“We’re fine!” Martina said, a vicious shriek this time, and Mrs. Teasedale retreated.
Probably to call the PO-lice, if another neighbor hadn’t beaten her to it. Whichever officer was on duty was probably heading in this direction. Please, Jesus in heaven, let it not be Cody. “You better clean it up right now your damn self, or I will have you arrested.”
I leaned in toward her, uncomfortably close. “Do it. I can’t wait to tell the judge how you got up out of bed and took the time to put your teeth in. How you hushed your dogs first, so the barking wouldn’t scare the kids off. How big and high the moon was and how both of those dumb-ass kids were wearing summer colors. You saw them, you saw exactly who it was, and you knew what they were doing. You weren’t feeling in danger, not a bit, and you weren’t aiming at the sky to scare them off either. I saw you. You meant them harm. So please, get your grandson to arrest me, and best of luck with that. I’ll use my phone call on the chief, tell him what you did, and you and I can sit out the morning in the cell together. Dibs on the cot.”
She cocked her hip at me like Lavender in a snit might, an insolent, easing-back gesture.
“My gun is only loaded up with ice-cream salt,” she said, sulky. “I keep it to run off cats and possums.”
Ice-cream salt? No wonder the shell felt so light. Even so, I could not calm down. My brain chemicals had hit Digby now, and he was awake inside me, going off like teeny Pop Rocks. I took a deep breath, trying to get my heart rate down.
“Oh, well, if you were only going to shred their skins open and salt-burn them. Maybe put a kid’s eye out,” I said, dripping sarcasm and venom in equal parts.
“Yes, I meant to burn their vandalizing hides a little. So what? Teach them a good lesson, but that’s all. We Macks? We don’t kill people.” That one hit, and she saw it in my face. Her front lip lifted again, baring those fake white teeth in a sneer. That face she made—it was so familiar that I blinked hard, twice, and stepped back. She followed me, pressing her advantage. “Guess that little jail cell is going to get right crowded, once your granny joins us.”
“No one is going to send Birchie to prison,” I said, but I had a faint tremor in my voice, and we both heard it. “She’s ninety years old. She has a terminal disease.”
Martina shrugged, insolent, and reared that donkey lip up again. God, I knew that look! Why was she so smug? Her threat to call the cops had rolled right off me, but she was acting as smug as the moon.
“Maybe so, maybe so. She’s rich enough to buy her way past fifty murders, I reckon. But Cody says anyone who helped her cover up? Why, they might as well of done the deed themselves. That’s the law.”
I felt my cheeks flush, and I said, “Wattie didn’t have anything to do with it,” before I could stop myself. I should have pretended I had no idea who she was referencing. It sounded defensive and, worse, untrue.
“Course she did. Everybody knows,” Martina Mack said, so certain of herself that it sounded offhand. “Train a nigger right, they can be as loyal as them dogs in there.” She jerked her thumb at the screen door, her eyes avid on my face, watching to see how her words would land. They hit my heated skin like a slap. I clenched my fist around the unspent shell, feeling the salt shift and crackle in the plastic casing. My other hand went to Digby, as if these ugly words could burn the buds of his ears, twist his little stomach.
Cody really needed to stop confiding in his granny. She could not keep her ugly mouth shut. So they were going to come at Birchie using Wattie, and I should not have needed Martina Mack to unload her ugly words into the summer air to have known this. I should’ve guessed at Sunday services, in the speaking silence after Birchie claimed that First Baptist was Wattie’s church, too. When I watched the pastor trying to take Miss Wattie’s place at Birchie’s side. When Cody blocked me in the narthex with this same ugly-donkey braying mouth, and that was why Martina’s smug face looked so damn familiar.
I’d seen that look on Cody’s face before, years ago, when I was a seventh-grader at First Baptist’s Summer Youth Lock-In. Thirty-some-odd kids, ranging from sixth grade to seniors, eating microwave s’mores and singing “Blue Skies and Rainbows,” playing hide-and-seek all over the building and then gathering for a midnight prayer circle. By 2:00 a.m. most of the kids were sleeping, girls in the youth room, boys in the prayer chapel. I was still awake and roaming, looking for a quiet spot to curl up with The Dark Knight Returns.
I ran across Cody Mack, chaperoneless in the kitchen with three of the other high-school boys. He was doing what looked to me like a magic trick. He had a shallow soup bowl full of water set out on the linoleum counter that ran in between the kitchen proper and the fellowship hall.
“So this here is the swimming hole,” he said, not quite a whisper, and something in his tone told me there was naughtiness afoot.
It felt much like last year’s lock-in, when he’d snuck in a single Fuzzy Navel wine cooler. Every kid still awake at 3:00 a.m. had shared it. A precocious insomniac, I was the only sixth-grader left standing. As the lowest on the food chain, I got the bottle last, when there was barely a quarter inch of room-temp orange liquid remaining. For years I’d thought that alcohol tasted mostly like human spit. But it had felt brave and naughty-good to be included, so instead of crossing through, I came over to the counter to watch.
Cody’d fetched a set of salt and pepper shakers from the stove, and he upended the salt over the bowl.
“See here? Lookit, here’s all the white kids, swimming in the Coosa River. Pretty happy, right?” At once I felt the muscles in my belly going tight. I knew what he’d say a full shocked second before he lifted up the pepper shaker, dumped some in, and said, “But then all the little nigger kids show up.”
I’d heard that word before, of course. I’d heard it at school. I’d heard a loud man say it at the Dillard’s in Montgomery this very week. But not inside the walls of Birchie’s own church. It made me hot-faced to hear it, always, but inside these walls? It felt much worse. Earlier that day Wattie had come over and spent her afternoon teaching me how to make fudge for this lock-in. We’d made three batches, and she’d cut them into fat squares. Hearing one of the same mouths that had eaten her good fudge saying this word, it made my stomach drop like I’d just tipped over on a roller coaster.
“Don’t say that,” said a high, unhappy voice, and it was mine.
Cody Mack ignored me. Well, almost. “So here’s the white kids swimming with all these little niggers now, nigging up their nice white swimming hole.” He did not address me directly, but the repetitions were aimed at me.