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“Your what?”
“My grandmother,” Lupe explained. She pursed her lips. “Jericho… Jer-i-cho…” she said, and he loved the way she made it sound. Like he was someone else. Someone who deserved happiness.
“Follow me.” She took Jericho’s hand and guided him through the parking lot into the flat field behind the motel. Jericho tensed, thinking of the last time he’d gone wandering off from an inn. But he would not allow Sergeant Leonard and his dire warnings to intrude on this moment.
“Hold me right here,” Lupe instructed, moving Jericho’s hand to the middle of her back. She placed her hand on his shoulder. Their other hands were joined in the air. “Now: one, two, three, four,” Lupe intoned, pushing and pulling Jericho into each movement.
The only other time Jericho had danced with a girl, it had been on a disastrous date with Mabel. They’d ended up salvaging the night in the end, but Jericho never felt a spark with Mabel. Not like he had with Evie. And nothing like what he felt standing so close to Guadalupe de la Rosa. He wished he were more graceful and experienced. Mostly, Lupe moved around him, leading him through a series of steps that seemed complicated and confusing. When he got them wrong, which was most of the time, Lupe would break into snorts of laughter. Jericho was not offended. He found it all pretty funny, too.
“Okay, okay. Be serious now,” Lupe said, still fighting the giggles. They resumed their positions. Jericho moved in closer. Lupe raised her chin and looked into his eyes, and all at once and completely, Jericho fell hard for her as they moved seamlessly together, one, two, back and forth and sideways. He even finished by dipping her low, his mouth near her neck. When he lifted her body back to standing, her face was flushed.
“You have that whole room to yourself?” she asked.
“Yes,” Jericho said.
“Seems a lonely shame,” she said and bit her lip.
This time, Jericho led the way.
Jericho had read many books in his eighteen years. Thousands of pages full of words, but none of them were adequate to describe what transpired between Lupe and him in that room with only a golden moon as witness. There was nothing he had ever experienced that could match the profound sympathy of their bodies learning this new dance, nothing that had prepared him for how incredible it was to be that close to another person. If he were doomed to repeat his life endlessly, at least there would always be this moment.
They lay together, his arm around Lupe, her head resting on his chest, which had never felt more human. The sky was brightening toward morning. His right hand tingled, half-asleep. For a moment, the old panic resurfaced. Jericho made a fist, just to be sure, and sighed in relief when it was easy to do.
As easy as falling in love with Guadalupe de la Rosa.
Everywhere they traveled, the ghosts followed. After the music and the dancing, when folks let down their guard, it was the ghosts they wanted to talk about. Sometimes, when they went out back to pee in a field behind the dance halls, lodges, and nightclubs, the spaces they’d had to carve out for themselves on the edges of white towns, they got a shiver up the neck and a need to race back toward the lights of those clubs, to the sweat of the dance, to the human press of communion. Sometimes they spoke of things glimpsed from a bus window late at night when most everyone else was sleeping and it felt as if the country’s loneliness had crawled out of its graves to stand along the split-rail fences and beside the red barns and Burma-Shave signs, on the high ridges of desert canyons and Civil War battlefields, out where the buffalo had once been plentiful. Ghosts? They saw these winking reminders and quickly told themselves they had not. They did not want to believe in ghosts.
“I’ve got a ghost story for you—it really happened to my sister,” Babe said as the Ford rolled into another night on its way to the next town. “My people are from South Carolina. That’s where my sister, Doreen, lives, and all my cousins, too. Doreen’s a nurse. She went to deliver a baby out near Pickens. A fine boy,” Babe said.
Alma wrinkled her nose. “Pickens! What kind of a name is that?”
“Shh, Alma, let her tell it,” Emmaline chided.
“It is a funny name,” Alma whispered to Ling, and held her fingers where no one could see, like a secret they shared.
“He took his sweet time coming, though. Doreen had to drive back home in the dark. She said her little headlamps were the only light, and she couldn’t see farther than the little bit of road in front of her. All of a sudden, those headlamps fell on a white lady waiting by the shoulder with her suitcase. She was dressed real nice, and Doreen stopped and asked her what she was doing out there in the dark—she was likely to get run over! Well, the lady said her name was Reecie Cowan and she was going to Spartanburg and would be much obliged for the ride. They rode together for a few miles. Doreen asked the lady all about herself. She said Reecie told her she was going to Spartanburg to meet her fiancé, who’d run off after getting her in the family way. His name was Milton Swinton, and after she’d threatened to report him for desertion, he told her to meet him at the Calvary Baptist Church outside town and they’d get married there. Doreen figured that was why she was dressed so nice. Sure enough, about a mile from town, they were coming up on Calvary. The lady started acting st
range. ‘This is where it happened,’ she told Doreen. ‘Where what happened?’ Doreen said. ‘This is where Milton Swinton bashed my brains in,’ the lady told Doreen. And then, right in front of Doreen’s eyes, Reecie started to bleed from her head. Blood pouring down all over her pretty dress. ‘I’m dead. I keep forgetting as long as there’s no justice.’”
Two seats up, Lupe jumped at this and Jericho put an arm around her shoulder, holding her close. She gazed up at him, happy, and Ling looked away, embarrassed.
“My sister stopped that car on a dime and got out, screaming. She said she looked over and Reecie was on the side of the road again with her suitcase. The blood was drying up, pulling up into the air like rain in reverse. ‘Tell the police to look for my locket. He kept it. And don’t pick up anybody else on this road,’ Reecie told her. ‘It won’t be safe after I’m gone. There’s bad ghosts these days. Ghosts that belong to the man in the hat.’”
“What did she mean by that?” Sally Mae asked. She’d been resting her eyes, not really interested till now.
“Beats me. Doreen didn’t know, either.”
Alma squeezed Ling’s hand, and Ling nodded without looking. Up front, Jericho leaned forward, suddenly tense. Say something, Ling thought. Say something, Ling. But then Eloise was asking what happened next and Babe was talking again.
“Then? Then Reecie Cowan disappeared.” Babe snapped her fingers. “Well, Doreen liked to nearly die from fright. She hopped back in that car quick and drove with her hands so tight on that wheel and didn’t stop till she got to Spartanburg! The next day, she asked around and heard that there’d been a girl named Reecie Cowan found out on the road near Calvary Baptist Church. She’d been murdered, her skull bashed in with a rock. They never found her murderer. She’d been dead eight years. Doreen told them she thought it was Milton Swinton who’d done it, but Milton Swinton was friends with the mayor. He was married to a Lassiter girl, who came from money. He said he didn’t do it, and they believed him, and Doreen said she felt so bad for Reecie, wandering that road, just waiting for justice.”
“When did this happen?” Ling asked.
“She told me this story about two years ago October, and it had happened the spring before.”
“That’s a long time. It’s been going on a lot longer than we thought,” Ling said.
Lupe turned around to look at Ling. “Dios mío, Mary!” she laughed. “You sound as creepy as that ghost lady.”
