The woman came forward and said, “We have formula.”
“I’ll just take him back here to the bedroom and nurse him right quick,” I said.
“You can sit down here and do it,” she said.
“Please,” I said. “I need privacy.” I turned to the policeman. He had kinder eyes.
“All right,” he said. “Go on.” Then he looked at her. “I’ll wait outside the door.”
I was fixing to bust out fighting again. But then I remembered how awful it was for me and Johnny, seeing Mama go wild. I didn’t want to mark Sunny like Mama done me. I forced myself to be calmer. The policeman followed me down the hall. I thought of the window again, wondering if I could make it to the ground without hurting Sunny. But Mr. Thompson was right. I couldn’t go on the run with such a small baby. I was cornered. My mind went blank. I went in Zelda’s bedroom and shut the door in the policeman’s face. Under the lamp on the nightstand, Sunny’s hair was even more yellow. I held him and gave him my breast. At home I nursed him all through the nights. I didn’t wear anything so he could find my breast in the dark. I knowed they’d put a bottle in his mouth, after I had tried to make sure no rubber nipple ever touched it. I knowed my breasts would get hard and leaky when he was gone. I vowed not to cry in front of them people.
Then I seen the scissors glinting on the nightstand. They was laying on top of a stack of bright colored coupons. I reached over and took the scissors in one hand. The other hand was curled around Sunny’s bottom. He was sleeping as he drunk from me. His long eyelashes made shadows on his soft round cheeks. I dipped my head to smell of him and went to the end of the bed. It creaked when I set down. That’s the same sound the bed made at home when I bounced Sunny. We’d bounce up and down when he got fussy, until pretty soon both of us was smiling. The scissors shined when I brought them close to Sunny’s head. He liked anything shiny. I looked at all that pretty yellow hair. I could hear the policeman pecking on the bedroom door. I knowed I would have to do it fast.
JOHNNY
After I left the farm, I went back to Millertown. The Lawsons gave me a job at their gas station, a sooty building with pumps out front and a room over the garage. Bobby rented me the room while I saved money and decided what to do next. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ford’s prophecy. Sometimes I heard the scrape of his voice saying the words in my head. “You will be a great man.” A week after I got back, I was having a cigarette in the rocking chair on the gas station’s porch while Bobby was gone running errands. When a hatchback with missing hubcaps slowed down and turned in, I thought it would pull up to the pumps but it came across the dusty lot and parked in front of the porch instead. I remembered Marshall Lunsford as soon as he got out of the car and shuffled up to me grinning. His face hadn’t changed much but his eyes seemed older.
“Bobby said you was around.”
“Yes.”
“I ain’t seen you since the ninth grade.”
“I know. It’s been a while.”
Marshall looked down at his shoes. The morning was warm and the old T-shirt he wore had dark rings at the armpits. “I just got back in town not long ago myself.”
“Huh.”
“I took off on the Greyhound, lit out for Texas. I always did want to see Texas.”
I took a long draw from my cigarette. “How was it?”
“Not how I thought.”
I smiled. “It figures.”
“Yeah. I stayed in a hostel down yonder while I was looking for work. I swear, all I could think about was getting back home. I wouldn’t have bet on that, would you?”
“No,” I said, “I guess not.”
“I always wondered if you’d be back.”
“I didn’t think I ever would.”
Marshall looked down at his shoes again. “Neither did I.”
We were quiet for a while, watching a bag float end over end toward the used car dealership across the highway. Then he said, “Well, I come to tell you something.”
I pitched my cigarette, still smoking, over the porch edge. “What’s that?”
“I seen your sister.”
I stopped rocking and sat there frozen.
“I remembered her cause of how she favors you.”
“Where did you see her?”
“That’s what I thought you’d want to know. She was down at the county jail. Some man claimed Daddy was trespassing, digging ginseng on his property. I was in the office trying to bail Daddy out when they brung her in.”
“What did she do?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I had other things to tend to.”
The wind freshened, flapping the faded plastic pennants strung over the parking lot and blowing dirt across the planks at my feet. I sat thinking, listening to the hum of the drink machine, as Marshall watched patiently. Then I stood up. “Can I get a ride?”
At the county jail, I was shown to a place where there were booths with phones and windows. I sat on a stool between cinder-block walls. It seemed I was floating outside myself, watching from above, when the door opened and a guard let Laura into the room on the other side of the glass. She was swallowed up in a blue jumpsuit, rail thin and ghastly pale, her skin like curdled milk. Worst of all, her long black hair had been cut off. I couldn’t bear knowing she had spent even one night in a cell like the one I was in for four years at Polk County. I thought in those first seconds I would get up and leave. But when she approached the window to sit on the stool opposite me, the feeling passed.
Laura took the phone and I looked at the one on my side without picking it up. I had forgotten what I could possibly say to her after so long. The guard who had opened the door for Laura crossed the room behind the glass and let himself into where I was. Without speaking, he brought a white envelope and handed it to me. Then he walked out another door, the one I had come through, where there was an office with a desk and filing cabinets and a water cooler. I sat blinking after him for a second and then turned to pick up the phone. “I told them I wanted to give you a letter,” she said. At the sound of her voice, an unexpected warmth bloomed in my chest. It was filled with images of home, high cliffs and light-gilded leaves and groundhog holes on the muddy creek bank.
“Are you okay?” I asked at last. It was a stupid question, and not what I wanted to say to her, but there were no words close enough to what I was feeling.
Laura smiled weakly. “They’re always trying to lock us up, ain’t they, Johnny?”
I tried to smile back but couldn’t.
There was a silence. Then she said, “Where have you been?”
“I guess I could ask the same of you.”
“Well, here lately I been in jail.”
“Laura,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I done a lot of things since I seen you last.”
I glanced around the room, toward the office where the guard was, down the line of empty booths, at the polished floor reflecting the lights overhead. “Yes,” I said. “Me, too.” Then I made myself look back at her. “I don’t have enough money to get you out.”
She took a ragged breath. “There’s a way you can get some more.”
I gripped the phone tighter. “How?”
“Go to my house on Miller Avenue. It’s bright yellow, beside of a car wash. I got a key hid in a watering can under the porch.”