We drank from our bottles of water and then set around in silence with our backs against the tree.
I don’t know how long we sat there, but I do know it was good and dark when we went up to the car. Tony stretched out on the backseat, and I sat behind the wheel and slid the seat back and tried to sleep. Jane leaned against the door on her side.
The moon was bright that night, and it was shining in on her, and the way the light was on her face, she looked like pictures I’d seen of Joan of Arc, or maybe it was someone else, but whoever it was, she was pretty.
I watched her sleep for a while, and then I nodded and went to sleep myself.
In the morning, when I woke up, things didn’t seem as bad as they had the night before.
I got out of the car as silently as I could, walked down to the creek.
It was a wide creek, and unlike those near my home, it was full of water, and the water was running fast. I walked along the creek till I came to a place where it went narrow and was partly fed by a spring. The spring bubbled up out of the ground and ran into the creek and joined up with water coming from some other source. My guess was it was the Red River, as we were heading in the direction of the Texas border. Or so I hoped. So far we were mostly working off the sun’s position and a lot of guesswork and wishful thinking.
I walked back along the bank and enjoyed the cool morning air and the greenery and the way the boughs grew close and shaded things. The trees that grew against the bank had thick roots, and they twisted out from the soil like well ropes and hung over the water. Watching the creek as I walked, I saw fish in the water. They were small, but they were fish.
I found a little willow growing up along the bank, and I got hold of it, bent it back and forth till it snapped off, and then used my pocketknife to clean it of smaller limbs. I cleaned it until I had a fishing pole.
Back at the car, I tried to open the back door as gently as I could. When I did, Tony stirred, looked at me, then turned his face into the seat and went back to sleep. Jane didn’t stir.
I lifted our flour sacks out, two in one hand, one in the other, and carried them down to the oak by the creek. I dug around in one of the bags until I found a ball of twine, and measured me off some and cut it and tied it to the bottom of the pole, ran it to the tip, and let the bulk of it hang. I bent a safety pin I had in place of a button on my shirt, made a hook, and tied it to the twine. I got the empty bean can from last night’s supper and walked along the creek until I saw some soft dirt up on a rise. It was good dirt, not sand. It was the kind of dirt that needed to be in the fields. It was the kind of dirt they had farmed out and scraped off the top of the earth, leaving only the bad earth, the sand that the wind could carry off as easy as if it were talcum powder.
I dug in the dirt with my hands, and it felt good to put my fingers in it. It was rich and full, and it would grow corn as high as a rain cloud. I didn’t know till right then how much I wanted to be away from dried-out Oklahoma. It was like I had been numb until this moment when my fingers went into the dirt. I was feeling things again. Smelling things again, like the rich dark earth and the sharp smell of the trees in the grove. In that moment, the sky seemed bluer and the sun seemed brighter, and at least for a little bit, it seemed as if there might be a brighter tomorrow. My mama always said that. No matter how bad things were, there was always tomorrow, and a possibility it would be brighter. Daddy hadn’t remembered that, but I told myself right then and there that I would.
Eventually, I found some worms. Some of them were grubs. I liked grubs the best for fishing, so I was glad to have them. I filled the can and went back to my fishing line lying beneath the oak. I cut another stretch of twine off the ball and wadded it up and stuffed it in my pocket. I put one of the grubs on the hook I had made from the safety pin and went along the bank with my can and pole until I came to where it was wide enough I couldn’t jump across and deep enough I could have stood in it to my waist. I put my line in there, and found shade beneath a sweet gum that was full with leaves and sat with my back against it.
Daddy and I had gone fishing a bunch of times, and I thought about him while I fished, and without even knowing it was coming, I started to cry. I thought about Mama, and how she would fry the fish after we cleaned them. How after a meal like that, Daddy would churn up some ice cream and we’d sit out on the porch with it in big bowls and eat it and watch lightning bugs fly along.
Mama would put her arm around me, and tell me stories, mostly things her parents had told her. Scotch-Irish stories from the old country about ghosts and leprechauns and such. She told me her parents had died of the smallpox, both of them, when she was a girl. She said a day never passed she didn’t think about them.
Mama always smelled like she had just taken a bath, and her breath was sweet as mint. She never missed telling me she loved me. I tried to remember if I had told her I loved her before she died. I wanted to believe I had.
When I was young, when it rained, I didn’t like the lightning and the thunder, and she would lie down beside me and tell me it wasn’t nothing more than a bunch of little men throwing balls at bowling pins, and that was the noise I heard, and the fire I seen in the sky was just them lighting their pipes.
It seemed so long ago.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a lightning bug.
Or rain.
And I didn’t remember what ice cream tasted like.
All of a sudden, I was crying. It came on hard, with me heaving and bawling like a lost calf. I was glad there wasn’t anyone around to hear me, and when I was through crying, I dipped some water in my palm from the creek and washed my face with it. After that, I was mostly all right.
I don’t know how long I fished, because I dozed a little, but eventually I felt a tug. I pulled up a little perch. I took it off the hook and laid it out on the soft ground, where it flopped around. It was what we called a sun perch, bright with colors and small in length, but pretty fat. I baited the hook again.
Sticking the pole in the dirt so that the line hung in the water, I took the twine out of my pocket and got the perch and ran the cord through its gills, then took it down to the creek and lowered it in on the twine. I tied the twine off to a root sticking out of the bank and went back to fishing.
By the time the sun was up high, I had four perch. I wanted to catch one more, but by then they had quit biting, and I wasn’t up for walking along the creek and trying to find another spot.
I took the fish and gutted them and cleaned them in the cold spring water. I built a fire and got a frying pan out of the flour sack, along with a can of lard. I scooped some lard into the frying pan with my spoon, and when the lard was melting I put the fish in the pan. There wasn’t any flour and egg to make a batter, but they’d fry up good just the same.
One of Jane’s books was in one of the bags, and I got it out to read. It was a book of poems. I wasn’t much on poems, but I read it anyway. I found it was good to move the words around in my mouth and my mind. It had been a while since I had done that, and I had pretty well forgot the fun of reading. I read and smelled the fish fry, pausing now and then to turn them in the lard with my spoon, since we hadn’t been smart enough to bring forks. The smell was starting to make me hungry, and my stomach was growling like a tiger.
I got some salt and pepper and dosed the fish a little with it, and by the time Jane and Tony were awake and come drifting down the hill to the smell of the perch, they were fried up and ready.
When Jane saw that I had been reading her book, she said, “That isn’t Tractor Digest.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I just put the book back in the sack.
“That smells good,” Tony said.
“It’s for all of us,” I said. “Get your plates and spoons.”
We had the fish for breakfast, and they were good, if I say so myself.
And I do.
10
Just about the time I was thinking things weren’t turning out so bad afte
r all, events took a turn for the worse.
I was driving along, and we’d actually been singing songs together, some Carter Family stuff, and though we weren’t too good as singers on the whole, Jane wasn’t bad by herself at all. I liked hearing her sing. She had a high sweet voice that cut the air like a sharp knife and then came floating down soft as a kitten’s belly.
She had taken off on a solo, and I was enjoying it, when we blew a tire. The car sort of bunny-hopped, then skidded, and I fought that wheel all over the place. Next thing I knew we had the back tire off in a ditch and the car was rocking like it was going to lean over on its side and die a hard death with us inside it.
I turned off the engine and got out, and Jane slid out on my side. Tony climbed out too, and we stood looking at the car like we were watching a great ship sink. The back right tire was blown out, and there was rubber all over the road.
“That one’s gone,” Tony said, like nobody could have figured that out without his help.
I touched the car, and it rocked. If I tried to get the spare tire and tools out of the turtle hull and change the flat, I figured the whole car would just turn over in the ditch. It was a big ditch. Wide and deep.
“Well, what now?” Jane said, as if everything we had done was my idea, and I personally had thrown tacks in the road to blow out the tire.
“I ain’t got no idea,” I said.
We stood there for about fifteen minutes, trying to will the car back on the road so we could fix the tire, but that wasn’t getting anything done. I was thinking on an idea that might work, if I held my mouth just right and the ground didn’t shift. Most likely, it was an idea that would end up with me in the ditch, under the car, with the blown-out tire and wheel lying down on my chest.
In other words, it wasn’t an idea that charmed me much, but I was considering on it. I thought I could drag enough limbs out of a pecan grove across the way, stack them in the ditch tight enough so that the blown tire could rest on it, and then drive the car out. It had about as much chance of working as me bending a tree over and getting on it, letting it go, and shooting myself to the moon.
I was about to suggest we start dragging limbs, when we looked up to the sound of an engine. A brown Buick was coming our way. Smoke was curling up from under the hood and filling the air, and I could smell something burning from where we were.
“Looks like we ain’t the only ones with car trouble,” Tony said.
I could see two men. One behind the wheel, the other sitting over on the passenger side. Even through the windshield, I thought they looked like hard men, and the closer they got, the more I was certain of it.
They stopped the car at the edge of the road next to the ditch. Nobody got out for a while. The car sat there and steamed white smoke from under its hood. Finally a man in a brown suit with blue pinstripes got out of the car. He had a light beige shirt on and a big wide tie that was mostly brown with blue designs on it. The way he stretched his leg to get out of the car, I saw he was wearing some two-tone shoes, brown and white, and brown socks with blue clocks on them.
He came forward about halfway between his car and ours, stopped and stared at us, and grinned. He was a nice-looking fella with a square-jawed face. He wasn’t wearing a hat. His dark brown hair was freshly cut. He had a toothpick in his mouth, and he was moving it back and forth over his teeth with his tongue like it was a dog looking for a place to lie down. He had an expression on his face like he’d heard a joke he liked but he wasn’t going to share it.
The other man got out on the passenger side. He was in his shirtsleeves. The shirt was lilac-colored and the rest of what he wore was black. He didn’t have on a tie. He looked a lot more pleasant than the driver.
Both men came over to us. The one in shirtsleeves said, “You kids seem to be in a fix.”
“From what I can tell,” Jane said, “and understand, I’m not a mechanic, but I’d say you got a busted radiator, and from the way your car sounds you might be just shy of a rocker arm going out.”
The man in the pinstripe suit laughed. He said, “No one can miss that the radiator has blown out, but you don’t know from rocker arms.”
“I guess I don’t know much, but I don’t like you coming up here smirking like you’re about to lay out some real mechanic advice or something, and you can’t even fix your own car.”
“Well now,” said the man in pinstripes. “I was actually thinking along those lines myself. I don’t plan on fixing nothing. I was just thinking how damn lucky we are to come up on you, you with a car that don’t need nothing but a tire, and us with a car that is going to have to be either replaced or jacked up and another car driven under it.”
“How would that work?” Tony said.
The man moved the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “That’s what we call an expression, kid.”
“I know what you mean,” Jane said. “Tony ain’t nothing but a kid. But I know what you mean. I think even Jack might know.”
I thought: Nice.
“Well then,” said the man in the pinstripe suit, “since you know I can’t jack our car up and drive another one under it, then you got to know that what I’m planning on is taking your car away from you. How about that, Little Snooty? Did you know that?”
“This isn’t your car to take,” Jane said, going closer to the man.
I said, “Jane. Don’t.”
“Yeah,” said Pinstripe, reaching out and clutching Jane’s face with his hand. “Don’t, Jane.”
She kicked him right between the legs. It was a good kick too. I figured if she’d kicked a potato she would have knocked it over their car and down the road a bit. It was such a hard kick, it sort of made me feel bad. It made him spit his toothpick out like he was shooting a bullet.
Even Tony went, “Holy moly.”
Pinstripe let out a bellow and his eyes nearly closed, like he was squinting them against a harsh light he hoped would pass. He dropped to his knees.
The man in shirtsleeves let out a laugh, like he’d just seen a circus monkey do something funny.
“Damn, if that wasn’t a good one,” he said.
“I’ll say,” Tony said. “I’ve seen her do it before.”
I took hold of Tony’s arm and tried to shush him, but Jane wasn’t finished.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Jane said.
Pinstripe, still on his knees, pulled back his jacket and showed us a gun in a holster. He reached across and put his hand on it.
I was going to yell “Run,” when the other man said to Pinstripe, “Put it up, you idiot. They’re just a bunch of ragged kids.”
11
“You got some spunk, kid,” the man in shirtsleeves said, and gave Jane a smile.
“What I got is a size-four shoe with a good solid toe on it,” Jane said. “And I suppose I put about two of the four in him.”
Pinstripe finally got to his feet. He was mad enough to chew nails and spit horseshoes. The other man said, “Ah, come on, Timmy, where’s your sense of humor?”
“Watch how much I laugh when I shoot her a couple times,” Timmy said.
“Come on now,” the other man said. “We ain’t got time for this kind of silly business.”
“It don’t take so much time to shoot somebody,” Timmy said. “And besides, I’d enjoy it.”
“What you’re going to do is shut up and help me get this car out of the ditch,” said the man.
Timmy looked at him like he might not like that idea, but the way the other man was looking at him, and him not even having a gun, showed us who was boss pretty quick.
“Oh, it’s all right,” Timmy said. “I wasn’t going to do nothing. I was just sore, is all.”
“Consider yourself healed,” said the man. “Go see how Buddy’s doing.”
Timmy went back to the car, opened a back door, and stood there talking. We couldn’t hear what he was saying, but now we knew someone was in the backseat, lying down.
“Thanks,” I said t
o the man. “Thanks for not letting him hurt us.”
“Don’t get too happy about things,” he said. “I might let him shoot you yet. I ain’t for killing for nothing, but my killing for something might be less than someone else’s. He had that kick coming. But him I know, and you I don’t have any idea about, and don’t want one. Only concern I got for you is we might need you for something.”
Timmy came back then. “Buddy ain’t doing so good, Tiger.”
“All right,” the one called Tiger said. “We got to make some tough choices.”
Tiger looked at us.
Jane said, “You wouldn’t be Bad Tiger Malone, would you?”
“I would.”
“Dang it,” she said.
“What I want you kids to do is go back there and help Buddy out of the backseat. There’s a little sycamore tree over there in the pasture, and I’d like you to help him over there so he can sit under it. You understand me?”
“Sure,” I said. “We understand.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Jane asked.
“He’s got a stomachache,” Timmy said.
Bad Tiger looked down the road, first one way, then the other.
“We ain’t got all day,” Bad Tiger said. “I’ll just keep the squirt here till you get back, ’cause I want you to come back, and right away.” He reached out and took hold of Tony, resting his hand firmly on his shoulder. “I wouldn’t want you to take too long or run off, ’cause I’d consider that bad behavior, and Tony here, he’d have to pay for your bad behavior. You wouldn’t like that, would you, Tony?”
“Pay how?” Tony asked.
“Let’s just say it would be harsh,” Bad Tiger said.
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Y’all come right back.”
Timmy smiled. “Or take your time. Run off, you want to. I’ll take care of Tony. I wouldn’t mind that at all. When I get through with him, y’all can use what’s left of him for third base or something.”