He can see little in the beam of headlights, can’t even tell what type of car has pulled over to the side of the road. He stands up from where he sits on the open tailgate and shields his eyes with a hand. One of the car doors opens, then another, and two figures emerge. They do not shut the doors behind them; these fan out from the car like wings. Frank watches the men approach, featureless in the blinding light. He doesn’t pray as much as steels himself, wills this thing to go the way he needs it to.
The men stop a few feet from the wagon, regarding Frank. He can see their features more clearly, now: one has a lazy eye, and sucks on a load of dip; the other is stout and solid, eyes and nose small and close-set, burrowed in his face. Behind them, the car engine growls. Frank waits for them to speak.
“Well, Pope,” the stout man says, finally. “What you reckon we have here?”
Pope spits a brown stream to the ground; it spatters just in front of Franks’ feet. “Looks to me like a mule pulling its own stone to the grave,” he says. He eyes the slab of granite in the back of the wagon thoughtfully, shifting the dip with his tongue.
“Looks to me like a pretty rich stone,” the first man says. “Pretty rich stone for a nigger who can’t afford a proper mule, anyway.”
Pope looks from the stone to Frank. Or his right eye does. “What’s yer story, old man?”
Frank wipes his brow with his forearm. Normally, he would give a simple answer, try to defuse the situation, but now it seems to him he doesn’t have much to lose. “Mule sure is just about ready for the grave,” he agrees. “But the stone for my son.”
“Well, now,” Pope says. “What I want to know is where a man like you got the money fer a stone like that.”
“I borrowed it, sir,” Frank says. “’Gainst all I have and more.”
The first man’s eyes narrow. “I don’t know,” he says, looking at Pope. “Now Pope, if you was you would you lend money to a nigger like him?”
Pope’s right eye doesn’t move from where he’s fixed it on Frank. “Don’t lend money to no one, but I’d be dead ’fore I did to the likes of him.”
“Mmm-hmmm. Can’t rightly imagine who would.”
“Due respect, sirs, I got my slip right here.” Frank takes the receipt the banker had given him that morning from his pocket and holds it out to the men. He watches his own hand shake, making the paper quiver, and suddenly he is overcome by the odd sensation that he is lifting from his body, rising upward like a ghost, or a helium balloon. He looks down at the self he’s left behind, his thin, angled body, his glistening pate and trembling hand, the two solid men, the three of them lit bright and shimmering in the fumy headlights.
“Oh yeah?” he hears the stout man say, his voice distant, distorted. Frank sees him take the slip and rip it up without looking at it first. He tosses the fragments into the air, and Frank watches the pieces rise up toward him and then flutter to the ground, white confetti in the headlights. “Who you trying to fool, nigger?” the stout man asks, as the scraps settle. Still as if from above, Frank sees the man reach out and cuff him on the shoulder, and with the blow he plunges back into his body, feels the ache, the heat.
He reaches for his shoulder and shakes his head, thinking how he’s a fool in so many ways. A fool to have waited so long to get the stone, a fool to have taken the mule to get it, a fool to sit and wait for help when he should have known all the help he’d get would be the likes of this. “No one, sir,” he mutters now. “Ain’t trying to fool a soul, and don’t want to trouble you no more.” Nervously, he begins to collect the little pieces of receipt from where they have scattered on the ground. “I’m a fool myself. Y’all go on now. Don’t mean to keep you, sure this time of night y’all have yer families to—” He stumbles sideways, blindsided by a shove. He falls to a knee, then catches himself, but as soon as he stands again he is shoved from the other side. Again, he stumbles, and this time he falls to his knees, and he doesn’t get up. He lifts his hands. He keeps his eyes on the ground, which seems to glint and flicker, and his pulse thuds loudly in his brain. All other sounds are distant, his vision is dim, and then he shuts his eyes.
He kneels there in the heat, waits for the blows to come, the knee or toe to the underside of his chin, the hard strike of tire iron against his skull, whatever the worst can be. He finds himself thinking to Elma as if it were a prayer, Elma, hear me, Elma, sending her his love as the blood like love roars through his brain, and he can hear nothing else until that pulsing din is pierced by the shout of what can only be a child.
Frank opens his eyes. A figure stumbles into the headlights, a boy, his eyes wide, his red hair awry. “Stop it!” he shouts. “Let him alone!” The boy is out of breath, and his eyes dart frantically from one of the men to the other, though he does not look at Frank.
Frank’s accosters look at the boy with a combination of surprise and disgust. For a second they are quiet, and then Pope spits. He snorts, and looks at the smaller man. “Apple falls far, you say, Walt, eh? Hah.”
But Walt has already lunged toward the kid, grabbed him by the collar. “You mind your own goddamn business, you nigger-lovin’ son of a whore!” He yanks the kid closer, fairly lifts him up by the collar. “You ain’t no better than your daddy, and when I get through with you you gonna—”
“Walt.” A third man has stepped into the lights, so tall that his features are hardly within the ring of illumination, and his voice seems disembodied. It is a low voice, firm. “Let the boy go, Walt. This ain’t the evenin’s business.”
Walt flinches. Then he drops the boy’s collar angrily.
“Like I said before,” the tall man says. “We ain’t got time for this.”
“C’mon, Sutcliffe. We weren’t gonna do nothing but rough him up a little,” Pope says.
Sutcliffe looks at his watch. “Been waitin’ on this too long to cut it close. Git in the car.” He looks at Frank. “Stand up, man,” he orders.
Frank stands, his hands still half raised above his head.
“And put yer damn hands down.”
Frank lowers his hands slowly.
Sutcliffe looks at the other two men, and at the redheaded boy. “I said git in the car.” He shakes his head. “Y’all just go lookin’ for trouble,” he mutters. He frowns, squinting down the highway into the distance, where a tiny speck of light is bouncing closer in from the horizon. The others follow his gaze, and when they, too, see the lights, they climb back into the car. Sutcliffe gets into the car last, lowering himself into the passenger seat, and the car accelerates abruptly away, wheels skidding on the gravel of the road. Frank shuts his eyes against the dust, stands there and listens: fading engine, growing engine, night bugs, his heart, and he keeps his eyes closed even as the light from the nearing car has turned the insides of his eyelids burning white.