that he couldn’t, for the life of him, seem to speak.

  “Just tell me,” Lee said. He fiddled with the wire connecting the little box in his shirtpocket to the bulb inside his earhole. “I can’t do nothing son if you won’t tell me.”

  Maybelle would know what to do. The thought drove into Lee again and again. He wished he could just ask her. He didn’t believe in prayer, in talking to God or to the dead by shutting your eyes tight and mumbling under your breath. He believed that doing what you loved to do was near as you’d get to communicating with anybody on this earth or beyond. And look what Lee’d done. Look what he was doing. Hadn’t sang since her funeral, didn’t play Rosette. Forget trying to come up with a new song. He hadn’t written a new song in years.

  Buckshot came inside and lapped water from a cereal bowl, tongue flashing against the yellowed ceramic. He trotted over and nosed
Ricky, then sat down and thumped the underside of his chin four times.

  “Let me give you a ride over at the house then,” Lee said.

  Buckshot sat between them on the bench seat. Lee waved at Raul and Pee-Po sharing a jug of water in some shade as he steered the pickup onto the road. They’d just passed the Quik-Stop when a line of pickup trucks came flying from the opposite direction. Buckshot barked at the hounds standing atop toolboxes and leaning over the sides of the truckbeds. Lee recognized most every vehicle in this line and the white faces behind the dirty windshields. Ren Treeborne brought up the tail end, Wooten Ragsdale sitting passenger. Lee stopped in the middle of the road and spoke to them.

  “Where’s the fire at?” he said. Buckshot leaned over, panting for attention, and Lee shoved the dog back with his elbow. “What say Woot?”

  Ren stuck his head out the window. “Tammy’s gone missing. Ain’t been home for several days. Hey now Ricky.”

  Ricky didn’t acknowledge Ren. He’d eaten the peach and now held its wrinkled brown pit in his hand. He popped the pit in his mouth and sucked like it was candy.

  “Let me drop him off and I’ll meet you,” Lee said.

  “You don’t got to.”

  “I’m coming,” Lee said.

  “Well, we appreciate it.”

  Wooten leaned forward and placed his bad hand on the dashboard. Gave a grim nod. Lee nodded back then pulled away.

  He patted Ricky’s leg and turned up the radio. He recognized the song being played but couldn’t remember its name. So memory sometimes went. Tammy’d gone missing. The bulb in his ear whistled and Lee adjusted the dial on the box. Words wormed up from out of his head, words of his own making, and he began to sing: Bleary-eyed and lonesome, out in Freedom Hills, wondering when they’ll carry me to The Elberta County Jail … Filtered through whatever machinery was hidden within the glass bulb, his voice disagreed with the tune. Sounded less him. Time he got to a chorus, Lee couldn’t stand hearing himself thisaway and hushed.

  He parked among a herd of lawn mowers. Some broken down for parts, others rusted orange brown and forever seized up. Elberta County High School let Ricky Birdsong keep his best mowers in its shop building in exchange for mowing the ballfields. The kids in shop class did all sorts of meanness to Ricky when he came to retrieve or deposit one. As punishment they wrote winding sentences assigned by a teacher who couldn’t pronounce his rs when he got angry. Getting the teacher riled up was part of the kids’ fun too. They loved asking the teacher about turkey hunting, turning red-faced as he recounted waiting in the woods for a gobbler to walk out in front of him and show its fat breast.

  The Birdsong house was cinder block and built underneath a towering black walnut tree. The air smelled bitter with rotting nuts. Time, the house was also Mrs. Birdsong’s flower shop. Silk remains and busted green foam blocks yet scattered the property bordering a never-named creek. Ricky opened the front door and Buckshot ran inside. Lee remembered when cemetery flowers were made of delicate crepe paper and dipped in wax to protect them from rain. Roses, peonies, gladiolas, dahlias. Pretty enough to eat. Mrs. Birdsong’s shop was called Flowers Para Los Muertos. She claimed Spanish bloodlines, way many in the valley do. But Elbertans shortened the name to Debra’s Place rather than trip over their tongues. Around Decoration there’d be a line down the road. Ronnie Birdsong would make slabs of peanut brittle to share with those waiting for something to put on their loved ones’ graves.

  Ricky went to the bathroom and shut the door. Lee stepped over sports magazines and old copies of the Times-Journal on his way to the refrigerator he’d given Ricky when Dyar’s Tamale Shop got a new one. An open pack of pink baloney meat, loafbread, half-used jar of mustard, jug of spoiled milk. Lee’d let bringing over groceries slip amid all else that’d happened this summer. And now Tammy was missing. Seemed it did rain and pour. Lee knew the sheriff, knew everybody, would be asking him about this before long. One reason why he’d volunteered to join the search party. The other reason being Maybelle herself.

  He walked out back to the patio and opened a deep freezer. Running low too, he saw, moving around packets of freezerburnt meat from animals he’d shot and cleaned, other cuts he’d bought at Beachy’s Butcher Shop. Lee worried Ricky would burn down the house one day while trying to cook for hisself. The boy was forgetful even before the injury and the volunteer fire station was on the other side of town. But what could Lee do? He kept up a constant negotiation about protecting Ricky and letting him live on his own terms. Lee started counting the packets, doing math in his head. He was nearly through when he noticed something down at the bottom of the freezer. He grabbed ahold and pulled till it came loose.

  He unballed an ice-crusted longsleeved black shirt and draped it on a folding chair then leaned back down in the freezer. Something else. He grabbed and pulled. His hand slipped and his elbow banged the side. He hunted for something to chip the ice. Nothing he could find but silk flowers and fishing poles. He grabbed ahold again and pulled. This time the fabric ripped. He unballed a piece of camouflage britches, laid it out by the shirt he’d freed then tried to imagine what would make Ricky Birdsong stuff his clothes down inside a deep freezer. When was the last time he’d even seen the boy? Before Peach Days, was it not? And that, what, a week or more? Maybelle’s funeral for sure. He remembered Ricky Birdsong being there. Hell, Ricky dug her grave. But that was months ago.

  What worried Lee Malone was the idea that there was no root cause to Ricky Birdsong’s behavior. This just another sign of something they’d known to be coming since the boy was knocking heads on the football field while they all roared as if there’d be no tomorrow. Something confirmed when Ricky was sent back home from college in Mississippi on a big silver bus after falling out during one of the first practices. Ten years they’d pretended otherwise. Given him work, food, carried him home when he turned up somewhere lost. Ten seasons the Conquistadors presented him with a peach home jersey that said BIRDSONG on back above the number 42. Everybody in the bleachers chanted, Fly, Ricky, Fly! Fly, Ricky, Fly! and clapped and hollered even louder when Coach Williams gave a speech that was, truth, a eulogy, like all this aftermath was beauty to behold.

  The ice had melted. The clothes hung limp on the chairback, little pool of water beneath them. Lee resituated the meatpackets then shut the deep freezer. He picked up the clothes to head inside and ask Ricky about them. Doing so, he stepped in the icemelt. It was, he noticed then, tinted pink. He squeezed the clothes and pink water ran down his wrists. He searched the fabric till he found one vein of yet unmelted ice colored dark red, almost black. He picked with his thumbnail, rubbed till the ice melted, and blood smeared on his skin.

  He could hear water running, pipes buzzing inside hollow walls, as he made his way through the dark house. Buckshot was pawing at the bathroom door. The hall carpet soggy-wet. Lee jiggled the doorhandle. “Ricky, Ricky,” he said. “Open this up!” No answer came but for running water. He hunted for something heavy. At the side of the house he found a garden hoe. He hacked around the doorhandle till the door gave.

  The water in the tub looked like weak tea. Ricky hisself had turned a light purple underneath his eyelids and around his mouth. Lee pulled the boy out and began pumping his chest. He pushed back Ricky’s lips. Something was blocking the airway. He pried apart Ricky’s teeth and ran his hand down the boy’s fishy throat. Something lodged there. Buckshot pawed Ricky and whimpered and shivered. Lee counted to three then shoved his fingers in the boy’s mouth, deep as they’d go. Ricky convulsed as if touched by a live-wire. Lee plunged deeper yet. Buckshot barked, a high-pitched aarf aarf! Lee was in up to his knuckles when he got ahold of the thing and pulled it out. The goddamn peach pit. He dropped it in the sink and let it rattle down the drain.

  After Ricky stopped puking Lee blew fresh air into his lungs. He turned off the bathtub faucet and unstoppered the drain. The pipes gurgled, bringing Lee back to handling Maybelle’s body the day she died. He thought about how lit
tle Janie Treeborne’d helped wash her grandmomma. First that, now her aunt. Lord lord lord.

  Lee stripped off Ricky’s wet clothes then toted him to bed. He wrapped the boy in a quilt. Buckshot jumped up onto the bed and licked Ricky’s forehead till Lee made the dog quit. He wondered if he should let Ricky sleep. The dog settled down with a grunt then began washing his own big paws. Ricky fought loose from the quilt. “This summer,” Lee said, tucking Ricky back in, “it just ain’t going to let up is it.”

  Every so often Lee placed his hand on the boy’s chest and felt it rise and fall, rise, fall, rise. Ricky kept struggling loose from the quilt. Once when the boy had, Lee noticed a red mark in the shape of teeth on his arm. Looked no more than a few days old. “Good Lord have mercy,” he said, petting the boy’s still-wet head. “What have you done?”

  Peach Days

  1958

  Folks put out chairs and buckets the night before to save spots from which they could watch the Hernando de Soto Peach Days Festival parade putter past. But Ren Treeborne was buddies with Gene Kilgore, who roped off the sidewalk in front of his pawnshop, iced down beer and grilled hamburgers and hot dogs, meaning Ren could avoid the rush to save spots.

  Before heading to the parade he needed to make one final pass through the cottage Maybelle had rented from Lee Malone after Hugh died. The place was sorry with memory. Squirrels nested in the attic and the crumbling plaster walls. Ren had saved for last his momma’s clothes, which yet smelled like the coconut lotion Luther bought her from a mail-order catalog. Time, Maybelle cared about the way she dressed. Her more recent outfits could be confused with something used to cover windows or a tabletop though.

  Ren taped a box shut then toted it to the living room where Sister sat fooling with the dirt boy Crusoe. A vehicle pulled up out front. Tammy was all done up for the holiday, wearing a linen dress with sequined peaches strung along the neckline.