“After he got about half way to the front, he looked back and waved me on, like this was still some great adventure he wanted me to share. He was afraid to be on his own, that was all. When he realized I was going to stay put, he bent down and moved real slow past the side. He still couldn’t see more than a sliver of the inside of the shack, and he moved ahead another little ways. By then, I figured, he should have been able to see about half of the inside of the shack. He hunkered down inside his sheet, staring in the direction of the open door. And there he stayed.
“I took it for about half a minute, and then I couldn’t any more. I was sick enough to die and angry enough to explode, both at the same time. How long could Dee Sparks look at a dead whore? Wouldn’t a couple of seconds be enough? Dee was acting like he was watching a goddamn Hopalong Cassidy movie. An owl screeched, and some man in another shack said Now that’s over, and someone else shushed him. If Dee heard, he paid it no mind. I started along toward him, and I don’t think he noticed me, either. He didn’t look up until I was past the front of the shack, and had already seen the door hanging open, and the lamplight spilling over the plank floor and onto the grass outside.
“I took another step, and Dee’s head snapped around. He tried to stop me by holding out his hand. All that did was make me mad. Who was Dee Sparks to tell me what I couldn’t see? All he did was leave me alone in the woods with a trail of apples, and he didn’t even do that right. When I kept on coming, Dee started waving both hands at me, looking back and forth between me and the inside of the shack. Like something was happening in there that I couldn’t be allowed to see. I didn’t stop, and Dee got up on his feet and skittered toward me.
“We gotta get out of here, he whispered. He was close enough so I could smell that electrical stink. I stepped to his side, and he grabbed my arm. I yanked my arm out of his grip and went forward a little ways and looked through the door of the shack.
“A bed was shoved up against the far wall, and a woman lay naked on the bed. There was blood all over her legs, and blood all over the sheets, and big puddles of blood on the floor. A woman in a raggedy robe, hair stuck out all over her head, squatted beside the bed, holding the other woman’s hand. She was a colored woman—a Backs woman—but the other one, the one on the bed, was white. Probably she was pretty, when she was alive. All I could see was white skin and blood, and I near fainted.
“This wasn’t some white-trash woman who lived out in The Backs— she was brought there, and the man who brought her had killed her. More trouble was coming down than I could imagine, trouble enough to kill lots of our people. And if Dee and I said a word about the white man we’d seen, the trouble would come right straight down on us.
“I must have made some kind of noise, because the woman next to the bed turned halfways around and looked at me. There wasn’t any doubt about it—she saw me. All she saw of Dee was a dirty white sheet, but she saw my face, and she knew who I was. I knew her, too, and she wasn’t any Backs woman. She lived down the street from us. Her name was Mary Randolph, and she was the one who came up to Eddie Grimes after he got shot to death and brought him back to life. Mary Randolph followed my dad’s band, and when we played roadhouses or colored dance halls, she’d be likely to turn up. A couple of times she told me I played good drums—I was a drummer back then, you know, switched to saxophone when I turned twelve. Mary Randolph just looked at me, her hair stuck out straight all over her head like she was already inside a whirlwind of trouble. No expression on her face except that look you get when your mind is going a mile a minute and your body can’t move at all. She didn’t even look surprised. She almost looked like she wasn’t surprised, like she was expecting to see me. As bad as I’d felt that night, this was the worst of all. I liked to have died. I’d have disappeared down an anthill, if I could. I didn’t know what I had done—just be there, I guess—but I’d never be able to undo it.
“I pulled at Dee’s sheet, and he tore off down the side of the shack like he’d been waiting for a signal. Mary Randolph stared into my eyes, and it felt like I had to pull myself away—I couldn’t just turn my head, I had to disconnect. And when I did, I could still feel her staring at me. Somehow I made myself go down past the side of the shack, but I could still see Mary Randolph inside there, looking out at the place where I’d been.
“If Dee said anything at all when I caught up with him, I’d have knocked his teeth down his throat, but he just moved fast and quiet through the trees, seeing the best way to go, and I followed after. I felt like I’d been kicked by a horse. When we got on the path, we didn’t bother trying to sneak down through the woods on the other side, we fit out and ran as hard as we could—like wild dogs were after us. And after we got onto Meridian Road, we ran toward town until we couldn’t run any more.
“Dee clamped his hand over his side and staggered forward a little bit. Then he stopped and ripped off his costume and lay down by the side of the road, breathing hard. I was leaning forward with hands on my knees, as winded as he was. When I could breathe again, I started walking down the road. Dee picked himself up and got next to me and walked along, looking at my face and then looking away, and then looking back at my face again.
“So? I said.
“I know that lady, Dee said.
“Hell, that was no news. Of course he knew Mary Randolph—she was his neighbour, too. I didn’t bother to answer, I just grunted at him. Then I reminded him that Mary hadn’t seen his face, only mine.
“Not Mary, he said. The other one.
“He knew the dead white woman’s name? That made everything worse. A lady like that shouldn’t be in Dee Sparks’ world, especially if she’s going to wind up dead in The Backs. I wondered who was going to get lynched, and how many.
“Then Dee said that I knew her, too. I stopped walking and looked him straight in the face.
“Miss Abbey Montgomery, he said. She brings clothes and food down to our church, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“He was right—I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard her name, but I’d seen her once or twice, bringing baskets of ham and chicken and boxes of clothes to Dee’s father’s church. She was about twenty years old, I guess, so pretty she made you smile just to look at. From a rich family in a big house right at the top of Miller’s Hill. Some man didn’t think a girl like that should have any associations with colored people, I guess, and decided to express his opinion about as strong as possible. Which meant that we were going to take the blame for what happened to her, and the next time we saw white sheets, they wouldn’t be Halloween costumes.
“He sure took a long time to kill her, I said.
“And Dee said, She ain’t dead.
“So I asked him, What the hell did he mean by that? I saw the girl. I saw the blood. Did he think she was going to get up and walk around? Or maybe Mary Randolph was going to tell her that magic word and bring her back to life?