If I wasn’t hiccupping, I would cut my eyes at Michael, but the hiccupping is so bad I can’t breathe. I think of Richie and wonder if this is how he felt in them dusty rows, how they must have stretched to the end of the earth before him, how this place must have gone on forever. But even as I’m gulping to swallow past the food, to breathe easier, and another hiccup shakes through me, I know it must have been worse for the boy.
A rain begins, so light it’s like a gentle spray from a water bottle, and it turns the air white, and everything looks hazy. I want another sandwich, but Michael is sitting where Misty sat, and he’s eating his sandwich slow, tearing off his bites before putting them in his mouth. It’s one of the things I heard Pop say about Michael when he moved in with us: Mike eat like he too good for the food, he told Mam. She shook her head and cracked another pecan, picking out the meat. We were sitting next to each other on the porch swing. I’m still so hungry I can imagine the taste of those pecans, how the dust around the nut taste bitter, but the pecan is wet and sweet. Mam knew, but she ignored my thieving and let me eat. There’s only one sandwich from the lawyer left in the bag, and Misty still hasn’t eaten hers yet, so I swallow.
“We got some water?” I ask.
Leonie passes me a bottle of water the lawyer must have given her. The plastic is thick and has mountains painted on the front. The water is warm, not cold, but I’m so thirsty and my throat is so clogged I don’t even care. The hiccups stop.
“Your sister finish hers?” Leonie asks.
Kayla’s fallen asleep in her car seat, which I had to move to the middle. Misty’s back, and she’s sitting with me now that Michael’s here. Kayla has half of a sandwich in her hand, her fingers curled around it tight. Her head tilted back and hot. Her nose is sweating, and her curls are getting stringy. I pull the sandwich from her grip and it comes, so I eat the rest of it, even though it’s a little soggy where she was gumming it.
“Most of it,” I say.
“She look much better.” Leonie is lying. She don’t look much better. Maybe a little, but not much. “I knew the blackberry would work.”
“Something wrong with her? She sick?” Michael asks. His hand done stop moving, and he turns around to look at us. I stop chewing. In the gray foggy light, and in the close car, his eyes look bright green, green as the trees pushing out new spring leaves. Leonie looks disappointed he’s stopped touching her and leans across the seat toward him.
“Just some kind of stomach virus, I think. Or she was carsick. I gave her one of Mama’s remedies. She better.”
“You sure, baby?” Michael looks closely at Kayla, and I swallow the last of her sandwich. “She still looks a little yellow to me.”
Leonie gives a little half laugh and waves at Kayla.
“Of course she’s yellow. She’s our baby.” And then Leonie laughs, and even though it’s a laugh, it doesn’t sound like one. There’s no happiness in it, just dry air and hard red clay where grass won’t grow. She turns around and ignores all of us and looks out the front windshield, gummy with bug splatter, so she doesn’t even see when Kayla startles, her eyes open wide, and throw-up, brown and yellow and chunky, comes shooting out her mouth and all over the back of the front seat, all over her little legs and her red-and-white Smurfs shirt and me because I’m pulling her up out of her seat and into my lap.
“It’s going to be all right, Kayla, it’s going to be all right,” I say.
“I thought you gave her something for that,” Misty says.
“Baby, I told you she didn’t look good,” Michael says.
“Goddamnit sonofabitch,” Leonie says, and a dark skinny boy with a patchy afro and a long neck is standing on my side of the car, looking at Kayla and then looking at me. Kayla cries and whines.
“The bird, the bird,” she says.
The boy leans into the window and blurs at the edges. He says: “I’m going home.”
Chapter 6
Richie
The boy is River’s. I know it. I smelled him as soon as he entered the fields, as soon as the little red dented car swerved into the parking lot. The grass trilling and moaning all around, when I followed the scent to him, the dark, curly-haired boy in the backseat. Even if he didn’t carry the scent of leaves disintegrating to mud at the bottom of a river, the aroma of the bowl of the bayou, heavy with water and sediment and the skeletons of small dead creatures, crab, fish, snakes, and shrimp, I would still know he is River’s by the look of him. The sharp nose. The eyes dark as swamp bottom. The way his bones run straight and true as River’s: indomitable as cypress. He is River’s child.
When he returns to the car and I announce myself, I know he is Riv’s again. I know it by the way he holds the little sick golden girl: as if he thinks he could curl around her, make his skeleton and flesh into a building to protect her from the adults, from the great reach of the sky, the vast expanse of the grass-ridden earth, shallow with graves. He protects as River protects. I want to tell him this: Boy, you can’t. But I don’t.
Instead, I fold myself and sit on the floor of the car.
*
In the beginning, I woke in a stand of young pine trees on a cloudy, half-lit day. I could not remember how I came to be crouching in the pine needles, soft and sharp as boar’s hair under my legs. There was no warmth or cold there. Walking was like swimming through tepid gray water. I paced in circles. I don’t know why I stayed in that place, why every time I got to the edge of the young stand, to the place where the pines reached taller, rounded and darkened, draped with a web of green thorny vines, I turned and walked back. In that day that never ended, I watched the tops of the trees toss, and I tried to remember how I got there. Who I was before this place, before this quiet haunt. But I couldn’t. So when I saw a white snake, thick and long as my arm, slither out of the shadows beneath the trees, I knelt before It.
You are here, It said.
The needles dug into my knees.
Do you want to leave? It asked.
I shrugged.
I can take you away, It said. But you have to want it.
Where? I asked. The sound of my voice surprised me.
Up and away, It said. And around.
Why?
There are things you need to see, It said.
It raised its white head in the air and swayed, and slowly, like paint dissolving in water, its scales turned black, row by row, until it was the color of the space between the stars. Little fingers sprouted from its sides to grow to wings, two perfect black scaly wings. Two clawed feet pierced its bottom to dig into the earth, and its tail shrunk to a fan. It was a bird, but not a bird. No feathers. All black scales. A scaly bird. A horned vulture.
It bounced up to alight on the top of the youngest pine tree, where it bristled and cawed, the sound raw in that silent place.
Come, It said. Rise.
I stood. One of its scales dislodged and floated to the earth, wispy as a feather.
Pick it up. Hold it, It said. And you can fly.