Joe Lansdale - A Fine Dark Line

“What started the fire?”

“Oh, chile, I don’t know. I jes’ remember it burnin’ down and that sweet Jewel Ellen burning up.”

“You knew her?”

“I know’d them all. My mama used to wash the mess out of that whole family’s drawers, and that Miss Margret, she live on across town in the lesser part. You see, this here used to be money here. Right where the drive-in stand. Then money move on over there a ways. You know all them big pretty houses ’cross the highway?”

“Yes, ma’am. Well, I know they’re there. I’ve never really looked at them.”

“I don’t know lookin’ such a good idea. I look over there, I feel how that Lot’s wife felt in the Bible when she looked back on stuff she wanted, and God turn her to that pillar of salt. ’Course, she least got to have it oncet. I ain’t never had it none. Ain’t never gonna. Ain’t no need for God to turn me to nothin’ for lookin’ back. There ain’t no lookin’ back. Place I live ain’t nothin’ but a nigger rent house. I don’t be lookin’ forward or back.”

“What about Margret?”

“Miss Margret live over on the other side of town, ’cross them tracks. It’s the place where the poor whites live, down by the swamp land. Their house set off a bit from the others.

“Miss Margret was poor, but seemed like she had it pretty good to me. My momma would have jes’ wanted to move us up that much. For her, it would have been a castle. Miss Margret had a yard out back, even if it was wet land, and the house was painted up white and nice, and it was big enough she might have had her own bedroom. And Miss Margret, she jes’ as pretty as could be. Had dark hair and dark eyes and this real pretty skin, and she smile, she got a big smile, and a big silver tooth right next to these front two.

“I use to see her ’round. She didn’t have no daddy ’cause he run off when Miss Margret born. That’s how I heard it. I think he was some kind of Mex’kin and white man mixed up, or some such thing, and her mama got some Indi’n blood.”

“So they weren’t really white?”

“Well, when you a colored girl, they white. Miss Margret look like she gonna grow up to be a movie star, she so pretty. I really liked that tooth, though I don’t know white people would make no movie star out of some girl with a silver tooth.

“I hear her mama was kinda mean, though. Really don’t know much about ’em ’sides little Miss Margret was nice. Both her and that Jewel Ellen was nice. That brother of Jewel Ellen, James Ray, he not always so nice. He pinch me on my bottom oncet. I’m on the street, carryin’ white people’s wash home to be done by my mama, and he pinch me on the rear end and laugh and say he give me money I do somethin’ for him. I got away from there real quick.”

I thought: M for Margret and J for James. Some of the mystery was coming together.

“Is James still around?”

“After they house burned down, he growed up, lived on the hill over there where the money is. Guess he still live there. He own a big store downtown. Men’s shop with suits and the little drugstore next to it, and the picture show. Colored can buy hamburgers and get a pop out back the drugstore. Movie house has a big upstairs and it’s where the colored go. But, James Ray, I don’t really know so much about him. He don’t ’vite me over for supper, you see. All I remember was him wantin’ to pinch my bottom, and I wasn’t but a girl.

“Come on, now. I don’t want no one thinkin’ I’m takin’ leave ’cause your momma been nice to me. Let’s go down see there’s anything left we can do . . . And, Stanley, you tell me. I shouldn’t have mentioned that salt in them green beans, should I?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I know’d it when I done it. But I jes’ couldn’t helps myself.”

———

THAT NIGHT after the drive-in was closed and Rosy Mae was given a place to sleep on the couch, I slipped out of my room, leaving Nub to curl up on my bed, opened Callie’s door, stuck my head inside. “Callie?”

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I wanted to talk.”

“You’ve talked to me more in the last two days than since the time you learned to talk.”

“I found out some stuff about the old house that burned down.”

“Oh . . . Come in.”

I sat on the foot of her bed. Callie sat up in bed and turned her face toward me. I couldn’t make out her features completely. Her dark hair was undone and fell down to her shoulders. In the moonlight I could see a bit of her face and the horse designs on her pajamas. The water-cooled fan beat the warm air into near submission.

“What do you know?” she asked.

I told her what Rosy Mae told me.

“That’s kind of creepy, Stanley. To think a little girl burned up right over there.”

“What’s creepy,” I said, “is that a little girl named Margret was murdered on the same night as Jewel Ellen Stilwind died, and her brother’s name was James. Don’t you think it’s odd, Callie, that the letters we have are from an M to a J? Margret to James, who got her pregnant.”

“It may not be connected at all. You certainly didn’t even know how a girl got pregnant until I told you.”

“I know now. Come on, it’s interesting? Right?”

“Tomorrow, maybe we’ll look into it. Right now, I got to sleep. I’m exhausted. Beat it.”

I told Callie what Rosy said about Margret’s ghost, about her missing head and the wolf’s man.

“Oh, poo. I don’t believe that. Coloreds are always telling ghost stories. Besides, I don’t want to hear that right now. This whole thing is kind of scary to me and I don’t want bad dreams. Now beat it.”

“It isn’t any harder for this to be connected, than believing someone stuck that balloon through your window when your bedroom was downstairs.”

“Stanley, you little shit, get out of my room.”

I beat it with regrets, knowing full well I shouldn’t have added that zinger, not if I wanted Callie’s help. But, heck, it was the brotherly thing to do; I couldn’t help myself.

I didn’t go right to sleep. I got the letters out from under my bed and looked at them. I read the journal carefully. Nothing in the letters or the journal mentioned Margret’s last name. But I was convinced these letters had been to James and that Margret had torn out the journal pages and given them to him, maybe to keep her mother from seeing them, or as a gesture of some kind.

I put the letters and pages up, went to bed, dreamed of a decapitated girl walking along the railroad tracks, searching for her missing head. I dreamed too of a wolf’s man, as Rosy called it, running through the brush with Margret’s head in its mouth.

5

NEXT MORNING after breakfast, I pulled Callie aside and we walked out to the drive-in lot.

“Are you going to help me find out more?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Last night you said you would.”

“I didn’t say for certain. It sounded like fun last night. But in the light of day, I’m not so sure. What if it is the same Margret? So what?”

“She was murdered. No one ever found the murderer. That’s a real mystery, Callie. James Stilwind lives over on the hill with the rich folks. He might know something.”

“You’re just going to knock on his door and ask him about his burned-up sister and a murdered girl named Margret, and a boxful of letters he might have owned?”

“I hadn’t really thought about what I was going to do. Not really. Are you going to help or what?”

“I’m not allowed to go anywhere. So what can I do?”

“But last night . . .”

“I forgot. I forget about it ten times a day because I didn’t do anything. Then there was that crack about the balloon . . . So, just solve your own stupid mystery.”