A few negro men in uniform walked on the streets, a couple of them passing in front of the house, swinging their arms as they went by. One of them was the Ghost, traipsing back and forth like he was on misshapen guard duty, a peculiar askew figure in dirty army khakis and a crumpled garrison cap. Delvin hailed him from the porch. The Ghost came angling up, walking half sideways like a dog, his head held slightly to the side, the freckles on his cheeks pinker than ever. He gravely shook Delvin’s hand and spoke cheerily to Mr. Oliver who didn’t seem to recognize him. “I’m home on leave,” he said.
“Leave?” Delvin said. “You look like
“I help out with the soldiers. With the cooking.”
“Cooking?”
He was glad to see the Ghost, but something about him, his peculiar listing manner, his off-speaking and the way his pale eyes darted — he wanted to throw him off the porch too.
“So they finally let you out,” the Ghost said, studying Delvin’s face.
“It took some doing,” Delvin said. The news about his escape had scattered like spilled leaves; he’d overheard some people in Jacksonville say every newspaper in the country had written it up. He read about himself first in a paper somebody had used to wrap onions, sitting behind a barbershop with some other men eating fish stew the barber’s wife had prepared for passing tramps. All the assembled had heard about his jump and he had hidden his face in the shade of a droopy magnolia and then cut quietly out of the yard before he got his fill of stew. In C-town they must have been patrolling the streets with shotguns.
“We all figured they would give up trying to trickerate you sooner or later.”
He said it like it was a joke and strung a little frolicky cutup kind of patter together and after a few minutes said he had to be on his way. He bowed to Mr. Oliver and grinned at Delvin and skipped down the steps, the tail of his gray army-style shirt flapping.
Delvin caught up with him out in the street across from a large white oak that had the word GIT carved into its trunk. A large man wearing a shirt made of rainbow patches walked by carrying a sign that said BARLOW BAR-B-Q.
“Where you headed?” Delvin wanted to know. He was afraid the Ghost would try to get him picked up and wondered why this was and wanted to get him to say.
“I’m on my way over to the Emp,” the Ghost said in a finicky, snubbing manner.
“I thought you were done with that place.”
“I don’t believe I ever said anything like that.”
“I was probably given false information,” Delvin said, thinking of his mother gone from there for a quarter of a century now. “I mean—” He couldn’t get the words out straight. He wanted to cry — lord, that was most of what he’d wanted to do since he got out — but he couldn’t do that here, now, not in front of the Ghost.
“I got me a friend over there,” the Ghost said, “a white woman.”
“They got white women at the Emporium?” Times had changed.
“It’s almost fifty-fifty,” the Ghost said. “I’m gon get her to marry me and we gon have white children.”
