The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [51]
“You need to be watching your language,” said the boy policeman.
“Y’all need to be arresting those drunks that tried to kill me.”
“Hey now,” he said in a voice she assumed he felt was soothing. “No one tried to kill you.”
“You were there?”
The boy looked at his sharply shined police-boy shoes. “I’ll call this man if you sure you want me to.”
“It’s call him or stay here. I imagine we’d both prefer you call him.”
For the couple hours it took Woodrow to arrive, she lay sweating and shaking on the bunk. She asked for water but no one tended to her. Shaking, retching, nearly dying of thirst, she realized that the moment she gave them Crawl’s name they assumed she really did go down to the body shop with the idea of, as her escorts said as they held her down on the bus-seat sofa, fucking the lot of them six ways to Sunday, for what woman innocent of such charges would call a nigger to come pick her up out of jail?
She imagined they treated Woodrow even worse when he arrived. She knew they subjected him to all kinds of questions, treated him as if he were her pimp. She knew also, though not from anything he said for he said nothing to her about it, ever—she knew that the things they said to him got away with him, hurt him, deeply.
BACK ON THE ISLAND in the slow wretched weeks after her return, what got away with her the worst, what kept her eyes to the ground and her cheeks streaked with dampness, was not anger at the men who’d had their drunken way with her, or the thought of what Boyd felt when he came in off the water that day to hear from his sister about the crazy old woman liked to beat her door down calling his name. What she’d done to Woodrow—Sarah too—came in time to cause her mind to switch back and forth between two opposite notions: thereafter she would never venture farther from home than the post office (for it was easy to blame for the terror that seized her that day at the lunch counter not the way she had of thwarting over and again some slim shot at contentment, but instead the wider world, the vast and un-confined lie that had seduced so many before her starting with the first white child born on these shores) or, more terrifying but maybe more what she deserved, she needed to leave again, and this time for good.
Woodrow’d been sweet enough to carry her across. Sarah’d stroked her wet forehead as she heaved over the side of the boat. Now neither of them could quite raise their gaze higher than her waist when she encountered them on the lane. She could not bear this eye-avert for the rest of her life.
But instead of Maggie having to leave, everyone else left. What it came down to was the three of them sitting on the steps of the church trying to figure out what in the world’s a blow-dryer. Sarah dead and gone, Crawl nearly given up on ever getting his daddy away from his white women. Even the Tape Recorders skipping a season now, Dr. Levinson too old to go without power and light for the three days or else sick of the mosquitoes, or maybe he was sick of hearing Whaley tell the same old stories. Maggie never thought she’d miss the Tape Recorders, but when they did not come that year she thought, Hell, now that everybody’s gone and most of them dead, now that it was only the three of them left of this island, she might could tell the real story of her life.
But no one was interested in this story. Least not Whaley, who pieced it together from folks coming and going across the sound. Maggie sure didn’t volunteer it, though in some ways she did not have to say a word. She’d disappeared for two days, Whaley knew Woodrow to be over in Morehead fetching Sarah, she knew Boyd lived over in the Promise Land, she wasn’t so dumb at math that she couldn’t add. She liked numbers, her prices, what things cost. Plus all she had to do was look at Maggie to know the whole sordid story.
Maggie went about trying to forget again, tried all the things she’d tried and failed before: prayer, work, endless hours in the after-supper surf. The village was overrun by ghosts. Sometimes Maggie would wander down