LISTEN, I WASN’T ALWAYS ASHAMED of Mom. It was just that she was the darkest white person I knew. I never thought twice about it in the context of Mister Abrams’s pool. Heck, what was the difference between her and Missus Burns, who was always slopping on the Coppertone, doing her damnedest to brown up every bit as much as Cleopatra? Which is why I always begged Mom to come along to Mister Abrams’s pool. Imagine: here it was, the closest thing we had to a country club, and she, the prettiest housewife in Akersburg, refused to step foot in the place. It didn’t matter that the rest of the moms all went—even Missus Orbach, whose one-piece made her look like a beach ball in sunglasses. Mom absolutely, positively, refused. After a while I stopped pleading with her. Then the pool closed, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore.
A few days after Mister Abrams gave me that home-run ball, I was tossing it to myself out front when the door creaked open and Mom stepped out with an armful of laundry.
Poor Stanley.
Dad was sitting on the front stoop, showing me the proper way to sort through a pile of stack poles.
Poor Stanley? Poor us. They got every white man in town complaining about how they’re being made to take a bath with those colored boys. They got no choice but to close the pool until they find out who did it.
Close the pool? Don’t be ridiculous.
Sorting through a pile of stack poles might seem like a piece of cake, but it isn’t. Never mind that the pile went all the way up to our roof and was home to all kinds of vermin—each pole was eight feet tall and strong enough to support five hundred pounds of peanut hay. We literally had thousands of them that we reused every year. When I realized that pitching in was the only way to get Dad to shut up about how important our work was, I squatted down and propped the end of the mangy-looking one I’d kicked down from atop the pile across my lap and tried to decide if it should go into the scrap heap or not. And as I looked it over for what Dad called “seams” or “beams” or “reams” or something—I hadn’t really been paying attention—I started to wonder how in the world it hadn’t been tossed on the junk heap years ago. The son of a bitch had to have been over a hundred years old for all the gouges, pits, and what looked like whip lashes covering it.
I hesitated. Staring down at the gnarled and knobby end in my hand, I felt kinda bad. I mean, this thing looked like there wasn’t anything it hadn’t had heaped upon it over the years. Instead of taking it to the junk heap, I dragged it across the yard, over to the truck. I leaned it up against the rear bumper, then hopped up and into the truck bed and lifted it over the tailgate until it was in the truck bed with me. As I stood there looking down at it, sorta proud of myself for having spared it, everything around me was nice and quiet except for the chick chick chick chiiiiiiiiick of the field sprayer across the road and the squeaky sound of the rusty nails Dad and Toby were pulling from dry sweet gum.
Mom came out with another basket of laundry. There’s a plate of peaches for you on the porch.
Lord knows I was hot and sticky. The shade felt nice, and the peaches were cold and juicy. Mom was standing in the bright sunlight, wringing out a pair of Dad’s boxers like a dishrag. And as I sat there atop the stoop, slurping up slice after slice, she went on about how her grampa had picked peaches in the orchard surrounding the Camelot before there even was a Camelot. How, as a girl, she’d seen him walking down Cordele Road on his way home from work after having stopped off there for an “iced tea,” shortly after it had opened, back when it was called the CanTab.
I leaned back against a piece of cordwood. She took a clothespin from her mouth and pinned it up, then explained how her grampa had to scratch the CanTab out of his Green Book shortly after they built Turner Airfield.
I wiped peach juice from my chin. What’s a Green Book?
It’s like the Yellow Pages, only for colored people—listing places where they’re welcome. Anyway, the motel’s not in there anymore. The furniture—threw it out. The carpet—tore it out. Wood paneling gone—tore that out, too. Anything in that motel that held even a trace odor of Mister Abrams’s old customers had to go. Then he outfitted it with a new pool. Been the Camelot ever since.
I sat up. The Green Book still exist?
Of course.
Can I see one?
I don’t see why not.
Mom reached down into the laundry basket and fished around for another clothespin. The porch floorboards were itchy and creaked under my weight, but that didn’t stop me from dozing off. While I was lying there half asleep, Dad came out onto the front stoop, wiping his hands on a red rag. He helped himself to a peach slice and asked if I wanted to go for a drive.
I shot up so fast I bumped my head on the rail. It felt like forever since Dad had asked if I’d wanted to go into town, six days a week of having to go without that pool having turned into seven. I darted into the house for my shoes and notepad before he changed his mind. This was my big chance. Green Book, Yellow Book, Purple Book, or whatever book, there was more to the Camelot than met the eye. That much was for sure. I needed to know more—lots more. Who knew where it might lead?
The sun burned the top of my head before I’d even cleared the three lopsided steps out front. I stood there with my shoes in one hand and a pencil and notepad in the other. Dad disappeared around the side of the house. The sky was a crisp blue, and skylarks swirled about in the trees. The laundry was all up, and the bed sheets wafted in the breeze. Mom was hunched over in her vegetable garden, patting down a tomato vine.
You coming?
Mom tossed her garden shears into a bucket, came over, and took up the plate. The screen door clicked shut, and she was gone. Her voice rang out from inside.
Maybe next time.
• • •
AKERSBURG HAS A business route that branches off a two-lane highway that takes traffic straight through the center of town. At its northern edge, Main Street merges onto Cordele Road, and a couple of miles up we passed the Camelot. Judging from the way Mom and Dad had been talking, I expected to find yellow tape strung around it and a bunch of patrol cars out front. But Mister Abrams’s Pontiac was sitting all by itself underneath the carport of the otherwise empty parking lot.
How long before we can go for a swim?
Filter’s busted.
Busted?
I know. Can you believe it? Probably got clogged or something. God knows from what. Could have been from all those little frogs that are always getting in there, for all we know.
The town council had issued a notice decreeing that the Camelot’s pool was closed until further notice. I turned to Dad with my pencil still in my hand. Detective Joe Friday wrote stuff down, that much I knew. But what, I had no idea.
I doodled little frogs instead. Wouldn’t stop me.
Dad chuckled. And here that ol’ fussbudget went to all that expense of applying a fancy chemical treatment, and after all that headache it turns out it’s just his filter.
Why doesn’t he just ask Toby to fix it?
Borrow Toby for half a day—in July? Are you kidding me? Not on your life. That boy’s up to his gills with work. But I’m sure he’ll buy a new one soon. Probably have it in, oh, I dunno—best case, a couple of weeks.
I looked down at my fingers and counted. Two whole weeks? But that only leaves eleven days until Danny’s gotta go back to Fayetteville!
The order fulfillment alone is bound to take a week.
Order fulfillment?
You didn’t think a pool filter just arrives here magically, did you? No, sir. A stock clerk’s gotta package it up first. Likely to arrive with bubble wrap stuffed all around it so it doesn’t break in transit. Then he’s gonna have to invoice it and ship it. Didn’t think of that, did you?
Mister Abrams is gonna turn us kids away all that time?
What choice has he got? Our health is a matter of the public trust. Next thing you know, you have the Black Death getting spread. Could be catastrophic.
The tattered billboard leaning off to the side of the road announced that the Camelot was the only place with a pool for the next seventy-five miles. I screwed myself up in my seat.
Know what I don’t understand?
What’s that?
You remember how we were the only ones there?
Dad grinned.
Well, how’d everyone else know?
The moms probably called around.
The Norkfolk Southern Railway cuts right smack through the center of Akersburg on its way to Blakely. We followed the dirt road running alongside it for a good quarter mile before turning off to park. Dad tossed me a couple of plasterer’s buckets from the back, and we started up the dirt road on foot.
There must have been at least five hundred head of cattle in the confinement feed lot, and every single one of them was making such a squawk I couldn’t hear myself think. Their handlers were gouging cattle prods into their hindquarters, trying to get them up a ramp and into a paneled boxcar. One ambled over. Or maybe he was shoved, I dunno. I could only see a foot or two into the boxcar. After that, it was a dark well filled with bloodcurdling squeals I thought only pigs were capable of making. Anyway, this one cow was crammed in at one end of the boxcar, sorta pinned in, trying desperately to poke his snout through the slats. I reached up and petted his bristly hair, caked flat with dried mud.
I stroked his rubbery snout and told the poor fella not to worry because with any luck they’d get the dirty business done and out of the way before he knew what had hit him. Then I asked Dad how they did it. But before he could answer, I told him how it’d be neat if maybe someday soon we could setup a sanctuary, kinda like the wildlife preserves they got down in the Everglades for the heron that people love so much, only for cattle. Then I looked into this big, dumb animal’s beady eyes and gave it to him straight. I told him that it was nothing he’d done. Life just wasn’t fair. The trick was just to be so bony no one wanted to eat you and—who knows?—maybe grow some wings.
I turned to Dad and asked him to level with me.
Like I was saying—there’s a beefy fella whose job it is to hold him steady, and another burly fella holding the ax. You always gotta have two. One’s just not enough. And they do it from behind so the poor bastard doesn’t see it coming. Because the meat doesn’t taste nearly as good if he does. And if he can get the blade just right behind the ear here—
I mean, how come no one called us?
Dad kicked at the dirt and grimaced like he was afraid that was something I was going to ask, then looked away.
Huey, there’s something about your mother that you oughta know. No matter what she does, she can’t help but stir up resentment in this town on account of how good-looking she is. Now, you may not know this, being just a boy, and her son at that—but she’s a knockout. Okay? There, I said it. Because it’s the God’s honest truth. I dunno. You’re observant. Maybe you’ve noticed that it causes her more than her fair share of grief. Which is why she doesn’t even like coming into town anymore—it’s too much of a hassle. No matter how modest she tries to be about it, people resent her. The other moms see how their husbands look at her, and they don’t like it. Doesn’t matter that it’s unwanted attention, either. No one ever looks at them like that, or offers them the same courtesies, which gets under their skin. And they blame her. So ask yourself: why on earth would they have called her?
Dad shook his head disconsolately. Huey, I’m not proud of it, but that’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Okay? Now you know. And you and me had both better just get used to it.
• • •
BUSKIN BROTHERS WAS the local consolidator and supplier for all the farmers in Early County. They didn’t sell a whole lot, but what they did sell, they sold a lot of. Dad stood at the counter shooting the breeze with Mister Buskin’s eldest son, Stuart.
Still no leads?
It’s like a ghost done it. Personally, I don’t even see how that’s possible. We’ve got the boy’s shoe sitting in some evidence box, for crying out loud.
Dad took the two buckets from me and set them atop the counter and wandered off to the back of the store. I stooped down to the gumball machine and started fiddling with the knob. Derrick claimed that he knew how to get a handful of gumballs to come out without having to put anything in. After what seemed like a million turns of that knob, I was about to punch a hole through the glass case when I felt a pinprick on the back of my neck.
Stuart leaned over the counter and spit out another sunflower seed shell at me. Go easy on the machine, squirt.
Stuart wasn’t even a real grown-up.
Aw, go suck on a lemon.
Stuart went back to flipping through a stack of receipts.
Dad was fingering over the sweet gum display case on the far side of some paint cans. Wanna help me pull the truck around?
I shook my head no, then turned the knob and jiggled the machine some more. Still nothing. I turned that damn knob round and round, shoving and jerking and tugging at the glass case, wondering what in the Lord’s name I was doing wrong, only vaguely aware of the stupid front door opening and closing and our truck’s diesel engine knocking as Dad pulled into the loading bay and, above me, some loud-mouthed woman shouting over the siphon pump hee-hawing behind the counter, Of course you know him! The one Buck always has fix that piece of junk truck of his!
I looked up, surprised. It was Missus Orbach.
Stuart spiked a receipt. Toby?
Yes!
I stood up, brushed the sawdust from my knees, and tapped Missus Orbach on the elbow.
Ma’am? Can Derrick come over to play later?
Missus Orbach was dressed in overalls, and her boots were covered in mud. She was looking down at me kind of funny. Her face was red and sweaty. She didn’t look very happy.