Many a day, I got up and hunted my breakfast. Possum is good and quail and pheasant — if you cook them right. Get that wild taste out of them. Lard quail with salt pork to get that wild taste out. And you got to boil pheasant in cream.
I used to cook for a man and his family but I couldn’t eat with them. Seem like any son of a bitch could eat at our house but I couldn’t eat anywhere but home. When I was older, my grandmother explained it to me. If you cook for one child, you can invite a family over. But if a family have six or seven children, you be eating their food.
Hatch stretched his legs. The plastic-covered couch moved beneath him. He said no more than he needed. Webb smoked cigarette after cigarette. His lungs are black. A coal-town alley. His words were Hatch’s words too.
See, back home, we’d slaughter a hog and cook it in the earth. Dig a pit. Fire some hot coals. Man, that be the sweetest-tastin hog. Real barbecue. You ever had real barbecue?
No.
Hatch, you need to go down South.
I been—
We used to have everything on our land. My grandmother sold rabbits to white folks. Frogs too.
Yuk! Taste like chicken.
I go out to the pond and catch them for her. Hunt the rabbits. You ever been huntin?
Hatch shook his head.
See, rabbits hear you comin and jump up, run away, run in a circle back to the spot where they jumped. All you got to do is be quiet and wait for em. You ain’t never been huntin?
No. But my Uncle John and Spokesman—
Hatch, I done hunted me some of everything. I’d shoot me a deer and drag it behind my truck to skin it. Ever have any venison? In Tennessee, I’d hunt me a bear. Little black bear. Skin it. Cut it up. Put it in my suitcase and fly it home on the plane.
But you need a good huntin dog. I used to have this dog that bark and twitch in his sleep. He dream about huntin. You know he gon catch something. But he liked to bite everybody. I put a bell around his neck to warn people he comin.
OKRA?
You don’t like okra?
Hatch shook his head. Okra trees harbor red ants.
Boy, what yo mamma feed you? Down South, you better eat you some okra. Sorghum too. Bet you don’t know nothing bout sorghum, do you?
No.
Up here, food just ain’t the same. Can’t find no good grapes. Now, back home, you chopped through the cudgery to find the scuppervine and muscadine.
What?
Grapes. Scuppervine these white grapes. And muscadine. You ain’t never been down South?
Yeah, I—
I built me a grape arbor in Crownpin. Scuppervine. White grapes.
YES, I USED TO WORK HARD. If a donkey’s ass was a Kodak, my picture would be all over the world. But I knew how to work and how to make money. I used to steal cotton seeds. They paid fifty dollars a ton. I had a thousand dollars in my pocket when I went in the army. I had the first sergeant in my belt.
I first worked loading ships. Then I drove a truck on convoy. We drove bumper to bumper at seventy or eighty miles an hour on these mountains. Didn’t need the clutch either. We had our own signals. That was the only way you could stop in time.
We only lost one guy. He drove right off the mountain. All you could see was fire and smoke. We retrieved his body. The fire had melted his dog tags.
We drove ammunition to the front line and carried back a cargo of bodies. Many were headless. Couldn’t identify them. So we used to get a tractor and dig these big graves.
We had to clean up at Hiroshima too.
Pull the other one. Radiation. Cleaning up radiation ain’t like wiping off yo shoe. What yall do for protection?
We wore goggles.
Goggles? Hatch rolled his eyes. Goggles.
Spent some time in Europe too. The French women thought we had tails that came out at night.
PASSING THROUGH TEXAS those crackas threw rocks at you. Spit on you. You wanted to shoot them.
What about the officers? Hatch said.
In the States they treated you like shit, but overseas you were their brother. Many of them officers didn’t come back.
YOU EVER KILL ANYBODY?
Like I say, we drove convoy. Now, at times — You ever seen a bayonet?
Yeah. At the Armory museum.
I mean really seen one?
Hatch said nothing.
They were sharp as razors. I could throw a bayonet so it twirled only once.
WEBB’S SNORES fell and rose.
From his distance, from this plastic-covered couch that would serve as his bed, Hatch could see four-leaf clovers sticking from between the pages of Pool’s Bible. Southern folks do that. Four-leaf clovers. Lula Mae. Hatch opened the Bible. Someone had written on the white of the inner jacket, “Miss Addie Lee Webb was borned June 15, 1900. Departed her life June 21, 1956, at 4:10 a.m. Age 56 yrs.”
A thin strip of paper poked out from the gold-trimmed edges. Hatch removed it. An old newspaper sketch. Hatch’s age-fearing fingers gently held it up to sight. Beneath a tree in full bloom, a topless Eve — ugliest Eve he ever saw, with her hard man’s face and buck wild hair — holds a branch to hide her vaginal bush. Eve holding her twat. A lion rests at her feet. Mouth-startled, Adam is drawing back, a firmly rooted shrub relieving him of the need to palm his privates from the viewer’s eyes. In the distance, a deer drinks from a pond.
Hatch flipped the sketch over, like a hamburger on the grilclass="underline"
33
STORE SIGNS AND STREET SIGNS he couldn’t read. Store windows that offered prolonged looks at suspended, gravity-free roasted ducks, chickens, and pigs. Fish resting on eternal beds of ice. Tray after metal tray of fried rice and noodles lined up like boxcars. And short people with fortune-cookie eyes. He had seen all this before. Lived it all before. A Yellow cab had brought him to this yellow place. Brought him here for answers. He moved on urgent feet, moved at the speed of a reborn man.
He found the cathedral and cemetery where Spokesman had said they would be. The gravestones looked like so many white boat sails anchored in a busy harbor. They faced the street where pedestrians and drivers could read them. So little regard for the dead and the bereaved. You had to walk through the cemetery to enter the cathedral.
The largest Gothic structure in the world, the cornerstone was laid on December 27, 1892. The nave was dedicated on November 30, 1941, one week before Pearl Harbor. The war halted construction. The cathedral remains a great work-in-progress. Completion date is unknown. Stained-glass windows as tall as two men cast pyramids of faint light. Columns marched in stone rhythm. Flying buttresses shot up into concrete heaven. Taut arches and groins stretched up into darkness. The new churches slowed the movement through the nave by dividing and subdividing it into carefully articulated compartments. Gray paradise at the top. A seemingly endless runway of velvet carpet led to the altar. Wood pews lined the stone floor. Ran into darkness like unscheduled trains bound for unknown destinations. So this was a cathedral. A world of distance. Space. And more space. Armageddon could happen here. Plenty of room for all God’s angels and all the devil’s saints to battle.
Lucifer found the house where Spokesman had said it would be. More like a hangar than a house. The structure took up one square block. Perhaps Spin need all that room to hold all his wealth. Dinkins Airport was only a few miles away, and Lucifer was certain that this hangar had been airlifted from there and set down intact here. He imagined what he would see inside. Each object would show that Spin’s fingers knew the touch of luxury. Objects from every corner of the globe, proof that Spin had nosed abroad. Lucifer also imagined how their conversation would end.