be sitting around the pit, passing a bottle of whiskey around, their cigarette smoke rising up to mix with the sweet-smelling smoke from the pit. She had loved barbequed pork, but she hadn’t had any for God knows how long. She and Lester Ray would stop at a restaurant and she would treat him to a barbecue sandwich or a slab of ribs.
She suddenly remembered something, so she got up and went into the hallway. She opened the coat closet and got her hat from the shelf. It was a dark blue straw hat with a tiny little cluster of red wooden cherries on the brim. It had been her church hat back before she’d stopped going. She laughed, thinking about the church: she supposed she’d lived too long, because all the preachers just kept saying the same things over and over again. She’d already heard everything ten times over. She figured she knew more than they did, anyhow. Most of them too young to blow their own nose.
She stood there in the hallway, holding the hat, looking curiously at it, because she could not understand what it was nor why she had it in her hand. Then she realized it was a hat. “Now whose hat do you suppose this is?” she asked the empty air. She put it on her head and looked in the mirror in the hall; she turned her head this way and then that way. She smiled at herself in the mirror. “Well, finders keepers, I always say,” she said. She went back into the kitchen and sat down again. She crossed her still shapely legs and folded her hands in her lap. She felt dressed to go on a trip with the hat on her head.
It had grown very dark as Lester Ray was crossing the backyard with his pillow slip of clothes—he had gotten his mother’s picture from where he had hidden it and put that in as well—when he heard someone. “Hey,” a voice said, barely above a whisper. It was a moonless night and very dark, and he could see nothing.
“Who’s there?” he said.
A willow bush started to shake. And someone stepped out from behind it. Even in the dimness Lester Ray could see the red dress. The girl just stood there quietly. “What you want?” he said.
“Where you goin?” Virgin Mary Duck asked.
“Is it any of your business?” Lester Ray replied.
“It might be,” she said. Her voice had a coquettish lilt to it, a flirtatious trill.
“You’re trespassin,” he said.
“So’re you.”
“What the hell do you want, girl?” he said, more harshly. “I ain’t got time to stand out here in the dark and argue with you.”
“I been watchin y’all,” she said, “you and that old lady. Y’all are fixin to go off somewhere in that car, ain’t you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“I want to go with you,” she said.
“Shit, don’t even think about it.”
“Listen here,” she said, coming closer to him. “I’ll be real good to you. I’ll suck your dick.”
“There ain’t any way you’re comin with us, so you might as well get on home,” Lester Ray said. She was making it tempting, with her last proposition, though she was far from the sexiest girl he’d ever seen, with those buck teeth and that pale red hair. But he couldn’t take any risks. He couldn’t, and he wouldn’t at this point even if she was the sexiest girl he’d ever seen, because he was focused on finding his mother and he wanted nothing to distract him from it.
“Listen, Lester Ray,” she said, coming even closer, “you got to hear me. I got to get away from him. He’s mean to me. Beats me. And he’s been fuckin me since I was six years old. Probably before that, only I can’t remember no further back than that.”
“Fuckin you? His own daughter?”
“Don’t make any difference to him. He’s a mean sumbitch, I’m tellin you.”
He could smell her now, her unwashed body. The cruelty that a man could inflict on his own children still amazed him, in spite of all he’d seen and experienced in his life. His own daughter! And her a halfwit midget to boot.
“Listen to me, V. M.,” Lester Ray said, “we ain’t got room . . .”
“I ain’t got no bag or nothin,” she interjected.
“ . . . and it’d be kidnappin. Your daddy would come lookin after us. Or send the law after us. We can’t have that.”
“Please, Lester Ray,” she said. “Please! I got to get away!”
“No, I said.”
“Look here,” she said, holding something out toward him. “Look what I got.” It was a bottle in a wrinkled paper sack. He pulled it out. He couldn’t read the label, but he knew it was whiskey, and from the weight of it the bottle was full.
“Who’s that out there in the yard,” came a voice from the back porch, from the deep shadows behind the wisteria. “Lester Ray?”
“Yes, ma’am, it’s me,” he said.
“That your wife with you?” Mrs. McCrory asked.
“No, ma’am, it’s not,” Lester Ray said.
The girl grabbed Lester Ray’s arm and he jerked it free. “Please,” she said, “just take me a little way down the road.”
“No,” he said. He handed her back the bottle of whiskey.
“You’d be savin my life, Lester Ray,” she said. “You would. Just like you was snatchin me from a fiery pit.”
“I got to go,” he said. He left her standing in the yard. He knew she wouldn’t leave. He was softening toward her in spite of himself and against his better judgment. Maybe they could take her as far as Pensacola, and then she’d be on her own. If they did take her, she’d have to understand that.
“Who you talkin to out there, then?” Mrs. McCrory said, when he came up on the porch, “if it’s not your wife.”
“Some little dwarf girl,” he said. “She’s beggin to go with us.”
“How’d she know we were goin anywhere? You didn’t tell her?”
“No, ma’am,” he said, “she figured it out. It was her daddy fixed the car.”
“Where’s her daddy now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably laid up drunk somewhere.” He paused a minute. “He beats her,” he said.
“Well, let’s take her with us, then,” Mrs. McCrory said.
“It’s risky,” Lester Ray said.
“If she acts up and doesn’t behave, we’ll just put her out,” she said.
“I wasn’t talkin about that. The more people we got, the more folks might come lookin for us.” He and Mrs. McCrory stood gazing out into the dark yard. They could barely make out the reddish form. “And she stinks to high heaven,” he said.
“Well, bathe her.”
