“You’re fortunate to be alive,” Berenice Urschel said. “God’s will.”
“That storm wadn’t made by no God of mine.”
Jones knew these people, how they lived and scavenged. Only most of them he’d known were down in Juarez or Nuevo Laredo, people burned off their land and out of work, fighting over a pot of beans or milk from a goat. He’d seen human beings turned to pack animals during the Revolution, and this country was being torn apart in the same way, suffering plagues he’d only heard about in a sermon, wandering in the desert and searching for something solid to believe.
Berenice staggered for a moment, re-dressing her wound. And she focused on the boy, her expression righting on her face, determined, and saying, “Well, I don’t have any money.”
“I don’t need no money,” he said. “We got everything a man could need right here. Fish and loaves to feed us all.”
She touched his face, holding it within her hands adorned with jeweled rings and shiny bracelets. The jewels winked in the firelight, and Jones thought they’d be lucky if they got out of this shithole without a fight. But they walked on, down the sliding hill and toward the banks of the Canadian River, where a group of men stood around an oil-drum fire and sang old hobo songs and buck-danced. One man played a guitar, another a harmonica, the rest singing about the “ Big Rock Candy Mountain ” and having a hell of a time.
The men in tattered clothes had fashioned a grill from an oil drum and cooked fat T-bones above the flames while passing bottles of bonded whiskey back and forth between verses about your birthday coming around once a week and it being Christmas every day. The men, six of them, were so caught up in the drunkenness that they didn’t even see the lady and old man in a cowboy hat walk close to the firelight.
Berenice Urschel just stared at one, the one tipping back the bottle and high-stepping it, and nodded in recognition.
Jones nodded back and stepped close enough to the fire to feel the warmth on his face and to hear the hissing of fat dripping from the grill. The guitar stopped on a dime and the harmonica softly petered out. The men shuffled a bit and then circled around Jones. The man with the whiskey bottle ambled up to him and gritted what few teeth he had in his rotten hole of a mouth.
“Y’all living high on the hog,” Jones said. “T-bones and bourbon. Fine ole night in the Hooverville, ain’t it?”
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked, tipping back the whiskey bottle. He was unshaven, dressed in rags, with the breath of the dead. He polished off the bourbon, Adam’s apple sweaty and stubbled, bobbing up and down as he took the last swallow.
When he saw Mrs. Urschel, he broke the bottle on the grill, sparks scattering, and pointed the bottom directly at Jones’s chest. “You shore are a fat little fella. Like a little hog.”
Another bum snatched Berenice Urschel’s arm and twisted it up behind her back. “Take them rings off,” he said, nuzzling his mouth into her ear. “Them things are bigger ’an a cat’s-eye. You shoulda never come lookin’.”
The broken bottle refracted hard and silver in the fire glow as the hobo lunged for Jones’s belly. He sidestepped it easy, and the two men circled each other, the old hobo licking his dry lips. Jones reached for the.45 and aimed dead center at the man’s forehead.
“Y’all got ten seconds to hand over this woman’s money.”
“We ain’t got it.”
“Decent people live here,” Jones said. “And the shit runs downhill.” Jones took a breath and walked forward, gun loose by his side, and went straight up to the man gripping Berenice Urschel’s arm. He simply coldcocked the bastard across the temple.
The bum fell to his ass, clutching his face and moaning.
Jones pointed the gun at the hobo with the busted bottle and eyed down the barrel, squeezing the trigger just slightly, the cylinder buckling and flexing.
The man spit in Jones’s face, and Jones wiped it from his cheek with the back of his hand. He stepped forward and placed the revolver’s tip flat into the man’s nose.
The bum waited a minute, breathing hard and sullen, before reaching down and plucking a fat wad of bills from inside a busted boot. He nearly lost his balance, trying to stand tall before Jones but uneasy on drunk feet. “You can’t grudge a man for trying to go on the tit.”
“Open your mouth,” Jones said.
He opened his ragged hole, and Jones smelled a latrine of dead shrimp and whiskey and garbage. Jones pulled the broken watch from his breast pocket and set it on the man’s fat tongue. He sucker punched him in the gut, dropping the bastard to his ass, hitting him again in the mouth, breaking the timepiece into shards of glass and busted gears.
“All is forgiven,” Jones said.
8
Kathryn didn’t get up till almost eleven, worn out from the drive back and forth to Coleman and Paradise. She made a pot of coffee, grabbed her cigarette case, and took old Ching-A-Wee out for a doo-doo on her front lawn. How Kathryn loved that little dog. Lots of folks-including George-didn’t realize Ching-A-Wee was royalty. That’s God’s truth. When she and George had just gotten hitched in Saint Paul and lived in that awful apartment building with Verne Miller and Vi, there’d been an old maid who’d sold Pekingese on the second floor. Kathryn loved Chingy from the start. You could tell he was royal from the way he stood, begged for food, and, hell, even took a dump, legs sprawled and looking you dead in the eye, daring you to tell him it don’t smell sweet.
He skittered up the porch steps and, as she settled into a chair, onto her lap, nearly spilling coffee on the robe’s monkey-fur trim. She smoked for a while, stood and checked the mail slot-loaded down with nothing but bills and more bills. The department stores were the worst, always addressing you like this was something personal and not a business transaction, calling her “Mrs. Kelly” and telling her how “unfortunate” it was they hadn’t received a payment. The hell of it was, there was nothing unfortunate about it. She and George had blown through that Tupelo money damn-near Christmas, and if Mr. Urschel’s family didn’t come through she’d be back to making fifty cents an hour cutting men’s nails, complimenting fat old duddys on their style just to make a dollar tip or get an invite back to their hotels to make twenty bucks a throw.
“Hey, watch it,” she told Chingy. “Settle down. Settle down, little man.”
She raked her nails over the nape of his neck and felt for the diamond collar, wondering how much she could pawn it for if things got really rough. Her bags were packed and plans made. She knew every step by heart. She would meet George in Oklahoma City, bring the new Cadillac, telegram to Saint Paul…
She’d nearly counted off the list for the second time when the gray Chevrolet rolled into her drive and killed the motor, Ed Weatherford stepping from the cab and taking off his hat. “Mornin’.”
“What do you want?”
“That ain’t no way to greet a gentleman caller.”
“What if George was here?”
“I’d sit down and chaw the fat with him,” he said. “George knows we’re buddies.”
“Some buddy.”
“What are you sore at, darlin’?” He gave that crooked, two-dollar grin. “Did you want moonlight and roses? I can look in my pocket.”
“I know what’s in your pocket.”
She stood and opened the screen door to let Chingy in. Ed followed the walkway, and Kathryn turned, pulling arms across her chest, the cigarette still burning in her fingers. “If you came here for a throw, I ain’t in the
