Joan Hess - Arly Hanks 02 (10 page)

"Or at Raz Buchanon's knee."

"Or from a carnival huckster with tattoos."

"Or from Robin Buchanon," Estelle contributed, enjoying the exchange. "Or from a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. Or from a -- "

Ruby Bee stuck up a finger. "Did I tell you what happened earlier today? It was most puzzling." When Estelle shook her head, Ruby Bee related the confrontation with the puny, vile-mouthed Buchanon child.

"I can't believe he talks like that," Estelle said, tossing off her beer with a snort.

"But the strangest thing is why he was with Arly. She never did say anything about why he was in her custody or what crime he had committed. If you'd heard him, you'd probably guess murder or armed robbery." Ruby Bee took a handful of popcorn and pensively chewed it. "It's outright mysterious, if you ask me. Why on earth would anybody want anything to do with Robin Buchanon's bastards? They're such dirty, nasty things that the social worker crossed them off her clipboard and never mentioned them again. The school wouldn't take them, as sure as I'm standing here. I thank my lucky stars I don't ever have to see any of them again. But I sure would like to know why Arly had that savage with her."

"Why don't you ask her when you see her?"

Ruby Bee had to agree that was likely to be the best plan. She even wondered why she hadn't thought of it first.

The patches of sunlight twitched and flickered as the breeze rippled the oak leaves. Although it was October, the heat had swelled all afternoon and was hot enough to raise a sweat, had anybody been hiking on the north side of the ridge. Nobody was. It was calm and quiet, just the way it's shown in a primary-level picture book. If you listened real hard, you might be able to hear a train way down at the bottom of the hollow. Once the leaves were gone, you might even have a fair chance of seeing a flash of silver or the dull red of the caboose rumbling loyally on the tail end of the train. But except for a hoe and knife, and a rotting gunnysack beside them, there was nothing to prove civilization was right down at the bottom of the mountainside.

You wouldn't have to listen too hard to hear the flies buzzing, though. The big old blue-green ones were the loudest as they danced on the clotted nostrils and crawled on the dried-out lips of the body still lying there, undisturbed by anything except that drawn by instinct to decomposing flesh.

The two eyes could have been glass for all they saw. The mouth, opened in a moment of surprise, was shaped for all eternity to offer the first syllable of a common curse word. The rest of the body had been gnawed by predators, but not so fiercely that you couldn't recognize the various parts of it. One foot lay twisted under a thin wire stretched between two almost invisible metal stakes. There were other wires around the half acre that should have been thick with ginseng but wasn't, and those wires were attached to funny-looking contraptions whose purposes were not at all funny.

"Why, here's Arly now," Ruby Bee chirped. "Were your ears burning a while back? Estelle and I were discussing a minor puzzlement, and we decided you were the one to clear it up for us."

I came across the ten-by-ten dance floor and leaned over the bar to put my hand on my mother's shoulder. "You know, Ruby Bee, you're the most compassionate woman in Maggody. You're probably the most compassionate woman in all of Stump County, for that matter."

"I am?" she said, easing from under my hand.

"Yes, indeed. That's why I thought of you when I needed help. I knew I could count on Ruby Bee Hanks to do the decent, charitable thing." None of this was easy, but it was the best I could come up with. I licked my lips and plunged back in. "You've always taught me to care about less fortunate folks, and you've been an inspiration to me all my life."

"I have?" She retreated down the bar to get the beer tap between us.

"Cross my heart." I drew an "X" on my chest and tried to look just a shade misty at all those warm memories I didn't have.

Ruby Bee (now the Sister Teresa of the bar-and-grill industry) studied me for a full minute. "You didn't just drop in to spew out the compliments. What do you want from me, Ariel Hanks?"

(A small digression. If you don't know by now, I was not named after the etheral character in The Tempest. I was named after a photograph taken from an airplane. Ruby Bee loved the sound of it, and she never was one to win blue ribbons at the district-wide spelling bee. As a whole, the Hanks clan has always gone in for exotic-sounding names. The fact that there was a German measles epidemic about the time Ruby Bee was born is not mentioned in her presence. Work on it.)

"Do you remember that little kid I brought in earlier? He was starving, and your good cooking saved him from death," I continued.

"That awful creature with the filthiest mouth I've heard in all my born days? Is that the one you're referring to, Miss Smarty Pants?"

I hung my head. "I am sorry you had to hear some of those words. He's had a tragic upbringing, little Hammet, and he just doesn't know what to say in the presence of a fine, moral, kind, generous woman like you. He was so ashamed of himself that he cried all the way home."

"I can imagine," Ruby Bee said, her arms crossed and her voice chilly. She was all the way down to the cash register by now. "So why are you telling me all this and buttering me up like I was a hot biscuit from the oven?"

I told her how Robin had disappeared and the children had been without food for more than three days. I added very firmly that I intended to deliver them to Mrs. Jim Bob as soon as they were fed -- and that I'd promised them the best home cookin' in the county in order to lure them off the mountain. I tossed in a quick aside that Mrs. Jim Bob's cookin' was hardly comparable to certain other folks' efforts. I concluded with a vividly drawn picture of malnourished children outside in the jeep, almost too weak from hunger to walk through the door of the most outstanding grill in all of Arkansas. I did not mention that said victims were probably ripping up the seats of the jeep, if not ripping off the radio for a transaction at the pool hall.

She didn't look especially pleased, but she grudgingly said they could come in for a plate lunch special -- if they minded their manners and washed up first. I went back outside and gathered up my little herd of heathens, not bothering to warn them to watch their language. It would have been as successful as throwing rocks at the moon.

Hammet, however, had most likely related his previous encounter with the proprietor, because no one said a word as they followed me to the bar and sat down on stools. Sissie was carrying the baby, but she put the bundle on the floor before she took a seat. The bundle didn't stir.

I picked up the baby and drew back a corner of the quilt to gaze at a gray, translucent face and two closed eyes. "What's the baby's name?"

Sissie flashed some mossy teeth at me. "We jest calls him Baby. Do you reckon we can get some milk or something for him?"

Ruby Bee came out of the kitchen, armed with a dish towel just in case a savage leaped across the bar. "What do they want to eat?" she asked me.

"Whatever's convenient," I said before Hammet could offer an editorial. "Lots of it, please. Piles of it. Mountains of it. These kids haven't eaten in a long time."

She barked an order to Dahlia in the kitchen, then came around the bar to get a closer look at the baby. "That baby looks mighty unhealthy, Arly. What do you aim to do with it?"

"I don't know; I've never had any experience with this size infant. I suppose I ought to try to get some milk in him. You don't have a baby bottle in the back room, do you?"

"Why, this poor little thing needs a warm bath, clean clothes, and formula. You stay here and help Dahlia serve the plates. I'll have Estelle stop by the Kwik-Screw for a bottle and some formula, or at least condensed milk. I'm taking this baby over to my unit."

I handed over the baby, wondering if Bubba or Sissie might object to their brother being carried away by a stranger. Hammet raised an eyebrow, but none of the others so much as turned around as Ruby Bee went out the door. They were, I think, a bit bewildered by the appearance of Dahlia O'Neill. All three hundred pounds plus of her.

Dahlia was taken aback herself, but managed to dish up the plate lunch special and serve Bubba, Sissie, Sukie, and Hammet -- who tore right into it as if he hadn't eaten in a week. There were some grunts and snorts, not to mention a good deal of smacking and slobbering, throughout the meal, but no one said a word, obscene or otherwise. Dahlia stared at them, coming out of her reverie every once in a while to dish out another mound of blackeyed peas or mashed potatoes.

I took the opportunity to go over to the pay phone and call Mrs. Jim Bob to tell her the success of my mission, depending on how you gauge success in this situation. "I've got them," I said brightly when she answered.

"You do? Well, it's a relief to know that the little bastards are safe now."

She didn't sound all that enthusiastic, but I didn't allow that to faze me. "Yep, I've got four of them over at Ruby Bee's right this minute. They're almost finished eating, so we should arrive at your house within thirty minutes."

"Have they -- ah, have they bathed?"

I glanced across the room at grimy necks, hair snarled with twigs and dried leaves, clothing that the ragman would have turned up his nose at, brown feet, and eight hands glistening with grease. "They look right smart, Mrs. Jim Bob. We'll see you in a few minutes."

I hung up the receiver, then went out the door and around back to see how Ruby Bee was doing with the baby. Estelle drove up as I reached the covered walkway, and she grabbed a plastic sack before joining me.

"What is the emergency?" she panted. "Why in heaven's name does Ruby Bee want condensed milk and a baby bottle? I left Edwina Spitz in the chair, setting lotion dribbling down her neck, to dash over here." I began to explain, but she scuttled around me and went into Ruby Bee's unit, no doubt inspired to hurry by Edwina Spitz's impending fury. By the time I caught up with her, she was sitting beside Ruby Bee on the couch, and the two of them were cooing and making silly faces at a bundle wrapped in a clean blanket.

"Isn't he the sweetest little thing?" Ruby Bee said with a saccharine smile. "I could just gobble up those darling little toes like they were jelly beans. What's his name, Arly?"

"I don't know. The Buchanon children refer to him as Baby."

"Why, that's disgraceful!" Estelle said, bending over to touch a waving hand.

"Can't help it," I said. I waited while they fussed around and eventually got enough warm condensed milk into the baby to satisfy some maternal thermometer that was beyond me. I then mentioned that I was taking the infant to Mrs. Jim Bob's. I was informed that I was not.

If you think I argued the point with those two, you overestimate me. I went back to the bar and gathered up the kids, with a short explanation that the baby would stay with my mother for a few days. Bubba shrugged and belched. Sissie nodded and belched. Sukie stuck a finger in her mouth and belched. Hammet opted for a nofrills belch.

On that pleasant note, I herded everyone out to the jeep and drove out Finger Lane to the Buchanon driveway, which had red-brick pillars on either side and a wroughtiron grill spanning them like a rusty banner. A number stuck on one pillar proclaimed their residence as "Number Four." I was impressed, since I hadn't known we had house numbers in Maggody.

The house was an imposing red-brick box, with a white colonnade and other pretentious stuff. A circular drive, and a discreet sign indicating deliveries were to be made in the rear. Barbered shrubs. Flower beds lined with red bricks. One was supposed to presume it was an antebellum plantation house. If I hadn't known that it was built ten years back, when Jim Bob bought the land for a pittance from an elderly widow with failing eyesight and no family, I might have fallen for it. Ha, ha.

The Buchanon children were making all sorts of noises as they stared at what was by far the fanciest house they'd ever seen. They all gasped when Hammet pointed at the glass in the windows. Sissie said it were higher'n a mountain. Sukie said it were a fuckin' monster house. Bubba, the eldest and therefore most sophisticated, said it weren't neither as big as a mountain, and iffen she said it was he would whup her ass.

I saw a curtain twitch, so I knew Mrs. Jim Bob hadn't fled the county. I turned around to Bubba and said, "I have to decide what to do about your mother. Hammet says she's been gone for nearly a week, and that she said she was going to hunt ginseng. Right?"

"Reckon it's close enough."

"She don't normally stay gone when it's dark," Sissie contributed. "She allus comes back before -- " She broke off as Bubba glowered at her hard enough to produce spontaneous combustion.

"Thank you," I said hastily. "Now, no one knows where her secret patch is, which means I can't drive up there to see if she's still there. Do any of you have any idea why she might have gone off like this?"

"Bet a bear et her," Hammet said helpfully. "Probably kilt him."

Sukie's eyes filled with tears. "My mama ain't dead, motherfucker."

"I'm sure she's fine," I said. "Now, this is where you all are going to stay until I find your mother. The woman who lives here is very nice, and she wants you to have food and clean beds. She may seem a bit testy, but she does want to take care of you. Come along and I'll introduce you."