Inside, Mr. Rishner scraped the dregs of his eggs from hisplate, looked me over and said, “You think you’re running a fever?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I need you to come out and say something over the fields,”he told me. “Gotta earn your feed sometime.”
We went, his fingers drumming a rhythm on the truck’ssteering wheel. I sat with the family Bible in my lap and sang one of Grammy’sold songs. Mr. Rishner fussed with the fence line so long, he never saw meclimb up into the driver’s seat and get the engine running, the tail of my silkdripping blood on the gas pedal beneath me. I took the truck down into thefoothills, then stranded it in a pile of thorns and walked. He could look; he’dnever find me.
I figured the others might come with me. We’d make a Vacross the hill country as we flew north. Mrs. Miellon with her burns fadinginto scars, watching the town get smaller and smaller from the smudged windowof a Greyhound. Annabelle Leahy going out at night, cutting her hair short.Mrs. Donahue sitting in a fancy restaurant booth, telling some eager young manhow she opened up the chicken coop and ran her husband’s livelihood into a woodfull of bobcats and lions. My Miss Angie reading tea leaves in a truck stoptown under a false name.
You have to keep a leash on that kind of hopefulness. No onegoes halfway bewitched. When I left town, only Miss Angie followed me out. Shepulled money from a sock to pay our cab fare, then fifty miles down the roadsaid I was a long way from even deserving Grammy’s name and left me on the sideof the road somewhere in hill country.
In the hills I got comfortable, tilled my own fields ofroots and grasses, slept on a bed of leaves with alder branches hanging over myhead. At midwinter, I bore a child so dark and damp and forested, she might nothave had a drop of her daddy’s blood inside her. I hear that’s how witches areborn; I surely hope so. My child isn’t going to be the marrying kind.
Roiling and Without Form
The couple washes upin the Flamingo’s dimly-lit lobby way past sundown, heedless of the NoVacancy sign illuminated by a row of sputtering candles. Molly’s in themiddle of laying down cards for solitaire when they come in.
“Help you?” she says halfheartedly when the door bangs shutbehind them. She catches a whiff of something sharp and chemical, unfamiliar,and looks up for the first time at her prospective guests. Her breath catches,but she manages to keep her mouth shut.
“We’d like a room,” the woman says airily, patting herpiled-up cylinder of pinkish-gold hair. “Scott, your wallet?”
The man makes an agreeable sort of grunting sound and rootsin his pockets, then lays a wad of wrinkled paper on the counter. Molly makesherself stop looking at their faces—so strange, like a mirror of her own, she’snever seen anyone so like herself—and start looking at their weird currency.
“I don’t know,” she says haltingly, “if we can accept this.”
“Aren’t you the manager, lovie?” says the woman.
“Yes,” Molly says, “but. Just a moment.”
She has the key to Mother’s room on a string around her neckso it doesn’t get lost. The master that unlocks the rest doesn’t work on thatdoor. 1B locks from the outside, as all the rooms at the Flamingo do. If Mollylocked the door and then lost the key, Mother could be stuck there forever,flies crawling across her skin and the melancholy soft glow of TV staticshadowing her face. Molly twists the key between her thumb and index fingerwhile she stands on the threadbare little doormat in front of Mother’s room.Then she knocks, to be polite, and twists the key in the lock. Mother sitsresplendent in her recliner, a cooler parked on the floor to her left, acommercial for pantyhose flickering on the screen in front of her. Theelectricity doesn’t still work in the Flamingo besides in Mother’s room, andthen only for the TV.
“We have customers wanting to pay in dollar cash,” Mollytells her.
“Cash, Molly, or dollars,” Mother says wearily. “You don’tsay both words. Just one.” Her face is obscure and pale to blueness in the darkroom, but she insists: no candles, not even a citronella one to discourage themosquitoes that filter freely through the windows all hours of the day, bobbingdizzily into the bathroom and examining the toilet but somehow never lingeringlong enough to sip Mother’s blood.
Molly smacks an insect from her wrist, suspecting she’salready been bitten. “Dollars, then,” she says. “Do I let ‘em?”
“It’s good for nothing,” says Mother. “Not even fit forbarter. Tell ‘em go, unless they look dangerous.”
“They don’t,” Molly says quickly.
“Edible?”
“No,” Molly says, still quicker. “They’re like everyone whocomes through here. Don’t know where they got that money.”
She tries to get out the door, but Mother says first: “Girl!What do I tell you every day?”
Molly has one foot in the moonlight and one foot on thecoarse stinking carpet of 1B, so she says the words so quickly, so insincerelythat she almost doesn’t believe them: “No one and nothing out there.”
“Tattoo it on your goddamn skin!” Mother says, her voicesplitting with laughter.
Molly locks the door and tucks the key on its string beneathher shirt. She’s got a stack of mildewy paperback romance novels that all say awoman’s supposed to be swept off her feet by something called a billionairetycoon before she’s twenty-four, but she’s forty-six now and no one’s everappeared through the mangroves besides the kind of man who pays for his room inpool chemicals or
