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By Root 1076 0

walked. “Like the block just swallowed poor Donald Booker up,” the neighbors canted, even though while he was in their midst, most—black and white alike—readily consented that Donald Booker was a bad seed, incorrigible, disrespectful, meanspirited, vulgar, shoplifting, hate-spewing…. But after he turned up missing and became “poor Donald Booker,” at least a half dozen dogs and cats were said to have vanished from here around the time of day when the sun was hanging way back in the sky. Brand-new Corvette Stingrays and Mustangs stalled in this block as the day got tangled with the night, and even the birds lay low until the nightfall was complete. A once-prolific bread factory had to close up and relocate a few years ago. Taxes in the city too high, was the official word. But rumor had it that the shift that started at four-thirty refused to report in the winter until after the transition from sun to moon was finished. But since the girls knew nothing about the strangeness Dead Block was said to evoke in people and things this time of day, they took the man only as someone out walking, trying to beat the night and get to where he lived, until he jaunted across the street, straight toward them, and tipped his hat slightly and smiled.

“Cold as shit out here today, little ladies,” he said.

The girls closed in the spaces between them and repositioned the books they carried so they could link arms in a huddle. “Stupid old man,” Bliss said. “Probably drunk. Go on, man, get,” she warned. “Or I’ll tell our daddy to shoot your ass off.”

Shern pushed her elbow into Bliss’s side. Told her not to talk to him. “Just walk normally,” she insisted.

The tall dark man kept pace with the girls and threw his head back and laughed a bellow of a laugh. “You wouldn’t do that, would you? You wouldn’t tell your daddy to shoot my ass off. For one thing, your daddy’s dead.” He stilled his laugh and now had a mocked softness to his voice. “Plus I’m your own flesh and blood.”

“You don’t know us,” Victoria said tenuously, more a question than a declaration. She was walking on the end closest to the man, and the scent of pinecones and burned wood seemed to rise from his clothes in jagged bolts. It was acrid and went right to her head and made her feel dizzy and confused.

“Are you crazy talking to him?” Shern yanked Victoria’s arm.

“But he might know something—”

“Shush!” Shern cut her off. “He’s crazy, he’s drunk, whatever.”

“But maybe he knows the aunts and uncles if he knows us,” Victoria half wailed. “Maybe he can tell them where we are; they must not know where we are since we’ve been here a whole month and they haven’t tried to see us.”

“It’s the courts that are keeping them from us.” Shern yanked Victoria’s arm again, and Victoria cried out. “Now, do you want this drunk-up old man following us all over the place? We talk to him and he’ll think he’s making sense and we’ll never get rid of him.”

The stranger continued to talk in uninterrupted streams. “Yeah, I’m your own flesh and blood, yes, I am. Sad child that doesn’t know their own line. You part of my line, directly descended from me.”

“Wait a minute.” Bliss stopped suddenly. “I know who you are.”

Shern and Victoria stopped too. “Don’t talk to him, Bliss, just don’t,” Shern yelled in her sister’s ear.

“Look, though, look.” Bliss pointed wildly. “He’s the man who tried to take Mommie from the aunts and uncles. See the scar where Aunt Til went upside his head.”

They all three looked at him, at the thick beige scar running down his forehead that looked like steak gristle. They were startled and mesmerized to see the subject of so many Sunday night dinners standing right in front of them.

“She was my child, my baby girl.” He moved in closer to the girls. His voice went to a lower tone. “I’m Larry. Girl, I know you know me; look at you, you the spitting image of me. I’m your granddaddy. Come give me a hug.”

“My aunt Til said you couldn’t have fathered my mother because you don’t have a pecker.” Bliss spit the words out right before Shern grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth