At the end of the flood channel, he crouches and looks both ways up and down the canal, then leans forward and runs up the steep embankment. Once he reaches the top, he walks quickly along the fence until he comes to a place where the barbed wire lies flat. Debra Ann knows this spot. She hops it all the time, a shortcut to the bookmobile or 7-Eleven.
He stops at the dumpster behind the club to take a piss. After he buttons his pants and knocks on the back door of the gentlemen’s club until it swings open, Debra Ann squirms her shoulders and hips and slides awkwardly out of the box. She brushes the dust from her T-shirt and then rears back and pitches a rock. It travels halfway across the field and lands with a solid enough thud to raise some dust. She can’t figure out why the man is living down there unless there’s something wrong with him. Her daddy says you’d have to be half stupid, half crazy, or half dead not to find work in Odessa right now. Everybody’s hiring. Maybe the man is all three—stupid, crazy, sick—but whatever his story, he poses no danger to her. She feels it down deep in her soul, feels convicted in the same way she believes that nothing bad can happen as long as she steps between cracks in the sidewalk and eats her veggies and doesn’t talk to any men she does not already know. D. A.’s confidence has been shaken this spring by Ginny’s leaving, and it is a relief to study this man and know: he will not hurt her.
She spits in the dirt and picks out her next rock. This one lands in a small thicket of mesquite trees next to the spot where the land begins to curve toward the flood channel. I’m going to get one over the canal before summer is over, she says out loud.
* * *
Every day for a week, she rushes home from school to watch him. The first three afternoons she gathers information—What time does he leave? Is it always the same? Does he always go to the titty bar? Then she waits for her chance to get a closer look.
It is nearly five o’clock and the sun beats like a fist against the top of her head. Her mouth and throat are so parched that they ache. The heat presses against her chest and stifles her breath, and because she sweated through her T-shirt an hour ago, she doesn’t have any sweat left to cool her off. When she pulls the fortune-teller from the pocket of her shorts, it is dry and brittle against her hands. Should I check out his camp? Yes. Should I check out his camp? Do not hesitate!
The drainpipe is tall enough that she only has to bend a little when she steps in and sees a trash bag with dirty underwear and socks hanging out of it. Next to the bag, a small stack of pants and shirts lies neatly folded. A pair of boots sits next to a wire milk crate that has been turned upside down to make a small table, upon which rests a ceramic bowl and razor, along with two manila envelopes. One has the words PFC Belden, Discharge written on it in black marker. Medical is written on the other.
Ten feet in, the man has constructed a wall to close off the rest of the pipe, which carries water all the way to a field outside town when it floods. These days, that means never. The last time this channel flooded, D. A. still had training wheels on her bike. On closer examination, she recognizes an old appliance box from the previous summer, one the girls had abandoned after it was battered by a dust storm. Lauralee’s awkward, loping cursive is still clear on the side—the word Hideout with a large smiley face and two hearts with arrows through their centers.
A backpack and neatly rolled sleeping bag are stacked against the cardboard wall. Debra Ann walks to the man’s table and gently runs her finger across a crack in his shaving bowl. She picks up his razor and his small black hair comb, turning them over in her hands while she looks again at the envelope with his discharge papers. He’s probably a hero, she decides. He was probably injured in the war. Ever since her mama left town, D. A. has been looking for something to do with her weekends. She’s been looking for a project, and this man might be it. Maybe he is there to help her become a better girl, not the kind who drives her mother so crazy she feels like she has to leave town without telling anybody where she’s going, or how long she’ll be gone. Will Ginny be home before the fireworks show on the Fourth of July? Yes.
* * *
She leaves his first gift in a brown paper bag at the mouth of the drainage pipe and scampers back to her box to wait and see what will happen next. The man opens the bag carefully, as if he expects it to be filled with tarantulas, or at least a couple of cow patties. When he instead pulls out a can of creamed corn, a package of gum, and a brown crayon with a dull tip, he smiles and looks around. There is a note too, folded in half, the edges sticky and stained with candy, and Debra Ann can see his lips moving as he reads it. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. Write down what you need & put it under the big rock next to the fence. Don’t tell anybody. D. A. Pierce.
She watches him sharpen the brown crayon with his pocketknife, and later, when he knocks on the back door of the bar and steps inside, she runs down the concrete embankment to fetch the note. It reads Blankit cookpot can opener matches, thx & bless you, Jesse Belden, PFC, U.S. Army.
On the Monday after Easter, she brings everything he needs in a paper sack from Piggly Wiggly. In it, she has packed two hard-boiled eggs, a piece of corn bread wrapped in foil, a slice of ham, and a half-thawed casserole with most of Mrs. Shepard’s name picked off the label. COR is all that’s left, and that’s not enough for the man to trace it back to anybody in particular. She also brings him two ripe tomatoes, and a handful of chocolate bunnies from the Easter basket her daddy left on the kitchen table.
While he reads the note, she watches with joy from her spot in the field, her lips moving along with his. Happy Easter, Jesse Belden, PFC, U.S. Army, you are a great American. Do you like okra and pinto beans? Sincerely, D. A. Pierce.
At the beginning of May, three weeks since she first saw him, D. A. waits until he goes into the pipe and then climbs down into the drainage ditch with a bag of food and two cans of Dr Pepper. She shines her flashlight into the pipe. Are you in here? Her voice drifts through the dark. I won’t tell anybody you’re here. Do you need help?
Later, when they know each other a little better, Jesse Belden will explain that he had been resting on the bare concrete because it was cooler, counting his money and thinking about how to get his truck back from Boomer, the cousin who says that Jesse owes him two months’ rent and groceries. Jesse will tell her that he had been lying with his good ear to the ground—the world is so much quieter that way—and that’s why D. A. was practically standing on him before they saw each other.
Well, didn’t we scare the living daylights out of each other? Jesse says.
I nearly pissed myself. She watches him carefully, waiting for him to scold her for cussing, which he does not do. Jesse might be a grown man, but he sure doesn’t act like it. He might be a little stupid, she thinks, and he is surely ignorant of the ways people talk to kids. He tells her that his eyes had been dry as the dust he sleeps on every night, dry as the half-dead snake that old tomcat drug up one morning and laid at the opening of the flood pipe, but they still managed to fill with water when Debra Ann shined her flashlight in his face and asked, What do you need? And Jesse, who had not said anything more than yes sir or no sir for days, whose ribs were still sore from the blow to his back when he was standing in the parking lot, practically begging his cousin to stop the truck, Jesse said, I want to go home.
She doesn’t tell him that she has been watching him for weeks. She says, Yes sir, and promises she will always sit on his right side, where her words will be as clear to Jesse as the cold streams he tells her about, back home in eastern Tennessee, where he used to live with his mama and his sister Nadine.
* * *
He is twenty-two years old and she is ten, and they are skinny as ocotillo branches. They both have a small scar on their right ankle, his from a bad infection he got in Southeast Asia, hers from a firecracker that exploded before she could sprint away from it. They eat baloney sandwiches and watch the cat chase sunflower shells they spit on the concrete. They talk about getting a collar for the cat, so if he ge
ts lost somebody can call Debra Ann’s house and tell her to come get him.
She brings chocolate bars that melt in her pocket and they lick the warm liquid directly off the foil wrapper. When she asks him why he works at a strip bar, the back of his neck turns scarlet and he looks at his feet. Without his truck, he can’t get to his job in the oil patch. They only let me mop the floors and take out the trash, he says, but I used to work with my cousin mucking saltwater tanks.
He doesn’t tell her that he came to Texas because there aren’t any jobs in Tennessee and Boomer swore he was making money hand over fist. Nor does he tell her about a two-week stop at the VA hospital in Big Springs where he slept in a good bed and ate some pretty good food, and talked to a doctor who eventually walked Jesse out to his truck and handed him an envelope and said, You are twenty-two years old, son, and lucky you came home in one piece. There isn’t one thing wrong with you that some hard work won’t fix. He doesn’t tell D. A. that he felt the weight and shape of the man’s class ring against his T-shirt. How far is it to Odessa, Jesse asked him, and the doctor pointed west. Sixty miles and be sure to lock up your truck at night, he said, and Jesse wished the man could be his father.
D. A. tells him that she went looking for the cat yesterday and saw Mrs. Shepard’s Lincoln parked in her driveway, which was strange because Mrs. Shepard only drives her dead husband’s truck now. There was no answer when she knocked on the front door, and Debra Ann guessed she was taking a nap, but then she tugged open the garage door to see what she could find in the deep freezer and found Mrs. Shepard sitting in Mr. Potter’s old truck with the motor running. How come you’re out here? D. A. asked, and Corrine sat for a few more seconds without moving, then sighed and said Jesus Christ and turned off the motor. How come you’re out here?
I’m looking for a sharp knife.
Corrine pointed to a workbench covered with gardening tools and dust. Bring it back when you’re done, she said. Don’t run with it in your hands.
Have you seen the cat?
No, I have not seen that goddamned cat. Now will you please get out of my garage?
Jesse and Debra Ann chew blades of St. Augustine that she pulled out of Mrs. Ledbetter’s lawn and saved in plastic bags. They drink a gallon of orange juice that one of the bartenders gave Jesse. They play poker with a deck of cards she pilfered from Mrs. Shepard’s kitchen drawer. He shows her a small leather bag filled with agates he found near the Clinch River, which is so close to his family’s hollow that you can hit it with a rock. Pick out your two favorites, he says. They’re good luck.
Before the war, he tells her, his hearing was so good that his uncle used to brag that Jesse could hear a doe swat a horsefly off her ass from a hundred yards away. He could hear a tick let go of a dog’s ear, and a catfish farting from the bottom of a swimming hole. He doesn’t tell her that when he came home after three years overseas, he walked a little ways into the woods and stood real still, waiting. And when the sounds finally came—a branch striking the dirt after the wind had shaken it loose from the tree, a whitetail tearing up the woods, a rifle report from the other side of the hollow—he couldn’t tell if he was really hearing those sounds, or just remembering them. Thrum of cicadas, frogs belching by the creek, two crows fighting off a blue jay trying to steal their eggs, buzz of mosquitoes and yellow jackets, the splash a rainbow trout made when Jesse pulled it from the river—maybe he heard all these noises when he came home from the war, maybe he just wished he did.
D. A. tells him she always checks the toilet bowl before she sits down because she has heard stories about water moccasins climbing up through the sewer pipes and curling themselves around the rim. There was a girl in Stanton who sat down in the middle of the night to pee, and a four-foot-long water moccasin crawled up and bit her right on the cooter.
The cooter? Jesse starts laughing his ass off. Yeah. D. A. laughs. She swole up like a deer tick. She takes a deep breath and fills her round cheeks with air, then reaches over and flips the cat onto its back, feeling around in its fur. When she finds a lump, she pulls out a fat gray tick, fully engorged and big as her thumbnail. Like this, she says and squeezes it with her fingernail until it pops and blood spurts all over her fingers.
She tells him that she has consulted her fortune-teller and her mother will be home in time for the Fourth of July fireworks show. Next time she comes, she will bring it with, so he can ask some questions of his own. Will he get his truck back from Boomer? Will he be home in time to fish the Clinch River before it gets too cold and the fish stop biting? She tells him that she visits the bookmobile so often the two old ladies who work there, unmarried sisters from Austin, have threatened to put her on the payroll. They let her check out as many books as she wants, and some mornings, she is already sitting on the rickety metal stairs when the sisters pull up in their Buick. Sometimes, Debra Ann says, one of the sisters tosses her the keys to the trailer and lets her unlock the front door, and then Debra Ann lies on the wet-dog-smelling carpet in front of the swamp cooler and reads all day long.
Every book has at least one good thing, she tells Jesse, because she’s pretty sure he can’t read, not really. Love stories and bad news and evil masterminds, plots as thick as sludge, places and people she wishes she could know in real life, and words whose loveliness and music make her want to cry when she says them aloud.
She stands up and wipes the tick’s blood on her shorts, stretches her arms over her head and recites some of the most beautiful words she ever read. The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last forever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year—the days when summer is changing into autumn—the crickets spread the rumor of sadness and change. Now see here, she tells Jesse, I can’t even imagine a place where there is autumn, but I guess I can understand sadness and change as good as anybody else. Me too, he says.
* * *
When school lets out in late May, she visits him every day, at least for an hour before he goes to work at 4:30. While the cat naps on Jesse’s army pack, they sit next to each other on two milk crates D. A. found next to the dumpster behind 7-Eleven. The front porch, Jesse calls it, and she says it’s a pretty good porch, but she is already hatching a plan to invite him over for lunch one day when Mrs. Ledbetter is out running errands. She wants to show him a real porch, let him sit down in a real chair at a real kitchen table, so he can see what is possible.
She brings two forks and it takes them less than five minutes to eat the casserole she stole from Mrs Shepard. Even the frozen parts are good, he says. They taste like something a person made with care and love. When they finish eating, she sets a piece of notebook paper on the cardboard box between them. She hands him a pencil, momentarily embarrassed when she notices the metal band at the bottom of the pencil is covered with small bite marks. Write down everything you need, she says. I’ll bring it if I can.
Could you write it? He hands the paper and pencil back to her. I’m tired.
He could use an old bedsheet. It’s already too hot out for the blanket she brought him last month. He loved those cigarettes she brought, even if he won’t smoke them in front of her. Some more of them would be nice, and maybe some more of that corn bread, if she can get it, and those pinto beans and chow-chow.
You wash a meal like that down with a cup of buttermilk, he says, and you’re standing in tall cotton.
What’s the best meal you ever had? she asks.
Pot roast and potatoes, probably. Maybe the steak they gave me at the base the night I came home from overseas.
Favorite snack?
Chocolate-chip cookies that my mama makes from scratch.
Me too, she says, and they fall quiet for a little while. She stares at his face as if trying to memorize it. I’m going to bring you a toothbrush, she says, and Jesse laughs. The only person who ever gave a tinker’s damn about whether or not he brushed his teeth had been his sergeant, and he rode Jesse’s ass all the time. Now he’s back home in som
e place called Kalamazoo. That sounds like a made-up place, D. A. says, and Jesse tells her that he used to think so too, but then he looked at an atlas and there it was, barely an inch from Canada.
When the plant whistles at quitting time, Jesse says he has to go to work soon, but he could use a flea collar for the cat if she can get one, and a few more cans of tuna fish. Another jug of water, maybe some bug spray. She writes it all down for him, and when she spots a scorpion coming out of the pipe where he puts his trash, Jesse walks over and stomps it with his boot. D. A. looks down at her thin plastic sandals, the pale-pink nail polish she let Casey put on for her, and she imagines the scorpion scuttling over the lip of her sandal, the tail rising to deliver the hot, agonizing sting. She thinks how nice it is when somebody saves you from something, even if you don’t need to be saved.
* * *
She can ride her bike the entire length of Larkspur Lane, even around the curve, without touching her handlebars, not even once. She can turn twenty-six cartwheels in less than a minute and hang upside down on the monkey bars until she nearly passes out. She can stand on her hands for thirty seconds, on her head for one minute, and on one foot for ten. These, she demonstrates on the hot concrete at the bottom of the flood canal. She can slip a candy bar into her pocket at 7-Eleven, smuggle a casserole out of Mrs. Shepard’s house in her backpack, and, if her T-shirt is baggy enough, listen to a lecture from Mrs. Ledbetter with a can of chili tucked in the waistband of her shorts.
In a different year, a normal one, she might feel guilty about stealing. But since Ginny left, Debra Ann has thought about what it means to live an upright life. She keeps the kitchen clean and makes sure her daddy gets some rest on Sundays. She checks on Mrs. Shepard and plays with Peter and Lily—she knows they’re imaginary, and she does not care, they have pointed ears and wings that shine in the sunlight, and they fly in from London when she is having a bad day, when she can’t stop picking at her eyebrows and wondering where her mama is, and why the hell she left in the first place. D. A. has given a lot of thought to the matter of petty theft, parsing her lessons from a week of vacation Bible school last summer, and she knows: Stealing is better than letting a man go without food and company.
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