Cars pass, occasional screen doors slam, the lawn mower goes silent, and the mockingbirds shuttle back and forth with their beaks full of grasshoppers and beetles to stuff those insatiable little gullets.
Babies must be fed. The young are always hungry...
Into the silence comes the sound of a crooning voice.
The mockingbird buzzes a raspy alarm and watches as a human at the end of the wall stretches out a hand to the cat. She rises, sniffs the strange hand, then allows it to stroke her sleek back.
No threat to his mate or their babies, the mockingbird decides, and goes back to scanning the yard. His eye locks onto a huge grasshopper there at the base of a nearby flowering judas. It's one of those big brown-and-green creatures, enough to fill at least three ravenous beaks. The instant the bird approaches, it springs up; but the bird is quicker and catches it on the wing.
Intent on smashing the struggling grasshopper into manageable bits, the mockingbird pays no attention to what's happening at the far end of the wall; and by the time he flies up to the nest to distribute his grisly morsels, the cat has vanished from his tiny brain as completely and as finally as she has vanished from the wall.
There are babies to feed.
Only the babies matter.
ii
Boxer shorts.
That's how she always thinks of him.
The old-fashioned kind made of striped cotton. With snap fasteners. Except that half the time they'll be unsnapped, with a little circle of damp where he's gotten up to use the bathroom and has been careless about the last drop or two before tucking his thing back inside the striped cotton.
If it's after midnight and her light is still on, he comes into her room without knocking, as if hoping to catch her doing something forbidden.
'Time you were asleep,' he growls before lumbering back down the hall.
That's okay. A lot of fathers do stuff like that.
What's not okay are the nights she gets home after they've gone upstairs and he comes to the head of the stairs and stands there looking down at her, his bathrobe hanging open. Or he's waiting in the living room, sitting spraddle-legged in his lounge chair, and he makes her sit down on the couch across from him while he cross- examines her about the evening.
'Why is your skirt so wrinkled? Were you in the backseat of his car? Did you let him put his tongue in your mouth? That's the first thing men want with a girl—to get their hands inside her blouse, put their hands in her panties. Did you let him? Did you? Is my daughter nothing but a slut? Look at me when I talk to you, young lady!'
But she doesn't know where to look. At his eyes, hot and greedy for something she doesn't understand? At the gaping slit in those boxer shorts where his thing hangs dark and disturbing against those wrinkled hairy lumps?
When he sees her looking there, the striped fabric quivers and rises as the thing beneath engorges and swells. He usually stands then. 'I just want your solemn word that you're still a virgin,' he says.
Sobbing now, she swears that she is.
And now he knots his robe around him and retires in patriarchal seemliness to the master bedroom.
Her mother often complains of insomnia; yet somehow, she never wakes up when he lectures her at night like this.
iii
The kitchen is even filthier than the rest of the trailer—every surface littered with fast-food cartons, soft drink cans, wilted lettuce leaves, dirty dishes, gummy knives and forks.
'What'd you expect,' she bristles.
And now she's in there on the couch crying 'cause she got the slapping she was begging for. Well, damn it all to frigging hell, a woman pushes a man like that, what's she expect?
A bunch of roses?
All her fault.
Yeah, and it's her fault, too, if he has to go looking for what he can't find at home anymore.
Including a clean glass.
Every single glass they own is sitting dirty on the narrow counter. Enraged, he sweeps them all to the floor and bangs out of the back door to go where it'll be cool and quiet and clean glasses appear with the snap of a finger.
iv
George Jones's nasal twang fills the flashy little car—two speakers in the rear and one on each door—but the thief's mind isn't on cheating and hurting songs at the moment, and it's certainly not on the lush green trees and fields flashing past the closed car windows. No, it's remembering details from those articles in the
They made it sound so easy. Like Velma Barfield, the 'Death Row Granny' and last woman executed in North Carolina. Five or six people died before anybody started really noticing. A woman's crime. Middle-aged women. Women like Blanche Taylor Moore, who's sitting up there on death row right this minute. Before her trial actually began, they were saying she might have poisoned as many as nine people.
