Rumble Tumble

By midday it was humid as a monkey’s armpit down in the bottoms where the trees grew close together and right up next to the road. The moss and vines hung from the trees like alien spiderwebs and the birds were thick and colorful and loud and fluttered about like living Christmas ornaments.

We rode down the red-clay road with the air-conditioner on and the windows rolled tight, and the lovebugs, dense as back home, swarmed the truck from all sides and splattered against it like kamikazes.

Eventually the little red road played out at a dead end where a clapboard house three shades below gray stood amongst tall grass, a broken tricycle, an ancient Ford truck on blocks, an old wrecker with an oily winch. There were three young kids in the yard, two boys and a girl who looked as if they might bathe if they were pushed into a creek at gunpoint, held under with a foot, and beat with soap.

There was a chinaberry tree off to the right, and we parked under that next to a rusted outboard motor and a very old carcass that may have once been a possum. We got out of the truck and the kids came over. I thought they were going to sniff us like dogs. They looked to be about eight, ten, and twelve under all that dirt, the boys being the oldest.

Leonard said, “Aren’t y’all supposed to be in school?”

The oldest said, “We’re off today.”

The girl said, “We don’t go much. Daddy said we’re gonna start getting home schoolin’.”

In what? I thought. Collecting dirt?

“Haskel around?” Leonard asked.

“He’s out to the barn,” the oldest said.

“Could you go get him?” I asked.

The older boy studied me. “Well, I reckon.”

“I mean, if it wouldn’t hurt you,” I said.

“I don’t reckon it’ll hurt none. Y’all stay right here. Pa don’t cotton to folks wandering around here much.”

“Probably afraid they’ll step on a nail,” I said. “Or trip over a car part. Or maybe step in a possum.”

The kid went away then, but not like he was in a hurry. Way he walked with his head down, you might have thought he was cataloguing worms and insects in his path.

The remaining two kids stared at us. The little boy looked to have caught a good shot in the forehead at one time, maybe with a stick or a rock. He had a crease there, like you might iron into a pair of trousers. The little girl had black greasy hair with lovebugs in it, patches of dirt on her face that gave her a spotted pup appearance, and slimy trails from her nose to her upper lip.

I tried to make small talk with the kids, but they didn’t exactly warm to me. They didn’t seem annoyed either. Sort of ambivalent, as if they had both just gotten over a lobotomy operation and were still weak from it.

Fifteen minutes later the oldest boy came strolling up. He said, “Pa’s comin’. He told me tell y’all you better not be sellin’ nothin’.”

“We’re buyin’,” I said. “’Course, if he wants a good set of encyclopedias, we might can fix him up.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” said the older boy. Then added proudly: “He don’t read much.”

I looked up then. Coming around the far side of the house was a man I assumed was Haskel. Even from a distance, you could see he was about as clean and cuddly as a steaming pile of diseased dog shit. He had on a pair of faded overalls with no shirt, and was spitting a nasty brown stream of what I hoped was tobacco.

He walked briskly, and as he neared I could see he wore a pair of loafers without socks, and the arms that swung by his sides were big and gnarly, as if they had been broken several times and the bones had healed improperly.

When Haskel was still out of earshot, Leonard said, “Let me do the talking.”

Haskel walked up, wiped his hands on his overalls and put them in his pockets. I could see his right hand had hold of something bulky in his overall pocket. I assumed it wasn’t his dick.

Haskel looked at us carefully. He had a bumpy face that made you nervous. He said to Leonard, “I reckon I know you, don’t I?”

“You have a good memory,” Leonard said.

“Double-barrel shotgun, sawed off,” Haskel said. “Some ten year ago.”

“More like fifteen.”

“More like twelve, now that I think about it. I ain’t as good with colored faces.”

“We all look alike, huh?”

“Far as I’m concerned, everybody looks alike, but coloreds look more alike. I hope you ain’t working for the law now.”

“Why would I?”

“Sometimes it happens. It’s not something I like. I tend to become angry something like that goes on.”

“Don’t try and scare us,” Leonard said. “It isn’t necessary.”

“There’s lots of fellas weren’t scared that aren’t scared even now, but they ain’t happy neither. They got dirt in their faces and they lay nearby.”

“The garden?” I said.

“What?” Haskel said.

“You know, the garden,” I said. “For fertilizer.”

“You could talk yourself to death,” Haskel said.

Leonard said, “Listen here, Haskel, that gun in your pocket, it’ll only get one of us. Maybe. Then the other one will clean your clock.”

I jerked a thumb at Leonard and said to Haskel, “Be sure you shoot him so I’m the one does the clock cleaning.”