Free Ginny Gall by Charlie Smith Page A

some painful feeling. Make Winston pull himself together. Something in him felt like beating the poor fissle til he quit crawling. Felt like hauling him to safety.
    The men walked away from the half-wrecked boy. The women hooted at him from the steps, shaking their flimsy morning skirts.
    The boy gathered himself and got to his feet.
    Joe stepped up and gave him a kick in the ass, sending him stumbling into a trot that carried him right at Delvin who stepped backto let him pass. As he did he smelled again the odor of shit, now augmented with the wet, sour-smelling dirt.
    The boy fumbled at the low side gate of unpainted wood palings that separated the back from the front yard. Delvin came up behind him and snagged the latch for him and swung the gate open. The boy looked wildly at him, his pale eyes blinking in the light that had always seemed too much for them.
    “I just wanted to get down in the dim spot,” he said.
    Delvin didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.
    “You didn’t have to pull me out of there.”
    “Yes I did.”
    With the side of one finger Morgred scratched his eyebrows hard and then he screwed his eyes tight shut and opened them. His eyelashes were orange like his hair.
    “You got a dime?”
    Delvin started to say no but then he said, “I got one.”
    “Let me have it. I got to get me somethin to eat.”
    “Way you look nobody’d sell you anything if you had five dollars.”
    “Let me have the dime.”
    “I tell you,” Delvin said suddenly, and it was as if he had fallen through a shaky patch of leaf shade, “you follow on behind me to the house.”
    “To the undertaker? I’m scared to go there.”
    “You’re safer there than anywhere else I can think of.”
    The boy dropped his eyes then looked quickly up as if trying to catch Delvin in some piddling joke at his expense. Delvin could see he was done in, that he had no other place to go.
    “Just lope on along behind,” he said.
    He started out across the street and ran along the dirt path that served as a sidewalk in Red Row and turned right onto Sweet August street running fast. In his mind he didn’t know if he was leading the boy or trying to lose him; maybe both. Children played in a puddle under the big gum tree that stretched heavy, grooved branches over the dirt street and humped it up out in the middle with its roots.Delvin gave the children a sharp eye as he passed but still he could hear them hooting at Morgred as he came along. The path went up a plank step to the section of wooden sidewalk in front of New Big Bethel Baptist church. The wooden portion ran along the rest of the block and dipped down again two steps into the street.
    Delvin ran steadily and he only looked twice to see if the boy was still with him; he was, both times, straggling but coming on in a half-lame trotting style, holding his pant remnants up with one hand and his pale squinting eyes looking squarely at him.
    They came up the alley from wind-flecked Brocade street. Delvin checked off the flimsy leaves of chinese elms hanging over the board alley fence of the Askew house and then the great blanket of cherokee roses sagging from the crumbling brick fence of the Lewis house, running. Then came backyards opening directly on the alley, exposing gray- and yellow-streaked red packed dirt yards stacked with boxes or old horse collars or fragments of no longer identifiable machinery, pump parts or busted forge buckets or pieces of streetcar undercarriage or canvas-covered piles of plaster or old weathervanes—roosters or codfish or racehorses—and, in each yard, lines of washing; raised among these like guardhouses were the neighbors’ wash sheds and kitchens emitting mixed and penetrating smells of lye and raw ashes and boiled pork-fortified greens and cornmeal and brushwood fires. He checked these off and he checked off old Mr. Berke petting his blind german police dog and Mrs. Sanderson accompanying her tiny triplet daughters sitting side by side