Flight Behavior (4 page)

She knew it would take only minutes for Luther to finish the lamb he’d taken next, ahead of its mother, so she ran back to fetch that soft dove-gray fleece and was careful to keep it separate. The wool from these lambs’ first and only shearing was finer and more valuable than regular wool. Hester could get an astounding fifty bucks apiece for virgin fleeces on the Internet, selling to hand spinners, and last year recouped the cost of her new computer in one season. The lambs’ flesh was already contracted to a grocery chain and would be consumed by Christmas, but their wool would go on keeping people warm for years.

Dellarobia slid back into her place at the skirting table in time to hear the end of one of the world’s unnumbered tales that share the same conclusion:
Can you believe the nerve?
The guilty party was evidently some friend of Crystal’s, but the details were hazy. The friend had come to visit and somehow suffered damage from Crystal’s kids.

“They’re just horsing around like always, right?” Crystal’s voice rose to a question mark at the end of every declarative sentence. “Shooting water pistols? So Jazon’s trying to get away from his brother? And she’s trying to get away from both of them I guess? So that’s when Mical slams it. She’s all, like, You boys are going to wreck my coat! And then wham, boo-hoo. She was worried about the water on her silk jacket, which she should not have wore to my house, I mean,
hello,
I have
children
?”

Dellarobia was accustomed to Crystal’s question-mark oratory and her everlasting train wreck of the past and present tense, but couldn’t quite pick up the thread. She looked from Crystal to the two Norwoods, slightly overripe ladies whose dyed-black hair was identically parted down the middle by a stripe of white roots.

“Slammed what?” she asked, when none present offered to pony it up.

“The car door on her hand,” Crystal replied tiredly in a descending singsong. She seemed weary of the tale, yet told it with such enthusiasm.

“Oh. Ouch.”

“The thing of it is,” Crystal maintained, “I am sorry Brenda broke her fingers. But accidents happen. The same could have happened without my kids being there.”

“Brenda’s asking Crystal to pay her doctor bills, and Crystal don’t want to,” one of the Norwoods explained in a lowered voice, filling in Dellarobia on the plot as if she were a moviegoer who’d slipped in late.

“You know Brenda, her and her mother does the Sunday school,” said the other. One of these Norwoods was married to Peanut and the other was his sister, so how did they look just alike? It was that half-grown-out dye job, a weirdly permanent fixture. Secretly Dellarobia thought of them as the Skunkwoods.

“Let me get this straight, Crystal,” she said. “You’re thinking if Mical hadn’t been there, Brenda would have slammed the door on her own hand?”

“Accidents happen,” Crystal repeated with a more strenuous intonation.

“Oh, they do. And many among us have got the kids to prove it.”

Hester threw Dellarobia a look, still simmering from the earlier exchange. The ponytail-yank was impending. “You ought to be looking after your own,” she said.

Dellarobia was indignant. Her daughter was perfectly content, throwing herself around in the crate of belly wool like a tiny insane person in a padded cell, and Preston was circling nearby making the whooshing noises boys make to imply they are going fast. It was Crystal’s pair running wild all over the barn, two freckled, big-for-their-age elementary boys in buzz cuts and tight T-shirts just a little past expired. Jazon and Mical. What kind of mother misspelled her kids’ names on purpose? Dellarobia had last seen them jumping off the loft stairs with empty feed bags over their shoulders like superhero capes. Now they were nowhere in sight, not a good sign. Roy, the collie, tended to keep tabs on the kids and now wore a long-nosed look of concern.

“Preston, come here a minute,” Dellarobia called. “Where’s your buddies?”

He arrived dramatically panting, his straight-cut bangs stuck to his forehead and his little wire glasses askew. “Outside. They wanted to step on poops but Mr. Norwood said they couldn’t. Look!” Preston in one vigorous hop turned his back to them, revealing that over his shoulders he wore a full white fleece for a cape.

“You’re going to wreck that fleece,” said Hester.

He turned back around and said in a cartoon growl, “
I’m Wool Man!
”

“Wow, what superpowers do you have?” Dellarobia asked, but Wool Man was off, orbiting the skirting table and calling out answers on the fly, including being tricky and eating grass. His shenanigans pulled the fleece apart in less than a minute, as Hester predicted, and that was all it took to get the family thrown out of the proceedings. Hester ordered Dellarobia to round up Preston and Cordie and the other two boys and take them in the house for the rest of the day.

She felt bruised, and inclined to argue, but this was Hester’s show. Immediately Crystal was demoted into Dellarobia’s former position of step-and-fetch, and ran to get the next fleece. No more ogling Luther Holly’s biceps until the spring shearing. Dellarobia went to find the kids and tell Cub they’d been banished to the house, in case he should wonder. Her anger collapsed into a familiar bottomless sorrow. It was just the one fleece, and not an especially valuable one. A more forgiving grandmother would have let Preston have it for a day of play, since it clearly made him happy. The woman had no feeling for children’s joy. She could take the fun out of ice cream, dirt, fishing with live bait, you name it. Being around Hester tended to invoke an anguish for Cub’s childhood that made Dellarobia wish she could scoop him up and get him away from there. Probably that was where all her family troubles began.

A
t half past five, she lay flat on her in-laws’ uncomfortable sofa with Cordie asleep on her chest. The jelly toast Mical had demanded, but not eaten, sat flattened in its plate on the floor where Jazon had stepped on it, and then violently refused to let her take off his sneaker. He’d used his fists. As a personage of third-grade status Jazon was no joke, within striking distance of her own height and weight. Probably one of those kindergarten holdbacks where teachers tried to postpone the inevitable. She’d surrendered to spending some of the afternoon crawling on her knees with a damp dishtowel following that sticky, waffled left footprint over rugs and floors and sofa cushions, imagining Hester’s ire if she overlooked one. When Jazon started running and leaping against the wall to see how high he could leave a jelly print, poor little dutiful Preston lost it and started crying, which set off Cordelia too. Dellarobia finally started up a game of Crazy Eights for money—a desperate measure—in which kids were allowed to use shoes for money, and won on purpose so she could gain control of the offending sneaker. She hid it upstairs in a laundry hamper.

Her mind was on temporary leave from the din when her phone caused her to jump, ratcheting its manic jangle from the sofa cushions under her. It must have slid out of her pocket and attempted its own escape. She tried to move Cordie without waking her, but missed the call before she could locate the phone. Dovey. She hit call.

“Help,” she moaned. “I’m trapped in that
Twilight Zone
episode where a child has mental power over adults and turns one of them into a three-headed gopher.”

“I hate when that happens,” Dovey said. “So how does that work, are there three corresponding butt-holes?” Dovey and Dellarobia had started life under the surnames Carver and Causey, thrown together in grade school by alphabetical seating. No one had come between them since. “So where are you?” Dovey asked.

“At Hester and Bear’s. Hell, in other words, department of child management. Can you come over? I’m seriously losing my mind here.”

“Nope. I’m on break, I had to come in to work. Three guys called in sick.”

“
Three?
So you have to close, on a Saturday? That stinks.” Dovey worked behind the meat counter at Cash Club, a man’s world if ever there was one, and was of such slight stature she had to stand on a box to use the grinder. But Dovey held her own. Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto.

“There’s a U-T game today,” Dovey said. “I’m sure that’s the reason those guys called in, basketball flu. So yes, I’m closing, and we’re swamped. That’s why I couldn’t answer when you texted, like, sixteen times. Jeez, Dellarobia.”

“Sorry.” She lay down again and eased Cordie back onto her chest, facedown, without disrupting the child’s devoted unconsciousness.

“The problem can’t possibly be those angels of yours,” Dovey said. “It’s you.”

“Actually it’s Crystal Estep’s two boys. She and Valia are over here for the shearing, and Hester is using the occasion to put me in my place.”

“Oh, God. She stuck you with what’s-their-names, Jazzbo and Microphone?”

“Affirmative. I’m in the custody of two small men with plastic AK-47s forcing me into the slave trade.”

“Why do they even make toys like that? I ask you.”

“Crystal said Jazon and Mical are fixing to be terrorists for Hallowe’en.”

“No real stretch there. Okay, look, you have to find your fierce. That’s what the instructor says in my kickboxing video. Aim for the groin.”

Dellarobia lowered her voice. “To tell you the truth, I’m kind of scared of Crystal’s boys. She told us about some friend of hers that came over and the kids broke her fingers in a car door.”

“Here’s my advice. Run for your life. Maybe put in a really long video first, so you’ll get to the state line.”

“A video, are you kidding? Jazon and Mical are hating on me here because there’s no X-box in Hester world. The only child-oriented thing she’s got is this one DVD they’re playing over and over, probably for revenge. It’s that squeaky-voiced muppet thing with the red matted hair.”

“You want to know something? That creature right there is why I have no children. That voice was invented by the drug companies to get all the parents on Xanax.”

“My own kids have better taste, I’ll give them that much. Listen.” She held up the phone. Preston had stuck his fingers in his ears and was walking in a circle shouting the words to “Willoughby Wallaby”:
An elephant sat on YOU!

“Do you hear that? That’s my son. He is innocent by reason of insanity. His sister gnawed awhile on a stuffed dog and then she conked out.”

“Okay, honey, I suggest you do the same. I have to run, my break’s almost over.”

“Here I go. This is me, chewing on a stuffed doggie.”

“Listen, Dellarobia.”

“What.”

“Not now, but sometime. Are we going to talk about it?”

“What?”

“You.”

“Me and what.”

“Whatever happened two Fridays ago. With your telephone guy.”

“Nothing happened. I told you that. Over and out.”

“But you were like, Category Five obsessed. How’s that just over?”

She had told Dovey the outlines of her affair, after the torment rose so high in her throat she felt she would choke. And if Dovey had seen reason to judge, she didn’t say so. The better part of friendship might be holding one’s tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage. Dovey had weathered her own run-ins with strange fortune, in several varieties including the man kind, and seemed to understand the appetite for self-destruction. What stumped her now was the return of sensible behavior. Dellarobia could see the perspective. Of the two events, the latter did seem further outside the standard script.

“If I had a reasonable explanation, you would hear it, Dovey. This is all I can tell you: it wasn’t my decision. Something happened. I was blind, but now I see.”

“Now you’re talking crazy. Is this something religious?”

Dellarobia was at pain to answer. In twenty years she’d sheltered nothing from Dovey, but there were no regular words for this.
When you pass through the rivers they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, the flames will not set you ablaze.
That was the book of Isaiah. “It’s not religious,” she said.

“I
know
you,” Dovey said. “And I don’t get this.”

“Me either.”

“Okay, but we’re not done.”

“Okay, go back to work, bye. I hear the rescue squad.”

The shearing crew must have wrapped things up. She could hear them outside the front door, stomping the muck off their barn boots. Dellarobia knew she should look alive so Hester wouldn’t call her Lazy Daisy, but the weight of her baby’s sweet sleeping body kept her immobile on the couch. The collies rushed in and circled the toy-strewn living room like the sheriff’s posse in an old western, surveying the wrecked Indian camp, then retreated upstairs. The tumbling dog feet on the stairs sounded like a waterfall in reverse.

From her horizontal position she watched Bear lean over Luther in an intimidating way, apparently in disagreement over payment due. Surely Bear wouldn’t push it too far. Sheep farmers lived in dread of getting crossed off Luther’s list for some infraction, such as trying to short the head count when they wrote his check. As the only shearer in the county, Luther’s skills probably put him in greater demand than any doctor or drug dealer out there. Dellarobia and Cub had actually changed the date of their hastily planned wedding when it turned out to be the day Luther had put the Turnbows on his calendar for shearing. She’d argued with Hester about it, and still to this day felt humiliated by the priority, but they’d ended up moving the wedding from October to November: first trimester to second. Not that she’d been showing that much yet, but the compromise felt significant. That was over a decade ago, and even then Luther was the last shearer standing. Younger men wanted nothing to do with such hard work, preferring to drive some rig or gaze at a screen.

She glanced around for Cub, but he hadn’t come in. Hester had probably left him to sweep up. She and the other ladies were washing up at the kitchen sink, and Crystal was nowhere to be seen, probably off somewhere plotting to have another horrible child and dump that one on Dellarobia too. No word of thanks would be forthcoming, she assumed. She sat up gently and settled Cordie in the sofa cushions, warning Preston to keep the roughhousing away from her. Jazon and Mical were using the edge of a CD to press down cornerwise on Legos and make them pop into the air. She stretched her stiff back, waiting for acknowledgment from someone who had attained the age of reason.