you can,” said B. J., “and if there’s a little honest profit in it for a Christian, it’s nothing wrong with that.” B. J. took off the catcher’s mask and stood for a minute watching the worked-up dogs prowl up and down the pen, baring their teeth at each other as they passed, their tails carried low between their legs and the hair on their backs all roughed up. Then he turned toward his brother and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Let’s go get a drink of water and talk about your business problems, Bubba. The Lord’ll find an answer for you. You just got to give Him a chance.”
The houses were lined up on each side of a dirt road that came up from the patch of weeds to the south and stopped abruptly at the edge of the pasture. In front of the first one on the left, a cabin with two front doors opening into the same room and a window in between them with a pane of unbroken glass still in it, was the body of a ’54 Chevrolet up on blocks. All four wheels had been taken off a long time ago and fastened together with a length of log chain and hung from the lowest limb of an oak tree. The bark on the oak had grown over and around the chain, and the metal of the wheels had fused together with rust.
MayBelle took another sip straight from the bottle and stepped around a marooned two-wheeled tricycle, grown up in bitter weeds, careful not to trip herself up. She walked up on the porch of the next shotgun house and leaned over to peer through a knocked-out window. Her footsteps on the floorboards sounded like a drum, she noticed, and she hopped up and down a couple of times to hear the low boom again. There was enough vodka left in the bottle to slosh around as she did so, and she shook it in her right hand until it foamed. It didn’t seem to bother the Bear-King any.
The only thing left in the front room was a two-legged wood stove tilted over to one side and three walls covered with pictures of movie stars, politicians, and baseball players. “Howdy, Mr. and Mrs. President,” MayBelle said to a large photograph of JFK and Jackie next to a picture of Willie Mays and just below one of Bob Hope. “How y’all this evening?” She took another little sip and had a hard time getting the top screwed back on, and by the time she had it down tight, it was getting too difficult in the fading light to distinguish one face on the wall from another, so she quit trying.
The back of the next cabin had been completely torn off, so when MayBelle stepped up on the porch and looked through the door all she could see was a framed scene of the dark woods behind. A whip-poor-will called from somewhere deep inside the picture, and after a minute was answered by another one further off. MayBelle held her breath to listen, but neither bird made another sound, and after a time, she stepped back down to the road and looked at the clear space around her.
She felt as though it was getting dark too quickly and she hadn’t been able to see all she wanted. Already the tops of the bank of pines around the row of houses were vanishing into the sky, and one by one the features of everything around her, the stones in the road and the discarded jars and tin cans, the bits and pieces of old automobiles, the broken furniture lying around the porches and the shiny things tacked up on the wall and around the edges of the eaves, were slipping away as the light steadily diminished. Whatever it was she had come to see, she hadn’t discovered yet, and she shivered a little, hot as it was, feeling the need to move on until she found it. I waited too late in the day again, she thought, and now I can’t see anything.
It was like the time at Holly Springs she had been playing in the loft of the barn with some of the Stutts girls and had slipped down between the beams and the shingles of the roof to hide. Papa had found her there at supper time, passed out from the sting of wasps whose nest she had laid her head against, her face covered with bumps and her eyes swollen shut from the poison. He had carried her down to Double Pen Creek, the coldest water in the county, running with her in his arms two miles through the cotton fields and the second-growth thickets until he was able to lay her in the water and draw off the fire of the wasp stings. She hadn’t been able to see for six days after that, even after the swelling went down and she was able to open her eyes finally. The feeling of the light fading and the dark creeping up came on her again as she stood in the road between the rows of ruined houses, the bottle tight in her hand.
“You looking for Cora, her place down yonder.”
MayBelle lifted her gaze from the Bear-King and focused in the direction from where the voice had come. In a few seconds she picked him out of the shadow at the base of a sycamore trunk two houses down. He was a little black man in a long coat that dragged the ground and his hair was as white as cotton.
“You Sully,” declared MayBelle and took a drink from her quart bottle.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the little black man and giggled high up through his nose. “That be me. Old Sully.”
“You used to do a little work for Burton Shackleford. Down yonder.” She waved the bottle off to the side without looking away from the sycamore shadow.
“That’s right,” he called out in a high voice to the empty houses, looking from one side of the open space to the other and then taking a couple of steps out into the road. “You talking about me, all right. I shore used to do a little work for Mister Burton. Build some fence. Dig them foundations. Pick up pecans oncet in a while.”
“Uh-huh,” said MayBelle and paused for a minute. Two whip-poor-wills behind the backless house traded calls again, further away this time than before.
“I heard a lot about you. Cora she told me.”
“Say she did?” said Sully and kicked at something in the dust of the road. “Cora you say?”
“That’s right,” MayBelle said, addressing herself to the Bear-King and lifting the bottle to her mouth. The liquor had stopped tasting a while back and now seemed like nothing more than water.
“She says,” MayBelle said and paused to pat at her lips with the tips of her fingers, “Cora says you’re still a creeper.”
“She say that?” Sully asked in an amazed voice and scratched at the cotton on top of his head. “That’s a mystery to me. She a old woman. Last old woman in the quarter.” He stopped and looked off at the tree line, then down at whatever he had kicked at in the sand and finally at the bottle in MayBelle’s hand.
“What that is?” he said.
MayBelle raised the bottle to eye level and shook its contents back and forth against the Bear-King’s feet, “That there liquor is Communist whiskey.”
Then both regarded the bottle for a minute without saying anything as the liquid moved from one side to the other more and more slowly until it finally settled to dead level in MayBelle’s steady grasp.
“Say it is?” Sully finally said after a while.
“Uh-huh. You ever drink any of this Communist whiskey?”
“No ma’am, Miz MayBelle. I a Baptist,” Sully said. “If I’s to vote, I vote that straight Democrat ticket.”
MayBelle unscrewed the lid, took a hard look at the level of the side of the bottle, and then carefully sipped until she had brought the liquid down to where the Bear-King appeared to be barely walking on the water beneath his feet.
“You don’t drink nothing then,” she said to Sully, carefully replacing the metal cap and giving it a pat.
“Nothing Communist, no ma’am, but I do like to sip a little of that white liquor that Rufus boy bring me now and again. Somebody over yonder in Leggett or Marston, they makes that stuff.”
“Is it hot?”
