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Sammie drives with one hand, clutching the guitar neck in the other. His foot never leaves the gas pedal, even as he bounces in his seat and tears run down his face.
The adrenaline. That’s all it is. His need to get out.
The streets are empty, save a few folks skipping church. They stare—what else should they do?—but they don’t give him trouble. Just stares. He must look like a man shot out of Hell.
Hell, that’s what he was.
The sun is right in his eyes and he’s grateful to it. His eyes straight ahead but his mind trapped in the world of not-yet-5 hours ago. He’s worried if he breaths he’ll smell the smoke again.
Smoke…
It’s hard enough to see as is. The sun and the tears, the way his face is swelling up and the dirt kicked up from the wheels of the car beneath him makes it worse.
Might be a kind of Sunday blessing though. He can’t think of all the things he’s leaving behind. So when the houses turn into buildings, they all blur together. He rumbles past an old man hollering and a couple with their baby and grips the guitar harder.
His grip on the wheel is much looser. It slides about under his hand. He just needs to drive outta Clarksdale. Ain’t running if I’m choosing to leave, he tells himself.
He wants to say a proper goodbye to the place and people who raised him. Wants to leave his father with more than an “I love you” as he turns to walk out the door. To pack his bags and kiss his mother in her cheek and tell his siblings to always obey her. But if he looks back now, he’s never leaving.
So the buildings that built him blur into one and Preacherboy is leaving Sammie Moore behind.
But then there’s a movement in the corner of his eye. A door shutting.
He stops. Damn stupid decision, but it’s what he does.
Lisa, he remembers her, is standing on the sidewalk in front of her familiy’s grocery store and holding a glass of water.
Or well, isn’t the Chow’s grocery store anymore, is it? Not unless Little Lisa—less little now—is somehow able to run the whole damn thing.
She walks towards the car with the glass and hands it up to him, standing tiptoe to see inside the car. If his injuries bother her, she’s good at hiding it.
Sammie lifts the cup with a trembling hand, but downs it like it was from a shotglass. God, that was holy water.
He pants after swallowing the water, and he realizes he nearly forgot the sound of his own voice. What it felt like to talk and not just scream.
He turns to look at Lisa, hands the glass back. Her eyes flit to every mark on his skin. He knows what she’s about to ask, but that doesn’t make the answer easier.
“They ain’t coming home.” She says it as a statement.
Sammie shakes his head. The words don’t come.
“My ma and daddy-” her voice catches and she ducks her head so Sammie can’t see her face. “-they dead?”
It was different, not coming home or dead. Maybe the party went till dawn and they were cleaning up.
“Killed” is what Sammie finds himself saying.
Lisa’s head snaps back up as Sammie clears his throat. She deserves to know.
He continues. “Some…some white folks came in and started a fight. Your momma was killed trying to stop ‘em.” He can tell her the white folk were vampires later.
There are tears streaming down Lisa’s face, but she does her best to keep them out of her voice. “And Daddy?”
Limbs shaking, Sammie stands and opens the car door, reaching out to pull Lisa into a hug before his feet have even hit the ground. He’s unsteady, the pain finally starting to set in, no longer starved off with the adrenaline rush, but Lisa holds him up, burying her head in the crook of his shoulder.
“I’m sorry Lisa, I’m so so sorry,” he murmurs to her between sobs of his own.
The Chows had always been there for Sammie and his family. He and Lisa played together, when he was real little he thought she was another cousin like Stack and Smoke, just light skinned with straight hair. He watched her grow up along side his own brothers and sisters, and even though he knew they weren’t related, he would always do his best to look out for her.
He’d said as much to Bo and Grace once, and the memory punches him in the gut.
It was sweltering July heat, and Lisa came running in with a scrapped knee, shouting about boys throwing stones at her.
Sammie, nearly 13, was standing with his mother waiting for Bo to package their order. But as soon as he heard Lisa’s angry, 6 year old screaming, he rolled up his sleeves like he was about to go fight the boys himself.
She pointed to a trio hiding behind a truck, and Sammie made a big show of walking over there, fists balled up and chest puffed out. It was all bluff. But the boys scampered away, and when Sammie walked back into the shop, Lisa was telling both their parents all about it.
“You raised a good protector,” Grace said to Sammie’s mother.
It was these words that Sammie took quite seriously. Protector. The only other men who he knew as protectors were Smoke and God.
“Yes maam,” Sammie responded, standing up straight. “I’m always gonna protect my family.”
Sammie pulls back from the hug, keeping his hands on Lisa’s shoulders. He looks at her face, so much older and sharper than all those years ago, even as she furiously wipes at her tears and snot bubbles in her nose. She’s not a 6 year old with a scraped knee, but she’s still family. And now he’s the only family she’s got left.
Maybe he wasn’t the protector, maybe he couldn’t save everyone. He’d let Mary slip past him and everyone he loved had paid the price.
Nearly everyone.
“We family,” Sammie says, “so we gotta protect each other. Okay?”
Lisa nods. “Uh-huh.” She looks back to the car. “We’re leaving?”
Before Sammie can respond properly, Lisa turns back into the grocery store. Through the windows, he watches as she grabs a crate and fills it with a variety of foodstuffs. Shit ton of cans all clanging together. She sets the crate down by the door, then rushes to the back room. When she comes back out, she has a stack of clothes, some of which must be her daddy’s, and a blanket. She’s clutching a bag to her chest.
Without a word she heaves the crates into the back of the car and climbs on into the passenger seat, setting the clothes over the food and the blanket over that. She sits in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, shuffling her feet some as Sammie climbs back into the drivers seat.
The car engine rattles to a start. It’s a quiet drive through the rest of town, no one stops them. The sun moves through the sky, beating down at them as the road opens up to the horizon.
“Where’re we going?” Lisa asks finally. Sammie glances at her, but her eyes are straight ahead.
“Heading north,” Sammie responds. He knows she can see through him. The gas tank probably can’t carry them out of Mississippi. Chicago, or anywhere near it, is a long shot for a beat up Black boy driving along with a Chinese girl. No jobs for either of them.
But she doesn’t press it.
“I want a funeral,” she says instead. From the bag, she pulls out a spool of white ribbon and begins to tie it around the mirror.
“That safe?” Sammie asks. How can he tell her that there are no bodies to bury?
“Ain’t no one to care for miles. Just means there’s been a death in the family. I want a funeral for them. And everyone else who didn’t come back.” She adds the last part slowly, looking at Sammie.
He knows what she’s asking. Of course she would notice half the town had vanished overnight, she saw all of them on a daily basis.
“Yeah. Yeah, it was–”
Remmick slicing across Pearline’s throat, Stack’s bloody corpse with Mary over him.
“It was a lot of ‘em. Shoulda never let any get in. Like the Devil came and got us. Smoke saved me.”
Remmick going up in flames. Smoke staying behind.
Lisa was quiet now, threading the ribbons through her fingers. She was probably the only other person in the world who could ever hope to understand what happened at Club Juke, what Sammie was going through now. In any case, she wasn’t about to let him go through it alone.
In his silences, in the gaps, she could guess about it. He’d been driving down the road like a bullet shot out a rifle. The preacher’s son all bruised and bloody on Sunday morning, after spending the night playing blues music in a club for sinners. And her daddy and ma weren’t home.
She wondered about the group of white folks though. It had to be the Klan. That didn’t explain how they’d gotten past Smoke though. He shot two men for touching his truck, and those had been his people. She’d heard how he killed his own daddy.
Sammie was keeping things. But he was also her lifeline, and more than that, her friend. They’d grown up together. She’d be damned to forget how they would play hide and seek between the pews in Preacher Moore’s church while he prepared his sermons. He would tell her some time, or she’d figure it out herself.
“No bodies.” She knows it already, but it’s another stab through her heart.
“Whole place burned,” Sammie said, coughing to suppress any tears that might surprise him. “Nothing to bury. I’m sorry.”
Lisa put her hand over Sammie’s on the guitar. It was a light touch, she didn’t want to hurt him bad. “You ain’t the one who killed them. You made it home. And I’m glad.”
The gas tank wouldn’t carry them much further, but they kept on anyway, speeding on.