In the middle of the room in front of a little pool of water sat Moses, smoking a long stemmed corncob pipe. The water was lit green. The smoke from Moses’ pipe was green. “Come boy. Sit you DOWN!”
“Why’d you run off from me?” I said. “I got lost.”
“First go through the world! Then CHANGE come.” His voice reminded me of Mr. Slabodnik’s accordion back home, wheezing up loud, then dragging bottom. “COME BOY! Sit.”
“I ain’t no puppy dog Moses!” I kicked a rock. The rock rolled a little bit in front of me and stopped.
Moses took a puff off his pipe and looked into the pool. He started to sing. It was the same sweet song Willis had sung to the chickens. With Moses though it came out like a cat, yowling on a backyard fence. He stretched his mouth every crazy way.
At the end his mouth was stretched out so crazy I had to laugh. Moses watched me from under his hat and grinned. “YOU! think dis be FUNNY?” The way he said this made me laugh even more. Moses laughed too. “Come boy. Sit you down!” He reached around in back of him and brought up a dingy gray towel. “Dry you off BOY! Keep you warm!”
I wasn’t cold, but I took the towel anyway and wiped myself off. I sat down and looked at the pool, a shiny green pool if you looked at it one way, a clear pool, not deep, with little pebbles on the bottom if you looked at it another. The green smoke was all over the place. It smelled like matches. I could hear rain slapping against the rocks outside the two bumpy portholes. Moses reached down to where I had the knife and tapped it with his fingers. Looking at me, he said, “put it IN BOY!” He motioned toward the pool of water.
“It’s Granny’s knife,” I said. “It doesn’t belong to me.”
“Put it in! See!”
“See what?”
“Go through the world! SEE!”
Going through the world made no sense to me, but I got hold of the knife handle anyway and pulled it out. The blade looked gray in the shadowy cave light, its end still bent from where I’d used it to dig for crawfish. Lightning flashed outside the portholes. It made a shadow-picture of me with the knife and Moses against the opposite wall. There was another sound of thunder. The bottom of the blade started to glow. My hand began to shake.
“Good,” Moses said.
I watched the glow climb up to the top of the blade. Blue neon, like at the swimming hole.
“Good,” Moses said. “NOW! Put it in.”
I looked at the pool of water. It was clear now, not deep at all. I could see the pebbles on the bottom, pink and blue and gray. I put my hand in with the knife just under the surface and let go. The water was ice cold.
The blade fanned this way and that till it reached the stony bottom. The whole thing glowed now, even the handle part. Then it was like the glow streamed out and away from the knife, mixing in with the green glow of the water, turned over and out like a fan or a flower until all the water was glowing, not green anymore but silvery blue. Moses swirled it with a stick. Little pearls of silver light splashed out onto the floor where they stayed a while — like beads of mercury — before slithering back in. “Look!” Moses said and took away the stick. Right away the water went like a mirror.
In it I saw myself — a wet, tired, scrawny boy. I saw Moses too, smoky black eye sockets and no eyebrows under a cowboy hat. Behind us though were things that weren’t there before. Beams ran under the dome ceiling of the cave-room. Dried plants and thick knuckled roots hung from the beams along with rusted lantern bottoms, loops of rope and bunches of chicken claws tied together with string. I looked away from the mirror up at the real ceiling. There were the beams and things just like in the mirror. “Where’d all that come from Moses?” I asked, but got no answer.
More lightning flashed. Again I could see our shadows on the wall. There was something else too, next to the wall, a table and chairs, boxes stacked up next to the table. Flat boxes like the ones Moses used to carry his snakes in, screens over the ends, something bumping, hissing inside. I looked at Moses. He jerked his chin back toward the room. When I looked, the table, the chairs, the boxes, the beams, everything that had been there a second ago was gone.
“Not always what you think. Now, isn’t it boy?” Moses jerked his chin again, this time toward the pool.
What happened when I looked at the pool confused me way more than anything else. It was like the pool or the light of the pool had somehow sucked me inside itself, surrounding me in silvery blue light. I tried to yell but no sound would come out of my mouth. I was lost in the middle of a silvery blue nowhere. Then, a little way in front of me, the light began to darken and blend, to turn into a something — the figure of a boy, a dirty uncombed little boy, lying on his belly in a kitchen, elbows underneath, writing out something on a piece of paper. He wore thick black eyeglasses too big for his head, one of the corners broken and held together with orange electrical tape. He had no shoes. The heels of his socks had worn through.
“Hey!” I hollered, this time finding my voice. “Who are you?”
He didn’t answer.
I bent down next to his ear. “Little boy! Don’t you ever take a bath?” I tried to touch his head, but my hand went right through. Three men and a woman sat at a table in the kitchen. One of the men pounded the table with his fist. Everybody laughed. Next to the table was a sink piled with dirty dishes — above it, a darkened window. I walked up to the people at the table. Nobody noticed. Bottles of beer and ashtrays sat everywhere. There was a big, square shouldered whiskey bottle too. It was half empty.
The men looked like factory workers. They were big muscled and wore gray pants and long-sleeved shirts. White long john underwear showed out the necks of their shirts, the ends of their sleeves. They smoked and drank beer, took turns taking little sips from the whiskey bottle.
One man clinked his glass with another man’s. “Here’s to the cat’s meow!” he said.
“Pussy, pussy, pussy!” the other man said.
All three looked at the woman and laughed.
The woman laughed too, her face long and smiling. She was smoking a cigar. She was pretty, but kind of horse-faced with dull black hair, red powdered cheeks and wide flaring nostrils. Eyelids painted green. She sat with her feet propped up on the leg of the man next to her, her knees in the air, her dress pushed back you could see the hemline of a pair of red panties.
She took a puff off the cigar and grinned, letting the smoke leak out small slits between her teeth. She talked like a Yankee; her words jagged-edged, deep and rough sounding like a man. “So now, who wants it first? Michael? You? Don’t be shy. You boys.” She punched the shoulder of the man next to her. “Come on now. It’s not nice to keep Momma waiting.”
One of the men grabbed up the whiskey bottle, took a long pull, and then passed it to another man who did the same. The third man, the one next to the woman, put it back down on the table. All three sat with their eyes lolled out, grinning at each other and at the woman. The man next to the woman grinned and ran his hand up her leg, right up to the red panties.
The woman pressed her feet harder into the man’s leg. “Oh baby, I know what you want.”
The man slid his fingers inside the panties but the woman laughed and slapped it away. All the other men laughed too.
“Ma! No!” The little boy was on his knees now, looking at the people around the table.
The three men looked at the boy and at each other.