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“Your kind ain’t need to be here. You unnerstand what I’m sayin’?”
Frank knew if it had been even five years ago, the man would not have dared talk to a white man that way, even on his own doorstep. But the Blacks were getting more impatient, and the whites more desperate. Or so his son kept telling him. But he watched the TV, too. If Walter Cronkite said it, he believed it.
“I understand. But my son is a lawyer and he’s helpin’ out Miss Jessup’s kin, and I just need to ask her some questions.”
“Uh-huh, sure you do.” Daniel rose and took a step toward Frank.
Thinking quickly for some topic to calm things, Frank said, “I saw one of your buddies had on an Army jacket. He fight in Vietnam? I fought in the Big One.”
“We all fought in ’Nam. And we all come back here and it all the same as when we left. You come back to parades, old man. We come back to shit. And not just the shit the white boys did.”
“I hear you.”
“I don’t like it. I don’t like you.”
Frank didn’t know if it was the fact that Daniel had not been able to say his piece the last time he had been here, but he seemed determined to voice it now.
“Any man fights for his country deserves respect. And you got mine, Daniel.”
Daniel abruptly sat back down and sipped his beer.
Frank pulled his hand away from the gun in his rear waistband and headed up to Miss Jessup’s.
They sat in rocking chairs on the front porch to catch what little breeze there was. In the moistened heat the smell of the dump was so strong that Frank started breathing through his mouth. Jessup seemed unfazed by the stench, but then Frank knew she had lived in this house for many decades, because she had told him so.
“I don’t own it, Mr. Lee,” she had said. “No bank loan me no money. One colored man own all these homes here. Charges rent three times what they worth. He takes my money with a smile on the first of every month when he drives here in his fine car. Only difference now from ten years ago? He come with a man who got him a gun. But I don’t have a lot of other choices where I can live.”
Frank had felt bad for her, but what could he do.
“Your boy seems to be workin’ hard on things,” said Miss Jessup.
“He’ll do his best. Now, he wanted me to find out more about Jerome.”
She stopped rocking. “Well, what you want to know?”
“Whatever you can tell me about him.”
“He a good man. Fought in the war. He a good daddy to his babies.”
Jessup rocked away, cooling herself with a green church fan.
“How was he when he got back from Vietnam? Anythin’... funny?”
She stopped rocking again. “He got him some nightmares, guess you’d call ’em.”
Frank shifted in his seat and said, “Nightmares?”
“Yeah. Pearl say they was some bad ones. He sit up in the bed screamin’ and punchin’ like he still fightin’. Or sometimes she’d wake up and they be tears runnin’ down his face and the poor man not even awake.”
Frank closed his eyes for a few moments. He was instantly back on Guadalcanal with dead and dying men lying all around him, even as the enemy drew ever closer. Frank had never fought anything close to the Japanese. It got to be whenever he killed one, he shot the man six more times, because he never wanted to have to face him again. His face started trembling at the memory. Nightmares? How many times had he woken up screaming, reaching for a weapon, looking for someone to kill? That was when he’d had Hilly hide his guns.
“Mr. Lee, you okay?”
He opened his eyes to find her staring worriedly at him. “I’m fine, just probably somethin’ I ate.”
“I got bicarbonate.”
“It’s already passed. Look, does he, I mean, does Jerome get violent?”
