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Chapter One
In the starlight, Gracie wonders when her life will begin. Because it hasn't yet, there's nothing to do but stare at her reflection, superimposed over her big brother's, in the glass. Benny is on his bed listening to "Telstar."
"It's named after a satellite," he tells Gracie.
She turns, closes the French doors.
"What is?"
"The song," he says.
Gracie looks at his clock radio. They're listening to WSGN. She hangs on every word he says. Since he's turned seventeen, he's let her back in his life. He wants to educate her. "The album cover has a flying saucer," he tells her.
She nods. She has no idea what he's talking about.
Benny is short and muscular like Pete, his father. He has his mother's skin.
The family runs a hotel in Birmingham. The hotel's eight rooms are full this evening. Gracie knows something is going to happen because of all the journalists from up North. Mr. Connor has been eating lunch in the café every day, bent over in conversation with their father.
Gracie sits on the edge of Benny's bed.
From his window, she can see the minarets of the terminal and a half-moon. Benny gets up on an elbow. "Telstar," he says once more, glancing over at Gracie. She watches him blow a smoke ring.
There are some things she'd like to tell Benny, like how she can't play tackle football anymore because when the boys tackle her, they straddle her, put their weight on her chest, and it makes her want to do something she can't even name. She knows he has the answers. But Benny's getting up, shooing her on. It's time for him to cruise the underside of the viaduct--blast furnaces, train yards, Negroes.
"What's going to happen?" she asks him.
He lights another cigaret. He is a mechanic at the Sinclair station. His work shirt bears the green dinosaur logo. A shark's tooth hangs from a lanyard around his neck.
"Who knows," he says.
"I mean with Mr. Connor."
"Nothing."
Gracie jingles her charm bracelet. It's new. Tiny silver items dangle from it--ballet slipper, snowflake, typewriter--that have nothing to do with Gracie's life.
"Bye, now," he says, slapping her butt with a magazine.
It is a tradition that Benny and Gracie rise at dawn's light to fix Mother's Day breakfast. The hotel café is a fine place: black-and-white tile floor, ceiling fan, drugstore soda fountain stools, yet with the ambience of a rural kitchen. A big black pot of blackeyed peas that's soaked overnight, a dusty icebox. They are at the grill, cracking eggs into a blue bowl. "Get the toast," he tells her, a cigaret dangling from his lips.
Gracie reaches for the bread near the soda fountains.
"Here," he says, handing her the butter.
She pops a few slices into the toaster and hears water running in a few rooms overhead. "Shit," Benny says. The journalists are up. Dinah's Mother's Day breakfast will be a public event. She waits for Benny's cue. "Let's take it to her in bed," he says.
"What about the guests?"
"Make some coffee," he tells her.
"What'll we feed the reporters?"
"Donuts. They won't be hungry." Benny wipes a hand on his madras shirt. The colors bleed when you wash it, he says. Gracie has watched Dinah toss it into the washing machine, pull it out thirty minutes later, and toss her head back, laughing at the lack of color change. "There's no magic in this world, baby," she tells Gracie.
They never get close to serving Dinah breakfast in bed.
At seven sharp, Mr. Connor drives up in front of the hotel, parking on the yellow line. He jumps from the city car, tossing his cigar into a sewer. He draws in his pudgy self and peers in at Gracie.
"Open?" he mouths.
Benny goes to the door and lets him in.
Connor has been eating meals with them for years. He has a glass eye. It's from a playtime accident. As a kid, he'd been peering into a fence hole when a friend shot an air rifle through the other side. Gracie has never laid eyes on his wife, and there is a big rumor that his daughter is in Washington and may go to work for John F. Kennedy.
Benny shakes his hand, and Mr. Connor asks him what's up. "They're upstairs," Benny says, meaning the journalists. Mr. Connor is always searching for Northerners, like an exterminator on the lookout for pests.
Gracie keeps spreading butter for toast.
"Morning, Gracie," he says to her.
She smiles.
"Making breakfast for Mother?" he asks. He always knows everything. Gracie watches his glass eye, the color of a robin's egg.
As if summoned, her parents come down the spiral stairs into the café. Dinah wanders in like a dark Gypsy, wearing anklets. Pete's got on a work shirt and baseball cap. "Sit down," Benny instructs, and leads Dinah to a table.
They keep on cooking until they've set a feast of eggs, grits, bacon, toast, and jelly in front of Pete, Dinah, and Mr. Connor, who's taken it upon himself to join them. In time, the journalists arrive from upstairs, smelling like Jade East and wearing dog chains of credentials. They swarm Mr. Connor, flipping tiny spiral notebooks and asking questions like what he is going to do to prevent violence and whether or not he's heard the news from Anniston and if he wants to make any statements to the press concerning his lack of response.
Dinah smiles warmly at the yolks of her eggs. "How sweet of my children," she says, glancing up at the journalists. "It's Mother's Day," she reminds them. Her legs are crossed under the table. Beside her is the New English translation of the Bible. Gracie knows she's going to read scripture because she always does on Sundays. Opening to Genesis, she reads how God called the light day and the darkness night; the dry land, earth; the wet, sea. She reads of all the fruit, seasons, gardens, how God broke it to the woman that she'd have sorrow and pain in childbirth, but Adam called her Eve anyhow, because she was the mother of all living. The hushed reporters grow more uneasy by the minute. Pete adjusts his baseball cap, straddles his chair for a good view of the impending theater.
Mr. Connor walks behind the counter for a glass of ice water.
"How many of you got mamas living?" he asks the room. He's tossed his herringbone hat aside; his fat chest bulges over red suspenders.
They just stare at him.
"Well?" he presses, taking a long drink of water.
"How many police on duty today, sir?" a reporter asks.
"That woman's handled snakes," Connor replies, gesturing to Dinah. The journalists look over at her. Dinah smiles, shrugs, puts grape jelly on her toast.
Gracie thinks they are trying to avoid staring at Dinah. But they'll carry this image with them all day, this Slavic-style Southern woman holding a serpent, her palms sweating against its skin. Connor knows this, too, and isn't going to let the idea die quickly. "Ain't that right, Pete?" he asks. "Didn't she pick up a canebrake rattlesnake the day you met her? In church , boy," Mr. Connor goes on, sticking an accusatory finger in the reporter's face.
Pete's legs vibrate under the table.
Dinah's colorful bracelets dangle, barely missing her grits. Over the years, she's developed a kind of tic in her right eye that causes her to have a perpetually raised eyebrow.
"We forgot to pray, Gracie," she whispers. "Oh, what the hell," she concludes brightly and stares at the reporter beside Connor.
"You all got your little rosebuds?" Connor asks the reporters. He's still behind the soda fountain. He sets saucers and cups on the countertop, as if he is running the café. "Yeah," he chuckles, "got to wear your little rosebuds to church, red if your mama's living, white if she's passed. We all do this here. You do it there?" he asks the reporter nearest him.
The reporter--he is gangly, arms like a marionette--just grins.
"Where do you go to church?" he asks Connor.
"You ever played sports?" Connor counters.
"Baseball," the journalist tells him.
"Could have guessed. Pete over there plays for his company team. Down here where people work for a living, we have what you call a company family. Men play ball, wives play bridge. I used to call the Barons' games. You know," he points his cigar at the reporter, "who the Birmingham Barons are. Guess the baseball matinees were before your time, though. We'd call the games from a studio, using telegraph wires."
"You used to work as a telegrapher," the reporter affirms.
"Boy's done his homework," Connor says to Benny, who's moved to the jukebox. He's selected Patsy Cline, "I Fall to Pieces."
Gracie likes the song. It makes her know that love's got a side to it.
"Yeah," Connor says, spitting cigar smoke in three quick gusts. "I'd get it all from ticker tape, then just make up the rest. That's why they call me Bull. I'm a real good bullshitter, can you tell?" he asks and gets a pitcher of fresh cream from the icebox.
He's really on today, Gracie thinks.
Dinah rises. Gracie watches the men watch her.
She goes to the window. The hotel is near the train station, which is made of light buff brick, with terra-cotta roof tiles, its dome flanked by minarets. A sign over the west portal of the underpass reads Birmingham the Magic City. She stares at the yellow apron of steam heralding the arrival of the Crescent, en route from New Orleans to Atlanta.
"So why don't you people ever write anything true?" Connor concludes.
"You intend to keep the riders safe, then?" The reporter is leaning over the counter. Connor is toying with Dinah's trivet, hot pads, biscuit cutter. "What's your story for today, son?" he asks.
The reporter doesn't look up.
"You people write what's going to happen before it happens, don't you? Then you fiddle with facts after the fact, to make it look right." Connor keeps up a running monologue. Gracie learns what she already knows, for the most part: that students are coming in on a bus, that Mr. Connor "feels sorry for their mamas on Mother's Day," that he wants these journalists to understand that all this started with the steel industry, too many industrialists and loan sharks, that this is a blue-collar city built on fire, nails, and guts, that the workingman has suffered at the hands of Northern opportunists.
"This siege mentality is precisely what is destroying the city's reputation in the press," one of the reporters says. Connor walks from behind the counter and puts his cigar in the guy's face. "That's cute," he says. The reporters hardly get a chance to smoke. They flip page after notebook page, aghast with the wonder of it all, having Mr. Connor come to their hotel in this way, having him come to them . The truth of the matter, Gracie knows, is that he hates the media, yet he can't resist them.
"You got people at Greyhound and Trailways, sir?"
"This Birmingham of ours is a lovely place. It is a city where fear does not abide. Did you see Mr. Salisbury's article? What he reported, we all should know, is in substance untrue," Connor says and stares at his chubby fingers, white as bread dough.
"I don't work for that newspaper," the reporter says.
"Which newspaper do you work for?"
The reporter doesn't reply.
"You from New York?"
"Are your officers in place to protect the citizens?"
"Is your mama alive?"
"How big is the PD here, anyhow?"
"Mine died when I was a little boy."
"Have you been to City Hall this morning?"
"I've been up all night, boy," Connor says. His double chin is trembling. Gracie loves this part of an interview, and she's seen plenty at the café. This is the part where Mr. Connor is going to split open--either in fire or surrender.
"What's the story?" the marionettelike reporter asks him. "What's the story here, Mr. Connor?" The others draw in, hounds at the neck of trapped prey.
"That's not my job."
"I think you understand what we're asking," the reporter presses.
"No, son, I don't."
"Klan active in Birmingham?" the mustache guy asks.
"Sure is," Connor replies, drawing on his cigar.
"You know men in Klavern 13?"
"Go on now, boys," Mr. Connor urges, waving them toward the door. "Get your little Brownie cameras and walk on over to the bus station so you can see your comrades pull in," he says, his face darkening like a bruise.
"What time are they coming?" the marionette asks.
"My mother's name was Molly," Connor spits. "She died when I was eight. She caught pneumonia right after my baby brother was born. I hardly remember her, but I tell you, my mother was a saint."
"They all are," Dinah chimes in. She's gotten a broom from the pantry and is sweeping the black-and-white tile floor. The reporters' heads turn in unison, like puppets. "Mine was a prostitute," she says with a sigh. Pete, wearing his baseball cap backwards and washing plates at the sink, glances at Gracie in the mirror.
Benny, bent over the jukebox, grins.
"Is it true that you were once arrested for violating a city ordinance concerning sexual conduct?" the reporter with a mustache asks Connor.
Mr. Connor picks up his cigar. For a fleeting instant he glances over to Gracie, to see if the word sexual has registered. It has. She tucks it away, to check out later with Benny.
"Is this your story, son?" Mr. Connor asks the reporter.
"He was making it with a woman in the hotel," Benny tells her later. They are taking a walk in the park. The city is dark from steel-mill smoke. They walk by the war memorial obelisk and the bronze soldier running with a bayonet.
Making it. She's not heard it put this way, but she likes it. It contains a clue. It puts it in the realm of pottery, finger painting, or baking--sex is something you shape with hands.
"What hotel?" she asks.
Imbecile, Benny's face says. " Our hotel, Gracie. You know, the place where we live, sweetheart?"
She is wearing coral pedal pushers that have gotten short on her. They rub her kneecaps. She is growing tall. Boys like long legs, Benny has told her as part of her education.
Benny explains that Mr. Connor had been caught in a room with his secretary and forced out of office ten years ago. Gracie asks him how he knows this, and he says that everybody knows it. He tells her there is a city ordinance that makes it against the law for a man to be in a hotel room with somebody other than whom they are married to. "Especially this hotel," he goes on, kicking leaves with his penny loafers.
She looks up at him.
"You know," he says and tosses a cigaret butt into a dogwood tree.
She shakes her head.
" Grandmother's hotel."
She can't grasp it all yet--that the hotel was once a whorehouse--but it holds a certain charm. Gracie knows that her mother has known Mr. Connor all her life, that he'd been a regular at the hotel during the 1930s--before Dinah's mother was killed and Dinah moved up to the chicken farm to live with the preacher. She knows her mother can't kick Connor out of their lives. He talks to her about the old days, her mother, how men hungry for a girl sat smoking into newspapers.
"How do you know if you're in love?" she asks Benny.
"It gets in your hair, Gracie," he tells her, running a finger in her bangs. "In your eyes." He looks at his watch. "Almost time," he says, speaking of the arrival of the students. They leave the park shortly after three. The last thing Pete said to them was to stay away from the bus station. Benny leads Gracie to the bus station's back side. It is dark, with the stench of garbage, liquor, exhaust. They sit on a ledge, and Gracie rests her chin on a rusty old retainer rail. Her legs are dangling, the coral pedal pushers coming up over her bony kneecaps. She looks at her reflection in the bus terminal window. Her bangs are brown, cut straight. She likes to think of herself as Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird . It makes her think she's a boy.
Benny holds a Marlboro like an old ranch hand, telling her this and that. "No police, Gracie. You see, there is not a soul. Right? This is calculated. Mr. Connor is the big director. Cops and robbers. We're the bad guys, hon, but don't let that bother you. Mom and Dad are mere spectators. We just run a business." He stops occasionally for a drag of his cigaret, puffing it like those fake five-and-dime cigarets made of sugar that disperse clouds of baking powder if you blow. "We're in the audience," he goes on. "Birmingham is under a microscope. This is Golgotha. All of life is a stage."
Benny likes drama.
In the distance, a drove of reporters are coming up the street, carrying cameras. Gracie's heart starts going. She looks right in Benny's emerald eyes.
"What's going to happen?" she asks him.
Mosquitoes and gnats are starting to bite. It's hot. Gracie feels that she has spent the past few years on the edge, waiting for something to happen. It took a lifetime for Alan Shepard's rocket to go up. All those T-minus-so-many minutes and counting. It took an eternity for Kennedy to be elected. And now she is sitting here, on Mother's Day, waiting for a bus to arrive.
It's coming down Fourth Avenue. It stops for a traffic light, and Benny tosses his cigaret into a cylinder barrel. "Get up," he says.
There is an S&H Green Stamp logo on the side of the bus.
It says Trailways in big red letters.
It squeals and lumbers into its stall. Benny crawls over the rail. The bus door swings open. Several white men step down to the landing, where they stand in a cluster, hands jammed into trouser pockets, as if surveying the place for a way to escape. They look, to Gracie, the way people look when they wake up confused, at midnight, to the sound of a dog barking or a phone ringing. "They're normal people," Benny tells her. She looks at him. " What? " she whispers. "They're innocent," he goes on, leaning over the railing. Gracie stares at them. She can't get a handle on any of this. They disappear down the dark corridor that branches into white and colored waiting rooms. The hall is crowded with men who wear T-shirts and have an unshaven look as if they've just left a ratty old sofa bed and a case of beer. "The Klan," Benny whispers. Gracie's heard the word, but it means nothing to her. The riders make their way along the corridor. Others emerge from the bus door. One of them has blood caked on his face. Gracie feels sick. "Let's go home," she says to Benny.
A few colored men step off to the landing. A white man and a colored man walk side by side, the colored man reaching over to hand the white man--who's got a bloody nose--a handkerchief. "He hit him!" somebody shouts from the corridor. The white man says, "Don't hurt him. He didn't do anything." Gracie peers down the corridor. Somebody shoves the colored man into the colored waiting room. Gracie thinks of Loveman's, where she shops with her mother. She thinks of the signs over the water fountains. She thinks of bathrooms, cafés, hospital nurseries, white churches, where everybody sits still, colored churches, where they sway. The colored man who's been tossed into the colored waiting room is nowhere to be seen. "Let's go home, Benny," she says. But Benny is running to the other side of the station. The streets are empty except for a vehicle marked WAPI NEWS. A man with a club is chasing a broadcast journalist. The man rips the newsman's microphone apart, and Gracie starts to cry. The newsman flees. Gracie keeps thinking a policeman is going to break it all up, but there isn't one in sight.
Benny is inside the terminal. She follows him. Suddenly, it is as if somebody has blown a whistle, unleashing a drove of ballplayers or a stampede of bison. Papers fly in all directions. In the colored waiting room, the bus rider is being thrown up against a concrete wall again and again, like he's a dummy, like he's a sack of potatoes. "Benny!" she shouts, even though she's right beside him. She backs up to a peanut machine. The glass has been broken, and peanuts are all over the floor. She pulls Benny's jacket. "I'm going," she tells him, but she's afraid to leave his side. Now there's a white man helping the colored man up from the floor, but it's only to situate him at the right angle for another pelting. The colored man and the white man who had the bloody nose are side by side once more. "They're friends!" she shouts to Benny, and she doesn't know why she's said it, what it matters. She's light-headed now, like she is in her dreams when she's able to fly. The room is bright. It's like looking into the lights at a football stadium during a winning score. She can't understand why they're beating the white man. She's never witnessed a real fight, never heard the cracking of fists on a rib cage. Skin on skin is the only noise--like a scrimmage practice--and that's what makes it so frightening. When the screams finally begin, it is a relief.
"It started on the bus!" a woman shouts.
"Kill the Negro," somebody behind her calls. Gracie turns. Benny grabs her arm, jerking her up against a Coke machine. "Get on the floor," he whispers, then sits on her. She can see the corridor where the rest of the bus riders have come in. Gracie spots a man holding a newspaper up to his face. She can see where he's punched a hole in it, so he can witness what's happening without getting noticed and beaten up. If you're not a witness, you're not dangerous. She closes her eyes for a moment, hoping nobody will see her watching, but she can't stand the darkness. She squints, the way you do when you're trying to trick your mother into believing you're asleep. The colored man is crawling like a worm, slithering in between the legs of the people who're beating him, struggling for a door. A man comes out of the bathroom. He is instantly slugged. Gracie sees him on the floor, still, like he's dead. A white man is being beaten with what looks like a giant ring of keys. A photographer snaps a shot and is instantly tackled and pummeled. He wrestles to get the film from his camera before the men start to jerk the case, strangling him. Some men are knocked into a stack of boxes, and they all domino-fall over the cigaret-ridden floor of the terminal. Gracie will never ride a bus as long as she lives. She'll never come here again. She's starting to pray now. It's a typical prayer that makes her feel like trash, a please-get-me-out-of-here-and-I'll-never-do-anything-wrong-again kind of prayer. An I'll-be-a-missionary-and-marry-a-preacher-and-take-care-of-orphans kind of prayer. Benny's heavy, but she's glad he's on her. They'll have to shoot all the way through his body to get to hers. There is no gunfire, but Gracie thinks there is. She thinks there are guns and knives and ice picks. Out the window, she sees that the WAPI News car has been bricked. The sight of broken glass makes her think she might vomit. She hates broken glass. Broken glass is worse than anything she can imagine. It makes her think of broken skin, blood, trails of it. She keeps a steady watch on Benny's face. He looks like he's watching something interesting but distant. It keeps her going, how calm he is.
When the police finally arrive, carrying clubs, it is too late. The attack has lasted only a matter of minutes, but it has been instant, brutal, decisive. People are on the floor, on benches, huddled in corners, crying and bleeding. Benny helps Gracie up, and they tiptoe to the door.
That's when they see the girl, standing by the restroom door. One of the reporters from the hotel is interviewing her, reassuring her, holding a handkerchief to her bloody lip. Gracie remembers having seen her with the other riders--the tiny frame, dark pants, and boots.
"Take her to your mother," he tells Benny.
They jump in a taxi.
"Crescent Hotel," Benny instructs.
The cab driver's face is alert, on edge. The three of them--Benny, Gracie, the girl--ride cramped in the backseat. The rider's hands go to her face. "Where are we?" she asks Benny.
"Birmingham," he tells her.
Gracie stares at the floorboard--her own Keds, Benny's loafers, the rider's boots. The cab driver pulls up in front of the hotel. Before Benny can pay, the rider has reached into her back pocket--like a boy--for her wallet. She hands the driver a five.
Inside, Dinah is listening to a transistor radio at her big cherry desk in the foyer. News has traveled fast. She scolds Benny for being at the bus station, grabs Gracie like she is a stray dog who's been hit by a car.
Then she stares at the girl. She just says, "Get the Merthiolate and an ice pack, Benny," once she notices the bloody lip.
"What's your name, baby?" she asks. Gracie studies the girl. She almost looks colored. It's the kind of look you can't stop looking at, like, is she or isn't she? Her blond curls are like Shirley Temple's, yet she is dark.
"Your name, baby?" Dinah repeats.
"Angel."
Dinah glances up, takes that in.
"Come on in here," she says, leading Angel to the parlor. Dinah draws the velvet curtains and sits on the hearth, surveying the cut lip. When Benny brings the Merthiolate, Dinah paints her lip with the red stick. The ceiling fan makes havoc of Angel's hair. Dinah holds a dishcloth of ice to Angel's lip. She tells Benny to call his grandfather on Brindley Mountain, to have him start praying for "this madhouse city." She lectures Angel about everything from chicken farming to local theater. She asks, "Do you hurt anywhere?"
Gracie doesn't know, at the time, what a complicated question this is.
Gracie is in Benny's room watching him stand at the antique mirror over his chest of drawers, combing his sand-colored hair. He's getting ready to go out. Dinah has put the freedom rider in Gracie's room for the night.
"Where's my leather jacket?" he asks. Gracie dissects the bedside pile of dirty laundry.
"Here," she tells him, retrieving it, but she doesn't give it to him.
"What's wrong?" he asks, taking the jacket from her hands.
"Is she colored, Benny?"
"What the hell, Gracie. What does it matter?"
"She has that half-breed kind of look," Gracie says.
Benny zips the jacket halfway up. "Don't talk like that," he says to her. "You sound like Connor." He gets his cigarets and opens the door.
The hall is quiet. The reporters aren't back yet from gathering the city's trash. This is the family suite, a cranny of balconied rooms. A broken, old-fashioned cuckoo clock stands up against the wall beside Gracie's door.
Gracie knocks but doesn't wait for an answer. Angel is holding a blanket to her bare chest. "Oh, hi. There was blood on my shirt."
Her legs are crossed. She jerks a T-shirt from her backpack and pulls it over. Her chest is like a boy's, flat. Benny is in the hall, lighting a cigaret. "You can come in, too," Angel calls to him.
"You all right now?" Gracie asks her.
She shrugs, crams her bloody shirt into her knapsack.
"We can wash that," Gracie reminds her.
Gracie looks back at Benny in the hall. She gestures to him and he comes in. He sits at Gracie's desk. Angel's hands fly to her light curls. "I must look awful," she says.
"What're you doing here?" Benny asks, studying her with a journalist's cryptic eye.
"I'm a part of the CORE riders."
Benny looks at her. He doesn't know what that means.
"I'm sorry to intrude," Angel says, tosses her knapsack aside, then begins unfastening her boots. Her arms are compact. Horsewoman is Gracie's idea of her.
Gracie is taken with her--the way she stares right at her with ravaging hazel eyes and plum lips. "My father is Mexican," she says, as if reading Gracie's mind.
"Mine's from north Alabama," Gracie tells her.
Gracie wants to ask her a hundred questions. Who is she, why did she ride the bus, where is home? "Maybe you better phone home," she suggests, staring at Angel's cut lip.
"Birmingham," Angel says. "I mean, I can't believe this is happening to me. It's like the end of the world; it's like Cape Town or New Guinea or the Yucatan." Gracie looks at Angel's hands. They're dark, tiny. Her socks have a jungle print. Gracie stares at Angel's legs, snug in jeans, wanting to ask, what do you want to be when you grow up?
"Have you been to the Yucatan?" Benny asks her.
"No. My mother is an anthropologist," she says and shakes loose a cigaret from her pack of Kools. "She wanted me to do this, to come here. Well, not necessarily here, but she did want me to do it."
"Do what?" Gracie asks and watches Angel blow the match.
"Ride the bus."
The train from Atlanta pulls into the terminal, throwing an exhausted noise all over the place, a flash of light. Gracie has never felt this way about a stranger. She is scared, scared of all that she's seen, scared of staying in the hotel, of what might happen next, scared of the city on the other side of her windowpane. Most of all she's scared of Angel.
"They told us we'd never make it through Birmingham. They were right," she says. She's got a raspy twang in her words. Benny gazes at her. Gracie tries to get behind his eyes to see her flat chest, tiny hands, and big eyes as he does. "They burned a bus in Anniston, before the one I was on."
Benny doesn't say anything.
"You want to call home?" Gracie asks again.
"No."
"I wonder where the others are," Benny says.
"The only reason I'm here is because I'm a girl," Angel says. "They would have never asked you to bring me here if I was a boy. They would have taken me to jail with the others. Why's Bull Connor's car here?"
Gracie glances to the window. The viaduct's underside is orange. The blast furnaces are in operation.
"Who was the man who asked you guys to bring me here?" Angel asks.
"Journalist," Benny tells her.
"He's staying here?"
"They all stay here."
"Where am I?" Angel asks, touching her cut lip.
"Birmingham," Benny reminds her.
"But what is this place?" she insists, speaking of the hotel. "All this furniture. It's like it's from another era. It's cool. Do you live here?"
"It's a hotel. Our mother owns it," Benny tells her. "We're between houses. We sold our old one and we're building a new one. So we're going to live here for the summer."
Angel gets up and walks to the window, jamming her hands in her back pockets. She stands there, staring at sunset's last colors. "Red sky at morning, sailor take warning," she says.
It's night, Gracie thinks.
"Sailor's delight, then," Angel says and turns, as if she's heard Gracie's thought.
Gracie wants to ask how she chipped her tooth.
"I'm sorry to be in your bedroom like this. I hate to get in somebody else's space. This isn't what I'd planned," she says, dabbing her cut lip with the ice pack.
Gracie stares at her.
"Guess you've seen a lot, living in a hotel."
"We've just lived here a few weeks."
"Still, though," Angel says. "You've hung around here, haven't you?"
Gracie has never questioned anything. She figures everybody's grandmother was a prostitute, all mothers have picked up a rattlesnake, all fathers wear baseball caps and work in a foundry and wash breakfast dishes in a café with a jukebox blaring. All the world is moving to a subdivision with green manicured lawns, staying in the family hotel in the meantime.
"Your mother is nice," Angel says to Benny. Gracie wants her to smile, so as to give them a piece of that broken tooth.
"She grew up here, in the hotel," Gracie tells her. Gracie's back is to the window. Behind her is the city, where police cars feign a patrol of neighborhoods, where men in basement laboratories are storing dynamite and making homemade bombs.
"Our grandmother was a hooker," Gracie says and glances at her rabbit's foot keychain on the bedpost.
"Tragic," Angel replies.
On Gracie's desk are photographs of classmates, a fake megaphone, a row of Nancy Drews. She feels this wholesome motif makes her appear a liar. "Mr. Connor was my grandmother's friend."
Angel's eyebrow is up. "Birmingham," she sighs.
Gracie has been raised on public approval. She doesn't know why she said what she said about her grandmother. She knows Benny is going to get on her for saying it. She stares at Angel's body silhouetted against the first moonlight. The train is leaving the terminal. Gracie doesn't know where it's going on Mother's Day. Trains are part of her existence, their lights playing on her bedroom walls for these few months. They make animal figures in the shadows they create. All her life she will dream of trains.
"See you," Benny says and turns to go.
Angel smiles at him. He stands perfectly still in his jacket, a cigaret between his lips, holding her gaze. Gracie feels something moving between them. It excites her.
They hear voices from the sidewalk. Reporters are coming up the steps, to the blue awning. Soon they'll be in the parlor, where the banquet lights reign over mantel scarves, summer fire screen, and onyx stand. Tasseled draperies hint of a Victorian drawing room. They'll pass the Imari vase, candelabra, umbrella stand glowing in the dark. They'll come to Dinah's cherry desk, wondering where on earth they are. The hotel is a misfit, they'll think. It's got class, charm. It's not for this city. But they'll be wrong, as they make their way up the staircase, holding the banister. The hotel is the city.
Copyright © 1996 Vicki Covington. All rights reserved.
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