Free Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel by Joy Jordan-Lake Page A

we’re going, Welp.”
    Welp crouched as if he would leap. “No. Not to that part of town, we’re not.”
    Bo looked at him and grinned. “You driving from back here?”
    “I ain’t going down there tonight. You hear?” Welp stood up straight then, not seeming to care that the truck was already moving at near full speed.
    Bo dove for Bobby’s legs and buckled him down into the truck bed. “Are you nuts ?” Jimbo banged on the back of the cab. “Em, man, swing Bobby by his house.” To Farsanna, Bo added, “He lives close by. Won’t take but a clip of a minute.”
    She nodded, looking more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. And more relaxed than I felt, or she should have been, had she known where she was headed.
    Welp sat sulking as the truck tunneled into the dark of a back road that connected the Look with the Pike, a road so obscure that no one but Bobby and his mother lived there, so far as I knew, and no zoning laws could apply.
    At the foot of Welp’s drive, L. J. roused himself for a moment. “Anyone home at the Taj?” The Taj was Jimbo’s name for Welp’s mobile home, which even for an ancient single-wide trailer was in sorry condition. But L. J. had said it out of kindness, even if it was L. J. We were grown up, almost, but still of an age that our mommas liked us not to be home all alone for too long, and we looked out for each other.
    Welp shot me a look. “Ask Turtle. She’d be real glad to tell you: Is there ever anyone here?” He’d swung out of the truck before Emerson’s back wheels had followed his front into the drive.
    Emerson let the truck idle there at the head of the drive till we saw a light go on in the trailer. “You’d think,” I said then, “that I made a habit of slamming his momma. Or that she didn’t do nothing to earn it.”
    As Em drove off, I could feel the truck engine and the bumps of the old road beneath us. I closed my own eyes and let the last few miles of our Ridge disappear under the tires without my having to watch. Then the road that left the backside of our mountain pitched downward and switched back on itself again and again in a long, slithering snake whose tail petered out in the Valley.
    We reached the snake’s tail in a few windblown minutes: Our record down was fifteen, but that was by daylight. Farsanna was rubbing her ears from the rapid descent. And I was nauseous from the dozen switchbacks and getting swung side to side in the truck bed. But it had been my suggestion, these lights down here in the Valley being worth seeing after all—my suggestion that I didn’t even remotely agree with. So I wasn’t saying a word.
    Em steered the truck toward downtown, and then exited onto Seventh Street. I pounded on the cab window, but he ignored me.
    Seventh Street was the border of the neighborhood of Victorian homes L. J. described. And while I’d never thought twice about them before, I could admit if I squinted and imagined fresh paint and new front porches and turrets that weren’t collapsing into bare yards, maybe there was something attractive about them—like the black-and-white sketches in children’s versions of Dickens’ novels, his young ladies of good family who’d fallen on hard times and were hungry.
    But Seventh Street also housed a number of bars and lounges and long lines of shanty houses whose roofs slumped in tired, halfhearted attempts at protection. The bars throbbed with music, their walls seeming to pulse and push those inside out into the street. Unlike our Ridge, where after nine at night, most house lights flipped off so inhabitants could retire to bed respectably early, Seventh Street blazed with light. The bars pulsed with neon carnival color, bold red block letters and yellow floodlights and green cursive words, “Appearing Nightly” and “Live Music.” But the houses, too, spilled out bright yellow light from every window and door, flung open to the night air, and from cracks between planks, as if their being so