“I’ll tell you this,” Lester Ray said tightly, “if what you say is true, then I’m relieved! I’m glad as hell you’re not my father. You’re nothin but a fuckin drunk.”
“I warned you, boy,” Earl said, whirling back around to Lester Ray. He was practically in the boy’s face. Lester Ray was taller than him by an inch, and they were looking eye to eye. His father’s face was flushed flame-red, sweat beading on his forehead and his upper lip. His eyes were wide and knifelike, stabbing at Lester Ray’s own. He reached out and shoved Lester Ray in the chest, causing him to stagger back half a step. The boy righted himself quickly.
It was something as unplanned and instinctual as a sneeze, so quick that it was over before he even knew he was doing it. The boy’s fist caught Earl on the mouth and nose and blood splattered as he went backwards, crashing against the wall. He slid down the wall and lay propped there, his head lolling to the side. Lester Ray had split his lip, and there was a lot of blood. His nose was probably broken as well. The front of the green jumpsuit was quickly covered with blood.
Earl did not move, his eyes closed. The woman let out a shriek. Then she stood next to the boy looking down at Earl. “You’ve kilt him,” she said.
Lester Ray was rubbing his knuckles, trying to massage away the stinging. “No,” he said, “he’s just passed out. I only helped him along a little.”
They stood there side by side for a few moments, gazing down at the inert, bleeding man on the floor. Then she looked at Lester Ray. Her face was broad and chubby, with her powder caked around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. She smelled of flat beer and talcum powder and strawberry shampoo. She winked at him, an expansive gesture that she, in her drunkenness, probably thought was subtle. “Less you and me, sugar, git somethin goin while he’s dead to the world, whatayasay?”
It flashed into Lester Ray’s mind that this might be the very picture of his mother, that this would be the woman his father would choose, the whore, his mother; it was unbearable to think that he, Lester Ray Holsomback, had sprung from the loins of something this hideous. He stood looking into her tired face, at her flat yet yearning eyes. His mother could not be anything like this. It was impossible. No. “No,” he said aloud.
“Why not, baby?” she said, completely misunderstanding his negative.
And it took him a few seconds to fully comprehend her question. “Because,” he said, “you make me sick to my stomach.”
Mrs. McCrory found her suitcase, but she didn’t know what to put in it. She put in a doily that had been knitted by her mother, yellowed and limp, and then she took it out. “What would I do with that old thing?” she asked aloud, as though a companion were in the room with her. She picked up a fly swat and inspected it closely, trying to decide what it was. She tossed that in. She decided she’d best put in some clothes; all she had were the cotton house dresses, so she scooped a batch of them in her arms directly from the closet, with the hangers still dangling from them, and shoved them in. Her underwear. The boy’s wife had stolen all her panties. She didn’t wear brassieres anymore, nor corsets nor stockings, garter belts, things like that. She opened the drawer expecting it to be empty and saw all her panties there, most of them washed thin with sagging elastic. “She must have snuck in and put em back,” she said. “I would’ve given em to her if she’d asked.” She folded all the panties in with the dresses.
She found an extra pair of shoes, exactly like the ones she had on, black and chunky and comfortable. She put them in, along with a pair of her husband’s old bedroom slippers that she happened to spy in the closet when she retrieved her long cotton nightgown. Then she remembered her medicine. She found a brown paper sack and went into the bathroom and dumped all the medicines, the ones she was supposed to be taking now and some as old as six or seven years ago, into the sack. She put in a jar of Vicks VapoRub and a bottle of Jergens lotion. She grabbed a box of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, a box of Bayer Aspirin, and a bottle of Hadacol and put those in, too. She stood looking around for a minute. “Well then,” she said, “I’m ready.”
She lugged her suitcase into the kitchen and put it beside the door. She got the shoebox of money out of the pantry and set it on top of the suitcase. Then she took a long, last stroll around the house. There were lots of antiques, no telling what they were worth, but she reckoned Orville would find out soon enough. Her eye landed on something she didn’t think she’d ever seen before, a little polished mahogany box with a tiny figure of a ballet dancer in a pink tutu on the top of it. The dancer was standing on one toe, with the other leg stretched straight out. Her arms were raised gracefully over her head. Mrs. McCrory picked it up, and when she did there was a little “ting”sound. She turned it around, discovering a key in one side. It was a music box! She wound it and released the key, and the dancer began whirling around and around, while the music box tinkled out a song she’d never heard before. Until it came to her precipitately and without warning what the song was. It was “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you.” “Well, ain’t that the prettiest little thing,” she said, as the dancer went round and round, and she decided she would take it with her. She must have seen it before because she knew there was something significant about it, but she couldn’t recall what it was; sort of like when you wake up from a dream and you can’t remember what it was about but you know it was a nice, pleasant dream and you’d like to go back to it but you can’t.
She sat down in one of the kitchen chairs to wait for Lester Ray. She felt confident the boy would be able to drive an automobile safely, because he said he could. He told her he had taken it around the block a couple of times, after dark. He didn’t want anybody to see the car and get suspicious why it was all of a sudden up and running again. He had told her they were going to Pensacola, to the West Florida State Fair. She remembered going to the fair when she was a little girl, when it wasn’t much but some cattle and some prize hogs and some women’s pies and canned figs and such as that. There was always a barbecue contest. You could go around to the various pits and have a sample of the meat, or a little cup of Brunswick stew. The men would be sitting around the pit, passing a bottle of whiskey around, their cigarette smoke rising up to mix with the sweet-smelling smoke from the pit. She had loved barbequed pork, but she hadn’t had any for God knows how long. She and Lester Ray would stop at a restaurant and she would treat him to a barbecue sandwich or a slab of ribs.
She suddenly remembered something, so she got up and went into the hallway. She opened the coat closet and got her hat from the shelf. It was a dark blue straw hat with a tiny little cluster of red wooden cherries on the brim. It had been her church hat back before she’d stopped going. She laughed, thinking about the church: she supposed she’d lived too long, because all the preachers just kept saying the same things over and over again. She’d already heard everything ten times over. She figured she knew more than they did, anyhow. Most of them too young to blow their own nose.
She stood there in the hallway, holding the hat, looking curiously at it, because she could not understand what it was nor why she had it in her hand. Then she realized it was a hat. “Now whose hat do you suppose this is?” she asked the empty air. She put it on her head and looked in the mirror in the hall; she turned her head this way and then that way. She smiled at herself in the mirror. “Well, finders keepers, I always say,” she said. She went back into the kitchen and sat down again. She crossed her still shapely legs and folded her hands in her lap. She felt dressed to go on a trip with the hat on her head.
It had grown very dark as Lester Ray was crossing the backyard with his pillow slip of clothes—he had gotten his mother’s picture from where he had hidden it and put that in as well—when he heard someone. “Hey,” a voice said, barely above a whisper. It was a moonless night and very dark, and he could see nothing.
“Who’s there?” he said.
A willow bush started to shake. And someone stepped out from behind it. Even in the dimness Lester Ray could see the red dress. The girl just stood there quietly. “What you want?” he said.
“Where you goin?” Virgin Mary Duck asked.
“Is it any of your business?” Lester