The sun was gone now and dusk was fading to night. Fireflies blinked all around as if to switch off the light and spread the darkness. Crickets chirped incessantly, and a whippoorwill rang out a call that had always sounded like doom to me. The trouble it had summoned for so long had surely arrived.
I glanced at my watch. Almost 8:45. I had checked the time when we stopped at the store, because I had been trying to calculate when Jackie and I would get to Eden Rise. All this had happened in less than ten minutes. I didn’t have a second to think about it, and I couldn’t have known it anyway, but in that time—only enough to smoke a cigarette, or chew the sugar out of a piece of gun, or listen to a couple of good songs by the Supremes—I lost Eden Rise. I wouldn’t get there that night, and when I did find my way, it wasn’t the place I had left.
2
The tire noise on the rough pavement roared in our ears as I raced the Galaxie through the darkness. I kept looking to hit Highway 80, the big road to Montgomery, but we had gone farther down the county road than I remembered. As time slipped away, panic crept up the back of my neck. My naked back, sweaty from heat and fear and bloody from broken glass, stuck to the leather seat.
“Hang in there, Jackie.” I glanced over my shoulder but it was too dark to see them. “Can you hear me, buddy?” I waited a moment. “Is he moving?”
“He moaned a minute ago. He’s really hurt.” At last she sounded scared.
“Are you keeping that shirt pressed on his neck?”
“It’s soaked through now.”
The smell of Jackie’s blood and Alma’s urine now overpowered the odor of the chemicals lately put on nearby fields. We had to stanch the bleeding. I slammed on the brakes, rushed to the trunk of the car, and rifled in my bag until I found two clean tee shirts. In the dim light of the car’s dome bulb, I could see how sodden the shirt was. Jackie’s eyes were half closed, and he wasn’t moving. His right hand lay open on his thigh. A jagged smear of blood marked the white palm. Those beautiful hands.
I shoved one of the clean shirts at her. “Hold him up!” Panic filled my every membrane.
The shotgun lay propped against the front passenger seat. I had been taught to admire the beauty of shotguns. This one had been the object of loving kindness. It gleamed, its pewter-colored barrels bearing just the right sheen and odor from the recent caress of a chamois cloth lightly coated with gun oil, its cherry stock waxed and buffed. Its presence suddenly made my heart thump in my ear and my right hand shake uncontrollably.
I jumped out and slung the weapon as far as I could into the blackness.
I finally came to Highway 80, turned east, and pushed the accelerator to the floor. I held the car steady at 100 miles per hour, whizzing so fast by other cars that I could hardly make out their shape or color. My window was rolled down just far enough to create a loud whistle from the air rushing in. I had never driven so fast before, but the danger suited my panic. I felt like I was floating above the ground—and indeed the car did bounce at times on the uneven pavement. When the lights refocused their gaze on the highway, three times they caught the reflections of the eyes of possums and a skunk. Their tiny twin points of red glare made me think I wasn’t the only scared creature on Highway 80.
Nothing slowed the big Ford until I got to the outskirts of Montgomery. I smelled the big stockyard, and as I approached a red light in front of it, I could see nothing coming from the other directions so I pinned the accelerator to the floor and ran it. At the next intersection, I got a green light and made a tire-squealing right turn onto Fairview Avenue. I ran another light and flew past the signs for dry cleaners and funeral parlors and package beer stores, all just smears of red and green and white. Jackie was making no sound that I could hear.
Finally ahead on the left was St. Jude’s Hospital. I cut in front of a truck that braked hard not to hit me. When I shouted “emergency,” a guard pointed me around to the side. I fell out of the car and scrambled inside, then stopped a short woman in a white uniform, and begged for help. She shouted over her shoulder toward the back of the emergency room as I rushed her to Jackie. Two orderlies appeared and lifted his limp body onto a gurney. She hurried them back through the door shouting.
“Type this blood now!”
The smells of Ajax and ether hit my face as I entered the hospital. Before I cold see where they were taking Jackie, I was hustled to little room lighted by a bright bulb hanging from a wire in the high ceiling. A nurse began to inspect my heaving chest and shoulders. Beatrice, she said her name was; she looked about my age. I studied the way her thick, black hair fell in long, shiny, clumpy strands and wondered what they felt like to touch.
For the first time my body started to hurt. “I’m cold.”
“I’m going to get you a gown and a blanket in just a minute, honey, just soon as I get these little wounds dressed.”
“He mostly missed me,” I said. She nodded, smiling, but kept her focus on my injuries. She asked my name and how the accident had happened, if my family knew I was there. “Why did you come to St. Jude’s?” she said.
“Because this is a colored hospital and my friend is colored. I’ve been here before. Sister Carol is a friend of my grandmother.” Sister Carol was the nun who headed the hospital.
I lay back on the examining table and closed my eyes, wondering where Jackie was, what the doctors were doing to him. Maybe he would need surgery to get the shot out. Beatrice covered me with a blanket and I soon fell into an edgy sleep. I awakened to the soft voices of two people, one of them Sister Carol, the other a black male doctor in a long white coat. The doctor began to pick out pieces of glass. I asked about Jackie.
The doctor glanced at Sister Carol. “Tom, Jackie’s lost a lot of blood,” she said.
“We tried to stop the bleeding, but it wouldn’t stop. We really tried.”
She took my trembling right hand. “We know that, dear.” She smiled. “Your grandmother is on her way here.”
“Bebe shouldn’t come. She’s sick.”
When they left, I drifted back into the strange sleep. I awakened when I felt someone stroking my arm. As I sat up on the examining table, I saw my grandmother’s pale, shocked face. She cast her eyes from my bloody face to the smears across my chest. “Look at you, Tommy,” she said. She turned away and found a cloth, which she wet and used to wash my face.
“Does anything hurt you, dear?”
“You’re so thin, Bebe. How you feeling?”
The worry on her face deepened the hollows of her cheeks, framed by the thin strands of white hair that had fallen out of the bun at the back of her neck. “Do you hurt badly?” she said again.
“No. I’m just so tired. What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
“Where’s Jackie?”
William Addison, Bebe’s house man and driver, slipped into the room, his broad face creased with concern. “Here, son.” He handed me a Coca-Cola. “Your mama and daddy are on their way.”
Sister Carol appeared at the door and asked me to go with her to another room, and she nodded at Bebe to come along. I followed warily, and saw Alma sitting on a straight-backed chair. Her arms were covered with small bandages, and her bloodshot eyes were locked on the black doctor beside her. Sister Carol told us to sit down. Her eyes swept from Alma to me.
“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news. Jackie has died.”
There