Tempest Rising - Diane Mckinney-whetstone [115]
“So are you, little one, I’m so sorry, but you’re out too.” The voice she made sounded so menacing that she caused the hair on her own scalp to recede with such velocity that it was like a push and pull against her head. She gripped at the gray air, trying to keep her balance, trying not to fall from the thudding weight pressing into the back of her head. But there were no anchors in the air that she clawed into now, no support. The air was empty and light and fell down with her, covered her even as she closed her eyes on its grayness and landed hard on the cold, slick floor.
She just lay there and listened to her heart beat. Then reached her hand behind her to feel her head, make sure it wasn’t busted as hard as she’d fallen. She sat slowly, shook her head, put her hand down at her side, and chided herself for being so silly. But her fingers touched leather instead of the hard slick floor. She snatched her hand back, held down a yell, looked up to see Mister peering at her.
“You shouldn’t be in here, little one,” he said.
Bliss studied his face. Smiled, praying he would return the upturned lips.
He didn’t. He grunted and leaned over to pick up the bat. “You should go in the main room with your sisters. Don’t come back in here again, ever.”
His tone was crisp, had lost that languishing quality that made his words flow into one another as if he were singing. Bliss was suddenly terrified of Mister, much beyond the skepticism that had shrouded their interactions up until this moment; she was now experiencing full-blown terror. She suddenly realized that this was the first time since they’d been pulled from their mother’s reaching, flailing arms that one or the other of her sisters was not at her side, enabling her to be Bliss, bold, snappy, say-anything-she-wanted-to Bliss. She felt centerless without Victoria’s gravity that held in place, Shern’s friction that gave her her spark. She looked away from Mister, looked at her hands as they shook. Cried a scared little girl’s cry as she mashed her stockinged feet into the cold, slick floor and ran into the other room, where her sisters were.
Mister repropped the bat against the wall. Got down on his hands and knees and smoothed out the patch of red velvet rug. He didn’t even know why he still kept this trinket of a young boy. Every time he had occasion to walk past this door, peep at the irregularly edged velvet sticking under the door, he told himself to dispose of the bat once and for all. Should have buried it all those years ago, when he came upon the boy, deep in the woods of the park, cold as steel and twice as hard, skin gone from pink to blue to what looked like gray. Even the foam around his mouth had dried to a crust that looked like steel wool. He turned his head back and forth, much the way he’d turned his head back and forth that evening eighteen years ago. He’d had a choice then. Could have left the body undisturbed; let the police find this dead white boy in the black side of the park; let every colored man in the city become a suspect; let the police come through there with handcuffs and vacuum cleaners, sucking up every able-bodied black man as if they were clumps of dust, might even start in on the women, maybe even the children. Or he could save the parents the funeral expense, bury the boy himself, say a prayer over the dirt, and ask the Lord to cleanse his no-good soul.
He picked up the bat, twirled it around in his hands. This was thick, solid wood, slow burning. Worth at least a couple of hours of glowing heat in his stove. Plus that little one might mention that she’d swung a heavy old bat at Mister’s place. Might raise an eyebrow, a question here, a look-see there. Yeah. It was time. Eighteen years was long enough to honor the memory of a murdered white boy, especially one as hateful as Donald Booker.
He listened to Bliss crying in the other room, telling Shern that they should go; they should just leave right now and go