The mechanic came out after a while and told Kathryn the damage, and it was only going to be twenty dollars, and she reached into her purse and handed him the money without looking at him or making the fuss he clearly expected.
She fanned her face and between her legs again with the newspaper, Boss and Ora’s hardscrabble faces staring back.
Advertisements on tin all around her. DRINK COCA-COLA. SMOKE CAMELS. BUY FIRESTONE. She lit her Lucky and waited for another car to pass and kick up a little wind.
“Sure love the smell of a cigarette,” a little voice said.
Leaning into the stone wall, legs spread, opening one eye, Kathryn Kelly looked at the little girl in the flour sack standing in front of her. She opened the other eye and muscled her sweaty forearms onto her knees and took in some more of the Lucky, blowing the smoke right into the girl’s face and pug, freckled nose.
The little girl winced a little, but then sniffed the air like a rabbit and said, “Yes, ma’am. That’s smells right stylish.”
“You’re an odd little duck.”
“Don’t take me on account of my clothing,” the girl said. “My father lost our suitcase in a card game.”
“You don’t say…”
“He almost won, too.”
“Where’s your car?”
“We don’t have a car,” the girl said. “We’re just tramping.”
“I see.”
“You have a car.”
“If you can call it that.”
“Must be nice.”
“What’s your angle, kid?” Kathryn asked, crushing the cigarette under the heel of her shoe. The sunset cut across the girl’s light eyes and blunt, bowl-cut hair. She wrinkled her nose. “Thought maybe we could hitch a ride, is all. Don’t want to be no trouble, ma’am. We just walked a fur piece.”
The mechanic pulled the truck around. He had black teeth, and black grease across his red neck, and he winked at Kathryn as he opened the door, at the ready.
“Some town,” the little girl said. “Even the people have fleas.”
The grease monkey spat.
The little girl turned to walk back to her old bucket daddy, Momma sitting like an Indian beside him. Kathryn wondered where in the hell were those Western gifts the billboards had promised.
She kicked in the clutch and clattered up slow to the girl, having to shout over the coughing motor and through the open passenger window. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Gerry.”
“Y’all want a ride, Gerry?”
“Can my folks come?”
“Why not.”
A mile down the road, Gerry sitting up on an apple crate beside Kathryn and talking ninety miles an hour, her poor-faced folks in back on the Ford’s flatbed, Kathryn started to think about the miracle of prayer and how that family, cresting over the hill with holes in their shoes, just might be some kind of crazy redemption, like they had in the Bible and in the movies.
Cleo Brooks knew she could be good. She just goddamn well knew it.
“YOU SAY SHE’D JUST UP AND LEFT YOU, MA’AM?” JONES ASKED. “Did your granddaughter say where she was headed?”
“No, sir,” Ma Coleman said. “I can still smell him among us.”
“How does he smell?”
“Like sulfur and hellfire.”
“I think it smells right pleasant, ma’am,” Jones said. “Smells like you baked a pie.”
“Coconut,” she said. “Just starting to cool. Yes, sir, it is.”
Jones looked to the ledge, where dozens of flies had gathered over the pie, taking off and landing in a spotted black swarm. He sat across from the old woman, on the other side of a table cobbled together with barn wood, coffee-ringed and beat to hell. Behind her, he had a clear view of the agents walking the land, and he could see young Agent Colvin conversing with that sharpshooter Bryce by a willow growing in the bend of a narrow creek.
A black row of clouds inched toward them, about to blot out the sun.
“It’s nice to converse with a fine young man, for a change,” Ma Coleman said. “Picks up the spirit. May I offer you some more sweet tea? I brewed it in the sun this morning. My son brought me a block of ice just before you men arrived.”
“I don’t mind if I do,” Jones said, reaching across to grab the sweating pitcher. “I appreciate you inviting us in.”
“It’s a hot day,” she said.
“It’s supposed to rain.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jones said, fanning his face with his Stetson. “Sure would cool things down.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Ma Coleman said, cold and vacant as a broken doll on a ladder-back chair, flies buzzing off from a half-eaten cheese sandwich. “You will find that man she’s with?”
“Kathryn’s husband?”
“If that’s what he claims.”
Bruce Colvin walked through the front screen door and was careful not to let it bang closed. He’d sweated through his white dress shirt, perspiration ringing his neck in an effect that looked like a halo. He looked to Jones and shook his head.
There was dirt across the front of his pants.
“She left some things here?” Colvin asked.
“Her furs and trinkets,” the old woman said. “Vanity has no shame. He bought them for her. He made her wear them. They feel like dog skins to me.”
“I understand,” Jones said.
“You are a fine bunch of men,” she said, rocking a bit to herself and smiling. “You understand that he’s the one to blame?”
“Of course,” Jones said, shifting his eyes over to Colvin. Colvin rested a shoulder against the wall, flowered wallpaper peeling from the wood planks, listening. “We only want George Kelly.”
Jones reached out his hand and grabbed the frail old woman’s arm. “Tell us what you know, ma’am.”
Colvin shook his head and looked away from Jones, letting the screen door slam behind him. Jones watched the young man walk away down a rutted path but then turned back to the blind woman, who smiled and rocked. “You do know she has a friend named Louise in Fort Worth? You do realize she’s a demon, too?”
KATHRYN RENTED A CABIN IN A LITTLE MOTOR COURT NEAR Cleburne for herself and Gerry and her parents, the Arnolds. Flossie Mae and Luther. She’d left them there to get cleaned up and she’d gone to town to try to phone Sam Sayres again, getting the runaround from his secretary and finally giving up, bringing back some boxed dinners of fried chicken and some fresh clothes for the family. The family sat together on a short bed opposite an identical short bed where Kathryn sat and gnawed on a chicken bone. She was thinking of Sam Sayres being so almighty stupid as to let her momma get sent back to Oklahoma when Luther Arnold coughed in the silence of hungry people eating and said how much they appreciated meeting a real-life angel out on a Texas highway.
“Don’t mention it,” Kathryn said.
“’Preciate the dress,” Flossie Mae said, looking down at the floorboards and lifting her eyes just for a moment to give Kathryn a ragged smile.
“You gonna eat that?” Gerry asked her father.
“Get your grimy little hands off my chicken,” he said.
“You can have mine,” Kathryn said. “I’m not that hungry.”
She passed over the little greasy box to the girl, who snatched up another drumstick, rocking her feet to and fro on the little bed.
“Where y’all headed?” Kathryn asked.
“Where we can find work.”
“Where you been?” she asked.
“We was thrown off our land in April,” Luther said, closing his eyes and shaking his head with the memory.
“Where?”
“Ardmore.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
Flossie Mae shot a surprised look at her husband, and he reached down and tweaked her kneecap.
“Daddy was a good farmer,” Gerry said, bright and wide-eyed. “I had me a little goat that would pull me in a wagon. He was a good little goat.”
“Hush now, doll,” Luther said, cleaning down a breast to the bone. “Quit talkin’ ’bout that gosh-dang goat.”
“What kind of work can you do?” Kathryn asked, crossing her legs at the knee and lighting a cigarette. She could see her reflection in the mirror over the cheap bureau. A sign read WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE LODGING FOR THOSE OF LOOSE MORALS.