Lyla, page 8
“Is this Rory McAllister's house?” I asked.
Mullet nodded.
“How do you know where he lives?”
“I did some work for the McAllisters, years back.” Mullet threw the truck into park. “Never you mind about any of that. We got work to do.”
Mullet opened the glove box and removed a little cloth bag. The bag jingled in his hands. He spilled it open and a slew of metal keys fell into his lap. He weeded through the mess and removed a handful of the brass keys.
“Listen up, we don't have much time.” Mullet pulled a watch from his pocket. “The ballgame's almost over. It won't be long until the whole McAllister family's home. I don't want to be here when they're sipping on juleps, telling each other how smart they are. We have to haul ass if we're going to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Just follow my lead, boy.”
“Mullet, I don't want to do anything wrong.”
“Don't you worry, Old Timer.” He patted my shoulder. “I'll be the one engaging in all the evildoing.”
We walked up to the tall wooden door. It loomed over our heads like a castle drawbridge. Mullet jammed a key into the slot of the door and fiddled with it. He rattled it back and forth. The latch clicked, and the door swung open.
“Eureka,” he laughed.
We walked into the spotless home.
The floor-to-ceiling wood paneling made it seem as though we were walking into a mahogany-covered afterlife. A bulbous vase of fresh white flowers greeted us on a table in the entry way. It was taller than we were, and it smelled better than we did, too.
Mullet whistled. “This is fine-damn living right here.”
I reached up and touched one of the flowers in the vase.
We walked into the kitchen. It was a large, white tiled room. High ceilings towered above us. The kitchen stove was big enough to cook an elephant on–or three. Mullet opened up the tall ice box. With squinted eyes, he scanned the contents of the cooler and removed a glass jug of milk.
“Hurry now, find me two glasses,” Mullet said. “Not their good glasses, neither.”
I went to the marble counter and pilfered through the cabinets. I'd never seen so many glasses in all my life. There were glasses of every shape and size. Round ones, tall ones, short ones, and long skinny ones. I picked out two of them and handed them to Mullet. He filled the glasses with milk and then took a sip from each. The white milk ran all over his thick beard, trailing down onto his shirt.
“Okay now,” Mullet whispered. “Let's go find Rory's bedroom.”
“Why are we whispering?”
“Because it's better than yelling.”
The bedroom was upstairs. It was spacious. It looked like a wooden football field. The long and wide room sprawled outward in every direction. Baseball posters covered the walls, a radio sat on the nightstand, and there were mountains of magazines in every corner. I'd never seen so many pleasantries in one place before.
I inspected the small radio on his nightstand.
I figured Rory listened to baseball games on that fancy thing.
“Don't let jealousy curl your upper lip, Old Timer,” Mullet looked toward the radio. “Won't do you no good.”
“Me?” I set the radio down. “I ain't jealous.”
“Mmm hmm, well you'll do good to stay that way, then.”
Mullet searched the room, looking along the wood floor. He looked behind the furniture and felt underneath the bed. He opened up the door to the closet and looked around inside.
“This is what I'm looking for.” Mullet grinned and knelt down. The metal floor vent was a grid-work of steel that looked like it belonged on the front of a Buick. The vent let out a rusty groan as he lifted it open.
“Give the milk here,” he said.
He took one of the full glasses from me, and lowered it down into the vent hole, careful not to spill it. Then he drew back his hand from the crooked hole. Mullet shut the vent and looked at me with wide eyes.
“That oughta do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Never mind. Find me another vent.”
We searched the room for another heating vent, feeling along the floor. I found another big vent behind the dresser on the other side of Rory's enormous bed.
“You do the honors this time,” Mullet said, handing me the glass of milk.
I lifted the vent cover and set the glass of milk in the duct. Just like he'd done.
Mullet smacked me on the back and laughed. “Come on, let's giddy up out of here.”
We scampered down the grandiose staircase to the front door like a couple of cats. We ran as fast as our legs could move, darting through the entryway in a flash. Mullet paused for a moment. He grabbed a white flower from the big vase and put the stem between his teeth.
He tossed another white flower to me.
“Here's one for the road,” he said.
͠
Mullet sped down the road as fast as the vehicle would run. The marshlands zoomed by the truck windows in a horizontal blur. I held out my shaking hand in front of my face. The adrenaline from our caper made me tremble like a blade of grass.
Mullet talked to himself in a quiet voice, or maybe he was talking to me, I wasn't paying much attention. I was too busy admiring the artwork inside the truck cab. The nude woman above the visor caught my eye. She reclined on a large daisy with an apple in her hands. The look on her face was whimsical.
“What's this?” I asked, pointing to the drawing.
He looked at the little painting. “Oh that? Why that's Lady Eve. Before she ate the fruit.”
“You mean Adam and Eve?”
“The one and only.”
“Aren't they from the Bible?”
“Yessir, she was the first woman alive.”
“Ever?”
“She was perfect.”
I imagined what a perfect woman would look like. That was easy to do, they all looked perfect to me. Even the bad-looking ones.
“Even though Eve was perfect, she made a bad mistake,” said Mullet.
“A bad mistake like what?”
“The worst mistake anyone could ever make. She was misunderstood.”
Mullet chewed on a mouthful of tobacco staring out the windshield. His jaws chomped, and he spit every so often. Mullet offered me the plug of tobacco without saying a word. I took the little brown brick and ripped a hunk off with my teeth.
“Mullet, what'd we do, exactly? To Rory, I mean.”
“Well Old Timer, the beauty of our work is two-fold. First off, the milk will keep souring as the days go by. Each minute getting worse. After a few weeks, the smell will be so foul, Rory will wish he was sleeping in the outhouse.”
I couldn't help but laugh.
Rory deserved every bit of it.
“What's the second thing?”
“Second thing is: the milk we hid in his closet won't just stink up his room. Since it's in his closet, it'll stink up his clothes, too. Rory will be waltzing around town smelling like a pile of oysters.”
Mullet wiped spit from his mouth.
I could think of nothing better than Rory McAllister smelling like a pile of oysters. Just like me. I smelled like oysters every day of my life.
The laughter crawled all over me like a tickle. It started in my gut and rose upward into my chest like red in a thermometer. I threw my head forward and laughed until my stomach muscles were sore.
Mullet watched me laugh through the corner of his eye.
It was his gift to me.
͠
Emma Claire stood at the window. Her face pressed against the glass in a kind of helpless boredom. The house was completely silent. It wasn't very tidy, either. Nobody ever cleaned it except me.
I walked through the front door and kicked my shoes off.
“Quinn,” Emma Claire said, running over to me with her hands out.
I grabbed her by the arms and swung her in big circles. I wasn't able to scoop her up the same way Daddy did. He could lift her high up in the air as if she were a teddy bear. I wasn't as tall as he was, or as strong. I set her feet on the floor and noticed that she smelled like sweat and dirt.
“Have you been playing outside today?” I asked.
“All day.” She smiled. “With Silver, Bits, Crystal, Tawdy, and Rocks.”
“Rocks? You named one of your cats rocks?”
“He always hides from me behind the rocks when I chase him.”
I'd probably do the same thing.
“What happens when you catch him?”
“I give him a bath. All of them had baths today. They don't like it.”
“Well, that's because cats hate water.”
“They drink water, though.”
“That's different.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
She didn't follow my logic.
I bent down and tickled her. “And now it's your turn to take a bath, you little sapsucker. And I know you hate bathing even more than the cats do.”
“Hey!” Emma Claire let out a roaring laugh. “I'm not taking a bath!”
“Oh, yes you are, or I won't cook any dinner tonight, and you'll go to bed hungry.”
That changed her mind.
“Bet you can't catch me!” she shouted, running from me, stomping through the house toward the bathroom. “Quinn can't catch me, Quinn can't catch me!”
I sighed, watching her run away.
She was right.
͠
The radio sat perched in the kitchen windowsill. It hummed sultry music through a tweed speaker, filling up the room. The sounds of southland jazz wafted through the atmosphere. The music made me feel warm. I liked the radio. I needed it on, even when I wasn't in the house. It made the dark, lonely place feel alive somehow. Alive in an artificial way, but alive just the same.
Emma Claire sat at the table and ate her cinnamon toast. She bounced her legs, humming to herself in a high-pitched voice. She like the radio as much as I did. If ever I turned it off, she'd fuss and point to it until I turned it back on.
Recently, Emma Claire had learned how to turn it on all by herself. Her little hand would clasp around the knob, and the radio would boom. The screaming clarinets and trumpets would scream until I came to adjust the volume.
While Emma ate, I sketched with a pencil on a scrap piece of paper. I attempted to draw a picture of Lady Eve, like the one in Mullet's truck. My drawing was terrible compared to Mullet's. My naked women looked like cheap smut.
“What's that you're drawing?” Emma Claire asked with a mouthful of food.
“Eve. From the Bible.”
“Oh.”
Each night before bed, Emma demanded cinnamon toast. I don't know how that habit started, but I'm pretty sure it was my fault.
“The Bible?” Emma Claire wrinkled her nose “What's that?”
“It's a big book.”
She took another bite of her toast. “Have you read it before?”
“No. I can't read.”
“At all?”
“Some words.”
Emma thought about that. “Which ones?”
I shrugged. “Mostly just little words.”
“Is my name a little word?”
“No. It's two words.”
“Is your name a little word?”
“Yeah.”
“I want my name to be a little word too.”
If she could've been named Quinn Applewhite, she would've done that, too. She even slept in the same bed I did.
Emma never slept in her own room anymore. In fact, she refused to even go in there, not even during the daytime. Her room sat unused as lifeless as an old graveyard. The bedroom was a nothing but a storage room. It housed a few pieces of furniture, and a few bolts of Mother's old fabric. That was it.
“Where's Momma?” Emma Claire licked her fingers.
“Sleeping.”
“Momma always sleeps.”
I let out a big breath. It was true.
“Emma Claire, do you ever see Mother during the day? Does she ever come out of there?”
“Nope. Never.”
We hadn't seen Mother in several days. I was sure she came out of her room when we weren't around. I knew she'd wandered into the kitchen at some point. The refrigerator was missing a block of cheese. The crackers in the cabinet were gone, too. She always took the best things from the kitchen. I'd taken to hiding certain things so Mother wouldn't steal them.
“Naked.” Emma touched my drawing. “That girl's naked.”
“It's all part of the Bible. That's why she's naked.”
“The Bible must be a bad book.”
“It probably is.”
“What's the Bible?”
“It's a book for lawyers, I think.”
“What's lawyers?”
“They make sure that people are miserable.”
I'd heard Daddy say that once.
I crumpled my paper into a tight ball and started sketching on a fresh piece of paper. This time, I drew a daisy. Daisies are easy enough to draw, anyone can do a daisy. I traced the round petals onto the paper and then drew a circle in the middle of the flower.
My artwork wasn't as good as Mullet's.
Not by far.
“Oooh, that's pretty.” Emma Claire pointed her buttery hand at the paper. “I like flowers.”
8.
Two years went by as fast as a sunset in November. Two years didn't feel like a long time. And I suppose it wasn't, not really. It was just a little over seven hundred days. Seven hundred days doesn't even seem long enough to grow a tomato, if you think about it.
Emma Claire grew faster than anyone I'd ever seen in those seven hundred days. She sprouted like the woody weeds that grow in the ditches. Those weeds shoot up overnight. They look like small trees, like they'd make terrific bows and arrows. But they don't work for that sort of thing. They're far too papery and soft.
I know this from experience.
Emma Claire spent her days playing in the backyard behind our home. The feral cats chased her, parading themselves behind Emma Claire like committed disciples. She built forts out of palmetto leaves and decorated them. She told stories to the cats and sometimes dressed them in doll's clothes.
I'm sure they loved the doll clothes.
Once, Emma Claire threw Silver into the bay. His little paws swatted at the water, a feline attempt at the dog paddle. The cat's head bobbed up and down like a popping cork. I saw the whole thing happen through the kitchen window. I ran outside, jumped into the water and plucked the drowning cat from his peril. He thanked me by scratching the Holy Jesus Jeremiah out of my forearms.
Silver never went near the bay again after that.
Neither did any of his feline friends.
Emma Claire loved the bay. Often she stood looking at it, her eyes wide open, to see how far she could see.
On a good day, you could see six miles. That's what the old fishermen often said. Six miles in each direction. The large cool water makes you glad somehow. It stretches out into the greater world, reaching the crevices of the unknown. It fills the largest troughs, connecting itself to everything. I wished I was a poet sometimes, so that I could write about it.
But crackers make terrible poets.
Especially crackers who can't read.
“I got a fish!” Emma Claire yanked backward on the cane pole.
The speckled trout tried to shoot underneath the boat. Emma Claire muscled against the fish with her young arms, cranking her reel.
“She's a better fisherman than you are, Old Timer,” Mullet said.
When her fish got closer, I reached over the side of the boat. I lifted the fish out of the water and flung it into the basket. The trout flopped, twisting and beating its body against the braided wicker.
“I'm a fisherman,” Emma Claire said.
“That's right, baby.” Mullet rubbed Emma Claire's head. “You're the best one on the damn boat.”
“A lot better than me,” I said. “In fact, you're embarrassing me.”
“Am I really better than Quinn?”
“Hell baby, you're better than both me and Quinn put together.”
That made her head swell up like a watermelon.
She dropped her line into the water again, looking to outdo herself with a bigger fish than the last.
The truth was, Emma Claire was the world's biggest copycat. Whatever I did, she did. Whatever I liked, she liked. She fished whenever I fished. She followed me like a shadow and even ate the same blue crab I did. I took care of her the best I could. I taught her to tie her brambly shoes and washed her clothes every four days.
That girl could stink worse than an old Billy Goat.
Emma Claire held on to her cane pole with both hands. She watched the tip of the pole, just like we'd taught her to do. She watched for the slightest movement in the water.
Mullet was right, Emma Claire was a good fisherman. Or rather, a good fisherwoman. She had the fiery spirit of a hunter, and the arrogance that it took, too. She would lock her eyes on the tip of that pole and hypnotize a fish into swallowing her hook.
All of a sudden, my own rod bent downward in a grand arc, like it was going to snap in two.
“Fish!” Emma Claire shouted. “Look Mullet, he's got a fish!”
I gripped my pole tight, without even pausing to consider what had happened, and I fought against my reel as it zipped. The little wooden boat rocked back and forth with my movements.
“Give him some more line, Old Timer.” Mullet was calm, he tucked a bit of tobacco in his cheek. “You're going to have to wear this big one out.”
“Quinn's got a fish!” Emma chirped. “A big one!”
“Alright, baby,” said Mullet. “Lower your voice or you'll scare the rest of the fish away.”
So she whispered, “Quinn's got a fish.”
I braced my feet against the side of the boat and let the line shoot underneath my fingers. The metal reel buzzed like a machine in my palm, warm from the friction. I pulled against the fish and cranked him backward toward the boat. He shot forward again, in an S formation. I reigned him back. He shot sideways, and downward again.
“What's happening now?” Emma Claire whispered.
Mullet nodded.
“How do you know where he lives?”
“I did some work for the McAllisters, years back.” Mullet threw the truck into park. “Never you mind about any of that. We got work to do.”
Mullet opened the glove box and removed a little cloth bag. The bag jingled in his hands. He spilled it open and a slew of metal keys fell into his lap. He weeded through the mess and removed a handful of the brass keys.
“Listen up, we don't have much time.” Mullet pulled a watch from his pocket. “The ballgame's almost over. It won't be long until the whole McAllister family's home. I don't want to be here when they're sipping on juleps, telling each other how smart they are. We have to haul ass if we're going to do this.”
“Do what?”
“Just follow my lead, boy.”
“Mullet, I don't want to do anything wrong.”
“Don't you worry, Old Timer.” He patted my shoulder. “I'll be the one engaging in all the evildoing.”
We walked up to the tall wooden door. It loomed over our heads like a castle drawbridge. Mullet jammed a key into the slot of the door and fiddled with it. He rattled it back and forth. The latch clicked, and the door swung open.
“Eureka,” he laughed.
We walked into the spotless home.
The floor-to-ceiling wood paneling made it seem as though we were walking into a mahogany-covered afterlife. A bulbous vase of fresh white flowers greeted us on a table in the entry way. It was taller than we were, and it smelled better than we did, too.
Mullet whistled. “This is fine-damn living right here.”
I reached up and touched one of the flowers in the vase.
We walked into the kitchen. It was a large, white tiled room. High ceilings towered above us. The kitchen stove was big enough to cook an elephant on–or three. Mullet opened up the tall ice box. With squinted eyes, he scanned the contents of the cooler and removed a glass jug of milk.
“Hurry now, find me two glasses,” Mullet said. “Not their good glasses, neither.”
I went to the marble counter and pilfered through the cabinets. I'd never seen so many glasses in all my life. There were glasses of every shape and size. Round ones, tall ones, short ones, and long skinny ones. I picked out two of them and handed them to Mullet. He filled the glasses with milk and then took a sip from each. The white milk ran all over his thick beard, trailing down onto his shirt.
“Okay now,” Mullet whispered. “Let's go find Rory's bedroom.”
“Why are we whispering?”
“Because it's better than yelling.”
The bedroom was upstairs. It was spacious. It looked like a wooden football field. The long and wide room sprawled outward in every direction. Baseball posters covered the walls, a radio sat on the nightstand, and there were mountains of magazines in every corner. I'd never seen so many pleasantries in one place before.
I inspected the small radio on his nightstand.
I figured Rory listened to baseball games on that fancy thing.
“Don't let jealousy curl your upper lip, Old Timer,” Mullet looked toward the radio. “Won't do you no good.”
“Me?” I set the radio down. “I ain't jealous.”
“Mmm hmm, well you'll do good to stay that way, then.”
Mullet searched the room, looking along the wood floor. He looked behind the furniture and felt underneath the bed. He opened up the door to the closet and looked around inside.
“This is what I'm looking for.” Mullet grinned and knelt down. The metal floor vent was a grid-work of steel that looked like it belonged on the front of a Buick. The vent let out a rusty groan as he lifted it open.
“Give the milk here,” he said.
He took one of the full glasses from me, and lowered it down into the vent hole, careful not to spill it. Then he drew back his hand from the crooked hole. Mullet shut the vent and looked at me with wide eyes.
“That oughta do it,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Never mind. Find me another vent.”
We searched the room for another heating vent, feeling along the floor. I found another big vent behind the dresser on the other side of Rory's enormous bed.
“You do the honors this time,” Mullet said, handing me the glass of milk.
I lifted the vent cover and set the glass of milk in the duct. Just like he'd done.
Mullet smacked me on the back and laughed. “Come on, let's giddy up out of here.”
We scampered down the grandiose staircase to the front door like a couple of cats. We ran as fast as our legs could move, darting through the entryway in a flash. Mullet paused for a moment. He grabbed a white flower from the big vase and put the stem between his teeth.
He tossed another white flower to me.
“Here's one for the road,” he said.
͠
Mullet sped down the road as fast as the vehicle would run. The marshlands zoomed by the truck windows in a horizontal blur. I held out my shaking hand in front of my face. The adrenaline from our caper made me tremble like a blade of grass.
Mullet talked to himself in a quiet voice, or maybe he was talking to me, I wasn't paying much attention. I was too busy admiring the artwork inside the truck cab. The nude woman above the visor caught my eye. She reclined on a large daisy with an apple in her hands. The look on her face was whimsical.
“What's this?” I asked, pointing to the drawing.
He looked at the little painting. “Oh that? Why that's Lady Eve. Before she ate the fruit.”
“You mean Adam and Eve?”
“The one and only.”
“Aren't they from the Bible?”
“Yessir, she was the first woman alive.”
“Ever?”
“She was perfect.”
I imagined what a perfect woman would look like. That was easy to do, they all looked perfect to me. Even the bad-looking ones.
“Even though Eve was perfect, she made a bad mistake,” said Mullet.
“A bad mistake like what?”
“The worst mistake anyone could ever make. She was misunderstood.”
Mullet chewed on a mouthful of tobacco staring out the windshield. His jaws chomped, and he spit every so often. Mullet offered me the plug of tobacco without saying a word. I took the little brown brick and ripped a hunk off with my teeth.
“Mullet, what'd we do, exactly? To Rory, I mean.”
“Well Old Timer, the beauty of our work is two-fold. First off, the milk will keep souring as the days go by. Each minute getting worse. After a few weeks, the smell will be so foul, Rory will wish he was sleeping in the outhouse.”
I couldn't help but laugh.
Rory deserved every bit of it.
“What's the second thing?”
“Second thing is: the milk we hid in his closet won't just stink up his room. Since it's in his closet, it'll stink up his clothes, too. Rory will be waltzing around town smelling like a pile of oysters.”
Mullet wiped spit from his mouth.
I could think of nothing better than Rory McAllister smelling like a pile of oysters. Just like me. I smelled like oysters every day of my life.
The laughter crawled all over me like a tickle. It started in my gut and rose upward into my chest like red in a thermometer. I threw my head forward and laughed until my stomach muscles were sore.
Mullet watched me laugh through the corner of his eye.
It was his gift to me.
͠
Emma Claire stood at the window. Her face pressed against the glass in a kind of helpless boredom. The house was completely silent. It wasn't very tidy, either. Nobody ever cleaned it except me.
I walked through the front door and kicked my shoes off.
“Quinn,” Emma Claire said, running over to me with her hands out.
I grabbed her by the arms and swung her in big circles. I wasn't able to scoop her up the same way Daddy did. He could lift her high up in the air as if she were a teddy bear. I wasn't as tall as he was, or as strong. I set her feet on the floor and noticed that she smelled like sweat and dirt.
“Have you been playing outside today?” I asked.
“All day.” She smiled. “With Silver, Bits, Crystal, Tawdy, and Rocks.”
“Rocks? You named one of your cats rocks?”
“He always hides from me behind the rocks when I chase him.”
I'd probably do the same thing.
“What happens when you catch him?”
“I give him a bath. All of them had baths today. They don't like it.”
“Well, that's because cats hate water.”
“They drink water, though.”
“That's different.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
She didn't follow my logic.
I bent down and tickled her. “And now it's your turn to take a bath, you little sapsucker. And I know you hate bathing even more than the cats do.”
“Hey!” Emma Claire let out a roaring laugh. “I'm not taking a bath!”
“Oh, yes you are, or I won't cook any dinner tonight, and you'll go to bed hungry.”
That changed her mind.
“Bet you can't catch me!” she shouted, running from me, stomping through the house toward the bathroom. “Quinn can't catch me, Quinn can't catch me!”
I sighed, watching her run away.
She was right.
͠
The radio sat perched in the kitchen windowsill. It hummed sultry music through a tweed speaker, filling up the room. The sounds of southland jazz wafted through the atmosphere. The music made me feel warm. I liked the radio. I needed it on, even when I wasn't in the house. It made the dark, lonely place feel alive somehow. Alive in an artificial way, but alive just the same.
Emma Claire sat at the table and ate her cinnamon toast. She bounced her legs, humming to herself in a high-pitched voice. She like the radio as much as I did. If ever I turned it off, she'd fuss and point to it until I turned it back on.
Recently, Emma Claire had learned how to turn it on all by herself. Her little hand would clasp around the knob, and the radio would boom. The screaming clarinets and trumpets would scream until I came to adjust the volume.
While Emma ate, I sketched with a pencil on a scrap piece of paper. I attempted to draw a picture of Lady Eve, like the one in Mullet's truck. My drawing was terrible compared to Mullet's. My naked women looked like cheap smut.
“What's that you're drawing?” Emma Claire asked with a mouthful of food.
“Eve. From the Bible.”
“Oh.”
Each night before bed, Emma demanded cinnamon toast. I don't know how that habit started, but I'm pretty sure it was my fault.
“The Bible?” Emma Claire wrinkled her nose “What's that?”
“It's a big book.”
She took another bite of her toast. “Have you read it before?”
“No. I can't read.”
“At all?”
“Some words.”
Emma thought about that. “Which ones?”
I shrugged. “Mostly just little words.”
“Is my name a little word?”
“No. It's two words.”
“Is your name a little word?”
“Yeah.”
“I want my name to be a little word too.”
If she could've been named Quinn Applewhite, she would've done that, too. She even slept in the same bed I did.
Emma never slept in her own room anymore. In fact, she refused to even go in there, not even during the daytime. Her room sat unused as lifeless as an old graveyard. The bedroom was a nothing but a storage room. It housed a few pieces of furniture, and a few bolts of Mother's old fabric. That was it.
“Where's Momma?” Emma Claire licked her fingers.
“Sleeping.”
“Momma always sleeps.”
I let out a big breath. It was true.
“Emma Claire, do you ever see Mother during the day? Does she ever come out of there?”
“Nope. Never.”
We hadn't seen Mother in several days. I was sure she came out of her room when we weren't around. I knew she'd wandered into the kitchen at some point. The refrigerator was missing a block of cheese. The crackers in the cabinet were gone, too. She always took the best things from the kitchen. I'd taken to hiding certain things so Mother wouldn't steal them.
“Naked.” Emma touched my drawing. “That girl's naked.”
“It's all part of the Bible. That's why she's naked.”
“The Bible must be a bad book.”
“It probably is.”
“What's the Bible?”
“It's a book for lawyers, I think.”
“What's lawyers?”
“They make sure that people are miserable.”
I'd heard Daddy say that once.
I crumpled my paper into a tight ball and started sketching on a fresh piece of paper. This time, I drew a daisy. Daisies are easy enough to draw, anyone can do a daisy. I traced the round petals onto the paper and then drew a circle in the middle of the flower.
My artwork wasn't as good as Mullet's.
Not by far.
“Oooh, that's pretty.” Emma Claire pointed her buttery hand at the paper. “I like flowers.”
8.
Two years went by as fast as a sunset in November. Two years didn't feel like a long time. And I suppose it wasn't, not really. It was just a little over seven hundred days. Seven hundred days doesn't even seem long enough to grow a tomato, if you think about it.
Emma Claire grew faster than anyone I'd ever seen in those seven hundred days. She sprouted like the woody weeds that grow in the ditches. Those weeds shoot up overnight. They look like small trees, like they'd make terrific bows and arrows. But they don't work for that sort of thing. They're far too papery and soft.
I know this from experience.
Emma Claire spent her days playing in the backyard behind our home. The feral cats chased her, parading themselves behind Emma Claire like committed disciples. She built forts out of palmetto leaves and decorated them. She told stories to the cats and sometimes dressed them in doll's clothes.
I'm sure they loved the doll clothes.
Once, Emma Claire threw Silver into the bay. His little paws swatted at the water, a feline attempt at the dog paddle. The cat's head bobbed up and down like a popping cork. I saw the whole thing happen through the kitchen window. I ran outside, jumped into the water and plucked the drowning cat from his peril. He thanked me by scratching the Holy Jesus Jeremiah out of my forearms.
Silver never went near the bay again after that.
Neither did any of his feline friends.
Emma Claire loved the bay. Often she stood looking at it, her eyes wide open, to see how far she could see.
On a good day, you could see six miles. That's what the old fishermen often said. Six miles in each direction. The large cool water makes you glad somehow. It stretches out into the greater world, reaching the crevices of the unknown. It fills the largest troughs, connecting itself to everything. I wished I was a poet sometimes, so that I could write about it.
But crackers make terrible poets.
Especially crackers who can't read.
“I got a fish!” Emma Claire yanked backward on the cane pole.
The speckled trout tried to shoot underneath the boat. Emma Claire muscled against the fish with her young arms, cranking her reel.
“She's a better fisherman than you are, Old Timer,” Mullet said.
When her fish got closer, I reached over the side of the boat. I lifted the fish out of the water and flung it into the basket. The trout flopped, twisting and beating its body against the braided wicker.
“I'm a fisherman,” Emma Claire said.
“That's right, baby.” Mullet rubbed Emma Claire's head. “You're the best one on the damn boat.”
“A lot better than me,” I said. “In fact, you're embarrassing me.”
“Am I really better than Quinn?”
“Hell baby, you're better than both me and Quinn put together.”
That made her head swell up like a watermelon.
She dropped her line into the water again, looking to outdo herself with a bigger fish than the last.
The truth was, Emma Claire was the world's biggest copycat. Whatever I did, she did. Whatever I liked, she liked. She fished whenever I fished. She followed me like a shadow and even ate the same blue crab I did. I took care of her the best I could. I taught her to tie her brambly shoes and washed her clothes every four days.
That girl could stink worse than an old Billy Goat.
Emma Claire held on to her cane pole with both hands. She watched the tip of the pole, just like we'd taught her to do. She watched for the slightest movement in the water.
Mullet was right, Emma Claire was a good fisherman. Or rather, a good fisherwoman. She had the fiery spirit of a hunter, and the arrogance that it took, too. She would lock her eyes on the tip of that pole and hypnotize a fish into swallowing her hook.
All of a sudden, my own rod bent downward in a grand arc, like it was going to snap in two.
“Fish!” Emma Claire shouted. “Look Mullet, he's got a fish!”
I gripped my pole tight, without even pausing to consider what had happened, and I fought against my reel as it zipped. The little wooden boat rocked back and forth with my movements.
“Give him some more line, Old Timer.” Mullet was calm, he tucked a bit of tobacco in his cheek. “You're going to have to wear this big one out.”
“Quinn's got a fish!” Emma chirped. “A big one!”
“Alright, baby,” said Mullet. “Lower your voice or you'll scare the rest of the fish away.”
So she whispered, “Quinn's got a fish.”
I braced my feet against the side of the boat and let the line shoot underneath my fingers. The metal reel buzzed like a machine in my palm, warm from the friction. I pulled against the fish and cranked him backward toward the boat. He shot forward again, in an S formation. I reigned him back. He shot sideways, and downward again.
“What's happening now?” Emma Claire whispered.
