When Mr. Oliver had discovered what he’d done with the rendezvous women, tricking them and him into getting together, he was at first so mad he had ordered Delvin out of the house. Get out and be gone, he’d said to him in as stony a voice as he’d heard coming from him. Delvin had walked out not knowing whether he meant just for now or for all time. The yard that night was fragrant with mock banana flowers and peonies. The twins heaved their lanky selves toward the west trailing Cassiopeia and Taurus. Delvin had stood at the end of this alley feeling his life like snow falling on him or the stars falling in cold white bits off the heavenly firmament and the night had seemed too much for him but still great and wonderful. As scared and hurt as he was, he had laughed outloud. Now the stars were something else entirely. Bleak and wind-polished, half sopped up by wads of cloud blowing from the west. There was nothing in the stars. He stood on the shore of a dark and terrible sea.
But that wasn’t true. Where he stood was not a shore.
The breeze picked fitfully at the mimosas bent over the fence behind him, nicked the roses on the Ballard’s fence, scuffed its knuckles on the loose grass behind Capell’s. Somebody in the Lewises’ yard was banging on a piece of metal. Not hitting it hard, just lightly, marking time. It made a hollow sound. He turned and it was a turning back into a world corrupt and ruined, a dirty place with a stink on it. But it was still the world, white quartz pebbles mixed into the grass track down the center of the alley, the sound of Big Archie the bay horse whinnying, somebody singing
He walked down the alley, speaking to people as he passed, telling them he was sorry, doing what Mr. Oliver did, a facsimile of it. Folks knew him as Mr. Oliver’s ward. He was a good boy they thought, but what did they know. In his heart he was an unruly force, battering mountains, a wild lover ravaging the world’s naked body.
On the way back to the shed he decided he would get Morgred to join him in a flight to another place. To Texas maybe.
But when he got to the shed the Ghost was gone.
“Got hisself run off,” Mortimer Fuchs, who was petting the gray’s face, told him, “cause he was about to steal one of these horses.”
“I needed him for something,” Delvin said. Yes, he was going to leave Chattanooga.
“If I knowed you wanted him, I’d ah helt him for you,” Mortimer said.
“That’s okay. I’ll find him.” He pulled out his notebook, intending to write Oliver a message—
He scribbled a note, folded it and handed it to Mortimer.
“Would you take this to Mr. Oliver for me?”
Mortimer, a naturally troubled-looking person, looked scared.
“If you can’t find him, give it to Polly. You know who that is?”
“Sholy I do.”
“She’ll give it to Mr. Oliver. I’m Delvin.”
“I know who you are too,” Mortimer said, offended that Delvin might think he didn’t.
“Thanks.”
“Taint no trouble.”
He walked the streets of Red Row looking for the Ghost. On the backside of the quarter the streets played out into the woods, climbing uphill into the mountains. On the opposite they funneled into Washington street, which paralleled the gully and crossed it back and forth in half a dozen places, bridged and unbridged. Other streets shanked and flopped over each other and wound like a snake. If you tended west most likely you’d eventually reach Morgan street and the block the funeral home was on. East they met the white section of town across a dusty unpaved street of mixed domesticities, white and black staring face-to-face through the red dust, and beyond this standoff the railroad tracks beyond which the real white world began.
