This Bitter Earth Part 23

"I thought you left. I saw the car this morning," JJ said as he pulled the screen door open.

"Gloria left," Seth said, folding his hands in his lap and looking out toward the road.

JJ looked down at his brother. He felt as if he should ask why, but he didn't really care and so he stepped into the house without another word, allowing the door to slam shut behind him instead.

Sugar had seen pictures of him as a child. Black-and-white snapshots of Seth and JJ, their faces plastered with broad grins, arms thrown around each other's necks, bodies silky wet from Hodges Lake.

But those pictures did not prepare her for what stood before her.

She'd always thought that Seth looked like his father, but now she could see that that wasn't the case at all. JJ was almost Joe's twin, just as tall if not taller, same coal-black skin, thick lips and broad nose.

"Afternoon," JJ said as Sugar realized that he spoke like his father too.

Their eyes met briefly before the dead blackness of his pushed hers away.

"JJ!" Pearl squealed. She rushed to him as if this were the first time she'd seen him in years.

"This here is Sugar. Sugar, this is your brother JJ," Pearl said in a singsong voice as she took JJ by the hand and pulled him toward the table.

JJ looked at his mother and then at Sugar.

"Sister?"

His face was expressionless. Sugar suspected the news hadn't even surprised him.

"Uh-huh," Pearl said, grinning. "Oh, it's a long tired story that I really don't feel like revisiting. Ask your daddy, he'll tell you," Pearl chirped. "Oh, that there is her friend Mercy," Pearl said, pointing toward the living room and the small figure who sat on the couch. "She don't talk," Pearl leaned in and whispered.

JJ took a deep breath. "Sister?" he said again as he folded his arms across his chest.

"Yes," Pearl said. "Y*all need to get acquainted. Oh, she sings too. Maybe she can come on down to the club and sing sometime."

Sugar's eyes popped wide open. "Miss Pearl, Ia""

Pearl waved her hand at Sugar. "She sing like an angel. She'll come down, you'll see."

JJ walked over to the sink. He needed to have a gla.s.s of water to help wash down what he'd just been told. It took four gla.s.ses and by then Pearl had disappeared upstairs.

JJ turned and stared at Sugar for a long time; his head moved this way and that as he studied the features of her face.

Look like Jude, he thought to himself.

Sugar fidgeted a bit in her chair.

"How come she don't talk?" JJ asked, nodding his head in Mercy's direction.

Sugar looked up at JJ's chest; she wouldn't dare look him in the face.

"She's been sick."

"Uh-huh," JJ said.

Mercy was watching televisiona"well, staring at it really as she fought with her memories. JJ's voice grabbed her attention away from her thoughts and Mercy turned to get a good look at him.

He turned to look at her at the same time.

JJ waited for her eyes to drop away, but they didn't. They held his for so long, he became uncomfortable.

JJ tore his eyes away from Mercy. He was shaken. "Where is my daddy?" he asked in a voice that sounded splintered.

"I don't know where he's at," Sugar said to JJ's quickly retreating back.

"You all right?" Seth was still seated on the porch, his hands still folded in his lap.

"Yeah, fine," JJ said as he straightened his back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Mama told you?"

Seth thought that this was JJ's reaction to the news. He didn't know that Mercy's eyes had taken his breath away.

JJ looked down at his brother. "Yeah."

"Well, what you think?"

JJ looked over his shoulder, slapped his chest a few times to loosen the tension around his heart and then stepped down and off of the porch.

"I think Daddy is a man and people have always looked at him as something else, something greater than that, but sitting inside is proof that he is just a man."

JJ walked off, leaving Seth to his own thoughts.

Pearl's fingers fumbled with the small cross around her neck. She was the only one talking; everyone else was sitting around, looking mad, sad or just evil.

It had been the same at dinner the night before and breakfast that morning. Everyone eating and no one talking.

Things just were not going well.

Sugar had been back for three days and Jude had not stepped into one of her dreams to give her a clue as to what she was to do next.

Three days and the people inside of the Taylor home walked circles around each other.

JJ hadn't been back and Joe and Seth hadn't pa.s.sed more than a dozen words between them, and six of those were strained and unkind.

Pearl whispered her dead daughter's name and waited.

On the fourth day Sugar got Mercy out onto the porch and down the stairs. She'd reached for her hand twice, and twice Mercy had pulled away.

She did follow Sugar, but remained a good ten steps behind her.

"See here." Sugar was standing where #10 once stood. There were still pockets of charred earth here and there, but seedlings and young gra.s.s shoots were popping up in s.p.a.ces where the earth was rich and brown.

"I used to live here a long time ago. After St. Louis... with you and Mary."

Sugar wasn't sure if Mercy had started to remember that year. She wanted so much for her to remember it.

Sugar turned around to see that Mercy had placed her hands over her ears.

Mercy did not want to hear her grandmother's name, did not want to hear the stories of the three of them and the happiness they'd shared. She did not want to hear about things that she could not remember clearly.

"Mercy?"

Mercy began to walk in circles, faster and faster until her feet became entangled and she fell, face first, to the ground.

"Ooooooh!" Mercy wailed, holding her bruised face.

"Let me see," Sugar said, reaching for Mercy's head.

Mercy turned over on her side and started to slither away from Sugar.

"Please, Mercy, you're bleeding. Let me just help you."

Mercy got up and started running. She turned left toward the house and, seeing Pearl, Joe and Seth standing there, she moved right and shot across the road and into the field.

"Mercy!" Sugar screamed and started after her.

A car was coming; the evening sun caught the grill, temporarily blinding both Sugar and Mercy. Sugar stopped, but Mercy just shaded her eyes and kept running. The field swallowed her until nothing but her wails remained.

Long, narrow shadows and a few inches of tarred road were the only things that separated them.

The car had come to a screeching halt, its hot grill so close to Sugar's leg that a small blister had begun to rise there.

Everything inside of her melted and the wounds he'd left on her stomach peeled open and screamed.

Him.

Lappy Clayton extended his arm from the open window so that Sugar could see the gold watch around his milky-colored wrist and the glowing tip of the cigarette that he held between the fingers Pearl had seen dripping with blood ten years earlier.

It was him, she was sure of it even though she was blinded by the sun's reflection off the grill of his car.

She waited for him to say something or to step on the gas and run her over, but he did nothing and the only things that filled Sugar's ears were the sounds of her heartbeat and the steady hum of the car's engine.

"Sugar?"

Pearl's voice came to her in a faint whisper and then there was the sound of three pairs of feet walking across gravel and dirt and out onto the road.

"Come on now." Joe's voice came next.

Joe's strong hand wrapped around Sugar's arm and began to gently pull her from the road. "Go on and see if you can find that child," he said to Seth.

"Hurry up *fore it get too dark," Pearl added.

Both of them squinted into the headlights. Joe even brought his hand up to shade his eyes so he could better see who was behind the wheel.

"Much obliged," Joe said, pulling Sugar away with one hand while giving the hood of the car two hefty thumps.

Lappy honked the horn and pulled off.

The side windows were tinted; no one but Sugar knew who was behind that wheel.

"Lucky the man's brakes worked." Joe's words were meant to be light, humorous, but his voice was uneven and Sugar knew he was shaken too.

"That car ain't from around here," Pearl said, still standing close to the road, her hands on her hips as she watched the car disappear down the road.

The sound of Seth's voice calling Mercy's name resonated through the field.

Sugar looked up at the sky and the moon was ringed in red.

JJ moved the bottle of scotch from the top shelf and onto the bar for the fifth time that night. He tilted the bottle and watched the amber liquid trickle into the small shot gla.s.s that sat below it.

He focused on the liquid because he didn't want to look at the fine manicured fingernails, the gold watch or the silk cuff of the s.h.i.+rtsleeve that belonged to the familiar-faced stranger.

He had been there every night since the first night he'd walked through the doors of Two Miles In. It was bad enough his face filled JJ's dreams; worse yet, JJ had to have him at his bar from the band's first set till its last.

They'd never exchanged a single word, but their eyes danced every once in a while and that small contact sent cold chills down JJ's spine.

More than once, JJ telt compelled to pull out the .45 he kept hidden behind the bar. He had only touched it though, caressed the cold steel and ran his fingers over the small curved metal of the trigger, before swallowing his fear and placing his hand back on the bar.

The stranger never spoke except to ask to have his gla.s.s refilled. His head never bounced to the music that swirled around him and his eyes never lingered for more than a second on the thighs, b.r.e.a.s.t.s and broad pretty smiles that Angel and the rest of the women presented him.

Who was he and what was his business here, JJ wondered. But most of all, why did he seem so familiar to him and why was JJ gripped with such suffocating fear when he was around?

JJ had plenty of questions but no answers.

"Last call!" JJ shouted out as he rang the cowbell after the band had finished their last set. Two Miles In was still pulsating from the music Jericho had laid down. Sweat-drenched customers mobbed the bar, still snapping their fingers to the echo the music had left in their heads.

JJ worked swiftly, serving up drink after drink while Angel and Harry cleared the tables. By the time the last customer stumbled out of the door, the stranger was gone.

JJ looked around for evidence of him having been there. An empty gla.s.s, b.u.t.t-filled ashtray, a misty thumbprint on the bar. But there was nothing and JJ began to wonder if the familiar stranger was just a figment of his imagination.

The last automobile pulled out, honking its horn at Angel and Harry, who moved slowly down the road and toward home.

Angel's fingers were intertwined with her son's and their arms swung back and forth as Angel sang loudly and off-key.

JJ stood outside and watched them until Angel's crooked tune faded away and they disappeared into the blue dawn.

The dogs started barking just as JJ's hand came to rest on the door handle. He thought rabbit, squirrel, even muskrat, before something in him told him he was wrong.

He thought about the .45 behind the bar and then he thought about the stranger and his mind s.h.i.+fted to the rifle beneath his bed.

The dogs were going wild. Their barks echoed across the field and the horses that were grazing there began to shake and bolt about nervously in their corral. JJ moved slowly around the side of the building, the muscles in his face tight, his heart banging inside his chest.