Gradle Bird

by J. C. Sasser

  She hurried down the aisles and threw seven cans of SpaghettiOs and a jar each of creamy Jif and Smuckers Concord Grape in her buggy. She grabbed a sleeve of Wonder White, broke into it, and shoved a slice of bread down her throat before she nested it in the buggy’s baby seat. In the toiletries section she grabbed a value pack of Schick disposables and a bottle of White Rain that could double as shampoo and shaving cream to clean up all of Grandpa’s hairs. She tossed them in the buggy, marched toward the first-aid section, and grabbed a box of Band-Aids for Grandpa’s blisters. She did the math in her head and came up short. Twelve dollars wouldn’t buy what they needed for the week, nor would there be any left for a stamp to mail her letter to Delvis Miles.

  She looked around, but there were too many people staring. She mazed through the aisles until she found one that was empty and shoved the box of Band-Aids down her underwear.

  Gradle waited wide-legged in line at the cash register while an old man, gaunt as a needle and dressed in a woman’s blouse, stood at the counter buying a bag of rice, unable to decipher a nickel from a dime. As he handed the cashier his money, the butcher yanked Gradle by the arm.

  “Shame on you,” he said. His fingernails dug into her bones, and his cockroach-colored eyes turned skinny. “I saw you, so don’t lie to me.”

  “I have money,” she said, reached into her bra, and showed the butcher the bills. The photograph parachuted to the ground and landed atop the butcher’s bloody shoe. She snatched up the photograph and put it back inside her bra.

  The butcher got into her face. The overhead light shone on his bald head in a spot where she could see her reflection. “Exodus twenty-fourteen says thou shalt not steal.” He shook her arm. “How should I punish you?”

  “Let God decide her punishment.” The voice was familiar and came from the next line over. Ceif limped toward Gradle with one hand clutching his cane and the other his Bible. A bandage stained with old blood wrapped around his forearm.

  “Saint Matthew, chapter seven verse one says judge not, that ye be not judged,” Ceif said. He paused and let the butcher take in the scripture. “In all due respect, butcher.” He nodded at the man and nudged his tam hat forward.

  The butcher looked down at Ceif’s Bible and let go of Gradle’s arm. He wiped his hands on his slaughter-stained apron. “Give me your money and what you stole, and don’t ever step foot in here again.”

  She slapped her money into his palm, lifted up her skirt, and removed the Band-Aids from her underwear. “Here,” she said. She threw the Band-Aids at his chest.

  She pushed her buggy through the Pig’s sucking doors into the heat and hid around the corner so nobody could stare at her anymore, and where she could cry in peace if she wanted.

  A tapping sound that started off small grew closer and louder, and soon Ceif rounded the corner and stood beside her. He took off his hat and removed the two slices of bread sitting on his head. He pulled a package of bologna from inside his vest, made a sandwich, and as he took his first bite, he extended his good leg, shook his pants, and a shiny red apple fell to his toe.

  “If you’re gonna steal, you need to learn from a real thief,” he said, kicking the apple toward Gradle. He crammed the sandwich in his mouth and chased it down with a bottle of milk he retrieved from the cinch of his belt.

  “The trick is,” he said, his dime-sized mouth covered in white, “steal what you can get by on. You steal more than that you become a glutton.”

  “It was only a pack of Band-Aids,” Gradle said.

  He pulled a cigarette from behind is ear. “God don’t like greed,” he said, lit his match one-handed, and blew a cylinder of smoke through his mouth.

  “What does God think about throwing firecrackers at a crazy man’s house and making him kill his dog on account of it?” she asked.

  “He don’t like it.”

  “How do you forgive yourself for all the stuff God doesn’t like?”

  “I pray a lot,” Ceif said.

  “Why do you do it in the first place?”

  “For Sonny Joe’s sake,” he said. He took a puff of cigarette.

  “Why do you worship him so much?”

  “He saved my life. And I’m gonna save his.”

  “How’d he save your life?” she asked. She took a bite of the stolen red apple and listened as Ceif told her his history.

  When Ceif was twelve, he left Cape Girardeau, Missouri for good, with nothing but a funeral preacher’s Bible and a wad of graveyard dirt in his hands. Five minutes after they lowered his parents in the ground, Ceif asked the preacher if he could borrow his Bible and told the man that if what had just happened to his parents was because of The Way, The Light, and The Truth, he wanted to learn all there was to learn about it. After the preacher gave him his Bible, Ceif walked to the crossroad where a local work train had T-boned his parents’ car, and he flipped into the next junker hauling scrap metal and lumber out of town. When a dirty-faced hobo with glowing white eyes sitting in a dark corner of the boxcar asked him where he was headed, he raised his Bible and told the man “Eden.”

  It took him a year on the rails to find his Eden, but eventually he arrived in the warm, fecund South he had read about in the various libraries he frequented to escape bad weather, but moreso to fulfill his honest desire to improve his mind. In the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he learned the South was a place settled by those in search of religious hope who saw its alluring fertility as a garden where mankind could begin again. The South was the agrarian ideal, a place where a good American could thrive on a small little farm, where one could benefit from the purity of nature and escape the city’s temptations. Since he was a man of the Bible, who wrote scripture on every wall in every boxcar in which he flopped, what he read all appealed to him. It was the place where he could find a church. It was the place where he could become a preacher, and it was the place where he jumped from a fast-moving train and broke his left leg. This was the place that crippled him for life, which only confirmed his belief the South was where he should be.

  For three days, he crawled belly down with nothing to eat or drink until he finally gave out, his face buried in the white sand of a black river’s bank, his dry and cracked lips a mere foot from the nourishment the river would provide. He lost grip of his Bible, and shriveled there for a couple of days until Sonny Joe came to the same river’s bank, sent there by his voodoo-witch mother on a mission to find fresh water mollusk shells for a concoction that would bring her good fortune. He kicked Ceif a time or two and a couple of more times for good measure and one more time after that just for the hell of it. Sonny Joe took him for dead until he rolled Ceif over and saw white grains of sand fall from Ceif’s lips when he attempted to mouth the word angel. Sonny Joe left the shells on the sand, flopped Ceif over his shoulder, and brought him to the abandoned church in the woods where he nursed him to health with one of his mama’s potions that was known to steal away ills. It was Sonny Joe who splinted Ceif’s leg. It was Sonny Joe who whittled his cane, and it was Sonny Joe who stayed by his side, cradled his head in his lap every night and loved him as if Ceif was now his mission.

  “I owe him,” Ceif said.

  The sky shed soft drops of rain that soon became hard and wailing. Gradle and Ceif glued themselves against the building and rain dropped from the bill of Ceif’s hat.

  “Sonny Joe saved you from dying, but what does he need saving from?” Gradle asked.

  “He’s got a little bit of devil in him, don’t you think,” Ceif said. He looked in the direction from where a train’s whistle blew, warning the car stopped at the crossing. He kissed his fingers and made the cross over his heart.

  They stared at the train as it roared through town. Steel pressed upon steel. Hinges stretched and screamed as the boxcars sped by like a fast running rainbow, leaving everything in the train’s wake more quiet and still than it was before.

  “I’m sorry about your parents,” she said.

  “Ain’t nothing to be
sorry about. They deserved what was coming.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They’d been planning a vacation,” Ceif said. “We were supposed to go to the Gulf. I remember Mama and Daddy packing their suitcases with more than they would ever need for a week. But I really didn’t think much of it until Mama made me go pay for the gas after we fueled up for the trip.” He paused to take another rip from his cigarette. “I remember she had a nervous smile on her face, and I remember looking at Daddy, but he was too busy chain-smoking in the passenger’s seat to look my way. I paid the attendant for five on number three, and when I walked out of the gas station I saw where they’d dumped my suitcase by the pump. They never let on they didn’t want me, so I guess it took me by surprise. I heard screaming and saw their car at the train crossing stalled over the tracks, their windshield busted and bent from the railroad guards.”

  Ceif picked a piece of skin from the edge of his nailbed, put it in his mouth, and chewed on it for a bit. “I heard the train blowing its horn, screaming for them to get off the tracks. Everything was screaming. The train. My mama and my daddy. The gas station attendant. And all the screaming was louder than the explosion, and all that screaming stayed with me on every boxcar I ever rode. It stayed with me all way to Blackfoot, Idaho. To Evanston, Wyoming, Winnemucca, Lovelock, and Reno, Nevada. I heard it in Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado.” He paused and cocked his ear toward the train that just past through. “And if I listen real hard I still hear it. I’ll hear it until the day I die.”

  Ceif took a drag from his cigarette and ashed it on the ground. “What’s your story?”

  “I don’t have one,” Gradle said.

  “What about your parents? Where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You ever asked your grandpa?”

  “He doesn’t talk much.”

  Ceif clamped his cigarette between his teeth and unraveled the bandage from around his arm. “You don’t want to know what happened to them?”

  “Not really,” she said. She would much rather know what happened to Grandpa instead.

  “I like talking to you,” he said. He licked the dog bites and rewrapped his arm.

  “Sonny Joe saved your life twice,” she said, wondering if maybe he could save hers, too.

  “Hey motherfucker,” Sonny Joe yelled at Ceif from behind the Piggly Wiggly. “Hurry your ass up, everybody’s waiting.” He sprinted through the rain and huddled against the building between Gradle and Ceif. He lit a cigarette, pulled on it hard, and blew a chain of Os Gradle’s way.

  “You back for some more fun?” Sonny Joe asked, offering her a drag.

  She put the cigarette between her lips and executed the smoothest French inhale he’d ever seen.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said.

  “I don’t.” She handed the cigarette back.

  “Wanna see some fish fight?” he asked, grabbed her delicate hand, and led her along with her shopping buggy in the alley behind the Piggly Wiggly.

  There were men and little boys. Whiskey and Kool-Aid. Rednecks and preps. Charm and seed. Nested between two dumpsters full of soggy cardboard and stinking cabbage he had set up a table with a half-gallon Mason jar filled with water as its centerpiece. A plastic tarp supported by four lean-to sticks covered the table and protected it from the rain, but it wasn’t large enough to cover the entire crowd that shoved for position around the jar.

  He led Gradle through the mob. She held his arm tight, like she was scared, and he felt strong, vibrant, and in control. When the boys saw her, those who smoked froze and left their cigarettes dangling in their mouths. Those who drank lowered their bottles and didn’t bother wiping away their whiskey or red-sugar mustaches. All the rednecks forgot about their crosses that hung around their necks on gold rope chains, and all the preps forgot about their slick watches. The youngest boy there tripped over a forty-ounce Cobra bottle full of rainwater and wrigglers that belonged to the oily bluish black man named Pierson, who propped himself against the wall drunk, and who opened his eyes only to watch her pass by.

  “I know it’s hard gentlemen, but try not to stare,” Sonny Joe addressed the crowd, as he led Gradle to the best seat in the house, front and center.

  He sat in a chair behind the table. “Y’all see Rhonda Sikes’s tits when she walked out of the Pig a while ago?” he asked the crowd and received laughter. “Her nipples were hard as jellybeans,” he said, motioning for Ceif to collect everyone’s admission fee. “Gradle can watch for free.”

  He placed two clear plastic cups on the table. One held a Halfmoon with a blue head and flowing orange finnage, the other, a velvet red Apache. He held the cups high above the crowd. “Halfmoon against the Apache. Both have a gene pool mean as cat shit. You got two minutes to pick a fish.”

  The crowd lifted and shoved to get a better look at the fighters before placing their bets with Ceif, who recorded them with a knife-sharpened pencil in a spiralbound notebook. The butcher walked through the Pig’s backdoor, lit a Parliament Light, and narrowed his eyes on Gradle as he inhaled a drag. He paid his admission fee, inspected the two fish, and placed his bet on the Apache. He propped his leg against the wall beside Pierson and enjoyed the rest of his smoke while he picked raw meat from beneath his fingernails.

  Sonny Joe watched Gradle as she looked at the two fish like she had never seen anything like them in this world before. It was the same look she had given him the first time they met, a curious wonder.

  “Why do they fight?” she asked.

  “It’s their nature,” he said, turning the cups around in his hands. “They find it rewarding.”

  Sonny Joe had been studying Siamese fighting fish since the first time he had ever seen them battle. He was eight years old and his mama needed the ingredients of a potion that caused acute paralysis. A one-armed mechanic had broken her heart. She needed the tail finnage of a Blue Cambodian, bit off by a juvenile Doubletail Opaque known as the Holy Grail and thought to be extinct. On a mission to revenge her heart, she packed a bag with enough clothes to last six days, snatched Sonny Joe by the arm, cranked up the Pontiac, and drove down every dirt road and highway in the Southeast in hunt of two fish the size of a pinky finger. On the seventh day of searching, his mama had to wear her underwear inside out, but she found a thirty-year-old ex-beauty queen in Baton Rouge Louisiana who bred these fish in mud puddles in her backyard. She had shady ties with a breeder in Thailand and possessed a Blue Cambodian and one of the last doubletail opaques in existence, an aggressive juvenile.

  His mama spent a week’s worth of pay for these little fish and made him drive the Pontiac all the way back to Georgia while she sat in the passenger’s seat and cuddled the fish in two plastic bags between her legs, in the naughty heat in which they thrived. She screamed at Sonny Joe every time he ran off the road or drove over a bump. She smacked him three good times, when too scared to swerve, he slaughtered an opossum that darted in front of their path.

  His mama waited for a night with a blood-orange moon and a deep purple sky and placed the Blue Cambodian and the Holy Grail side by side in two separate cups. While she went to smoke a cigarette, he watched the fish communicate through their clear plastic homes. Once they saw each other their colors turned brilliant, and even the white seemed to glow. Their finnage extended, and their gills erected around their faces. At first he thought it was love, some way of one impressing the other, but soon he realized their beauty was disguised hate.

  The Holy Grail jumped from its cup into the Blue Cambodian’s and fought the blue fish until it was dead. Before his mama came back, he hid the Holy Grail in a cup of water under his bed. She figured the fish had jumped out of its cup through the open window and searched the ground for two hours with a flashlight, finally arriving at the conclusion the cat had got it. She ended up poisoning the cat because she had planned on reselling that fish to get her week’s paycheck back. Yet, to her delight, three months later, the one-armed mechanic dev
eloped paralysis in his only hand, whether from the delusional success of her potion or from the inevitable result of nerve damage that existed years before.

  After the capture of the Holy Grail, Sonny Joe spent most of his days in the library reading books on Siamese fighting fish. He learned everything written about the species and saved the money he stole weekly from his mama’s wallet to buy the Holy Grail a female companion. He learned through careful observation Siamese fighting fish were socially intelligent and pursued wily strategies of manipulation, punishment, and reconciliation. He also learned through careful observation it was the male who protects the spawn. After laying eggs, the female tries desperately to eat them and is only prevented by the male from doing so.

  He continued to steal money from his mama and continued to spend it on fighting fish and everything that went with them. He bred different shapes with different colors. He bred Crowntails with Halfmoons, Veiltails with Spades. He bred blues with reds to get purples, greens with reds to get chocolates, chocolates with reds to get blacks. He conditioned some for victory and some for defeat so that when he organized a fight there was no surprising him who would win.

  “How much money can you win if you bet on the winning fish?” Gradle asked.

  “Depends on the day, who bets on who,” Sonny Joe said. He took the wad of money from Ceif’s hand. “If you bet on an unpopular fish and it wins, you can walk out of here rich.” He held the cups of fish side by side. “Alright, gentlemen,” he said, starting to pour the fish together in the jar.

  “I want to bet,” she said.

  Sonny Joe halted his pour. “Put your money down.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “What you gonna bet with, Gradle Bird?”

  “I’ll show you my nipples,” she said.

  He leaned across the table and whispered in her ear. “I can already see them.”