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Show Blue Run/28 three brushes, charcoal and stump paper, a putty eraser, some colored pencils and an Exacto-knife. She found one of those big folding sketch pads full of the kind of paper that can take a beating and I was set. So Joey and I moved our days out into the front yard, a small corner lot beside Thayer Street, which the lispy neighbor called Prayer Street, which it sort of was, if drawing your son into a bird can be thought of as prayer. The yard was on the apartment building's front side, a square of Bermuda where dog walkers did business Dee believed it was a good sign when neighbors walked their dogs, way better than Scranton-her old home place, where hillfolk let their hogs run wild in the heat and perfectly sane people fished for chickens off front porches when the purple hull peas were hulled. Little Rock was, Dee'd say, the Capitol. She was number three auditor for the Department of Finance and spent days driving her Toyota to Paragould and Rison and Dirty Devil, checking city ledgers and school district funds, keeping the country people straight. Lord save your soul if you screwed up With Dee you'll find your butt up river, picking peas on the County Farm Buddy came as a postman. This was July bleeding to August, when the heat finally wins out and people move around stunned, half out-of-their minds. Joey'd invented a game that day of walking a spiral from the inside out, squatting on chubby legs and staring the Bermuda grass as if there lay the answer to all things. I'd just lined out a rough of his face as an owl, how his nose hooked like my Daddy's, the high forehead and widow's peak. A strong chin. Blue eyes with the Stepwell glint inside them. He'd take a punch some day. And he'd be wild in love just like the rest of us It's not like we were under the witness protection program or anything like that. Finding us couldn't have been too much trouble, through casing us, inventing the Postman malarkey, and |
