Chapter 3
Jojo
Breakfast today was cold goat with gravy and rice: even though it’s been two days since my birthday, the pot was still halfway full. When I woke up, it was to Leonie stepping over me. She had a bag over her shoulder and was grabbing Kayla. “Wake up,” Leonie said, not looking at me, but frowning as Kayla whimpered to waking. I got up, brushed my teeth, threw on my basketball shorts and a T-shirt, and brought my bag out to the car. Leonie had a real bag, something made of cotton and canvas, although it was a little beat up, pulling loose at the edges. Mine was a plastic grocery bag. I never needed an overnight bag, so Leonie never got me one. This is our first trip north to the jail with her. I wanted to eat the goat hot, to heat it up in the small brown microwave, the one Pop say is leaking cancer in our food because the enamel on the inside is peeling off like paint. Pop won’t heat anything in it, and Leonie won’t give him half to replace it. When I started to put it in the microwave, Leonie walked by and said: “We ain’t got time.” So I put my birthday leftovers in a Styrofoam bowl; crept in the room to kiss sleeping Mam, who muttered babies and twitched in her sleep; and then went out to the car.
Pop was waiting for us. Looked like he had slept in his clothes, his starched khaki pants, his short-sleeved button-up shirt, all gray and brown, like him. He matched the sky, which hung low, a silver colander full to leak. It was drizzling. Leonie threw her bag in the backseat and marched back into the house. Misty was playing with the radio controls and the car was already running. Pop frowned at me, so I stopped and shuffled in front of him. Looked down at my feet. My basketball shoes were Michael’s; an old pair an inch too big for me I found abandoned under Leonie’s bed. I didn’t care. They were Jordans, so I wore them anyway.
“Might rain bad up the road.”
I nodded.
“You remember how to change a tire? Check the oil and coolant?”
I nodded again. Pop taught me all of that when I was ten.
“Good.”
I wanted to tell Pop I didn’t want to go, that I wanted me and Kayla to stay home, and I might have if he didn’t look so mad, if his frown didn’t seem carved into his mouth and brow, if Leonie hadn’t walked out then with Kayla, who was rubbing her eyes and crying at being woken up in the gray light. It was 7 a.m. So I said what I could.
“It’s okay, Pop.”
His frown eased then, for a moment, long enough for him to say:
“Watch after them.”
“I will.”
Leonie rose from buckling Kayla into her seat in the back.
“Come on. We got to go.”
I stepped in to Pop and hugged him. I couldn’t remember the last time I had, but it seemed important to do it then, to fold my arms around him and touch my chest to his. To pat him once, twice, on his back with my fingertips and let him go. He’s my pop, I thought. He’s my pop.
He put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed, and then looked at my nose, my ears, my hair, and finally my eyes when I stepped back.
“You a man, you hear?” he said. I nodded. He squeezed again, his eyes on the forgotten shoes I wore, rubbery and silly next to his work boots, the ground worn sandy and grassy thin in the driveway from the beating it took from Leonie’s car, the sky bearing down on us all, so all the animals I thought I could understand were quiet, subdued under the gathering spring rain. The only animal I saw in front of me was Pop, Pop with his straight shoulders and his tall back, his pleading eyes the only thing that spoke to me in that moment and told me what he said without words: I love you, boy. I love you.
* * *
It’s raining now, the water coming down in sheets, beating against the car. Kayla sleeps, a deflated Capri Sun in one hand, a stub of a Cheeto in another, her face muddy orange. Her brown-blond afro matted to her head. Misty is humming to the song on the radio, her hair piled in a nest. Some of it escapes, a loose twig, to hang against her neck. Her hair turning dark with sweat. It’s hot in the car, and I watch the skin all around her nape dampen and bead, and the beads run like the rainwater down the column of her neck to disappear in her shirt. The longer we ride, the hotter it gets, and Misty’s shirt, which is cut wide and loose around the neckline, stretches out even more so that the top of her bra peeks through, and tall as I am, I realize I can see it from the backseat if I look diagonally across the car. It’s electric blue. The windows begin to fog.
“Ain’t it hot in here?” Misty’s fanning herself with a piece of paper she’s pulled out of Leonie’s glove box. Looks like Leonie’s forged car insurance papers. People pay Misty twenty dollars to make copies of cards and insert their names into the copies so if they get stopped by the county police, it looks like they have insurance.
“A little,” Leonie says.
“You know I can’t stand heat. It makes my allergies act up.”
“This coming from somebody born and raised in Mississippi.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m just saying you in the wrong state for heat.”
Misty’s hair is dark at the root, blond everywhere else. She has freckles on her shoulders.
“Maybe I need to move to Alaska,” Misty says.
We taking back roads all the way there. Leonie threw the atlas in my lap when I got in the backseat behind her, said: “Read it.” She’s marked the route with a pen; it scrawls north up a tangle of two-lane highways, smudged in places from Leonie’s finger running up and down the state. The pen’s marks are dark, so it’s hard for me to read the route names, the letters and numbers shadowed. But I see the prison name, the place Pop was: Parchman. Sometimes I wonder who that parched man was, that man dying for water, that they named the town and the jail after. Wonder if he looked like Pop, straight up and down, brown skin tinged with red, or me, an in-between color, or Michael, the color of milk. Wonder what that man said before he died of a cracked throat.
“Me, too,” Leonie says. Last night, she relaxed her hair in the kitchen and rinsed it out in the sink, so it’s as straight and wispy as Misty’s. Misty dyed the tips of Leonie’s hair the same blond as hers a few weeks ago, so when Leonie stood over the sink and rinsed and hissed as the water ran over her scalp, over the chemical burns I’d see later, little scabs like dimes on her scalp, her hair looked like it didn’t belong on her, limp and flowing an orange-blond down the drain. Now her hair is starting to puff and frizz.
“I like it,” I say. They ignore me. I do. I like the heat. I like the way the highway cuts through the forests, curves over hills heading north, sure and rolling. I like the trees reaching out on both sides, the pines thicker and taller up here, spared the stormy beating the ones on the coast get that keeps them spindly and delicate. But that doesn’t stop people from cutting them down to protect their houses during storms or to pad their wallets. So much could be happening in those trees.
“We got to stop,” Leonie says.
“Why?”
“Gas,” Leonie says. “I’m thirsty.”
“Me, too,” I say.
When we pull onto the gravel strip in front of the little gas station, Leonie hands me the same thirty dollars I saw Misty hand to her when she got in the car this morning and looks at me like she didn’t hear me say I’m thirsty.
“Twenty-five for gas. Get me a Coke, and bring me my change.”
“Can I have one?” I push. I can imagine the dark burning sweetness of it. I swallow and my throat seems to catch like Velcro. I think I know what the parched man felt.
“Bring me my change.”
I don’t want to go nowhere. I want to keep looking down Misty’s shirt. Her bra flashes bright blue again, the kind of blue I’ve only seen in photographs, the color of deep water off in the Gulf of Mexico. The kind of blue in the pictures Michael took when he worked on the oil rig offshore, and the water was a living wet plain around him, making a great blue bowl with the sky.
The inside of the store is even dimmer than the dull glow of the spring outside. There’s a woman sitting behind the counter, and she’s prettier than Misty. Black curly fro, her lips pinkish purple from the AC, her mouth an upside-down U. She’s my color, and thicker than Misty, too, and a whip of longing, like a cut power line set to sparking, jumps behind my ribs.
“Hey,” she mumbles, and goes back to playing on her cell phone. Every wall is lined with metal shelves, and the metal shelves are lined with dust. I walk toward the dimmer back like I’ve been here before, like I know what I want and I know where it’s at. Like a man would walk. Like Pop would. My eyes burn and find the display case of drinks in the front of the store. I stare at the glass, imagining how wet and fizzy a cold drink would be, swallowing against the parched closure of my throat: dry as a rocky river wash in drought. My spit is thick as paste. I look back at the clerk and she’s watching me, so I take the biggest Coke and don’t even try to slip another in my pocket. I walk toward the front.
“A dollar thirty,” she says, and I have to lean toward her to hear because thunder booms, a great clacking split, and the sky dumps water on the tin roof of the building: a tumble of sound. I can’t see down her shirt but it’s what I think about when I’m standing out in the rain, the back of my shirt pulled over my head like it could protect me, but all of me wet, gas fumes thick with the smell of wet earth, rain running down to blind my eyes, to stream from my nose. It all makes me feel like I can’t breathe. I remember just in time and tilt my head back, hold my breath, and let rain trickle down my throat. A thin knife of cool when I swallow. Once. Twice. Three times because the pump is so slow. The rain presses my eyes closed, kneads them. I think I hear a whisper of something, a whoosh of a word, but then it’s gone as the tank pings and the nozzle goes slack. The car is close and warm, and Kayla is snoring.
“I could’ve got you a drink if you was that thirsty,” Misty says. I shrug and Leonie starts the car. I peel off my shirt, heavy as a wet towel, and lay it on the floor before bending to root through my bag for another one. When I pull it on, I notice Misty looking at me in the mirror attached to the back of the passenger shade while she reapplies gloss, her lips going from dry pink to glossy peach; when she sees I see her looking, she winks. I shiver.
* * *
I was eleven when Mam had the talk with me. By that time, she’d gotten so sick she spent a few hours in the middle of each day in the bed, a thin sheet looped around her waist, sleeping and startling awake. She was like one of Pop’s animals hiding in the barn or one of the lean-tos built on the side of the barn, secreted away from the heat. But this day she didn’t sleep.
“Jojo,” she called, and her voice was a fishing line thrown so weakly the wind catches it. But still, the lead weight settled in my chest, and I stopped mid-walk toward the back door, toward Pop, who was outside working, and walked into Mam’s room.
“Mam?” I said.
“The baby?”
“Sleep.”
Mam swallowed and it looked like it hurt, so I passed her water.
“Sit,” she said, so I pulled the chair next to her bed close, happy that she was awake, and then she pulled a slim, wide book from her side and opened it up to the most embarrassing diagrams I’d ever seen, flaccid penises and ovaries like star fruit, and began to teach me human anatomy and sex. When she started talking about condoms, I wanted to crawl under her bed and die. My face and my neck and my back were still burning when she laid the book down on the side closest to the wall, thankfully away so I couldn’t see it again.
“Look at me,” she said.
There were lines, new since the cancer, running from her nose down to the edges of her mouth. She smiled half a smile.
“I embarrassed you,” she said.
I nodded. The shame was choking me.
“You getting older. You needed to know. I gave your mama this talk.” She looked past me, to the doorway at my back, and I twisted, expecting to see Pop, or Kayla stumble-walking and cranky from her too-short nap, but there was nothing except the light from the kitchen casting a glowing doormat. “Your uncle Given, too, and he was redder than you.”
Not possible.
“Your pop don’t know how to tell a story straight. You know that? He tell the beginning but don’t tell the end. Or he leave out something important in the middle. Or he tell you the beginning without setting up how everything got there. He always been like that.”
I nod.
“I used to have to piece the things he told me together to get the whole picture. Piece his paragraphs together like puzzles. It was worse when we just started courting. I knew he’d been away for some years, up in Parchman. I knew because I listened when I shouldn’t have been. I was only five when he got arrested, but I heard about the brawl at the juke joint, and then him and his brother, Stag, disappearing. He went away and was gone for years, and when he came back, he moved into the house with his mama to take care of her, and worked. He was back for years before he started coming over, helping my daddy and mama with little things around the house. Doing chore after chore before he even introduced himself to me. I was nineteen, and he was twenty-nine. One day, me and him was sitting on my mama and daddy front porch and we heard Stag a ways off, coming up the road, singing, and River said: There’s things that move a man. Like currents of water inside. Things he can’t help. Older I got, the more I found it true. What’s in Stag is like water so black and deep you can’t see the bottom. Stag was laughing now. But then Pop said: Parchman taught me the same in me, Philomène. Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up. And it could be something simple as sex, or it could be something as complicated as falling in love, or it could be like going to jail with your brother, thinking you going to protect him.” The box fan hummed. “You understand what I’m telling you, Jojo?”
“Yes, Mam,” I said. I didn’t. Mam let me go and I wandered out to the yard and found Pop slopping the hogs. “Will you tell me again?” I asked him. “What happened, Pop? When you went to jail?” And he paused, a hitch in the smooth arc of the bucket, and he told me his story.
That twelve-year-old boy I told you about? Richie? They put him on the long line. From sunup to sundown we was out there in them fields, hoeing and picking and planting and pulling. A man get to a point like that, he can’t think. Just feel. Feel like he want to stop moving. Feel his stomach burn and know he want to eat. Feel his head packed full of cotton and know he want to sleep. Feel his throat close and fire run up his arms and legs, his heart beat out his chest, and know he want to run. But wasn’t no running. We was gunmen, under the gun of them damn trusty shooters. That was our whole world: the long line. Men strung out across the fields, the trusty shooters stalking the edge, the driver on his mule, the caller yelling to the sun, throwing his working song out. Like a fishing net. Us caught and struggling. Once, my grandmama told me a story about her great-grandmama. She’d come across the ocean, been kidnapped and sold. Said her great-grandmama told her that in her village, they ate fear. Said it turned the food to sand in they mouth. Said everyone knew about the death march to the coast, that word had come down about the ships, about how they packed men and women into them. Some heard it was even worse for those who sailed off, sunk into the far. Because that’s what it looked like when the ship crossed the horizon: like the ship sailed off and sunk, bit by bit, into the water. Her grandmama said they never went out at night, and even in the day, they stayed in the shadows of they houses. But still, they came for her. Kidnapped her from her home in the middle of the day. Brought her here, and she learned the boats didn’t sink to some watery place, sailed by white ghosts. She learned that bad things happened on that ship, all the way until it docked. That her skin grew around the chains. That her mouth shaped to the muzzle. That she was made into an animal under the hot, bright sky, the same sky the rest of her family was under, somewhere far aways, in another world. I knew what that was, to be made a animal. Until that boy came out on the line, until I found myself thinking again. Worrying about him. Looking out the corner of my eye at him lagging crooked like a ant that’s lost scent.
* * *
It’s not until an hour later, when I figure the shirt’s as dry as it’s going to get in the humid-close car, that I see it. A small bag, so small two could fit in the palm of my hand, secreted in the middle of my bundle of clothes. Like the dot of blood the size of a pin at the center of the yolk in an egg: life that would have been life, but not. It’s smooth and warm, soft to my touch. Feels like leather, and it’s tied together with a sinewy leather strip. I glance up. Misty’s dozing in the front seat, her head falling forward and jerking upright only to list forward again. Leonie’s got both hands on the wheel, her fingers tapping to the music on the radio; we’re listening to country, which I hate. We’ve been in the car a little over two hours, so we lost the Black station from the coast at least an hour ago. Leonie smooths the hair at the nape of her neck with one hand, as if she could caress it into flatness, and then she taps again. I hunch over my lap, turning toward the door, making a small room with my body, a screen. I pull the strip. The knot gives, and I tease it open.
I find a white feather smaller than my pinkie finger, tipped with blue and a slash of black. Something that at first looks like a small chip of white candy, but when I pick it up and hold it close to my face, it’s some kind of animal tooth, lined with black in the chewing grooves, sharp like a canine. Whatever animal it came from knew blood, knew how to tear knotty muscle. Then I see a small gray river rock, a little perfect dome. I swirl my pointer finger into the dark of the sack, searching, and pull out a piece of paper, rolled thin as a fingernail. In slanted, shaky script, in blue ink: Keep this close.
It’s either Pop’s or Mam’s handwriting. I know this because I’ve seen it all my life, on Catholic wall calendars, on the inside of a kitchen cabinet next to the refrigerator where they tack a list of important names and phone numbers, starting with Leonie’s. On permission slips and report cards when Leonie was too busy or absent to sign. And because Mam hasn’t left her bed in weeks and can’t hold a pen, I know it’s Pop who wrote the note, Pop who gathered the feather, the tooth, the rock, who sewed the leather pouch, who says to me: Keep this close.
My knees rub the seat in front of me. I can’t help it; I’ve gotten tall enough that the backseat of Leonie’s hatchback is close and tight. Leonie glances in the rearview.
“Stop kicking the back of my seat.”
I hold my palms, a warm open bowl, over the things that Pop has given me, which are in a tiny pile in my lap.
“I didn’t mean to,” I say.
“You should have said sorry,” Leonie says.
I wonder if Pop ever did something like this for her when she made this trip before. If he snuck out in the morning when Leonie was sleeping, at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m., and secreted something in her car, some little collection of things he thought might be able to keep her safe, to watch for her when he couldn’t, to protect her on her trips to north Mississippi. Some of my friends at school have people living up there, in Clarksdale or outside of Greenwood. What they say: You think it’s bad down here. What they do: frown. What they mean: Up there? In the Delta? It’s worse.
Up ahead, the trees by the side of the road begin to thin, and there are suddenly billboards. A picture of a new baby in the womb: a red-yellow tadpole, skin and blood so thin the light shines through it like a gummy candy. Protect Life, the sign says. I put the feather, the rock, and the tooth in the bag. Roll Pop’s note so thin it could be a straw for a mouse, and put it in the bag before tying it shut and putting it into the small square pocket sewn into the waistband of my basketball shorts. Leonie is not looking at me anymore.
“Sorry,” I say.
She grunts.
I think I know what my friends mean when they talk about north Mississippi.
* * *
Pop’s told me some parts of Richie’s story over and over again. I’ve heard the beginning at least too many times to count. There are parts in the middle, about the outlaw hero Kinnie Wagner and the evil Hogjaw, that I’ve only heard twice. I ain’t never heard the end. Sometimes I’d try to write them down, but they were just bad poems, limping down the page: Training a horse. The next line. Cut with the knees. Sometimes I got fed up with Pop. At first, he told me the stories while we were awake at night in the living room. But after some months, he always seemed to tell me part of his Richie story when we were doing something else: eating red beans and rice, picking our teeth with toothpicks on the porch after lunch, sitting in front of the television in the living room watching westerns in the afternoon, when Pop would interrupt the cowboy on the screen to say this about Parchman: It was murder. Mass murder. When Pop told me about the small pouch he kept tied to one of his belt loops, it was cold outside, and he was splitting logs for the woodstove that heated the living room. We were out of gas for the weekend. Mam had all the covers in the house on her, crocheted blankets and quilts and flat and fitted sheets, and still she moaned: My bones. Her hands tucked up under her neck, wringing one against the other, the skin raspy and chafed white, even though I lotioned them every hour. It’s so cold. Her teeth rattling like dice in her mouth.
“Everything got power.”
He hit a log.
“My great-granddaddy taught me that.”
The log split.
“Said there’s spirit in everything. In the trees, in the moon, in the sun, in the animals. Said the sun is most important, gave it a name: Aba. But you need all of them, all of that spirit in everything, to have balance. So the crops will grow, the animals breed and get fat for food.”
He put another log on the stump, and I breathed into my hands, wishing I had a hat for my ears.
“Explained it to me like this: if you got too much sun and not enough rain, crops will wither. If you got too much rain, they rot in the ground.”
He swung again.
“You need a balance of spirit. A body, he told me, is the same way.”
The logs fell.
“Like this. I’m strong. I can split this wood. But maybe if I had some of the boar’s strength, a little bit of wild pig’s tusk at my side, something to give me a little bit of that animal’s spirit, then maybe, just maybe,” he huffed, “I’m better at this. Maybe it come a little easier to me. Maybe I’m stronger.”
He split another.
“But never more than I could handle. The boar share so much, and I take so much. No waste. Waste rots. Too much either way breaks the balance.” He rested his axe on the ground. “Get me another log.”
I returned from the pile, put the wood on the stump, balanced it just so. Snatched my hand away as Pop brought the axe down, clean through the center of it.
“Or a woodpecker could share something, too. A feather, for aim.”
My finger stung from the nearness of that blade, how close Pop come to my hand.
“That’s what you keep in your pouch?” I asked. I’d noticed his small pouch when I was four or five, and I’d asked him what he kept in it. He never told me.
Pop smiled.
“Not that,” he said. “But close.”
When that next log split, I looked up at Pop and shook, felt that splintering in my baseball knees, my bat spine, my glove of a skull. Wondered what power he had running through him. Where it come from.
I lay my head on the seat in Leonie’s car, rubbing the pouch Pop gave me, and wonder if he ever gave a small sack, full of things to balance, to anyone else. His brother, Stag? Mam? Uncle Given? Or even the boy Richie? And then I hear Pop:
Richie wasn’t built for work. He wasn’t built for nothing, really, on account he was so young. He ain’t know how to work a hoe, didn’t have enough years in his arms for muscle, or to know how to break the earth good, or to pull with just enough power to clean the bolls from a plant instead of leaving little half tufts of white, ripping the cotton in two. He wasn’t like you; you already filling out, getting longer through the shoulders, longer in the leg. You built like me, like my papa—good stock. But whoever his daddy was must have been skinny, weak-muscled. Maybe short. He was a bad worker. I tried to help him. Tried to break his line when he was hoeing, dig a little deeper in his grooves. Reach over and clean his plants better when we was harvesting. Pull his weeds. And mine. And for a while, a few months, it worked. I was able to save him, kept him from getting beat. I worked myself so hard I was sleep before my body even hit my bunk. Sleep on the fall. I kept my eyes on the ground. Ignored the sky, all that open space pushing down that made fear gather in my chest, a bloated and croaking toad. But then one Sunday when we was doing laundry, scrubbing our clothes on the washboards with soap that was so weak everything smelled a little less like wet-stink but still didn’t smell good, Kinnie Wagner rode by with the dogs.
Kinnie was the inmate caretaker for the dogs. He was a legend even then. I knew about Kinnie. All of us did. They sang songs about him in the hill country of Tennessee, down through the Delta, all the way to the coast. He bootlegged and brawled and stole and killed. Had the truest shot I ever saw. Even though he’d already escaped Parchman once, and one of them break-proof prisons in Tennessee, too, they still put him over the dogs. Even though he put more than one lawman in the dirt. Poor White people all through the South loved him for it, loved him for spitting in the eye of the law. For blinding it. For being lawless in the lawless South, which was worse than the frontier, for standing like David in an Old Testament place, where, for a century before Parchman, law had been meted out like this, Jojo: eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. I think even the sergeants respected him. Anyway, Kinnie and some of the men he’d chosen to help him was on their way to drill the dogs, to train to scent. And one of the men that ran with the dogs was dragging. Maybe he was sick. Maybe he had been whipped. I don’t know. But the short man fell, and his dogs broke loose, ran away from his dusted-over face, his receding belly, and ran to me. Hopped around me like big barking rabbits. Let they tongue hang. Kinnie, who was a big White man, six foot three, probably damn near three hundred pounds, laughed. Told the Black man on his knees in the clay: Nigger, you more trouble than you worth. And then pointed one of them big sausage fingers at me and said: You look skinny enough. I hung the pants I was wringing on the line on the way over to him. Took as much time as I could, because he was the type of man who expected me to run. To look at his big, healthy whiteness in awe. When I came, the dogs came with me, ears flopping, big black eyes rolling. Happy as pigs in shit. Can you run, boy? Kinnie said. I looked up at him; his horse was big and dark brown, but with a red tinge. Looked like you could see the blood boiling just under his coat, a river of blood bound by skin, knit together with muscle and bone. I’d always wanted a horse like that. I stood close enough to Kinnie so he know I’d come, but far enough away he couldn’t kick me. Yes, I said. Kinnie laughed again, but there was a knife underneath, because then he turned them blue eyes on me and said, But do you know your place? Shifted his rifle so the muzzle was facing me. A great black Cyclops eye. I let him think what he would about my place, but I said: Yes, sir. And hated myself a little bit for saying it. One of the dogs licked my hand. They like you, Kinnie said, and I need myself another dog trusty. I didn’t say nothing. Animals had always come to me. Mama said one time she left me wrapped in a basket on the chicken stump out in the back when I was a little baby, not more than a month, and stepped inside to get a sharpening stone for her knife; when she came out, one of the goats was licking my face and my hand. Like it knew me. So I just looked at the top of Kinnie’s head, his bushy blond hair. He looked at my neck, and he said: Come on. And turned his horse and kicked, and took off.
Once, we tracked a gunman through ten miles of swamp to an abandoned cabin, and I saw Kinnie put a bullet through that running gunman’s head at two hundred yards: the gunman’s skull burst. Kinnie had killed him as the sun was going down, so we camped next to a stream. The clouds rolled in, and the night was twice black and fogged with mosquitoes. We’d smoked the fire; all the inmates working with Kinnie and the dogs leaned in to it. Everyone but me and Kinnie. I mudded myself to help with the bites. The smoke boiled his face, melted it to nothing, but I still felt him watching me in the darkness. Knew it when he stopped his story about how a woman sheriff had caught him in Arkansas, sent him back to Parchman this last time, and then said: I could never hurt a woman; they knew that. And then his gaze is on me. I looked right back. Everybody got a line—something to break them, he said. I thought about Richie scrawling through the dirt with his hoe. Everybody, Kinnie said, and spat chew into the fire.
* * *
When I wake up, it’s midmorning, and Leonie done pulled off the highway. The atlas says we should take Highway 49 all the way up, deeper north, into the heart of Mississippi, and then get off and drive a ways to get to the jail, which Leonie has marked on the state map with a black star, but we’re not following the map anymore. We pass a grocery store, a butcher. A sagging building with a flat roof and a faded sign: Lumber Wholesale. The buildings thin and the trees thicken until we’re at a stop sign and there’s nothing but trees, and when we roll through the intersection, the road turns to dirt and rocks.
“You sure you know where we going?” Leonie asks Misty.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Misty says. It’s stopped raining, and the air is fuzzy with fog. Misty rolls down the window and holds her cell phone out. Aside from the chug and pull of Leonie’s car, it’s quiet; the trees are still and tall. To the left of the car, the trunks are brown and healthy, the undergrowth sparse. To the right of the car, the forest looks recently burned. The trunks are black halfway up, and the undergrowth is thick and bright green. I wonder at the stillness of it all. We are the only animals rooting through.
“Ain’t shit out here,” Leonie says.
“If I could get a signal, I could call him and ease your mind, but we too far out.” Misty wipes her phone on her shirt and slides it into her pocket. “I been here before with Bishop. I know where I’m going.”
“Where we going?” I ask the front of the car. Leonie half turns, so I can see her frown at Misty before she turns to the road.
“Got to stop for a minute. See some friends,” Misty throws over her shoulder. “Then we getting back on the road.”
We round a bend and there is a gap in the trees, and suddenly we are among a little cluster of houses. Some have siding like Mam and Pop’s, some have insulation paper and no siding. One is an RV that looks years off the road, with wisteria draping along the top and crawling down the side. It’s like the thing has green, living hair. Chickens run in bunches as a dog, a pit bull with gray-blue fur and a gaping maw, chases them. The chickens scatter. A boy, probably four, is sitting on the ground in front of the porch steps of a house with no siding, and he is stabbing the mud with a stick. He wears a baby’s onesie that fits him like a shirt, yellow underwear, and no shoes. He wipes his hand across his face as Leonie comes to a stop and turns off the engine, and it turns his skin from pale milk to black.
“Told you I knew where we was going,” Misty says. “Blow the horn.”
“What?”
“Blow the horn. Ain’t no way I’m getting out of this car with that dog running loose.” Leonie blows, and the dog, who has stopped chasing the chickens and trotted around to the car to sniff the tires and pee on them, begins to bark. I know what he says. Get out. Inhale. Get out! Inhale. Trespasser, get out! Kayla wakes up and starts to cry.
“Take her out,” Leonie says, so I unbuckle her.
The little White boy waves his stick in the air, and then grabs it with both hands, pointing it like a rifle. His blond hair sticks to his head, curls into his eyes like worms. “Pow pow,” he says. He is shooting at us.
Leonie cranks the car.
“We don’t need this—”
“Yes, we do. Cut it off. Blow the horn again.”
Leonie compromises. She doesn’t cut the car off, but she does blow the horn again, one long, loud honk that makes Kayla cry harder and burrow in to my chest. I try to shush her, but she can’t hear me over the barking dog, the shooting boy, the silence in that clearing in the pines, a sound as heavy and loud as the others, but not. I want to jump out of the car with Kayla, and I want to outrun that boy and his dog and that fake gun, and I want to walk us all the way home. My insides feel like they want to fight.
A White woman steps out the door of the house with no siding, steps past the dirt-faced child. Their hair is the same blondish-reddish color, with the same curliness. Hers is long, down to her waist, and except for her nose, which seems swollen in her face and burns red, she’s prettier than Misty. She’s also barefoot. Her toes are pink. She coughs, and it sounds like a scraping in her throat, and walks toward the car. The dog runs up to her, but she ignores it. At least it stops barking. Misty opens the car door and sticks the top half of her body out while holding on to the frame.
“Hey, bitch!” Misty says, like it’s a term of endearment. The woman smiles and coughs at the same time. The mist is settling like dew on her hair, turning it white. “Told you we was coming.” The boy is still shooting us with his stick gun while the dog licks his face. I want to run back home. Leonie drags her hand through the hair over her right ear, scratching at her scalp. She does this when she is nervous. You going to make yourself bleed, Mam told her once, but I don’t think Leonie realizes when she does it. She scrapes so hard it sounds like nails pulled over canvas. Misty is hugging the woman, who is staring into the car. When Leonie opens her door and steps out and says hey, I barely hear it over Kayla’s crying. She scratches again. The little boy hops up the concrete steps and disappears into the house. When Leonie walks up to the woman and all three of them begin talking to each other, her hands hang weak-jointed at her sides.
* * *
The floors are uneven. They are highest in the middle of each room in the naked house, and then slope down to the four shadow-sheathed corners. The inside of the house is dim through the porch, which is crowded with boxes so all that’s left is a walkway into the living room, which is also dim and crowded with boxes. There are two sofas here and one recliner, and this is where the shooting boy sits. He is eating a pickle Popsicle. The television sits on top of a box instead of a TV stand, and it’s playing some sort of reality show about people who buy islands to build resorts.
“Through here,” the woman says to Misty and Leonie, who follow behind. Leonie stops me with a raised arm in the living room.
“Y’all stay here,” she says before leaning forward to touch Kayla’s nose with her pointer finger and smile. Kayla’s face is still wet with tears, but she is sniffing and holding on to my neck and staring at the shooting boy as if there is something she wants to say to him, so I let her down. “I’m serious,” Leonie says, and then follows the woman and Misty into the kitchen, which is the brightest room in the house, lit by a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, laden with bulbs. There is a curtain hanging over the doorway, and the woman pulls it halfway shut and coughs and motions at the table for Misty and Leonie to sit. She opens the refrigerator. I sit on the edge of the sofa so I can watch the shooting boy in the armchair and Kayla, who is squatting feet before him with her hands in her lap, and the gap in the curtain where the women sit in the kitchen.
“Hi,” Kayla says, drawing the word out so that it’s two long syllables, her voice rolling up and down a hill. It’s the same thing she says to her baby doll when she picks it up first thing in the morning, the same thing she says to the horse and the pig and the goat, the same thing she says to the chickens, the same thing she says to Leonie when she first sees her. The same thing she says to Pop. She won’t talk much to Mam: when I carry her in the room to see Mam’s still body, Kayla shrinks into my chest and shoulder, puts on her brave face, and after five minutes of cringing away from Mam and saying shhhh with her finger in front of her lips, she says out. She never says hello to me. She just sits up or crawls over to me and puts her arms around my neck and smiles.
The boy looks at Kayla like she’s his dog, and Kayla hops closer.
“Hi,” she says again. There is a worm of snot running down the boy’s face. He jumps up to stand in the recliner, and seems to make a decision because he smiles, and his teeth are all capped with silver, the metal stopping them from rotting out of his mouth. He begins jumping in the chair like it’s a trampoline, and a few of the boxes stacked to the side of the chair wobble.
“Don’t get up there, Kayla.” They’ll both fall out. I know it. Kayla ignores me and swings one leg up and pulls herself into the chair, where the two begin talking to each other and jumping, having a conversation. I catch words: chair, TV, candy, all gone, move. I cup my hand around my ear, look at the women in the kitchen, watch the way their mouths move, and try to hear.
“I was sleep. That’s why I didn’t hear y’all at first. We all been sick back here.”
“It’s the weather,” Misty says. “One day it’s freezing, the next it’s in the eighties. Damn Mississippi spring.”
The woman nods, drinks a plastic cup of something, clears her throat.
“Where Fred?” Misty asks.
“Out back, working.”
“Business still good?”
“It’s booming, baby,” the woman says, then coughs.
Leonie is worrying the table with her hands.
“The warmer it gets, the better it gets.”
“You still got me?” Misty says.
The woman nods.
“Y’all want something to drink?” she asks.
“You got a cold drink?” Misty asks. The woman hands her a Sprite. I remember how thirsty I am, but I won’t say anything. Leonie would kill me.
“No thanks,” Leonie says, and the only reason I know it’s what she’s said is because I read her lips and the shake of her head. She speaks so low.
“You sure?” Misty asks her.
Leonie shakes her head.
“We need to get back on the road soon.”
There are cases of cold drinks stacked up against the wall: Coke and Dr Pepper and Barq’s and Fanta. When we drove up, I never would have imagined this much plenty in one house: it is stuffed with it, so much food and so many things, so much bulk—cases of soup, cases of crackers, cases of toilet paper and paper towels, three microwaves still in the box, rice cookers, waffle makers, pots. So much food the boxes of it reach to the ceiling in the living room, so many appliances, they are as tall as the lights in the kitchen. I am hungry and thirsty: my throat a closing hand, my stomach a burning fist. And Leonie at the table, Leonie who doesn’t usually care whether we accept food when it’s offered, Leonie who normally will take everything given to her with an open hand—now she says no. Now, when the goat and rice I ate is silt in my gut.
The woman crosses her arm over her chest and frowns. She’s trying to keep the coughs inside, but they come out in sputters. She shakes her head, and I know what she’s thinking because I can see it in the way she’s standing and staring at Leonie. Rude.
* * *
If Pop was here, he wouldn’t call this boy no rascal. Wouldn’t call him a scalawag, neither. And he definitely wouldn’t call him boy. He’d call him badass. Because he is. He’s tired of playing Kayla’s game of chase, so he’s stopped running. He crouches in front of the television, turns on one of his four game systems, and begins playing a game. It’s Grand Theft Auto, and he doesn’t know how to play it. He drives the car over medians, into stores, gets out of the car at stoplights, and runs. Kayla is bored. She walks back over to me and climbs into my lap, grabbing a bunch of my shirt, and begins talking to me seriously about wanting juice and graham crackers, so I can’t see the women, can’t see the glass of water that Leonie drinks now that she’s been bullied into accepting something, can’t see Misty and the woman leaning toward each other over the table, whispering to each other. Drawing pictures on the table with their fingers.
The boy is screaming at the television. His video game has frozen.
“No! No!” he yells in a voice that sounds like his nose is stuffed with snot.
The boy’s car has sailed off a road that winds around a cliff. The car has jumped the railing but is frozen in the air. The car is red with a white stripe down the middle of it, splitting it in two. The boy punches the buttons on the controls, but the game does nothing.
“Take it out,” the woman yells from the table.
“No!”
“Start it over,” the woman says, and then bends toward Misty again.
The boy throws the controller at the television. It hits and clatters to the floor. He bends and begins fiddling with the game station, pressing buttons, but nothing changes.
“Don’t want to lose my spot!” he yells.
The women ignore him.
Kayla jumps up from my lap and bends to pick up a blue plastic ball from the floor, about the size of two of her fists, and starts playing with it.
“If you take it out, it won’t lose your spot. It’ll save it,” I say.
I know this not because I have a game system but because I played Michael’s when he lived with us, so I know how they work. He took it with him when he left. The boy ignores me. He makes a sound halfway between a cry and a growl in his throat, something gurgling and whiny, and when he comes up in front of the shelf of game systems, he doesn’t stand or turn around and begin playing with Kayla again. He doesn’t grab another ball off the floor, a black one or a green one or a red one, all that I can see, and roll one toward us. He stands up and punches the TV. He hits it with his right hand first, then his left, and then his right, windmilling his arms so that his small fists connect with the plastic so hard it sounds like it’s cracking. It is cracking. His fist hits again and there is a firework on the car that bursts and stays, one shot through with white and yellow and red. He hits with his left and it does nothing, but then he hits with his right again and there is another firework burst on the car. It stays.
“What are you doing?” the woman yells from the kitchen. She’s half risen from the table. “You better not be messing with them boxes again!”
The boy hits again with his left. Nothing.
“What I say!” the woman yells, and she’s all the way standing now. The boy bends to the floor, grabs a T-ball bat, and swings. There’s a loud crunch, the sound of glass and plastic cracking, and for one moment, the entire car is one brilliant burst of fireworks, and then the TV winks black, and there is nothing on the screen, but before the screen there are the woman and the boy. She stalks past Kayla, who runs and launches herself into my lap and grabs my shirt with both hands, and corners the boy in front of the TV. He turns with the bat and whacks her on the left leg with it.
“MotherFUCK!” she half coughs and screams, and then she grabs the bat from him. She picks up the boy by one arm and holds the bat with another and yells, “What did you do?” Each word is a swing. Each swing makes the boy run. He shrieks. “What did you do!”
The boy’s legs are red wherever she hits him with the bat. He laps the woman like a horse on a merry-go-round, his face like that: open mouth, grimace, rictus. She hits him so many times, his cry goes silent, but that mouth is still open. I know what he is saying: Pain, please, no more pain, please. The woman drops the bat and the boy’s arm all at once, the bat dropping in a straight line to the floor, the boy sagging into a heap.
“Wait till your daddy come out the shed. He’s going to kill you.”
Leonie walks across the living room and takes Kayla from me. When she talks, she looks at Misty, who still stands in the doorway of the kitchen, holding back the sheet.
“We really got to get back on the road soon.”
“He’ll be in soon,” the woman pants.
“Y’all got a bathroom?” I ask.
“It’s broke,” the woman says. She’s sweating and wiping her hair back away from her face. “We use the toilet in the shed, but if you got to pee, it’s best you just go do it out in the yard.”
When I walk out, the boy has crawled back into his recliner, and he has curled himself into a ball and is crying noisy tears. Kayla reaches for me when I open the door, but Leonie holds her in a tight hug and walks back into the kitchen with her, away from the crying boy and the shattered television, as if that is what she needs to protect Kayla from. The woman is already there, drinking a cold drink, shaking her head. “This the second one he done did that to,” she says. “It’s called birth control,” says Misty. The woman coughs.
* * *
The front yard is still cloaked in mist, still empty. The dog has disappeared, but my hands still burn when I run to the car, the sweat coming in spikes with the fear of teeth. Nothing chases me to the car, where I open the doors on the driver’s side to make a shield and pee by the driver’s seat. I half hope Leonie will step in it. I zip and ease the doors shut, wonder where all the people that live in this small circle of houses are. Nothing comes for me when I glance at the house, study the closed front door, or when I creep around the back. There is a shed there, brown with a dark tin roof, papered like the house with weatherproofing liner, but no siding. There is a light coming through slits in one of the windows, which have been blacked out with aluminum foil. Someone is listening to country music inside, and when I put my eye to the slit, I see a shirtless man with a beard. He is tattooed, like Michael, but has shaved his head. There are tables with glass beakers and tubes and five-gallon buckets on the ground and empty cold-drink liter bottles, and I know I’ve seen this before, know that smell because when Michael built his lean-to in the woods behind Mam and Pop’s house, it looked and smelled like this. The reason he and Leonie fought, the reason he left, the reason he’s in jail. The man is cooking, moves as easy and sure as a chef, but there is nothing to eat here. My stomach burns. I sneak back around to the front of the house, fingering Pop’s bag in my pocket, wondering if that tooth is a raccoon’s, if it makes me so quiet and quick that even the dog won’t hear me when I circle around to the front of the house and ease inside.
When we leave fifteen minutes later, I’m not nervous and I don’t sweat. Misty’s trying to act like she’s not holding a paper bag tucked into a plastic bag, her arm straight as a yardstick at her side, the bag crinkling and hissing when she walks. Leonie looks everywhere but at Misty. She doesn’t hand Kayla off, but instead buckles Kayla in herself. When we pull away from that sad circle of houses with all that plenty inside, Misty is bent down fiddling with Leonie’s floor mats, and the bag disappears. I slide a pack of saltines and two bottles of juice I stole out of that house into my own plastic bag. After we leave the half-burnt room of pine trees, and we’re back on pavement and the highway, Leonie turns on the radio and lets it play louder than she ever has. I open my stolen bottle and drink the juice down, then pour half the other bottle into Kayla’s sippy cup. I hand one cracker to Kayla and slide one into my mouth. We eat like that: one for me and one for her. I let the saltines turn mealy and soggy on my tongue before chewing and swallowing so I don’t crunch. I am silent and stealthy in another way. Neither of the women in the front seat pay us any attention. When I eat and drink, I have never tasted anything so good.