Barbara Jean let out a grunt and doubled over like she’d been punched in the stomach. Then she ran from the room. She was up the stairs and back in her bedroom before Clarice or I could get our feet moving. We went up after her when we heard the screaming start again.
Later that night in bed, James and I stared at the ceiling while he explained to me what had happened to Adam. James said Adam had been on his way to Mama’s house when he was hit. He was eight years old and knew that he was supposed to go the long way from his house to get to Grandma Dora’s, but Adam was an adventurous boy. The temptation of taking the shortcut had, apparently, been too great. And the risk of punishment hadn’t stopped him. James said, “I guess we haven’t done a good enough job of making them afraid.”
James said Lester was right about it being Desmond Carlson. There were tracks in the muddy road that led directly from the place where Adam was hit to the unnamed street that wound through the woods and led to a neighborhood of only five houses, one of them Carlson’s place. Desmond, who had been falling-down drunk when the police got to his house, claimed his truck had been stolen the day before and he hadn’t gotten around to reporting it. The truck was nowhere to be found and Desmond’s girlfriend was backing up his story. Even after the police had located the truck later that evening, hidden in the woods less than a mile from his house, its grille streaked with blood, he’d stuck to his tale that he didn’t know a thing about what had happened to little Adam.
Desmond had probably been playing the same game of chicken he had been playing with blacks along Wall Road for years. This time he’d just gotten too close. Or maybe Desmond had simply been so drunk he couldn’t keep his truck in a straight line and it was just horrible luck all the way around. After all, Adam was so fair-skinned that most people seeing him would think he was a tanned white child. The why of it didn’t matter. The result was the same.
“We’ll get him, though,” James said. But he didn’t sound too certain to me.
James was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Adam was lying on his side against a tree. I thought Lester was going to die when he saw him. He made this terrible sound like he couldn’t breathe out, just in. Then he dropped down beside Adam and grabbed ahold of him and just rocked back and forth in the dirt and mud with him.”
“Oh, James,” I said, reaching out to touch my husband’s arm.
“When I finally got him onto his feet, he just stood there wheezing and staring down at Adam. Then he said, ‘Where’s his shoes?’ Over and over, he kept asking where Adam’s shoes were. He wouldn’t leave or let them take Adam away until we found the shoes.
“We poked around, looking in the weeds and underbrush for what seemed like forever, and the whole time Lester’s wailing louder and louder, ‘Where’s his shoes?’
“It was the coroner’s assistant who finally found them. They were twenty feet away at the side of the road, little white sneakers, just sitting there side by side, like they’d been polished and set out for him by his mama. Lord, Odette, I’ve seen some bad things since I’ve had this job, but as long as I live I don’t believe I’ll ever forget watching Lester put those shoes on that poor dead baby’s feet.”
James mumbled, “His face was okay. The back of his head was bashed in and his neck was broken. So was one leg and probably an arm. But his face was okay, so they’ll be able to have an open casket if they want to. That’s something, I guess.”
James and I rolled over toward each other in the bed and we pressed our foreheads together. We both shook with tears of grief over Adam and sorrow for our friends. And we cried with guilty relief that this thing, the monster that all parents fear most, had swiped near to us with its sharp and merciless claws, but had not carried off one of our own babies.
Neither of us got any sleep on the night of that worst day. Both James and I were up and on our feet