CHAPTER 22

Sam and Jenny Latta,

Marietta, Georgia, Tuesday, February 23, 1982:

She came out to the driveway and stopped at the front bumper of her blue bug. Dismay crossed her face as she realized that she had left her glasses behind. They were sitting on the kitchen counter.

“Shit,” she said. “Forties. Spare me.”

Since her last birthday, she had needed glasses for some things, and she hated them. Carting them around and keeping track of them was a nearly constant irritation. She usually wore them to drive now, but she was late. She had managed without them for years. She shifted the heavy briefcase onto her hip, set her coffee mug carefully on the car’s curved front hood, and pulled out her keys. She saw the pebbles glittering on her seat at the same time that Sam came out of the front door. Although they taught at the same school, they never rode together. He gave her a small wave as he headed across the front lawn to his yellow Volvo, parked out at the curb.

“Sam, c’mere a sec,” she called.

He glanced at his wrist watch and then changed course over to her.

“Look at this,” she said, pointing.

A chunk of cement lay on the passenger seat of the VW. Small pieces of green safety glass littered the interior. Sam leaned in and grabbed the rock, and then straightened and tossed it out into the road.

“Weird they’d come up in the driveway to smash a window when mine was out on the street,” he said. “Piss anyone off lately? Student maybe?”

The question irritated her, and she looked up to retort. She saw that he was smiling at her, the first smile in a long time, and her anger died. She felt a tiny flood of warmth.

He saw her smile, the first one in a long time, and he wondered how it was that her beauty escaped him for such long stretches of time. They hardly talked anymore.

He was surprised by depth of his missing her. “Ride in with me,” he said.

“I can’t just leave it here all day with the window wide open,” she said. “Someone might steal it.”

“They’d be doing you a favor. It’s past time you junked this thing.”

“I love my bug,” she said absently and wrinkled her brow. “Wait--I have conferences tonight. I can’t go in with you. You’d have to hang around for an hour or two after school. Don’t we have something you can put over it? It might rain this afternoon.”

He almost told her that he would wait for her at the end of the day, but instead he turned and walked to the garage. She watched him go, and almost called after him to suggest that they both skip school today. She bit her lip. She was surprised at the depth of her missing him.

He came back with a translucent roll of plastic and some tape and set about covering the broken window. When he was done, he opened the door and swept the loose bits and pieces of glass onto the floor.

“I’ll see about getting this fixed tomorrow,” he said.

“My hero.”

She started to get in and hesitated. Abruptly, she turned and kissed him. She could see the surprise in his eyes. They both wanted to linger, but didn’t. He heard the anemic rattle of her little engine start up behind him as he walked to his car.

Six miles away from them, a man named Ennis Dougherty looked at a clipboard. He sat high above the massive radiator grille of his Mack Super-Liner, travelling at a steady sixty miles an hour along the two-lane state highway.

His last stop was a warehouse near downtown, and the waybill said he’d be leaving three pallets there. Problem was, he only remembered seeing two pallets in the trailer at the last stop. Was it possible? A paperwork screw-up, or was a whole goddamned pallet missing off the truck? He glanced up at the highway from time to time. The two-laner was nearly empty, and he sped up. He needed to make time before he hit the morning freeway into Atlanta.

The small blue car clattered its way out of the neighborhood. She realized she should have used the delay in the driveway to go back inside for her glasses. At last she came to the stop sign where the road crossed the highway. She always felt a pleasurable tingle of risk when she stomped on the gas to take the underpowered bug across the two lanes to the other side. Sometimes, if traffic was heavy, she had no choice but to pick a gap and go. There had been some close calls.

This morning, the northbound lane was clear approaching from her side. She looked to the right. It was hard to see through the plastic taped to the window frame, and she squinted, wishing again for her glasses. The road seemed clear, and she stepped on the gas.

Her neck broke at the first touch of the truck’s front bumper.

Ennis Dougherty looked up at the road at the very moment the VW crossed in front of him and vanished from sight under the flat plane of his front hood. He had the smallest fraction of a second to hope that he had been seeing things, and then there was a series of thumps, as though his trailer had crossed a set of train tracks.

The huge truck slewed to the right, and, as the front end nosed softly down into the ditch and came to rest, time caught up with him and he blew the horn. He began to cry, sitting high up in his cab. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he blasted the air horn again and again.

Jenny felt none of the violent impact. There was only a curious, gentle tearing as she came free of her body. She got out of her car and stood beside the truck. Looking up, she was overcome with pity for the man behind the wheel. She wanted badly to comfort him, but she had torn loose from the road, too. A veil was falling over the scene, and she could see the things here less clearly with every passing moment.

All at once, she understood that she had been dreaming, and that her time on earth was illusive. No dreamer could touch a dream once they were awake. Reluctantly, she turned away. She had a long way to go today, and the body left behind under the front of the truck never crossed her mind as she started walking.

Far, far away, in a city that looked very much like the Berlin of our world, twilight fell. It was a ruined city, but by design rather than history, and it held no sense of desolation. Every building was warm, romantic, and mysterious. Every hall and every room waited for her, hushed. It was completely dark.

As she approached, windows began to glow with light, one by one. As the glow spread across her horizon, she was reminded of fireflies, and she laughed with the absolute joy of it.

She began to hear snatches of laughter and conversation from open windows and doors as she wound her way through the streets. She had never been here before, but she knew the place better than she knew her own heart. She turned corners and climbed stone steps without hesitation. Finally, she saw the sign for the Blue Moon, and she went in through the door.

Her staff was gathered in the kitchen. They stood silently, looking at her. Finally she threw up her hands, smiling, and they broke ranks and gathered around her.

“Welcome home, welcome home, welcome home...”

“Let’s get ready to open, people,” she said. “A big night at the Blue Moon.”

“The Blue Moon...the Moon is open again...she’s come home, she’s finally here...she’s home...”

The gray days were finally over. She marveled at how real it all was. The loveliness ran through everything like the vibrations in music.

From time to time, she glanced up from what she was doing. Her eyes lingered on the door, watching for Sam to walk through it. Time would bring him, and the waiting would make the advent sweeter.

***

Present Day:

The old Pontiac station wagon was parked on the shoulder near the entrance to the church yard. From fifty yards away, I recognized Arthur Sutton leaning on a front fender and studying us.

“Arthur Sutton. Wonder what he’s doing,” the doctor said. “He doesn’t have people in here.”

“I think he’s letting me know he doesn’t like me visiting his mother.”

“Bullshit. C’mon, get in.”

He drove to the gate, slowed, and lowered his window when we came abreast of the station wagon.

“Hello, Arthur,” Roy said. “That’s quite the ride, ’59? ’60? Safari wagon. I had a Chevy Nomad, kissing cousin to that, years ago. Sold it for about five hundred bucks. The things we do when we don’t have a crystal ball, right?”

Sutton didn’t reply. He stared in at me, sitting on the other side of the car.

“How’s your mother, Arthur?” Roy persisted. “Doing all right?”

“If there weren’t motherfuckers like this one coming to my house to bother her, she’d be good,” he finally said. “She’s freaking out, and I ain’t happy a bit about it.”

His voice was surprisingly soft and breathy. He tilted his chin at me. “Got that, motherfucker? I don’t want to catch you even on my street anymore. Leave my mama alone.”

I started to answer, but the doctor put his hand on my arm and I subsided.

“Your mama is an old friend,” he said. “Mr. Latta went to pay his respects to her. There’s no cause to be upset about it. He won’t have a reason to go back, I’m sure of it.”

He raised the window, gave a small wave to the younger man, and drove on.

“If he keeps spending my dad’s money on old cars, I’ll be him visiting again,” I said. “Bet on it.”

“Now, now, Mike. Arthur works hard selling dope. No reason he can’t buy a nice thing or two for himself.”

I smiled, in spite of myself.

“Now, lunch first, or go see the old store?” he asked.

“If it’s not that far, let’s stop at the store first.”

“You got it.”

We passed a small, half-finished housing development. Huge semi-mansions sometimes seemed to be the only housing that was built anymore in the south. This street had two or three completed houses and several poured basements. Survey flags stirred in the wind, faded to pink. There was no construction equipment and no sign of activity.

“That project looks like it’s coming along slowly,” I said.

“Shit,” the doctor snorted. “They throw those big houses up anywhere they can find cheap land. No sense of neighborhood, no sense of community. Then strangers from somewhere else buy new homes here, right in the middle of a black area, and they think they have a manor in the woods.” He looked over at me. “I’m not talking about segregation, you know. I’m talking about history, tradition. The things that make a place your home. A barn with shutters on the windows and central air conditioning on a plastic street full of other big barns isn’t home, far as I can tell.”

The pines began to crowd close to the road. I looked into the trees as they rolled past. They were getting denser and the forest was growing darker.

“As for that place back there, they started building about the time half the other palaces around here were going into foreclosure. Serves ’em right. You have to feel for the poor folks who took on a huge mortgage for the couple houses that got finished. They have a bunch of half-framed houses and basement holes for neighbors.”

He slapped the steering wheel and laughed. “Now that’s creepy. Forget graveyards. It’s a street like that I’d hate to walk down at night.”

The two lanes of blacktop went straight through the trees for several miles, the blur of trees on either side only occasionally broken by a house.

“This road probably hasn’t changed much over the years, has it?” I asked.

“It looks just the same as it did fifty years ago, except of course when your dad and I were youngsters it was dirt, with gravel on the good parts. Here we are.”

“Imagine--my dad walked along here more than sixty years ago.”

“Sure, he did. Me too.”

We turned onto a weedy lot. The paving was broken and heaved. The old store sat and glowered at me, somehow black. The sight of it made me hurt physically. Shingles on the sloping roof were missing, and the windows were boarded up. It had clearly been derelict for a long time. It sat in the daylight, but it gave off an overwhelming impression of darkness, a sense of cloudy nights.

This was the place that must have haunted my father’s dreams. This was where he had pulled a trigger as a child and watched two grown men die. I wondered if he had come back here from time to time over the years, or if he had completely avoided the place.

“We can walk around,” Roy said, “but I won’t go in. It’s all closed up anyway, or supposed to be. No way to look inside.”

There was a sign mounted on the covered front porch above the door. It said “Country Mart” in faded letters. There was a drawing of an old-fashioned spinning wheel beside the letters.

“Country Mart,” I said. “Nice.”

“It was always Bradford’s Store,” Roy said, “even when the Suttons owned it. There was never a sign, it was just Bradford’s.”

There was almost no paint on the building. The wood had weathered dark. Most old wooden buildings turn silvery when the paint has been gone for long enough, but moss and mildew had turned this one rotten, almost greasy.

“I don’t much like it here anymore, not that I ever did,” the doctor said. “Too many bad memories. I don’t even like to drive by. This place has been closed more than it’s been open since the Sutton family had it. The county has sold it for a song to someone every few years, someone who thought the low price guaranteed they could make a go of it. They all went under, and the county took it back for taxes every time, ’til the next sucker came along. It was even an art gallery for a little while, if you can believe that.”

From underneath the cheap facade of modern convenience store that the previous owners had tried to paste on, the original general store seemed to be reasserting itself. The long porch only needed a couple of old men in rockers, a sleeping cat and some tin signs to roll the years away. Under the eaves, the plate glass windows that had been added were boarded up.

“It’s been empty a long time this time, by the looks of it,” I said.

“Yes, a long time,” he agreed. “The last people had a couple gas pumps out front here. One of the underground fuel tanks started leaking. They had to dig it out and clean it up. That closed them. Since then, no one’s been tempted to try again.”

We walked around to the back. Behind the walls, I sensed movement from inside the building.

“Here’s where it happened,” Roy said.

The woods came up to the edge of a large area of packed dirt. Generations of sharecroppers had worn a path to the back door to pick up what they needed, and often stayed for a time to smoke, play dice, and listen to gossip. This had been a social center for a lot of years. I tried to picture my father being here as a young boy. There was an old water pump standing by itself. Its handle was gone.

“Looks like this was a popular spot,” I said.

“It was. We came here to shop, or just to pass the time.”

“Only blacks?”

“Sure. No reason for a white person to come back here. They went in by the front door.”

“The day Wanda kissed your brother there was no one else around?”

“No. It was an afternoon, mid-week in July. Tobacco would have finished planting, and it was time to start getting in peaches. Folks were busy. You’d mostly see people hanging around here after the first week in December, when the last of the cotton is in. Your dad, Eli, and Wanda had the place to themselves that day.”

“Do people still hang around back here?” I asked.

“No, not really. Don’t think so. The store’s been shut, and the population’s different. A few people probably come here to do dope, that kind of thing.”

“It’s just a bit strange that it’s not all overgrown back here. It’s still clear, like it sees a lot of traffic.”

“I don’t know if anything will grow here,” he said. “This place has a terrible reputation. There are places that have seen too much shame, I guess.”

I thought about it and nodded. “Places remember,” I said. “There are old houses that are full of memories--children and birthday parties, Sunday dinners, engagements, and grandchildren. They’re haunted with what life is, and that makes them a little bit alive. You can wake up in a house like that, hear a creaking on the stairs, feel comforted, and go right back to sleep.”

“Not this place,” Roy said. “Nothing happy here.”

“No,” I said. “Fill a building with enough hate and violence, and it gets sick. It starts to turn in on itself and obsess. It can’t forget what it’s seen.”

I heard what sounded like a sigh. I couldn’t tell where it came from.

“What’s worse, it doesn’t want to forget. It replays things over and over to keep whatever negative power it has as fresh as it can.”

I looked at Tull. He didn’t look back. He was staring at the structure, his face slack and thoughtful.

“People still live in those buildings sometimes,” I said. “Live or do business, go to school, whatever. I think the chances of getting sick, of getting divorced, of doing something crazy that lands you in jail are higher if you stay in them. Most people don’t believe, though. Even if there are dishes flying from the cabinets by themselves, they don’t believe there’s any haunting.”

He nodded. “Buildings like this one are so haunted,” he said, “that it leaches out and poisons the ground underneath them. You can tear the damn thing down and build something brand new, and it’ll be just as sick as what was there before. The ground’s no good anymore.”

“People are afraid of this place?” I asked. “Is it because of the shootings? The men my father shot?”

“No. Not many people remember about that anymore. They just say it’s haunted. Sixty years of local legend. People claim to have seen and heard things.”

“Do you think it is?” I asked.

“Yes, maybe I do. Wanda’s mother...Florence, her name was. I remember her--not that old, but a bitter woman all the same. Disappointed with her life. She hung herself inside there. I always thought she had more to do with Eli’s killing than people realized. I wouldn’t be surprised if she drove those men to do what they did.”

“Why do you think it’s her?”

“I saw something myself, years ago. I never knew what it was for sure.” He looked away. I waited and, finally, he spoke. “In the early ’70s I drove by here on my way to a house call, early one morning. The place was between owners again. Closed. I was passing, and I saw a woman with a ladder going up the front steps. Looked like she was going to do some work, and I wondered if someone bought the place and was fixing it up. I slowed down a bit, interested. She stopped at the top and turned around and looked at me.”

He stopped, clearly debating whether to go on.

“And...” I prompted.

“And I recognized her. It was Florence Sutton. I hadn’t seen her since I was a child, but I recognized her. I stepped on the gas, but I saw--I saw--she was carrying the ladder, and she was also carrying a rope, so help me God. I’m sure you think I’m crazy.”

“Not at all,” I said. “You have no idea. I absolutely believe you.”

He was obviously stricken by his admission, and I changed the subject.

“Are you ever afraid of dying?” I asked.

“Am I ever not afraid of dying? I’m a doctor. I can’t kid myself about it the way most people can. I know better than anyone that it comes to us all.”

We stood there in silence. The old store was still, almost as if the building were listening to us.

“I think,” he said, “maybe I’m expressing myself wrong. I made my peace with Mr. Death when I was still a young man. I think what I’m afraid of is dying wrong. I see the people who die without leaving behind anything good. Being the world champion of anything doesn’t matter. Getting rich, being good-looking--none of it. What matters is decency, and doing the right thing, and raising your kids up right. You do take those things with you. They last forever. They spread like ripples in all the lives that follow you.”

“Do you think we go on from here?” I asked.

“I know we do, and from what your Molly has told me, you do too.”

I was surprised. Molly didn’t confide very often. My measure of Roy Tull went up. “I see things sometimes, yeah. So does she. She told you about that?”

“Some of it,” he said. “I think the world of that young lady. I don’t think I’d be inclined to doubt much of anything she told me.”

“It’s not like I walk around seeing dead people every day,” I said. “Once in a while I see a person who’s...out of place. Someone who seems out of kilter, somehow. I realize that whoever I’m seeing has moved on, but for some reason, they’re still here.”

“How do they look? Are they transparent or something?”

“Not at all,” I said. “They seem perfectly real, because they are real. They aren’t here in the same way that they used to be, but they’re very much still here. As real as you or me, you know? But with a different physicality than they used to have.”

“Believe it or not, more than forty years as a physician doesn’t make me doubt you. When you’ve been present at as many deaths as I have been, you start to notice that there’s a remarkable similarity to being present at a birth. There’s a physical change at death. I can’t describe it.”

I was starting to feel like I wanted to get away from the store. Things were stirring, and I wanted no part of them.

“Tell me,” he said. “If you’ve seen what seems to confirm that life goes on afterward, are you still afraid of dying?”

“I’ve seen some incredible beauty. I think I’ve seen angels. I’ve also seen some crazy, scary shit, enough to make me believe that you’re not automatically flooded with wisdom and light and grace just because you die.”

I turned to go.

“I guess that makes me the same as you. I’m not so much afraid of dying as I am afraid of dying wrong. I don’t want to die wrong.”