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  “Love,” MawMaw Sands answered before I asked.

  I gave a loud snort.

  “Now, love ain’t all bad, Levi Battle.” The old woman’s face crinkled into a papery smile. “You just wait and see.”

  Uh-huh. I hadn’t forgotten about Margie with the Margarine Hair, and the crumbled cake that didn’t even make it from Kansas to Washington, D.C. Or my daddy and Queen Bee Walker. Love was a mess. Nobody could convince me otherwise.

  While we were standing there talking, a fancy Packard pulled up, all shiny and sparkling in the sunshine. A white lady stepped outta the passenger side and came up the dirt path to the porch. She was wearing a straw hat the size of a turkey platter and high-heeled shoes. They tottered sideways on the uneven ground. “You sell baskets?” she called out, as if she didn’t have eyes and couldn’t see them hanging everywhere.

  “Yes ma’am, I does,” MawMaw Sands answered back, real polite.

  The lady sashayed up to the porch and took forever studying all the baskets, holding them up to the light and turning them back and forth in her hands like she was buying diamonds instead of dried-up weeds.

  MawMaw Sands didn’t say a word about the baskets’ names while the lady looked, just eased back down in her chair and worked on one real intently, humming a little to herself to fill the silence. Finally the lady picked out one of the largest ones—a kettle-sized one with all kinds of braided loops and twists all over it.

  “This one’s my favorite,” the lady said. “I’ll take it.”

  “Six dollars,” MawMaw Sands told her.

  I’m telling you, my eyeballs just about fell out.

  Six dollars woulda bought a big part of a war bond to help the troops. Or an entire afternoon and evening of tunes on the bubbling jukebox at Lennie’s in Chicago. Or who knows how many half-price double features you could see at the Regal Movie Theater with that kind of money. And the lady was spending it all on a basket.

  I watched the woman dig through her pocketbook and pull out six crisp ones from a coin purse full of them. She made Uncle Otis and all his money seem like nothing special. After the lady got back in her car and drove off, I asked MawMaw Sands what the basket she bought was called.

  “A Rich Lady and Her Money Is Soon Parted,” MawMaw Sands said loudly, licking her fingers and laying the dollar bills on her lap one at a time. “That’s what I call it, anyhow.”

  A snort of laughter escaped outta me, and the old lady gave me a sly sideways look before she started chuckling too. Pretty soon we were carrying on so much that the striped cat who’d been sitting peacefully on the porch bolted right over the railing from the noise. “Even the Cat Was Scared Off basket.” I waved an arm in the direction of the fleeing cat, and we just about fell over ourselves crying with laughter again. Never did hear the real name of the basket.

  I think the laughter must’ve worn out MawMaw Sands, though, because she got quiet after we were done carrying on and didn’t make a move to pick up the basket in her lap. Just flopped her hands over the rocking chair arms, looking suddenly weary. “Hear there’s a nice ribbling crick waiting on you,” she mumbled, eyes closed.

  “What?” I said, not following a word.

  Sighing loudly, the old woman opened her eyes and waved her weaving spoon in my direction. “I says, it’s about time for you to go ahead and visit that nice cool crick you was on your way to see. McDeeds used to have crawdads the size of Maine lobsters. Probably don’t have none of those no more. Been years since I been down there myself. Stop by some other time and visit again, you hear? Gotta get back to my work.”

  Hunching over her basket again, the lady turned me off like a radio. Taking a few steps backward, I retreated down the porch steps silently, closing the gate quietly behind me and latching it. Straightened the crooked sign too. Just being polite. It wasn’t until I got to the road and looked back at the porch that I realized I’d never told MawMaw Sands I was on my way to the creek.

  16. Cool Ribbling Crick

  The creek sure was pretty, I gotta admit. Having grown up in the city, maybe it looked better to me than it would have to other folks who were used to that kinda thing. The water was clear and sparkly and ran above a pale orangish sand. Silver minnows the size of Aunt Odella’s sewing needles darted back and forth in the shallows.

  I leaned over the bridge, looking down, and tried to come up with a sensible opinion about MawMaw Sands. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, I had to admit that something about the vine-covered porch had felt strange. Couldn’t figure out how the old lady had guessed some of those things about me either. And I swear my ears were still ringing with the hum of those nasty porch bees. Levi Battle, I told myself, you’re going completely crazy. Two days in the South and you’ve lost your ding-donged mind.

  I picked up a warm pebble from the road and tossed it over the side of the wooden bridge, just for something to do. Listened to its lonely plop in the creek below and weighed how close a person could get to the tempting cool water. Tall weeds covered the sandy banks on either side of the creek, but the idea of jumping down into the tangle of brush made me real uneasy. The dark pistol sticking outta that storekeeper’s palm wouldn’t leave my mind, you know? Had the jittery feeling of eyes watching me and kept hearing rustling noises in the weeds and that kind of thing.

  Staying where I was, I scooped up a handful of pebbles and dropped them one by one into the creek, seeing if I could scatter the minnows. Tried skipping a few of the flat stones, although the bridge was too high and they ended up hitting land instead. Wasted more time than I probably should have on a bunch of rocks before I decided I’d had all the fun I could manage to squeeze outta the morning. Never did find the guts to go any farther than the bridge.

  Shoving my hands in my pockets, I ambled back toward Cal and Peaches’s house the same way I’d come, kicking up puffs of dusty clay as my shoes plodded along. Aunt Odella woulda called the day hot enough to melt the stripes off a candy cane. MawMaw Sands’s rocker was empty when I passed by her house, so maybe she’d been run inside by the heat too.

  The sight of a big sedan with white sidewall tires rolling slowly down the street and coming to a sudden stop right in front of Cal and Peaches’s rented house made my heart skip about two years, though. When the driver started sounding his horn, the first thought that went tearing through my mind was that the storekeeper from Fayetteville had found me. My second thought was where in the world to hide.

  As the jarring blasts of noise filled the air, I leaped off the road where I’d been walking and crouched behind a half-dead bush in somebody’s yard. Tried to camouflage myself as best I could behind that useless plant. God knows what anybody looking out their window might’ve thought. After a good five minutes, when the loud honking had finally stopped and nothing more had happened, I got up the courage to stick my neck out and have a careful look around. That’s when I spotted Peaches coming around the side of her house holding a basket of laundry stuck out in front of her huge belly. Opening one of the passenger doors of the sedan, she shoved the basket into the back, and a white arm reached through an open window and dumped some money into her hands before the automobile drove off.

  Laundry.

  Nobody was coming after me. They were just picking up their darned laundry.

  Feeling like the world’s biggest fool, I crawled out from my hiding place, cursing at myself under my breath. Couldn’t believe I’d gone diving for cover like I was under enemy attack, over nothing but a bunch of laundry. Big Man had become a sissy girl overnight. Punch me in the stomach now, and feathers would probably fly out. Disgusted, I smacked the dust off my pants and flicked away a stray beetle crawling on my shirt. You see how much a person can change in just a couple of days.

  “Catch-up jobs,” Peaches told me later, after I got back and found her sitting on the side-porch steps fanning herself with a magazine. “Most everybody around here does laundry for money.” She nodded in the direction of the other houses. �
��We get laundry from all the rich resorts around the Pines, and some of the army officers bring us their wash jobs too.”

  Not long afterward, Cal came back with a laundry sack stuffed full of one resort’s dinner napkins. “Peaches, the lip nappies is here,” he joked as he came through the doorway. Which busted me up since nappies are what babies wear on their behinds, not something you wipe off your lips with.

  However, it wasn’t so funny when I had to help clean those things, let me tell you. Cal showed me how to shake them out over a trash bucket and how to stack them in piles by how dirty they were. Trust me, you don’t wanna to know what came outta some of the real dirty ones. I figure the resort must’ve served almost nothing but fish because there were enough little bitty fish bones when I was done to assemble a whole school. Cal said it wasn’t unusual to come across teeth too. Human teeth, that is. “Even found a gold one once,” he told me. “Thought I’d hit the mother lode when that chunk of metal landed in the bottom of the pail. Until I saw it was a tooth.”

  “You give it back?”

  “Yes sir.” Cal grinned. “Gave it straight back. Didn’t want the rest of them teeth to come looking for me.” He’d found a couple of pairs of eyeglasses and a woman’s watch too.

  I didn’t find anything that exciting. But I decided if I ever ate in a rich resort someday, I would never use a napkin to wipe my mouth. Not after seeing what people left on them. Think I’d rather wipe my mouth on a baby’s behind.

  Cal and Peaches didn’t bring up the subject of sending me back to Chicago until after supper that night. Maybe they wanted to get some work outta me first, who knows. I could tell they’d been discussing what to do. Caught some of the looks flying back and forth behind me, and saw the two of them having a conversation in the yard, just outta earshot of the house—Peaches with her hands never stopping as she talked, and Cal standing at ease, doing nothing but listening.

  Peaches had just finished clearing the plates after supper when Cal pushed his chair back from the table and said maybe we could talk about some important things now that our stomachs were full. You could see he wasn’t used to being in charge much. He was trying to be serious and all, but underneath the acting, he seemed closer to being an older brother than an older person, if you know what I mean.

  He started by saying, “Me and Peaches, we’ve been trying to come up with the best thing to do, seeing as how you’ve come all the way down here.” You could tell he was tiptoeing around the subject of Aunt Odella not wanting me back. “We know it’s a tough spot you’re in.” He let out a puff of air from his cheeks and shook his head. “No two ways about it. Me and Peaches are both from big families ourselves, and we feel real sorry for how your family’s treating you.”

  Like I said, Aunt Odella wasn’t all that bad, even if they seemed to think so. Probably sleeping on a fold-out cot for three years wasn’t easy for her. And when she’d sent me to North Carolina, how could she have known my daddy wouldn’t be there?

  It was easy to see Peaches and Cal hadn’t been able to come up with a better plan for me either. Cal folded his arms and gave me what I think was supposed to be a wise look, although it seemed more like a wide-eyed gaze of desperation. “If it was up to you, Legs, where would you go? Back to Chicago or somewhere else?”

  Honestly, I was all out of good answers. If I went back to Chicago, I’d be dumping the same burdens on Aunt Odella’s shoulders again, and what would be the sense of doing that? Or would it be smarter to stay where I was for a few weeks? I wondered. Maybe what Aunt Odella needed was a little time to start missing me. And Peaches and Cal seemed like nice enough people who wouldn’t mind some company for a short time.

  On the other hand, there was a lot about the South that scared the living daylights outta me, and I didn’t want to come face to face with those scenes again.

  Watching me, Peaches and Cal must’ve thought I was feeling all torn up inside, because Peaches eased her pumpkin-belly self into the kitchen chair next to me and tried giving me a tender look of sympathy underneath all her wincing.

  “You don’t have to decide anything now,” she said, patting my arm. “You can take a couple of days if you need to, but me and Cal think you should write a few words to your aunt and tell her where you ended up at least, so she won’t worry.” Peaches reached into an apron pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper that mighta been wallpaper once, by the looks of it. Paper was often in short supply because of the war.

  “This is the best I’ve got right now,” she said, pushing it across the table. Cal pulled a nub of a pencil out of his shirt pocket and rolled it toward me. Then the two of them tried to pretend they were real busy with other things while I stayed at the kitchen table swatting flies and sweating over the bad cursive I was doing. I knew Aunt Odella would notice my handwriting before she even bothered to read the words.

  What to say was harder.

  It ended up being a short letter. Told her where I was and how my father had to leave on an army mission right before I got there. Couldn’t help adding how I found out it was true about him being in the paratroops. I underlined the sentence, so she wouldn’t miss it. He jumps out of airplanes with a parachute. Could picture Aunt Odella smacking my letter down on the kitchen table, making the salt shaker jump, and saying, “Nohow. That can’t be true.”

  I’ll admit, I still had a few doubts of my own. Needed more proof before I could convince myself one hundred percent.

  Anyhow, I wrote that I was staying with two nice people who’d been good friends of my father, and we were waiting on word from him next. Didn’t say we were waiting for her to start missing me too. Thought about scrawling a quick note to Archie, but I couldn’t come up with what facts to tell him, so I gave up. He’d probably already decided I’d run off to be a secret spy with my father. And who wanted to ruin that good story?

  Ended with So long, Levi—just like my daddy’s familiar letters.

  I decided to hang on to the words for a few days before I mailed them to Aunt Odella, just to see what happened. Turns out a lot of things would.

  17. Like White on Rice

  The next day was my third day in the South. A Tuesday.

  It started out as one of those days when nobody was in a hurry to get up because nobody had gotten much sleep. Cal had tossed and turned and snored the whole night. It was like listening to a B-17 bomber rumbling down the runway. All. Night. Long.

  I don’t think Peaches ever went to bed, because every time I checked, her shadowy shape was still sitting in the rocker by the bedroom window, softly moving back and forth. I was stuck on the same lumpy mattress on their bedroom floor. “We don’t pay for those other rooms, so we can’t go using them,” Peaches insisted when I asked. She was as much a stickler for rules as Aunt Odella.

  The air was so stifling that night, it was a wonder all of us didn’t suffocate in our sleep, crowded together in that breathless space. Only when I slid halfway off the mattress in the middle of the night and rested my cheek against the cool linoleum, outta pure desperation, did I get any relief.

  When I woke up the next morning, my whole body was sprawled across the floor as if it was some refreshing iceberg I had crawled onto in the night. Let myself stay that way for a minute, just enjoying the soft morning breezes that were sweeping in. It seemed well past sunrise, from the bright light that already filled the room. Rising carefully on one elbow, I looked in the direction of the rocker where Peaches was fast asleep with her chin slumped on one shoulder and her hands flopped over the top of her big stomach. Cal was a mound of mashed-potato silence in the bed by the wall.

  Seeing as how nobody else was moving yet, I decided to ease back down to the floor and keep snoring too. I snagged my pillow off the mattress and folded it behind my head, just closing my eyes and letting my mind wander. Thought about my daddy drifting down from the sky with his parachute. What would jumping into the air feel like? I wondered. Was it like water? Did you dive into it? Or did you start running, legs sp
inning like propellers, and take a flying leap into the sky?

  When we were real young, me and Archie used to jump off the lower part of an old brick wall behind his apartment building, daring each other to move higher and higher, until our feet stung like pins and needles when we landed.

  Tried to picture what Aunt Odella would be doing on that same Tuesday morning back in Chicago. She’d be getting ready for work, of course. There’d be the smoky smell of the hot irons transforming her hair into its stiff rolls, along with clouds of Snow White talcum powder drifting through the rooms. “Don’t know why I go to all this bother,” Aunt Odella would always huff as she snapped her old pocketbook shut. She’d been a cook at a city high school for years and took cleaning shifts sometimes too. Plus, all her funeral work. It was easy to see why she was so wore out.

  I wondered what my teachers thought of my disappearing from school outta the blue. It happened a lot during the war. Families came and went, but I still liked to hope people would miss me being around. Where’s Big Man gone to? I pictured the little kids at recess asking, lips quivering and all. Nobody left to be their tree.

  There must’ve been a lot of little kids living next door to Peaches and Cal’s house because you could hear their screechy voices in the yard that morning playing a game of tag, it sounded like. They were shouting, “Lo, tally lo”—which must’ve been the words they used in the South for taking off from home base. They seemed to be running circles around the houses, from the way their voices rose and fell.

  Gotta admit it felt kinda peaceful lying there on the floor listening to all the soft sounds floating around me. In Aunt Odella’s neighborhood, the racket from the streets never stopped, day or night. Friday nights, when the jazz joints were hopping with people, being the worst.

  Maybe that’s why the shriek that happened next—outta the clear blue sky—nearly launched all of us through the roof. The three of us were drifting along, real peaceful in our sleepy little worlds, when a woman next door yelled, “Lord Jesus almighty, everybody, listen up, listen up,” at the top of her live-long lungs.