Wolf Whistle Read Free Page B

nose. She took a bottle of eye wash from her pocket and applied a few drops to each eye.
    There was nothing to say. Alice and the class stood for a while in silence.
    All around the little bedroom, Scotch-taped to the walls, were the Get Well cards that the children had made. The sunny colors, bright fires, the kind sentiments, the bees that sang “buzz buzz” from the yellow petals of crayon flowers.
Get Well Soon, Glenn Gregg.
    After this, everyone moved out of the room, silent, shuffling. No one spoke.
    Then Wanda Gregg, the fifteen-year-old sister, said to Alice, “I’m getting married.”
    They were standing in the bare, poor living room now. Glenn’s breathing was ragged behind them.
    What could anyone say?
    Alice said, “Well, that’s fine. That’s just fine, Wanda.”
    Wanda said, “He advertised for a wife in the personals in the
Memphis Press-Scimitar.”
    Alice said, “Is he—is he older than you?”
    Wanda said, “He’s forty-something. He has a cattle ranch in Missouri. That’s what he says, anyway.”
    Alice said, “These things work out, Wanda. He will love you.”
    Wanda said, “I’d have to go in any case.”
    Alice said, “Oh, Wanda.”
    Wanda said, “Well, thank you for coming to see Glenn. It was nice meeting you.”
    The Greggs stood on the porch and waved.
    The schoolchildren formed their single line behind Alice. They wound through the gravel streets of Balance Due. The bottle trees, the woodsmoke, the boy with a pistol and an apple and the crying girl, the Nazi voodoo woman, Red’s Goodlookin Bar and Gro., and all the rest.
    They did not speak. They did not dance. They made their way back towards Arrow Catcher Elementary School, where they would move through the hours together in safety, in silence, before it was time to go back to their homes.
    It was still early in the day, not quite noon. The rain had started now. Alice thought of Wanda Gregg and the rancher in Missouri who was waiting for her, forty-something. She saw pastures filled with horses, salt licks on fence posts, troughs of water, mangers of dusty oats. A child tied to a dying farmer.
    Dr. Dust was more like fifty-something, and he wasn’t really waiting, he had a wife, and no ranch. He wasn’t even answering his telephone.
    And did it really matter that Santa Claus had restored a mute woman’s voice, and her hope in this world?
    Alice had to get out of Balance Due while it was still safe to move along the roads with these children. They walked quickly, one step at a time, without looking from side to side. Violent men were awake now, cursing whores in the rain-drenched street.

2
    T HE DAY Glenn Gregg’s daddy got back from New Orleans was the same day Lady Sally Anne Montberclair decided to park her big white Cadillac out in front of Red’s Good-lookin Bar and Gro. and leave the motor running and scoot inside, out of the first drops of rain, on an errand. Glenn’s daddy was named Solon.
    Solon was a skinny man, with thin, greasy hair. He had been sleeping in his clothes for six months to protect himself from creatures in his mattress, gabardine pants that were baggy in the butt and a western-style shirt and a bolo tie, brogans on his feet. Solon considered himself a ladies’ man.
    It was early September, still hot as blue blazes in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. Now this rain! The Delta was steaming. The colored school hadn’t even started up yet—the white school started the week before—and so there were kids standing around up on the big front porch of Red’s store, colored children, teasing and messing, all time messing, their parents would say, flirting with each other and playing grab-ass, when Lady Montberclair showed up.
    Bobo, he was the center of attention, always was, fourteen years old, fote-teen he pronounced it, always intosomething, always had him a joke going, a dare,