“Pass that bowl on down,” the old man said to one of the boys, indicating a blue china bowl with ice chunks in it. The girl, slim with a broad mirthful face and quick black eyes, bobbed her head at him. She made big chomping motions.
Delvin said, “I used to cut down through the alley back there looking for my friend Buster Moran.”
“The Morans, sho,” one of the boys said. “They moved away.”
“Old Moran was a pipefitter, I believe,” said the old man. “Out here to Cranley’s. On the colored shift.”
“I believe he was,” Delvin said.
Mr. Dandes talked about his farm out toward Scooterville, passed down in his family since it was deeded to them just after the Civil War.
“We been out there all summer,” the lively girl said. “That’s all we do in the summer — just farm, farm, farm.”
“Whoo, you don’t do nothing,” the older boy said, Harley. He had a riotous bush of shiny hair. “And sit under the arbor writing letters.”
The girl blushed. Delvin could see the blush on her light skin, feel it, as if the heat traveled, on his own face.
“What kind of letters?” he asked because he wanted to know and wanted her to speak to him.
“She writes to the government,” the other boy said.
“What about?’ Delvin said.
“About their shortcomings and about their longcomings too. I ask them if they are trying to be as helpful as possible.”
“She’s a complainer,” the lopsided twin said.
“I wrote the president a letter when I was a little boy,” Delvin said. This was true.
“What happened?” Harley said.
“He wrote back.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said he was enjoying himself — I’d asked him about that — and he hoped I was enjoying myself too.”
“Were you?” the girl — more than a girl — asked.
“I was at the time.”
As he spoke to her — this, what, sixteen-year-old girl, seventeen maybe — he experienced a bluster and yank of feeling, something slung onto a pile of odds and ends, an accumulation of breached and disordered living, messes and blunders and crushed years and thoughts too sullen and miserable to do anything about, packed against clotted falsities, outright lies, hopes packed hard into sprung joints — useless dumb hopes — stuffed with the knotted eccentric sadness of the jailbird; slather of meanness and repudiation and scarcity. He hurt in his gut and the ache like a fresh malarial sickness sucked into his bones and filled his mind with confusion. He wanted to lash these ignorant people with sarcasm and bitterness, to humiliate them and leave them with pictures in their minds that would haunt and hurt them.
Excusing himself — forcing the polite words out of his mouth — he got up and walked away from the table.
He made his way out into the alley and stood in the ample dark, letting pain rush unhindered through him. He was not here, but he was not any other place either. He sat down, unlaced and took off his boots, removed his socks, stood up and walked half a dozen steps in the soft sand that covered the alley. He stretched out his hands like a man sleepwalking in a cartoon. He reached for the air and for whatever was in the air or might be soon. He could smell the hot lard. He could smell the smoke from the fire, birch wood and chestnut, he recognized them, still did. The chestnut trees were dying all over the country, a blight, come from where nobody knew, no way to cure it, the trees just died. He could smell something else, apples, yes, cut apples, a sweetness, unrevisable. Some said
“It’s a cherokee rose,” a girl’s voice said from behind him.
He turned. The young, dark-eyed girl stood there. She too was barefoot.
He made a tiny sound, as hard to hear as a dog whistle.
The girl moved up and stood silently beside him.
“Indian roses,” he said. “I knew a Indian once.”
“We are part Indian ourselves — at least that’s what Daddy says. But he likes to make things up.”
She laughed a small, crackling, unrueful laugh, a slender girl with high-flown wiry hair.
“Would you like to take a walk?” he said.
“All right.”
