“We need to get back on the road soon.”
There are cases of cold drinks stacked up against the wall: Coke and Dr Pepper and Barq’s and Fanta. When we drove up, I never would have imagined this much plenty in one house: it is stuffed with it, so much food and so many things, so much bulk—cases of soup, cases of crackers, cases of toilet paper and paper towels, three microwaves still in the box, rice cookers, waffle makers, pots. So much food the boxes of it reach to the ceiling in the living room, so many appliances, they are as tall as the lights in the kitchen. I am hungry and thirsty: my throat a closing hand, my stomach a burning fist. And Leonie at the table, Leonie who doesn’t usually care whether we accept food when it’s offered, Leonie who normally will take everything given to her with an open hand—now she says no. Now, when the goat and rice I ate is silt in my gut.
The woman crosses her arm over her chest and frowns. She’s trying to keep the coughs inside, but they come out in sputters. She shakes her head, and I know what she’s thinking because I can see it in the way she’s standing and staring at Leonie. Rude.
*
If Pop was here, he wouldn’t call this boy no rascal. Wouldn’t call him a scalawag, neither. And he definitely wouldn’t call him boy. He’d call him badass. Because he is. He’s tired of playing Kayla’s game of chase, so he’s stopped running. He crouches in front of the television, turns on one of his four game systems, and begins playing a game. It’s Grand Theft Auto, and he doesn’t know how to play it. He drives the car over medians, into stores, gets out of the car at stoplights, and runs. Kayla is bored. She walks back over to me and climbs into my lap, grabbing a bunch of my shirt, and begins talking to me seriously about wanting juice and graham crackers, so I can’t see the women, can’t see the glass of water that Leonie drinks now that she’s been bullied into accepting something, can’t see Misty and the woman leaning toward each other over the table, whispering to each other. Drawing pictures on the table with their fingers.
The boy is screaming at the television. His video game has frozen.
“No! No!” he yells in a voice that sounds like his nose is stuffed with snot.
The boy’s car has sailed off a road that winds around a cliff. The car has jumped the railing but is frozen in the air. The car is red with a white stripe down the middle of it, splitting it in two. The boy punches the buttons on the controls, but the game does nothing.
“Take it out,” the woman yells from the table.
“No!”
“Start it over,” the woman says, and then bends toward Misty again.
The boy throws the controller at the television. It hits and clatters to the floor. He bends and begins fiddling with the game station, pressing buttons, but nothing changes.
“Don’t want to lose my spot!” he yells.
The women ignore him.
Kayla jumps up from my lap and bends to pick up a blue plastic ball from the floor, about the size of two of her fists, and starts playing with it.
“If you take it out, it won’t lose your spot. It’ll save it,” I say.
I know this not because I have a game system but because I played Michael’s when he lived with us, so I know how they work. He took it with him when he left. The boy ignores me. He makes a sound halfway between a cry and a growl in his throat, something gurgling and whiny, and when he comes up in front of the shelf of game systems, he doesn’t stand or turn around and begin playing with Kayla again. He doesn’t grab another ball off the floor, a black one or a green one or a red one, all that I can see, and roll one toward us. He stands up and punches the TV. He hits it with his right hand first, then his left, and then his right, windmilling his arms so that his small fists connect with the plastic so hard it sounds like it’s cracking. It is cracking. His fist hits again and there is a firework on the car that bursts and stays, one shot through with white and yellow and red. He hits with his left and it does nothing, but then he hits with his right again and there is another firework burst on the car. It stays.
“What are you doing?” the woman yells from the kitchen. She’s half risen from the table. “You better not be messing with them boxes again!”
The boy hits again with his left. Nothing.
“What I say!” the woman yells, and she’s all the way standing now. The boy bends to the floor, grabs a T-ball bat, and swings. There’s a loud crunch, the sound of glass and plastic cracking, and for one moment, the entire car is one brilliant burst of fireworks, and then the TV winks black, and there is nothing on the screen, but before the screen there are the woman and the boy. She stalks past Kayla, who runs and launches herself into my lap and grabs my shirt with both hands, and corners the boy in front of the TV. He turns with the bat and whacks her on the left leg with it.
“MotherFUCK!” she half coughs and screams, and then she grabs the bat from him. She picks up the boy by one arm and holds the bat with another and yells, “What did you do?” Each word is a swing. Each swing makes the boy run. He shrieks. “What did you do!”
The boy’s legs are red wherever she hits him with the bat. He laps the woman like a horse on a merry-go-round, his face like that: open mouth, grimace, rictus. She hits him so many times, his cry goes silent, but that mouth is still open. I know what he is saying: Pain, please, no more pain, please. The woman drops the bat and the boy’s arm all at once, the bat dropping in a straight line to the floor, the boy sagging into a heap.
“Wait till your daddy come out the shed. He’s going to kill you.”
Leonie walks across the living room and takes Kayla from me. When she talks, she looks at Misty, who still stands in the doorway of the kitchen, holding back the sheet.
“We really got to get back on the road soon.”
“He’ll be in soon,” the woman pants.
“Y’all got a bathroom?” I ask.
“It’s broke,” the woman says. She’s sweating and wiping her hair back away from her face. “We use the toilet in the shed, but if you got to pee, it’s best you just go do it out in the yard.”
When I walk out, the boy has crawled back into his recliner, and he has curled himself into a ball and is crying noisy tears. Kayla reaches for me when I open the door, but Leonie holds her in a tight hug and walks back into the kitchen with her, away from the crying boy and the shattered television, as if that is what she needs to protect Kayla from. The woman is already there, drinking a cold drink, shaking her head. “This the second one he done did that to,” she says. “It’s called birth control,” says Misty. The woman coughs.