father shrugged. He drank down the rest of the beer. “Listen here,” he said, “you got any money?”
“No,” Lester Ray said. He unrolled his pack of Camels and shook one out. He stuck it between his lips and lit it with his Zippo. There was no way he would ever let himself get like his father, he thought. His father was like a piece of driftwood that had washed up behind a dam and was just bobbing there. His life had no direction at all, never had, as far as Lester Ray knew. Lester Ray wondered if that was why his mother had left him, or if he had gotten that way because she left him.
“I thought you said you didn’t have no cigarettes,” his father said.
“I did say that,” he said. He tossed the pack onto the table, and his father took one. Lester Ray lit it for him. He watched his father suck the smoke deeply into his lungs. He stood there watching his father smoke.
Lester Ray was antsy, anxious. He could feel the days of his youth piling up, like blown leaves up against a fence. He didn’t want to get as old and worn down as his father before he found his mother. He had thought of just going, sticking his thumb out, taking off in whatever direction the first ride took him. He was not frightened of being off on his own, not knowing where he was nor where he was going nor what he would eat when he got hungry. In a way it would be a comfort, a new kind of freedom. Except that he knew he would never find her if he just took off, with no plan, no idea whatsoever where she might be. He kept thinking that sooner or later he was going to get a handle on it, that his father would slip up and tell him something that would help him find her.
All he knew was that she had just left one day, without a word to his father, when Lester Ray was almost a year old. He had only the vaguest memory of her: her hands, soft, smelling of Jergens lotion. Maybe it wasn’t a memory at all, just a sense of her that had lodged itself inside his mind and stayed there. His father told him that a Gypsy caravan came through Piper, on the way to one of their burying places down near Fort Myers, camping outside town out in a field behind Saddler’s Lounge, and his father figured she had gone with them. “She was a Gypsy anyhow, that’s where she come from,” Earl has said.
“How do you know that?” Lester Ray had asked, “you don’t know that. Tell me. How you know she was a Gypsy?”
“I just know,” his father said.
“Did she look like a Gypsy?”
“I don’t know,” his father said, “look in a mirror and see.” His father, even though he stayed drunk for a solid year—and had been drunk most every day since—and cried in the night and moaned about how much he missed her, had never tried to find out where she’d gone. Or at least to Lester Ray’s knowledge he hadn’t. Lester Ray could not understand that; he would have followed her and brought her back, even if he’d had to hogtie her.
He had known, when he got six or seven, that his father knew a lot more than he was telling, though how he knew it Lester Ray didn’t know. He suspected that his father knew exactly where his mother was. It was maddening to him. He had searched through everything his father had: an old coming-apart cardboard suitcase that contained a few old yellowed bills that had never been paid, two or three pieces of hard candy in the bottom; his clothes, a few pairs of pants and shirts, most of them torn and put up dirty, underwear with the elastic stretched out of them. One day he had hit the jackpot, or as close to a jackpot, he had decided, as he was likely to hit: he had found a picture of his mother, in an old Bible with an imitation leather cover that was cracked and peeling. Or a picture of a woman that he was sure was his mother, even though his father swore that it wasn’t. It was a black and white photograph, faded, with a checked border around it. The woman was sitting on the fender of a dark automobile, her elbow on her knee and her chin propped on her fist. She had on a light colored dress, maybe white, and her skirt draped around her legs. She was looking straight into the camera and smiling. Her dark hair was long and straight, parted in the middle of her forehead. It was impossible to tell from the picture whether she was a Gypsy, but she was beautiful. Her eyes were squinted, as though the sunlight was high and bright.
“That’s my sister,” Earl had said when Lester Ray showed it to him. “Where’d you get that?”
“In the Bible, where you ain’t looked in twenty years,” Lester Ray said. “Nor me either, ever.”
“My sister,” his father said again.
“What’s her name?”
Earl, drunk, hesitated just long enough for Lester Ray to know for sure he was lying and said, “Daisy. She died of the polio.”
“You’re lyin. That’s my mama, I know it is.”
“No it ain’t, boy,” Earl said, “give it here.” He reached for it and Lester Ray snatched it away.
“No, it’s mine now,” Lester Ray said.
“Maybe Daisy was your mama. Maybe your mama died of the polio, and I been just tryin to spare you.”
“All right,” Lester Ray said, “my mother’s name was Daisy, then.”
“I ain’t said that.”
“Yes you did. You just did.”
“My sister’s name was Daisy. She died of the polio, I’m tellin you.”
“Awww, fuck it, then,” Lester Ray said, and he stormed out of the house, letting the rattly old screen door slam to behind him. He sat down by the river for a long time, looking at the picture. He waited until his daddy was passed out and then hid the picture in a Prince Albert can behind a loose brick under the house.
Mrs. McCrory, from behind the thick tangle of wisteria vines draping her back porch—ancient vines, several of them as big around as a man’s thigh—watched Mrs. Wrinstine’s old tomcat cross her backyard. The cat crawled close to the ground, wary, suspicious; it seemed to know it was only a matter of time before the jay struck. Mrs. McCrory had heard the jay squawking earlier, raucous and shrill, but it was silent now. It was playing possum to trap the dumb cat. The cat scooted forward a few feet, then was still. The heavy wisteria blossoms hung like bright lavender-red Japanese lanterns, and bumblebees floated indolently around them. The wisteria showered a fine perfume down upon Mrs. McCrory. She watched eagerly, anticipating the moment when the jay would strike. It would serve the old cat right. The old cat would sometimes come up on her porch during the night and puke on the floor. Leaving Mrs. McCrory a surprise. Mrs. McCrory was put out with all of Mrs. Wrinstine’s animals. Just that morning she had seen the woman’s milk cow flying over the fence, flying as though it had wings, up and away toward the river and beyond. It was not the first time she had seen the cow fly, but she could not immediately recall when the other time had been.
Mrs. McCrory never left her house any more. The boy went and bought her groceries, and in the winter he carted in the coal scuttles from the shed in back for the Warm Morning heater in her kitchen. Her son Orville had bought and installed the heater for her. Before that, for many years, she had relied on narrow coal fireplaces; there was one in every room of the old house, but she used only two or three of the rooms. Her son Orville had liked pronouncing the name of the heater: Warm Morning, he would say, like it was something out of the Bible, something you couldn’t say like normal things, stove or fireplace or table or something like that. She was supposed to be very grateful to him for buying her a Warm Morning and not just some ordinary heater. She only had to run it about two months out of the year, anyway, and she didn’t see how it was that big a deal. The boy cut her grass and raked her leaves, and he swept up for her, too, and dusted the house, and washed up whatever
