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