Chapter 5
Jojo
Kayla need to eat. I can tell by the way she keep crying, the way she keep hunching over and then knocking her head back and arching against her seat once we get back on the road. And screaming. I can tell there’s something wrong with her stomach. It won’t stop hurting her. She need to put something in it, so I take her out and let her sit on my lap, thinking it might make her feel better, but it don’t. She scream a little softer, her cries a little less high-pitched and sharp. The pain’s knife edge dulls. But she still knocks her head against my chest, and her skull feels thin against my bones, against the stone where my ribs meet, her skull easy to break as a ceramic bowl. Leonie done laid her plants on the armrest between her and Misty, and minute by minute, mile by mile, those blackberry leaves get more and more wilted, the roots get stringier and stringier, sling their dirt loose in clumps. Kayla growls and cries. I don’t want Leonie giving her that. I know that’s what she think she need to do, but she ain’t Mam. She ain’t Pop. She ain’t never healed nothing or grown nothing in her life, and she don’t know.
She bought me a betta fish when I was six, after I kept telling her the same story, every day, about the tanks we had in my class at school, the betta fish, red and purple and blue and green, swimming lazily in the tanks, flashing brilliant and then dull. She came home with one on a Sunday, after she’d been out all weekend. I hadn’t seen her since Friday, since she told Mam she was going to the store to buy some milk and some sugar and didn’t come back. When she came back, her skin was dry and flaking at the corners of her mouth, her hair stuck out in a bushy halo, and she smelled like wet hay. The fish was green, the color of pine needles, and he had stripes down his tail the color of red mud. I called him Bubby Bubbles, since he blew bubbles all day, and when I leaned over his tank, I could hear him crunching on the fish food Leonie had brought home in a sample-size bag. I imagined even then that one day I could lean over his bowl, and instead of crunching, little words would pop out the bubbles that fizzed up to the surface. Big face. Light. And love. But when the sample size of fish food ran out, and I asked Leonie to buy me more, she said she would, and then forgot, again and again, until one day she said: Give him some old bread. I figured he couldn’t crunch like he needed on some old bread, so I kept bugging her about it, and Bubby got skinnier and skinnier, his bubbles smaller and smaller, until I walked into the kitchen one day and he was floating on top of the water, his eyes white, a slimy scrim like fat, no voice in his bubbles.
Leonie kill things.
* * *
Outside the car, the trees thin and change, the trunks shorten and they get fuller and green, the leaves not sharp dark pine but so full, hazy almost. They stand in thin lines between fields, fields of muddy green, bristling with low plants. The sky darkens. The forests and fields around us turn black. I put my mouth to Kayla’s ear and tell her a story.
“You see them trees over there?” She groans. “If you look at the ground under them trees, there’s a hole.” She moans. “Rabbits live in them holes. One of them is a little rabbit, the littlest rabbit. She got brown fur and little white teeth like gum.” She’s quiet for a second. “Her name Kayla, like you. You know what she do?” Kayla shrugs and sinks back in to me. “She the best at digging holes. She dig them the deepest and the fastest. One day it was dark and a big storm come and the rabbit family’s hole started filling up with water, so Kayla started digging. And digging. And digging. You know what she did?” Kayla’s breath hitches, and then she turns to face me and puts her mouth in my shirt and sucks in more air. I rub her back in circles, rub it like I could rub away the cramping, the hurt, whatever’s making her sick. “She dug and dug and the tunnel got longer and longer. The water wasn’t even coming in where Kayla was digging, but she kept on until she popped up out the ground, and you know what?” Kayla digs her fingernails in to my arm, then raises up a little to look out the window and points at the dark fields, at the thin line of trees with the rabbit hole underneath it. “Getting dark,” she says. Then she leans back in to me and slumps. “Uh-huh. Little rabbit saw the gray barn and the fat pig and the red horse and Mam and Pop. She dug all the way to our house, Kayla. And when she saw Mam and Pop she loved them, and she decided to stay. So when we get home, she going to be waiting for us. You want to see her?” I ask. But Kayla is asleep. She twitches and for a blink I imagine I know what she’s dreaming, but then I stop. She smells sharp like sweat and throw-up, but her hair smells like coconuts from the oil Mam used to put in it, the one that I use now when I pull her hair into little ponytails: two little cotton balls on the sides of her head. I block out the image of her in the wet earth, the size of a rabbit, digging a hole. I don’t want to know that dream.
When we pull off the highway and onto a back road, the sky is dark blue, turning its back to us, pulling a black sheet over its shoulder. The world shrinks to the headlights coming from the car, twin horns leading through the darkness, the car an old animal, limping to another clearing in the woods. Pop always told me you can trust an animal to do exactly what it’s born to do: to root in mud or canter through a field or fly. That no matter how domesticated an animal is, Pop say, the wild nature in it will come through. Kayla is her most animal self, a worm-ridden cat in my arms. When we finally pull into a yard and the trees open up, this place is different. It’s not like the huddle of houses in Forrest County. There is only one house here, and it is wide. There are windows all along the front, and warm yellow light shines through all of them. Leonie stops the car. Misty gets out and waves at us to follow. I walk to the porch with Kayla asleep in my arms, snoring, breathing out of her mouth, and I see up close the paint is peeling in thin strips with marker-thin lines of brown-gray showing through. The windows look a little cloudy, like the water my fish died in. The wisteria planted on each side of the front steps has rooted thick into the earth, grown as big around as a man’s muscley arm, and has twisted and twined up the railings to weave thick as a curtain along the front of the porch. Here, the animal coming out. Misty knocks on the door.
“Come in,” a man’s voice sings, and there is music behind it.
He’s a big man. We find him in the kitchen, boiling noodles for spaghetti. My mouth turns to water. I have never been so hungry.
“Smells good, doesn’t it?” he says as he walks toward us. He bounces, seems to walk on his tiptoes. He has a white long-sleeved shirt on, except it’s rolled up to his elbows. The shirt is like his porch, the thread coming loose at the neck, something that looks like green paint splattered across the front. His kitchen is green. I ain’t never seen a green kitchen. That’s when I smell the sauce. It pops in its pot on the stove and streaks his arm as he stirs it. He licks it off. The noodles he put in the water slowly sink, disappear down the edges of the pot as their bottoms turn soft. I frown when he licks his furry arm. His hair is pulled back on his head, and he has it in a little ponytail that sticks out, short as Kayla’s. “Figured y’all would be hungry,” he says. He’s the whitest White man I’ve ever seen.
“You figured right.” Misty hugs the man as she says this, turns her face so that she speaks it into his paint-splattered shirt. “Took us longer to make it here because the little one got sick.”
“Ah yes, the little girl!” he said. Leonie looks like she wants to shush him, but she doesn’t. “She’s—” He pauses. “Sticky.” Now Leonie looks like she wants to punch him. Her mulish look, Pop says. “Is the young man sick too?” I already like him better, even though when he looks at me, I see something like sadness in his face, and I don’t know why.
“No,” Leonie says. She crosses her arms when she says it. “We’re not hungry.”
“Nonsense,” the man says.
“Leonie,” Misty says, and looks at Leonie. I know it’s the kind of look that says something else without saying it, but I can’t read Leonie’s eyebrows, her lips, the way she nods her head forward and her long bangs fall in her eyes. Whatever Misty says, Leonie understands and nods back.
“We’ll eat.” Leonie clears her throat. “I was wondering if I can use your stove. I got something I need to cook.”
“Of course, my dear, of course.”
Up close, the man smells like he ain’t took a bath in a few days, but it’s not a musty smell. Smells sweet and wrong at the same time, like sweet liquor that done sat out in the heat and started turning to vinegar.
“Excuse the French, Al, but I’m fucking starving.” Misty smiles.
When I sit in the living room, Kayla stays asleep, breathing hot into my shirt with little puffs. The room has high ceilings and bookshelves on every wall. There is no TV. There’s a radio in the kitchen, where Misty is sitting at a counter stool, drinking a glass of wine Al has poured for her in a mason jar. The music, all violins and cellos, swells in the room, then recedes, like the water out in the Gulf before a big storm. When Leonie comes in from the car, holding her weeds in one hand, she trips on the rug covering the wooden floor, red and orange and white and frayed, and a bag falls from under her shirt, hits the carpet, and what was inside the crinkled brown paper slides out. It is clear, a whole pack of broken glass, and I’ve seen this before. I know what this is. The man is laughing at something Misty says, and Leonie will not look at me as she picks it up, scoops it back in the bag, and slumps over the counter before sliding it to Misty, who passes the bag to Al. He picks it up, tosses it into the air, and then makes it disappear like a magician.
* * *
Al is Michael’s lawyer.
“Boy’s around his age,” he says, pushing his sleeves up his arm and frowning after pointing at me, “and they thought he was selling weed in school.”
Misty swigs her drink.
“And do you know what they did to him?”
She shrugs.
“Brought him into the principal’s office with two other boys his age. Friends. Made them drop their pants and strip so they could search them.”
Misty shakes her head, her hair swinging around her face.
“That’s a damn shame,” she says.
“It’s illegal, is what it is. It’s pro bono, and the school will probably get off with some sort of censure from the courts, but I couldn’t not take it,” he says, shrugging and drinking. “Long moral arc of the universe and all.”
Misty nods like she knows what he’s talking about. She’s pulled out her ponytail to let her hair hang, and every time she nods or shakes her head, she does it so violently her hair swings, as languid and pretty as Spanish moss, across her back. She’s pulled her shirt down at the collar, let it sag, so her shoulder is a gleaming globe in the living room light. Al has all the lamps lit. The more she drinks, the more her hair swings.
“You do what you can.” Al smiles, touches her shoulder, and lifts his cup of wine. “How do you like it? It’s good, right? I told you it was a good year.”
“So what you doing about my man?” Misty leans toward him and raises her eyebrows and smiles.
“Okay, okay,” Al says, leaning back away from her to laugh before coming toward her, talking with his hands, telling her about whatever he’s doing to help free Bishop.
Leonie is sitting on the sofa next to me, sippy cup in hand. It took her around thirty minutes to cut the blackberry plant, boil the roots and the leaves. She boiled the root in one pot and the leaves in the other, while I hunched over my plate shoving spaghetti into my mouth, hardly chewing. She let it cool. She stood at the counter, squinting and talking to herself with her arms crossed, and then she poured half from one pot and half from the other pot into Kayla’s cup. It was gray. I shoved the last of the food in my mouth, went to rinse my plate off and put it into the dishwasher, which smelled sour, and watched while she asked Al if he had any food coloring and sugar. He did. She dumped a few spoons of sugar and drops of food coloring into the cup and shook it until it looked like muddy Kool-Aid. Now she’s sitting next to Kayla, who we left sprawled, asleep, on the couch, and she’s trying to nuzzle her awake. Every time she asks Kayla to wake up, kisses her ear and neck, Kayla reaches up and puts her arm around Leonie’s neck and pulls like she wants her to lay down, to go to sleep with her. Like she doesn’t want to be woken.
It scares me.
“Come on, Michaela,” Leonie says, and she tugs Kayla upright. Kayla opens her eyes and slumps like Leonie did in the kitchen when she passed that package across, whining and trying to lie back down. “You thirsty?” Leonie whispers, putting the cup in front of Kayla. “Here. Drink,” she says.
“No,” Kayla says, and slaps the cup away. It flies out of Leonie’s hand and rolls across the floor.
“She don’t want it,” I say.
“Don’t matter what she want,” Leonie say, rolling her eyes at me. “She need it.”
I want to tell her: You don’t know what you doing. And then: You ain’t Mam. But I don’t. The worry bubbling up in me like water boiling over the lip of a pot, but the words sticking in my throat. She might hit me. I did a lot of talking when I was younger, when I was eight and nine, in public. And then one day she slapped me across the face, and after that, every time I opened my mouth to talk against her, she did that. Hit me so hard her slaps started feeling like punches. Made me twist to the side, my hand on my face. Made me sit down once in the middle of the aisle in Walmart. So I stopped. But she doesn’t know how to make medicine out of plants, and I worry for Kayla. Two years ago, when I was so sick with a stomach bug that I could hardly get up off the sofa and make it to the bathroom, Mam told Leonie to go gather some plant in the woods and make a tea out of the roots. She did it. And because Mam told her to do it, I trusted her, and I drank it, even though it tasted like rubber. Leonie must have picked the wrong plant, or prepared it wrong, because whatever she gave me made me even sicker. She poured the gritty, bitter mess by the back steps, and a few days afterward, when I had worked whatever she gave me and the bug out of my system, I found a stray cat dead, carbuncular and rotting, by the steps. It had drunk whatever she’d poured into a pool on the ground.
Leonie’s picked up the cup, holding it to Kayla’s lips.
“You thirsty, right,” she says, and it’s an answer, not a question. Kayla coughs and grabs at the cup. My underarms spike and sweat, and I want to grab that sippy cup and throw it like she did, bat it across the room and snatch her out of the loose circle of Leonie’s arm. But I don’t. And then she’s sucking at the spout and turning up her cup and drinking, and I feel like I lost a game I didn’t know I was playing.
“She just need to sleep it off,” Misty says then. “Probably carsick, that’s all.”
Kayla is thirsty. She’s drunk half of it, and she’s pulling hard on the spout, her lips puckered like it’s a bottle. When she’s done, she lets the cup clatter to the floor, and then she crawls across the sofa and into my lap, grabbing my hand and saying, “Down,” which means up. She wants me to tell her a story. I lean in.
“I have a better vintage in the kitchen,” Al says, looking at Leonie. “Maybe we could sample it this evening.”
“Sounds good to me,” Misty says.
“I don’t know,” Leonie says. She’s looking at Kayla in my lap, Kayla who is beginning to fuss because I haven’t begun the story yet. She’s beginning to squirm and cry again like she did in the car before she threw up. “She ain’t feeling good.”
“I’m telling you, it’s probably carsickness. Let her sleep it off,” Misty says. “She’ll be fine.” And then she looks at Leonie like she’s saying two things at once, one with her mouth and the other with her eyes. “You been driving all day. Might be nice to unwind and take a break.”
I can’t read her yet. Leonie reaches out and smooths Kayla’s hair down, but it springs back up. Kayla curves away from her.
“You probably right,” Leonie says.
“You know how many times I threw up with my head out the window when I was a kid? I lost count. She’ll be fine,” Misty says.
It looks like Misty’s said the right thing this time, because Leonie sits back then. There is a wall between us.
“Michael got motion sickness bad. He can’t even ride in the backseat without feeling like throwing up.” It makes sense to Leonie then. “Must have got it from him.”
“See?” Misty nods. Al nods. They all nod and rise and head off to the kitchen. I take Kayla into the bedroom Al pointed us to earlier, with two twin beds. I take off Kayla’s shirt, which smells like acid, and wet and soap a rag from the bathroom next to the bedroom, and then wipe her off. She’s hot. Even her little feet. So hot. I take off everything but her drawers and lay down with her in one of the twin beds, and she puts her little arm over my shoulder and pulls me to her, like she does every morning we wake up together. “Doe-doe,” she says.
I lay there until the music goes quiet in the kitchen and I hear them moving out to the back porch. No glasses clink, no wine. I figure they’re opening up that pack Leonie brought. I lay there until I can’t no more, and then I carry Kayla into the bathroom and stick my finger down her throat and make her throw up. She fights me, hitting at my arms, crying against my hand, sobbing but not making no words, but I do it three times, make her vomit over my hand, hot as her little body, three times, all of it red and smelling sweet, until I’m crying and she’s shrieking. I turn off the light and go back into the room and wipe her with my shirt and lay in the bed with her, scared that Leonie’s going to walk in and find all that red throw-up in the bathroom, find out I made Kayla throw up Leonie’s potion. But nobody comes. Kayla sniffs and dozes off, hiccupping in her sleep, and then I clean all of it up with soap and water until the bathroom is as white as it was before. All the while, my heart beating so hard I can hear it in my ears, because I knew what Kayla was saying. I knew.
I love you, Jojo. Why you make me, Jojo? Jojo! Brother! Brother.
I heard her.
* * *
I try to sleep, but for hours, I can’t. All I can do is lay there and listen to Kayla breathe. Outside, somewhere far away off in the dark reach of the woods, a dog barks. It’s a hacking sound, full of anger and sharp teeth. At the heart of it all: fear. When I was younger, I wanted a puppy. I asked Pop for one, and he said ever since his time in Parchman, he couldn’t keep a dog. He said he tried when he got let out, but every one of the dogs he got, mutts and hounds, died within the first year of him getting it. When he was in Parchman, Pop said, once he started working with the hounds the prison used to track escapees, all he could smell, when he was eating or waking or falling asleep, was dog shit. All he could hear was the dogs, yipping and howling and baying, raring to tear. Pop said he tried to get Richie on with dogs so he could get him out the fields, but it didn’t work. I close my eyes and imagine Pop sitting on the high-backed chair in the corner of the room. Pop, with his straight back and his hands like tree roots, telling me more stories, speaking me to sleep.
Was one of them days when the sun bear down on you so hard feel like it’s twisting you inside out, and all you do is burn. One of them heavy days. Down here, it’s different; we got that wind coming off the water all the time, and that eases. But up there, they ain’t got that, just the fields stretching on, the trees too short with not enough leaves, no good shade nowhere, and everything bending low under the weight of that sun: men, women, mules, everything low under God. Was a day like that the boy broke his hoe.
I don’t think he meant to do it. He wasn’t nothing but a scrawny thing, littler than you, I already told you that, so he must have hit a rock or leant on it the wrong way, and that’s what did it. Kinnie had me running the dogs around the fields, working on they sense of smell. I was circling Richie’s field when I saw him walking with the two pieces in his hand, just dragging the handle in the dirt, little trail following him to the wood line. The driver, the man who set the pace for the day’s work, something like an overseer, saw Richie. He sat up on his mule and watched the boy’s back, and he looked more and more mad, like a snake drawing down and bunching up before he strike. I edged around the field until I could get close enough to Richie to hiss at him.
“Pick the handle up, boy. Driver watching you,” I said.
“He going to beat me anyway,” Richie said, but he picked the handle up.
“Who say?”
“He say.”
The boy was jittery around the eyes, even though he walked like he wasn’t scared. Them marks I saw on him when he came in Parchman told me he knew what it was to be beat, whether it was his mama taking a belt buckle to him or some man. But I knew the boy wasn’t ready for the whip. I knew he wasn’t ready for Black Annie.
I was right. Sun went down, and after supper, sergeant tied him to some posts set at the edge of the camp. So hot the sun still felt like it was up, and the boy laid there spread-eagle on the ground in the dirt with his hands and legs tied to them posts. When that whip cracked in the air and came down on his back, he sounded like a puppy. Yelped so loud. And that’s what he kept doing, over and over. Just yelping for every one of them lashes, arching up off the ground, turning his head like he wanted to look at the sky. Yelling like a drowning dog. When they untied him, his back was full of blood, them seven gashes laid open like filleted fish, and sergeant told me to doctor on him. So I cleaned him up as he lay there throwing up with his face in the dirt. I ain’t tell him to stop. Sergeant gave him a day to heal, but when they sent him back out in the field, them lashes on his back wasn’t anywhere near healed, and they oozed and bled through his shirt.
I can almost hear Pop in the dim room, which feels wet and close from all the hot water I ran to cover the sound of Kayla throwing up and to clean up after. He would shift and lean on his elbow, and his voice would rise out of the black like smoke. I wipe Kayla’s hair away from her head, and she sweats. Whenever Pop talked about Richie getting whipped, he told me about Kinnie, his boss in charge of the hunting hounds, who escaped the day after they flayed Richie’s back.
Kinnie Wagner pulled his last escape that day. It was 1948. Walked right out the front gates of Parchman with a machine gun he’d stole out of munitions. Warden was pissed.
“I’ll look a fool,” he said, “being the warden who let the damn man escape a third time. You want your job, you better catch him. Let the dogs,” he told the sergeant.
Sergeant looked at me and I got the best of the pack: Axe and Red and Shank and Moon, all dogs Kinnie’d named, and I let them loose and started tracking. But the dogs wouldn’t track the man that fed them, the man that first touched them, the man that raised them. Kept walking slow and sad in circles through that country, slinking through those thin trees under that heavy sky, and I followed them, catching Kinnie’s tracks clear, but slowed down by the animals so I had to go back at the end of the day, tell the sergeant the dogs wouldn’t track they master.
Him and two other sergeants and a gang of trusty shooters came out with me the next day, and it was the same. The hounds smelled that son of a bitch and thought he was they daddy. Couldn’t savage him because when they slept, they dreamed of him, of his big red hands and his gray mouth. The stink that came off of him from all his sweating as dear to them as the scent from they mama’s ears.
* * *
I can tell Leonie ain’t slept. She never came in the room last night, and this morning, the music is still playing in the kitchen on Al’s stereo, and all three of them look wrinkled: their clothes, their hair, their faces. Leonie’s looking at the empty chair across from her, so she misses when I walk in the room, Kayla in my arms, her head on my shoulder. Normally, she’d be asking for a dog (she likes hot dogs for breakfast), or pointing outside and pulling my hand and saying Pop. But I woke to her touching my cheek right underneath my eye, looking very serious, not smiling. Her little hand like a stick burned with fire and now throwing off heat, red and black. As I walk into the kitchen, Kayla breathes little huffs into my neck. I rub her back, and Leonie finally notices us.
“They got oatmeal on the stove,” Leonie says. All three of them are drinking coffee, black and strong. “Did she throw up again?”
“No,” I say. Leonie looks toward that empty chair again. “She hot, though.”
Leonie nods, but she don’t look at me. She look at the chair. Raise her eyebrows like somebody said something surprising, but Al and Misty are leaning in to each other, murmuring things, whispering. Leonie ain’t part of that conversation. I walk over to the pot and see the oatmeal crusted to the sides, burnt crispy on the edges, and jelly in the middle with cold.
“Let’s go get your man,” says Misty, and they all stand.
“But they haven’t eaten,” Al says. “They have to be hungry.”
“I’m not,” I say, and my mouth tastes like old gum chewed almost to paste. I figure I’ll eat some of the food I stole in the backseat on the way to the jail, ease the grinding suck of my stomach. Sneak some to Kayla if she’ll let me. She burns in my arms, her neck against my neck, her little chin digging in to my collarbone. Her legs dangle, lifeless as a carcass’s from a hook.
“Let’s go get your father,” Leonie says.
* * *
The jail is all low, concrete buildings and barbed-wire fences crisscrossing through fields. The road stretches onward, out into the distance, and for a while, this road points us toward the men housed here. There’s no other sign, nothing in those fields: no cows, no pigs, no chickens. There are crops coming in, baby plants, but they look small and stunted, as if they’ll never grow. But a great flock of birds wheels through the sky, swooping and fluttering, moving graceful as a jellyfish. I watch them as Kayla mewls in my ear, as we pass another sign, old and wooden, that says Welcome to Parchman, Ms. And then: Coke is it! But by the time we get out of the car in the parking lot, the birds have turned north, fluttered over the horizon. I hear the tail end of their chatter, of all those voices calling at once, and I wish I could feel their excitement, feel the joy of the rising, the swinging into the blue, the great flight, the return home, but all I feel is a solid ball of something in my gut, heavy as the head of a hammer.
When we get to the jail proper, Leonie and Misty sign our names into a book, and then we’re led into a room with cinder-block walls painted yellow. Misty follows a guard through a door set at the opposite end of the room, where we sit at a table ringed by low benches, like we could be taking a picnic while we wait on Michael, but there is no food, no blanket, and there is white pockmarked ceiling above us: no sky. Leonie rubs her arms, even though it’s warm in here, warmer even than outside. It feels like there’s no air-conditioning. She leans forward and rubs at her eyes, smooths her hair back from her face so for a second I see Pop, his flat forehead, his nose, his cheeks. That hammer in me twists, and then Leonie frowns, and her hair flops back over her forehead, and she’s just Leonie, and Kayla whimpers again, and I want to go home.
“Juice,” Kayla says. I look at Leonie, asking the question without saying nothing: raised eyebrows, wide eyes, frown. Leonie shakes her head.
“She got to wait.”
She reaches out to Kayla, brushes her fingers along the back of her neck, but Kayla says no and burrows in to my chest, her skull hard, her nose smushed into my shirt, trying to get away from Leonie’s hand. I’m looking at Leonie’s frown so hard that I don’t even see Michael when he appears at the door, two guards at his shoulders, who stop at the door and let him pass as it opens and clangs shut, and then all at once, he’s standing in front of us. Michael’s here.
“Baby,” he says. I know he ain’t talking to me or Kayla, but only Leonie, because it’s her who drops her arm and turns, her who rises and walks stiff-kneed to him, her that he hugs, his arms wrapped around her like a tangled sheet, tighter and tighter, until they seem one thing standing there, one person instead of two. He’s bigger than I remember around the neck and shoulders and arms, wider than he was when the police took him away. They’re both shaking, speaking so low to each other I can’t hear them, whispering and shivering like a tree, juddering in the wind.
It takes less time than I thought it would to check Michael out. Maybe he done all his paperwork beforehand. Misty is still in another room, talking to Bishop, but Michael says: “I can’t stay in here another minute. Let’s go.” Before I know it, we’re walking back out into the weak spring light. Leonie and Michael have their arms around each other’s waist. When we get back to the parking lot, they stop and begin kissing, wet, openmouthed, their tongues sliding onto faces. He looks so different than he did when he left, but he’s still the same Michael underneath, in the neck, in his hands, kneading Leonie’s back the way Mam used to knead biscuits. Kayla points out to the fields, fields covered in a fog, and says, “Jojo.” I walk across the parking lot, closer to the fields with her.
“What you see, Kayla?” I ask.
“All the birds,” she says, and coughs.
I look out at the fields but I don’t see birds. I squint and for a second I see men bent at the waist, row after row of them, picking at the ground, looking like a great murder of crows landed and chattering and picking for bugs in the ground. One, shorter than the rest, stands and looks straight at me.
“See the bird?” Kayla asks, and then she lays her head on my shoulder. I blink and the men are gone and it is just fog rolling, wisping over the fields that stretch out endlessly, and then I hear Pop, telling me the last bit of the story he is willing to share about this place.
After the sergeant beat Richie, I told him: “You got to keep that back clean.” Got clean rags and put them on him, and then changed them with supplies I stole from the dogs’ stash. I bound them around Richie’s chest with long strips. His skin was hot and runny.
“It’s too much dirt,” Richie said. His teeth was chattering, so his words came out in stutters. “It’s everywhere. In the fields. Not just my back, Riv. It’s in my mouth so I can’t taste nothing and in my ears so I can’t hardly hear and in my nose, all in my nose and throat, so I can’t hardly breathe.”
He breathed hard then, and ran out the shack where our group of trusty shooters bunked, and threw up in the dirt, and then I remembered again how young he was, how his big teeth was still breaking through his gums in some places.
“I dream about it. Dream I’m eating it with a big long silver spoon. Dream that when I swallow, it go down the wrong hole, to my lungs. Out there in the fields all day, my head hurt. I can’t stop shaking.”
I touched his narrow back, pushed one of the cuts to see if pus would come out, trying to see if it was infected, if that’s why he was sick with fever and chills, but it oozed a little clear and that’s it.
“Something ain’t right,” I said to myself, but the boy was kneeling over his sick in the dirt, listening to the trusty shooters calling to each other on they patrol, shaking his head like I’d asked him a question, right to left, right to left. And then he said:
“I’m going home.”
* * *
“See the birds?” Kayla asks.
“Yeah, Kayla, I see,” I tell her.
“All the birds go bye,” Kayla says, and then she leans forward and rubs my face with both hands, and for a second I think she’s going to tell me something amazing, some secret, something come from God Himself. “My tummy,” she says, “Jojo, tummy hurts.”
I rub her back.
“I ain’t had a chance to give y’all a good hello,” comes a voice, and I turn around and it’s Michael. He’s looking toward Kayla.
“Hello,” he says.
Kayla tenses up, grips me with her little legs, grabs both of my ears, and pulls.
“No,” she says.
“I’m your papa, Michaela,” Michael says.
Kayla puts her face in my neck and starts to shake, and I feel it like little tremors through my gut. Michael lets his hands drop. I shrug, look past Michael’s face, clean-shaved and pale, purple under his eyes, sunburn high on his forehead. He got Kayla’s eyes. Leonie’s behind him, letting go of his hand to grab him around the waist. He reaches behind him to her, and rubs.
“She got to get used to you,” I say.
“I know,” he says.
* * *
When we get back to the car, Leonie pulls out her little cooler and then hands out sandwiches that the lawyer must have made before me and Kayla woke up, sandwiches on brown bread thick with nuts with slabs of smelly cheese and turkey slices thin as Kleenex layered in between. I eat mine so fast I have trouble breathing, and I start to hiccup around the food, big bites, lodged in my throat. Leonie frowns at me, but it’s Michael who speaks.
“Take your time, son.”
He says it so easy. Son. He got his arm on the back of the driver’s seat, his hand wrapped around the back of Leonie’s neck, rubbing it, squeezing it soft. It’s something like the way Mam would hold me by the neck when we went to the grocery store when I was little and both of us could walk, up and down the grocery aisles. If I’d get too excited, like when we got to the checkout and saw all the candy, she’d squeeze. Not too hard. Just enough to remind me that we was in the store, around a whole bunch of White people, and that I needed to mind my manners. And then: she was behind me, with me, loving me. Here.
If I wasn’t hiccupping, I would cut my eyes at Michael, but the hiccupping is so bad I can’t breathe. I think of Richie and wonder if this is how he felt in them dusty rows, how they must have stretched to the end of the earth before him, how this place must have gone on forever. But even as I’m gulping to swallow past the food, to breathe easier, and another hiccup shakes through me, I know it must have been worse for the boy.
A rain begins, so light it’s like a gentle spray from a water bottle, and it turns the air white, and everything looks hazy. I want another sandwich, but Michael is sitting where Misty sat, and he’s eating his sandwich slow, tearing off his bites before putting them in his mouth. It’s one of the things I heard Pop say about Michael when he moved in with us: Mike eat like he too good for the food, he told Mam. She shook her head and cracked another pecan, picking out the meat. We were sitting next to each other on the porch swing. I’m still so hungry I can imagine the taste of those pecans, how the dust around the nut taste bitter, but the pecan is wet and sweet. Mam knew, but she ignored my thieving and let me eat. There’s only one sandwich from the lawyer left in the bag, and Misty still hasn’t eaten hers yet, so I swallow.
“We got some water?” I ask.
Leonie passes me a bottle of water the lawyer must have given her. The plastic is thick and has mountains painted on the front. The water is warm, not cold, but I’m so thirsty and my throat is so clogged I don’t even care. The hiccups stop.
“Your sister finish hers?” Leonie asks.
Kayla’s fallen asleep in her car seat, which I had to move to the middle. Misty’s back, and she’s sitting with me now that Michael’s here. Kayla has half of a sandwich in her hand, her fingers curled around it tight. Her head tilted back and hot. Her nose is sweating, and her curls are getting stringy. I pull the sandwich from her grip and it comes, so I eat the rest of it, even though it’s a little soggy where she was gumming it.
“Most of it,” I say.
“She look much better.” Leonie is lying. She don’t look much better. Maybe a little, but not much. “I knew the blackberry would work.”
“Something wrong with her? She sick?” Michael asks. His hand done stop moving, and he turns around to look at us. I stop chewing. In the gray foggy light, and in the close car, his eyes look bright green, green as the trees pushing out new spring leaves. Leonie looks disappointed he’s stopped touching her and leans across the seat toward him.
“Just some kind of stomach virus, I think. Or she was carsick. I gave her one of Mama’s remedies. She better.”
“You sure, baby?” Michael looks closely at Kayla, and I swallow the last of her sandwich. “She still looks a little yellow to me.”
Leonie gives a little half laugh and waves at Kayla.
“Of course she’s yellow. She’s our baby.” And then Leonie laughs, and even though it’s a laugh, it doesn’t sound like one. There’s no happiness in it, just dry air and hard red clay where grass won’t grow. She turns around and ignores all of us and looks out the front windshield, gummy with bug splatter, so she doesn’t even see when Kayla startles, her eyes open wide, and throw-up, brown and yellow and chunky, comes shooting out her mouth and all over the back of the front seat, all over her little legs and her red-and-white Smurfs shirt and me because I’m pulling her up out of her seat and into my lap.
“It’s going to be all right, Kayla, it’s going to be all right,” I say.
“I thought you gave her something for that,” Misty says.
“Baby, I told you she didn’t look good,” Michael says.
“Goddamnit sonofabitch,” Leonie says, and a dark skinny boy with a patchy afro and a long neck is standing on my side of the car, looking at Kayla and then looking at me. Kayla cries and whines.
“The bird, the bird,” she says.
The boy leans into the window and blurs at the edges. He says: “I’m going home.”