Читать книгу Fire Ants and Other Stories - Gerald Duff - Страница 8

A Mouth Full of Money

Nancy saw him first, way up beyond where the heat rising from the surface of the highway made everything look wavy like water. But I told her it was just a large cow or maybe Wylie Knight’s young bull standing in the middle of Farm-to-Market Road 1276.

“Nuh-uh,” my sister said, coming to a dead stop on the shoulder of the road. “That’s Weldon Overstreet, and I’m going back home.”

She was wearing shoes, sandals I remember, and so could afford to stand in one place for longer than a second or two at a time while she thought about something other than her feet. But I was barefoot, like always in the summer, and I had to stay in motion to keep the asphalt from burning clean through the skin on the bottom of my soles, tough though they were by the middle of August in East Texas.

“It’s not him, neither,” I said, lifting first one foot then the other like a soldier marching in place. “It’s just that Brahma bull, and he’ll go off in the woods when he sees us coming. Let’s get to moving.”

“Stand in the gravel if your feet’re burning. Get off the road.”

She knew I couldn’t do that because of the grass burrs up and down every roadside in that part of the country, so I didn’t even bother to answer.

“I’m going back home,” Nancy said. “You can go on by yourself if you’re so sure it ain’t Weldon.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You know Mama’ll just send us back out again, and we’ll have all this road to do over. Let’s just go on a little closer.”

I reached over and took the empty two-gallon jug out of her hands to carry, and that got her going again, not nearly as fast this time, but at least my feet were spending more time in the air and less on the black asphalt after I took up the burden she’d been carrying. But I knew my doing that would make Nancy even more nervous because she would realize we hadn’t come to the halfway point between our house and Sleetie Cameron’s, and so we hadn’t yet passed the big longleaf pine with its top shaped like a chicken’s head. That was what we used to mark the spot where the other person’s turn to carry began. On the way back after Sleetie had filled the jug up with the skimmed milk, we would both have to keep a hold on the wire handle to be able to carry the thing home.

“Weldon held Barbara Ann upside down in a tub of rinse water last Saturday,” Nancy said. “Mrs. Overstreet had to hit him on the back of the head with a bleach bottle to make him quit.”

“He was probably just trying to worry her some,” I said and shifted the milk jug from one side of my chest to the other. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, of course, and I didn’t like the way the sweat felt between my skin and the glass of the jug. It would catch and slide against my flesh with no warning, and every time it did it made my skin crawl like I’d seen a snake.

“He was trying to drown her,” Nancy said. “Not just worry her some. He was out to drown his own sister in a tub of rinse water that had done had several loads of clothes run through it.”

“Well,” I said. “Maybe. But Maggie Lee got him loose from her with that bleach bottle.”

“Had to hit him four times, Maggie Lee told Mama. Until Weldon forgot about Barbara Ann and looked back to see what was stinging him.”

The chicken’s head-shaped pine was coming up on the left, and up ahead through the heat waves rising off the highway whatever it was that was standing in the middle of the road hadn’t moved a peg. It was there like it had been bolted to the ground by somebody with a big wrench, and he had leaned back hard and taken a couple of extra turns to make sure it was fastened for good.

“It’s that young bull,” I told Nancy. “That’s all. See, I can tell it’s got horns on its head.” I turned my face sideways and squinted through an eye, and it did look like I could see something sticking up from the top of the dark bulk beyond the shimmering curtain of heat.

“Could be a hat,” said Nancy. “Or some sticks tied to his head.”

“Weldon don’t do that no more,” I said. “Tie things to his head with string. Not since Brother James told him it was what heathens did.”

“He’d sneak off and do it,” Nancy said. “I know he won’t wear it to Sunday school or church no more, but he’d do it off in the woods or when he’s off by himself walking the highways and roads.”

I knew my sister was right about that, so I didn’t say anything back to her. Weldon Overstreet would do one thing inside the Camp Ruby Baptist Church building and then another one just the opposite of it outside. Everybody knew that.

Like the time he began praying out loud for the boys on the battlefield and kept that up for several months each Sunday whenever the preacher would call for voluntary offerings to the Lord. When we told Daddy about it, he said Weldon must have heard something about the war in Vietnam on the radio and it had caught his imagination.

“I expect that’s not the last you church folks are going to hear from Weldon about the boys on the battlefield,” my father said. “He’ll be praying for them long after LBJ sends all those Vietcong back to their rice paddies. Weldon likes the sound of those words. Boys on the battlefield. It’s got a ring to it.”

“If he cares so much about them,” I said, “why did he thump that soldier’s ears in the Fain Theatre in Livingston, then? He did that until the popcorn girl had to call the deputy sheriff to make him stop.”

“He held that soldier from behind with one hand and thumped his ears with the other one,” Nancy said. “Delilah Ray saw him do it. Said that soldier’s ears was as red as fire by the time Weldon got through with them.”

“That Fain Theatre has been a major drawing card to Weldon Overstreet,” Daddy said and laughed real big. “It seems to get him all excited and makes him want to do things. I think his daddy is still paying some every month for all those seat backs he sliced up that time in the Fain.”

“You know what Weldon told them about that?” I said. “Said he liked the way the cotton stuffing popped out through the holes when his knife went through the plastic.”

“It was a feature showing Weldon didn’t care nothing about that time he got to using his pocketknife,” Nancy said. “He didn’t look back once at the screen after the first two minutes had passed, Delilah Ray said.”

But that had been all talked about back in our house there across the road from Estol Collins’s store, and right now there was something big up ahead bulked up in the middle of the highway. I wanted a better look at it, and I wanted it before we got much further on up Farm-to-Market 1276.

“Hold this for a minute,” I said to Nancy. “I’m going to try a trick way of seeing things way off.”

“Just set that jug down on shoulder of the road,” Nancy said. “It’s not my turn to carry it.”

She backed off with her arms close to her sides and kept a close watch on me as I found a smooth place to set the jug down. I understood and didn’t blame her. Several times before she got old enough to be wary, I had tricked her into holding something for me and then run off at top speed, leaving her to carry it the rest of the way to wherever we were going at the time.

“It comes from a book,” I said, setting the milk jug down and twisting it in the sand of the shoulder to make sure it wouldn’t tump over when I let loose.

“You get down real low like this and look under the heat rising off the water and you can see whatever you’re looking at a whole lot better.”

“It ain’t water. It’s a blacktop highway,” Nancy said, watching me lie down on the edge of the road in a push-up position to keep from getting burned on my bare chest and legs by the rocks and sand.

“Same thing, same thing,” I said and tried to sight along the stretch of highway running up to the thing way off in the middle of it.

“Is not, is not,” Nancy chanted. “Is not, is not.”

What I had read in the book was right. I could see better under the heat waves rather than through them, but just as I was zeroing my sight in on the bottom of the thing bolted to the road ahead, it moved off at a pretty good clip to the left, and I lost it in the stand of pines it walked into.

“He’s gone off the road,” Nancy said. “Now he’s hiding in the woods to jump out and catch us when we walk by on the way to Sleetie’s.”

“I doubt that,” I said, hopping up and brushing my hands together to knock off the sand and gravel. “Since he had four legs that I counted.”

“Did he?” said Nancy. “Was it four you counted? Don’t tell me no story again, brother.”

“Four,” I lied. “I counted them. Nothing but a cow or Wylie Knight’s bull.”

“I hope that’s what it is, all right,” Nancy said. “I hope that thing’s chewing on grass and leaves instead of quarters and nickels.”

What she was talking about was Weldon Overstreet in church on Sundays, the way he would carry his money in his mouth while he waited for the collection plate to come around. If one of the younger deacons was passing the plate, he’d make Weldon take all the coins out and wipe them off with his handkerchief before he’d let him put them in the collection.

But I had seen times when one of the old men was in charge, Mr. Collins or Milton Redd, say, and Weldon would just lean forward in the pew and urp a whole mouthful of currency into the plate, spit and all.

“Look at that crazy thing,” my mother would say, “mouth just full of money. Sit back in your seat and don’t look at him, Harold. It just encourages him to try himself.”

One Sunday, by the luck of the draw having to sit by Weldon, I couldn’t hear a word of what Brother James was saying during his whole sermon because all the money hadn’t come out of Weldon’s mouth when the plate came by, and he sat there for the full hour rattling a couple of leftovers, pennies or dimes by the sound of them, up against his teeth on both sides of his mouth, top and bottom. I remember I kept wondering the whole time whether he had saved those coins back on purpose or whether they had lodged under his tongue or behind a molar when he leaned forward to puke his money into the pie plate coming through. I knew one thing, though. When Weldon’s money hit that tin bottom it sounded different from everybody else’s. More like a rock than metal. The spit did something to the sound.

“I wish it was a watermelon we were going after,” I said to Nancy. “Instead of that old raw milk.”

“I don’t like to drink it,” she said. “It ain’t pasteurized. It’s liable to give you rabies.”

“Well, it don’t cost nothing,” I said.

“Ain’t worth nothing, neither.”

About then I stepped on a grass burr, not looking where I was going, and had to stop to pull it out of the sole of my foot. This time my sister consented to hold the milk jug while I operated on my foot, so I didn’t have to find a safe place to set it. When I finished, we fought briefly over whose turn it still was, but the argument was mainly a matter of principle so it didn’t last long.

“It’s some buzzards up there,” Nancy said, pointing toward where a sweetgum tree had fallen on the shoulder of the road several weeks back during a high wind. “I wonder what they’re after.”

“Maybe it’s a rattlesnake,” I said. “Or a piney-woods rooter.”

“Naw,” she said. “It’ll just be a run-over armadillo.”

I hoped against hope, but she was right when we got to it. The odds were in her favor by about a million to one, I knew, but it would have been nice to see something else dead on the road besides a swelled-up armadillo with its feet in the air and its shell worked over by bird beaks.

“Look how its tongue’s stuck out to the side of its mouth,” I said, leaning over to take a good close look at last night’s kill. “That’s just the way an armadillo will do the second it dies. Stick that tongue out like greased lightning. It’s armadillo instinct.”

“Frankie poked a stick at a dead one’s belly last Wednesday and a bird flew out of its neck,” Nancy said. “Living up in there.”

“Oh, it was not,” I began telling her. “You don’t know anything. Birds don’t live up inside dead armadillos. That’s just a fool superstition. That bird was just eating around inside there after the thing was already dead.”

I had already set the milk jug down again, well away from the armadillo for the sake of hygiene, and was leaning over to pick up a small piece of broken lumber that had bounced off somebody’s truck there on the highway, thinking to use it as a surgical instrument on the dead armadillo, when the first bellow came.

He had hidden down behind a big pine stump left from when the highway department men had cut down the dead tree itself to keep it from falling on the highway in case a big wind came up. Nancy and I hadn’t even noticed where we had got to on the road because of watching for what the buzzards were after, and when I looked up at the sound, Weldon Overstreet was about fifty feet away, standing flatfooted in the middle of the road with his head throwed back, yelling straight up into the sky like he was trying to make the noon-day sun itself hear him.

“Uh-oh,” Nancy said and began to cry, “I knew you was lying about counting four feet on that thing. It’s him, all right.”

One of the straps on Weldon’s overalls had come unfastened so that it was dangling, and I could see that the laces on his workshoes were loose and he wasn’t wearing any socks. His straw hat had fallen off when he jumped out from behind the stump and was lying in the road ditch propped up against a rock like the rock was wearing it. I looked at that hat so hard I can still see it today whenever I want to, that yellow straw with one side curled up so you could see the sweatband dark with where it had been around Weldon’s sweaty head.

“We got to run,” Nancy said. “Come on. Don’t you bust that milk jug.”

“No,” I said, watching Weldon lower his gaze from that hot blue sky and look directly at me with a big smile on his face. “If we turn our backs to run, he’ll catch one or both of us. We got to get on by him somehow.”

“Hot,” Weldon said, and then, “Woo wee. Y’all didn’t see me then. Y’all didn’t see me until I hollered.”

And then he threw his head back and did it again. I could hear the echoes from it ringing on down through the woods on both sides of the road, bouncing off sweetgums and stands of pines and moving further off toward the creek bottoms and wetlands.

Weldon’s face was as red as I’d ever seen it, clear from his hairline on down to where his neck was covered by his blue shirt and overalls, and it was glistening with sweat like it had just been rubbed with a wet dishrag. The shade of his face was an important thing. I knew it, and Nancy knew, and anybody living around Camp Ruby and acquainted with the Overstreets knew it.

“He looks just like fire,” Nancy said, beginning to ease into a backwards shuffle. “He looks like he’s fixing to have a fit any minute now.”

“Don’t you run back,” I told her. “Listen to what I said now. Backing up won’t do it, I flat guarantee you.”

By this time Weldon had moved out almost into the exact center of the highway and was standing facing us with his arms stretched out like a human barricade. His fingers all looked the same length to me and as big as pork sausages dangling there from the palm of each plate-sized hand.

“Y’all are going after milk,” Weldon yelled in a voice loud enough for a deaf man to hear. “Up at Miss Sleetie Cameron’s.”

The echoes came back from both sides of the road, Cameron’s, Cameron’s, Cameron’s, like a Houston station fading out on the radio.

“Yeah, we are,” I said, picking up the milk jug and reaching out to grab Nancy’s hand. “We got to go and do it now.”

“Y’all got to get by me first, you kids,” Weldon yelled in a voice loud enough this time to spook the two buzzards that were perched in a dead tree waiting for us to get away from their armadillo. All three of us watched them flap off, slow at first and then catching an updraft, beginning to circle up and up into that blazing sky until finally they were just two black marks against the blue background.

“I wish I was a buzzard,” Nancy said in a whisper.

Weldon had thrown his head so far back watching the birds rise up that I could see the roof of his mouth, pink instead of red, the lightest shade of skin I could see anywhere on his body.

“Nancy,” I said out of the side of my mouth, “when I say so, you run toward that left ditch over yonder and I’ll run toward the right one. That way he won’t know which direction to jump and we can slip on by him to Sleetie’s.”

“Say it quick,” said my sister. “Before I pass out here on the shoulder of the road.”

“Now,” I said, and we broke like a covey of quail in opposite directions, Nancy going to the left with her sandals slapping the pavement like rifle shots and me aiming for the far right ditch, the grass burrs I had been avoiding no longer a consideration.

We’d have both made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the milk jug. It began to slip because of the sweat all down my right side and when I looked down to grab it with my left hand, I took my eyes off where I was going and stubbed my right foot against a sweetgum root and started to fall. As I did I got my left hand under the milk jug and turned sideways in the air as I went down in full gallop, sending the milk jug flying like I was deliberately trying to throw it up after the buzzards.

The sun caught it in its rise, and it glittered in the air like a block of clear ice in a blue lake. That’s what took Weldon Overstreet’s eye, and he went to his left like an outfielder after a line drive and speared it with one hand as it started down for the roadbed of Farm-to-Market 1276. With the other hand, he scooped me up and in what seemed less time than a lightning bolt I was opening my eyes about two inches from the side of Weldon Overstreet’s head and looking deep into his right ear which I could see had a tangle of stiff red hairs growing right in the middle of it.

“Uh-huh,” Weldon said, and I could feel his voice rumble all through my chest and stomach where he had me grabbed up against him, “uh-huh, I caught you and the milk jug both.”

That close to him, the main thing that came to my mind was the way I was afraid Weldon was going to smell when I finally had to take a breath. I tried to push away from him with my free arm, the one that wasn’t stuck under his, but when I did he just tightened up, and I took that breath I was dreading before I realized it.

It wasn’t much at all, the smell, even hot and sweaty and worked up as Weldon was. It was like hot metal, maybe a pan that had been left out in the sun all afternoon and I had to pick it up and bring it in the house to wash. Just flat and even, not a stink to it at all.

I looked over the top of Weldon’s head for Nancy and saw her about twenty feet away, walking back toward me and Weldon and the milk jug at a steady pace, her bangs down in her eyes and a frown on her face that made her bottom lip stick out.

“Run,” I started to tell her, but about then Weldon cut loose with a bellow that filled up the pines and the yaupons and the sweetgums and the underbrush on both sides of the road, and my voice got lost in his and the echoes he set ringing.

“Holler,” was what he was hollering. “Holler, holler, holler.”

“Weldon Overstreet,” Nancy said after about the eighth or ninth bellow, “quit saying holler, and put him down on the road.”

She was standing right in front of him when I turned my eyes away from looking down into Weldon’s mouth where all the noise was coming from, and she was reaching up to grab at the bib of his overalls to get his attention.

“Put my brother down and hush up that racket,” she said in the crossest voice I ever heard her use.

“Nuh-uh, Nancy,” Weldon said. “I ain’t. I got him and the milk jug both. holler.”

“All right, then. If you won’t, you got to pick me up, too,” said Nancy and put her arms down stiff by her sides to be lifted up.

“Take the milk jug and don’t let it tump over and bust,” Weldon told her, leaning forward to hand it to her and then after Nancy had taken it and put it on the blacktop, sweeping her up in the air on his other side.

I didn’t know anything to say. I just hung there, smelling hot metal and looking back and forth from the wad of red hair in Weldon’s ear to the pooched-out lower lip of my sister.

“Hum,” Weldon said. “Hot, hot.”

“Yeah, it is,” Nancy answered and twisted around to get more comfortable underneath Weldon’s left arm. “Weldon,” she said, “I know that wreck you had with your daddy’s pickup wasn’t your fault.”

“No,” Weldon said in a long drawn-out syllable and the woods came back with the same sound, “Noooo.”

“I was coming to where the little road runs into the big road,” he said, “and I looked and there wasn’t nobody either way. No truck and no car. So I speeded up and put in the clutch just like Daddy said I was always supposed to do when I shifted them gears. It was to make them smooth. And then I turned the wheel to go to Livingston, but the pickup wanted to go straight off into the woods. And then the trees came up and hit at the bumper and the fenders and made the pickup stop and not run no more.”

“I don’t know nothing about shifting gears yet,” said Nancy and threw her head back to get the bangs out of her eyes, “but I know it wasn’t your fault, Weldon, that the trees hurt the pickup.”

“I bumped my head when it happened,” Weldon said. “It made the bleed come out and made a mark. Mama made me put a big bandaid on it. It was a sore place for a long old time.”

“Where?” Nancy said. “Right there where the scar is?”

She reached out her hand and touched a finger to a white line right in the middle of all that red skin on Weldon’s forehead and then she leaned forward and kissed the spot. Just a touch of her lips that made a little smacking sound in the center of that hot day on Farm-to-Market 1276.

“Now,” she said, “I kissed it and made it well. Let us get down to go get our milk, Weldon.”

“Harold’s got to make it well, too,” Weldon said and leaned his forehead toward my face. I never said a word. I just kissed that white spot, smelled metal, tasted Weldon’s sweat, and felt the heat rising from his big red head.

“Don’t drop this milk jug,” Weldon said, setting us down and handing the jug to Nancy. “It’s hard to find a bottle this big with a screw-on lid that fits it.”

“We won’t,” Nancy said. “Come on, brother.”

“I like to get off in the woods,” Weldon called after us as we walked off on up the road toward Sleetie Cameron’s. “I like to walk on to where there’s a bunch of high trees. I like to see where the squirrels have their nests. I like to watch the squirrels play on the tree limbs. I like to lean my back up against a big oak tree. I like to let my belly rest.”

“That bird was too living down inside that armadillo,” Nancy said to me as we pushed on up the highway. “Just like Frankie said. It flew out of its neck when she poked it with a stick. It was alive inside that dead thing.”

“All right,” I said to my sister as we walked together side by side. “O.K., fine. Here, give me the milk jug. It’s still my turn to carry it.”