Dark River Road by Virginia Brown Page B

been something about her that kept people at arm’s length, a sort of air like a princess. Untouchable. Distant. Sometimes even sad. He’d said that last to Mama one time and she’d just looked at him for a minute, and then said, “There are times I think you know too much for a little boy.”
    Since he didn’t know why she’d say that when she was always telling him he needed to study more, he’d just thought it a little strange.
    Now he said to Tansy, “Your mama was really pretty, just like you.”
    Tansy looked at him. She smiled, with her mouth and her eyes and something deep inside that made her whole face glow like a lit candle. He liked it when she smiled at him like that.
    “You always say the right thing, Chantry.” She went quiet, and after a minute she said in that dreamy voice she got sometimes, “One day I’m gonna be a star. I’ll make a lot of money, too. I have songs in me, Chantry, things I can’t say to anyone else unless I put it to music. Things that get all mixed up in my head until they come out as a song. There’s others feel the way I do. Maybe they’ll want to hear my songs so they’ll know they don’t have to feel alone, y’know?”
    Yeah. He knew all about feeling alone.
    They sat side by side for a while without speaking, until Tansy decided to leave before Rainey woke up and said something smart to her. He had a way of doing that, especially when Mama wasn’t home. He always said something nasty about Chantry being friends with a colored gal and her daddy, but never in front of Mama. She didn’t tolerate that kind of talk. Mama said prejudice against someone because of their skin color was as foolish as hating someone because of their hair color. Rainey always said it was the way God intended it to be, but he said it kinda smart-like. He never made much secret of the fact he didn’t really believe in God.
    Chantry wasn’t sure about God either, but just knew there were a lot of folks who thought like Rainey did about black people. He didn’t think that way, though. Like Mama, he thought it was better to judge people on what they did instead of skin color or how much money they had. He wouldn’t like Chris Quinton no matter what color he was, but he liked and respected Dempsey who had no money and no education. And Tansy had always been his best friend. His only real friend.
    But the strangest thing kept happening lately. For some reason, Chantry kept having these dreams that were crazy. Mixed up dreams. He’d start off dreaming about Cinda Sheridan and it’d end up being about Tansy. He didn’t know why. He’d never dreamed about Tansy like that before and didn’t ever think about her like that when he was awake. Not much, anyway. Not like in the dreams.
    Maybe it was because he’d seen her breast that day her top slid down. It was the first breast he’d ever seen that wasn’t in a magazine. There was a world of difference, he’d decided, between the real thing and pictures. He’d found magazines once when Beau and Rafe were still living with them, with pictures of ladies without any clothes. There had been men, too, and they’d been doing stuff to the ladies that he couldn’t believe. Mama had found him looking at them one day and raised a big fuss, then she’d taken the magazines outside and burned them in the old fifty-gallon metal drum where they burned garbage, and Beau and Rafe beat him up later for getting into their stuff. But he thought about those pictures sometimes, a lot more lately when he didn’t even want to. It’d make him feel all hot and funny inside when he thought about it, and then he’d feel weird for thinking about Tansy that way at all. She was more like a sister than a friend, and he liked her better than most anyone he knew, even though he still couldn’t understand her stupid fascination with Chris Quinton.
    After the day Chris and his friends had caught him at the edge of the park, Tansy didn’t say any more to him about Chris.