Eden Rise. Robert Jeff Norrell

      The heavyset white man at the cash register looked me over as if he’d never seen a customer before. He wore faded bib overalls, a stained tee shirt, and a straw hat. His potbelly made inoperable the waist buttons on the overalls, exposing dingy boxer shorts. Three days of white beard covered his face, and a large plug of tobacco distended his left cheek.

      As he reached out to take my money, the old man looked out the window at the gas pump and frowned. He turned slowly back toward me. “What are you and them niggers doing here?”

      I didn’t look at the man and put my hands in my pockets. “We’re just passing through.”

      “Y’all some them freedom riders?” I glanced over his shoulder at the double-barrel shotgun leaned against the wall. “No, sir,” I said. “We’re just passing through.”

      I eased myself out the door and stopped Jackie on his way into the store. “Not a good place to stop,” I said. I jerked my head toward the store. “The guy’s real hostile.” I looked over at Alma, who was still in the backseat tying her sneakers, the car door open. “Tell her we need to go on, okay? I’ll fill the car up as fast as I can.”

      Jackie went over to the car and talked to her in a low voice. “To hell with that,” she said loudly. “I got a right to use the toilet.” She pushed past Jackie and headed for the store.

      For almost thirty years now, I have cursed myself for not shoving Alma back in the car, diving into the driver’s seat, and peeling out of that particular acre of hell. It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to put the damn gas in the car. Five fucking dollars worth of twenty-five-fucking-cent-a-gallon gas. But I had paid for it, and the limits of the nineteen-year-old mind kept me from fleeing immediately, gas or no gas.

      Still, I had almost finished gassing up when I heard Alma shouting inside the store.

      I looked through the dirty front window and saw her gesturing at the man. I couldn’t make out everything, but I heard her say “bathroom.” A pause. “You can’t run a damn Jim Crow store no longer!” and “Who you calling . . . ” and then “What the hell…”

      I was behind the gas pumps, Jackie in front of them. He looked over his shoulder at me. “I better go get her.” I let him go first, and surely I shouldn’t have.

      He moved quickly toward the door and I was following when Alma appeared in the door frame. “That motherfucker’s got a gun!” Pure hatred, not fear, in her voice.

      “Come on, Alma, let’s get out of here.” Jackie was half pleading, half ordering her.

      She looked back in the store. “Fuck you!” Jackie got to her just then and started pulling her toward the car. Alma was shouting. “Let go of me! I’m going to the bathroom! He can’t do that shit no more.”

      The old man appeared in the door with his gun in the crook of his left arm, his right hand cradling the barrel about halfway down. He was glaring at Alma as Jackie dragged her toward the car. I ran to crank the car so we could get the hell away from there. Just as the key slipped into the ignition, I heard a deafening boom. I knew that sound. I had heard it often from the time I started hunting quail and dove with Granddaddy. The boom came from about the same distance that I was taught hunters should stay apart from each other when shooting at birds—thirty feet. The storekeeper had the shotgun at his left shoulder.

      I reflexively sprawled flat across the seat but then realized I had to rise and help. I was squirming from under the steering wheel when the second boom went off.

      The ringing in my ear had just subsided when the man spoke. “You goddamn agitators. We orta killed every one of you sonsabitches.”

      I had a gun, too. Granddaddy’s pistol.

      I rolled out of the car and onto my knees outside. My hands were trembling so badly that I fumbled under the seat trying to jerk the pistol out of its holster. It was heavy and slippery, and it took three tries to get the safety catch off. Move, move, move. When I came around the back of the car, I saw Jackie lying motionless and silent on his side. Alma was on all fours. “He shot me! He shot me!” She had wet herself.

      I heard a snap. The old man had reloaded the double-barrel. He looked at me and Alma.

      “We shoulda killed all you bastards when you first started coming down here.” He raised the shotgun again.

      I lifted the pistol in the direction of the man and started firing. The first bullet shattered the window to the man’s left. His eyes flicked at the crumbling glass. My second shot hit the door frame above his head. He jerked the shotgun up and aimed at me.

      Shoot, shoot, a voice screamed in my ear. I aimed at the man and pulled the trigger. I pulled it again and then again. The man fired simultaneously with my last shots, but one of my bullets hit high in his right leg and his aim jerked. I felt a sting in my shoulder, but it was glass, not buckshot, from the shattered Esso sign above me.

      I lowered my gun, deafened, stunned. The man had pitched forward on his belly and I saw him crawling toward his gun, which had fallen a few feet to his side. I ran over and stomped my foot on his outstretched left hand. With the pistol pointed at his head, I snatched the shotgun off the ground.

      “You move,” I said, “I swear I’ll kill you.” The man stared back at me with a look not of fear or hatred or pain but of blankness. His eyes were open wide but unfocused. It was as if there was no content to him, no recognition that he had tried to kill three people just because we happened by and two were Negroes. It was as if he had scratched an itch on his chin.

      I knelt over Jackie and pulled him on his back. My hands went red. His torso was drenched in blood. I raised his tee shirt and saw mutilated skin and tissue down his right side. He was bleeding from several places on his neck. I wanted to howl at the horror of what I saw, at the mutilation of this beautiful body. I flashed back to the hog-killings I had witnessed as a boy—the gushes of pig blood as the teams of black men held steady a scalded Hampshire carcass and the strongest of them pulled a twelve-inch blade the full length of its belly.

      My lunch rushed upward into my throat, and it took two deep swallows to get it back down. Jackie’s eyes were wide but I wasn’t sure that he could see me. His mouth was open and he was panting rapidly.

      I yanked off my tee shirt and pressed it against the neck wounds leaking so much blood. “Hold on, buddy, we going to get outta here.”

      Jackie’s eyes started to flick from side to side, as if he were looking urgently for something. I wiped some of the sweat off his forehead. I felt the clenched muscles of his brow.

      Alma was screaming. “That motherfucker tried to kill us!”

      “Are you hurt?”

      “Yes!” She held out her left arm. I saw a lot of welts and small wounds from the shotgun but not much blood. She wasn’t hurt badly.

      “Call an ambulance!”

      I knew we didn’t have time for that. We were at least a half hour from a Montgomery hospital. Jackie needed to be at a hospital now. Getting an ambulance would take twice the time.

      “Call an ambulance right now!”

      My fear flashed into anger. I jumped toward her, opened my right hand, and slapped her as hard as I could. She staggered sideways. She was stunned into silence but only for a moment.

      “You white bastard!”

      “Shut the fuck up and help me get him in the car, or I swear I’ll leave you right here.”

      She started to say something but she stopped when I drew back my hand. I looked at Jackie, and she followed my gaze. His desperate condition channeled our anger into action. I lifted up his torso and put my arms around him and lifted. “Pick up his feet.” She did.

      I backed around the gas pump, slid into the backseat, and pulled Jackie in to lie lengthwise on it. Something told me that Jackie shouldn’t lie flat. He needed pressure applied to those neck wounds. I told