the shotgun again.
I lifted the pistol in the direction of the man and started firing. The first bullet shattered the window to the man’s left. His eyes flicked at the crumbling glass. My second shot hit the door frame above his head. He jerked the shotgun up and aimed at me.
Shoot, shoot, a voice screamed in my ear. I aimed at the man and pulled the trigger. I pulled it again and then again. The man fired simultaneously with my last shots, but one of my bullets hit high in his right leg and his aim jerked. I felt a sting in my shoulder, but it was glass, not buckshot, from the shattered Esso sign above me.
I lowered my gun, deafened, stunned. The man had pitched forward on his belly and I saw him crawling toward his gun, which had fallen a few feet to his side. I ran over and stomped my foot on his outstretched left hand. With the pistol pointed at his head, I snatched the shotgun off the ground.
“You move,” I said, “I swear I’ll kill you.” The man stared back at me with a look not of fear or hatred or pain but of blankness. His eyes were open wide but unfocused. It was as if there was no content to him, no recognition that he had tried to kill three people just because we happened by and two were Negroes. It was as if he had scratched an itch on his chin.
I knelt over Jackie and pulled him on his back. My hands went red. His torso was drenched in blood. I raised his tee shirt and saw mutilated skin and tissue down his right side. He was bleeding from several places on his neck. I wanted to howl at the horror of what I saw, at the mutilation of this beautiful body. I flashed back to the hog-killings I had witnessed as a boy—the gushes of pig blood as the teams of black men held steady a scalded Hampshire carcass and the strongest of them pulled a twelve-inch blade the full length of its belly.
My lunch rushed upward into my throat, and it took two deep swallows to get it back down. Jackie’s eyes were wide but I wasn’t sure that he could see me. His mouth was open and he was panting rapidly.
I yanked off my tee shirt and pressed it against the neck wounds leaking so much blood. “Hold on, buddy, we going to get outta here.”
Jackie’s eyes started to flick from side to side, as if he were looking urgently for something. I wiped some of the sweat off his forehead. I felt the clenched muscles of his brow.
Alma was screaming. “That motherfucker tried to kill us!”
“Are you hurt?”
“Yes!” She held out her left arm. I saw a lot of welts and small wounds from the shotgun but not much blood. She wasn’t hurt badly.
“Call an ambulance!”
I knew we didn’t have time for that. We were at least a half hour from a Montgomery hospital. Jackie needed to be at a hospital now. Getting an ambulance would take twice the time.
“Call an ambulance right now!”
My fear flashed into anger. I jumped toward her, opened my right hand, and slapped her as hard as I could. She staggered sideways. She was stunned into silence but only for a moment.
“You white bastard!”
“Shut the fuck up and help me get him in the car, or I swear I’ll leave you right here.”
She started to say something but she stopped when I drew back my hand. I looked at Jackie, and she followed my gaze. His desperate condition channeled our anger into action. I lifted up his torso and put my arms around him and lifted. “Pick up his feet.” She did.
I backed around the gas pump, slid into the backseat, and pulled Jackie in to lie lengthwise on it. Something told me that Jackie shouldn’t lie flat. He needed pressure applied to those neck wounds. I told Alma to come and take my place, hold Jackie’s torso up, and keep the tee shirt pressed against his neck. She was crying again now, but she did what I said. I threw the shotgun in the front seat, jumped behind the wheel, and made a sliding U-turn in the gravel beyond the gas pumps. As we pulled away, the old man was sitting up, his left hand clamped on his injured leg. He’d live, the sorry piece of shit.
The sun was gone now and dusk was fading to night. Fireflies blinked all around as if to switch off the light and spread the darkness. Crickets chirped incessantly, and a whippoorwill rang out a call that had always sounded like doom to me. The trouble it had summoned for so long had surely arrived.
I glanced at my watch. Almost 8:45. I had checked the time when we stopped at the store, because I had been trying to calculate when Jackie and I would get to Eden Rise. All this had happened in less than ten minutes. I didn’t have a second to think about it, and I couldn’t have known it anyway, but in that time—only enough to smoke a cigarette, or chew the sugar out of a piece of gun, or listen to a couple of good songs by the Supremes—I lost Eden Rise. I wouldn’t get there that night, and when I did find my way, it wasn’t the place I had left.
2
The tire noise on the rough pavement roared in our ears as I raced the Galaxie through the darkness. I kept looking to hit Highway 80, the big road to Montgomery, but we had gone farther down the county road than I remembered. As time slipped away, panic crept up the back of my neck. My naked back, sweaty from heat and fear and bloody from broken glass, stuck to the leather seat.
“Hang in there, Jackie.” I glanced over my shoulder but it was too dark to see them. “Can you hear me, buddy?” I waited a moment. “Is he moving?”
“He moaned a minute ago. He’s really hurt.” At last she sounded scared.
“Are you keeping that shirt pressed on his neck?”
“It’s soaked through now.”
The smell of Jackie’s blood and Alma’s urine now overpowered the odor of the chemicals lately put on nearby fields. We had to stanch the bleeding. I slammed on the brakes, rushed to the trunk of the car, and rifled in my bag until I found two clean tee shirts. In the dim light of the car’s dome bulb, I could see how sodden the shirt was. Jackie’s eyes were half closed, and he wasn’t moving. His right hand lay open on his thigh. A jagged smear of blood marked the white palm. Those beautiful hands.
I shoved one of the clean shirts at her. “Hold him up!” Panic filled my every membrane.
The shotgun lay propped against the front passenger seat. I had been taught to admire the beauty of shotguns. This one had been the object of loving kindness. It gleamed, its pewter-colored barrels bearing just the right sheen and odor from the recent caress of a chamois cloth lightly coated with gun oil, its cherry stock waxed and buffed. Its presence suddenly made my heart thump in my ear and my right hand shake uncontrollably.
I jumped out and slung the weapon as far as I could into the blackness.
I finally came to Highway 80, turned east, and pushed the accelerator to the floor. I held the car steady at 100 miles per hour, whizzing so fast by other cars that I could hardly make out their shape or color. My window was rolled down just far enough to create a loud whistle from the air rushing in. I had never driven so fast before, but the danger suited my panic. I felt like I was floating above the ground—and indeed the car did bounce at times on the uneven pavement. When the lights refocused their gaze on the highway, three times they caught the reflections of the eyes of possums and a skunk. Their tiny twin points of red glare made me think I wasn’t the
