Body and Bread (9 page)

Afterward they stood, weak, breathless, until Kurt brushed at dirt clods stuck to his jeans, then walked toward his row of weeds and cotton. “Too bad,” Sam shouted. “I was ready to chop again ‘til you came at me like that.”

Kurt reacted like Sam knew he would: He stopped, and he laughed. “You bastard,” he said. He wiped his hairline with the back of his hand, flipped sweat onto the dirt. Sam wheezed his giggle, clutched himself, toppled onto his side.

Cyril dropped his hoe, ambled toward the ‘49 Ford pickup parked next to the fence. He reached over the lowered tailgate, unscrewed the top of his tin cooler, turned the spigot and filled the lid. He sucked gulps, filled it again, set it on the truck’s fender. He removed his hat and the dishrag, drenched the cloth, bathed his face, his neck. He sat next to the cooler, his legs falling lazily open, and between more sips, he stared past the brothers at something invisible to Sam, something far away.

“Sam,” Kurt called, “come back to work and I’ll find a hanky for your head as cute as Cervenka’s.”

My biceps need work, Sam thought, and my chest could use some sun. He took off his t-shirt, draped it through a belt loop. He picked up his hoe, swinging at weeds with determined whacks, triceps straining.

“So, you think he’s queer, or what?” Kurt said as he chopped in the row next to Sam. Each nicked root echoed:
tap
.

At the end of the field, Cyril stood, poured, drank, his head tilted back. Sam imagined his belly filling with sluicy coolness.

He remembered seeing Cyril two years before in the high school hallway, his textbooks carried in a ratty briefcase and no noticeable friends, even though there’d been other Czech students. Wasn’t he in the band? The guy played basketball, for sure. Cyril’s quick fakes had been legendary.

Cyril repositioned his hat, brushed his palms across his jeans then ambled toward his hoe, which lay in a furrow near Sam. His face turned toward the barn, then forward again. He moistened his lips, stretched his arms behind his head, then above it, finally swinging his hands. The guy made walking a sport, Sam thought.

“Or maybe,” Kurt continued, “he’d rather screw one of his daddy’s sheep.” An eyebrow lifted; he scratched his head.

Sam knew Kurt wasn’t comfortable around Cyril—all that aloofness and ease in this crop-and-animal place. But insulting Cyril not only might be dangerous; it wasn’t right. “Shut up,” he said. He was sure Cyril had heard.

Sam worked alongside the others for an hour, this time without talking, their hoes’ clips and soil shuffling like soft brush beats. Sometimes one stretched, holding his breath, then released it, satisfying as a belch. Grasshoppers rattled free of the plants, chirring. Once when Sam tilted, arching his back, a buzzard circled three times, disappearing toward the railroad tracks.

o

The blisters on Sam’s hands throbbed. Sweat dribbled down his forehead, burning his eyes. When his nose dripped, he sneezed, dropped his hoe, wiped his face with his itchy t-shirt. He walked to the truck for a drink, the water tinny in its metal lid, quenching. Then he soaked his head, the water stinging his neck, shoulders. Oh, he thought, and put on his shirt.

Cyril leaned toward the cotton plants, his hat shadowing his face, that dishrag protecting his neck, his shirt-sleeved arms pumping, his body drifting. Like a damn machine, Sam thought. Kurt, on the other hand, swatted weeds like flies, his body all strains and jerks, the sun roasting his arms.

In a minute, they joined Sam at the truck. Kurt got a drink then opened the door, stepped, grunting, onto the running board, and grazed his hip on the gearshift knob as he threw himself across the seat. Too much Budweiser and armchair football, Sam thought.

After Cyril doused himself, he sat beside Sam. He stared, unblinking, toward the field’s opposite border at a silhouette of trees, a green mesa amidst the sky and scrub.

“See something?” Sam asked, peering.

“Great horned owl. Listen—”

“Shit, you can’t see that from here.” Crows—Sam had no idea how many—squawked like ducks. Another one appeared, plunked itself among the maze of limbs and leaves. “Those, genius, are crows,” he said.

Cyril seemed not to notice Sam. “Look, in the top branches of that middle sycamore. Its face is heart-shaped.”

Sam searched the center trees, each visible limb, trunk crook. “Man, there ain’t nothing there.” He shoved Cyril, who bumped the side of the truck.

Cyril waved a balancing arm, scowled. “The crows are diving at the owl because it eats their babies. I’d say there are five of them, gathered around him at the tank.”

“Tank?”

“The caliche cow pond on the other side of those sycamores and poplars.” He pointed, and as if commanded, the owl rose and flew, five crows darting, diving at its head, swatting with their stiff-legged feet, as it drifted forward.

Ten feet overhead, its body floated, a deformed moon swimming through blue. Its short wings agitated then stiffened, fluttering, then grew still.

Kurt stayed in Austin the next summer. When Sam arrived alone at the cotton field, Cyril might have already chopped a full row.

“How’s it going,” Sam would’ve said.

Cyril nodded then, his hat brim tracing a check mark. If he noticed Sam’s change to a long-sleeved shirt and gimme cap, he didn’t let it show. He clipped weeds again.

Sam got a hoe out of Cyril’s pickup, chopped along an adjacent row. Flipping short taps, he almost kept up. By Nugent and Pelton standards, Sam thought, Cyril was strange enough to get talked about, picked at like his own parents harped at him. But Cyril’s difference came from his foreignness, while Sam’s
otherness
was tied to “unacceptable” habits like telling what he honestly thought, remarks others labeled “disrespectful,” while he called them truths. “Sam’s on another wavelength,” our mother said.

Sam swung his hoe with minimum effort, having developed an instinct for where and how hard to chop. Each thump signaled a clip of Johnson grass. He squeezed a cotton boll, marveling that a bloom could be so soft, so fibrous, perfect as store-bought socks. An hour and three rows later, he took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve; sweat beaded again. He aimed his face into a rustle of wind as a jet unfurled a smoky rope.

Thirsty, he dropped his hoe, strolled toward the cooler. Unscrewing the top, he heard a shuffling come from the uncultivated area beyond the fence. A scrawny jackrabbit, short-haired with jumbo ears, tipped forward off its back legs, lifted its head, stared. Ears flattened, it lurched then loped—back legs folding, stretching—fifty feet along the fence. Between posts, it stopped, raised its stringy ears, checked Sam a second time. Another frantic toss of limbs, then it bounded across the field. Sam noticed small trails of worn undergrowth. Had rabbits made them? As if called, Cyril appeared.

“Are those some kind of animal trails?” Sam asked, pointing.

“Yeah,” Cyril said. He took the lid, poured.

“
What
kind?” Sam flicked a grasshopper off his sleeve.

“Rats and field mice. They’re all over.” Cyril bathed his head and neck with his dishrag.

Sam drank, pulled a Boy Scout scarf from his hip pocket, copied Cyril’s routine. “Saw a jack rabbit over there a minute ago.” Cyril’s eyes moved in close: telescopes. Sam shifted, his heel sinking into loosened earth. What was the guy thinking? Didn’t he ever blink?

“You ought to see them at night while my father’s plowing. Even the babies get at the loosened roots.”

“You ever eat any?”

“They’re too tough. But Mom and Terezie fry up cottontails with garlic and onions. For rabbit, we say
králík
.”

Sam pictured Cyril’s sister: tall, stomping, heavy-heeled shoes echoing, man’s shoes, he suspected. Her eyes, the same near purple as poker chips, glared at anything daring to block her way. A scar stretched from beneath her nose through her lip, from falling off a horse, someone had said, but Sam thought “cleft palate?” then “no, of course not,” and finally came to admire the lip’s puffiness, its exposed underside. Once, she leaned, listening to a friend; then out of some primitive, childlike need for stimulation, she stroked the rosy mark, back and forth, up to the nose, down again.

Sam had overheard some girls at a football game giggling about Terezie. Apparently, her mother picked her up afternoons, kept her home on weekends. She was kept on a short leash. Except, she got a little on the side. According to the talk at school, Terezie was sneaking out with the band teacher.

“I know your sister,” Sam said, his hands sliding into his back pockets, respectful. “Serious.”

“Not particularly.”

“Smart, though.”

Cyril shrugged then shaded his eyes.

“I been meaning to ask,” Sam said, picking up what looked like a piece of granite, specks flickering, “what’d happen if some guy called her? She go out?” He whipped the rock toward the tangled field of hidden animals.

“Depends on who’s calling.”

Sam wondered what that meant but wouldn’t ask. Not yet.

As Cyril ambled toward the fence, his hat’s weave cast striped shadows across his shoulder. Climbing, he called, “Over here.”

Sam followed until they reached a stand of trees and brush.

“Remember this?”

Sam didn’t.

“Last summer. The owl. This is where he flew.”

Was Sam supposed to remember something from a year ago? “Oak?”

Cyril’s eyes kept steady, a silent note.

“The tree,” Sam said irritably, “here. Looks like oak.”

Cyril pointed, “Wild primrose. My father makes pipes out of the briar roots.”

“No way. What’s that?”

“Hackberry,” Cyril said, pointing, “mesquite, wild plum, and beodarck; over there, buffle, blue stem, and coastal bermuda.”

Sam tried to memorize the names, noting the leaf and stem shapes, the textures, heights of grasses. The rotting stumps and broken limbs smelled dusty, the wildflowers spicy. He remembered Otis fertilizing with banana peels, splayed like starfish underneath topsoil. Then he spotted a green apple among flickering leaves, noticed seed heads on the grains. His nose itched, dripped.

“The creek’s dry here, but my father left this place for quail and other animals.” Pushing aside mesquite limbs, he stepped forward.

They found a spider web four feet wide and nine feet high. A dragonfly and a moth wriggled. The spider, six inches long, black with yellow stripes, crept upward.

“Wonder where the male is,” Cyril said. “Their sex is really violent.”

“Yeah?” Sam stepped back. “How?”

A whistle came from the left. Cyril answered in a duplicated skirl. “A meadowlark. You interested in birds?”

Sam started to say something funny about peckers, but he couldn’t. Cyril, he knew, got up at five every morning, liked his parents. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

“I do imitations on a violin. It’s rough, but…”

The Cervenka farmhouse smelled strange. The odor came from garlic stalks set in drug store vases—Sam would later learn that Mrs. Cervenka added the cloves to everything from okra to catfish batter—and a pot of orange peels boiling on the stove. The family used garlic and orange water for home remedies—
domácí úlevy
Cyril later told him—to ensure a strong heart and relieve rheumatism. Sam knew what his mother would think of the air the Cervenkas breathed: unacceptable.

Cyril walked through the living room, and Sam followed. A sofa had a pillow and a folded army blanket stacked at the far end. Next to a pie safe stood a Victrola with a radio, doilies covering the top of its water-stained cabinet, and “The Czech Melody Hour,” he’d later learn, tuned in most Sunday afternoons. Books on rocks and wildflowers, opera and symphony records, biographies from Truman to Caruso, and children’s novels like
Green Mansions, The Sugar Creek Gang
series, and
Roy Rogers and The Rimrod Renegades
crammed an unpainted shelf that extended around the top of the room

Sam didn’t usually notice furnishings, but when he thought of his home’s chintz and marble, he longed to sprawl in a chair, to look.

Two paintings hung above the Victrola—bluebirds painted by Cyril, a still life of fruit by Terezie—their unembarrassed sentiment comforting. A tinted photograph of a stocky couple—grandparents, Antonín and Johanna, Cyril said—hung next to a doorway. “Howdy,” he called into the kitchen.

Terezie stood across the room, slicing cucumbers on a cutting board at the tile counter. She wore a blouse and knee-length slacks.
Great ass
, Sam thought. The Chambers stove was metal-knob locomotion, a pinnacle of heat. “I brought somebody,” Cyril said to his mother as she lifted a pot’s lid then stuck in her finger.

“Naww,” she said irritably, glancing at Sam. She replaced the lid and whistled, cradling her hand in her apron. “Just how did that thing got so hot? Tell me that.” Her house shoes, strapped to her feet with rubber bands, slapped linoleum as she crossed to the Formica table. She slumped, sighing, into a metal chair.