I’m glad you’re happy about it, the voice said before the receiver banged down.
Most of the customers who weighed in felt that the police had not addressed the threats to Mount Hope particularly seriously, but you couldn’t call the police on the police. Sparkplug had a routine in which he would imagine making the call himself: Hello, police of the police? We got some officers that’s breaking the law—all over my back. Send us a cop fast, but send another cop to watch the first cop.
From the moment Darlene woke up, Nat’s absence burned pinholes in the fabric of her life. She very much considered Nat’s life and her own the same life—it had never occurred to her that marriage could represent anything less. If she ever thought about death, she prayed that the two of them would die in a car crash together at age eighty-three, or drift off into senility as their many grandchildren stood beside their king-size bed, massaging the balls of their thumbs and feeding them black cherry–flavored gelatin. She hadn’t thought very carefully about how big a risk it is to love anybody, or how much the choices made by the one you love can increase that risk.
Darlene ordered herself to rise; she tossed the sheets back, letting them crinkle across the mattress. On a normal morning, Nat would’ve calmly entered the room by now, set her coffee on a coaster on the nightstand, made the bed as she showered, whistling as he glided from room to room. She tiptoed into the hallway, thinking that she would discover him there; he would make an excuse about getting a slow start, she would blush at her foolish worry, and they would kiss. He did not appear, and yet the sound of his whistling entered her mind along with a knife of sheer dread that sharpened itself on her rib cage. For a while Nat had favored that Tavares song “It Only Takes a Minute,” but sometimes he’d whistle a gospel tune, or something a little more somber that sounded like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Sometimes he would whistle through his teeth, other times he wet his lips and puckered them. The notes of the songs would repeat in her memory, like breezes drifting around the corners when she didn’t expect them, sometimes warm and loving, other times merely annoying.
By that time Nat would normally have filled the house with the smoky aroma of country bacon. Eddie would probably have gotten up with him to set the table and pour juice into their jam-jar glasses before Nat walked him to what they called day care—really just the home of a caring local matron. But when she peeked into Eddie’s room, she saw him still asleep. Darlene shivered at this realization and attempted to warm herself as she walked down the hallway to the phone. When she called Mount Hope, the other end rang interminably. She dialed the number of every person on her list of people to call in the entire town of Ovis and several of the nearby towns, but she couldn’t get an answer anywhere; perhaps nobody got up that early. The fear of bad news kept her from journeying down to the store herself. She would wait at home, at least for a while longer. Eddie woke up, distressed to be late, asking for his father. Darlene told him that he’d stubbed his toe and driven himself to the hospital.
How could he drive with a stubbed toe? Eddie demanded to know.
He stubbed the left one and stepped on the gas with the right, she said.
Eddie quieted down, and her own lie calmed her enough to dismiss her fear as irrational. Maybe some version of her lie had actually happened. Sometimes, she knew, if she dwelled on it too closely, she could fear every moment she spent apart from Nat—not knowing what danger he might face in those murky parts of his life she did not share.
That afternoon, when she’d decided to figure everything out once and for all, the police paid a visit just after Eddie came home for lunch from playing down the street.
The police spoke of something they called it.
At first, she became unhinged and threw herself outside, toward the clothesline, but once the police left the house, she calmed down, remembering not to trust what the police said, certainly not more than her own experience. She steeled herself to walk up to Mount Hope and investigate. The police may not have had the facts exactly right—white folks in Ovis had a habit of confusing one black man for another. Perhaps Sparkplug had burned himself to death accidentally a few doors down and Nat had merely fallen asleep in one of the chairs out back, the way he had done once after too many beers at an evening party, and he’d had to open the shop as soon as he awakened. Then he couldn’t answer the phone because a long stream of customers had kept him busy.
Outside, a small group of short trees gave off a sweet thick maple-syrup odor. Anybody she met along the way she subjected to a grilling—Did you see him? He wouldn’t ever stay out all night. If only she hadn’t asked him to go out. If only she hadn’t had a migraine last night. I’m sure he’s okay, they told her back. Didn’t hear nothing. Didn’t hear nothing—but they didn’t make eye contact when they said it.
Then Darlene ran across Sparkplug chuffing up the road outside their house—alive, half awake. She tried to hide her disappointment in his continued existence, and the rising terror making her limbs shudder.