Drifting South

I walked back up one step and leaned forward, staring at Ma as hard as I could. “You don’t even know her. She’s the best thing that—”

“Danger may have followed her.”

“What danger?”

“We have to leave until I can find out if—”

“You’re talking crazy, Momma. I’m going to see her.”

“I forbid it!”

Ma drew a line in the dirt right there with those words and with her hands now all fisted at her sides. A line I’d never crossed that she’d ever found out about. She looked plain shook-up, standing up above me and staring down. I felt sorry for her all of a sudden for whatever was wrong with her with the shape she was in, but I had to go. I figured we’d work it out somehow when I got home. We’d probably worked out worse before.

“Come here,” she said, finally lowering her voice and trying to cover up more with the chill in the air.

I didn’t say anything else and took off around the side of the saloon to head up to the Alton House. Ma didn’t say or scream anything else, but I could hear her running through our apartment, yelling at Uncle Ray.

Just before I was out of earshot of her kitchen window, opened a crack, it sounded like she said, “They’re gonna kill my baby.”

I slowed, wondering if I’d heard her right. I did hear “kill” and “baby” clear enough. Ma tended to call all of her boys “baby”sometimes, even though none of us were babies anymore. But it wasn’t just what she said, it was the way she said it that sent a sharp chill through me. My legs were still trembling. It was the first time I’d stood up to her in such a way and flat disobeyed her like I just did. Something big had changed between us.

I stood on the boardwalk outside the open door of the Last Rebel Yell and tried to get my breathing back to normal and my legs still as all sorts of folks started to funnel into that place laughing and having a big time.

I paid no attention to them, even the ones bumping into me, and wished I’d have grabbed my green corduroy coat before I left, because the wind was starting to kick up cold off of the river. I shivered and tensed myself all over a few times and then leaned over an old rotten horse trough to see if my hair still looked all right in the reflection, but I couldn’t see nothing in the black water.

Then I looked up the street past the shacks and businesses as people were starting to go here and there, walking toward the gaming parlors and bawdy houses and restaurants and taverns. The sun was way over the mountains now, and Shady always came alive in the evening hours like the whole place was a bunch of vampires in a comic book.

The Shady keepers stuck out from all of them in their white bowler hats and black bow ties, making their rounds like they always did an hour or two before dusk, lighting all of the lanterns and turning on gaslights, and spotting potential trouble to report to the elders.

Amanda Lynn’s car was what I was looking for, and it was still parked in a dried mud lot off the side of the Alton House, right next to an empty lean-to with a tin roof where farmers would bring in country hams and homemade sausage and bushel baskets of things that come from the dirt to sell during the spring through summer months. In the fall and winter, those with nowhere else to go, drunks mostly, tended to find refuge under it.

After a minute or two, my legs were shaking a little less but still wobbly. I’d warmed up some but wished I’d snuck in a long drink of Ma’s beer earlier, or at least got a little of that chowder or a few crackers down in me.

I thought for a minute about going back to ask Ma about what had gotten into her. But if she was on a bad high, I didn’t want to be around her until she came back down from her visions. I was going over all of that in my mind when a blue dress caught the corner of my eye.

My full gaze turned toward the blue dress coming down the boardwalk on the other side of Alton’s. Even though I hadn’t seen her in months and months and she was a good fifty yards away, I knew it was her at first glance.

Amanda Lynn looked just like a dream I’d had over and over, always knowing deep down inside when I’d wake up that it would never come true.

But it had. She’d come to Shady, and I felt like I was in that dream.

I turned my body full toward her and, even so far away and with all of the other folks milling around, I saw her smile.

I wanted to run or walk to her or jump up and down or do anything but what I did there for a few moments—I just stood not able to move and kept watching her walk, getting closer and closer.

Finally, I raised a hand to wave after she waved at me, and I realized she really had recognized me, and I couldn’t believe how she was even more beautiful than I remembered. She’d changed in her face and body since I’d seen her last, fuller in places but just a little, and they were all real good changes by the looks of it.

I noticed, too, that I wasn’t the only one looking at her in her blue dress that fit tight against her in all the best places.

Something finally happened in me, and my legs moved a step at a time as I began walking past Phelps’s Grocery and The Oasis Lounge. Then all of a sudden, yelling and name-calling and some sort of ruckus spilled out of Chappy McGee’s Public House across the street. I took my eyes off of Amanda Lynn when it turned into a full-blown fistfight between two men as people from all directions swarmed in to watch it.

I had to look, too, because I needed to see if any in the fight were my brothers or pards, but they weren’t, so I kept walking. When I started to turn back toward Amanda Lynn, I saw a man less than twelve feet from that fight. Unlike all of the other folks gathering, he wasn’t watching the fight. He was staring at me.

Staring hard, too.

He wasn’t a big man but not small, either, and he wore a long overcoat and had a fedora pulled low on his head. When I stared back at him, he turned around and walked through the open doors of Chappy’s. He’d looked at me like he knew me, but he was a stranger. I’d remember a man with cold eyes like that stranger had. But then I thought I did know him. It was hard to tell who he was by the way he was all covered up in coat and hat, but he couldn’t hide those cold eyes. They looked just like the eyes of a man I’d met the summer before, a man who worked for Aunt Kate. I wondered if it was him, and if he’d driven Amanda Lynn to Shady.

I then turned and saw Amanda glance at the fighting, too, and it embarrassed me that she’d have to see such a thing on her first day in Shady. She veered away from it as far as she could on the boardwalk, and I figured it was probably the first fight she’d ever seen.

I sucked in what little stomach I had to raise my chest and look tall as I could when we got near, but then when we got close, the air went out of me like I was a leaky tire. I couldn’t say a word or touch her or anything, and that was a strange feeling after all of the touching and talking we’d done in the past.

I don’t know what came over me but I guess my arms just couldn’t stand it anymore, so they pulled her to me. I hugged her with both hands that ended up around her waist, and I felt all of her against me from my chest to way down my legs.

I soon had to back myself away from the feel of her a little bit, and when she pulled away from me, her eyes were wet and she was smiling. I just kept taking in the smell and look of her blue eyes and all of that blond hair. I went to kiss her and that’s when she put a folded piece of yellow paper in my breast pocket, and then she smacked me across the face harder than Ma even did. It was the second time in ten minutes that I’d been hit by a girl.

Then she grabbed me and pressed her face into me. I kept holding her, feeling the sting on my face and hoping her mood was changing and wishing I had on a cleaner shirt. After a long time, she pulled from me and said, “You promised you’d never leave without me.”

I didn’t know what to say back because it would take a whole day to explain, so I just wanted to say I was sorry for everything.

“I didn’t want to,” finally came out of me quiet.

She looked at me for a long time like she was really studying my face in a good sort of way, like I was doing to her, and then she looked past me at all the loud goings-on around us. Shady Hollow was definitely different looking and acting than the place I’d made up that I told her I was from.

I looked down at the fancy paper poking up out of my pocket and saw there was handwriting on it. I hoped that later she wouldn’t want me to read it out loud with her around because I couldn’t read and she didn’t know that.

“How’d you find—” I said.

I couldn’t finish my question because the fight across the street headed in our direction and the crowd was about to run us over. So I grabbed Amanda Lynn by the hand, looked around for somewhere to take her inside so we could talk and hopefully patch up. I led her up the street back to the Alton House, which was a fairly decent place to be at that time of the evening.

“Ben!”

I turned around and Ma was running toward me wearing her robe and old furry slippers, and Uncle Ray was trying to keep up, limping behind her. He didn’t even have his boots or socks on.

I gritted my teeth and wanted to yell or cuss or something but didn’t with my company. Amanda Lynn turned around, but I just kept hold of her hand and starting walking faster in the other direction as she started saying she had to tell me something.

Ma’s hollering cut off whatever that something was. She was carrying on like she’d completely gone off nutty and I just thought about the pure bad luck of it having Ma high as a hootie owl on the one day that Amanda Lynn showed up in Shady.

I finally went to turn around to yell at her, hoping Amanda Lynn wouldn’t catch on that she was my ma. That’s when I saw that man with the cold eyes again, his eyes staring into mine like they had earlier, but this time he was walking toward me determined and fast. He had a newspaper over one hand.

Ma saw him right after I did. I watched her grab Uncle Ray and point at that man, and Uncle Ray pulled out a revolver from his waistband and directed it at him.

I pulled Amanda behind me and felt like my heart had quit beating. When it started again, it pounded in my ears and was the only thing I could hear until Uncle Ray yelled.

“Stop where you’re standing, mister!” he said.

I’d never heard Uncle Ray say anything over a normal talking voice. He’d yelled so loud that most of the people watching the fight just down the street turned to look. And then a Shady elder who was watching the fight to make sure it didn’t get too out of hand saw Uncle Ray holding that black revolver, and he came running up the street, pulling two guns from hip holsters.

Uncle Ray kept hurrying until he got about ten feet from me, trying to get between me and the man I was almost sure was the same man who worked for Aunt Kate. That close to those eyes, there was now little doubt.