“I might. Bet Hero puts it to you tonight.”
“He’s not bad. I used to let him win but I think it’s the other way around now. What’ve y’all been doing all day?” I ask her as she leans back in the recliner.
“Nothin’ hardly. Darna carried me over to Hudson’s and I got some nail polish. Only ten cents a bottle. I got every color in the rainbow. See?” She holds her hands out and every fingernail is a different shade. “Wish I worked there instead of Rose’s. Bet they get better discounts.”
I look up and Hero and Spur are making their way toward the porch. Two squirrels scamper down the oak tree by the road and like wayward lightning bolts run quick circles around Hero’s feet. Spur leaps back, but doesn’t bark. Hero bends down and puts out his hand and one of the squirrels runs up his arm and sits on his shoulder. The other plays between the two of them.
“That is so weird,” Haley whispers.
“A little Tarzan,” I answer. The first squirrel jumps off Hero and they scurry off. Hero and Spur resume their walk toward us. “C’mon, Hero. Haley doesn’t think I’m your checker equal.”
Hero climbs the stairs and I grab a milk crate from the edge of the porch and place it between us. Under the crate is a box holding checkers and a board, more pink and gray than red and black. Hero folds his lanky legs Indian-style on one side of the crate and I sit in my aluminum chair on the other. Spur nestles next to Haley and she scratches the back of his neck.
We play into the twilight. Hero smiles shyly when he wins and I see words forming in him so clearly that I feel I could reach down his throat and pull them out. Haley cheers for Hero, poking fun at my bad moves and slapping Hero on the back whenever I’m forced to crown him. It’s warm with Haley here — she laughs and flirts and I imagine this as our house, our porch.
“I told you he was good,” she says whenever he gets me in a pinch. I laugh and tell Hero he’s just lucky.
“Hero! Get your ass over here! Your momma’s got supper ready,” Wayne yells from next door. It’s nearly dark now. Hero scampers to his feet and he and Spur rush home, kicking up dust along the way. Haley is the next to go.
“Do you want a ride? Darna would probably give me the keys to the car,” I say as she starts to walk the four blocks to her duplex apartment.
“Nah. It’s not so bad out tonight. Nice for a walk,” she answers. Haley twists her brown hair with her finger and marks a line on the asphalt with her foot. I stand at the top of the steps, looking at her, then glancing back over my shoulder at the blue hand.
“When will you be back?” I ask.
“When do you want me back?”
I shrug my shoulders. “Don’t you know the answer to that?”
Haley rolls her eyes and stuffs her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Better see what your wife is doing,” she teases, and turns and skips down the road.
I dread leaving the porch because there’s nowhere to hide inside. In our small house Darna’s squatty, wide frame sticks out from around every corner. I don’t remember the last time she looked pleasantly in my direction, and even if she did I’m not sure I’d recognize it. Now what’s left of her smiles and graces are reserved for the customers who sit and pay twenty dollars a session to listen to the good faith and promises of a white-trash psychic.
I walk into the kitchen. On the stove is a pot of macaroni and cheese cooked sometime in the afternoon. I take my dinner into the back room of the house and lay down on the floor. A twelve-inch black-and-white TV with rabbit ears is my companion during the psychic hours and I seem to have worn a spot in the wooden floorboard where my body stretches out each night in between boxes of garage-sale bargains — pots and pans, flower vases, ugly ties, pillows, and various volumes of encyclopedias. I rest my head on a pile of large-woman blouses.
The front door opens and closes periodically as Darna reads palms, tarot cards, the crystal ball, or anything else that might reveal to her exactly what it is the customers want to hear. She is a friendly fortune teller, promising the hope of wealth or love to the lonely souls living in houses like ours, living lives like ours. So little changes in this town that is nearly out of Mississippi, almost in Louisiana. We live in the perpetual in-between. But she sells what they want. Twenty dollars salvages hope for another day, until the mailman leaves a new stack of bills or the husband passes out on the porch or the fifteen-year-old daughter spends another night away from home. Darna fills the emptiness with bullshit, recycled every evening until midnight for a small, nonrefundable fee.
At six thirty in the morning, me and Wayne are waiting in the lobby of Labor Locators. The bald guy named Ed sits behind the glass and calls out job assignments to the early birds.
About twenty-five of us are there in the “labor hall,” as Ed calls it. Mostly men but a handful of women. Black and white, young and old, big and little — a pot of blue-collar gumbo there for the picking, willing to work any job Ed can scare up. People are scattered, some sleeping, some pretending to read. Everyone has a Styrofoam cup of black coffee, the steam dancing up and away.
“I hope that asshole don’t send us back to West,” Wayne mumbles to me. “That shit is killin’ me.”
I nod in agreement because I too don’t care to be sent back. For the past five days we’ve been hauling sheetrock on the trucks that deliver supplies to building sites. sheetrock is four foot by eight foot and weighs about three Darnas a sheet, but breaks easy. There’s no other way to move it than putting one man on one end and one on the other and carrying it long-ways, then letting it fall gracefully into a neat stack. The works gets rough when there’s 150 a load, and by the time you get down to the last thirty or so your body is so fatigued and cramped that it’s all you can do to cup your hand and let the sheetrock rest there while you bend your body to support the weight and try not to drop your end, wasting somebody’s good money. When it’s over you wonder how you were able to survive until the bottom of the stack, drink a jug of water, then get in the truck and go get the next load.
Ed looks up and sees us. There’s a grin on his face as he fingers us toward the window. “Back to West, boys,” he says.
“Shit, Ed. Ain’t you got nothin’ else?” Wayne replies.
“You wanna work or not?”
“Fine,” Wayne says, and swipes our time cards off the counter. He cusses all the way out the door, the whole ride to West, and up to the time we’re on the interstate with the first load.
We come home about the same time as the day before, and as we get to the railroad, Hero and Spur are there again zeroed down the tracks. We bump over the rails and Wayne yells, “Get the hell away from there I said!” Hero never looks up. “Guess the son of a bitch is deaf now too.”
We get out of the truck and Wayne says, “You think Darna would give me a free reading?” I’m surprised because Wayne has never before alluded to Darna’s cosmic enterprise.
“I guess. I don’t know. What for?”
“Nothin’ really. How about asking her for me?”
I open the front door and hear Darna yelling at the television. “Kick his ass! C’mon!”
I say “Darna” three times before she answers, and she only does then because there’s a commercial.
“Wayne wants to know if you’d give him a free reading.”
“Ain’t nothing free.”
“Shit, Darna, him and Doris have been living over there forever,” I say.
She rearranges herself on her Aunt Martha’s hand-me-down love seat. Her nightgown rises and her fat legs are white like church candles.