dollars. All I have. Come, walk me to the door, Quarter Bottle.’
‘My name is Pynter.’
‘What’s the other one call?’
‘Peter. He your brother too.’
Gideon’s hands were stuffed inside his pockets. Keys jangled.
He pulled them out. ‘How you know dat, uh?’
‘Everybody know dat,’ Pynter told him flatly.
Gideon brought his face down close to Pynter’s. ‘Look here, Half Eights.’
‘Pynter!’
‘Okay, Pinky! Either I lookin at a miracle or you and whatever-his-name-is is the fastest one anybody ever pull on my old man and get away with it. Jeez! And believe me dat is a miracle, cuz he never was nobody fool. I don’ see no part of us in you.’
‘Me neither!’ Pynter said, and he turned to run back in, but Gideon’s hand had closed around his collar. He could have cried out, let his father know, but he didn’t want to. He spun round, stared into the man’s face, putting the weight of all the memories of all the things the women by the river had said behind his words. ‘I don’ like you, Gideon. I never like you since before I born. An’ long as I live, I never goin to like you.’
Gideon stiffened. Pynter thought he was about to hit him. But something in Pynter had changed from the night when Coxy had pinned his back against a tree and looked into his eyes. He would never let a man lay his hands on him again. He closed his fingers around Gideon’s wrist and had twisted his shoulders to sink his teeth into his arm when a voice came suddenly between them, ‘Let the little fella go, Gidiot.’
Gideon stepped back. Pynter turned his head to see a young man leaning against the house. He had both hands in his pockets and his legs were crossed. His eyes were like Miss Elaine’s – large and wide and bright. There was no collar on his white shirt. A small book with a blue cover peeked out of one of his pockets.
‘What the hell you want?’ Gideon squeezed the words out through his teeth.
‘Pick on somebody your size – you flippin thug.’
‘Lissen, Mister Pretty Pants – watch your … ’
The young man’s movement cut Gideon’s words short. He’d pushed himself off the wall so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Pynter felt his heart flip over.
Gideon stepped closer. ‘You try anything, I give what you got coming to you.’
‘Not from you. For sure. And don’t forget, you beating up a child and threatening me in my mother yard.’
The man mumbled something under his breath and turned to leave.
Paso smiled. ‘Say what you thinking, Big Fella.’
‘You and your mother won’ like it.’
Paso curled a beckoning finger at Pynter. ‘Come this side,’ he said. He was looking at Gideon sideways. ‘That’s bad blood there. Sour blood.’
‘At least I’m a man.’
‘You say that again, I make you sorry.’
Their voices had drawn Miss Maddie out onto the porch. Gideon saw her, straightened up and strolled out of the yard.
The youth stared down at Pynter, smiling. ‘First time you meet that dog?’
Pynter nodded.
‘Don’t go near ’im. He’ll bite anything that move. When he come, jus’ give ’im space.’ He stepped back, playfully almost, as if he were dancing. ‘So you my mother brother? I hear a lot ’bout y’all. People round here talk!’ He thumbed his mother’s house. ‘Call me Paso, and you – you Paul – no, Peter. Not so?’
‘I Pynter. Peter home.’
Paso reached for his hand and shook it. ‘So how I must call you – Uncle?’
‘Pynter.’
‘Pynter, okay – nuh, I think I’ll stick with Uncle. It got a certain, uhm, ring, nuh resonance to it. See you around, Big Fella.’
He winked and strolled away. Pynter watched him walk towards the porch, watched him until he stepped behind his mother and seemed miraculously to be swallowed up by her bulk.
Later in the evening, when dusk had just begun to sprinkle the foothills with that creeping ash that would thicken into night, Paso appeared again, this time with Manuel Forsyth’s food. He had changed his trousers but not his shirt.
‘Still there, Uncle?’
Pynter nodded. He’d spent most of the afternoon waiting to catch a glimpse of Paso again.
Paso placed the plate on the step beside his foot. ‘I tell the Madre to put a little extra in for you – not just this time, but every time. You been inside that lil room yet?’
The question caught him unawares. Paso dropped questions the way a person threw a punch when the other was least expecting it.
‘Which room?’ Pynter asked.
‘The dark one.’ He winked.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Find what I find in there?’
Pynter turned his head and shrugged. Paso laughed.
‘Take me a coupla days and a bottle of the Madre cooking oil to grease them hinges. The Old Fella used to keep it locked. He shouldn ha’ tell me not to go in there. S’like an open invitation, s’far as I concern. I leave it open so he could know I was in there. He never close it back.’
‘Where you go to every night-time?’
The smile left his nephew’s face, but only briefly. In less than a heartbeat it returned. ‘Wherever night-time want me. Ever hear this one?
The road is long, the night is deep, I got promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
‘Uncle Michael?’
‘Nuh, Merican fella name Robbie Frost – with all the warmth from me, of course.’
He was fingering the little blue book in his shirt pocket. ‘Know any poetry?’
‘Wozzat?’
‘You serious?’
Pynter nodded.
‘You been reading Mikey’s stuff – and …’ He laughed, looked at Pynter closely and laughed again.
‘Jeezas, man! Moon over your shoulder.’
‘Shadow in me eye,’ Pynter cut in. The words had come almost despite himself.
‘You been reading Mikey stuff and you don’ know what it call? Listen to this …’ His fingers slid the little notebook from his shirt. He held it up before him. The way Missa Geoffrey sometimes held Miss Tilina’s face.
In the morning dark
my people walk to the time of clocks whose hands
have spanned so many nights
His voice was as soft as Missa Geoffrey’s too, and it was as if he were talking to himself from a bellyful of sadness.
Paso stopped, looked up. He didn’t smile. Pynter shifted under his stare and before he lost the courage, before it became impossible to say what had been sitting on his heart from the moment his fingers retrieved that strange little book from his uncle’s grip, he turned up his face at Paso.
‘I wan’ to make wuds like dat too, I want … I …’ Something desperate and quiet fluttered in his heart. He turned his head away.
Paso