He started out across the street and ran along the dirt path that served as a sidewalk in Red Row and turned right onto Sweet August street running fast. In his mind he didn’t know if he was leading the boy or trying to lose him; maybe both. Children played in a puddle under the big gum tree that stretched heavy, grooved branches over the dirt street and humped it up out in the middle with its roots. Delvin gave the children a sharp eye as he passed but still he could hear them hooting at Morgred as he came along. The path went up a plank step to the section of wooden sidewalk in front of New Big Bethel Baptist church. The wooden portion ran along the rest of the block and dipped down again two steps into the street.
Delvin ran steadily and he only looked twice to see if the boy was still with him; he was, both times, straggling but coming on in a half-lame trotting style, holding his pant remnants up with one hand and his pale squinting eyes looking squarely at him.
They came up the alley from wind-flecked Brocade street. Delvin checked off the flimsy leaves of chinese elms hanging over the board alley fence of the Askew house and then the great blanket of cherokee roses sagging from the crumbling brick fence of the Lewis house, running. Then came backyards opening directly on the alley, exposing gray- and yellow-streaked red packed dirt yards stacked with boxes or old horse collars or fragments of no longer identifiable machinery, pump parts or busted forge buckets or pieces of streetcar undercarriage or canvas-covered piles of plaster or old weathervanes — roosters or codfish or racehorses — and, in each yard, lines of washing; raised among these like guardhouses were the neighbors’ wash sheds and kitchens emitting mixed and penetrating smells of lye and raw ashes and boiled pork-fortified greens and cornmeal and brushwood fires. He checked these off and he checked off old Mr. Berke petting his blind german police dog and Mrs. Sanderson accompanying her tiny triplet daughters sitting side by side tied into a little blue wagon and Billy Batts who wore his engineer’s cap at all times and sang sorrow songs as he dug holes in his yard searching for confederate gold and Mrs. Opel and Mrs. Crawford, the former dancing twins, not dancing this afternoon, and a couple of the Pursleys who all looked exactly alike and Mrs. Vereen carrying on a big tray several of the fruit pies she baked and sold at the market over on Leopardi street on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and he checked off Mr. Campson who was home sick from the grocery store he owned at the edge of the chinese quarter, and Biddy Comber, the retired boxer, once a sparring partner for Jack Johnson and father of James who loved only the piano, Biddy standing in the center of his yard staring up into a pecan tree as if from there the Second Coming might commence. Hello and hello and hello. Hidy, yall, he said, checking each one off.
He already felt trailed — hunted really — by the boy loping behind him. He wished he hadn’t said anything to him. The Ghost. He gave him an angry look. Elta Napier, a girl his age, stood out in her yard stringing ragged shirts on the washline. She wore a white shift that dragged up her thighs as she reached to pin a fluttering gray shirt. Delvin wanted to leave his self-appointed duty and go speak to Elta. Her thick hair was tied around with a pale blue cloth. His heart took a leap; it was a day, he thought, for heart leaping. He wanted to rush across the yard and push Elta to the ground. He wanted to fly to her and kneel on the packed and swept dirt at her feet. He slowed down, stopped and gave her a wave; Elta waved back without looking at him.
The boy came and stood close enough behind so Delvin could smell him.
“I thought you was going to show me a place.”
“We’re on our way to it now,” he said without looking at him. “I thought I told you to hang back.”
“I got to lie down.”
“Well come on then.”
He led him to the shed and piled a bed of straw for him in one of the unused stalls. As Delvin worked, the boy watched without offering to help, an impatient, grieving look on his face. The two horses shifted uneasily. The big gray nickered at him and Delvin stroked his nose. “Yall be friendly,” he said to the pair.
“You can camp here,” he told the boy. “I’ll go up to the house and get you something to eat.”
