Drifting South. Charles Davis

      “Frank sounds like a fine feller and sorry about your daddy. Now go on. I need the rest.”

      She slid down and as she took a step across the aisle and jumped back on the seat beside her ma, she said, “He’s not nice but Momma keeps saying he’s got a job and a house with a big yard and a dog, and lots of other stuff.”

      I looked at her ma, who was still sleeping while trying to hold on to a baby boy on her lap through the whole conversation. She looked like a woman who could use a house and a big yard, and especially a lot of other stuff, minus Frank most likely, as her daughter pulled out a pad of paper and coloring sticks from a sack.

      For a good while the girl kept asking me questions and telling me things about her and her ma and brother and her dead daddy and Frank, and drawing pictures and wanting to show them to me. I kept playing possum with my eyes closed through all of it. I didn’t want them closed, I wanted them open to see what I’d been missing all of those years out that window. But I did feel safe that I could close them without worry of harm, because I’d studied every set of eyes at every stop that bus made and never saw a threat. And I could always tell the blazing look trying to be too still, or almost always.

      I did notice, watching everyone on that bus earlier that evening, that I was different in ways I hadn’t figured on, even when so many seemed not to be much more prosperous than I was, like that little girl and her family. But not so different. So much had changed, but some things surely hadn’t.

      I guess Frank was waiting for Grace and her family in Carlisle because that’s where they all got off in a hurry, but not before she laid a picture on the seat next to me. It was a nice colored drawing of a green tree in a yellow field. I ignored it at first but then gave it a good look over after they got off, and then I put it careful in the paper sack with the rest of my things.

      With no more commotion beside me, I was able to not pretend I was asleep anymore. On the half-hour stops in Hagerstown and Chambersburg, I did a lot of walking around and spent over five dollars buying Coca-Colas and Zagnut candy bars. Things I hadn’t tasted in quite a while and they tasted so good I couldn’t get enough of them.

      Between the stops and just looking out my window and trying to figure how I was gonna fit in any of it, I had a lot of time to think about Shady while watching the quiet miles of highway go by and drinking my odd-looking bottles of Coca-Cola. The pop tasted the same, maybe even better, at least to me, but the bottles and machines they came out of were a lot different.

      For some reason all of the new around me made me not think about what was to come and all of the things I was gonna do; it made me do a lot of remembering on being a young’un and growing up in Shady Hollow, and the bad that happened there on a nice Sunday evening, September 28, 1959.

      September 28,1959 was the last day before my life ended, and I never saw it was coming.

      Ma did, though.

      Chapter 3

      “What’s for dinner?”

      “Your momma’s gonna be busy for a while,” Uncle Ray had said.

      “How long?”

      “All-nighter.”

      “You eat yet?” I asked.

      “Not hungry.”

      Uncle Ray looked thin as the shoestring tie he wore with his city clothes, him sitting there on Ma’s sofa with his feet propped up on a heavy piece of glass that laid atop a chicken crate. Ma had at some moment the year before fancied that that particular crate would suit as a new coffee table, being me and my brothers had broken past repair the one she had before it…something she wasn’t pleased about, being that that one was actually store-made furniture. She’d made me and my brothers scrub and sand down the new one to where it was nothing but shiny dry wood and no chicken, before she stained and lacquered it and after all the fuss, it came to sit in the middle of her living room. Her decorations and lately Uncle Ray’s feet tended to take up most of the space on the glass top she was always keeping tidy for customers and company.

      Uncle Ray sitting there as usual looked to me the same as he always did, pretty much. He had two suits that he’d switch wearing every so often to his preference, one brown and one black. That day must have been a black day, because that’s the suit of clothes he had on.

      Both suits had wide white stripes up and down them and he’d usually wear a pair of shiny tan boots that he was so particular about when he’d step off a boardwalk. But Uncle Ray hadn’t been able to wear his boots for weeks because his feet were so swollen after the beating that had been put on him.

      “She here or downstairs?” I asked quiet.

      Uncle Ray didn’t take his eyes away from a straight razor in one hand that he was pushing slow and so careful against the grain of a small white stone he had resting on a leg.

      “She’s in the back,” he said.

      He finally looked up at me because I’d been standing there looking at him, and he pulled a flask from his coat pocket. Then he took a long swig of gin as easy as a person would take a drink of lemonade.

      Uncle Ray was one of those people who drank from morning to bed, always straight gin liquor, and he never seemed the least bit drunk whether he sipped or chugged. I didn’t care if he drank or not, or was drunk or not, but it was bad news that he wasn’t hungry. I knew I had to either make dinner myself—if I could find something to make—or rustle up something for free somehow from one of the bars in Shady.

      I’d never spend my own hidden stash on food, even hungry as I was, and I knew better than to ask Uncle Ray for eating money because lately he’d always said he was broke as a three-legged polecat whenever I’d asked him.

      Ma never believed Uncle Ray was as poor as an honest man, either, like he was so fond of saying at other times. He made a weekly wage from the elders for the doctoring that he did in Shady, and even though Uncle Ray always tended to gamble and drink away whatever money he’d make or win, Ma thought he squirreled away a little bit. But I guess after he got all busted up, I could see where he wasn’t able to make much of a living because he had to spend so much of the day with his feet up in air.

      From what folks said, the only reason Uncle Ray was back with us at all was because the Shady elders convinced him to do so. The elders were all business, and quick at convincing. Word was that every one of them was from Ol’ Luke’s bloodline and they ran everything. The head of the elders was Tobias Chambers, and that’s who you’d go to if you were having some sort of problem you couldn’t handle by yourself. Once Mr. Chambers listened and nodded, that problem got fixed. And fixed for good. But if he didn’t nod, whatever problem you had was about to get dreadful worse.

      Uncle Ray couldn’t walk for weeks after he left Ma and broke the elders’ contract with him to doctor in Shady. The elders tracked him to New Jersey and sent serious men to fetch him. Uncle Ray came back with both feet busted up, which displeased and troubled Ma, but Uncle Ray did seem to like staying with us more than before he tried to run off, or at least he acted like he did around Ma while he was hobbling around.

      I walked toward the kitchen and could feel the pine planks underme moving up and down, and then I heard the muffled sound of loud music and static coming from the transistor radio in Ma’s bedroom. I looked over my left shoulder at the framed picture of Jesus that Ma had hung at the entrance of the narrow hallway. The picture of him with bright lights coming from his head was bouncing back and forth against the wall a little, and when the Jesus picture was agitated, is how me and my brothers could always tell for certain that Ma was busy working. Not just working, she was busy working. We’d learned from more than a couple of times when she’d lost business to our interruptions, that we weren’t to bother her until the Jesus picture calmed, unless one of us needed her for something of an emergency nature. She always said not to disturb her business at all over nothing serious if her door was closed and locked, because Ma never closed her door unless she was working. But we all knew as long as the Jesus picture was steady that we could peck on her locked door about this and that without too much fuss from one