by Laird Hunt
“They were the dessert. He brought them out after you were done and had settled up. You didn’t settle up, you didn’t get one of Chan’s oranges. That was the house rule. Tell you what, we all finished up and paid quick.”
Big Bob smiled, then leaned back in his chair. He put both his hands out into the air palms down. Then he flipped his right hand back over and drew a good-size circle on it with his left. Through the circle he drew two lines. Then into this crosscut circle he dipped an imaginary fork.
“It was half an orange, set fat-side down, cut into quarters, served chilled and juicy in a bowl made out of its own peel. I never before nor since tasted the like. You want to try?”
I nodded. He gestured with his chin and I leaned forward and found myself looking at what he had just pantomimed. Only thing different from the way he had showed it was on each half, he had put a big darning needle into one of the orange pieces instead of laying down a fork.
“Go on now,” he said.
I could smell that orange even before it was in my hand and just the smell was about enough to knock me down then make me jump straight back up. It was like some sweet treacly fire had been floated up my nose. Bob picked up his half and plucked up a piece and put it in his mouth. I did the same. Pushed it through my lips, touched it to my tongue. It was a day of ugly firsts for me in Marvel but that fat wedge of orange flesh was the sweetest first I’ve ever known. To this day I can’t eat on an orange without thinking about that one. Bob got it, my first orange, and a few others, he said, from a fellow owed him money. He told me to always take the orange when it was offered to you. Didn’t matter where you were or how much you were owed or what kind of goddamn day it was.
“Amen to that,” I said, chewing slow. There might have been boys in the jail and cornsilk killers getting set to come for them and a little-girl dent in the Dictator door and a gun in the basket out on its front seat, and still I picked up those sweet, heavy pieces and still I put them in my mouth. We didn’t either one of us smile as we ate but we did study each other, our eyes bright in the dark of the shop.
“You done?” he said when I had been done five minutes at least and was just sitting there looking at the peel bowl in my hand and licking my lips. I told him I was and he said, “You can toss that peel in the can over there,” and I said I would just as soon hold on to it a minute, and he nodded. Then he wiped his hands careful on a towel didn’t look too clean and when he had finished his wiping he reached over and put his swollen pinkie into the bowl of whiskey and looked down at the big piece of paper.
“If I get done on this or give it up I’ll probably head my way over to a spot near Ryansville. Desmond ever take you there? Good spot to fish and wait things out.”
“Ryansville?” I said.
“I been working on this map, been working on it since this morning, since I heard, I was probably even working on it when I was trying to take my nap,” he said.
“Map?” I said. I could see he had painted Marvel in its middle and that it had many a black mark on it but that was about all.
He didn’t answer me, just looked down at the big piece of butcher paper in front of him and held his finger in the bowl and told me exactly where the fishing spot was, just in case. Then he asked me if I had seen his dog, Myrtle. I told him I had and he nodded and said she was probably outside working her bone or under the plum tree and then he picked up a pencil wasn’t the one behind his ear and made some kind of a mark on the butcher paper and right when he did that I heard a cry. I heard it sure. It came from outside. From the river. Good and deep and green down there where it rolled.
Bob didn’t look up from his work as I left, just said maybe he’d see me later. I said maybe he would and went out the door with the orange-peel bowl in my hand. The air was hot and the street was empty. If there had been a breeze, the grass and bushes and trees and sky, for all I knew, would have crackled loud enough when it came past to make me fear for my ears. But there wasn’t any breeze. Just the scraping of katydids and the tap-tap-tap-ing of some hard-beaked bird didn’t know it was too hot to work. I stood up tall and wiped at my mouth where there was some of that sweet orange stickiness caught. Then I wiped at my eyes. It must have been a hundred yards from where I stood next to Big Bob’s to the river. And down there at the river I saw Hortensia’s bright blue hat.
It had been her favorite hat when we were at the orphan house and she had kept it all this time. As I looked at it I heard that cry again. It was long and shimmery and came in and out like someone had thrown a piece of floppy metal up into the sky. I went hurrying across the street and down a sloping field and stumbled in my sturdy shoes, practically running even though I had that orange peel pressed tight against my chest. I had been a good runner at the orphan house and even Roscoe couldn’t beat me when I was out with him. Still, you couldn’t run sprint-speed holding on to a careful-cut orange peel you didn’t want to crush, plus even if it wasn’t just the heat had been cooking my head, it was hotter out than fresh-baked bricks, and it took me a while to get down to the river. Where I didn’t find any Hortensia. What I had seen and maybe heard too was a jay in some sprawly-armed spirea. Cousin, no doubt, to the one Uncle D wanted to shoot—especially after he had spent time at Bob’s—and it cocked its head at me then hopped up to a higher spot and cocked its head at me again.
“Goddamn bird even if you are pretty,” I said. I walked down to the river and plucked a leaf off a Japanese maple and stuck the darning needle through it and stuck the mast I’d made in the orange-peel bowl and set it down in the water then stood up straight again and watched it float.
I’d pondered on paper boats when I was waiting earlier for Leander and on how Hortensia and I had always tried to see how much we could load into one and it still float. Paper could carry a lot. I wasn’t so sure about orange peel. The current was slow but true and it took the little cup of orange and carried it away. I watched after it and splashed my hands into the water and ran them over my forearms. I splashed my hands down again then ran them over my neck. Some of the water found its way down my back and gave me a cool chill so I did it again. I watched the boat go and felt cool for about a minute, that’s all, because when the boat had disappeared and I turned away from the water and looked back up the slope to Big Bob’s I saw a white car pull up and some cornsilks climb out.
It was three of them climbed out of that car and one of them walked straight over to the Dictator like I hadn’t tried to hide it, and I realized that whether or not you’d have had legitimate trouble seeing it from the street, they had probably had a prize view from the lane that sloped down the ridge behind Bob’s house. The one that had walked over to the Dictator looked like he was saying something, and the others went over and one of these others looked like he punched at about the place the little girl had made her dent and the third one tossed something up onto the hood. Then it looked like they all took turns spitting on it, and then Myrtle started barking and Bob came out of the shop. The cornsilks turned and when they had all turned I set my chin and with my arms free now ran as fast as I could along a curved line of trees that fringed the long, low slope up to Bob’s. Myrtle was barking at the cornsilks and Bob had his hands up in the air and even as I was running the curve of the trees I thought about his whiskey-wet swollen finger swimming the airs over his picture map, how lonesome and wise it had seemed. Two of the cornsilks’ fingers now jabbed over in the direction of the Dictator or of what they had tossed up onto the hood, and Bob looked like he laughed or I couldn’t tell what, and I ran toward them along the side of the trees like a hot wind. They got bigger and bigger, and I saw at least two of them were the boys that had jumped out of the way when I sped up at the courthouse square. Bob nodded to them calm-like and stepped aside and waved those cornsilks one after another into his shop. He waved them in and Myrtle followed too, then Bob stopped and turned and looked straight at me and pointed at the Dictator, then made a gesture like he was dropping his fishing line into the water. The
n he went in after the cornsilks.
I didn’t stop running, didn’t slow a goddamn step, even if my heart did make a flip, up and over and into the air, when I saw what it was they had tossed up onto the Dictator. I grabbed it and kept running around the other side of the car and when I was in I sat a minute on the driver’s seat and looked at it, at the mop with its star-covered dress still cinched snug around its neck. I pulled it into the car after me and set it down hard on the passenger side and there it sat, looking out the windshield back toward the river. That’s where I ought to drive us, I thought. Lot about that day and everything since would have changed if I’d done that. Straight down the slope and into the river and maybe we could’ve found Hortensia and chased the orange-peel boat, chased it all the way down to the Wabash where our fine green river fed into its end. Picture of that peel boat came into my mind brought me back to Big Bob. I looked away from the river and at my basket. It sat next to the mop. I thought about Bob talking to those boys and looked at my basket and then I like to have screamed at myself because my hand betrayed me and instead of reaching for what was in the basket it went to the ignition.
Uncle D’s big old yellow baby jumped up fast. It always started quickly. I was rolling and had myself a good start when those cornsilk boys came pouring back out of Bob’s house, each one of them holding a bottle in a paper bag. I saw Bob reach for one of them and get himself punched at for it, and I saw Myrtle bite at one of them and get herself kicked. I started to slow and cursed myself for a fool and a coward and now my traitor hand did go into the basket but it was shaking again like shaking was the only thing it could do, and then the cornsilks were all back in their car anyway and they set it straight to rolling hard, so I looked to the road and not backwards any longer and held the Dictator open, and the Dictator roared.
I drove like I meant it then. The road curved, then ran straight, then curved again, then crossed the river and I went as hard as I knew how the whole time. If the police hadn’t been busy raising toasts and handing out sledgehammers down at the jail I probably would have had myself more than just those boys in their white car to see me out of town. It hadn’t looked like much of a vehicle they were driving but they must have stuffed in some extra horses under its hood because as fast as I went, they stayed always a few hundred yards behind me. You might have thought with my shaking hands and cowardly ways and that mop doll setting alongside me I would have got lost again, but even if I was huffing and sweating like a pig about to be stuck, I found my focus and kept on hard down the road and knew every scary second of my path.
Knew it even though it was the death carnival come to town. Still coming. So as I caterwauled my way out of Marvel I crossed many a cornsilk party making its way in. Some were laughing like it was a true carnival, and others had on hard faces like they were marching to war. Some didn’t have on any expression at all, like they were killed folk had clawed themselves out of the cemetery just to walk into town and look glass-eyed up into the courthouse trees. One of these was a woman in her old years. She had long gray hair been neatly combed and parted in the middle and she was holding a chicken that was turning its head to and fro, making its comb flop this way and that. Another was a seven-foot giant in dull red shirt and dirty suit and still a third was a young mother and her bald children locked in their stride and slow-stepping it down the road. A block or two after this family I crossed what must have been twins for they were dressed alike in homespun country overalls and yellow shirts and had the same big-nostril cornsilk noses and the same long pipes in their mouths. They were walking arm in arm. Almost step by step.
Spotting them—and it didn’t matter that I was getting up on seventy miles per hour—of course got me thinking about Hortensia, and about all the other places I thought she’d be and found she wasn’t. We had a mother and a father once, Hortensia and I. And then we didn’t. Thinking about her and about them, I left Marvel with those boys’ white car not a quarter mile in back of me and hit the poor shacks and bent fences of the outskirts and came on a pair of cornroots fighting in some poplar shade by the road.
You can fit a lot of thinking into a few seconds, and so I must have, because I had stopped the car and jumped out with my basket and come walking on up to them fetching out ham sandwiches before the Dictator’s dust plume had had a chance to start falling sideways. One of them looked up at me coming over and the other took advantage to hit him what he hoped would be a good one behind the ear. You could see the punch hadn’t hit square. If it had, the brawl or whatever it was would have been over. As it was, the one who had been hit cried foul and the other held up his hands to show he was stopping and I stepped forward with my sandwiches.
“You all are hungry, I can see that,” I said.
“Who in the jackrabbit hell are you?” said the one who had been hit on the ear.
“I got sandwiches is who I am,” I said. “Thought maybe you were dancing like that because you were hungry and didn’t have anything worth eating except each other.”
It wasn’t the best thing I could have come up with but it was what I said and once something is said to strangers what can you do? My hands were still shaking some. I didn’t like it but there we went with that too. If they noticed, they didn’t say a thing.
“We’re having a fight here. We’re in the middle of fighting. You’re interrupting a whupping is what’s happening,” said the other. He was tall and had hair came almost down to the middle of his back. I took another step forward and put a tight-wrapped sandwich in his hand.
“But who’s whupping and who’s getting some more whupping is the question,” said the other. He was shorter, had his hair cropped jagged, and was broader by a powerful amount of real estate around the shoulders. He had stayed crouched a little after he had been punched in the ear and before he finished straightening up I had put the other sandwich in his hand.
“They’re good sandwiches,” I said. “Made them fresh this morning. You like mustard? There’s some mustard. Good pickles. I’m not hungry because I just ate an orange.”
“An orange? What do you mean, an orange? And what in hell makes you think we’re hungry? You think every cornroot whupping on another cornroot you see needs a sandwich?”
“I don’t know. I just said that. You want them? You do, they’re yours.”
They looked at the sandwiches, then at each other, then at me, then we all turned and looked at the road. The cornsilks had come screeching up in their own dust plume and stopped, and it was hard to see as it fell down on top of them how they could breathe. I set my basket down on the ground where I could reach it easy if I had to, but I didn’t have to. There was only three cornsilks in the car and I expect every one of us could see straight off that the boys I was with were worth at least a couple of their variety each. And of course I myself was there too. I lifted up one of my hands and saw it had stopped shaking. About goddamn time. Maybe, I thought—and it makes me laugh now to think of it—twice in one day would be the end of it. We stood there and they sat there in their car. Huffing on their dust. Pretty soon I heard unwrapping and then crunching sounds coming from either side of me and looked and saw that the sandwiches were being eaten, the ham further rendered, the pickle slices put to an end. My sandwich eaters looked up at the cornsilks in their car and crunched down hard. One of the cornsilks had some metal pipe and he waved it out the car window. Another, the one had tossed the mop doll up on the Dictator, took a pull on one of Big Bob’s bottles and hollered in a whiskey-choked voice, “Give her up!”
“These your friends?” said the tall one without looking at me.
“These are not my friends,” I said.
“You the law?” said the other to the cornsilks, then went back to working his teeth on his sandwich.
“Go to hell,” said the driver.
“Yes, sir, we’ll do that, right quick,” said the tall one.
“She tried to run down folks, including us right here, then strung up the state flag,” said the one with
his piece of metal pipe. He had a reedy voice didn’t help put the bark on his claim too well.
“She what?” said the tall one.
“It was a mop,” I said nice and loud. “I put a mop in a state-flag dress and gave it a necktie. They were already devil-dancing under a bloody shirt so I thought maybe they needed something else to dance under. These cornsilk pansy flowers took it down and couldn’t even hold on to it. I just stole it from them again.”
When I said this, both of the cornroot boys laughed good and loud with their mouths wide open and neither one of them smiling, and when they set in to laughing, the driver started to get out of the car and straightaway I walked toward him and straightaway after that both boys set their sandwiches down on the dusty ground and walked toward him behind me. The driver saw all three of us coming and pulled his leg back in and shut his door.
“We’ll see you cornflower bitch and cornroot sons-of-bitches later,” he said. “We’ll make sure they save you and your mamas some space up in the tree.”
This set the boys, who had been walking slowly behind me to the car, to running ahead, and it was just about by the hairy skin of their teeth that the cornsilks got their vehicle turned around and gunned off down the dusty road. The two boys came back coughing. I told them with my eyes glued all the time on the vanishing vehicle that I wished I had some water to offer them.
“Water, hell,” said the tall one and picked up his sandwich and took a bite and looked carefully over it at me. “Anyway, what were you going to do when you got up on that boy?”
“I was going to hit him. Weren’t you?”
“You planned all that, didn’t you?” he said.
I gave a smile and kind of waggled my jaw back and forth, then asked him how he liked his sandwich.
They both laughed. They had let some smile onto their faces. I laughed a little too.