Читать книгу Weedeater - Robert Gipe - Страница 9

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RUCKUS

GENE

When Cora finished lining me out over what to do in That Woman’s yard, Brother come got me and we went down to the jail, put twenty dollars on the commissary of this girl from church. I was still inside when I seen Hubert Jewell out in the parking lot. His hair ran across his head in stripes, his eyebrows wadded together like plug tobacco. He was rubbing his arm muscles, which was like rocks. Hubert Jewell wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t nobody to mess with neither. Cats walked the other way when they seen Hubert Jewell. His nephew, skinny Albert Jewell, stooped to talk in his ear and Hubert turned away. Albert was Dawn’s brother. You’d see him in town, moving on all the store girls, gunning his big loud truck through red lights,

I was going to stand there till they passed, but the jail woman said, “Is that it?” and before I thought, I said it was and went outside.

Hubert Jewell said to Albert, “If you don’t know how to do it, you shouldn’t do it.”

I kept my head down, walked towards Brother’s vehicle.

Albert said, “What are you looking at?”

I looked up before I thought and said, “Nothing,” then seen Albert Jewell wadn’t talking to me. Albert said, “I aint talking to you, old dude,” and Hubert said something to him I couldn’t hear.

When I got close enough, Brother said, “Get in the damn car.” When I did, he said, “What are you thinking? It’s a dumbass step in the middle of two Jewells arguing.”

Brother fanned the gas, put the vehicle in gear, bounced over the railroad tracks, and threw gravel pulling out on the Drop Creek road.

“They’s a hundred women in there,” Brother said, pointing at the recovery center next to the jail. “A hundred women separated from mankind. Aint right.” When I didn’t say nothing to that, Brother spit his chewing gum out the window, said, “I heard Albert say that Tricia Jewell is ratting on Hubert.”

I said, “Why would she do that?”

Brother felt of his back tooth with his finger, said, “I’m gonna take them rehab girls some chewing gum.”

I said, “I might go back and work some more.”

Brother said, “Let’s go get some chewing gum for them women.”

I said, “We could.” Brother stepped on the gas. I said, “But I’d just as soon go work.”

Brother looked at me, then at the road. He had his vehicle wound up to where I thought it would fly apart. Brother said, “You’re a sight.”

Brother took me back over to That Woman’s. I started in on the ivy work and yard trimming. That Woman sat at a fold-up table on the porch, wearing a peach-pop tanktop and a flouncy flowerdy skirt, drinking a beer lit up by the sunshine, beer yellow as a caution light, out of a girl-shaped glass. She wrote in the book she was reading. I’d set a load of brush at the bottom of the steps and was heading back up the hill to the backyard. I wadn’t going to say nothing, just walk on, get on with my business.

“Say, Gene,” she said.

“Say,” I said, squinting up at her.

She said, “Be careful,” and I thought, shoo, I’d be careful with her, whatever she wanted me to take care with. I went on in the backyard, fired up the weedeater, let myself get lost in that.

Before long, Hubert Jewell come up the steps, Albert trailing behind, looking down at the muscles in his arms. I kept on weedeating. A while later, I seen them go back down. When I got done edging, I cut down ivy a while, hauled it off. I got the work going good enough I could give my mind over to think about things. Spent some time trying to think like a fish, so it’d be easier to catch fish. Thinking about having eyes on either side of my head give me a headache, and I had to stop thinking like a fish, least for a while.

Sun got close to the ridgeline. Bugs started to stir. I went to see if That Woman might still be on her porch. She wadn’t, but when I come up the steps, she come out, stood in the empty doorframe, said, “Gene, what are we going to do about a door?”

I said I didn’t know. She smiled and blinked real slow. She might have had another beer. I couldn’t see it mattered much. She wadn’t no drunk. You could see that.

She said, “How much I owe you?” I named a figure and she said, “OK.”

She was easy to work with. Always was.

She said, “Do you want a glass of water?” I told her I could drink some water. She wasn’t gone a second before she come back with a glass full.

I said, “You want, I could get Brother to hang a new door for you.”

She said, “You reckon we could get it done tomorrow?”

I said, “I’m sure we could.”

We stood there saying nothing. There’s days I go without talking to nobody. I hadn’t talked much at all, really, since Easter. Not since Sister died.

That Woman’s eyes darted like dragonflies. I felt she had something on her mind, something she wanted to talk about. I figured it had to do with Hubert Jewell coming up there. Figured it had to do with what Brother said about her sister telling on people. That Woman’s eyes settled off over my shoulder.

“I start teaching my class Tuesday,” she said. “I reckon Monday’s the holiday.”

I said, “I reckon that’s right.”

She squeezed hard on the door hinge. I asked her did it bother her to stay there without no door.

“I don’t reckon,” she said. “Should it?”

I sipped on my water. “I’d keep an eye on you if you like.”

She said she didn’t need that.

I said, “Let me know. There aint nobody else there at Sister’s.”

She said, “They gone for the holidays?”

I said, “Something like that.”

That Woman set on an old rocking chair with a fake leather seat.

I said, “I seen Hubert Jewell come up here.”

The sun went behind the ridge and everything got darker in a way made my head light. In the dim, That Woman’s face turned up at me, cool as the air from a coal mine.

She said, “You know him?”

I said, “Not really.”

That Woman rocked in her rocking chair. She looked at me awhile and then she looked out over the town, said “Did you ever get in over your head, Gene?”

“Several times,” I said. “Mostly out at the lake.”

She smiled.

I said,

“Is that right?” That Woman said.

“Like a cinderblock with hair, she said.”

That Woman said, “Mine too.”

I was getting my talking ability back. I was about to sit down in the other rocking chair next to That Woman when she said, “Well, thank you, Gene,” in a goodbye way. She gave me forty dollars. I told her when I’d be back with Brother to get her a door and I went up the hill and back over to where I lived, in the little house out behind Sister’s.

DAWN

Friday night, I was going back to Tennessee, to be with my husband Willett Bilson and his parents for 4th of July. Aunt June took me up to Mamaw’s, to get the Escort she said I could drive. June had to stay in Canard. Get ready for her college class. She said, “They might have me a job. If I do right.” Before we left we went to see my grandfather, Houston Redding.

Houston didn’t live up on the mountain no more. He lived in one big room in town. Houston was June and Momma’s daddy. Since he’d settled down, they’d let him live in the High-Rise Apartments with all them other old people.

When me, June, and Nicolette got off the elevator in Houston’s apartment building, there was a wall covered by a photograph of some Rocky Mountain scene—sharp mountains covered with snow, flowers in the meadow in the foreground. Nicolette took off down the sticky carpet through the bleach stink to Houston’s door with its ribbons and toilet paper roll firecracker 4th of July decoration done by somebody feeling good about theirselves for all they’d done to cheer up old people.

Houston’s room was twenty foot square. His bed was in the far corner, in the shadows beside the window. It was a twin bed had an old quilt on it from the little house around the bend from my grandmother’s, the place she’d chased him when his loafing and trifling got too constant.

There was a bookcase beside his bed. On top of it set a big boombox. On the shelves beneath it set plastic boxes each holding ten cassette tapes. There was twelve of those boxes on the shelves beside Houston’s bed. There were another twelve cassette boxes on the shelf to my right as we come in the room. There were old dime store frames filled with oranged-out seventies-looking pictures of my mother and grandmother and Aunt June. They hung next to black-and-white copies of pictures of musicians in suits and fedoras from the twenties and thirties, blurred pictures of pictures hanging in the same dime store frames as the pictures of my mother and aunt and grandmother. A sorry-looking meals-on-wheels lunch sat on a white foam tray beside the bed—syrupy pear slices curled together on their side like people died in their sleep, a slab of meat covered by a morgue sheet of gravy. There was a little kitchen set in from the rest of the room painted the gold of strip mine mud, had nothing on its counters but a box of devil food snack cakes and a ceramic man in a sombrero holding a ceramic basket in front of him. There was a cactus growing in the basket, placed so as to look like the ceramic man’s penis.

Houston said,

Nicolette said, “Who is that?,” pointing at one of the black-and-white pictures, a picture of a man sitting spread-legged on a chair, his mouth a grim stripe across his face, fancy socks showing where his suit pants had rode up, a banjo across his front.

“What’d you say?” Houston said, loud enough to be heard out in the hall.

Aunt June said, “Look at Houston when you talk to him, honey. So he can hear you.”

Nicolette turned, said, “Who’s that?,” and she slapped her hand flat against the wall below the banjo man with the fedora and the grim stripe of smile.

“Dock Boggs,” Houston said. “That’s Dock Boggs.” Houston marched up close to Nicolette and stuck his face in hers, said “You don’t know Dock Boggs?”

Nicolette laughed and grabbed hold of Houston’s ears. “No,” she said and went to twisting the ears.

Houston turned over a milk crate and said, “Sit down there.” Nicolette sat, and Houston pulled out one of the plastic boxes, taking out first one cassette and then another, holding them up to his face, pulling out slips of paper covered in typewritten names of musicians and songs paired the way they had been on the originals in his 78 rpm record collection. He settled on one of the cassettes and put it in his boombox. “You listen to this,” he said.

The music was terrible old banjo plunking, singing like they was sparkplugs up his nose. I said, “Aint no way a daughter of mine going to sit still for that.” And that’s when I learned how I didn’t know my own daughter, how rank a stranger she was to me, cause she set there and kept sitting there, fat little fists jammed up under her chin, elbows on her knocked-together knees. She set there and mumbled words to one song after another—no use for the red rocking chair—never had a dollar nor a friend—and Houston just looked at her like, finally here a child that will do right.

I said, “Nicolette, sit up straight,” and she didn’t even act like I was in the world, and when it switched over from Dock Boggs to Roscoe Holcomb, Nicolette wheeled around said, “That’s a different one, Houston. That aint the same one, is it?”

I said, “Nicolette, come on honey. We got to go see your daddy.”

Nicolette said, “Can’t he come here?”

I said, “No. We got to go back to Tennessee.”

Houston said to me, “Why don’t you leave her till you get back from Cora’s? She’d be good company.”

I said, “Nicolette, you want to do that?”

“Yes,” she said without looking. “Of course.”

Houston said, “Look here,” and when Nicolette turned he had a record cover had a skinny old-timer in a straw hat and a khaki shirt on the cover standing in front of a barn. Houston said, “That’s Roscoe Holcomb. That’s who’s singing now.”

Nicolette took the record cover out of his hands, held it up to her face the way he’d held the cassette cases up to his, and said, “That’s a good-looking man.”

Houston laughed his wheezy laugh and I got Nicolette by the chin, said, “You do what your papaw tells you.”

She said, “He aint gonna tell me nothing.”

I said, “Well, you do it anyway,” and me and June left out of there.

We were halfway down the hall when Houston come out, said, “Misty Dawn, let me see you for a second,” and when me and June come back towards him, he said, “June, you go on. I need to talk to Dawn a second.”

June looked hurt, but she went on. Back in the apartment, Houston took a pair of green headphones looked like they could’ve been Jesus’s down off a hook and put them on Nicolette’s ears. The foam in them was hard and crumbly, left black dandruff all over Nicolette’s shoulders.

I said, “Houston, I don’t want her wearing them.”

He hooked his finger at me. Pointed back towards the kitchen, back where Nicolette couldn’t see me. I went in there, Houston right behind me. We about bumped noses when I turned around.

Houston said, “Tell Cora I had a dream.”

His breath was shine and menthol, his nose a skin-covered beak.

I said, “Do what?”

He said, “Tell Cora I had a dream about her. Tell her I dreamed she was down inside a pumpkin. Stuck to the bottom. She was the candle down in the jack-o-lantern.”

I said, “Houston, stop.”

He said, “The face on the jack-o-lantern was mine, Dawn. Her light shone through my face.” Houston grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Somebody was shaking the pumpkin. They was wind trying to blow out the light.” Houston stopped shaking me. “Do you mind telling her for me?”

I said, “Kind of.”

He asked why.

I said, “Cause it sounds crazy.”

He said, “Dawn, tell her I’m worried something is going to happen to her. Tell her I’m willing to come back and look after her. Tell her I’m willing to let bygones be bygones.”

I said, “Houston, she caught you in the backseat of her car in the church parking lot during Sunday morning services with a girl my age.”

“Dawn,” Houston said, “that wasn’t what it seemed. Cora don’t even go to church.”

I said,

He said, “Dawn, I’m worried about her. That’s the truth. The fire was coming out of the top of her head.”

I said, “I aint leaving Nicolette here. You lost your mind.”

Nicolette hollered from the other room, “Yeah, you are.”

He said, “Dawn. Fire. Out the top of her head. I dreamed it clear as day.”

I said, “Listen to your music, Nicolette,” and to Houston, “Well, what is Mamaw spose to do about what you dream?”

Houston’s eyes got runny. His chin quivered. He pulled his jaw in and it got clear his teeth were out. He pecked the edge of a bill against the kitchen counter. He said, “Her hair was so black. Black as coal.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

He said, “Black is the color of my true love’s hair.”

I said, “Houston, I got to go.’

Houston’s shoulders trembled, like a dog after a bath. He said, “There was always fire in her, Misty Dawn.”

I said, “Houston, you got to settle down.”

He said, “That’s why she loved me. I aint scared of womanfire.”

I said, “You sure you don’t want me to take Nicolette?”

He said, “Promise me, Misty Dawn. Promise me you’ll tell her.”

“All right,” I said. “I promise.” Didn’t make no difference to me.

Houston pecked the bill envelope against the back of my hand, said, “Hey.” I looked up into his watering eyes. He face cracked a smile. He said, “That’d be good.”

* * *

JUNE WAITED till she got out of the parking lot before she asked.

“What did he want?”

I said, “Trying to worm back in with Mamaw.”

June crossed the new road that went up Drop Creek and into the old middle of Canard. Coal truck blew his horn at us. A city police leaning on his cruiser stared at us. I give him the stinkeye. Another coal truck downshifted, rolled through the stop sign at the corner.

June said, “I wish she would take him back. She just idles up there.”

Mamaw used to be good to get up in the face of the coal companies, challenging their mining permits, taking up for people who were getting blasted out of their houses, writing letters for people whose water got turned orange and poison, taking people to see the thousands of acres left bare and unstable—and back around the turn of the century, she and some others won a couple fights. But between the pills and the president, coal had knocked down most of the people willing to say something. People seemed tired out on fighting something big as coal, and though they still talked and had their meetings, it was mostly talk. That summer, Mamaw and this statewide treehugger outfit were lining up movie stars and such to come see what was going on. They’d had a dude in one of those boy bands and an actress who’d been about legalizing dope to come on flyovers. Mamaw paid for them flyovers with money she’d inherited from her sister, who made a bunch of money on coal.

I was proud of what Mamaw did. Houston had backed up Mamaw, when people would talk bad about her, soothing it over, so people would still come to their photo studio. So they could have money to live. It couldn’t have been easy. That was what he was talking about at the apartment. Loving Mamaw’s fire. When Mamaw got in a scrap, she was a woman on fire. As for that pumpkin shit, I don’t know what that was about.

I looked at my phone. I had a missed call from Willett.

I said, “Pull over, Aunt June.”

June stopped her car beside the railroad track at the only place for miles my cell phone worked. A bald man sitting on a four-wheeler cried into his cell phone behind us. A woman up ahead hollered into hers about the bad price she got for a bunch of mine batteries.

I called Willett about when we’d be getting to Kingsport. Willett wanted details. His mind don’t work right unless it’s full of stuff he don’t need to know. I told him, “We’ll be there when we get there, Willett. I got to help Momma.”

I must’ve sounded cross, cause Aunt June said, “Dawn.”

“Willett,” I said, “Why don’t you take care of yourself, stop worrying about us?”

Willett was at his mother’s. She was fixing 4th of July food. Willett’s nosiness always got worse when he was at his mother’s.

“Dawn,” Aunt June said.

“Why you got to take on everybody else?” I said. “Everybody else aint your problem.”

Albert said he’d heard people say my mother wore a recorder when she went to buy pills.

“Honey,” Aunt June said.

There was a strip of dirt twenty feet wide between the road and the railroad grade. Somebody’d planted four rows of corn in it. The stalks ran sixty yards down the tracks. The corn was tall as Nicolette. I told myself Nicolette wasn’t why I got married, but I guess she was.

I was getting heavy, couldn’t sit down without fat rolling over my middle, pinching me, making me grouchy. Only people skinny around here are on pills. My mom was skinny as a supermodel, a supermodel needed a good night’s sleep.

I got out of June’s vehicle, walked down the railroad track. I wished Nicolette was with me. She’d find things on the ground I never would. I turned to look at Aunt June. She stood outside the car, her elbows on the roof. Her head rested on her arms looking down the track at me. The wind turned the leaves upside down and the air looked like grape pop. It was fixing to rain.

“Willett,” I said into the phone, “I gotta go. I’m fixing to get hit by lightning. Hunh? Nicolette’s with Houston. At his apartment. In the High-Rise. Yes. We’ll be there before dark, yes.”

The raindrops came in stinging gobs, tiny jellyfish pelting me by the thousand.

I said, “I got to go, Willett.”

I hit the red button on the phone and my husband was gone. Thank you Jesus. A trailer set across the road from the train track cornfield. Car wheels filled up with cement all in a row down the edge of the yard kept people from driving in the grass. Outside toys, red yellow and blue, giant dollhouse, purple pink and white, a brokedown trampoline, a rabbit-wire pop-can silo messed with my seeing till I almost missed the woman on the porch, woman way bigger than me, sitting across a kitchen chair in the gloom, chin tipped up, peering over top of the paint-peeling porch rail. I didn’t wave at her, and she didn’t wave at me.

June came to Canard to try and straighten us all out. She’d been living in Tennessee, but she grew up here.

The woman on the trailer porch stood and turned around, her massive shorts thin and pale yellow, spotted and hanging wide around her knees. She swayed as she made her way to the door, a storm door without no glass in it, just a frame. She went in the house without closing the door, and I could see right through her house out a window on the other side, into the summer light, the rain light, dull and serious, the serious business of rain filling the river behind the trailer. Her house was too close to the river, the corn too close to the train track, her too close to me, everything one bad day away from crashing into everything else, one bad day away from getting washed away and ruined.

I was twenty-two years old. It was all ridiculous. I couldn’t see no point to it. I looked up into the sky, gray like line-dried bedsheets, tiny jellyfish pouring out of it into my eyes. All I did was think. How could I get rid of Willett? How could I get Nicolette somewhere easier? How was I ever going to lose any weight? Why did this woman have to live so close to the river? Why aint they figured out time travel yet? It never stopped.

I didn’t have no more business doing as much thinking as I was doing than a dog did doing the dishes. I had too much to do. But I couldn’t stop thinking cause it seemed the world was a blank, a bottle of pills without no directions for use on it. Somebody was asleep at the switch. Somebody was falling down on the job. I wish I knew who it was. I’d go where they work and beat their ass.

June come to my side like I knew she would. She had a raincoat on. I don’t think I ever had a raincoat. I’d just stand there dripping and Momma say, “She’ll be fine. She aint made of sugar.”

“Come on, sweetie,” Aunt June said.

My Aunt June’s face beneath the bright yellow hood of her raincoat was like the center of a flower, the place where bees go to get what they need, a place made to be touched, but I couldn’t touch it.

“Let’s go, honey,” Aunt June said.

I went with her, back to the car, out of the rain, and the dry beige inside of her clean red Honda car wadn’t no solace, nor were the cool turquoise lights of the dash. They were the same no solace as other people laughing when you got cramps. Same no solace as a sunny day on television when you’re cold and soaking wet and can’t remember your nose not running, your bones not aching, can’t remember sleeping through the night.

Twenty-two years old.

I said, “What the fuck, Aunt June?”

She looked at me for a second, stared out the windshield a lot longer. “It’s a good question,” she said, and started the car. June said, “Is Willett’s mother having a bunch of people over for the 4th?”

I said, “Just us I guess. You want to come?”

“No,” June said. “I need to get this class figured out.”

I said, “Well.”

Willett’s mother’s house was his father’s too, but his father was so sick and his mother was such a force that it was easy to say it that way—Willett’s mother’s house. The fall before, I finally got Willett to move out of his mother’s house. I did all right in town, but it was good to get out, get a place of our own, a place where things weren’t so fixed up, a place where you could walk down the road without worrying about being accused of doing something, of taking somebody’s something, of tearing up somebody’s something.

Willett’s mother would fix too much. There would be enough meat for twenty people and she would just cram whatever was left in the refrigerator or the freezer and it would stay there until it was no good.

June turned off the highway and headed up on Long Trail, where Mamaw lived, about a mile past where my daddy’s people lived in a gob of jacked-up houses against two hillsides and down in a bottom, close enough for constant spying and tormenting of one another. Mamaw lived off by herself, above everything.

We pulled in the carport next to Mamaw’s Escort. She came out on the patio, which she did more and more. Ever since I’d gone to Tennessee, Mamaw swore off housekeeping. She ate at the sink, let everything pile up where it fell.

“Have you got Tricia straightened out yet?” Mamaw thought my aunt June too ambitious in her plans to get my mother off dope.

“Mom, you want to come into town and eat, or go to the store?” June said. “You won’t have a vehicle until Dawn gets back.”

“I don’t need it,” Mamaw said.

June looked at Mamaw like she was a page of math problems. “Are you sure?” she said.

Mamaw put the key in my hand. “Be careful,” she said. “I love you.”

I said, “I love you too, Mamaw.”

“June,” Mamaw said, “You might as well be careful, too.”

“I love you, Mom,” June said.

Then me and June each got in our vehicles. I went and got Nicolette from the High-Rise and went to Kingsport. June went back to the house in town. And Mamaw went back inside her Mama Bear Wallow.

GENE

Next morning, me and Brother knocked at That Woman’s about eight. It was a minute before she come down. When she did, she was pulling a shirt on over another shirt.

I said, “I think we found your door.”

“Oh,” That Woman said, looking at the big door Brother held in front of him. “Do you think it will fit?”

“Well,” I said, “We’re thinking it’s your door.”

The door was the same color as the frame, but the glass knocked out.

“Oh,” That Woman said. “Where did you find it?”

Brother said, “At the river.”

That Woman said, “What was it doing at the river?”

I said, “Just laying there.”

That Woman didn’t have no shoes on, said, “Well, Let’s take it out in the yard,” pointed out towards the side of the house. Then she went back in.

Brother said, “She’s a odd one.”

Me and Brother took the door out in the side yard. That Woman went down to her vehicle and got out a hose and packed it up the steps. I run to help her, causing the door to slip out of Brother’s hands and go sliding down the hill, but me and That Woman and Brother was able to catch it before it run out in the street. We got the door washed and dried off mostly, and it didn’t take long to hang since it hadn’t been out there by the river but a little while. A little hammering and banging, and we was done.

That Woman said, “What do I owe you?”

Brother just stood there. That Woman looked at me. I said, “Whatever you think.”

She got her billfold out and give us eighty dollars, said, “Is that enough?”

We’d of been tickled with half that. Brother started down the steps. We’d told a man we’d help him tear the roof off his mother’s house, and I knew Brother was wanting me to help him get it done so he could go to wrestling at the Armory that evening, but That Woman stood there, her hand on that door, looking at the holes where the glass had been. The bugs was flying over the high grass in her yard and I said to Brother, “You go on. I’m gonna finish this yard.”

Brother give me a look, but he went on, so it must not have bothered him too bad.

I went to mowing. I was about finished, out in the side yard that evening when Belinda Coates pulled up in front of That Woman’s house in her pink Camaro. I was hoping maybe when I got done, me and That Woman would get a chance to talk—talk about how hot it was or how I got one of my injuries. Just whatever she wanted to talk about.

She had the quietest ways, That Woman did. She only wore colors you’d see in the woods, and when she moved her hands, it was like watching birds settle on a phone wire. I liked how there wadn’t no ruckus to her, so I was hoping Belinda Coates would leave her alone.

Belinda Coates was short and solid and would have been nice-looking if she wadn’t such a terror. You’d probably recognize her from the paper or the detention center website. She didn’t have no mother nor father, not that I ever heard of, and she mostly stayed with her uncle Sidney, who kept his name out of the paper fairly well, but we all knew was pretty much behind everything bad they ever put in the paper. And a fair amount of other bad as well.

Belinda sat in that gaudy mess of a car she drove, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel and checking her mirrors. I knew That Woman was in the house, but they wadn’t no way I would tell Belinda Coates that. I thought about mowing so the grass would throw on Belinda Coates’s vehicle. I thought that might make her leave, but more likely she’d start something up with me, which I didn’t have no interest in. I’d done my share of arguing and making a horse’s behind of myself, and I was trying my level best to steer clear of such.

I was weedeating under a weeping cherry tree. Belinda Coates started blowing her car horn and That Woman and her yellow dog come out on the screened-in porch to see what was going on.

I knew That Woman thought highly of me because when I stopped to drink a pop she had asked me would I be interested in feeding that dog and taking it for walks when she was gone. That Woman didn’t have no man nor kids, not that I could see, and it seemed that dog was near everything to her. I guess somebody who’d had it before had beat on it and tied it up and left it when they moved away and That Woman had saved it, and so she prized it even though it looked like every other yellow dog you’d ever seen.

Belinda Coates took a break from blowing her car horn when she seen That Woman on the porch. Belinda Coates started hollering, “Tricia Jewell, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get your ass down here.”

That Woman did a lot of cleaning up on her sister Tricia’s house. I know because I helped her do it. We packed clothes soaked in toilet water and broken glass and just plain filth down them steps for days. And when That Woman had them haul up some of her furniture from Tennessee to put in that place, I helped pack that stuff up them steps too.

That Woman come out from the screened-in porch and started down the steps, and when she did, Belinda Coates yelled up at her, “Who the hell are you?”

When Belinda Coates did that, the yellow dog stood up on its hind legs so it could see out the porch screen and started barking hard as it could go, rared up like a person, barks booming out over town like the tornado siren. That Woman tried to hush the yellow dog, but she couldn’t. She came down a few more steps and said, “I’m June. I’m Tricia’s sister. What’s your name?”

I had stopped weedeating by then and was standing sideways on the hill facing them, one leg higher up the hill than the other. Hard to stand like that, steep as it was.

“Don’t you worry who I am,” Belinda Coates said. “Where’s Tricia?”

That Woman come down some more, about twelve steps between her and Belinda Coates. That Woman sat down collected and calm, said, “She aint here, honey. I don’t know where she is. I wish I did.”

Belinda Coates come around the front of her car. She put her hand on the wall at the base of the steps. “I don’t believe you,” Belinda Coates said. “You’re lying. You’re just another lying Jewell.”

I stepped closer, still packing my weedeater.

“I aint a Jewell,” That Woman said, “but I do wish I was lying.”

“Tricia Jewell got my daddy throwed in jail,” Belinda Coates said.

Belinda Coates was talking about her uncle Sidney Coates.

“She got him throwed in jail and got his money confiscated cause she’s a rat snitch and when I find her she’s a dead rat snitch. Said my daddy sold her pills and he never did. Never sold her pill one.”

That Woman started punching buttons on her cordless phone. That’s when Belinda Coates come on up the steps and slapped the phone out of That Woman’s hand. That phone went flying, and Belinda Coates busted That Woman right in the side of her face and That Woman tried to stand up but Belinda Coates pushed her back down.

I was still a ways away and they was an unruly hedge between me and them, but I didn’t care, because Belinda Coates smacked That Woman in the face again, this time with her other hand on the other side of That Woman’s face, and I said, “Hey! You wait right there,” and I headed over there, because see,

So I said, “Hey!” again and then when Belinda Coates got a handful of That Woman’s hair and started yanking That Woman down the steps, I said, “You stop that now,” and stepped right into my weedeater and went chin first into them steps and when I tried to get up, my feet went out from under me and I went tumbling down That Woman’s hill and That Woman shouted and I imagined it was because of me, but more likely it was where Belinda Coates was flailing her, but whichever it was, I went over the edge of that wall, which was about a four-foot drop, and landed right on my forehead on the sidewalk in front of That Woman’s house.

My forehead split open like one of them TV wrestler’s and I sat up and wiped the blood out of my eyes and seen a man from the waterworks grab ahold of Belinda Coates and it surprised me how the bald of his head looked like the head of the lawyer lived next door to where my sister did before she shot herself the morning of Easter past, me trying to get in her locked kitchen door, my arm all bloody through the broken glass of the deadbolt, her all tore up because her husband was gone on pills and had took up with this girl they had known in high school who was also gone on pills. I begged my sister not to do it, her with the gun in her mouth, her who had fixed my meals my whole life, had got me little jobs and made Brother take me on, who read my stuff for me, who begged me to stay out of them payday loan places. I told Sister I couldn’t do without her and she shot herself anyway and when she did I had gone to that bald lawyer’s house and his wife looked at me through the locked storm door glass and said, “Gene, what’s the matter?” and I said, “I need some help with Sister.”

As it was, that waterworks man held Belinda Coates by one arm while he got the police on That Woman’s cordless, That Woman saying, “No, no, no, we don’t need the police, no, no, no,” and my head light as dried grass and that dog barking like if it didn’t, That Woman would tie her up and move off, and That Woman’s beautiful bathtub eyes telling me she didn’t need me to be her hero, and that I wadn’t never going to be no more to her than the man who mowed the yard. But that didn’t mean she didn’t need me.