Solemn Read Free Page B

trailer. She screamed into a magnetic blackness, with a second-guess as to which key fit the ignition of the 1995 Ford coupe her parents gave her as a wedding present—disapproval aside. They intended to give her a sure way up to Jackson, where she was born, to keep her from going down barefoot and pregnant and high. But Gilroy took over the coupe quickly, pretending and musing around. Now she had just stopped him from breaking her neck. Her elbows locked her arms too straight for him to to push it down. She was certain he had wanted to kill her. Pearletta was so beside herself at how her life turned out. She could not admit Gilroy’s efforts this evening were not exactly abrupt. It had mostly been like this. No matter her age, Pearletta found and married Gilroy late. Or perhaps too early, given how it all turned out. But, way back when it seemed now, she was addicted to that stuff —anything at all it could be: weed, coke, booze, rock. She blamed herself. She had been the one to walk off from other comforts. The only reason she spoke the truth aloud now was because her child was involved. All that was left of the baby was a soft pea-shaped impression dug into the covers of a cot.
    Gilroy wanted to upset her. He had to have the baby to do so. It was his highest card, after his cooking and his strength. They had fought before, though never quite like this. He had a problem—not so much drinking and drugs, but skeletons fiddling keys to the closet. Gilroy wasn’t quite right in the head. No one he introduced her to thought to warn her about it. She came to Singer’s, rebelled too far against her family, fell for too many smiles, and thought marrying a man at the wrong side of the tracks would be okay.
    The little township of Bledsoe, Mississippi—parish, really—took its go-to precinct as the one in Koscuisko, the main town, less than eight thousand posed in Norman Rockwell fashion at any one time. She arrived alone. Two policemen filled a cooled room with her. White folks—with pursed, pinched lips underneath gruff red and brown moustaches and slim, sunburned noses. Pearletta smeared snot onto her wrists. The black officer, a thirtysomething tagged “ Bolden, ” went to find her a box of tissue. The men had seen worse. Much worse on those by the Good Book, helter-skelter, Harley-ridden, Mississippi vestiges of prairie. To all of them and right now, Pearletta Hassle was lucky.
    â€œSo?” an officer tagged “ Hanson” inquired. “You say your husband carried your young son out of your house—”
    â€œMy trailer.”
    â€œYour trailer. He did something with your child, but you don’t know what he did? And, you ain’t seen your baby or husband since early this evening?”
    â€œYes,” Pearletta cried. “That’s what I’m saying.”
    â€œAnd,” the sergeant Nichols said, “you was apparently recovering from a fight with your husband, so you ain’t see and don’t know the whereabouts of your own baby, that you thought was sleeping?”
    â€œYes,” Pearletta responded to the men, looming above her, arms folded. “I still don’t … It took me a minute, a while, to realize my baby was gone. But when I did, I did and, well, I don’t know.”
    A drained and stained coffeepot sat on a rack of papers and folders in the corner, tucked tightly into a baseboard full of dusty neglect, ignored and cold cases run amok. Pearletta wondered why no one had asked her if they should make more coffee. Her reporting all this was nothing like she had expected: no alarms, no big men with guns, no APBs, no FBI. She wondered why she even came. She wished she had one true friend at Singer’s. The Redvine lights were off when her coupe motioned the dust onto their path.
    Officer Bolden returned to the stuffy, hot interrogation room with a floral box of tissues, the hard industrial kind. Pearletta snatched