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Show Go Love/149 "Help me?" He's already bending, sweeps and dumps-in jean shorts and a tee shirt, blue Addidas running shoes, worn on the inside arch. I can't know that in two day's he'll be the most darkly quiet chauffeur I'll ever think to remember. "Looky here," he says "Cooter's cousin " "What's that?" He holds up an inch of joint, sniffs it. "Hooter," he says. "Cooter's first cousin. Meet Mister Hooter." Before the words are dead, he's lit the roach, breathed out smoke and handed it two me between thumb and forefinger. "Ear." he says And without thinking I take the smoke into my lungs, hold it there. The woodpecker's alarm is fine from the hickory, a good note, between the dead and the living, a little music for the hear and now. "Thank you." "Thank yee," he says, green eyes like slab glass. A white LTD drives up in the lot beside O.W.'s tmck. Out gets an overweight woman in a flowery dress and her skinny husband whose name is, I'll bet my soul, Claude Her man gives her free rein, she's boss-I've seen her a thousand times She was my Sunday School teacher, my fourth grade music teacher, the woman whose arm was broken when the black tornado hit our post office in '76. She's a pianist at a church where people touch rattlesnakes I bet money she calls herself Claude's jewel. Three reasons occur to me why their walking up to the newly swept stoop, where the monkey man who'd lit up hooter has just skittered away to the car garage. The peckerwood screams and batters the hickory violently wen she passes Claude's jewel throws an evil look up into the tree, and her husband looks pitifully at his shoes. A heavenly smiles spreads |