The Gone Dead by Chanelle Benz

Author:Chanelle Benz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2019-06-24T23:00:00+00:00

Billie

THERE ARE HIGH HEELS IN HER SUITCASE. AS IF SHE EVER WEARS them in Philly let alone out here in the Delta where she knows next to nobody. Her mother rarely wore makeup. Pia was compact, unapologetic. She walked and biked, wasn’t one to show a lot of skin. Angry when someone was surprised that Billie was her daughter. The double take at Pia’s blond hair, the long, slightly openmouthed stare at Billie’s skin: the You’re her mother? But Billie always knew they looked alike.

There is a knock at the door. Rufus looks over to where she sits on the mattress, still picking at one last nugget of possibly infected gravel in her hand. He trots into the living room, barking. Through the bedroom window she sees her uncle.

She runs to the door and, holding Rufus back by the collar, opens it. “Where have you been? I must’ve called you a hundred times—why haven’t you called me back? Rufus, hush.” She lets go of him so that he can sniff her uncle.

“That’s why I come by.” Her uncle looks like he has just woken up or never been to sleep.

“I got the police report,” she says.

He stares at her. “Why you do that? Why you want to go opening up old wounds?”

“I wanted to know what happened.”

He leans his shoulder against the screen door. “Nobody know what happened. It wasn’t ever investigated right. To the police it was just another black man who’s dead.”

“And so Mr. McGee, Jim McGee, was he one of the officers?”

A sigh passes through him. “He didn’t find my brother, but he was one of the ones there.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Ain’t unusual. Greendale is a small town. We all wrapped up in each other’s business. I knew the undertaker too. The way I see it, I ain’t know what happened now or then. But I’m at peace with it.” With his red eyes and drawn face, he doesn’t look like somebody at peace.

“What did Grandmomma Ruby think?”

“That she didn’t want more trouble.” He turns and walks down the porch. She steps out and pushes Rufus back in. The birds are shouting, ignoring the impending rain.

“But it was her son,” says Billie. “Didn’t she want to make sure it was an accident?”

Her uncle lights a cigarette. “You have to understand that back then you couldn’t look whites in the eye, couldn’t go through the front door, had to say yes Sir, yes Ma’am, and they call you boy no matter how old you were. When you pay for something at their store you had to put your money on the counter so your skin didn’t touch theirs. Anything could be done to you for looking at a white man in the wrong way. Anything. She seen it done to folks she knew. There’s no use being angry at her. You don’t know what it was to live your days like that.”

“But this happened in 1972.”

He throws his hands up. “Greendale was segregated all the way up till ’72! Till then there was nowhere in this town for a black person to eat.

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