I would tell Jojo this: That was no place for hope.
It only got worse when Hogjaw returned to Parchman. They called him Hogjaw because he was big and pale as a three-hundred-pound pig. His jaw was a hard square. His mouth a long thin line. He had the jaw of a hog that would gore. He was a killer. Everybody knew. He had escaped Parchman once, but then he committed another violent crime, shooting or stabbing someone, and he was sent back. That’s what a White man had to do to return to Parchman, even if he was free because he had escaped: a White man had to murder. Hogjaw did a lot of murdering, but when he came back, the warden put him over the dogs, over Riv. The warden said: “It ain’t natural for a colored man to master dogs. A colored man doesn’t know how to master, because it ain’t in him to master.” He said: “The only thing a nigger knows how to do is slave.”
I wasn’t light anymore. When I ran to fetch, I didn’t feel like I was racing the wind. There were no more firefly moments to blink at me in the dark. Hogjaw smelled bad. Sour like slop. The way he looked at me—there was something wrong about it. I didn’t know he was doing it until one day we were out running drills with the dogs, and Hogjaw said, Come with me, boy. He wanted me to follow him to the woods so we could run the dogs up trees. Hogjaw told River to run a message to the sergeant and leave us to the drills. Hogjaw put his hand on my back, gently. He grabbed my shoulders all the time, hands hard as trotters; he usually squeezed so tight I felt my back curving to bend, to kneel. River gave Hogjaw a hard look, and stood in front of me that day, and said, Sergeant need him. He looked at me, tilted his head toward the compound, and said, Go, boy. Now. I turned and ran as fast as I could. My feet running to darkness. The next morning Riv woke me up and told me I wasn’t his dog runner anymore, and I was going back out in the field.
*
I want to tell the boy in the car this. Want to tell him how his pop tried to save me again and again, but he couldn’t. Jojo cuddles the golden girl to his chest and whispers to her as she plays with his ear, and as he murmurs, his voice like the waves of a calm bay lapping against a boat, I realize there is another scent in his blood. This is where he differs from River. This scent blooms stronger than the dark rich mud of the bottom; it is the salt of the sea, burning with brine. It pulses in the current of his veins. This is part of the reason he can see me while the others, excepting the little girl, can’t. I am subject to that pulse, helpless as a fisherman in a boat with no engine, no oars, while the tide bears him onward.
But I don’t tell the boy any of that. I settle in the crumpled bits of paper and plastic that litter the bottom of the car. I crouch like the scaly bird. I hold the burning scale in my closed hand, and I wait.
Chapter 7
Leonie
We got to leave the windows down because of the smell. I done used all the napkins I had shoved in the glove compartment to clean up the mess, but Michaela still look like she been smeared with paint, and she done rubbed it all over Jojo, and he won’t let her go so he can clean the throw-up off him, too. “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m all right.” But I can tell by the way he keep saying it that it ain’t all true. The part of me that can think around Michael knows what Jojo is saying ain’t true. That he ain’t all right, because he’s so worried about Michaela. Jojo keeps looking over at Misty, who is half leaning out the window, complaining about the smell (“You ain’t never going to be able to get that out,” she said), and I expect him to look mad in the rearview like he did earlier when Misty complained. Instead, there’s something else there, something else in his wide-open eyes and his lips that done shrunk to nothing.
*
Michael knocks on the door. All of us are huddled on the porch, smelling like vomit and salt and musk, when Al opens it.
“Hello. I’m surprised they processed you so quickly!” Al says.
He has another cooking spoon in his hand, a hand towel tossed over his shoulder like a scarf. I feel sorry for his housekeeper, if he has one, because I’m pretty sure he never washes any of his pots, just stacks one on the other on his counter. Whenever he’s not at his office, he must be cooking.
“Michaela’s still sick.” Misty shoulders her way past all of us and through the front door.
“Well, that just won’t do,” Al says, and he steps back so the rest of us can file past him. Jojo is last; Michaela won’t let him go, and he won’t put her down.
“Clean towels are in the hall closet,” Al says. “Y’all should wash up. I’ll borrow Misty and we’ll go to the store for medicine.” Misty nods, looks relieved at being able to ride in a vehicle not splashed with vomit. “Bread and ginger ale are in the pantry,” Al says. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that yesterday.” Al studies the carpet, then looks up and passes the towel over his face. “Oh yes, I remember.” He smiles at me and Michael. “I was dazzled by my company and their gifts, no?”
Michael holds out his hand. It is callused from the farm work he did in Parchman: looking after dairy cows and chickens, tending to some vegetable patches. He told me the warden thought it would be a good idea to get the inmates to working the land again, that he thought it was a shame all that good Delta soil was going to waste with all them able-bodied men there, with all them idle hands. But it had put a bug in Michael. He liked it, he told me in his letters. When he finally got home, he wanted us to put in a garden, wherever we ended up at. Even if it was a cluster of pots on a concrete slab. Can’t nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt, he said. Like I’m talking to God with my fingers. Al’s hand looks soft, big, and when he shakes Michael’s hand, his flesh is an envelope, swallowing.
“Thank you,” Michael says. “For everything you done for my family and me.”
Al shrugs, looks down at their hands, turns redder than he already is.
“It’s my job,” Al says, “for which I am well compensated. Thank you.”