“Look at that crazy thing,” my mother would say, “mouth just full of money. Sit back in your seat and don’t look at him, Harold. It just encourages him to try himself.”
One Sunday, by the luck of the draw having to sit by Weldon, I couldn’t hear a word of what Brother James was saying during his whole sermon because all the money hadn’t come out of Weldon’s mouth when the plate came by, and he sat there for the full hour rattling a couple of leftovers, pennies or dimes by the sound of them, up against his teeth on both sides of his mouth, top and bottom. I remember I kept wondering the whole time whether he had saved those coins back on purpose or whether they had lodged under his tongue or behind a molar when he leaned forward to puke his money into the pie plate coming through. I knew one thing, though. When Weldon’s money hit that tin bottom it sounded different from everybody else’s. More like a rock than metal. The spit did something to the sound.
“I wish it was a watermelon we were going after,” I said to Nancy. “Instead of that old raw milk.”
“I don’t like to drink it,” she said. “It ain’t pasteurized. It’s liable to give you rabies.”
“Well, it don’t cost nothing,” I said.
“Ain’t worth nothing, neither.”
About then I stepped on a grass burr, not looking where I was going, and had to stop to pull it out of the sole of my foot. This time my sister consented to hold the milk jug while I operated on my foot, so I didn’t have to find a safe place to set it. When I finished, we fought briefly over whose turn it still was, but the argument was mainly a matter of principle so it didn’t last long.
“It’s some buzzards up there,” Nancy said, pointing toward where a sweetgum tree had fallen on the shoulder of the road several weeks back during a high wind. “I wonder what they’re after.”
“Maybe it’s a rattlesnake,” I said. “Or a piney-woods rooter.”
“Naw,” she said. “It’ll just be a run-over armadillo.”
I hoped against hope, but she was right when we got to it. The odds were in her favor by about a million to one, I knew, but it would have been nice to see something else dead on the road besides a swelled-up armadillo with its feet in the air and its shell worked over by bird beaks.
“Look how its tongue’s stuck out to the side of its mouth,” I said, leaning over to take a good close look at last night’s kill. “That’s just the way an armadillo will do the second it dies. Stick that tongue out like greased lightning. It’s armadillo instinct.”
“Frankie poked a stick at a dead one’s belly last Wednesday and a bird flew out of its neck,” Nancy said. “Living up in there.”
“Oh, it was not,” I began telling her. “You don’t know anything. Birds don’t live up inside dead armadillos. That’s just a fool superstition. That bird was just eating around inside there after the thing was already dead.”
I had already set the milk jug down again, well away from the armadillo for the sake of hygiene, and was leaning over to pick up a small piece of broken lumber that had bounced off somebody’s truck there on the highway, thinking to use it as a surgical instrument on the dead armadillo, when the first bellow came.
He had hidden down behind a big pine stump left from when the highway department men had cut down the dead tree itself to keep it from falling on the highway in case a big wind came up. Nancy and I hadn’t even noticed where we had got to on the road because of watching for what the buzzards were after, and when I looked up at the sound, Weldon Overstreet was about fifty feet away, standing flatfooted in the middle of the road with his head throwed back, yelling straight up into the sky like he was trying to make the noon-day sun itself hear him.
“Uh-oh,” Nancy said and began to cry, “I knew you was lying about counting four feet on that thing. It’s him, all right.”
One of the straps on Weldon’s overalls had come unfastened so that it was dangling, and I could see that the laces on his workshoes were loose and he wasn’t wearing any socks. His straw hat had fallen off when he jumped out from behind the stump and was lying in the road ditch propped up against a rock like the rock was wearing it. I looked at that hat so hard I can still see it today whenever I want to, that yellow straw with one side curled up so you could see the sweatband dark with where it had been around Weldon’s sweaty head.
“We got to run,” Nancy said. “Come on. Don’t you bust that milk jug.”
“No,” I said, watching Weldon lower his gaze from that hot blue sky and look directly at me with a big smile on his face. “If we turn our backs to run, he’ll catch one or both of us. We got to get on by him somehow.”
“Hot,” Weldon said, and then, “Woo wee. Y’all didn’t see me then. Y’all didn’t see me until I hollered.”
And then he threw his head back and did it again. I could hear the echoes from it ringing on down through the woods on both sides of the road, bouncing off sweetgums and stands of pines and moving further off toward the creek bottoms and wetlands.
Weldon’s face was as red as I’d ever seen it, clear from his hairline on down to where his neck was covered by his blue shirt and overalls, and it was glistening with sweat like it had just been rubbed with a wet dishrag. The shade of his face was an important thing. I knew it, and Nancy knew, and anybody living around Camp Ruby and acquainted with the Overstreets knew it.
“He looks just like fire,” Nancy said, beginning to ease into a backwards shuffle. “He looks like he’s fixing to have a fit any minute now.”
“Don’t you run back,” I told her. “Listen to what I said now. Backing up won’t do it, I flat guarantee you.”
By this time Weldon had moved out almost into the exact center of the highway and was standing facing us with his arms stretched out like a human barricade. His fingers all looked the same length to me and as big as pork sausages dangling there from the palm of each plate-sized hand.
“Y’all are going after milk,” Weldon yelled in a voice loud enough for a deaf man to hear. “Up at Miss Sleetie Cameron’s.”
The echoes came back from both sides of the road, Cameron’s, Cameron’s, Cameron’s, like a Houston station fading out on the radio.
“Yeah, we are,” I said, picking up the milk jug and reaching out to grab Nancy’s hand. “We got to go and do it now.”
“Y’all got to get by me first, you kids,” Weldon yelled in a voice loud enough this time to spook the two buzzards that were perched in a dead tree waiting for us to get away from their armadillo. All three of us watched them flap off, slow at first and then catching an updraft, beginning to circle up and up into that blazing sky until finally they were just two black marks against the blue background.
“I wish I was a buzzard,” Nancy said in a whisper.
Weldon had thrown his head so far back watching the birds rise up that I could see the roof of his mouth, pink instead of red, the lightest shade of skin I could see anywhere on his body.
“Nancy,” I said out of the side of my mouth, “when I say so, you run toward that left ditch over yonder and I’ll run toward the right one. That way he won’t know which direction to jump and we can slip on by him
