Chapter Five

In October, when the coastal breeze had lost its summer warmth, Grady Pickens’s father knocked on the kitchen door. He was inviting us to go up to Jackson to the Mississippi State Fair. He gave Daddy the Shriner handshake. At least that’s what Charlene and I called it when they’d shake hands and grab each other’s shoulder with their left hands while they pumped away with their right. Daddy had known Henry Pickens since they were boys, and they’d joined the Shriners the same year, 1948.

He would drive, Mr. Pickens told Daddy, and there was plenty of room in his new Buick for Charlene and me, and a friend of Grady’s named Tommy McCarty, who lived in the neighborhood. Mostly, Mr. Pickens came to show off his new car to Daddy, and sell him a bottle of whiskey he’d bought in New Orleans for re-sale in Biloxi: bootlegging, most people called it, but Grady said his dad was an entrepreneur. “Entrapanure.” He said it as if it rhymed with manure. Kids made jokes that Grady’s dad was a shit trapper.

No one joked about that new Buick, though. “It’s got air-conditioning and seatbelts,” Mr. Pickens told Daddy, and they rode around the block so Daddy could see how smoothly it drove. Sometime on that drive, Daddy agreed to let us go to the fair. He came home and kissed me with whiskey on his breath and a bulge in his back pocket, a flask. “Henry Pickens is a fine man,” Daddy said, putting the flask in an upper kitchen cabinet. “A good Shriner. He doesn’t drink the whiskey he buys, just sips it to be sure it’s decent. I know you girls hear the bootlegging talk, but Henry Pickens pleases his customers. That’s what America’s all about.”

Like us, Grady didn’t have a mother. She had left his dad when Grady was six, so Mr. Pickens wanted to do something special for us motherless kids, I guess. Grady wanted to be with Charlene, and I was the tag-along kid sister with only Tommy McCarty for company. Tommy never said much, but he could deliver a newspaper right to your front door, first time, every time. When he talked, that was what he talked about, so I was prepared to hear a lot about how you fold the Biloxi Sun-Herald to give it the best momentum. But I’d heard about the big fair in Jackson for years, and never been, so I was glad to be going.

Charlene wished Art Johnson, not Grady, had asked her. “Just think,” she said, a moony look in her eyes. “Then we’d get to drive in that red Impala.”

“He might be cute, but he’s too old for you,” I said.

“I don’t like him just because he’s cute. He’s nice. He looks at me in the gym.”

“Oh, you think he likes you or something?” I tried to sound as sarcastic as Charlene could.

“Maybe. But you wouldn’t know what that feels like, would you?” Charlene was good at ending conversations.

Mr. Pickens turned us loose at the State Fairgrounds east of downtown. “I got business in Rankin County,” he said, and told us he’d pick us up in two hours. “Have fun.” He handed Grady a wad of dollar bills. But we hadn’t known it was what they called “Negro night” at the fair until we got to the turnstiles. The man taking tickets gave us a funny look. “You outside agitators? Freedom riders or something?” He laughed with a mouth of jagged teeth, brown from chewing tobacco, and tore our tickets in half.

Everywhere you looked, people had dark skin. They stared at us and pointed, laughing. I’d never seen black people look so relaxed and free, and my shoulders tensed when I realized they were looking at us. It was like passing through a mirror, the most exotic place I’d ever been. Out of the mass of faces, I thought I saw Pearl. She looked younger and prettier, out with her friends, without the iron hissing up at her face. Her husband had won a teddy bear for her, and she held him loosely by the arm. I waved, relieved to see someone I knew.

“Hey Pearl!” I wanted her to brush the hair from my face with her fingers, and tell me to hold my head high.

“What are you doing?” Charlene whispered, eyeing the people who were staring. “Shut up.”

“It’s Pearl,” I said, still smiling.

“Are you nuts? That’s a teenager.”

In an instant, the laughing girl before my eyes was no longer Pearl. What had I been thinking? I felt dizzy, as if I were in another land, a place where people’s faces could float away like balloons and come back, changed. The voices and laughter began to sound like the indecipherable noise from a foreign country. I wasn’t even sure how long we’d been there. Time seemed out of focus, like the blurred faces laughing around us. A slight wind sent dry oak leaves scuttling down the asphalt Midway like brown bands of refugees, hurrying past our feet. I felt like I was watching the world from a great distance, the way I had when Mama died in Intensive Care, but this time there was nothing peaceful about it.

“Yeah, they all look alike, don’t they?” said Grady. Broom-makers, I could still hear Grady in the auditorium.

“Shut up.” Charlene glared at him. “She does look like Pearl.” She glanced at me, but I didn’t feel better. The girl I’d thought was Pearl had started to smile at me, but her friends laughed and said something that made her grin. I felt like I’d lost a friend. What if it had been Pearl? Would she have even smiled at me? People pushed in line ahead of us and made us wait longer to get cotton candy. I knew then what it must be like to have black skin and walk down Biloxi’s Main Street, full of white people who either ignored you or made fun of you. So this is what it’s like to be a Negro, I thought, huddling closer to Charlene.

“Let’s go,” I said, but Charlene pointed at an enormous stretch of white cloth across a makeshift clothesline.

“Somebody’s underwear,” she said. “Heavens. Who would wear that?”

Grady hooted. “The fat lady! C’mon!”

Pictures of strange creatures had been painted on the canvas tent that read “Oddities and Freaks of Nature.” There was the fat lady, her dress looking like a tent itself, with two tiny feet painted beneath. Beside her was the bearded lady, with black tufts of hair descending from her chin. But there were other creatures whose costumes I couldn’t imagine how the fair made. The “Fish Girl” had eyes on either side of her head, and flippers instead of hands and feet. “Torso Man” was half a man on a table, his arms dangling. He wasn’t missing just legs, there was nothing at all from the waist down. How did he hide his legs? Above another picture, the letters read “Dog-Faced Boy!” It looked like a boy wearing a mask. This would be funny, I thought. I’d get a good idea for a new Halloween costume.

The line of spectators coiled inside, between two ropes, and as we wound closer, I could see the strange creatures sitting, as advertised, in stalls. A small table rose from the sawdust, and on it perched a man wearing a striped shirt. He didn’t need pants. He had the shirt tucked under where his stomach ended. The cotton candy began to rise in my throat. The people here were horribly deformed. I stared at the man who was only a torso, at the thick calluses on his knuckles. That was how he walked, I thought, with a sickening lurch to my stomach. It wasn’t magic.

One girl pulled at her boyfriend. “Let’s get out of here.” Other teenagers laughed. I looked back at the torso man. His eyes were dots of dark hatred, piercing from his face at me, at the horror he must have seen in my face as I looked at his knuckles. His eyes didn’t want to be there, trapped in that body. I opened my mouth to apologize, but nothing came out. Beside him the Fish Girl sat on a wooden bench, with enormous eyes so far apart she surely couldn’t see straight. Instead of hands, she had fleshy flaps without fingers. The tent had become a house of mirrors where the reflections were horribly distorted.

Charlene stood before the fat lady, a mountain of flesh with a sack of popcorn. “Want some, honey?” She extended an arm trembling with loose fat and held out the popcorn to a little boy sucking his thumb. “Why, you’re skinny as a pole.” The boy stepped back and sucked harder. “There’s nothing wrong with being a freak, honey,” she said. “I’m just like you, ’cept for all this.” She lifted her upper arm and wagged the skin that hung down. People laughed, but I felt sick. A sweaty, medicinal odor, like Mercurochrome, was mixed with the sweetness of cotton candy. I dropped the pink cloud of sugar into the sawdust, but a little boy with bright eyes like a magpie’s snatched it as it fell.

Charlene whispered. “Let’s get out. This is real.”

We pushed our way out, and then Grady appeared. “Hey, did you see that dog-faced boy? Man, he wasn’t even wearing a mask!” He whistled. “Do you get born like that, or what?”

“We’re all flawed,” said Charlene, so low I could barely hear her. Was she thinking of Mama?

“What?” Grady leaned down to hear.

“There’s something wrong with all of us,” she said. In that moment I loved Charlene more than ever.

“Nothing wrong with Tommy and me,” said Grady.

Tommy pursed his lips and frowned, looking confused. “Everybody’s a sinner, aren’t they?” he asked “That’s what we forgive each other for.”

“Yeah.” I looked at Tommy’s face. Why was he so earnest, all of a sudden?

“Hell, you’ve gone Catholic, girl. What do you know?” Grady looked at Charlene like he thought she’d laugh at me.

“A lot more than you do, Grady Pickens,” said Charlene.

“You girls don’t know how to have a good time.” He swaggered to the next tent, with Tommy following. On a stage in front, women pranced in high heels, wearing low-cut blouses and skirts they flicked around like Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Long feathers framed their heads like peacocks preening at the New Orleans zoo. “Club Lido” flashed above the tent. “All bare!” said the sign.

“They’re not wearing panties,” I whispered to Charlene.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “What?”

One of the women flung out her arms and spun so fast all you saw was a blur of naked flesh under her skirt. “Told you so,” I said. When she stopped, she winked at Grady, her long lashes brushing her cheeks. She bent over to blow him a kiss, her breasts swinging under taffeta that barely contained them.

“I know you don’t get born like that!” Grady’s eyes bulged almost as much as their bosoms. “Hey, let’s go.”

The tattooed man at the booth glanced at a guard and shook his head. “Too young, boys. Next year.”

“What are you kids doing here?” The security guard wore the biggest belt buckle I’d ever seen, visible even under the fold of his belly. Above his ears, his white scalp showed through his crew cut. A blue cap hid the rest. “Don’t you know it’s Nigra night?”

“My dad left us,” said Grady, his voice trembling. I’d never heard him sound scared. “We didn’t know …”

“You better call your dad to come get you.” The guard’s face relaxed a little.

“We don’t live here,” said Charlene. “We’re from Biloxi, and Mr. Pickens is here on business.”

“Pickens from Biloxi?” The guard gave his belt a heave, but the buckle didn’t budge. “Henry Pickens?”

“Yes, sir,” said Grady. “I can’t call …”

“Well, you kids be careful.” He ambled away.

“Your dad’s famous,” said Tommy.

Grady puffed up. “Let’s try the Tilt-A-Whirl, my treat.” Without even speaking to each other, we got behind the last person in line, our minds still too numb to think of anything but the fat lady and the torso-man. Only Grady still had his cotton candy.

Charlene threw up on the Tilt-A-Whirl, and Grady hovered at her elbow when we staggered off. “Get away,” she said, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. He looked hurt for a minute, then went over to one of the cheap jewelry booths dotting the Midway, and found a silver heart on a chain.

“Charlene,” I said, while she slurped from a drinking fountain. “He’s buying a heart.”

“Oh God,” she moaned. “Don’t let that be for me.”

At the booth, a gray-haired woman leaned on the counter with an engraving tool that buzzed into the heart. She blew on it, polished it with her apron, and handed it proudly to Grady. The look on her face surprised me. It was the first time I’d seen anybody at the fair look proud of their work.

Grady strutted up and dangled the chain in Charlene’s face. It said “G.P.” and, beneath, “C.S.” He reached to put it around her neck, but Charlene took it. “Thanks, Grady,” she said, with a weak smile.

“You’re giving a girl a necklace?” asked Tommy. “Why?” He looked betrayed, but Grady ignored him.

“Thought it’d make you feel better,” he told Charlene, She dropped it into her purse. “You’re not gonna wear it?”

“I might lose it here,” she said, and he nodded at what he thought was her wisdom.

As Grady was getting his weight guessed, a loud speaker blared out. “Grady Pickens, to the entrance. Grady …”

Grady thought he’d won something. He’d signed up for a drawing, but he couldn’t remember what it was. “I’ll share it,” he told us. “Promise.”

But it was his father waiting at the gate, furious. Mr. Pickens’ face was bright red, and he grabbed Grady. “Why did they let you kids in? Don’t you have any sense? Can’t you see who’s here?”

“It was our only chance for the fair …” Grady began, a whine in his voice I’d never heard before.

“Where would we have gone?” asked Charlene. She lifted her chin at Grady’s dad. “You left us here.” That quieted him. Grady looked at her softly, admiring how she’d stopped his dad, the man whose bootlegging was famous all over the state, the man the police wouldn’t even stop. We slept on the long drive home, curled against the plush upholstery of the new Buick. Tommy McCarty twitched once, and woke me, muttering in his sleep about the Fish Girl and forgiveness, and I knew there might be more to him than aiming newspapers.

When Halloween came around, a new moon left the sky black, twinkling with stars. If there had been a witch sailing on her broom, no one would’ve known. Every year before, I was a beatnik, wearing black fishnet stockings that Aunt Sylvia had once given Mama for Christmas. I’d wave a long silver cigarette holder in my hand, one Daddy bought as a joke for Mama in New Orleans. Charlene had a witch hat she’d made out of papier-mâché, with silver glitter glued on it in the shape of stars. It was too good a hat to use just once, so on most Halloweens she was a witch.

But this year, we felt too old to join the little kids. We were sitting on the sofa watching Seventy-Seven Sunset Strip on TV when Deanna knocked at the door. She carried a paper bag with “Piggly Wiggly” on it, like most kids carried for their candy. She wore a black turtleneck and stretch pants, with the neck pulled up over her mouth and nose.

“What am I?” Her voice was muffled and I could barely hear her.

Grady Pickens stood with her, kicking the bottom step with his tennis shoe. He had flesh-colored pimple cream caked on his skin in big mounds, like a clay volcano at the elementary school science fair, and wore a rubber animal nose.

I tore my eyes away from him. “You haven’t been over here in ages,” I told Deanna.

She shrugged and adjusted the turtleneck. “I’ve been busy. What do you think I am?”

A terrible friend, I wanted to say, but I knew I’d lose her forever that way. “A beatnik?” What a copy-cat.

“Get me your cigarette holder.” She was glazed-eyed and breathless, like she’d get before she went shoplifting.

So that was why she had come over. “I don’t know where it is,” I lied. “Be a bank robber, that would work.”

“What am I?” Grady pulled on the animal nose.

“I don’t want to know,” said Charlene, her lip curled.

“A volcano at the science fair?” I asked, but he ignored me.

“The dog-faced boy!” he said, laughing so hard the pimple cream cracked.

“That’s sick, Grady,” I said. Sometimes, I still saw the hatred in the torso man’s eyes.

“You should trick-or-treat as the fat lady, big butt.”

“Jubilee can’t help her rear end,” Charlene hissed.

“Sorry,” Grady kicked his toe against the step again.

“Why are you trick-or-treating?” I asked Deanna. “You said we were too old now.” Her sack looked full. I reached for the caramels Daddy had bought and handed her one.

“Thanks,” Deanna said, mushing it against her braces to soften it. “But I’m not after candy. We’re going to get Mr. Holliday. Come on.” She opened her sack and showed me the eggs and toilet paper inside.

“Why didn’t you ask one of your new friends?” She sat with other girls at lunch now.

“They’re having a party, and I wasn’t invited. Some friends. But we’ve got to get Mr. Holliday, pay him back.”

“After last year?” Charlene huddled in the door. “I wouldn’t go near that place. It’s devil’s work.”

“It’s revenge,” whispered Deanna, her eyes big above the stretched turtleneck.

“I won’t let anybody hurt you,” Grady told Charlene. “Not this time.”

The year before, the Hollidays’ house had been dark except for candles in the windows. Slowly, we had made out a skeleton and the tips of what looked like white sheets in the trees. The usual Holliday ghosts, we told ourselves, and pushed on. Then, as we kids crunched down the drive, a corpse with a rope knotted around its neck descended from the magnolia tree and dangled in our faces. Its feet were low enough to rake Charlene’s witch hat, and she screamed. Its pants billowed in the air, and we could see it was only a man’s clothing, stuffed with lumpy scraps. It blew in the balmy coast breeze like it didn’t have a care in the world. But Mr. Holliday had painted the workgloves that hung from the sleeves black. The head was covered with a hood. A mock lynching.

The bushes rustled at the side of the house and we ran like ghosts were after us. We stood at the end of the long driveway, panting from the escape. Charlene had fallen and scraped her elbow on the broken shells that paved the drive.

“You hurt?” Grady had asked Charlene, but she ignored him.

“You think they even bothered to buy candy?” I asked.

“If they’re giving out anything at that house, it’s bullets,” said Charlene, brushing sand from her elbow. “That’s what Mr. Holliday gave out last year.”

Mr. Holliday thought it was a treat to drop in a few bullets with the Tootsie Rolls and Lifesavers kids got from other houses.

Grady nodded. “I knew a boy who found BBs in his bag. Mr. Holliday put ‘em in with the candy. The kid tried to eat one. Almost broke a filling out, my mom said.”

“Grady, you don’t have a mom,” said Deanna. It was just the sort of thing she’d say. I wondered why Grady put up with her. She was always making him go shoplifting with her and then saying mean things about him.

Grady blushed, a crimson that rose to his crewcut. “Aunt Liz. She’s like a mom, even if she lives in Florida.”

For the first time, I had wanted to stick up for Grady. “My Aunt Sylvia would be like that, if our mom died.”

A shiver ran down my arms at that memory. I knew what Aunt Sylvia would say about our going to Mr. Holliday’s house on Halloween, with BBs and mock lynchings.

“We don’t have costumes,” Charlene told Deanna. “How can we go trick-or-treating?”

Deanna laughed. “There’s no treat. It’s all tricks.” We didn’t need costumes, she said, since we were just going to Joe Holliday’s house. And if all he had were bullets, they had eggs for sure. “C’mon,” she said to Charlene. Even though Deanna was still mostly my friend, I was glad she invited Charlene. We were both lonely.

“Okay,” said Charlene, without even asking me.

We eased our way down the Holliday’s dark drive. I could still hear Loretta Holliday saying, “Joe’s back,” and see that line of black marks on the front door. But now there was cackling somewhere, like a witch.

“Record’s scratched,” said Grady, and we laughed, like we’d known all along it was just a record. It felt good to laugh. Deanna clutched the sack full of eggs, and Grady had taken the toilet paper to hide under his jacket. It didn’t feel like much ammunition against Joe Holliday.

You had to look up at the sky to see your way down their driveway, it was so dark. Against the sky rose the silhouette of the pine trees lining the drive, but I couldn’t see any white sheets out there. Maybe Mr. Holliday was out of town.

But—whump! Charlene screamed. A dummy in a suit and tie dropped from a tree with a noose around his neck. We started to run, but Deanna grabbed me. All that shoplifting must have given her nerves of steel. “Wait,” she whispered. “It’s Levi Litvak. Look.” The head lolled to one side, as if appealing for mercy. I glanced at the pompadour toupee glued to the top and the yellow socks on the dangling ankles. On the back of the head was pinned a little round cap.

“No.” My voice croaked like a biology frog before dissection. Deanna reached into her sack, and I heard the steady whump whump of the eggs she was throwing. It was a sickening sound, and Loretta and Kathy would have to clean up the mess. I hoped they were hitting the ground instead of that battered little house, but I didn’t turn to see.

A shout came from the bushes, and a stocky figure rose from the shadows. “Hey! What’re you doing?” he yelled. A red glow that must have been a cigarette wagged with the words. Then his face emerged, the same face I’d see at the Pack-A-Sack with a cigarette scrunched in those thin lips and the eyes squinting as he stood at the counter buying beer. He always wore a sleeveless camouflage hunting vest, open down the front, so you could see a tattooed claw reaching up from the neck of his shirt.

The brown and gray patterns on his camouflage vest were right in front of me. A stubble of beard darkened the lower half of Mr. Holliday’s face, and his eyes were as cold and flat as turquoise beads. He had never noticed me before. He’d even stepped on my toe once when he left the Pack-A-Sack and kept on going without saying a word.

He saw me then, though. “You kids get back here!” he yelled, as the red glow fell to the ground.

We ran with the sound of his boots pounding briefly after us. We were all out of breath when we got to the street. “That dummy was Levi Litvak,” said Deanna. “I swear.”

“Nah,” Grady said. “Why would he hang somebody who’s already dead?”

“Maybe he’s not dead, like people say,” said Deanna. “He got away and he’s living in …”

“You’re scaring Charlene.” He tried to put his arm around her, but she shrugged away.

“We’re not scared.” I could see what might be tears in Charlene’s eyes. I asked Deanna, “Did you hit the house?”

“Yeah,” she grinned. “He’ll never know it was us.”

How much of me had he seen in that dim light? His eyes seemed like they could see in the dark, and I wished I’d worn a mask.

Charlene said she hadn’t looked at the dummy. “The only dummy there was Joe Holliday.” We laughed till our sides hurt, like it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard. That was how scared we were.

The face of that dummy stayed with me for weeks, until something else replaced it: Jack Ruby’s gun, and Lee Harvey Oswald doubling over. The day we heard the news about Kennedy’s death, someone stepped on a frog in the hall outside the boy’s restroom, a smear of green translucent belly and blood and gaping mouth. Somebody had smashed it under the heel of his shoe. You could see the imprint, and how deliberate it had been.

Aunt Sylvia called that night and all I could think about was the frog, how awful kids could be. Someone cheered when the news about the President came over the PA system, and afterward my science teacher went right on talking about how the digestive system connects the body. “How could he keep talking about that?” I asked Aunt Sylvia. “And why would anybody smush a poor frog?”

Her voice was raw. “I don’t know. There’s good in the world, don’t forget, even after a year like this one.”

“Mama liked Kennedy,” I said. “Did you know?” Mama didn’t tell just anyone, but she’d have told Aunt Sylvia. I remembered how, the year before, when James Meredith integrated Ole Miss, the students had yelled at the federal troops, “Go to hell, JFK,” and how mad Mama had been when we watched it on the news. “Look how hateful their faces are,” she said. I wondered how those students felt now that he was really dead. Maybe they were celebrating with beer at their fraternity houses.

“Of course she loved Kennedy. He was a good leader for us.” Then Aunt Sylvia’s voice rose, a false note, and she changed the subject. “Do you girls like the Beatles?”

I’d seen their faces on a record album, Meet the Beatles, at the five and dime store at Big Circle Shopping Center. Charlene and I were pooling our allowances to buy it. Their faces were half in darkness, half in light, like half-moons, the way I felt most of the time. But that wasn’t why I liked them. It was the music, the way it took you to places you’d never been. Even Elvis hadn’t done it this way for me. Elvis sang like he could see right through your clothes. The guys in the Beatles sang like they were happy, like they had a secret you could learn only by moving to the rhythm, dancing for the sheer joy of being one with the music.

“Sure,” I said. “We’re saving up to buy their record. Have you heard ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’? I get chills.”

“Well, you remember that feeling. It’s joy. Don’t forget it.” She breathed a sigh into the phone, but then her voice sounded brighter. “Tell you what. You and Charlene start looking for that album in the mail. I’ll mark it fragile. You spend your money on something else.”

Sure enough, a few days later, a square flat package arrived. It was a cool day for November, and Charlene and I took it inside to rip it open. There, staring at us, were the four faces of John, Paul, Ringo, and George. Charlene traced the angles of George’s solemn face. “He’s adorable.” She stood over the floor furnace, her skirt billowing like a hot air balloon. “He looks so intelligent.”

But it was Paul that I studied. “I like this guy.” I tapped his nose. “He’s got great eyes.”

“That’s Paul McCartney. Don’t you know anything?” said Charlene. She started to rip the cellophane, then stopped, staring at the label. “It’s in stereo,” she said slowly.

“So what?” I asked. “We can still hear it, can’t we?”

“We need mono.” She looked sad and a little pissed. “Doesn’t Aunt Sylvia know Daddy hasn’t bought us a stereo? What does she think we are, rich?” She stared at the little box-like record player we kept on the dresser.

A note had fallen out. “Enjoy,” it said in Aunt Sylvia’s angular scrawl. “Remember the ‘joy’ in that word.”

“Don’t be mad at her. She’s being nice to us,” I said. “We’ll exchange it at Big Circle. Look, the plastic’s okay.”

We got two dollars back from the exchange to mono, and picked out new Cutex lipsticks with the money. Charlene bought one that smelled like Daddy’s Halloween caramels.

From then on, the Beatles’ music filled the house. I played trumpet softly to “This Boy,” and added jazz riffs on “I Saw Her Standing There,” though Charlene complained. It seemed to change the colors of the walls, to raise the ceiling of that small house a little higher. Mama would have approved.