“What?”
“Blow the horn. Ain’t no way I’m getting out of this car with that dog running loose.” Leonie blows, and the dog, who has stopped chasing the chickens and trotted around to the car to sniff the tires and pee on them, begins to bark. I know what he says. Get out. Inhale. Get out! Inhale. Trespasser, get out! Kayla wakes up and starts to cry.
“Take her out,” Leonie says, so I unbuckle her.
The little White boy waves his stick in the air, and then grabs it with both hands, pointing it like a rifle. His blond hair sticks to his head, curls into his eyes like worms. “Pow pow,” he says. He is shooting at us.
Leonie cranks the car.
“We don’t need this—”
“Yes, we do. Cut it off. Blow the horn again.”
Leonie compromises. She doesn’t cut the car off, but she does blow the horn again, one long, loud honk that makes Kayla cry harder and burrow in to my chest. I try to shush her, but she can’t hear me over the barking dog, the shooting boy, the silence in that clearing in the pines, a sound as heavy and loud as the others, but not. I want to jump out of the car with Kayla, and I want to outrun that boy and his dog and that fake gun, and I want to walk us all the way home. My insides feel like they want to fight.
A White woman steps out the door of the house with no siding, steps past the dirt-faced child. Their hair is the same blondish-reddish color, with the same curliness. Hers is long, down to her waist, and except for her nose, which seems swollen in her face and burns red, she’s prettier than Misty. She’s also barefoot. Her toes are pink. She coughs, and it sounds like a scraping in her throat, and walks toward the car. The dog runs up to her, but she ignores it. At least it stops barking. Misty opens the car door and sticks the top half of her body out while holding on to the frame.
“Hey, bitch!” Misty says, like it’s a term of endearment. The woman smiles and coughs at the same time. The mist is settling like dew on her hair, turning it white. “Told you we was coming.” The boy is still shooting us with his stick gun while the dog licks his face. I want to run back home. Leonie drags her hand through the hair over her right ear, scratching at her scalp. She does this when she is nervous. You going to make yourself bleed, Mam told her once, but I don’t think Leonie realizes when she does it. She scrapes so hard it sounds like nails pulled over canvas. Misty is hugging the woman, who is staring into the car. When Leonie opens her door and steps out and says hey, I barely hear it over Kayla’s crying. She scratches again. The little boy hops up the concrete steps and disappears into the house. When Leonie walks up to the woman and all three of them begin talking to each other, her hands hang weak-jointed at her sides.
*
The floors are uneven. They are highest in the middle of each room in the naked house, and then slope down to the four shadow-sheathed corners. The inside of the house is dim through the porch, which is crowded with boxes so all that’s left is a walkway into the living room, which is also dim and crowded with boxes. There are two sofas here and one recliner, and this is where the shooting boy sits. He is eating a pickle Popsicle. The television sits on top of a box instead of a TV stand, and it’s playing some sort of reality show about people who buy islands to build resorts.
“Through here,” the woman says to Misty and Leonie, who follow behind. Leonie stops me with a raised arm in the living room.
“Y’all stay here,” she says before leaning forward to touch Kayla’s nose with her pointer finger and smile. Kayla’s face is still wet with tears, but she is sniffing and holding on to my neck and staring at the shooting boy as if there is something she wants to say to him, so I let her down. “I’m serious,” Leonie says, and then follows the woman and Misty into the kitchen, which is the brightest room in the house, lit by a chandelier hanging from the ceiling, laden with bulbs. There is a curtain hanging over the doorway, and the woman pulls it halfway shut and coughs and motions at the table for Misty and Leonie to sit. She opens the refrigerator. I sit on the edge of the sofa so I can watch the shooting boy in the armchair and Kayla, who is squatting feet before him with her hands in her lap, and the gap in the curtain where the women sit in the kitchen.
“Hi,” Kayla says, drawing the word out so that it’s two long syllables, her voice rolling up and down a hill. It’s the same thing she says to her baby doll when she picks it up first thing in the morning, the same thing she says to the horse and the pig and the goat, the same thing she says to the chickens, the same thing she says to Leonie when she first sees her. The same thing she says to Pop. She won’t talk much to Mam: when I carry her in the room to see Mam’s still body, Kayla shrinks into my chest and shoulder, puts on her brave face, and after five minutes of cringing away from Mam and saying shhhh with her finger in front of her lips, she says out. She never says hello to me. She just sits up or crawls over to me and puts her arms around my neck and smiles.
The boy looks at Kayla like she’s his dog, and Kayla hops closer.
“Hi,” she says again. There is a worm of snot running down the boy’s face. He jumps up to stand in the recliner, and seems to make a decision because he smiles, and his teeth are all capped with silver, the metal stopping them from rotting out of his mouth. He begins jumping in the chair like it’s a trampoline, and a few of the boxes stacked to the side of the chair wobble.
“Don’t get up there, Kayla.” They’ll both fall out. I know it. Kayla ignores me and swings one leg up and pulls herself into the chair, where the two begin talking to each other and jumping, having a conversation. I catch words: chair, TV, candy, all gone, move. I cup my hand around my ear, look at the women in the kitchen, watch the way their mouths move, and try to hear.
“I was sleep. That’s why I didn’t hear y’all at first. We all been sick back here.”
“It’s the weather,” Misty says. “One day it’s freezing, the next it’s in the eighties. Damn Mississippi spring.”
The woman nods, drinks a plastic cup of something, clears her throat.
“Where Fred?” Misty asks.
“Out back, working.”
“Business still good?”
“It’s booming, baby,” the woman says, then coughs.
Leonie is worrying the table with her hands.
“The warmer it gets, the better it gets.”
“You still got me?” Misty says.
The woman nods.
“Y’all want something to drink?” she asks.
“You got a cold drink?” Misty asks. The woman hands her a Sprite. I remember how thirsty I am, but I won’t say anything. Leonie would kill me.
“No thanks,” Leonie says, and the only reason I know it’s what she’s said is because I read her lips and the shake of her head. She speaks so low.
“You sure?” Misty asks her.
Leonie shakes her head.