The Boys Who Woke Up Early Page 4

  Jack claimed he was chief detective and I was the assistant, because my alleged authority as a detective stemmed from working under his alleged license. I didn’t remind him that nobody had actually given us a case. I didn’t challenge him because I had nothing to lose. Anything we did in the line of private detective work was just a game to me—a clever way of continuing to play, now that I had turned seventeen, the childhood cops-and-robbers game I had quit only when people told me I was too old to play pretend. And Jack made it easy to defer to his authority, asserting it only in private, and particularly never when we were around girls.

  = = =

  The girls were a big reason I put up with Jack. Just as boys who knew Gina DeLancey was beautiful began to think her friend Ernestine Thomas was also beautiful, girls who thought Jack was fun began to think I might be fun, too. And they did think Jack was fun. Girls in Early always found new guys interesting, I suppose because they so rarely appeared. Jack, however, had been a new guy at seven different schools, and he played the role like a star. Ernestine was the first to lay claim to him, on the strength of their homework connection, and that paid off for me.

  Study hall in our long-outgrown high school was held in the school auditorium—a drab room of plywood seats and insufficient electric lights. The windows were twenty feet above the floor and cost more to keep clean than the school could afford, so there was always an atmosphere of winter twilight no matter what time of year it was. Not much actual studying occurred there, mostly socializing. Still, I was surprised when, just a few days after Jack and I went target shooting, Ernestine sat down beside me in that auditorium.

  “Hi, Stony,” she said. “Jack and I are going to dinner in Bluefield Friday night. Gina would like you to ask her to double date with us.”

  In Early, this was the way a girl could ask a boy for a date without losing her dignity, but it had never occurred to me that Gina DeLancey would ever need to ask for dates. She had always been popular. I barely had the social status to speak to her, and only because I was her second cousin. We had been friends from the cradle, through gap-toothed elementary years and backyard circuses and Halloween carnivals. But she had bloomed into the prettiest girl in the school or maybe even the county—a teenaged queen, while I had remained a commoner.

  I managed some reply and, steeling myself for rejection, asked Gina out. Of course, she accepted with complete graciousness, because it was all prearranged. That Friday night, we drove to Bluefield, just across the West Virginia line. It was the nearest town big enough to offer both pizza and a first-run movie. We had a sausage-mushroom combination and saw North by Northwest. On the way home, Jack parked his father’s Impala behind the grandstand of the baseball field at the high school. In the back seat, Gina gave me my first French kiss. I can still remember the taste of her soft mouth, and every time I remember it, I also recall Ernestine’s simultaneous words from the front seat: “Ow! Your goddamn pistol is mashing my boob!”

  Not long after that, my relationship with Gina took an unexpected turn. During a spell of agreeable weather, she and Ernestine had taken to walking home from school, and after that first date broke the ice, I often walked with them. Gina and I both lived some distance from the school, but Ernestine lived closer. Sometimes she walked all the way to Gina’s house so they could study together and gab for an hour or two. But the day I’m telling about, Ernestine went straight home so I had Gina to myself the rest of the way. It started raining hard about the time we got to the business district, and Gina ran for shelter. She stepped into the doorway of one of the closest buildings, a vacant brick storefront, and said, “Let’s go in here till it quits. My dad owns the building.”

  Gina pulled a nail file from her purse and slid it behind the mailbox. A key dropped out, and she unlocked the door.

  “I don’t think Daddy knows about that key himself,” she said. “But I saw the painters leave it there last week.”

  Gina’s dad was a successful real estate agent and developer. His success gave Gina access to every material thing a girl could use in Early: a gasoline credit card, nice clothes, lots of shoes. But I didn’t envy Gina being his child. People said Mr. DeLancey was a hard driver in business, and I guess he was a hypocrite, too. He was a big shot in our Baptist church, which meant he was against drinking and smoking, but Gina had let it slip that he did both on the sly. Of course, he wasn’t the only one, and Gina didn’t pay him much mind. He also said it was sinful to dance, but Gina could dance like a gypsy, and danced every chance she got.

  Right then, I was grateful for Mr. DeLancey’s warm, dry building. A year or two earlier, he had leased out the first floor for a café, but it had closed the previous spring, and now the space was being remodeled and repainted for a new tenant. Drop cloths and stepladders were lying around, but the workmen had left for the day.

  The building had been a clothing and shoe store at one time, but that business went bankrupt in the Depression. A lot of the old stock had been left on the second floor, stuff that was out of date even in the 1930s and didn’t find buyers at the bankruptcy sale. It was still raining hard, so to kill time Gina showed me some of the merchandise. She showed me the first high-button shoes I had ever seen, and they had never been worn. She opened hatboxes and took out Easter bonnets that were more than forty years old but still looked like new. She put on a flapper’s beehive cloche hat and a knee-length straight-cut dark coat, mugged up a haughty frown, and sashayed down the aisle in her best imitation of an old-movie vamp.

  “You’re too blond to be a vamp,” I said, laughing.

  I asked her if there was more interesting stuff on the third floor, and she said she didn’t know. “The stairway door is always locked,” she explained.

  “Maybe we can find the key,” I suggested.

  We didn’t exactly agree to look for the key; we just walked to the stairway and started looking. I applied my detective skills, hoping to impress Gina. I thought there might be a key hidden under a mat, but there wasn’t. Then I saw an electrical switch where there was no reason to be one, and I noticed that the paint was chipped off the screws holding on its faceplate, as if those screws had been removed and replaced many times. My Boy Scout pocket knife had a screwdriver blade, so I took out the screws, and—sure enough—a key was taped to the back of the faceplate.

  We opened the door and almost ran up the stairs. “I bet the really good stuff is up here,” Gina said. But we didn’t find more merchandise. Instead, we came up into a short hallway with an empty room on each side, each about the size of a small bedroom or office, each with an attached restroom. The hallway opened into a spacious room that occupied most of the third floor. Several floor-to-ceiling windows on the left side flooded the room with light even on this rainy day, and we could see a low podium or bandstand at the far end of the room. There were about forty old-fashioned wooden folding chairs lined up along one of the walls, and a rack of about twenty more stored in one corner.

  “It’s a ballroom,” said Gina, pleasantly surprised. “See, the small rooms are dressing rooms for dance recitals and so forth. We could have our own dance here instead of in the school gym, and dance as close as we like.”

  She grabbed me and led me around in a playful box step, holding me closer than allowed by the teachers who patrolled school dances with a six-inch ruler. Then she pulled away and did several ballet whirls and leaps, such as she could manage in a sheath skirt and penny loafers, smiling with pleasure, exulting in the abundance of dancing room and absence of supervision. As she moved, light refracted through the raindrops on the windows and played over her blond hair and clear skin like dappled forest sunshine on the face of some woodland fairy, and it was very beautiful to see.

  Gina’s dance brought her to a curtain, which covered about six linear feet of the wall, floor to ceiling.

  “This is odd,” she said, a little breathless, as she looked behind the curtain. “Why have a curtain if nothing’s behind it?”

  I looked myself, just so I could agree that it was odd, but I saw something Gina hadn’t. As I pulled the curtain aside as far as I could, light from the windows across the room revealed three black lines in the wallpaper: two vertical ones intersecting with the third at the top and the floor at the bottom, forming a rectangle. The lines were actually cracks, and the wallpaper had been carefully fitted right up to each crack before picking up on the other side, so that the pattern of the wallpaper continued almost uninterrupted.

  “I think there’s a door under the wallpaper,” said Gina. But there was no doorknob or handle to pull the door open. I pushed against the door and released it quickly, and a hidden spring-loaded latch, like those on a fine sideboard or corner cupboard, made the door spring slightly outward so we could catch the edge and swing it completely open.

  We were looking into a garret under the building’s sloping roof. Light came from a couple of windows set in gables. On the rafters, which ran down the slope facing us, we saw briefcases hanging one above the other, five or six to a beam, about twenty-five in all. Each case hung by its handle, on its own big nail; glued to the rafter above each briefcase was a gummed label, about the size of a calling card. When we stepped closer, we saw that a two-digit number was handwritten on each label, no two numbers the same, as if a specific briefcase went on a specific nail. Some of the briefcases were very old, the leather cracking and the flaps curling up at the corners. Others were not so old, and a few almost new—the same styles you could buy in a luggage shop that year.

  “What are these?” Gina asked. She opened one of the new briefcases and pulled out a long, flowing costume. It was white. “Dance costume? Choir robe?” she wondered out loud.

  I saw the e
xpression on her face turn from curiosity to horror before I saw what caused it. She pulled the costume to her chest, to keep me from seeing it, but by then I had seen. Seen the big, round, red patch with its white Baltic cross and a drop of red blood embroidered at the center.

  The insignia of the Ku Klux Klan.

  I opened a couple more of the briefcases and each had a Klan robe and hood.

  Gina handled the robes mechanically, as if in shock. Slowly she asked aloud, “How could Daddy not know about this?”

  Then Gina started to cry. “He does know about it,” she said. “He must!”

  She walked into my arms and bawled like a five-year-old, her face turning red and tears pouring. I didn’t know how to comfort a girl. All I could think to do was give her my handkerchief. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes then buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed some more. I held her and stroked her hair.

  Gina kept crying. “The Klan lynches colored people, don’t they? Daddy could go to prison if anybody found out!”

  I despised all bullies, and especially despised the idea of the Klan. It seemed a particularly chickenshit outfit to me, its members so gutless they had to gang up to shove people around—and wore masks even then. But to comfort Gina, I found myself minimizing their poor character.

  “I don’t think they kill anybody nowadays. I think they just try to scare people. If that’s all they do, maybe it’s not illegal.” I was talking through my proverbial hat; I didn’t really know what they did and if it was illegal.

  Gina began looking for reasons her dad might not be involved after all. “Maybe the stuff was here when he bought the store,” she said hopefully. Then she saw the flaw in her reasoning. “But some of the briefcases are new! And he’s owned the building as long as I can remember.”

  “Stony,” she sobbed, “promise me you won’t tell Ernestine. Don’t tell anybody!”

  “I won’t, Gina,” I said. “Your relatives are my relatives, too. I don’t want to advertise this.”

  “Promise! I would die of shame if it came out my family was part of this! My mother would die!” Gina trembled in my arms, still sobbing.

  “I’ll swear it on any Bible!” I said.

  I kept that promise for years, kept it to this day, long after Gina released me from my promise and told the story herself, which she did not do until her father and mother were beyond the embarrassments of this earth.

  I dated Gina for a while after that, but because of that discovery in the ballroom garret our relationship changed. My role in her life became that of confidant. She began telling me things she formerly would have told only to Ernestine. Some of it was about other boys she dated, for we weren’t going steady. Now that she trusted me with her darkest secret, she seemed to enjoy revealing truths that could have hurt her reputation, at least for a couple of days. In truth, the confessions could scarcely be counted ugly. Popular though they were, Gina and Ernestine were square as honest dice. Based on the Confessions of Gina, I learned that girls who sang in the youth choir at our Baptist church smooched a lot and petted a little, but they did not do the deed. I doubt if Gina or Ernestine had ever shoplifted a Hershey bar.

  Even if she had been wilder, and if our relationship hadn’t been so changed, I’m not sure we would have fallen to fornicating. I really liked Gina, but beautiful as she was, and much as I enjoyed kissing her, I did not lust for her.

  All my lust was directed at Mary Lou Martin.

  Chapter 3

  I can tell you the exact day that I first noticed Mary Lou in any detail. It was in the spring of 1954, the day after the Supreme Court announced its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and the headline on the newspaper I delivered before school said, “Court Opens White Schools To Negro.” When I got to school, my fifth-grade classroom was in an uproar. Some of the boys made me go back outside and get a couple of extra newspapers from the carrier’s bag on my bike, so they could read the story.

  “It means niggers will come to this school,” Todd Powell said. Everybody believed this startling pronouncement, because even though he was mean, Todd was smart, and read the paper every day. “My dad says the first time they send a nigger here he’s sending me to private school.”

  The words echoed and evolved through the classroom: “Nigger … with niggers … boys and girls, too.”

  I was gossiping like everybody else and noticed Mary Lou, a tall country girl in dark pigtails and bib overalls, standing alone, not saying anything. I said to her, “Aren’t you worried about having to go to school with niggers?”

  I was really surprised when she snapped at me. “You shouldn’t call ’em niggers. You think you’d like to be called that? It isn’t right the way it is now—we have a big school and they have a two-room school with two teachers for six grades. It’d be fairer if they did come to school with us.”

  Todd heard that and called her a nigger lover. Mary Lou planted a solid left jab on his nose. While two other boys took Todd down to the boys’ restroom to stop his nosebleed with cold water, our teacher called the classroom to order and warned us, “It’s going to be a long time before we know what this does mean. I don’t want to hear of any fights about it. I don’t even want any arguments on it. Everybody is entitled to his opinions, and I want those opinions respected.”

  The opinion I immediately respected was Mary Lou’s. The viewpoint she expressed was new to me, but seemed absolutely right on first glance, and it embarrassed me that a sophisticated town boy like me didn’t see this until it was pointed out by a hillbilly girl who probably thought you could remove warts by rubbing them with a grain of corn and throwing the corn over your shoulder to a chicken.

  Todd didn’t take the lesson the same way I did. He remained an unreconstructed redneck, but Mary Lou had made an impression not only on his nose, but also on his young libido. He got kind of sweet on her after she punched him. I could name twenty-five things I disliked about Todd Powell, but I can’t blame him for that one.

  The furor over Brown v. Board of Education happened only a few months after my first brush with the law. I had been the youngest of four boys who, after school on Jubal Early’s birthday, ran a Confederate flag up the school flagpole and padlocked the hoisting chain so nobody could easily take it down. We might have escaped unidentified if one of the older guys hadn’t attracted attention by firing a salute with a .410 shotgun. But Mary Lou’s example changed my viewpoint. That was when I quit using the word “nigger,” and that was when I started liking Mary Lou.

  Of course, I never told Mary Lou how much I liked her. Barely spoke to her—mostly because of my shyness with all girls, but also because all of us kids from the actual town of Early chose to hang around with other kids from town. I didn’t see the hypocrisy at the time, but we hillbillies who had made it into town looked down on those still living in the hollows. We didn’t invite them to birthday parties, nor did they invite us to corn shuckings or whatever they did for fun. They were probably Baptists like I was, but they attended some “little church in the wildwood” rather than the impressive stone edifice where I had to ring the bell every Sunday and Wednesday.

  Town boys never remarked on how strikingly pretty Mary Lou became as she grew into her teens. That was one thing I personally did notice, however, and when I got old enough to have sexual fantasies, Mary Lou starred in them.

  The main fantasy opened with me out hunting on the mountain behind the Martins’ white frame house, which stood in the little apple and peach orchard at the end of the road up Sourwood Hollow. I would hear a faint cry of distress from the house. I would recognize the car outside, from a description broadcast on the radio, as one stolen by four escaped convicts. I would see the smashed-in back door and sneak in the same door with my dad’s pump .22 rifle. Quiet as fog I would slip up the stairs to an attic bedroom with roses on the wallpaper and golden sunlight filtering through gauze curtains onto a scene of terror. Mary Lou would be bound to her four-poster bed as the boss convict threatened her with a knife. He would see me, raise the knife to harm her, and I would shoot him between the eyes. I would quickly dispatch all four convicts, the last in desperate hand-to-hand combat with hunting knives.