We grabbed some straps attached to the inside of the truck bed. I could see inside the cab. Sam lay wide-eyed across the seat. His eyes locked on mine. I smiled slightly and laid my hand on the glass. He smiled very slightly at me and reached his hand up toward mine. We bumped across the field again.
This time we sped in a different direction. We reached the street in a short time. Hank drove expertly but very fast. I looked behind us and saw our bicycles lying in the grass.
It felt strange to be speeding through the streets of this neighborhood where I didn't belong, in a truck where I didn't belong, with my brother hurt and my sister sick. I thought of all those stories I had to read for school and the questions the teachers always asked. What is the theme? What does the story mean? Why did the characters act in a certain way? We whizzed by the pretty houses. It seemed that at this moment I was inside a story. This was the story of my life, and I did not know what any of it meant. Despite all that was terrible about that day, I found myself exhilarated by our speed, by the sheer adventure of the moment, and most of all by the fact that, by myself, I had found this man Hank Garvin, who was going to save my brother. It seemed amazing.
We pulled up to the hospital where my brother had been born. Hank ignored my sister and me and picked up my brother and was already running through the hospital doors as Lynn and I stepped down from the truck. We hurried after Hank.
By the time we got inside, Sam lay on a gurney and was being rushed away. Hank watched. We stood beside him. He smiled at us. "He's going to be fine," he said. Lynn hugged me.
The hospital called our parents. Hank sat in the waiting room with us. Once, he looked at his watch and left the room to make a phone call. When he returned, he had a coloring book and a few broken crayons for me. I was a little old for that, but I said thank you and pretended to be absorbed in coloring. Every so often I peeked at Hank Garvin. White people were not really mean to me, but they were rarely nice, either. And here was Hank, acting like we were the most important people in the world. I decided that besides being a handsome millionaire and a karate expert, my future husband Joe-John Abondondalarama would help out people in need, just like Hank. Maybe he wouldn't even be a millionaire.
Even after my parents arrived, Hank still didn't leave. He waited until Sam was released. We all went up to Sam's room to get him. The doctor had said we were lucky the trap hadn't broken any bones. My father's face contorted when he saw Sam's bandaged leg. My mother kept asking the doctor what she could do, and the doctor kept saying, "It's all under control now."
We took Sam into the lobby, where my parents thanked Hank profusely. I found myself embarrassed at the smells emanating from my mother. Back in Sam's room the doctor had sniffed once at the air and looked around for the source of the smell. What the doctor smelled was my mother's pad that she hadn't had time to change. But if Hank noticed, he didn't let on. He didn't sniff the air or any thing. He showed Sam a disappearing coin trick, and then he left.
Sam and Lynn rode with my father, and I rode with my mother. I knew I would be in trouble for the way the picnic had gone. I was afraid to mention our bicycles, still lying in the grass. Lynn wouldn't be in trouble because she was sick, and Sam wouldn't be in trouble because he was hurt. I waited to hear how I would be punished. Instead, my mother did not speak a word. She looked terrible. The whole car smelled from her pad, but I didn't open the window because she might be insulted.
At home later my mother gave my father and me sardines and rice. Even though Lynn was sick tonight, Sam was allowed in the bedroom. He and Lynn went to sleep. I was tired of sardines and rice and just picked at my food. My father was silent, not the normal type of quietness that I expected from him, but a dark, smoky, angry silence that I had never seen before.
"You've got a long day tomorrow," said my mother.
All my father's days were long. He worked seven days a week, every week. He hadn't taken a vacation the whole time we'd lived in Georgia. My father seemed to remember about his hard day tomorrow, and his smoky anger faded. My mother looked at me. "Clean up and get to bed. Tomorrow I want you girls to see how much money you've saved. We have to get something for that Ginger and especially that Hank Garvin."
"We hardly have any money saved."
My mother's face darkened, and my father stepped forward. "We'll get 'em something good."
"Dad?" I said. "Our bicycles are still out there. I'm sorry."
There was a long pause. I saw how exhausted my father was. "I'll go get them," he finally said.
I lay awake on my cot for a long time. I wanted to hear when my father got home. When he returned, my mother met him at the door. "They're gone," he said tiredly.
"Well, we can't afford new ones."
Their voices moved farther away. Late into the night I could hear my parents sitting in the kitchen talking, on and on, and I knew they were talking about us kids, in the way they could talk about us endlessly and never get bored. Sometimes it seemed that one way or another, no matter what my father was saying, he was talking about us. He was talking about all the things he could do for us—and, more often, all the things he could not.
chapter 12
Lynn didn't return to school in the fall. My parents told me it was her anemia, but when I looked up "anemia" in our new dictionary, this is what I found: a condition in which the level of hemoglobin in the blood is below the normal range and there is a decrease in the production of red blood cells, often causing pallor and fatigue. Pallor and fatigue didn't seem bad enough to make someone miss so much school.
Then Lynn was hospitalized in a nearby, bigger town for part of October. Some days, when my mother spent the day and night at the hospital, my father brought Sammy and me to the hatchery with him. A few times we slept overnight at the hatchery. There was a TV in a back room, so we watched that and read our books all day. We didn't even go to school some days. We didn't take as many baths. My parents could have arranged for us to stay at our aunt and uncle's house and go to school, but they didn't. It was as if my father didn't even want us to attend classes, because he wanted us there with him, where he knew we were safe.
The hatchery was a big, concrete, window-less building in the middle of a beautiful field. Unlike at the poultry factory, we could come and go freely at the hatchery. All we had to do was wash the bottoms of our shoes in soapy water each time we went inside. The sexers wore surgical masks so they wouldn't inhale the dusty down from the baby chicks.
I'd been excited to see all the baby chicks. The workers tolerated me and Sammy as we walked through the sexers' workroom. We got to touch the male chicks, because nobody cared about them. Each one looked different: skinny, fat, all yellow, yellow and brown, big, small.
During the breaks we would sit outside with the sexers. Most of them smoked, and they all seemed tired all the time. Even my father seemed tired, too tired even for me and Sammy. One break we sat next to a young sexer blowing smoke rings. When he finished one cigarette, he would light another. He looked at me and Sammy.
"How'd you kids like to make yourselves helpful?"
"What do you mean?" I said.
"Billy has a guy who comes around just to get his coffee and bring him refreshments. You know who Billy is?"
"No."
"He's the best sexer in Georgia. He won the national competition in Japan before he moved to the States. He can sex twelve hundred chicks an hour with one hundred percent accuracy."