Authors: Sara Taylor
“I bet you're glad school's out?” It's one of the newer librarians, and she moves slow, stacking the books square before scanning my library card and checking for fines. It isn't really my library cardâit has Mama's signature and name on the back, Ellie Fitzgerald Gordy, almost rubbed off nowâbut the librarians who know she's my mom don't mind, and the rest think that it's my card.
“Kinda. Summer gets boring sometimes,” I answer. My grades are awful, but I don't mind going to the Combined School out on Chincoteague. The bus driver likes me and we get free lunch.
“It's a good thing you're reading all these books instead of watching TV. Your brain would melt out your ears like molasses.” She checks
Twelve Dancing Princesses
in, then scans my card and checks it back out to me.
“I like books better anyway.” I don't mention we don't have a TV because we don't have electricity; the librarians still act like we're normal. She helps me stack my books in the backpack, then I hang around a bit by the magazines before leaving the air conditioning behind.
Now there's nothing really to look forward to; the walk home is always longer. There's a cornfield across the road from the library, with a stretch of wood beyond it and the main highway beyond that. The stalks are dead still, and the road is
empty. I could keep going down that road and be in the center of Parksley in seven minutes, but all they've got there is the courthouse and the sheriff's office and the jail and even though there's real sidewalk that looks too clean to walk on, all shaded with bright pink crepe myrtles, I don't have any reason to be there. The breeze has died, and the air is full of greenhead flies and massive mosquitoes. I eat the potatoes I brought, sitting on the curb in front of the library, but my stomach still feels empty.
Mama took us to the library every Tuesday. There were sandwiches afterward, and a Thermos of iced tea. We built a nest of pillows and blankets in our room when we got home, then curled up in it and read our books all afternoon, until Renee fell asleep. Then Mama and I would sit on her bed and she would read me the books I liked that Renee wasn't old enough for and let me braid her hair. It was really long, past her pockets, and so kinky it held my braids on its own. Our hair is like that too, mine and Renee's, long and curly, though Renee is salt and I'm cinnamon: she has white-blond hair and white-blond skin, like Daddy's, and silver-blue eyes, like Mama's. I'm darker than Mama, hair and eyes and everything. She told me that she'd explain why that was, when I was older. We read about pea plants and Punnett squares in science last year, so I know that blue eyes and blue eyes can't make brown eyes, but I still want to know where my brown eyes came from. Now that I'm older she's not here to explain.
A new breeze picks up, and I'm drowning in stomach-turning stench. One of the plants, Perdue or Tyson or I don't know, is across the highway from town, behind the cornfield and the dark band of trees, and when the wind's right the whole town gets hit square in the face with that smell. It smells just a
little bit like chicken soup, and a whole lot like dog food, with the inside of a molding coop mixed in.
In the time when Mama still took us to the library Daddy brought us a cockerel as a pet, just a day old and the yellow of a hi-lighter. It rode home in his pocket. Renee named him Suet, and after we fed him he slept like an old man on a park bench, his beak resting on his fat belly. He got to be a pretty good guard rooster, attacking the dogs that would come after Mickle, cutting at them with his spurs and generally making life unpleasant. Mickle was just a kitten and smart enough to not pick any fights, and they got along pretty good until a fox got Suet. There was blood and feathers all across the yard, and Renee just cried and cried for days. When she finally stopped crying, we asked Daddy to bring us home another cockerel. By then he'd stopped working at the hatchery and had gone on to work at a processing plant, and he'd started smoking his little glass pipe on his days off so his skin was all claylike and he smelled like cat pee. He was in a bad mood when we asked, so he told us how they get all the new-hatched chicks out on a table, and check them to see what sex they are, then all the cheeping cockerels get pushed into a grinder, alive, and get chopped all to pieces. Renee stood looking at him for a moment, then opened her mouth and just screamed and screamed until he smacked her. He and Mama got into a fight about that, later, and he smacked her too.
I keep to the shoulder of the highway instead of taking the shortcut that goes past John-Michael's house, and even though he
and the others aren't anywhere I can see, my stomach still does flip-flops. I walk by quicker than usual, and don't slow down until I turn off the pavement onto the gravel by Matthew's. There's a skinny brown dog sniffing at the smear of roadkill down the center, and his head snaps up when my feet make that first crunch. He trots over and takes a sniff at me. I shy away. I don't like dogs. I've been bit too many times. I trot along by the ditch on one side, he trots along by the ditch on the other side, and I watch out of the corner of my eye. My gut goes like a big chunk of ice, like it does when I'm scared.
After we get past the little houses he cuts into the cornfield, and I can relax again. It's late afternoon and the air is heavy and damp, like a wet wool blanket put over your head on a hot day. It's like breathing pea soup. I look for raspberries again, but the mosquitoes are out now, and I can't stay in the bushes for long. Rabbits watch me from the path, their noses twitching as they nibble, waiting until I'm feet away before going lippety lippety out of range. Mama called the tiny ones “bunnylettes.”
Mickle darts out of the brambles and across my path, gunning for a little rabbit. It sprints into the corn, and he drops and licks himself, pretending that that's all he really meant to do. I nudge him with my sandal, and he flops over to show me his belly, then trots along butting his head against my ankle every few steps. He's a grown cat now, a bit lazy and slack in the belly, and he does most of his real hunting at night. I sometimes find the smears of blood and tufts of feathers or fur that he leaves, and make sure Renee doesn't see them.
There's a frantic rustle in the cornstalks, and the dog that followed me bursts from between them. Mickle freezes, paws spread out on the ground, and the dog leaps at him. My cat
screams, and I jump on the dog, pulling him away from Mickle. We wrestle, and his front legs flail and scratch at me and his back ones coil up and shove me away and I snap my neck back to keep my face away from his wild, waving mouth. Library books scatter everywhere, and I smell sour and green and fear and hear us both snarling, too angry to be scared anymore. We roll in the dirt and shells until I get him around the shoulders and get his ear in my teeth, and bite down hard. He slows his bucking then, and I roll us to the ditch and fling him at the corn. He scrambles to his feet and lopes back at me, but I've got my backpack off now, still half-full of books, and I catch him square in the chest with it. When he gets up this time I come at him, and he turns tail and springs into the corn.
Our library books are dusty on the ground and dented at the corners, but not torn at all, and I wipe them off as I pick them up. Mickle is waiting for me a few yards on, curled up and licking at a torn place near his tail. I bundle him up like a baby and carry him the rest of the way home. I can feel the places on my legs and butt that are bruised from rolling on the oyster shells. The scratches on my arms have started swelling.
Renee makes a fuss over both of us, but I don't tell her that there's a dog going for our cat. While she feeds Mickle the chicken breast Daddy left, I take the .22 out again and practice hitting the tissue box. It has a heavy, solid, comfortable feel to it.
I listen all the rest of the day, and until I fall asleep, for tires on the oyster shells, but other than Daddy's, none come. I want to think that John-Michael's mother isn't coming, won't tell Daddy what I did, but I know he's going to find out. If she didn't come today then it only means that she'll come tomorrow.
In the morning I don't hear Daddy moving around upstairs when I wake up, and it takes a bit before I remember that it's Thursday, and he's going to be home all day. I go up to get us food anyway.
Pink light crisscrosses the kitchen floor; there's a grapefruit sun rising out of the marsh. Up here is all big windows, so you can see out to the barrier islands. Daddy's sitting on the old wooden bench outside with his back against the window, swirling a glass and watching the sun. He might go out later today, but it's not something I can bank on.
There isn't much upstairs: a gray couch that feels like a potato sack faces the view out over the marsh, and behind it against the wall is the kitchen dresser, next to the door to Daddy's little room. The table is square and from Goodwill, and it stays pushed up against the half-sized wall that keeps you from falling into the stairwell. All our chairs are from Goodwill too, and they wiggle when you sit on them. The red camp stove is still sitting out on the pressboard counter from yesterday.
Daddy got our icebox from a junk shop; it's the kind that you have to put a big chunk of ice in every few days, and mostly he remembers to get it. There's a dented package of chicken breasts in the front, which he probably brought home last night, and I think about Suet a second. Back behind it there's a dozen eggs, less two, and one of the big discount packages of bacon ends. He forgets about food for days sometimes, and this is more than we've had around at once in a while. I boil six of the eggs on the camp stove, then fry up a handful of the bacon ends, one eye on the shadow Daddy casts across the floor. It shifts and rolls as I dump the bacon ends into a pile of paper towels, and the door creaks open as I wipe the pan into the trashcan. I keep my
head down and keep rubbing at the bacon crust. He comes over, twitches the towels open; I can hear the piece of bacon crunch in his teeth.
“You and Renee going somewhere?” he asks.
“Out in the woods, maybe down to the creek,” I say.
“If you go, catch some crabs for dinner,” he says.
I don't say anything.
Renee is awake when I come downstairs, dressing Mickle in doll clothes. He bolts for the door as soon as I come in, trailing lace, and I undress him before turning him out into the yard. We pack up our food, a blanket, and a few books in my backpack, then I have to go back upstairs because I forgot to get us water.
While I'm filling our bottle from the big jug I hear tires. Daddy's sitting at the kitchen table, staring into a mug of black coffee, but this makes him get up and go downstairs. It's Stevo. He pinches my cheeks sometimes, and usually has strawberry candies in his pockets, but his tar-tooth grin makes me nervous in my stomach. Stevo's brother cooks and he deals, but Daddy gets it from them cheap because they've been friends for a long time. I can hear them talking, in that bouncy, happy way they have, and in a few minutes they'll come up and play a hand of cards and have a pipe. I wait as long as I can, then go back downstairs. They're standing in the little square space between the front door, our bedroom door, and the stairs, and when I stop on the bottom step Stevo grins at me and runs his hand over my hair.
He smells like cat pee even worse than Daddy, and his skin is red like raw meat or poison-ivy rash. He's skinny too, skinnier even than the models in the magazines at the library, almost as
skinny as the starving kids in
National Geographic.
He's alone this time, but I know that after the sun gets higher more cars will probably show up, lots of women and some men and teenagers, all of them with the same scarred-up skin and greased-up hair and smelling worse than he does. We want to be gone before they get here.
“How's life treating you, Chloe?” Stevo asks, and shuffles in his pocket.
“It stinks, thanks.” All he has is a peppermint, but I take it and smile at him.
“I could take care of that for a little while, sugar,” he says, then looks up at Daddy. “Ain't she about old enough to join us, Bo? Sweet little face like that, she could tweak as much as she wanted free.”
Daddy looks down at me. I stare at the front of Stevo's pants so I don't have to look at his face. “When she grows some tits, maybe,” Daddy says. Stevo runs his hand over my hair again as I scoot between them and go back into our room. Renee is sitting crisscross applesauce on our bed, and we climb out the window so we don't have to go past them.
We go to the same clearing we usually do, in the woods between the oyster-shell road and the creek; I lay down with a book once we've spread out our blanket, and Renee starts collecting up snail shells to decorate mudcakes with. It's too hot to move.
As the sun heads down it starts to rain, the light pattery kind that gets you soaked even though there isn't much to it, and I bundle up our books. It's too early to go home still, but after we've huddled together under a bush for about half an hour the patter turns to a downpour, and we decide we have to.
Daddy's car is still there by the side of the house when we get back. Everyone else has left already, but we can see the fresh ruts in the grass from where their cars were. We crawl back through the window and sit on the bed for a second, dripping and watching the rain. There are fast, light footsteps upstairs, and I can hear the drone of the radio. We dry off and change, then curl up on the bed, not talking, not thinking, waiting for the dark to come.
I'm watching the raindrops chase each other down the window when I see the long black car in and out through the evergreen trees as it rolls slowly down our driveway, Gabby and John-Michael's mother peering over the big steering wheel. I huddle deeper, then consider hiding under the bed. There's a knock on the door, and a chair scrapes upstairs. Renee looks at me, but I didn't show her the lump on the side of my head, so she doesn't understand what's going on. We listen as the front door opens, and the woman starts talking, but I can't catch all of what she says. She sounds angry. I slip off the bed and creep over to the door, slip it open just a crack so I can see.