Charlie Smith - Ginny Gall

“It’s a cherokee rose,” a girl’s voice said from behind him.

He turned. The young, dark-eyed girl stood there. She too was barefoot.

He made a tiny sound, as hard to hear as a dog whistle.

The girl moved up and stood silently beside him.

“Indian roses,” he said. “I knew a Indian once.”

“We are part Indian ourselves — at least that’s what Daddy says. But he likes to make things up.”

She laughed a small, crackling, unrueful laugh, a slender girl with high-flown wiry hair.

“Would you like to take a walk?” he said.

“All right.”

They walked past quiet houses, secret lives alit in windows or concealed by the dark. In one yard a tire swing, the tire painted white. In another an old car up on a homemade lift, doorless, hood up, wheels like tilted snaggle teeth. At the next, on a back porch, two women sitting at a round table whispered furiously. They looked up and the whispering stopped, started again as they passed. Leftover summer frogs made clicking sounds. A nightbird issued the early version of its song. The two of them, man and girl, man and woman, boy and woman, boy and girl, walking, not touching, Delvin still barefoot carrying his boots, feeling sand and leaf, a stick, grass, round pebbles, a flat slab of rock under his feet, the girl close beside him, barefoot too; neither speaking.

They reached the end of the alley and stood in the opening that spilled a fan of pale sand like a little river mouth into the faintly lighted street. A tall shuttered house that had belonged to a traveling preacher reared just across quiet Silver road. The night was warm but Delvin could feel the coolness underneath, a coolness that carried winter in its arms. Other nights, feeling this, he might shudder for what was coming, but not now. The warmth was strong enough to keep them safe, for a little while. The silence extended between them until Delvin didn’t know how to break it or if he could. Just then she spoke. She asked him who he really was.

“I’m uneasy about answering that,” he said.

“I guess that’s an answer.”

He sensed that already she was trying to catch something that eluded her, catch her footing. He sensed a sadness in her and an energy that was not all straightforward, and a roughed-up gaiety. Her hands were long-fingered, strong-looking, almost as large as his.

“Are you timid?” she said.

“Vigilant.”

“What are you looking out for?”

He figured that she knew. “Goblins.”

“Plenty of them around this place.”

He was silent. With Minnie he had been let alone to grope his way; both of them groped. Now he sensed he was in another confabulation. He didn’t think he could keep up. Maybe it wouldn’t matter.

“I feel like asking you a hundred questions,” she said.

“Cause I’m a puzzle to you?”

“Yes — but everybody’s that — just some people you want to go ahead and put the questions to them, get on through the whatever it is keeps them off to themselves.”

“Lots of situations’ll do that.”

“Lots of reasons to build hideouts.”

“Sholy.”

“But they don’t matter.”

“How come?”

“Cause if you got to ask the questions anyway, you ask them. And then the other one, the one you asking the questions to, why, he has to decide for himself whether he’s going to answer them or not.”

“Maybe he can’t.”

“If he can’t, then maybe that’s the answer to all of them.”

“That’s a lot of weight,” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Let me ask you something. Why do you want to know so much about me?”

“I can’t help it.”

The world seemed to have gone off in all directions. Every day he’d been free had been painful to him. It hurt to decide things. Soon as he could he’d latched on to a woman, Minnie May, sturdy and forbearing, owner of her own house, a small house on a quiet street, a woman away much of the time, grateful for what he might give her. Let her decide things. But what she decided scared him. And it scared him that Mr. Oliver was feeble — dying, he could see that, the future drying like a bubble of spit on his long lower lip. Out here everything was important, everything was too much: flake of soap on your wrist, smell of a bakery, somebody asking the time — like asking if you had the answer to their secret dilemma. It was all he could do not to turn himself in. Not to flee into some kind of drunkenness. Some other accelerating dark. But he had somewhere to go. Something to do. He had to hold on to that.

He looked at the girl. Her face turned in profile and she seemed to be minding business of her own.

He said, “I like windy rain. I like salad beds — mustard and turnip greens mostly. I like cattle at night. Piney woods in a mountain distance. I like to see winter wheat growing in a big field.”

She snapped her fingers, looked at him sideways under her brows, said, “I like riding in trucks. I like smelling things, anything that has a strong smell to it, even a stink. I like those birds with feathers that change from black to green according to how they take the light. I like stomping my feet in the dust.”

He said, “I like seeing how far I can make a thought go in my mind before I lose track of it.”

She said, “I like gritty cornbread and books about smart women.”

They fell silent again.

Above the houses, above the continuation of the alley behind the houses in front of them, three stars, faint blurred bits, ceaselessly changing entities, hung above the smear of city brightness.

“Where were you on the way to when we shanghaied you?”

“The Emporium.”

She took a half step back. “You one of those it’s important to go over there?”

“Yes. I’m looking for somebody.” He hadn’t let this simple thought come forth before now but it was true.

“I’d like to go over that way.”

“You want to gawk?”

“I guess I do — or no, I just want to see what that life’s like.”

“Like any other, I guess.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t get mad.”

“I’m not.”

“I want to see what folks over there. . are featuring. . in themselves. I think people can’t help but be curious.”

“That’s rightly so,” he said.

“Will you take me?”

“Okay.” He blurted this out but a second later it felt like a mistake. He was weighing himself down, whichever way he moved. But then he guessed he was bound to make mistakes.

A thin breeze angled in off the street, cooling their skin. A depressed feeling came over him. He wanted to ask at the bedhouse about his mother. He wanted to be alone with what he felt about that. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think. .”

“It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to take me.”

“It’s not that.”

“No,” she said, turning away.

She had a fading, falling quality to her, a weight of promises and needs that troubled him. Every knock at the door felt like all the pressers come to get him. He said, “I want to see if anybody there has heard anything about my mother.”

She looked at him, paying out the line of kindness. “Some odd girl’s not what you need at this time,” she said.

“I’ve come a long way,” he said, “just to take a look-see.”

“These nights lately,” she said, scanning the high parts of the sky, “since the big storm, have had such a deep blue to them. They say the blue only goes up for a few miles but it makes me feel good that we’re wrapped up in it.”

“Buttered in blue,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back at him. Her broad face was open and friendly, without guile.

“I’m going to shade off this way,” he said, indicating the direction — right, east — with his thumb.