Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

fishing line she’s swallowed, up through her bowels, up through her intestines’ winding course. Then Paloma drops it in a blue bottle filled with chamba and seals the cork with wax. Picking up the Bible, the old woman sits back in her chair, relaxed, and reads Psalm 51:

“Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

“For thou desirest not sacrifice, else I would give it; thou delightest not in burnt offering.

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.”

“Now I’ve done all I can,” Paloma says. “For the rest, we must wait and see.” She regards her son, speculatively and close, and Jarry nods his thanks.

It’s dusk as he carries Addie out again, dusk as she hears the creaking of the wheels, dusk as he carries her upstairs and tucks her into the fresh linen.

“Thank you, Jarry,” Addie whispers hoarsely as he cups her nape and lifts her up to drink.

He smiles and wipes her forehead with a cloth, then lowers her gently, like a rag doll, to the pillow. And Addie waits now for the coldness in her hands and feet. She waits for her teeth to start to chatter. It’s six o’clock. Now seven comes and goes. It’s a little after eight when Addie falls asleep. And for the first time in weeks, she gets a night’s uninterrupted rest. In the morning, she’s weak, but Addie knows by subtle signs that the sickness has departed. And all of this will quickly come to seem unreal, her conversation with Lucero or Nkuyu something that happened in a dream, when she was talking in her sleep.

THIRTY-SIX

Through the secret garden, where the scent of orange blossoms lingered, he led the children past Aunt Tildy’s headless nymph, her breasts exposed and lovely, though splotched with acid rain. One svelte arm extended, her finger pointed down into the rippling pool that, always emptying, was always full. When Ransom looked, a goldfish whisked its tail, a brilliant flash amidst the waterweeds…. Now the big black brass-knobbed door was parting. Meeting Street and open sky again.

As they emerged, the Charlestonian in black cashmere was hoisting his golf bag into the trunk.

“How’s it going, man?” said Ran, affecting normality, but hurrying the children on and lowering his gaze as they passed by.

The man frowned and made no answer. In the windshield of the parked car they were walking toward, Ran saw him step from behind the Benz, saw him place his hands on his lean hips and stare.

“Love those loafers!” Ransom, at the car, could not resist. There was a tremor in his hand as he unlocked the door, and the sound of the golf bag—the specific clank of graphites landing in the trunk—hit him like the sound of a maul on an iron railroad spike, a rattling chain, a lash, and Ransom dropped the keys.

The carabiner he used for a key ring lodged between two bars of a sewer grate, and as Ran knelt to fish them out, the trickle of bright water running far below the street made him think about Shanté, the summer she came home from Northfield, when they fell in love and made their plan to run away….

Ran was working at the New Jerusalem Church then, making a dollar thirty-five an hour, but Shanté’s cousin, Wallace, said the Killdeer Country Club was where the good, big money was. So one Sunday morning, early, Ran made the trek to the west side. The golf pro, Tommy Janklow, looking sour and hungover in opaque dark glasses, listened to him lie about his previous experience and didn’t really seem to give a shit. He assigned Ran to the first foursome of the day, which, as fate would have it, included Herbert Kincannon, Mel’s personal bête noire and capitalist nemesis. When the owner of Dixie Bag asked for his Big Bertha on the tee at number one, Ran handed him a four wood by mistake, then dropped the bag when Kincannon was in the middle of his swing. It went downhill from there.

Two hours later, as they headed up eighteen, Kincannon’s face had gone pinker than his Izod shirt, a color closer to the medium-rare roast beef the chef was carving in the club upstairs. Big Herbert hadn’t spoken to his caddy for the whole back nine, and Ransom, for his part, looked like he’d been swimming in his clothes. He had open blisters on his heels and a tingling numbness in his shoulder from the bag. Kincannon putted out, then turned and said, in a loud, public voice that made everyone in earshot turn, “What’s your name again?” It was the first time he had asked.

Ransom answered, and Kincannon said, “Your daddy’s Mel Hill, ain’t he?”

The trap was sprung, but Ransom merely blinked a sullen, frightened blink, refusing to step in. Not that it saved him.

“Mel Hill’s a sorry, no-count drunk who couldn’t sew a straight seam with a ruler,” Kincannon said, “and if you live life like you caddy, you’re gonna end up like him, if not worse. Now get your peckerwood ass outta here. I never want to see you at the Killdeer Country Club again. No Hill has business on this side of town. Never did, and never will.”

Then, peeling two damp ones off his pocket roll, he dropped them on the apron of the green and stalked away.

Upstairs at the big plate-glass windows, people coming straight from church to the buffet had gathered two and three deep to watch the goings-on on number eighteen green. Some boy made a catcall; another laughed. An older woman shushed them. Humanity expressed itself across its range, or so it seemed to Ransom Hill that day.

What he remembered later, though, what Ran remembered now, in fact, kneeling on the rusty sewer grate—having temporarily forgotten where he was, what he was doing there, his