Hope's Peak (Harper and Lane #1)(59)

She leans forward. “Don’t matter what it is. You just remember they niggers ain’t the same as us, you hear? They need teachin’ the right ways, the boundaries of what they can and can’t do. Your daddy had the right idea, Lester. He treat ’em like you would a dog. What do you do if a dog gets out of line?”

Lester fumbles for the answer.

“You give it a good kickin’ that’s what!” his mother shouts impatiently. “You could learn a lot from the way your daddy was, God rest his soul.”

Lester blushes. “Ruby’f my friend, Mama.”

She stops what she’s doing and slaps him in the mouth. Lester cries out, holding a hand to his lips. “Mama!?”

Her snarling face is in his, spit flying from between her broken teeth. “Don’t ever think of one of them as a friend again! You hear me boy? We is better than them. Why, your daddy would be rollin’ in his grave to hear you blaspheme in such a way. Now, get outta my sight!”

Ida can feel the hurt, the shame, the confusion. And now she sees Lester walking home from school and Ruby catching up.

“Hey, Lester, wait for me.”

He turns toward her, finger in her face. “I can’t walk home with you no more. My mama fayf,” he spits. The f of every s is heavy and thick.

Ruby backs off. “Lester . . .”

He rushes on ahead of her, waving one arm in frustration. “I can’t hear you!”

Ida wants to take the young girl in her arms and hold her tight, but she can’t. She’s left to watch her sobbing in the street, the boy she considered a friend storming off, turning against her for no reason other than the pigment of her skin.

It doesn’t end there. Lester watches her come and go. He thinks of her. Despite what his mother has to say to him, he follows her home sometimes, keeping his distance so that she won’t see.

His mother gives him a chest of his father’s old belongings. A worn pair of boots, some army paraphernalia, a knife. He roots through it all. Books, papers, medals, his old leather belt, the same belt Mama would use to “teach that boy some sense,” as she liked to say. Lester reads what he can in the Hope’s Peak library about the KKK, looking at the pictures mostly—when he tries to read the words, they just swim in front of his eyes like black minnows in a stream of white water. At home one night, he takes his pillowcase and cuts two eyeholes. He puts it on his head, but it just flops around. Lester takes his father’s old belt and ties it around his neck. Looking in the mirror, he feels a sense of power. That night, when he masturbates, it is better than ever. And all he can think of is Ruby Lane at school. Her tight curly hair and dark-brown skin.

Years pass. Eventually, he gets a job at the dry cleaner’s in town and finds her working there, too. They do not speak, but she glances up at him from time to time. One day, he says hello and she says hello back.

“Forry for how I waf back then,” Lester offers one afternoon on their break, both of them drinking a cold Coke out back. “I waf confufed.”

Ruby smiles weakly. “Okay, Lester.”

He asks her to meet him up at Wisher’s Pond for a picnic. Ruby says she will, if she can get a sitter for her kid. She lets him down twice before finally seeing it through. Lester finds her waiting for him under the shade of an old tree, standing in the tall grass.

She doesn’t appreciate the mask. She doesn’t get it. He feels powerful.

As he forces her down, as he hits her, as he consummates their years of friendship, as he wraps his strong hands around her throat, he can feel the power of what he is and what he is doing.

Ida doesn’t have any choice but to watch. It is the dream. It is what she has revisited when she closes her eyes, for so, so long. She watches as Lester strangles her mother, then crowns her head with the twisted supplejack vine.

Lester takes a job with an auto repair shop. His mother is at first confined to a wheelchair, then slowly starts to lose her mind. Mack, a man at work he’s gotten to know, suggests putting her in a home.

That’s what Lester does. He goes to Mack’s for dinner and meets his wife, Ceeli. Years later, he has left the repair shop, but he stays in contact with Mack, on and off.

Most of the time, it is Ceeli who calls him when something needs fixing. And when his mother dies, it is Ceeli who gives him comfort. She tells him he can come visit her, have a coffee and a chat, tries to help him through his grief. Lester asks Mack if that will be alright, and Mack doesn’t object. A few days after his mother’s funeral service, Lester arrives at Ceeli’s door.

That’s when it starts. Lester tells her how much he misses his mother. Ceeli confides in him that Mack works long hours, sometimes works away, and she gets awful lonely in the house by herself.

Doesn’t Mack understand a woman’s got needs?

For a time, his mama’s voice goes away. But weeks later, he hears her whispering in the dark corners of the house. When he closes his eyes, she is in his head, looking at him, bugs crawling from her rotten eyeballs, out between her jagged teeth.

The dark creeps in at the edges. Ida feels squeezed on all sides, but she knows she must see it through. Lester is falling from the light, from the glow of life. It is above him, as the sun is when you’re underwater, sinking toward the abyss.

Before his mama goes to the home, a man comes to the house, dressed in a light-gray suit, with polished brown leather shoes, a pristine white shirt, and a dark-blue tie. He is overweight, has chestnut hair struck through with silver at the sides. He smells like a salesman: cologne, perspiration, and cigar smoke.