Chapter Four

Not long after the funeral, the telephone rang when Charlene and I got home from school, while Daddy was working at the furniture store. I picked it up and someone was breathing so softly I could barely hear it. “Who do you want to talk to?” I asked, but there was no answer, just the slow rhythm of breath. Charlene saw the confusion on my face and grabbed the receiver, thinking it was some boy.

“Talk or hang up.” She listened for a beat, then slammed down the receiver. “Don’t let any boy treat you that way, Jubilee,” she said. “It’s not respectful.”

But I didn’t mind. It was a comforting breath. So, when the phone would ring after school and Charlene was watching TV or doing her homework, I would pick up and sit still to listen to the quiet breathing. Slowly, my own would begin to match it, and it seemed as if we existed in a secret world, halfway between dream and speech. We were breathing the same rhythm in a strange duet, as if there were a shadow of myself on the far end of the telephone wires that ran through the familiar streets of Biloxi into an unknown place. I’d found a twin who knew things I could not say, who even knew my dreams, maybe. But just as mysteriously as they started, the calls stopped after a few weeks. I missed them.

Daddy got letters from thrill-seekers offering to buy the truck, the “murder vehicle,” some said. Often, they wanted to know if the seats had blood stains. Daddy wadded them up. “Sickos. What’s the world come to?”

One afternoon in late May, Charlene and I were eating tuna fish sandwiches in the living room, watching As The World Turns on TV. Part of me felt like I was keeping up with the show for Mama, for when she came back.

Daddy hurried in, waving an envelope. “Look at this, girls,” he said. “All the way from California, and it’s got a legitimate check inside. Man from Los Angeles wants to buy the truck for ten thousand dollars. Says if it’s a 1948 pick-up in good shape, he’ll add it to his collection.”

“Does he say anything about blood?” Charlene asked, through a mouthful of white bread.

“Not a word,” said Daddy. “He’s legit.”

“Mama loved the truck,” I pleaded. I swallowed the tuna as fast as I could. “You’re not going to sell it, are you?”

“Ten thousand dollars? Come on. Think of the clothes and records we could buy,” said Charlene. “We could go see Aunt Sylvia in New York.” She kicked me under the coffee table.

Daddy looked happier than I’d seen him since before Mama died. “This check’ll be for your permanent record.”

“What permanent record?” Charlene looked scared and put down her sandwich.

“Your college educations. You know how much your Mama wanted you to go to college. You girls can teach awhile before you get married, prove you can support yourselves. There’s a lot of self-respect comes from that.” He paused. “That’s what your mama always said.”

So that was why Mama gave voice lessons to people who couldn’t carry a tune. “I wouldn’t dream of going to college on blood money,” I said. “I’ll get a trumpet scholarship.”

Daddy’s face went pale. “Blood money?”

“That’s what it is,” I said, though Charlene kicked me again. “That truck was as precious to Mama as anything, and we’d be losing her twice if we sold it. The truck is how I’ll always remember Mama. We might as well just burn her pictures if we sell it. Don’t do it, Daddy. Please.”

Charlene looked at me hard, then reached out and squeezed Daddy’s hand. “Don’t do it.” I could’ve kissed her.

Daddy went to the kitchen and propped the check on the windowsill above the sink. “You girls think about it,” he called, but the next morning the check was in the garbage, torn into pieces.

“The truck belongs to you,” Daddy said at breakfast, looking from Charlene to me.

“I couldn’t sit behind that wheel.” Charlene kept stirring her egg into her grits, not looking at us.

I spoke fast, before Daddy changed his mind. “I’m a good driver, like Mama. I’ll take care of it.”

“You shouldn’t even be driving, Jubilee. You’re not fifteen yet.” It was an argument Daddy and Mama used to have a lot, before Mama would take me on the back roads and show me how to shift so smoothly the hula dancer would barely bow. Daddy always lost those quarrels. “Clayton says you were driving a tractor when you were eleven, Harry. Who are you to talk?” Mama would rattle the keys at him.

I was eyeing those same keys, lying on the windowsill above the sink. “Mama taught me. How could I have had a better teacher?” I frowned at Daddy. “You’ve seen me drive. You know how good I am.”

That’s how the truck became mine, and I went to work on it. I propped the doors open for days, to air out the smell of blood and perfume. I even burned two vanilla votive candles on the dashboard, making puddles of wax right next to the little hula dancer that I had to scrape off. The grill had gotten dusty, so I took a chamois cloth and eased it between the chrome strips and then over the rounded hood, thinking of Mama’s soft breasts.

On the side, I always thought it said “Thirstmaster” in silvery script and I polished each letter, wondering for the first time what it meant. I closed my eyes and pretended the letters were Braille, imagining what it would be like to be one of those blind kids in Mobile, singing in a choral group. That was when it came to me: the thirst that ran through Mama’s life, the way the truck was probably the only thing that could satisfy it. And, for a while, Levi Litvak.

When I opened my eyes, the letters gleamed in the sun, and I realized the word was “Thriftmaster.” Nothing to do with thirst at all. Then I thought of Daddy, how he’d frown when Mama bought new sweater sets for Charlene and me, the sale tags still attached, or records she’d teach us to dance to, while the living room floor quivered under our feet so hard the needle would jump. I liked “Thirstmaster” better.

I brought an old toothbrush and some Clorox to scrub at the blood stains, but all they did was fade to pink, and a little hole appeared in the fabric, where I rubbed too hard. “You’ll damage the truck,” I told myself, and I could almost hear Mama agreeing. And was it right to fade out the blood that was Mama’s? So I brought out some nice bath towels instead, and tucked the ends into the crack between the seat and the back, to hold them in place like slipcovers. Mama would always be there, a kind of secret between us.

The blood and musky odor in the truck finally began to fade after I burned more vanilla candles in it. The familiar smell of grease filled the garage again, along with a faint, flowery smell I couldn’t place. I was sliding under the truck to check out a clunking noise one afternoon when I saw a bright red cloth behind Mama’s carpentry tools by the door. Every spare rag was useful to the truck, so I picked it up. It was a long chiffon scarf, red with orange poppies, soiled from the concrete floor. The flowery smell grew stronger as I put it to my nose. It wasn’t Mama’s perfume, too sweet. And I knew the scarf wasn’t Charlene’s.

While Daddy was making soup for dinner, I showed it to him and Charlene. “Where in the garage was it?” asked Daddy. “Right by the door?” Holding it by the hem, he dropped it into a paper bag from the Piggly Wiggly.

“What does he think?” Charlene wrinkled her nose when he left the kitchen. “It’s a bomb?”

He was calling the police. “No sir, never seen it before,” he said. “Might be evidence.” A minute later, he slammed the receiver down and came back in, a smile pasted on his face as he sat down.

“Evidence?” I asked.

He frowned. “You shouldn’t eavesdrop. The police don’t think so. Case closed, they say.”

“Deanna,” said Charlene. “She probably put it there. She said it couldn’t be a murder without clues.”

“She may have problems,” I said. “But she wouldn’t do that.”

“It’s a crime, if she did,” said Daddy.

Charlene made a gesture of pocketing the salt shaker. “She’s your friend,” she said.

The bag with the scarf disappeared, and I thought Daddy had thrown it out until I saw it up on a shelf in the garage, the bag secured with gray duct tape.

I still practiced my trumpet in the garage, imagining I was playing to Mama. Miles Davis was my favorite, and Mama’s woodworking and gardening tools vibrated against each other when I’d do “Old Devil Moon.” It was like her applause.

Mrs. Guest saw me with the votive candles, and told Brother Beeker that I’d made a “sacri-religious shrine out of a motor vehicle.” He stopped by the house one Saturday afternoon, just as Charlene was bleaching my hair a lighter brown. We had to stop so I could explain how a vanilla candle absorbs odors, even the smell of blood. The kitchen screen had a hole in it, and a fly kept buzzing at Brother Beeker’s sweet hair pomade. He ducked away from it, and held our hands at the kitchen table to pray for the family. He finally left, with the fly nestled in a thick swirl of hair.

At least he’s good fly paper, I thought, but Charlene rushed me to the sink to wash out the peroxide before the words were out. By then, my hair was as white as Grandma Starling’s. Until the brown roots started showing, people said I’d gone prematurely gray with grief.

In the glove compartment, I found a file of Mama’s notes, written in her precise, block letters, on when she’d changed the oil, re-lined the brakes, and bought new spark plugs for the six cylinders. She loved that truck, all right, all those Sunday afternoons she’d spend in the garage, checking the transmission fluid or the air in the tires, preening it like it was a wild bird that might fly, something she had to keep tamed, a thirst to be quenched.

For weeks, I had the same dream. Mama would be walking in the vegetable garden when her chest would begin to bleed, until it looked like red poppies blooming on her blouse. She was oblivious to it, like it was as natural as a menstrual stain. The blood dripped down her arms and legs, and she began to stagger, leaking the red liquid as if her heart had broken for all Biloxi to see. I’d be tapping on a window in the living room, trying to warn her, but she couldn’t hear. Always, she’d climb into the truck to escape her fate. By then, she’d be solid red, looking like a bride or a nun sacrificed to the inevitable ceremony that lay before her, the black of a habit or the white of a wedding gown gone to crimson. She would start the motor, and there was nothing I could do but watch. When the engine roared, her blood became flammable, and the truck began to crackle with fire, a sound like the snapping of brittle bones. The truck would disappear down the road, Mama’s upright body a darker pillar of red borne inside the orange flames. Then, somehow, it was me who was driving, the flames engulfing all but my face.

When I drove around Biloxi in the truck, the dream would snap into my mind and I’d shiver, feeling as if I were driving an inferno through the streets. But it was a secret fire, a sacred fire.

I went to Tallulah Junior High every morning in the truck until school let out for the summer, though people stared and pointed. Though I was too young to get a driver’s license, nobody had the nerve to stop me, not even the police. The truck made me immune, made me feel immortal. It was like Mama’s gift from heaven. Sometimes I’d spin the wheel and it seemed like Mama’s fingers were guiding it.

When I was cruising down the highways outside Biloxi, testing the limits of how close to New Orleans I could get before I’d be late getting home to the hot dogs Daddy fixed for supper, I knew why Mama prized it so much. It was her ticket out, her reminder that she still had her freedom, an escape from her singing lessons at the Methodist Church, or from the kitchen. Maybe even from us, her kids and husband.

When I offered Charlene a ride, she admitted she was scared of it. “How can you stand driving it?” she asked. “Those towels on the seat don’t make any difference.” I was a dumb little kid who thought I was grown up, she told me, but her eyes told me I was fearsome to her.

For one thing, I’d started going to Saint Sebastian’s, the Catholic church where Deanna’s family belonged. Charlene told me she prayed for me to come back to the Baptist church, but I bobby-pinned a lace handkerchief on my head and went off to Mass. The last time I’d gone to my Baptist Sunday School class, one of the girls, Ruthie Joy Stevens, had led the class in prayer. She asked God to help the fundraising drive for wall-to-wall carpeting in the sanctuary. Then she said, “And help Jubilee, God.” For a second, I thought she was trying to comfort me, but she added, “We ask Thee to help her calm down, to stop bleaching her hair and skipping school. Help her to obey the laws of our fine state.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked up, and the whole class had raised their heads to stare at me. Ruthie Joy’s blonde head was bowed, and she went on, her fingers clasped in her lap, the toes of her black leather pumps pointing together, like two shiny convertibles about to collide.

“Lead, guide, and direct Jubilee Starling not to burn candles in her truck, making a sacri-religious shrine on the dashboard. Help her not to drive without a license, and to know Thy ways, and not to wear glitter in her nail polish. Guide her to use her trumpet to knock down the walls of Jericho, not to build up the sinful walls of jazz-i-co. Help her to finally get over her mother’s death after these most tragical weeks, and …”

I slammed the door behind me before I could hear the rest. Build up the walls of jazz-i-co? Who on earth helped Ruthie Joy with that speech? That’s what it was, a speech, not a prayer, like one of Brother Beeker’s sermons.

Ruthie Joy’s mother said she’d be Miss America one day, she had such poise. She’d been one of Mama’s voice students, but Mama never thought she had talent. I reminded myself of that when I left the church and never went back.

There were other reasons I left the Baptists. Brother Beeker said we were all responsible for a small tornado that ripped through a trailer park up in McComb and killed a baby. We were evil, he said. We listened to snakes in the grass, chewing hard on every apple of knowledge that dropped our way. “Every time you bite down, the juice just spurts from your mouths!” he yelled, rising up on the tiptoes of his shiny black shoes, his finger pointing to the chandelier. “Poison! That’s what it is. God’s shakin’ his finger at you, and you, and you.” He jabbed his finger at one of the deacons, then Grady Pickens, and finally at Tommy McCarty’s grandmother. Grady looked proud, but the other two bowed their heads. Tommy’s grandmother picked at a thread on her purse. “He’s showing you what Judgment Day’ll be like. You thought that tornado was something, didn’t you, cars crushed like unto tin cans, trailers blown like a baby tossing his blocks into the air, that baby having himself one of the Devil’s own temper tantrums? Well, you’re going to see a whole lot more on Judgment Day.” Why didn’t he say “we”? He sounded like he was sitting by God’s side.

I couldn’t believe I had any responsibility for a tornado, or a baby dying in one. I’d studied how hot air could be dangerous under certain conditions. I learned a lot about hot air from Brother Beeker’s own sermons, even while Charlene sat beside me, inhaling his words like they were God’s own.

On Sunday nights, we’d stand in a line for “Sword Drills,” when the class would rip through their Bibles to see who’d be first to find the verse called out by the teacher. “Draw swords,” she said, and you’d pull out your Bible and hold it in the palm of your left hand, your right hand laid gently on top. But as soon as the verse was called, there was nothing gentle about it. My Bible might have looked bad, its edges curling up and torn, but I won a lot of gold stars on my sword drill card. It drove Charlene crazy, that her renegade sister might know more about the Bible than she did. You won enough of those stars, and you got a hot fudge sundae or a chocolate malted, your choice, from the church kitchen. But it was my downfall, all that knowledge, like Eve with the apple. That winter before Mama died, I gained five pounds in a month on all that ice cream. Mama said I’d have to start cheating on the sword drills, so I wouldn’t win those free desserts.

“It goes right to your fanny, Jubilee,” she’d tell me. “Your fanny and here.” She pinched some flesh beneath my chin. “We’ll have to roll you down the church steps if you keep remembering all those verses, sweetie. Good thing you’ve already been baptized. You’d flood the church if they dunked you now.” Mama was never strong on tact, but I lost the weight after I quit going to First Baptist.

The main reason I stopped going, though, was the way the invitational hymn called people down to have their souls saved. I didn’t want to think we had choices. It made it seem that maybe Mama didn’t have to die after all. Then the injustice would hit me so hard I could barely hear the choir sing. The worst part was that Mama’s alto wasn’t there, soaring over even the sopranos.

I liked the way everything seemed preordained and fated at Saint Sebastian’s, even the incense and robes and school uniforms. Free will, all the crazy rages and joys we have on this planet, began to seem like nothing more than the smoke from a votive candle that knows the inevitable direction of its burning wick. It was a comfort, feeling that nothing could be avoided, that all we had to do in life was hold on tight until the ride ended.

Father McGallagher never said God had sent a tornado to blame us for our wicked ways. His Latin was beautiful, so exotic and strange that I started studying it harder in school. It sounded as mysterious as incense, and I would think that was where Mama must be, somewhere in the smoke of incense and the lull of Latin invocations.

I felt closer to God when I drove, with the accelerator pushed to the floor, and Mama’s patron saint nodding her approval on the dashboard, telling me I might understand the mysteries of the universe if I could learn enough Latin. Then I might make it to sainthood, myself. It was just me and the road and Mama’s truck, a trinity made into a single being by movement and speed.

After Mass, I explored back roads, speeding along highway 90 that stretched from Biloxi to Pascagoula, past scrubby pines that lined the way like pathetic footmen bowing as I blew past at sixty miles an hour. I told myself stories about how Mama had felt sorry for Levi Litvak, hunted by the Klan the way he was, and then how she’d made him furious when she told him that it didn’t matter what he said, she loved Daddy and her girls. He’d gone crazy with love for her, I told myself. Maybe for the same reason I loved her. It didn’t matter to Mama what anybody said, what gossip was spread.

The latest rumor in town was that Levi Litvak didn’t die in the Thunderbird crash, after all. Somebody else drove the car, people said. Levi got away with murder, and ran to Puerto Rico, smoking big cigars.

On a Sunday afternoon in late July, I decided to skip the evening mass and find the cypress tree where Levi Litvak’s T-bird had crashed, see for myself how badly damaged it was. Maybe there was a clue about whether he survived. It was out in the swampy lands near New Orleans, so I headed west, watching the sun edge toward the brown horizon of the Gulf. I wished I had a map, one with arrows, a treasure map I could unfold and see where Levi Litvak had gone on that April morning, careening his convertible down back roads, his hair waving crazily in the wind until he crashed. Did he hit that tree on purpose, knowing there was no way he could survive either a murder trial or a life without Mama? How could someone else have been driving his car? But one cypress-lined road looked just like the next, so I turned back when the sky grew dusky and all those mossy shadows seemed scary.

I was getting close to Long Beach when I spotted a woman in a red dress hitchhiking. Company, I thought. And it was awfully hot for anybody to be hitchhiking. I’d seen a white family once, hitchhiking by the side of the road, with paper bags and boxes tied with rope. They had two little kids with deep rings beneath their eyes, sitting on one battered suitcase. The father had his thumb out. I remembered the look in his eyes, the same weary hopelessness that the rest of his family had, and the way Daddy had said we just didn’t have room for them when I asked. “Where would we put them all, hon?” he said. Mama reached to the back seat and patted my knee. “I love you, Jubilee,” she’d said.

So this time, I pulled the truck over. After I stopped, I recognized her red dress from morning mass, in Saint Sebastian’s third pew. It was Loretta Holliday. From the sandy berm, she waved with a handkerchief, but when she saw me at the wheel, her face puckered up, like she was going to cry.

“Mrs. Holliday?” I asked, leaning across to open the door for her. She hesitated before she climbed in, scraping the mud from her high heels on the edge of my running board. A clump of clay hung there. I resented that. I kept the truck polished, the inside spotless, the way Mama had.

“Take me back to town.” She smoothed the towel on the seat, but it was wrinkled and one of the bloodstains peeked out. She sat on the edge of the towel, like she wanted to touch as little of the truck as possible. I saw her glance for a second at the bloodstain. Then she fixed her gaze on the horizon, gray with rain clouds, and remembered her manners. “I appreciate your help.”

“Did your car break down?” I started the truck, and peered into the scrubby pines along the highway, thinking her car might have rolled down the slippery pine needles into the woods. I felt sorry for her. Now and then, Joe Holliday would come back to town, and disappear again after leaving those awful bruises on Loretta and Kathy. Loretta didn’t seem ashamed of the bruises when she’d go to work at WLOX, even though she sat right in the lobby at the front desk. She’d put extra make-up on her and Kathy, but she’d tell anybody how crazy Joe was, how she wished he’d stay gone. She told Onita Tate that she’d bought herself a little pistol, might kill Joe one night, or at least scare the pants off him. When Loretta showed Mrs. Tate the gun, people began talking about how Loretta might belong in Whitfield, the state mental asylum up near Jackson. But I could understand how she might buy a gun, thinking about Joe Holliday’s fists.

“No. My ole car’s got another fifty thousand miles in her,” she said. She took a pack of cigarettes from her purse and scratched a match against the package. Beneath a round hole in the sleeve of her dress, I could see pink flesh.

“Mrs. Holliday,” I said. “Did you know you have a cigarette burn in your dress?” What I was trying to say was, don’t you dare put a burn in this truck.

She put down the matches and lifted her arm to look at the hole. “You want to know what happened to my dress?” She didn’t wait for an answer, just smoothed out her skirt to show me two more ragged, round holes near the hem. “Joe, he got mad at me one night and put my clothes in the yard. Great big pile, everything but what was in the dirty clothes basket. Lucky he didn’t think of those. If Joe Holliday doesn’t understand something, he’s liable to shoot it.”

“What’s to understand about a dress?” I asked.

“It’s red, right? It’s sexy, isn’t it?” She pulled at her skirt to show me how tight it was, then waved the lit match through the air to extinguish it, as if she were fanning away my words along with the flame. “Joe grabbed his pistol out of the kitchen drawer, and—kablam! kablam!—fired a whole round of bullets into my best clothes. Got holes in my underwear, too. Slips, panties, bras. I tell you, that’s as close to shooting a person as you can get.”

I considered it. “I guess so.”

“Girl, I didn’t even think about stopping him. Not when he gets like that. Think God will forgive me for wearing my holey clothes to church?” She laughed, and took a tug on the cigarette, making the stub burn redder.

“Maybe that makes them holier,” I said.

Mrs. Holliday eyed me above her cigarette. “You really believe that, don’t you, honey? That’s right sweet of you. Holy dresses, yessir. My best dress, and I just couldn’t patch it up. Look at me! Loretta Sweeney from Ocean Springs, with holes in her best clothes. My mother used to tell me I was going to be Miss Mississippi, that’s how pretty she thought I was. That’s what mamas are for, isn’t it?” Then she blushed. “I’m sorry about Bernice, hon.”

“You’re still pretty.” It was true, except for her teeth. The front ones overlapped and protruded slightly, but she had nice eyes. “Mrs. Tate does a good job on your hair.”

She looked at me sharply, like she didn’t believe me. “Onita Tate respected Bernice, no matter what folks say.”

“What do people say?” I asked, and wondered if I really wanted to know.

“Onita came to the funeral to pay her dues, you know, even though they disagreed about things.”

“I saw her,” I said. “She never sat down.”

“She’d had surgery. Kind that makes it hard to sit without one of those pillows with a hole in the middle. Doughnuts, they call them. She’s a prideful woman, and I don’t blame her for not carrying it with her.”

“What kind of surgery?” Now that I was Catholic like Mrs. Holliday, surely I could ask a question like that. All kinds of mysterious things ran through my mind.

She laughed. “Kind of surgery you don’t ever want to need.” She lit another cigarette, squinting as she inhaled. “Reckon it’s going to rain dead mules. Mighty gray up there,” she said, peering through the glass. She tapped the divider that split the windshield into two frames. “Looks old-fashioned. The new ones have a solid piece of glass,” she told me. As if I didn’t know. “You ought to get yourself a cute little sports car. An MG.”

What kind of money did she think Daddy made? “This truck runs great,” I said and pointed to the hula dancer on the dashboard. “So smooth she barely moves.”

Loretta frowned. She looked like she was starting to say something, but she stopped. There was nothing but the sound of her blowing cigarette smoke right at the windshield. Some people will aim a lungful at the ceiling or out the window, to be nice, but not Mrs. Holliday. Instead of puckering her lips to blow out the smoke, she made a curved slit of her mouth, so the haze billowed out in all directions. It was like a crack in an inferno blazing inside her.

“I sure do like the Catholic church,” I said. The smoke reminded me of her veiled face on Sundays. “It’s the smell, and the stained glass. And that statue, you know the one of the guy with all the arrows in him? He stares at the ceiling with his sad eyes, like he can stand the pain that way.”

“Saint Sebastian,” she nodded. “Yeah, I know him.” She sounded like she knew him personally. “Got tortured a long time ago so they made him a saint.” She ground out her cigarette on the bottom of her shoe and tossed it out the window. “Now he stands around with sticks in him.”

“So that’s Saint Sebastian.” I coughed, trying not to be embarrassed. “He’s got the church named after him, he oughtta be there. You been going there long?”

“Hard to say. I don’t go when Joe’s in town. Makes him mad.”

“It makes him mad when you go to church?” I’d never heard of that.

“Roman Catholics, you know,” she said. “Joe thinks we’re too close to the Jews.”

I thought about it for a second, but it didn’t make any sense. “But we have Christmas.” In the Hollidays’ front window, a shabby little tree always flickered with tinsel at Christmas. Ugliest tree in town, Onita Tate always said.

“’Course we do, honey. Joe doesn’t like the pope, Catholics, or Jews. We’re not like Joe, that’s why he doesn’t like us.”

“What church does Mr. Holliday go to?” I couldn’t imagine him in a coat and tie.

She laughed. “Church of the Need-to-Be-Redeemed. I’ve seen Joe in a church once, when his mama died. He knew I was Catholic when he married me, but,” she shrugged, “what with Kathy on the way, Joe’s daddy just about whupped him into marrying me. Gave him a bloody nose. Damn near broke it. Joe had scabs all over his face when he asked me to marry him. He wasn’t a pretty boy that day. Looked at me all dog-eyed and sad. ‘Okay, Loretta, I’ll marry you.’ It was enough to make me feel sorry for him.” Her voice was softer. “He was fightin’ back tears.”

“Did you marry him because you felt sorry for him?”

“Why honey, what choice did I have? Real romantic, huh?” She laughed again, like she thought she was talking to a grown-up who’d laugh along with her. I didn’t, so she lit another cigarette, and looked at me like something had just occurred to her. “You’re too young to think about these things, aren’t you? Don’t go getting pregnant someday and having to marry a boy like Joe Holliday, just because he made your knees go wobbly when you were sixteen.” She looked at the thin plain band on her finger and twisted it, like if she turned it long enough, she’d find a diamond there.

How could she stand marrying a man she didn’t love? A sick feeling rose in my chest, like she had told me more than she should have. Mrs. Holliday studied me. “Course, I don’t guess you have a boyfriend yet, do you? Try not to wear those glasses all the time, darlin.”

“I just wear them to drive,” I said, feeling hurt. They were cat-eye frames, with blue glitter on the upturned edges. I was proud of them. “At movies. Things like that.”

“A nice pink lipstick would be pretty on you. Lipstick makes your eyes look bright. You could use a little.”

I didn’t want to hear Mrs. Holliday give me one of Charlene’s lectures on how I could look better. Charlene would come up and twist my hair into shape and say, “You know how your hair would look good?” The message was that I didn’t look very good the way I was.

I changed the subject. “What do you think about Medgar Evers getting killed?” I was trying to make grown-up talk. Everybody was talking about how outside agitators from the North were coming down and riling up everybody. In June, somebody had shot and killed Medgar Evers up in Jackson, in his own driveway. I felt sorry for his children, who ran out and saw their dad lying there, dying. People said all the violence made us look bad.

She jumped like I’d stuck a pin in her. “What?” She took a long puff and squinted at me, the longest look she’d given me. “Why’s everybody asking me?”

I said, “It’s all anybody talks about.” Ever since some black people and white northerners had gone to the Biloxi beach in what the newspapers called a “Wade-In,” everybody worried about what the communists would do next.

She stared ahead. “What’re they saying?”

“Well, you know.” I was stumped. How could Mrs. Holliday have missed it? “How the communists are making Mississippi look bad. Some people say it’s only a bad joke, that Medgar Evers wasn’t even shot, much less killed. It’s just the national press, they say.”

“Yeah, it’s a bad joke, all right. I tell you what, Joe Holliday knows some bad jokes. He asked me if I’d been getting any chiggers this summer, and I says no. Joe says, good, ‘cause we got to call them chegroes now.” She rubbed her temple like she had a headache.

My skin felt prickly, thinking of how somebody like Grady Pickens would laugh. “Mama always said jokes are one of the meanest ways of keeping people down.”

She laughed. “Your mama, she’d say something intellectual like that.” She crossed her legs and looked absent-mindedly out the window. “Course, Levi liked that about her.”

The words came so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “Levi?” I asked.

“Did I say that out loud?” Her eyes darted about, and she smoothed her skirt. “Lord knows, all that talk about civil rights workers has me to where I don’t know if I’m talking or thinking.” She laughed, a little snort. “You ever get that way? Talking and thinking, it’s all mixed up?”

Was that what it meant to be crazy? “Sometimes,” I said, to be polite. “I talk to Mama when I drive. I told her about Medgar Evers getting killed and all.”

Loretta stubbed out another cigarette on the sole of her shoe and threw it out the window.

Medgar Evers and freedom riders were all the grownups talked about, and usually you could start up a conversation fast about it. Charlene said Brother Beeker had preached a sermon on the civil rights workers and all the distrust they kicked up like July dust down here. Faith in each other, that was what Brother Beeker said we needed. I was glad I hadn’t been there to sit still for it. Charlene told me one of the deacons, Mr. Wishburn, had come into her Sunday School class to give an educational talk about Martin Luther. Mr. Wishburn had had three fingers blown off in a fireworks explosion when he was a teenager, and it was always awkward to shake his claw-like hand on the way out after the sermon. He still seemed mad about losing those fingers. He told Charlene’s class how Baptists were different from Methodists, different even from Protestants, since Baptists never protested. He said the word “protest” as if it were a bad word, something sinners and Methodists would do.

But he kept saying “Martin Luther King” instead of Martin Luther, until he was red-faced and spluttering, trying to correct himself. He finally slapped the lectern and shouted, “Martin Luther!” to stop himself. Charlene told me the Sunday School teacher had started to applaud, gently, to keep Mr. Wishburn from going on, though everybody knew you weren’t supposed to clap in church.

Charlene said she didn’t learn a thing, except that sometimes clapping in church might be a necessary evil.

“What do you know about Martin Luther?” I asked Mrs. Holliday, thinking I could tell Charlene about him.

“You mean Martin Luther King? Look, we don’t know a thing more than anybody else. Stop talking about this stuff.” For the thirty miles to Biloxi, the only sounds were matches striking and the occasional crinkle of a cigarette package.

When I pulled into the Hollidays’ driveway, crunching shells and sand under the wheels, she sighed. “Joe’s back. Been out with his buddies again.” I stopped in front of her house. “Just drive on in.” She pointed to a ramshackle garage where the broken oyster shells ended, and I could smell her perspiration when she raised her arm to gesture. “Give it a tap and it’ll fall over.” She laughed, but there was no happiness in the sound. She sat there, staring at the square box of a house, its shutters and front door peeling green paint. “I’ll have to change the locks again, but it doesn’t do a bit of good. He gets in.”

The door had a line of black marks right at knee level. Someone’s boot had landed there, Joe Holliday’s work boots, no doubt. She turned to me with a sad look, like she’d forgotten I was only thirteen and wouldn’t know what to say. I hesitated, trying to think of something. “How come he never takes you on his vacations?”

“Hon, if I ever get to take a vacation, I’ll fly myself to London, England, not ride in some truck to Mobile, Alabama.” She got a faraway look. “Maybe Italy, see the pope himself. I’d sure tell about Joe Holliday.”

“Tell what?” I asked.

She waved her hand. “Oh, to pray for him, all that.” She thought a minute. “I’d tell him how scared Joe is.”

“Of what?” I couldn’t imagine him scared of anything.

“Colored folks. ‘They’re gonna rise up,’ Joe tells me. ‘And ain’t no stopping ‘em from slitting our throats like hogs.’ Yeah, he’s scared of what’ll happen if the coloreds ever think they can get away with killing us. He’s been scared for a long time, but let that be a little secret between you and me. Wish he was scared of me.” She went on, thinking about escaping him. “I got cousins in San Jose, California. I’m saving to visit them someday.” She looked at me sharply, fear glinting in her eyes. “Don’t you tell Joe. ‘Course he couldn’t find my savings even if he turned the house upside down. And that’s just what he’d do. He’d set that money on fire before he’d let me use it.”

I tried to imagine stopping Joe Holliday at the Pack-A-Sack, telling him, “Your wife told me she’s saving money for a vacation. Alone.” “Don’t worry,” I told Mrs. Holliday.

She patted my hand. “Thank you, darlin’. Joe’s been in McComb, I expect. Hunting. What’s a lady like me supposed to do? Pluck dead ducks? Joe Holliday, hah. Only holiday he ever gave me was his name.” She looked at me. “That’s a joke. Lame as some of those damn birds he brings home for me to clean.” She opened the door. “Well, thanks.”

“Bye,” I said, but it came out in a whisper. What if Joe Holliday heard his wife complaining about him?

She walked to the front door, looking around as if Joe could be hiding in the thick shrubs. The stench of decaying conchs from the Gulf hung in the air, thick as moss. Joe Holliday’s bait, the same smell that wafted from him if I got too near, in the convenience store, his tackle box in one hand, cigarette money in the other. I half expected to see a monster rise up. I backed up as fast as I could down the long driveway, hoping I wasn’t spraying her with sand.

That house had always given me the creeps. Every Halloween, Joe Holliday put up the scariest decorations—witches cackling from speakers in the bushes, a skeleton glowing in the front window, and ghosts that hovered in the lower branches of the pine trees alongside the driveway. We’d make that long walk down the Holliday drive on dares, or as excuses to hold a boy’s hand, but we’d run as soon as we saw those ghosts.

“Why’d you give Loretta Holliday a ride?” Charlene asked when I told her. She turned down the sound of Elvis blaring out “Devil in Disguise.” It was Charlene’s favorite song, and she played it all the time, singing the lyrics. When it came to the part when Elvis sang for heaven to help him, because of the devil in his girlfriend’s eyes, I always thought about Levi Litvak and Mama, but Charlene didn’t notice the connection. She was too busy thinking about Art Johnson, a boy with blue eyes and a red Impala he drove around the Dairy Queen, where kids went on Friday night to socialize. Elvis’s voice was Charlene’s own special pick-up truck, transporting her where no one else could, places like Art Johnson’s arms. That was how we both got through the summer, pretending we were someplace else.

But she was mad enough now to stop singing. “Loretta Holliday’s as crazy as that husband of hers. They’re talking about sending her to Whitfield. She bought herself a gun, you know. They say she carries it in her bosom. Right in the middle of her bra.” She shivered. “Just think what would happen if it went off.”

“It was going to rain dead mules,” I said. “Wouldn’t you pick up a lady you knew, if she was hitchhiking?”

“Cats and dogs. That’s what it rains. Who’s seen dead mules coming from the sky? Holliday’s a stray cat, herself.”

“You been seeing cats and dogs coming down, Charlene? Who’re you calling crazy?” I figured Loretta Holliday was nuts, but that was no reason to call her a stray cat.

She blushed, one of the few times I’d ever seen her do that. “Why are you defending Kathy Holliday’s mother? She sure isn’t a lady. That woman was never anything but trash,” Charlene’s voice was sharp. “Even if she is one of God’s own. He made both the wicked and the good, didn’t he? When she was in high school, she beat up a girl just for giving her boyfriend a ride home. She pulled out a wad of the kid’s hair, then glued it like a scalp on her locker.”

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

“Aunt Sylvia heard it from Mama,” she said, a triumphant note in her voice, as if Truth itself had spoken. “Mama went to Tallulah High with her. Or didn’t you know?”

“Why would somebody need to sit on a pillow with a hole in it, after they’ve had surgery?” I asked.

She looked at me like I was a Martian. “Why are you always talking crazy? Hemorrhoids, probably. Who had ‘em?”

“It’s why Mrs. Tate didn’t stay at Mama’s funeral.”

“Figures.” With that, she adjusted the knob on the record player, and Elvis’s voice soared through the room again. She closed her eyes and leaned against her pillow, a smile on her mouth. Elvis was singing the part about walking like an angel, and Charlene was probably thinking about Art Johnson and his red Impala.

There was no doubt Mrs. Holliday was strange, but if she was truly crazy, it was because of that husband of hers.

That night, the red scarf was in my dreams, floating on the Gulf breeze like a strange bird, uncertain if it should land. Every time I tried to pull it from the air, another would appear, until the night sky over the beach was filled with orange and red, billowing like fire and smoke.