Hard Twisted (4 page)

She giggled, slapping his hand. You're bad.

You know a lot about stars, I guess.

Did you know that they's more stars in the sky than specks of dust on the earth?

Go on.

That's a fact.

Says who?

Everbody. My uncle Mack.

He lolled his head to take in her upturned profile and her parted lips and the dusting of starlight in her eyes. The staggering beauty of her innocence.

What?

Nothin. I was wonderin what you was thinkin is all.

She looked again to the heavens, and for a long while did not speak.

I used to stare at the sky of a night, she finally said, and pretend my mama was up there somewheres, lookin down and watchin
over me. All dressed in white, like a angel. But the older I got, the more I come to think that maybe it was always the other way around. Like maybe I was the one was all the time watchin out for her. Watchin and waitin for some sign that ain't never gonna come, and all the time missin what was under my nose.

She turned her face to his.

Only thing is, there ain't never been nothin under my nose to speak of but hard dirt and hoecake.

He reached and took her hand in his.

Until now, he told her.

They ate corn bread and Karo syrup straight from the pan, her head floating in the amber lamplight and the whiskey and the heat from the open firebox. The walls of the little kitchen closed around them and seemed to her to ripple, like a room viewed through antique paneglass.

He took her hand and placed her fingers in his mouth and sucked them each in turn as she held her breath and watched him.

Come over here.

He shifted his weight and lifted her into his lap and kissed her softly at first and then with greater urgency. She closed her eyes and her head swam and she felt the warmth of his mouth and the wet thrill of his tongue between her lips.

You ever had a boyfriend before? he whispered, his breath a hot caramel apple of whiskey and syrup.

She shook her head. No.

He kissed her again.

Could I be your boyfriend tonight?

BY MR. PHARR: How would you describe Mr. Palmer's relationship with your father?

A
: I don't know. I thought it was real friendly-like at first. Like maybe Clint wanted somethin, and he thought he could cozy up to Daddy and get it.

BY MR. RYAN
: Objection. Rank speculation.

THE COURT
: Sustained.

BY MR. PHARR
: Was there ever a time when your father and Mr. Palmer entered into business together?

A
: Yes, sir. Clint was lookin for a partner in his rooster operation, and he invited us to move there to Roebuck Lake.

Q
: When was that?

A
: May. Middle of May.

Q
: How long did you and your father live with the accused at Roebuck Lake?

A
: Around ten days or so.

Q
: And then what happened?

A
: Then we moved down here to Peerless.

Q
: Why? What precipitated the move from Roebuck Lake to Peerless?

BY MR. HARTWELL
: Calls for speculation.

THE COURT
: I'll allow it.

A
: I don't know about precipitated. I know there'd been a patch of trouble, and maybe Clint used that as a excuse to get us all down here into Texas.

They found her father in his bedroll, the fire cold and the old Dutch oven gaping in its bed of ash and coated with some black and glistening residue. He appeared to be fully dressed, and an empty fruit jar lay in the dirt by his feet.

You reckon he's dead? Palmer said, lifting and sniffing the jar mouth.

She bent and touched her father's forehead. He groaned as he rolled, covering his face with an arm.

He ain't dead. He's soused though.

Palmer dropped the jar and crossed to the larder, where he toed through their meager provisions.

This here's your food store?

Yep.

He shook his head, turning and appraising the campsite. The tumbled house. The odd assemblage of pans and mismatched crockery. The worn and orphaned tools.

What all do you do for water?

They's a well just yonder. That's how come we stay here.

She had straightened her father's blankets, and now stood so as to shade his head from the sun. Palmer moved beside her, and together they regarded the sleeping man like belated witnesses to some mishap.

This happen often?

She shrugged.

Where's that rooster I brung?

She turned. He's around here somewheres.

They found the cage on its side in the shade, the gamecock strutting tight circles on a speckled carpet of shit. Lottie righted the cage and fetched some soda crackers and a jar lid of water.

Shouldn't you be goin? she said as she stood again, wiping her hands on her pants.

You tryin to get quit of me?

I didn't say that.

He stepped closer, glancing at the sleeping man. He touched a hand to her face. When will I see you again?

I don't know.

You sore at me?

I ain't sore.

He lifted her chin. Remember what we talked about.

I know, she said, looking away. I ain't stupid.

By the time her father sat upright and ran a trembling hand across his face, the sky had darkened and the wind had risen again and the blankets snapped around him in a pyre of dusty flannel. He willed himself upright, staggering to the well and pumping himself a bucket. He steadied it on the concrete apron and took a breath and submerged his entire head.

He turned dripping and blowing back to their campfire. He walked two steps and sat as though on a chair, but there was no chair and he landed instead on the ground with his legs splayed. She rose to help him, but he stopped her with a hand.

I'm all right. Just stumbled is all.

They sat with their backs to the highway, and he rested his sodden head on his forearm. She thought he might have dozed.

I'm feelin poorly this mornin.

This evenin you mean.

He raised his eyes, blinking and bloodshot, to the western horizon.

Oh, Lordy.

You'll go blind drinkin that moonshine.

He nodded. I know it.

It's a wonder you ain't blind already.

It's a wonder I ain't put a strap to your backside already.

Yes, sir.

They sipped their coffee and ate their biscuits cold, watching the dark clouds drifting and shifting above the treetops, melding into blackness with the gathering dusk.

She told him all about Johnny Rae and the swimming hole, and about the half-broke ponies they'd raced in swirling dust clouds across the Palmer farm. She told him about the corn bread she'd baked and the fried chicken they'd eaten with green beans and the games of forty-two that kept them up laughing and drinking warm Nehis around the kitchen table until past her bedtime.

When she'd finished the telling, she refilled his cup and gathered up his plate and, in so doing, glanced at his face, apricot in the fireglow, and saw that he was weeping.

Dawn found Lottie sleeping. But Dillard Garrett, already risen, had sharpened his ax and his bucksaw before setting out for the Upchurch farm.

By the time Lottie was awake and stretching in her bedroll, her father had finished loading the Model A Ford, and she saw that he'd shaved his face and changed his shirt and had the coffeepot on and warming.

What time is it?

Early to bed and early to rise, he said without turning.

What're you doin?

He was squat on his haunches, chalking a scrapwood board with a blunt of old charcoal. He leaned aside that she might read his writing.

FIRE WOOD.

She lay back in her blankets and groaned.

They finished their coffee standing, their shadows long on the ground, and when they loaded the sign into the Upchurch car, they took care that they not mar the upholstery.

After a short drive in which few words were spoken, the water tower appeared on the horizon and they turned eastward into the low sunrise toward the Kiamichi. They parked by the river's edge and waded with their tools like naiad woodsmen through sumac and creeper knee-deep and fragrant and snatching at their pantlegs. Sunlight shafting through the tree canopy bathed them both in a silvery radiance. At last they came upon a small clearing at whose center a tree stump rose, and there her father set down his tools and turned a slow and appraising circle.

This'll do, he pronounced.

He chose a large hickory snag and hiked himself upward, grunting and scrabbling. Lottie handed up the bucksaw. He spread his feet and commenced to sawing at the thin and uppermost deadwood, which Lottie dragged backpedaling through the understory from where it landed.

He worked his way downward in this fashion, sawing and resting, resting and sawing, the zip-zip of the sawblade echoing in the empty clearing, until an hour had passed and his face was
damp and his hair and eyebrows and the ground around them were dusted white as from some dreamscape blizzard in whose passing her bootprints had tracked.

He brushed sawdust from his shoulders as he knelt to drink from the river, and when he'd finished his drinking, he crossed to the stump and sat, wiping his face with his shirttail. He waited for his trembling hands to quiet. When he rose again, he took up the saw and set to bucking the piled branches into lengths, the least of which Lottie gathered and carried to the twine she had laid on the ground in long, parallel strips.

Once the cut wood was sorted and piled, she returned to her father at the stump and set the largest of the remaining pieces on end. He rolled his shoulders and spit into his hands, and he split the rounds each cleanly with a single stroke of the ax. When all were thus cloven she gathered the half-rounds to her body and stacked them with the others, building in the forest marl a half dozen tapering piles.

All of this they did without speaking, like actors in a pantomime, moving in rote to an old and familiar script.

They parked under a towering elm by the railroad crossing. Here they'd set their wares in the shade, leaning the makeshift sign against the foremost of the wood bundles. When an hour had passed and no cars had stopped, her father lifted the sign and braced it atop the car. After another hour a Packard slowed and a woman with tight, blonde curls lowered the passenger window to ask how much. Ten cents a bundle, he told her. The woman turned to her husband, and they conferred in low tones until the woman smiled tightly and rolled up the window and the car drove on.

Lottie napped through the noon hour, and she woke to the sound of a locomotive. They had sold no wood and had eaten no dinner, and the rumble of the passing train cars echoed in the rumbling of her stomach. Her father watched her from the bumper where he sat with his jackknife poised as she propped herself upright, counting the cars that waited, idling at the crossing gate.

Palmer's truck was the last in the line. It trundled over the rails, and stopped, and reversed in a rack of bluish smoke and a low grinding of gears.

Afternoon! he called across the seat.

Her father nodded.

Had any luck?

Her father leaned and spat. Just got here.

Palmer raised a finger and drove the truck forward, crossing the tracks again and turning into the shade. Her father folded his knife and brushed the shavings from his lap. He rose stiffly, both hands moving to the small of his back.

Fixin to be a scorcher, Palmer pronounced, fanning his face as he approached.

Reckon so, her father replied, frowning at Lottie, who stood silent with her eyes downcast.

How much?

How's that?

For the wood. How much?

Well, her father said, scratching at the back of his neck. This here is hickory wood, all cut and dried. I reckon I'd take fifteen cents a bundle. They's about forty pounds apiece.

Fifteen cents.

Her father spat. Course, seein as how you brung us that
rooster and whatnot, I'd sell you the whole lot for... heck, call it seventy-five cents.

Palmer nodded, a hand to his chin. A man making his own calculation.

Tell you what. I got roosters in back and errands I got to run. If you ain't sold it all by three o'clock, how about you haul whatever's left down to Roebuck Lake. You know where that's at?

Down south somewheres.

That's right. I got me a little cabin there. You ask anybody where it's at. You haul it down there, and I'll pay you twenty cents a bundle, cash money, delivered and stacked. How does that sound?

How far you say it was?

No more'n seven or eight miles from where you're standin.

After three.

And I'll tell you what else. I'll throw in a chicken supper for your trouble. Palmer turned to Lottie and winked. You ask me, you couldn't beat a deal like that with a stick.

The lake, when they found it, was a shimmering oxbow over-hung by thick stands of winged elm and blue beech whose shadows formed a dark brow over the sun's mirrored eye. There was a hobo camp of Negroes and Indians where the gravel road emerged into a small clearing. Her father set the brake and stepped down to crouch amid the filthy men and the scorched grass and the glitter of broken bottles.

The cabins, when they found them, formed a tight crescent along a stretch of open shoreline. They were squat buildings of log and clay mud chinking, six in number, their stovepipes poked
like pea shoots through patchwork roofing tin. Scattered before them were outhouses, chicken coops, a small hog pen, tethered goats, clotheslines bowed with washing, and a motley assortment of sagging tents and boxing-plank shanties, the whole of it littered with logs and boulders and the shells of rusted motorcars through which brambles and saplings grew.

Men like farmers in overalls, and men like miners in stiff dungarees and suspenders, and men like the shadows of men in soiled rags gathered in groups of threes and fives and smoked and nodded and followed the Ford's arrival with wary circumspection. There were women as well, shapeless crones who swept or tended washing, and a lone camp dog lazing in the tree shade, perking its ears at the newcomers' approach.