Wildman

A neighborhood kid told me that Wildman was a bad man. The kid said no one should ever go in his store. He was standing in a patch of sun on the sidewalk outside the convenience store when he told me this. Corpse-thin and pale as a fresh chop of wood, mouthing a popsicle, letting it stain and redden his lips and the tips of his teeth so that he looked like he’d just emerged from the woods after having done something secret. The sign where his small finger pointed read: Wildman’s Civil War Surplus. This was in Kennesaw, Georgia, mid-July, near a club called Cowboys and a bar that advertized Jell-O wrestling for five dollars. In Kennesaw, trucks replaced women, horses had nice asses and twenty-five was sort of old to be having kids.

Wildman had his arms resting on the front desk. His gnarled fingers tapping wood, showing a glinting row of skull rings. A knotty braid hung from his chin to the silver button of his cutoff jean shorts. It was yellow and rotten looking, like a vine that’d grown there and died. He sported a white bandana, Rambo-style.

“What do you want?” he said. He had two 9mm on his hips. The store had no air conditioning, just a small, dust-coated fan.

The dim lights, the piles of rotting papers, the stagnant smell of old carpet, gave the store a bodily feel, like walking into an open mouth.

“Have a look-see,” he said, showing me a T-shirt advertising “United States Inspected Slaves” and a trucker hat that read boyz in da hood with a picture of three rapping Ku Klux Klan members.

I wandered off to the back of the store when I found a woman with long black hair full of uneven braids. Her name was Maggie and she was the store manager. She sat hunched on a stool in front of a velour rope. Her hair was in front of her face and she parted it before she spoke. “It costs a quarter to see the museum,” she said.

She told me she’d known Wildman since she was seventeen and when she said this, looking over my shoulder and into the distance, I imagined that at one time they had been in love.

“Guess what?” she said, latching the rope behind me. “Yesterday at lunch a colored girl came up to me, she was about eight years old, and she said: “Ma’am, do you think Wildman is gonna kill me? Do you think he hates me because of my color? Mama said he’s gonna kill me if I come too close.’” Her face turned stiff.

“The girl was about this tall,” she said, placing her right hand flat over the air near her hip. “Can you believe it?” She gazed at the image below her hand.

“Now this little girl, I’ve seen her around the neighborhood. She’s the daughter of a white mother and a black father. I think she lives with her mother now.” Maggie’s voice lowered and she put her mouth close to my ear. “Now don’t tell anyone about this,” she whispered. “Don’t tell Wildman I’ve been telling you these things.” Maggie backed up a step but kept her mouth where it was and her voice quiet. “He would be just devastated if he knew I was telling you this,” she said. “Just devastated.”

“I won’t tell,” I said.

“I was horrified,” she continued. “So I asked the girl, ‘Now what do you think honey? Do you really think Wildman’s gonna kill you?’ and she said, ‘Well no ma’am. I mean, I waved at him yesterday and he waved back.’”

Maggie swallowed, looked at the carpet, and started running her sneakers across it like it was dirt she was trying to smooth down. “If I saw that mother I would kill her. Yes, I would.”

The museum wasn’t much different from the store except that it was darker and full of swords and...