“What is it you be working on?” Willie wanted to know.
“I’m helping her to write a letter.”
“Okay,” Willie said, “I’ll tell him.”
“I need him to come fast.”
Which the Ghost did, hotfooting across the Row to the back door of Miss Louise’s lime-green house. Miss Louise was the unmarried sister of Rev Poulice Marchant who for forty years was the minister of the Sweetwater Holiness church and now ten years after he died continued on in fine form and local respect (Miss Louise did) in her small two-story house that was the only one on her block that was painted. As Winston started up the brick back steps Delvin called to him from some redtop bushes by a runoff ditch at the bottom of the yard. The Ghost gave him a misshapen grin and loped over.
“Hey, my boon,” he said.
Delvin told him he needed him to go around to the police station to see what he could find out about a boy being shot.
“Ju shoot him?”
“No. It wadn’t me.”
“Okay, fine,” the Ghost said. He’d been living in the shed semi-permanently for a few weeks now, despite being run off twice or three times by Willie or Elmer, slinking back each time under Delvin’s protection.
“I’m going around behind Heberson’s and get something to eat. Let’s meet right there in two hours’ time — around back.”
The Ghost said this was fine with him, grinned and took off running across the yard in his hunched, loping style, his head stiff on his shoulders and his arms swinging as if he was about to grab something.
It was full dark out and gloomy without lights along the streets except here and there on the corners and little wicklamps burning in the houses like it was still the nineteenth century. Instead of going straight to the store Delvin made his way to the Emporium, slipping along the alley behind his old birth house and ducking into the bordello’s wide yard, easing in under one of the big magnolias in back. He wasn’t sure what the Ghost would do and he felt safer near the bordello. The magnolia’s branches drooped all the way to the ground. He climbed up among them, feeling his sense of hopefulness, his strength, ebbing as he climbed and pushed into the smooth fork and lay along the high limb panting, nauseous and afraid he would vomit. His life felt emptied out, like earth from a barrow, and he saw himself alone, a trembling haint on the edge of the world. His mother must have felt like this. He let out a small cry, a squeak of pain and fright. He wanted to throw himself into the air and fly away but there was no way to do that. His felt his spirit leap out from him like a skittish bird, some creature without knowledge of the world or a way to go. He was suddenly dizzy. “Little Time,” he said, “Little Time,” addressing the tick of his life as if it was a small goblin he might appeal to. But there was nothing. He was terrified of every house in the quarter — in Chattanooga — in the world — but at the same time he wanted to rush into them and beg to be hidden. He thought of the Ghost crammed up under the Emporium. Lord, he would jam himself even deeper if he thought he could stay. He shivered, pressing his face against the tree body. His fingers moved across little whorls and striations like ancient messages age-carved into the bark, indecipherable. “Help me,” he said, “Dear God, Little Time, help me.” His heart hammered like a crazy man trying to get out — or in, he thought, trying to burrow deeper into his own body.
At the three-quarters chiming of the second hour by the courthouse clock he shinnied down and made his way across the Row to Heberson’s. The Ghost was crouched behind a line of garbage cans out back. His eyes gleamed like a cat’s.
“Yeah, they’s been some kind of shooting up that old mountain way. They was talking about it round the jailhouse.”
Delvin felt his insides clutch. A slashing pain driving down his body. He felt suddenly as if he needed to evacuate his bowels. “They say what they have on that?” he said in a crumped, rustly voice.
“Not to me, no, but they was talking about somebody’s got shot up on the mountain and they’s had to carry him out. Haul him out or something — somebody, some mosying wanderer or something or maybe it was a bunch of em up there. Or something else, I can’t remember. It’s mixed up. Shell Pickens — they got
“Was it a boy?”
“When? Yeah, I get you. Could have been. You done shot a boy?”
“No.”
“Was it a white boy?”
Delvin ignored the question. “Did they say who did it?”
“They aint come down real hard on that yet. Leastways not in my hearing. Maybe they holding back on it. Maybe they don’t know. That’d be some luck.”
