I gone out one day and just kept going and going and didn’t go back. What I had? I ain’t had no girlfriend, my children don’t—I ain’t got no real children anyhow, my brother dead, my parents long gone, and—
They both started and became still, alert, listening, because they’d heard a rustling outside, close enough that it sounded as if it had originated in their heads. The food delivery had already come through that afternoon; by now Eddie had the usual itchy acid sensation in his esophagus from the baloney. Neither of them could quickly come up with an explanation for the footsteps they heard making their way around the barn and casting a shadow through the open places in the planks. Quietly they rose and moved to the wall. A figure dappled with circles of sun and green shadow, made dark by the angle of the light, came around the side of the barn. It moved with animal grace for a moment, then its motions became twitchy. Eddie pushed his eye close to a break in the wall.
Somebody chasing a bird, Tuck whispered. Don’t blame em—them baloney sandwiches ain’t enough for nobody. He chuckled to himself.
The person muttered and stopped in a patch of sunlight. Though cautious of getting splinters in his cheek, Eddie pushed his eye closer to the wall and examined the figure in disbelief and confusion. A desperate and eerie feeling came over him that his fantasy of having crossed over into the land of the dead had leapt out of his control and become horribly real. He saw an apparition—a skinny woman, a witch with missing teeth and disheveled hair full of leaves and short pieces of straw, dressed in a tattered shirt and baggy, muddy jeans with a rope for a belt.
The woman dragged herself through the underbrush on her knees with her arms out, trying to catch an oily-looking grackle that kept backing up. Her eyes remained locked on the bird, which at last fluttered out of reach and into a young tree. The woman’s irises rolled up too far under her lids and she fell forward. She looked like something dead.
Eddie sprinted out of the barn and around the corner, adrenaline throbbing behind his eyes and sapping his breath. Then he paused at a safe distance and peered at the woman and called out to her. She turned to him, but her reaction was not sudden or full of surprise. She angled her head in his direction as if she had heard a faint noise much farther away in the distance. Her mouth opened slackly, caught remembering.
Mama, he breathed, a question, almost a hope that this sad apparition had only temporarily assumed a shape similar to his mother’s. Then the haunt’s eyes flared and took on an intensity unlike before, and recognition blazed between them. Eddie didn’t want to admit that his mother had turned into this thing, this barely familiar shadow, because he would have to move toward it and embrace it, but the relief that he’d found her, alive, finally conquered his disgust. His eyes overflowed, his heart broke into a blur of ecstasy; he ran toward her.
At that moment Darlene turned back to the bird and passionately groped toward it, and when again it moved to a higher branch, she burst into a panic. She rose and her wailing became violent, her grasping ferocious; she tore at leaves and flicked branches so that they snapped back against her arms and face and left welts that soon bled.
Eddie clung to her waist and bellowed, Ma, while she screeched and howled in the direction of the grackle, which leapt into even higher branches, then took flight above the treetops and into the smudgy sky, its black wings flapping quickly, then slowly, then fading into nothing.
Darlene collapsed against a tree and stroked Eddie’s head as he burrowed it into her lap. They remained attached in this way, Eddie pressing himself into Darlene as if he could squeeze her back into her old self.
Tuck sauntered out of the barn and stopped cold when he turned the corner and saw Eddie and Darlene. That your mama, huh, Tuck stated. Drunken bum was right! He tried and failed to remember the song he’d made up, humming to himself in quiet confusion.
Eddie and Darlene paid him no attention. Their rocking and crying reached a low, intense drone as natural sounds returned—the shuddering of crickets, the white noise of leaves in trees, the songs of birds, including the broken-radio cacophony of the grackles. Darlene, with her head back and her eyes rolled up, watched the sky for them but saw nothing. Eddie clung to her rough, foul-smelling jeans and wept, both because he had found his mother and because he’d found her like this, in a state that kept her from really being his mother.
Several strong breezes swept across the area at uneven intervals. No one spoke for a time. Tuck turned away and went back into the barn, and Eddie and Darlene prolonged the moment, soundlessly clutching at each other. What had come before was too unbearable to talk about and what would come afterward they did not know. Better to let the world melt into nothing for a while.
At last Eddie flipped over and scratched his hand through the dirt. Soon enough, Darlene said, Eddie, and Eddie said, Mom, and they repeated this rudimentary dialogue, having been so far away from the fact of each other that it took the dialogue to bring them each back into existence. The words of their names volleyed from one to the other, first as a question, then a statement, an incantation, and, finally, a revelation.
13.
Meet Scotty