21

“FONTAINE FONTAINE, WHERE are you?” Lateesha couldn’t believe she was being so bold, standing right in that giant’s yard, hollering out his name. But if he was her cousin June’s husband, it wasn’t like he was going to bite off her arms. Was it?

From deep inside the house, somebody answered. “Whaddyou want?”

It didn’t sound like Fontaine. It didn’t sound like anybody she’d ever heard before. Probably the ghost of one of those people who’d died up in the tower. Lateesha shivered in the middle of the afternoon of a warm spring day.

“I want to see Fontaine. I need to talk to him about something important.”

“He ain’t here.”

“Well, where’s he gone?”

“Gone to his day job.”

“And where’s that?”

“You don’t know that, girl, you ought not to be coming around here hollering out his name in the first place.” And then the door creaked open, and the tiniest little old man Lateesha had ever seen was standing there, his bottom lip all puffed out with snuff.

Lateesha had seen this little old brown apple doll before. She just didn’t know where.

“You that girl stays with Odessie?” said the old man, opening the screen door and spitting around Lateesha into the orange daylilies.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Then I’m your great-uncle, Sweet William.”

“Yes, sir.” So that meant she’d seen him at family reunions. Like last year when Aunt Odessie got to be the Big Momma and ride in the carriage with the white horses. Lateesha still had her family reunion T-shirt. She wondered if they’d given Uncle Sweet William a kid’s size, how’d he look in it?

“You want to see Fontaine, you just go on over to Greenwood Cemetery. You’ll find him.”

“Greenwood?” Lateesha didn’t like that idea one bit, even on this sunny day. Haints and goblins and who knew what? Besides, once when she was 10 and was up here visiting from New Orleans, she was over in that cemetery playing with her cousins, and one of them was running around, his foot went down into this hole in the ground, and when it came back out, it didn’t have a sock or a shoe, just these long scratches all around his ankle where this buried-alive person reached up and grabbed him. That’s what Aunt Odessie said. Said that’d teach ’em to be playing where they ought not to.

Lateesha asked, “What’s he do over to Greenwood?”

Sweet William leaned back his head and laughed this little old man silent laugh. He didn’t have a tooth in his head. “You’ll see. Now go on. You’re keeping me from my programs. I likes to watch my programs every day. Weekends I watch things got balls in ’em. Today I’m watching basketball. You like basketball, girl? No? I used to tell Fontaine he ought to go try out, he’s so tall, but the boy was too lazy. Now it’s too late. He’s too old. Not as old as me though. You know how old I am?”

No, Lateesha didn’t, and she didn’t mean to be rude, but she didn’t care either. What she cared about was telling Fontaine that she had first dibs on that Sunliner, she being the one who’d gone to all the trouble snatching it in the first place, and she didn’t appreciate Early, even if he was a stone bad killer, just stepping in and grabbing it all up. If there was anybody who was going to make the big bucks off that car, it ought to be her.

“Or you could talk with June,” Sweet William was saying. “June’s got more brains than Fontaine any day. She the one tells him what to do most of the time. If it’s important, ain’t that what you said, you ought to be talking with June anyhow.”

Lateesha thanked Sweet William kindly and walked on back around into the side yard to check on her Sunliner. She hadn’t noticed the sign over the garage door last night. FONTAINE BODY WORK. Well, it had been pretty late, and there’d been Fontaine and those dogs scaring her half to death. Now she could see the dogs, four huge black-and-tans, lunging at their fence, dying to get a piece of her.

She stuck her tongue out at them and opened a corrugated steel garage door that looked like somebody had just cut it out of the wall with a blowtorch and slapped a couple of hinges on it, which made her a little nervous about the quality of Fontaine’s work. She wasn’t sure she wanted him touching her Sunliner at all.

It was dark inside the garage. Dark and spooky, but not so dark that Lateesha couldn’t tell that Damn! That Sunliner had up and gone.