“Does too.”
We crossed a big pile of water on a bridge with towers and giant ropey things looping down. On the other side was Louisville, Kentucky. After that was just small towns and little white stores with red gas-pumps, farm houses and big barns and fields, empty fields and fields of corn and fields where there were cows and horses and pigs and long rows of tobacco plants Momma said cigarettes was made of.
I had me a war on all the towns going down.
Tat Tat Tat Tat! Blam! There goes Cox Creek!
Bombs away over Nazareth!
Blam! Blam! Boom! Hodgekinsville never had a chance!
“Let’s keep it down back there!” Victor said.
“A grenade rolled into Victor’s lap!” I whispered. “BlamOOO! Blowed him to smithereens!”
I wished Momma had left him back there in Toledo like she said she would. She was always threatening around like that, but then she would get to feeling sorry and forget all about it. She’d been mad ever since Victor spilled the beans about Daddy. Victor was mad too, drinking his beer and driving Momma’s Ford too fast. After Louisville he started throwing his empties out the window.
I liked to watch them bust on the road.
“Pretty country, Kentucky,” Victor said.
It was the end of daytime and a big orangey-gold sun ball hung way off over the hills, almost touching the trees. The Ford jerked over a ditch at the foot of a patchy burnt yard, thundering up a load of bubble noises as Victor shut it down.
“Get off me,” Missy said.
“I ain’t bothering you.”
“Yes you are.”
“But Missy, look!”
A big boned woman in a housedress had come to stand in the yard down by the well. She was looking into the sun — orange light in her face — standing upright, sharp edged and stiff, like an electrical tower, one arm bent like a triangle, the other raised with the elbow so the hand went flat out over her eyes like a cap. She stared out of wrinkles and scribbles and red leather cheekbones. Her nose was sunburned, long but snubbed off at the end, sticking out above a mouth that had no lips, a crack that squirmed and changed itself from long to short and back to long again.
Missy’s eyes widened. “Who is that?”
“Granny,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”
I saw Granpaw too, sitting squat-legged against Granny’s little Jesus Tree. He was turning in one big hand a piece of wood, shaving it, whittling it outward with a jackknife. The brim of a dusty Panama shadowed his eyes. In back of him stood the house, balanced on little piles of creek rock. You could see jars and cans and other old junk scattered underneath. It was the same dirty white color as before, the house was, but the sun ball had baked it orange, and now I could see at one end where somebody had started to paint.
As we got out of the car, the big boned figure in the housedress let out with a whoop, hollering, “Good God A Mighty! If it tain’t Ruby and them younguns of hers! Come all the way down here from Dee-troit!” Blue-green veins bulged and tree-limbed down the length of her arms.
Victor stayed out by the Ford, the round top of my ball cap hanging out his pocket. A gas station man had given it to me on the way down. It was gray and had a red winged horse with the word ‘Mobilgas’ printed across the front. Victor had swiped it away, said I shouldn’t be accepting gifts from strangers. I should have asked him about it first. Now it was in his back pocket, crushed against the Ford’s front fender where he leaned with an unlit cigar, rolling between his lips. The sun was in back of him, halfway swallowed up by a distant curvy line of hilltop trees.
“Hidy Victor!” Granny called. “Ya’ll have a good trip?”
Victor put on a smooth voice. “Fine Mrs. Wood. Real fine. You can’t beat blue grass for beauty, can you?” A long shadow stretched out on the ground in front of him.
Granny laughed. “Ain’t been no farther than Lexington to know!”
Granpaw changed his position against the tree, leaned forward a little bit and spat a brown gob, grunting out the word ‘shit’ as he did. Then he dragged the back of his knife hand sandpaper-like over the gap of his mouth.
“I want you just to looky here!” Granny said. “If tain’t Missy-Two-Shoes and that baby doll of hers!”
Missy backed away.
“Aw, Missy now,” Momma said. “That’s Granny.”
Missy smiled then and let Granny grab her up. Her legs went around Granny’s waist. She had on a pink Sunday dress with limp white bows dangling off its bottom. The back of it was all squashed and wadded, like a used hankie.
“How’s my little towhead?” Granny said.
“Good.” Missy held out her baby doll. “This is Mattie, Granny. She got the same name as you.”
“Well ain’t you the sweetest thang!” Granny grinned so big her wrinkles went out in circles like water does after a stone’s dropped in. She gave Missy a wet kiss and set her down. Then her grin flashed toward Momma. “There’s my other little girl!”
Momma, no taller than Granny’s chin, did a little toe dance up to her, smiling all the way. She hugged Granny and Granny in turn beat the blue and red roses on the back of Momma’s blouse.
“I just love it to death!” Granny said. “Let me look at you!” She held Momma away from her. Momma wiggled her hips; slim curvy hips packed up neat in a tight black skirt. She kissed the air in front of Granny.
Like Marilyn Monroe. Like in the movies.
“Jezebel!” Granny laughed. “You always was a teaser.”
They talked about the trip to Florida, about Victor’s prospects — his good fortune, his chance — about Armstrong and the men down there and that Pink Flamingo Hotel. They talked about Daddy too, and what a good man he’d been.
“It liked to’ve killed us all, what happened to Jessie,” Granny said.
“I know Mamaw. If I had more time, I’d go visit him awhile.” Momma looked out over the crossroads toward the graveyard. I looked too but there was nothing to see now, nothing but shadows and scrubby bushes and the boney black limbs of the cottonwood trees. I remembered what Victor had said about the nigger man, about the crane with the full ladle.
“I want you just to look what the cat’s drug in Mattie!” Granpaw had walked over from his place by the tree.
“Oh Papaw!” Momma hugged Granpaw’s rusty old neck and kissed him two or three times.
“Shoo! Ruby you’ll get paint all over me!”
Momma laughed and rubbed at a lip mark she’d left on his jaw.
“How you been daughter?”
“All right I reckon,” Momma said. She looked back toward Victor who was still up by the Ford. Victor took the cigar out of his mouth. He held it to one side, pinched between his fingers.
“How’s that car running Victor?” Granpaw called.
“Not too bad, Mr. Wood,” Victor answered, “considering the miles we’ve put on her.”
Granpaw made a bunch of little spit-spit sounds, flicking them off the end of his tongue as he did. He hawked up another brown gob and let it fall to the ground; then he gave Victor a nod of welcome and walked over. He walked with a limp, like somebody stepping off in a ditch, carrying the open jackknife in one hand and that thing, whatever it was he’d been working on, in the other.
Granny’s mouth got hard. “Ruby, I did get that letter of yorn. I done told you it were all right to leave that child. I told you in that other letter, ‘member?”
“You sure it’s not any trouble?” Momma said.
Granny’s eyes widened. “Trouble? Why, tain’t no trouble a-tall.” She looked over my way. “I want you just to look how he’s growed! A might on the skinny side though.”