The Hanged Man's Song

were stringing her along in your continuing quest to get the milk without buying the cow.”
    “That’s a disgusting phrase; I bet it’s from Wisconsin.”
    “You’re doing it again, making light,” she said.
    “I was not stringing her along,” I insisted, though the phrase touched a guilty chord. “She never even brought the subject up. It’s just when I saw her around kids . . .”
    “You were stringing her along,” LuEllen said with satisfaction. “That’s my last word on that. Well. Maybe not my last word . . .”
    Nudnik.

Chapter Seven
    >>> LONGSTREET IS SO GREEN that it hurts your eyes to look at it. Green, humid, and hot, a Delta town, a jungle, smelling of blacktop and spilled peach soda, melting bubble gum and dead carp, curdling exhaust from old cars; not as bad a combination as it might sound.
    The town is laid out along a high point on the Mississippi—not too high, maybe forty feet above mean high water where Main Street parallels the river. The oldest part of town, closest to the river, is mostly red and yellow brick, with pastel colors popping upin residential areas farther from the river, along the narrow treelined tar streets.
    “Maybe I’ll move here someday,” LuEllen said as we came over the last hill above the town.
    “And every single person would know every single thing you did, every day,” I said.
    “I’d call myself Daisy, and plant poppies in my backyard garden, and then invite the village women to come over and quilt, and drink my special tea,” she said. “When I died, everybody would say I was a witch.”
    “I already say that,” I said. “Did you ever sleep with that Frank, the liquor dealer with the Porsche?”
    She was prim. “No histories; that’s always been the agreement,” she said.
    “That’s not history. I introduced you to the guy.”
    “Try to concentrate on what we’re doing here.”
    >>> WHEN I concentrate on Longstreet, on the picture in my head, I see flop-eared yellow dogs snoozing on a summer sidewalk, pickup trucks and bumper stickers (“when it’s pried from my cold dead fingers”) and the bridge. The bridge is a white-concrete span, the concrete glowing with the colors of the sky and the Mississippi, as the river turns through a sweeping bend to the east. Across the water, you can see the yellow sand beaches along the water, and every night, wild turkeys come out to dance along the sand.
    We came in from the Longstreet side of the river, so we didn’t actually cross the bridge. We dropped down from the highground, stopped at an E-Z Way convenience store and got a Diet Coke and a box of Popsicles from the strange fat man who worked behind the counter, and threaded our way through town to John’s place, a tan rambler on the black side of town.
    John and Marvel had kids bumping around the house. The kids stood with their mouths open when Mom, laughing, jumped on me and gave me a kiss, and LuEllen gave John a big hug. Black people didn’t kiss and hug white people in Longstreet, not in the kids’ experience, anyway. I found it pleasant enough. Marvel was beautiful, a woman with tilted black eyes and a perfect oval face, a woman who naturally moved like a dancer.
    The kids were shy—they knew us a bit, from earlier visits—but loosened up when I produced the Popsicles. Marvel handed them out and told them to go outside so they wouldn’t drip on the furniture. In the resulting silence, after they went, slamming through the screen door, Marvel said, “You guys are looking great,” and John said, skipping the niceties, “You can stick a fork in Bole. He’s all done.”
    “They fired him?”
    “He’s gonna quit tonight,” John said. He had his hands in his pockets, almost apologetically. “He tried to say that it was all college high spirits, they had a couple of black guys in whiteface, but the media pack is howling after him, and the only thing you can actually see is that film loop. And we—you and me—probably are the ones that made it impossible for him to defend himself.”
    “How?” LuEllen asked, looking from me to John.
    “That burning cross,” John said. “We got the FBI into Jackson, all right, but then the Administration, the press secretary, madethat big deal about how racism is indefensible in the New South and blah-blah-blah . . . and then the next day this comes along. Bole is toast. He’s gonna talk to the President tonight.”
    “So he did it to himself,” LuEllen said. “He’s the one