The Air Between Us A Novel Chapter One The battered 1952 Ford Pickup jolted against the curb, bouncing the driver just high enough so you could see the tip of his head, making him look for all the world like a teeny ghost, a low-riding specter. The sight froze the two men--Charlie Symonds and Butter Bob Latham, standing at the coloreds-only emergency-room entrance to Doctors Hospital--stock-still. They watched a cloud of dust cover the truck as it started bumping its way onto the gravel-rock parking lot. Amazed, the men continued to stare as the pickup emerged from the gritty fog and honed in on the door right behind them. The head did not bob into view again, and for an instant each man thought he'd imagined it. This false comfort did not last long. The truck was there, and it was coming straight for them. Their minds told them to dive for cover and quickly, but their bodies were locked in place, like the gears of a car. Both men thought they were dead for sure. The truck jerked to a halt--"three feet from my kneecap," as Charlie would spend his winter down at Carter's One-Stop Barber Shop telling anybody who cared to listen--"and that truck must have been coming fifty miles an hour if it was comin' at all. You can bet I saw them Pearly Gates." Thus this first of many strange events that were to occur that autumn in the town of Revere, Mississippi--population twenty thousand and diminishing rapidly--naturally became famous. With each telling, the truck's speed increased and the distance to Charlie's kneecap decreased until one was up to sixty and the other down to no more than two inches--one, if Charlie had spent time in some juke joint the night before. Within a matter of days, most everybody in Revere had heard the tale at least once. No one questioned if that old rattle-trap truck could even have reached sixty miles an hour, which it could not have. Instead the Reverites all nodded, impressed and sobered by Charlie's choice of biblical allusion. This was later, after all, and right then he wasn't thinking about any implications whatsoever, other than those that had to do with protecting his life from destruction. The truck stopped so thoroughly that a puff of dust-following billowed around it. Ghostlike. It was seriously dawning on Charlie's mind that he should be hightailing it on out of there and right now. The man remembered that quick glance of bobbing head, and he remembered how thoroughly it had disappeared again. Beside him, Butter Bob had already started a slow turn toward the driveway. Then, through the haze, both men heard the driver's door crank open, heard a thud and the paddle of small, bare feet running toward them along the packed earth. Stirring up the dust. The owner of the feet pulled up short. Coughed. Tried to speak, coughed again. The men couldn't tell if it was the excitement or the dust. Both black men--strikingly dark in their white, emergency-room uniforms--rushed forward, one to the truck, the other to the child. Charlie Symonds, the older of the two, bent down eye to eye with the youngster. The kid looked to him to be about ten. No wonder they hadn't seen him over the wheel. Charlie shook his head. "Boy, what you doing driving this--" Before he could finish, he heard Butter Bob's whistle and then his carefully articulated, "Shit." Charlie Symonds was an elder deacon at the Mount Union Missionary Baptist Church and did not normally feel at liberty to use such language; but in the context of telling a real story, like being in court, you felt called upon to present only the unvarnished truth. And the unvarnished truth was that he took a certain naughty pleasure in shocking and eliciting gasps from whatever womenfolk happened to be hearing him. "Pardon me, ladies," he would say as an aside when he retold his tale again and again, "but you all know what kind of man Butter Bob Latham is, as well as I do--one of them Latham men from over Brooksville--and you know he really is capable of using such language." Everybody could agree with him on that. Now, however, in this run-down driveway, Charlie stared at the boy jiggling around in front of him, then glanced over at Butter sidling away from the truck. Charlie got up very, very slowly. He sure did not like the sound of that one word, "Shit." This part, of course, would be left out of the eventual tale telling at Carter's, but this was 1966 and this was Mississippi, and no God-fearing, right-thinking, common-sense-having black man wanted to be dealing with any kind of "shit" after sundown. "It's Mr. Billy Ray. He done shot himself!" The boy had finally recovered his breath, and his words got Charlie's immediate attention. He hurtled over to the truck, pushing burly Butter Bob aside like a feather. "Oh, my God." Blood was everywhere: seeping from a pale white man slumped over in the cut-up passenger seat, dripping down onto the running board, soaking into the dirt. "I got him here as quick as I could. His hunt stand done fall down, and the gun went off. Shot a hole right through him. I tried to tell him he was doing it all wrong. He don't read, you know. None of them Pucketts do, except maybe Miss Ruth Ann. A little. I tried to tell him, but he said . . . Well, I don't want to tell you what he said, but now he's bleeding himself to death." The boy was babbling. Charlie could not have shut him up if he'd wanted to. "Blood or no blood, he can't come in here. No way. No, sir." Charlie Symonds stepped back so smartly that he almost trampled the boy, who'd come up close behind him. "You gotta get this man on over to the other side of the building. This is the entrance to the coloreds-only emergency room--cain't you read?--and ain't no white folks can come in this way. We cain't touch 'em. I'm not gonna do it." The Air Between Us A Novel . Copyright © by Deborah Johnson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Air Between Us by Deborah G. Johnson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.