The boy was jittery around the eyes, even though he walked like he wasn’t scared. Them marks I saw on him when he came in Parchman told me he knew what it was to be beat, whether it was his mama taking a belt buckle to him or some man. But I knew the boy wasn’t ready for the whip. I knew he wasn’t ready for Black Annie.
I was right. Sun went down, and after supper, sergeant tied him to some posts set at the edge of the camp. So hot the sun still felt like it was up, and the boy laid there spread-eagle on the ground in the dirt with his hands and legs tied to them posts. When that whip cracked in the air and came down on his back, he sounded like a puppy. Yelped so loud. And that’s what he kept doing, over and over. Just yelping for every one of them lashes, arching up off the ground, turning his head like he wanted to look at the sky. Yelling like a drowning dog. When they untied him, his back was full of blood, them seven gashes laid open like filleted fish, and sergeant told me to doctor on him. So I cleaned him up as he lay there throwing up with his face in the dirt. I ain’t tell him to stop. Sergeant gave him a day to heal, but when they sent him back out in the field, them lashes on his back wasn’t anywhere near healed, and they oozed and bled through his shirt.
I can almost hear Pop in the dim room, which feels wet and close from all the hot water I ran to cover the sound of Kayla throwing up and to clean up after. He would shift and lean on his elbow, and his voice would rise out of the black like smoke. I wipe Kayla’s hair away from her head, and she sweats. Whenever Pop talked about Richie getting whipped, he told me about Kinnie, his boss in charge of the hunting hounds, who escaped the day after they flayed Richie’s back.
Kinnie Wagner pulled his last escape that day. It was 1948. Walked right out the front gates of Parchman with a machine gun he’d stole out of munitions. Warden was pissed.
“I’ll look a fool,” he said, “being the warden who let the damn man escape a third time. You want your job, you better catch him. Let the dogs,” he told the sergeant.
Sergeant looked at me and I got the best of the pack: Axe and Red and Shank and Moon, all dogs Kinnie’d named, and I let them loose and started tracking. But the dogs wouldn’t track the man that fed them, the man that first touched them, the man that raised them. Kept walking slow and sad in circles through that country, slinking through those thin trees under that heavy sky, and I followed them, catching Kinnie’s tracks clear, but slowed down by the animals so I had to go back at the end of the day, tell the sergeant the dogs wouldn’t track they master.
Him and two other sergeants and a gang of trusty shooters came out with me the next day, and it was the same. The hounds smelled that son of a bitch and thought he was they daddy. Couldn’t savage him because when they slept, they dreamed of him, of his big red hands and his gray mouth. The stink that came off of him from all his sweating as dear to them as the scent from they mama’s ears.
*
I can tell Leonie ain’t slept. She never came in the room last night, and this morning, the music is still playing in the kitchen on Al’s stereo, and all three of them look wrinkled: their clothes, their hair, their faces. Leonie’s looking at the empty chair across from her, so she misses when I walk in the room, Kayla in my arms, her head on my shoulder. Normally, she’d be asking for a dog (she likes hot dogs for breakfast), or pointing outside and pulling my hand and saying Pop. But I woke to her touching my cheek right underneath my eye, looking very serious, not smiling. Her little hand like a stick burned with fire and now throwing off heat, red and black. As I walk into the kitchen, Kayla breathes little huffs into my neck. I rub her back, and Leonie finally notices us.
“They got oatmeal on the stove,” Leonie says. All three of them are drinking coffee, black and strong. “Did she throw up again?”
“No,” I say. Leonie looks toward that empty chair again. “She hot, though.”
Leonie nods, but she don’t look at me. She look at the chair. Raise her eyebrows like somebody said something surprising, but Al and Misty are leaning in to each other, murmuring things, whispering. Leonie ain’t part of that conversation. I walk over to the pot and see the oatmeal crusted to the sides, burnt crispy on the edges, and jelly in the middle with cold.
“Let’s go get your man,” says Misty, and they all stand.
“But they haven’t eaten,” Al says. “They have to be hungry.”
“I’m not,” I say, and my mouth tastes like old gum chewed almost to paste. I figure I’ll eat some of the food I stole in the backseat on the way to the jail, ease the grinding suck of my stomach. Sneak some to Kayla if she’ll let me. She burns in my arms, her neck against my neck, her little chin digging in to my collarbone. Her legs dangle, lifeless as a carcass’s from a hook.
“Let’s go get your father,” Leonie says.
*
The jail is all low, concrete buildings and barbed-wire fences crisscrossing through fields. The road stretches onward, out into the distance, and for a while, this road points us toward the men housed here. There’s no other sign, nothing in those fields: no cows, no pigs, no chickens. There are crops coming in, baby plants, but they look small and stunted, as if they’ll never grow. But a great flock of birds wheels through the sky, swooping and fluttering, moving graceful as a jellyfish. I watch them as Kayla mewls in my ear, as we pass another sign, old and wooden, that says Welcome to Parchman, Ms. And then: Coke is it! But by the time we get out of the car in the parking lot, the birds have turned north, fluttered over the horizon. I hear the tail end of their chatter, of all those voices calling at once, and I wish I could feel their excitement, feel the joy of the rising, the swinging into the blue, the great flight, the return home, but all I feel is a solid ball of something in my gut, heavy as the head of a hammer.
When we get to the jail proper, Leonie and Misty sign our names into a book, and then we’re led into a room with cinder-block walls painted yellow. Misty follows a guard through a door set at the opposite end of the room, where we sit at a table ringed by low benches, like we could be taking a picnic while we wait on Michael, but there is no food, no blanket, and there is white pockmarked ceiling above us: no sky. Leonie rubs her arms, even though it’s warm in here, warmer even than outside. It feels like there’s no air-conditioning. She leans forward and rubs at her eyes, smooths her hair back from her face so for a second I see Pop, his flat forehead, his nose, his cheeks. That hammer in me twists, and then Leonie frowns, and her hair flops back over her forehead, and she’s just Leonie, and Kayla whimpers again, and I want to go home.
“Juice,” Kayla says. I look at Leonie, asking the question without saying nothing: raised eyebrows, wide eyes, frown. Leonie shakes her head.