Joe Lansdale - A Fine Dark Line

When we were finished, Mom said, “Rosy Mae, you want, you go lay down in there on the couch. We got to open up the drive-in.”

“Miss Mitchel,” Rosy Mae said. “You gonna feed me and let me spend the night. I be glad to help you in the kitchen with the fried chicken. Anything you doin’.”

“Well, there’s no real cooking except the chicken,” Mom said. “But sure. You can do that. But you get to feelin’ tired or in pain, you come in and lay down on the couch.”

“Thank you, kindly, ma’am.”

“You’re more than welcome, Rosy Mae.”

Rosy Mae finished eating, went out to the concession’s kitchen to help Mama fry chicken. I knew that was going to be the best fried chicken anyone ever had at the drive-in, or maybe anywhere else, and it would have just the right amount of salt.

Daddy sat at the kitchen table, looking in the direction of their retreat, an expression on his face like he had just awakened to find his old life was a dream and that his left foot was actually a cured ham.

Me and Callie finished eating, asked to be excused, told Daddy we’d be back in plenty of time to start helping with the drive-in work, went back to my room where we dragged out the box and Callie started reading from the letters.

“It’s all from M to J. Were any real names mentioned?”

“I don’t think so . . . I don’t know. I haven’t read all of that stuff.”

“These last pages, they’re out of a journal, or a diary . . . Well, this is odd.”

“What’s odd?”

“They’re from a diary, but the diary seems to be the girl’s diary. It reads in the same way as the letters. With it bound up and in a padlocked box, you get the idea it’s something someone treasured, but wanted to keep secret. That makes me think it all belongs to one person, this J. I guess it could belong to the girl who wrote the letters and the journal, and she never sent the letters. You know. Wishful thinking . . . Or maybe J gave them back. That happens sometimes when people break up. Back then, during the war, letters were prized more highly than now, Stanley.”

“How come there’s just pages torn from the diary? Where’s the rest of it?”

“That is odd, isn’t it?”

Callie examined the journal closely. “Here’s something interesting, though you may be too young to hear it.”

“I’ve heard more lately than I knew there was,” I said. “I don’t believe a little more information will kill me.”

“She’s talking about sexual activity in the journal. She says . . . I don’t know if I should read this to you. Maybe you should look at it.”

She gave it to me. I read it. I said, “What’s fingering?”

Callie turned red. “That’s why I had you read it, silly. I didn’t want to say it or explain it.”

“Well, I read it, but now you explain it.”

She did.

I said, “Oh,” and gave it back to her.

“She’s talking about what she and this boy, J, did. She says they did it out back in the woods, on a blanket. She doesn’t say anymore in detail, just that they made each other happy. That means they did it.”

“Did what?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Stanley, you are dense. Remember about the dogs?”

“Oh, yeah.”

I felt worse than when I discovered there was no Santa Claus. Here was something that was going on that everyone seemed to know about but me.

“You said they did it in the woods. You mean the woods where the old house was?”

“I don’t know. I think the house would have been there when these letters were written. So probably not. I think M tore these pages out of her diary and gave them to J as a kind of memento. I think that’s it, and that’s why J has M’s pages.

“I think maybe you’ve had enough of this for now. I don’t want you blowing out a fuse. You’re going to need a better hiding place for this than under the bed. Mom or Rosy Mae are eventually going to come across it . . . I’ll be.”

Callie was reading from the pages. I said, “What?”

“She thinks she might be pregnant . . . Listen to this. ‘I’m sorry about the baby. But it will be okay. Things can be done.’ She’s talking about getting rid of it before it’s born, Stanley. And here’s more. ‘Or we can learn to live with the idea. Having a baby around wouldn’t be so bad.’ ”

“What do you mean, getting rid of it?”

Callie spent a few minutes explaining.

“You can do that?”

“Some doctors will do it, but it’s against the law.”

“So J must have lived in the house in the trees?”

“I suppose. It wasn’t in the trees then, though.”

“I know that.”

“You can never be certain with you, Stanley. Thing to do, when we get time, is find out who owned the old burned-down house. That might help us decide who the box belongs to.”

“That sounds great. Like a mystery. Like the Hardy Boys. Or Nancy Drew.”

“It’s interesting, Stanley, but it isn’t exactly something that drives me to distraction. Understand?”

“Sounds to me like a murder.”

“Guess it could be that,” Callie said. “J didn’t really love her like M loved him, and when she got pregnant, he decided to get rid of her. It could have happened that way. But if he hated her, why did he keep the letters?”

“He hid them?”

“Why didn’t he just destroy them?”

“See,” I said. “You are interested.”

“I suppose. But that doesn’t mean I’m nuts to figure it out. I’m just saying, since I got nothing else to do with my summer, maybe we can take a crack at it. Maybe not. We’ll see. Come on. We got to help Mom and Daddy.”

Callie went out. I put the box in my closet on the top shelf and put a folded shirt over it and my Davy Crockett coonskin cap on top of that.

———

THE LAST SHOWING of Vertigo finished well after midnight. It was like that in the dead of summer. It got dark late, so to make two showings, you had to go into early morning.

That night they packed the place. Everyone wanted to see the new Hitchcock film. I saw none of it, of course. I was waiting for our family get-together.

I spent time helping out at the concession, and when we closed at eleven, Daddy took position at the exit to make sure no one was trying to sneak in for the last hour of the movie.

It took about an hour to clean up, and Rosy Mae’s disposition seemed much better. She even hummed a bit while she used woolen mitts to pour the grease from the frying pot into a barrel.

Rosy Mae washed the pot and other dishes, and when she finished, she asked if I wanted to go out front while she smoked a cigarette, as she was afraid of her man, Bubba Joe, and my mother did not allow smoking in the house by friend or relative.

Mom overheard us, said, “I wish he wouldn’t go out front. It frightens me to think Bubba Joe might be out there. Why don’t you go on the roof and let Stanley keep you company?”

“Yesum,” Rosy Mae said.

We went upstairs, walked a slanted ramp that opened on to the roof by a trapdoor. We stepped out just below the giant dew drop.

The last of the cars could be seen filing out of the drive-in, their lights coming on, poking at the night. I could see Buster leaving the concession stand, his thermos in his hand, walking toward the exit, moving slowly by the cars as they exited. I thought I heard someone yell “nigger” from one of the cars.

Buster didn’t look up. He kept walking.

Rosy Mae got out a can of Sir Walter Raleigh and shook some tobacco onto a rolling paper. She folded it quickly with one hand, licked, slipped it into her mouth, smooth as any cowboy.

She removed a big kitchen match from her wild hair, cocked her hip, struck it on the side of her dress, and lit up.