Blackbird by Tom Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

true?’
    ‘That God made us? I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe just the good stuff.’
    ‘Do you hate black people? Or poor people?’
    ‘No, why would I?’
    ‘I thought I was supposed to be mad at the rich white people down here. I thought there was some kind of conspiracy or something, and everybody was in on it. It was like, here are the good guys and there are the bad guys over there, and you can tell the bad guys because they’re white and they have growly teeth.’
    ‘You’ve met a lot of people around here,’ I said. ‘What do you think now?’
    She shook back her hair. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘All I can say, I haven’t met any bad guys yet.’
    Now Max said, ‘Was that not your last ride with her?’
    At first I couldn’t speak.
    ‘Jim, are you still there?’
    ‘Yeah, I’m here.’
    ‘Wasn’t that your last ride with Kat?’
    Finally I said, ‘You know it was.’
    ‘And you’re telling me all that was then, and this is now?’

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    FIVE
    I finally got around to Jonas an hour or so after I got back to what used to be home, the three-bedroom on Lanshire where I slept at night and where the emptiness was like an icicle through the heart. On the way, thinking maybe I needed a sugar and caffeine hit, I had stopped for a cappuccino at Starbucks, but ended up grinding my teeth and throwing it savagely at the ArkLaTex Realty sign in the front yard as I crossed the drive toward the door. Just the thing to show the neighbours what a stable guy I was. Then for my self-imposed act of contrition I walked humbly over and retrieved the cup, thinking, for no reason I recognised at the moment, of Father Joe – José Carbajal, senior pastor at Sacred Heart downtown – gone now but bright in memory.
    Father Joe walking into the fellowship hall, finished with confessions for now and carrying another six-gallon bucket of pancake flour to the kitchen, setting it on the end of the counter and lighting a small cigar. It was a freezing Saturday morning toward the end of my first year in Traverton, and I was standing elbow to elbow with Jonas McCashion, flipping all-you-can-eat pancakes for the Kids’ Roundup Ranch in Bowie County.
    ‘I thought this place was smoke-free,’ said Jonas.
    ‘ Que es peor que la que ,’ the priest said, rolling up his sleeves, the cigar cocked at an obstinate angle in his teeth. ‘ Es de la reserva privada de Fidel .’ He grabbed a spatula. ‘Let’s feed these paganos hambre .’
    Jonas and I went back to our conversation about women, snow geese and incoherent Texas governors, already on our way to becoming good friends. I was what he called dis-mated, a circumstance he was unwilling to let stand. He introduced me to a former neighbour of his, a ceramic artist named Jana Stiles, and his instincts turned out to be dead-on.
    Because without Jana I’d have had no story that could be whole. I still saw and smelled and felt the exact moment when it began for me: the CCR concert in Baton Rouge – our third date – midnight, cigarette lighters held high all around us in the dark, Fogerty and his latest line-up doing a long, sweet reprise of ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain?’ and Jana, deep inside the music, swaying against me, leaning over and taking the lobe of my ear lightly in her teeth, growling softly.
    When I lost her it was for reasons I should have understood then but didn’t even now, a fact that joined forces with many others to make me wonder how the hell there could be enough room in the known universe to accommodate all the things I didn’t understand.
    One thing I did get was that most of the women I’d loved had been John Fogerty fans, and I remembered him from about as far back as he went. When it came to dancing Rachel had been more country-western than anything else, but couldn’t get enough of Fogerty’s early stuff, like the Blue Velvets version of ‘Have You Ever Been Lonely?’.
    In fact, that was what had been