Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

creek with no attention to propriety whatsoever, swimming with black boys and white trash. He saw her day after day on the Hamilton veranda with Benedict Boykin whose father, after Vietnam, became the mailman and a member of the NAACP. Leela and Benedict Boykin smoked cigarettes. They sat on the rotting floorboards and leaned back to back against each other. Sometimes they kissed. Cobb, behind azalea bushes, could hear them laugh. They rode buses with banners on the side. They marched on the State House in Columbia and listened to speeches about the Confederate flag. Back then, it still flew above the State House dome. The flag must come down, they chanted.
    The demonstrations enraged Cobb’s father. “Sherman’s thugs,” his father said, “may have burned our fields, but they can’t burn that flag from sacred memory. Or off of our bodies either.” He flexed the tattoo on his arm.
    Leela put a sticker on her locker: Take it down! The war ended in 1865.
    The day after her sign was posted, Cobb shaved his head. He had a flag—a Confederate flag—and a rattlesnake tattooed on his arm and that worked.
    It worked spectacularly.
    Leela stared at him, at his right bicep, and at the coiled rattler on his right forearm, all through math class. The rattler was the Don’t Tread on Me snake of the Sons of Liberty flag.
    Leela penciled a question mark on her notebook and flashed it at Cobb. The interrogative curve was a snake, the dot below it a drop of poison from its fangs.
    Sons of Liberty , Cobb wrote on his own notebook. Revolutionary flag . He held up the page.
    Duh! Leela wrote. I know that. But why?
    Cobb turned away to hide his smile. He never looked at her again but he could feel her watching him all afternoon.
    She caught up with him after school. She drew alongside on her bike. He pedaled faster, but so did she. It became, pure and simple, a race, with the finish line at the Slaughters’ front porch and the result a dead heat.
    “You better watch out for my father,” he said.
    “Why, Cobb? Why ?” she asked.
    “Because he’ll shoot anyone comes on our porch before he even thinks about it, especially preachers’ leeches and types who suck up to the NAACP.”
    “I mean, why’d you shave off your beautiful hair? And why did you get the tattoos?”
    “Doesn’t heritage mean anything to you?”
    “It just isn’t you, Cobb.” She was genuinely puzzled. “It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t you.”
    “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know me at all.”
    “I know you go nuts every once in a while. I know you take after your mom.”
    “I do not take after my mother. I’m nothing like her. You think you’re smarter than I am at math, but you’re not.”
    “I don’t think that at all. I know you’re smarter. But Miss Morrow thinks we’ll both get into Ivy League.”
    “I wouldn’t go to a Yankee college if they paid me.”
    “What’s got into you, Cobb? What’s happening to you?”
    I saw you kissing Benedict Boykin , he might have said.
    And she would have said: So?
    “Don’t tread on me,” he warned. “You don’t know the first thing about me.”
    “I know you’re not making sense. But I admire the way you’re always loyal to your dad even though—”
    “Get out!” he shouted. “Get out before I get my dad’s gun.”
    She could not think of a single joke. She could think of nothing to say. She stared at him and then she turned her bike around and rode away.

2.
    L EELA OPENED HER eyes when he entered the room but she did not otherwise move. The ski mask startled her—he saw the widening of her eyes—but otherwise her body was relaxed. Her ankles were crossed and her arms folded. She leaned slightly back in the vinyl chair which gave a little under the pressure though her weight was slight. In all the years since he had seen her, Cobb thought, she could not have put on more than five pounds. He, on the other hand, was considerably heavier. He knew that the shape of