Apocalypse Crucible

I got back from the war. Lost my daddy while I was over there, an’ my momma got hit by a milk truck before I got back. I was the onliest chile they ever had.”
“It’s hard to lose family.” Delroy settled back in the seat but had a hard time getting comfortable because a spring threatened to poke through the cover. Strips of gray duct tape appeared to be the only thing keeping the seat together.
George pulled the column shift down into low gear. The transmission groaned and whined as the gear teeth fell together. The radio crackled and spat, and John Lee Hooker faded away as B. B. King flowed from the speakers. The windshield wipers strobed across George’s reversed amber reflection in the glass.
“My smokin’ bother you, boy?” George put his foot on the accelerator and let out the clutch. Betsy ground grudgingly into motion.
“No.” Aboard Wasp as well as at other posts, Delroy had gotten used to men smoking.
“Want a cigarette?”
“No, thank you.”
“Only carry roll-your-owns.” George shifted into second gear. The truck still felt like the makings of an avalanche gathering momentum.
“If you don’t know how to roll a cigarette, why, there ain’t no shame in it. Be glad to roll you one.”
“I don’t smoke.”
George looked at him again, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth and ash dribbling into his gray whiskers. “You got a name, boy?”
“Delroy.”
“That your onliest name? Most folks I know gots two names.”
“Harte,” Delroy said. “Delroy Harte.”
“I knowed some Hartes in my day. Still do. Josiah Harte, now he was a fierce-preachin’ man. Could set a congregation on fire, he could. An’ wasn’t a man in town what could set at a pianer the way that man could. He could flat tickle them ivories when he wanted.”
“Aye, sir,” Delroy agreed. “He could.”
George nodded, remembering. “Now, Josiah, come a Sunday morning, he’d play the Lord’s music. Played it right loud and proud, he did.”
Memories threaded through the pain and confusion that paraded through Delroy’s mind. He saw his father again, standing at the pulpit, hammering home a message to his parishioners; taking a lazy father and husband to task for drinking up the family’s rent and food money; working in the garden he kept behind the church.
“But come Saturday,” George said with a grin, “why, Josiah would sometimes show up at the domino hall an’ play the pianer. All us reprobates an’ no-accounts, like me an’ Luther when they wasn’t no yard work to be done, we knew the price we’s gonna have to pay for listenin’ to them sweet blues. After he got through layin’ out the hottest licks he could, after he sung Muddy Waters an’ Robert Johnson an’ Lightnin’ Hopkins, why then he’d commence to preachin’ an’ savin’ souls.”
“Must have been something to see,” Delroy said. He knew his father had gone down to the domino hall in town where the old men gathered, but he’d never gone along. Now he wished he had.
“Yes, siree,” George said enthusiastically. “It were something to see. You favor him some, Delroy. You kin?”
“Josiah was my father.”
George smiled. “I remember you now. The roundball player.”
Delroy nodded. “That’s right.” He’d gone to college on a basketball scholarship and had been headed straight to the NBA. Then his father had … died. Even with Glenda at his side, it had taken a year and more to figure out what he was going to do with his life.
A somber look painted George’s withered features. “He was a good man, Delroy. An’ he was a hard man to lose, him bein’ so young an’ the way he died an’ all.”
Delroy couldn’t speak. He still remembered the night he’d been told of his father’s death. He’d been at college, at basketball practice, with thoughts only of slipping over to see Glenda afterwards. Delroy’s mother had made the call, strong and broken all at the same time.
“They never did find the man what killed him, did they, boy?”
George asked.
“No, sir,” Delroy replied in a quiet voice. “They said they looked, but they never found him.”
“A sad thing,” George said. “A sad, sad thing.”
Delroy nodded.
“So you comin’ back home, Delroy?” George’s cigarette flared bright orange in the windshield reflection as he took a draw on it.
“Aye, sir.”
“Heard you’s off in the military.”
“The navy.”
“Made a career of it, I’ve heard tell. Me an’ Luther, why, we’s glad to be shut of it after the war. Got tired of bein’ told when to get up, what to do all day long, when to go to bed.”
“It’s not a life for everybody.”
“No, sir, it ain’t,” George agreed wholeheartedly. “You got a wife back here, don’t you?”
Shame flushed through Delroy as he wondered just how much the old man knew about him. Marbury was a relatively small community despite the racetracks there. “I do.”
“Comin’ back to see her?”
“Maybe,” Delroy said. He supposed there was no way around that encounter. Unless she chose not to see him. And he had to admit that was possible. But he hadn’t come back to see Glenda.
George was silent for a moment. Blues music continued to spin through the radio. “I hate to ask this, boy, but you been in touch with your wife?”
More guilt assailed Delroy. He hadn’t called Glenda to let her know he’d gotten emergency leave from Wasp. With everything that was going on in Turkey, she’d have asked why he was leaving now. He couldn’t have lied to her; he never could. At least, he’d never knowingly lied to her.
You told her you had faith, Delroy. You told her you believed as she believed. If that’s not a lie, then what is? Delroy stared at his own reflection. His blue-black skin almost made him a shadow inside the pickup. Only his eyes, bloodshot and haunted, stood out in the soft darkness. But maybe you aren’t so guilty there. Those are also lies you told yourself.
“No,” Delroy said. “I haven’t called her.”
“Them phones. A lotta them are still outta whack. People gets so they depend