When Ghosts Come Home(32)

“You Rodney Bellamy’s little brother?” the man asked. He propped the rifle on his shoulder as if he were a soldier preparing to march, but Jay could tell that he was no soldier. He appeared too casual, one hand in his pocket, his hip cocked to the side. It seemed that relaxing in this way after pointing a gun at two boys was the most natural thing he could do.

Jay wasn’t Rodney’s brother, not really anyway, but he wasn’t clearheaded enough to think of the term brother-in-law. He simply nodded his head.

“Well, damn, I know who your brother is,” the man said. “Your daddy too.” He laughed as if this fact should be funny to all of them. “Jesus,” he said to himself.

“Give me that gun back,” Jay said.

The man widened his eyes as if shocked by what Jay had just said to him. He bent slightly at the waist and lowered his voice as if speaking to a dog. “Come and take it, boy.”

Jay felt Cody’s hand on his elbow. “Don’t,” Cody said. “Don’t.”

The man smiled, looked from Jay to Cody. “Y’all are like salt and pepper,” he said. “Jesus, it’s cute.” His face went flat and his eyes suddenly narrowed. “If I catch you back here in this neighborhood again, I’ll kill you both, I promise you that.” Neither boy said anything, but Jay’s mind flashed back to the many things Cody had stolen, the times they had tracked mud into a house under construction, and the one time Jay had thrown a rock through a window that had not yet been installed.

“These ain’t your woods,” Cody said. Jay looked over at him. Cody’s nostrils flared and his chest heaved as if he couldn’t gather enough breath in his lungs.

“You’re wrong about that,” the man said. He raised his free hand and pointed behind him. “I own every stretch of this land from the waterline”—he swept his arm around and pointed toward the Grove behind the boys—“to the little shantytown right there, and I’ll come to own it soon enough.” He lowered his arm and looked at Jay, and then he tossed the rifle on the ground at Jay’s feet. “Get home, boy.” He looked at Cody. “I know your daddy,” he said, “and I don’t think he’d look kindly on you running around with colored boys. Don’t let me catch y’all back here again.” He stared at them for another moment, and then he turned and disappeared into the trees.

Jay and Cody stood there until they could no longer hear the man’s feet moving through the woods, and then Jay bent to gather the rifle in one hand and the case in the other. They ran in separate directions: Jay headed back between the fences that separated Rodney and Janelle’s property from the neighbors’, while Cody tore along the edge of the woods toward his family’s land. Neither of the boys had said a word.

Jay squatted next to the house before rounding the corner to the driveway, and he quickly checked the rifle for scratches or smudges or fingerprints. Seeing none, he laid it carefully back in its case and closed it. He picked it up by the handle and carried it around to the front of the house and through the front door. Once he was inside, he’d inspected the case with the same quick meticulousness with which he’d inspected the weapon, and seeing nothing that caught his eye, he set the case back on the top shelf on Rodney’s side of the closet.

The man’s cologne seemed to linger in the small closet, but Jay thought it possible that the scent had either become trapped in his nasal cavity or perhaps had burrowed into his brain. He spent the rest of the day in this jittery, adrenaline-driven state of apprehension and fear, waiting for a knock on the door or a telephone call that would relay to Janelle or Rodney exactly what had transpired in the woods right behind their house. But neither the knock nor the call came that afternoon or evening, and by the time he was brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed, Jay felt certain that the only person he would ever talk to about what had happened in the woods was Cody himself, and he doubted that Cody would say a word to anyone, mostly because, like Jay, he didn’t seem to have anyone to say it to.

It was hours later, well after Jay had drifted off to sleep, that he was awakened by the baby’s crying and kept awake by the whispers of his sister and brother-in-law. He looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was a few minutes before 3:00 a.m. Jay had never been awake in Janelle’s house that late at night, and he wondered if the whispering between Janelle and Rodney was something that happened every night, or if the baby always woke and cried each night at this time.

And then he feared that something else had kept Janelle and Rodney from sleeping. Perhaps the man from the woods had called Rodney at work and told him what had happened. Jay replayed every conversation he’d had with his sister and Rodney that evening during dinner and later when they’d carved two pumpkins on the front steps, searching each discussion they’d had for any hint that either of them knew something. Or perhaps Rodney had sensed something in the closet, perhaps he had caught a whiff of the man’s cologne and asked Janelle about it. Perhaps they had sought out the source of the smell and opened the rifle’s case and discovered something different about it, although Jay couldn’t imagine what that would be. He’d put it back exactly as he’d always put it back each time he’d taken it down from the shelf. But then fear gripped him by the neck when he realized he could not remember which way the case had been facing when he’d taken the rifle down, and he could not remember which way he’d left it facing when he’d put it back.