PASCAGOULA, MISSISSIPPI
NOVEMBER 1982
Danny hadn’t seen it, but he’d heard the man talk about it. Sometimes the man would slip into Danny’s room and not the old lady’s when he came back from his drives. He’d promise him things in his ear, tell him stories.
The man took the Pinto those nights, but only until they got the Lincoln. Almost always had two cars. One for the man and one for the old lady. Danny chauffeured the old lady on her boosting expeditions while the man slept all day, gathering his strength.
The man said he was a lion who had just eaten. Sleeping in the sun. Digesting, until he got hungry again.
Danny was somewhere he didn’t want to be. Someone was asking him questions. He got confused like that. His thoughts bounced around like foosball. He’d bounced around the country just the same, with the man and the old lady. How was he supposed to remember?
“Okay, let’s just start again, young man,” said the suit and tie with flossy strands of hair superglued to his pate. Cop #2 looked so similar to cop #1 that Danny wondered if he was seeing double.
The white cop sipped from a white cup. “Want one of these?”
“No, sir.”
“You sure?”
“Come on, son. Just your name.”
The other one said, “It’s not hard.” Sounded a little angry. Sounded like he wanted to go home.
“See, we already know. It’s like a little test.”
“Name’s Danny.”
“Anyone call you Dan?”
“Nah, just Danny.”
“Okay, Danny, let’s try another easy one. When were you born?”
“My birthday?”
“Son, you are being about as useful as a steering wheel on a mule, and I promise you, you are going to want to be helpful if you’d like to ever go home.”
“Home?”
He was in Mississippi now, he guessed. They moved so fast and so sudden. Arkansas was where the old lady and the man picked him up. The old lady traded his mama some clothes for him. Had a banged-up face been smacked around six ways from Sunday. Probably started out ugly too, but now she was straight hard to look at. Won you over so you hardly noticed after a while.
“I got this bad eye,” she’d told his mother.
Danny remembered thinking it looked like an asshole, puckered up. He’d right away felt bad for thinking it, nice lady like that. His mama had barely had enough money to feed them, plus she had his sister to worry about, coming home knees scraped to shit like some five-dollar whore.
“She sold me to them for some clothing and a vodka drink,” he said. He thought it was in his head. Maybe it was out loud. “Born November 28, 1963.” Felt proud of himself for that one.
“And it is now November 24 of 1982, so that makes you, what, Danny? Nineteen?”
“I only drove. I drove the old lady.”
“You talking about Orelia Dorsey? The woman they call Jean? Jean? We have her down the hall, and she told us you didn’t treat women right, Danny. Told us you’d been up to no good. Said you had the urge to put the hurt on ladies.”
“Who? That wasn’t me!”
“It’s okay, son. We understand. We all want to do it sometimes. Heck, I told Detective Harrison here just the other day my wife deserved a smack in the kisser, didn’t I?”
“Don’t piss on our leg and tell us it’s raining, son.”
“God’s honest, it wasn’t me!”
“Who was it then?”
He’d been nice to the old lady, tried to protect her, because that was what a gentleman does. That’s what he was taught. She turned nasty as a rattlesnake.
Don’t you talk about my Sam that way. You ain’t fit to wash his feet.
Danny drove while she crocheted, with tissues wadded into her bloodied nose.
Everyone knew when Jean came to town. She had the top-shelf boosted goods, a wink and a hug, a mouth on her that made people fall out cackling. She’d have Danny pull over by projects and set up shop in the trunk.
They called him the Driver. He knew he’d started as Danny. He was a little slow—not plum crazy. Somewhere on the road, he became what they called him.
The man and Jean conspired over a map of the country. They made notes and drew ballpoint lines for routes. The man called him son. The man hadn’t hurt him much. The man had maybe thought he was in the wrong bed now and again, but that was nothing new and a small price to pay for a family.
Danny got them where they wanted to go, checked them into the motels under his name. The man told Danny he liked to smack the ladies around. Told him he liked to choke ’em. They loved it.
“You ever pick up a prostitute, Danny?”
“Not me, sir!”
The man was an artist. The man and the old lady both had skills. The man even showed him an article about a painting he once did on a wall. Was that what’s-her-name Betsy Ross and some other Black folk, and it was big as a whole city block, and they put it in the Miami Herald in 1976. He was an important man.
Danny drove.
“You help this man Samuel procure prostitutes? Was this part of your job? Some kind of a scout? Set the bait in the trap?”
“I never did like how he treated ladies. Never did go in for any of it. You got a nice lady at home who taking care of you, why you gotta go act like that?”
“Act like what?”
“Get mad.”
“Mad at what?”
“Mad at ladies. Like when they didn’t treat him right. Turned their noses up. He called ’em stuck-up bitches. Said their noses were turned up so high they’d drown in a rainstorm. He like it here though.”
Carver Village in Pascagoula was Candyland to the man. He’d say, “Ooooooooweeeeee, here we go.”
One side of the road was the village—the projects—and the other was the stroll. The man would stick around for longer than usual, crawl the Jump Club, the King William Hotel, the juke joints and pool halls with rooms for rent by the hour round back. People came from miles around to get anything and everything they wanted: Ts and blues, guns and hos.
The man had told him it was because of the shipyards. World War II brought all kinds of crazy business to the yards, making warships and stuff. The man could talk a blue streak when he was high. He told Danny cops in Mississippi didn’t care nothing for Black folk, so they pretty much just gave up and left them to handle their own business, long as it didn’t start spilling over to the proper citizens.
Carver Village was a world unto itself. The man had brought Danny inside, and he had been proud to be called son in front of a bunch of ladies wearing hot pants and tube tops. Disco music blasted and light swirled around their heads. Girls named Moon Pie spun around poles for pimps named Pretty James.
“What did he do when he got mad?” asked the detective, who fiddled with a loose thread on the cuff of his sleeve.
“He’d yell. Like at the juke joints and bars and what not. He’d yell right in their faces. You nothing but trash. I got bitches you ain’t fit to lick their shoe, sorry ass ho. You bitches ain’t shit. Like that.”
“But you never picked up a ho for him.”
“I never did that.”
“But he told you he did that.”
“He told me things.”
“You know what a punk is, Danny?”
“I heard it before.”
“You a punk, Danny? You like a little girl to him?”
“No! He was with them hos. He told me he liked to slap ’em around and choke ’em. Told me they liked it. He liked to talk about it. See, I wasn’t no punk.”
“Sure, sure, not you. We won’t tell your mama…if you can help us. What else did he tell you?”
Get me a bottle of vodka, you sad piece of pussy.
“Told me if they made him mad, he leave ’em out in the middle of nowhere. Made him laugh real hard.”
“He was getting arrested all over the place.”
“Sure was!”
“But still no one asked about the ladies?”
“Huh?”
Every arrest just made the man hungry in the eyes, and he’d go out crawling. The next morning, Danny had to hose down the car with the old lady. The man and the lady would have a good old tussle about the earrings, the odd shoe, the chones, the shit. She cleaned it spick-and-span though.
Wanna know how to get a woman sexually excited, you retarded little girl? Offer ’em money.
There was the one he told him about, the scrappy bitch who tried to run his car into a wall, then had run across the freeway with her titties in the wind.
Offer ’em money. Just make sure you take it back.
The men placed newspaper articles on the table in front of him. Danny remembered Jean with her careful scissors, stuffing the clipping into her knitting bag. Danny was never much of a reader.
“You know what these are?”
You know what these fools think of me? They think I’m just a petty criminal.
“They from the newspapers?”
“They’re articles about dead women, Danny. Did you save these?”
Rough ’em up. They like it. Made a mistake of tying up that one cunt in Florida and we was just having fun. She was ashamed for herself and lied like the lying ho she was born to be. Did three months for that. Done more time for stealing a straw hat. Nobody cares a damn about a lying whore.
“Danny? Where are you right now? Oh, fuck this. He’s half a retard,” said the second guy, the one without pit stains.
Retard.
Danny remembered. “The one girl was a retard and a freak and loved it. That’s what the man said.”
The cop man stopped fiddling with his cuff. “Which one was that?”
You snitch and you’ll get yours.
It was as if Danny was watching himself talk from a corner of the ceiling. He couldn’t stop.
“The retard in Florida. The one who bit him.”
Danny told them about the bite mark on the man’s hand. The fight with the old lady. The shit in the car.
“You know this girl?”
The men put a photo in front of him. A white girl playing a flute with those white girl feathers in her hair. Someone plain and pretty. This wasn’t the Florida girl, he was sure of it.
“No, sir. I don’t know that kind of girl.”
“You never saw her?”
“I swear to Jesus I never did.”
“Name’s Mindy.”
“Pretty name.”
“Your daddy there killed her.”
The men put down another photo in front of him. It looked like a costume skull, the body below it like melted rubber.
“Is that from Halloween?”
“That was a girl,” said the detective. He tossed his cup, missed the trash. “Get this mongoloid out of here, and put him on a bus to his mother.”
On the bus out of town, Danny was no longer the driver. He had told the cops he’d never had enough money to escape from the man and the old lady, but the truth was he’d never tried. He wondered if he would ever feel needed again.