Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

He cut along the alley behind Suber’s Hardware, headed toward the Emporium, walking fast under the big skinned sycamores, on his way to someplace with a name. But then for no reason he stopped at the little auto repair garage Jimmy Dandes operated behind his house and stood in shadow under a monkeypaw tree listening to a couple boys playing guitars. He had stopped in this place when he was a child to listen to these boys’ father play ragtime tunes on his banjo. The two boys, twins, he remembered, looked nothing like each other and their playing too strained against harmony. They stood in the alley on each side of a small fire that as far as Delvin could tell had no reason for being except maybe somebody just liked little fires.

Then a young woman in a light, flower-colored dress covered with a white apron came out of the house carrying a big platter of fresh fish. The men quit playing and began to help her. One of them set a four-legged wire grill over the fire, laid a skillet on top and filled the skillet with lard from a tin bucket. The lard crackled and spit and the men stood looking at the fire. One of the boys ran to the house and came back carrying a small table and some plates and a sack of cornmeal. He looked across the alley and saw Delvin standing under the droopy-leafed tree.

“Do we know you?” he said in a friendly way. He was the brother with the lopsided face.

“I’m not sure,” Delvin said, taking a step forward. “I hadn’t been around here for a while.”

“Didn’t you use to work over to the Riverlight cotton warehouse?” the other said.

“No, that wadn’t me.”

“You play ball for the Negro Pioneers?” the first asked. His name, Delvin remembered, was Harley.

“No, I never played ball.”

“You from Chattanooga?” the other with the round face said. Delvin couldn’t remember his name.

“Born and raised.”

The woman was dredging the fish (they looked like bream) in cornmeal and laying them aside on the table. The closer boy — young man — the one whose face seemed to slant too far down on one side, asked if he would like to join them for dinner. Delvin without thinking said he would be happy to.

He helped them fry the fish and then he carried the platter of crackly, steaming bream back into the yard where the young woman directed him to put it down on a long trestle table that had a dark cloth laid on it. Lanterns were lit, citronella lamps set out on two chairs and then, helped by a couple of young girls, an older couple came out — Delvin recognized the father, now grown grizzled, with thin sunken cheeks — and took places in fat armchairs at either end of the table set up under a maple that was still, so he could see in the light, mostly green.

The boys explained to their father that Delvin was raised in Chattanooga and had just returned from several years away. The old man asked who his folks were and Delvin said he had found that they had passed on years ago.

“They would be who now?” the old woman, a sharp-eyed person with puffy cheeks and a light cloud of almost pure white hair, asked.

“Walker,” Delvin said.

“I don’t believe I recollect them,” the old man said. “They live over this way?”

“Long time ago,” Delvin said, “but they moved out toward Shipley Station, died out there.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear they’ve passed,” the old woman said, eyeing him rigorously.

Delvin thanked her. The first bite of fish had burned the roof of his mouth, a problem with hot food he had picked up on the prison circuit. He juggled the fish flesh with his tongue until it was cool and swallowed it down. One of the girls over by her mother giggled and mimicked him. He laughed.

“What sort of work you do?” the old man asked in a friendly way.

“I’m writing on a book,” Delvin said. He took a long pull of tea. It was cooled with chunks of ice hacked off a block. He picked out a piece and pressed it to his lips.

“Burn yoself?” the old man said.

“No sir, I just like ice.”

“Pass that bowl on down,” the old man said to one of the boys, indicating a blue china bowl with ice chunks in it. The girl, slim with a broad mirthful face and quick black eyes, bobbed her head at him. She made big chomping motions.

Delvin said, “I used to cut down through the alley back there looking for my friend Buster Moran.”

“The Morans, sho,” one of the boys said. “They moved away.”

“Old Moran was a pipefitter, I believe,” said the old man. “Out here to Cranley’s. On the colored shift.”

“I believe he was,” Delvin said.

Mr. Dandes talked about his farm out toward Scooterville, passed down in his family since it was deeded to them just after the Civil War.

“We been out there all summer,” the lively girl said. “That’s all we do in the summer — just farm, farm, farm.”

“Whoo, you don’t do nothing,” the older boy said, Harley. He had a riotous bush of shiny hair. “And sit under the arbor writing letters.”

The girl blushed. Delvin could see the blush on her light skin, feel it, as if the heat traveled, on his own face.

“What kind of letters?” he asked because he wanted to know and wanted her to speak to him.

“She writes to the government,” the other boy said.

“What about?’ Delvin said.

“About their shortcomings and about their longcomings too. I ask them if they are trying to be as helpful as possible.”

“She’s a complainer,” the lopsided twin said.

“I wrote the president a letter when I was a little boy,” Delvin said. This was true.

“What happened?” Harley said.

“He wrote back.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he was enjoying himself — I’d asked him about that — and he hoped I was enjoying myself too.”

“Were you?” the girl — more than a girl — asked.

“I was at the time.”

As he spoke to her — this, what, sixteen-year-old girl, seventeen maybe — he experienced a bluster and yank of feeling, something slung onto a pile of odds and ends, an accumulation of breached and disordered living, messes and blunders and crushed years and thoughts too sullen and miserable to do anything about, packed against clotted falsities, outright lies, hopes packed hard into sprung joints — useless dumb hopes — stuffed with the knotted eccentric sadness of the jailbird; slather of meanness and repudiation and scarcity. He hurt in his gut and the ache like a fresh malarial sickness sucked into his bones and filled his mind with confusion. He wanted to lash these ignorant people with sarcasm and bitterness, to humiliate them and leave them with pictures in their minds that would haunt and hurt them.

Excusing himself — forcing the polite words out of his mouth — he got up and walked away from the table.

He made his way out into the alley and stood in the ample dark, letting pain rush unhindered through him. He was not here, but he was not any other place either. He sat down, unlaced and took off his boots, removed his socks, stood up and walked half a dozen steps in the soft sand that covered the alley. He stretched out his hands like a man sleepwalking in a cartoon. He reached for the air and for whatever was in the air or might be soon. He could smell the hot lard. He could smell the smoke from the fire, birch wood and chestnut, he recognized them, still did. The chestnut trees were dying all over the country, a blight, come from where nobody knew, no way to cure it, the trees just died. He could smell something else, apples, yes, cut apples, a sweetness, unrevisable. Some said that doesn’t ring a bell , but for him everything did. Bole and bunch, dry squeak of old runner carpet, a cracked vase painted blue, a white shirt on a hanger hooked on a bedroom wire, smell of liver frying in the morning. The world a checklist of old favorites. He turned and walked slowly back, running his toes through the sand, taking his time. He smelled the roses on runner loops hanging over a fence. He went over and stood close to them. The blossoms were white and flat-faced and sweet. He touched a flower along the back of its face, feeling the swell of the bud it came from.