her coming: 12 Roses Perfume, sweat, hair grease and something else. A thick smell: the smell of almost-milk. Now her smell is right on top of me. Pressing down against my smell of sweat from running from the rock Snipes threw. He hit me on the back of the head. It hurt but it ain’t bleeding. I keep my eyes shut but I know Billy’s standing right above me looking.
“Whut the hell you laying there for?” Billy goes.
“I’m dead,” I go.
“No you ain’t,” she goes.
“Am too,” I go. “Laz Jackson is dead and you oughta be crying.”
“If you dead how come you running yr mouth?” she goes.
I open my eyes looking up at her. In one hand she’s holding her shoes, pink-colored pumps against her blue housedress. Her other hand’s holding her dress tight to her leg so the wind don’t lift it up.
“Your feet hurt?”
“No,” she says.
“They look like they hurt,” I says.
She bends down, putting her shoes back on, her eyes holding on to mines, making sure I don’t look up her skinny black legs and see nothing. She stands on one leg while she puts the first shoe on, then, balancing hard, she puts on the other shoe.
“I’m getting married Friday,” she says.
“To me?”
“Hells no,” she says. Then she looks to Midland. “Clifton and me been planning our wedding for months now.” She says it loud, like she’s saying it to me and to Snipes too.
I sit up, rising from the dead. If I had me a car and was sitting in it, the way I’m sitting would be towards Midland. My car’d be faster than his, as black as his is yellow. I’d go down there and run him off the road. Who bigged you? I wanna ask Billy but I know who: the one she calls Clifton Snipes.
“You think yr mamma’ll give me a good price on a dress?” Billy asks me.
“You gotta ask her yrself,” I says.
She looks down the road, towards Midland again, then she looks towards Sanderson’s filling station where her and her aunt and uncle stay at. They run the filling station and live in a mobile home out back. Sanderson’s ain’t theirs though, they just run it.
She starts walking, in her shoes again. Clop clop clop clop. I get up and walk after her. I seen up her smock. Where yr panties at? I ask her. Not out loud, just in my head.
“I was reading in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that there’s more dead in the world than there is living,” I says out loud.
“So whut,” Billy says.
We come up on the station. Four hundred yards. She throws her shoulders back and lifts up her chin. Someone on the porch, her Uncle Roosevelt, is standing there with Dill Smiles. They wave at us but Billy don’t wave back.
“There’s more Negro in the world than there is white,” I go but she ain’t listening.
“I want that wedding dress your mamma’s got in the window. The one with the train,” she says.
“That dress is high.”
“Snipes is paying for it. He gived me enough money to get any dress I want. Plus shoes.”
“Mamma closes up around five,” I says.
She glances up at the sky. It’s after four.
“Shit,” she goes and takes off running towards the filling station, as fast as her shoes and belly lets her, one hand still tight down at her hem, the other hand balled in a fist and working like a piston.
I keep walking, taking my time, looking at the sun, at the dirt, towards Midland, towards Sanderson’s. My fly is buttoned wrong. I button it right. My glasses are dirty. I clean them. Without my glasses on everything is a blur like I’m standing still and the world is moving. I got six different suits. Snipes, he got one or two but don’t never wear them together at the same time. He comes around every month to show my daddy his sample book and him and my daddy talk. It’s always the same.
“We don’t know nobody who wants to be buried in no coffin that looks like a banana,” my daddy tells Snipes.
“I got an appointment with Doctor Wells over in Midland. Doctor Wells says he’d like to be buried in a doctor’s bag,” Snipes says. “And look here, I got Cadillacs, guitars, Egyptian styles, and this here’s an airplane,” Snipes goes, turning his picture pages. “I made each one myself,” he says.
My daddy can’t be moved. “Jackson’s Funeral Home ain’t the most respected in Butler County for nothing. White or black, we the most respected. You seen the sign out front. ‘Established in 1926.’ We’ll be fifty years come ’Seventy-six,” Daddy tells him.
Snipes got on a yellow shiny shirt to match his face. He’s wearing a suit jacket that don’t match his pants. That’s his style. His shirt is dark with sweat and when my daddy turns him away he will fold up his sample book and stand outside at his car, taking a clean shirt out and tossing the sweated shirt in the trunk. I seen him do it last time he came through.
“Jackson’s Funeral is gonna be fifty in twelve years,” Snipes says smiling, still trying to make a sale. “That’s a heritage to be proud of.”
“Thirteen years,” I says, correcting him. So far I ain’t said nothing but that.
“You all planning for the future,” Snipes continues, not embarrassed by his wrong adding. “Custom coffins is the future, I’m telling you.”
“You talk like you know it all but you can’t even count,” I says.
“We thank you for stopping by,” Daddy says, shaking his hand and Snipes goes. I know where he’s headed. He’s going over to see Billy Beede. She won’t give me the time of day but she’d fly to the moon for Snipes. I watch him go.
Ten years ago, when I was ten years old, my mother and dad told me all the facts of life. They divided life into its two basic parts, Life and Death, and each took a part, explaining it all while we ate dinner. Mother took death, Daddy took life. They’d took the opposite parts when they’d explained it several years before to my brother Siam-Israel, but Siam-Iz went bad, so they switched around their parts when they got around to telling me. Neither of them went on too long. The whole of it was through before Mamma got up to get what was left from the night before’s pecan pie.
Roosevelt’s on the porch with Dill. I can see them both good now. Dill is holding a letter, working it like a fan.
“Billy oughta want to hear this letter,” Dill says.
“June’ll read it when Billy gets back,” Roosevelt says.
“June oughta read it now,” Dill says.
“She says to wait,” Roosevelt says.
I stand there looking at them. I tip my hat to both. “Mr. Beede. Miz Smiles,” I says.
