Fallen Angels (3 page)

“How you know that?” Willie's fingers followed the X's on the threads inside a basket of baseballs.

“I saw his things packed up. His job was spent. He's headed for work down in Texas. Lana told me. That's why she left—her gravy train was drying up. The only reason she hauled us off was because Daddy gave her a little money for it. He should have known she was brainless and likely to ditch us.”

Willie fished around inside the bag Lana had left in the theater.

“What you think you'll find?” Angel asked.

“Lana hid a little money in here yesterday. Flighty gals like her forget their own names once they get their minds on other things, like that huckster.” He fished out a scarf tied with string.

Angel untied the scarf and opened it. “Five dollars. Plus what Daddy give us. I'm glad she's gone. We can get to Claudia's by ourselves.” Claudia should have gotten her letter by how, Angel decided. Her memory of an older sister was little more than a grown-up laugh in the kitchen with Momma. Claudia had hot been one to write, but often enough she had dropped a note to tell Momma about her marriage to a railway man. She never said either way whether he treated her good. She just said the bills were paid and that was all the good in a man she needed.

“I don't think Daddy left at all. You're just saying it to get us to do what you want. I want to go home, Angel. We never heard nothing from Claudia. She doesn't know we're coming. What if she can't afford to feed us like Daddy couldn't?” asked Willie.

“Home's not home anymore and I'm not lyin’. Besides, Claudia knows about Momma. I wrote her a letter and told her. Daddy said he'd write and tell her we were headed her way, so stop complaining.”

A lady with a natural smile counted apples into a basket next to them.

“Ma'am, we need to catch a lift to our sister's place in Nazareth. We'd be glad to pay you a dollar for the trouble,” said Angel.

“Where would you kids get a dollar? Don't believe I've ever seen you around here.” The woman's entire expression changed as though a cloud had all at once formed above her.

“Oh, we got it from our daddy.” Angel backed away from the woman. She remembered the way the deputy sheriff had fixed his eyes on her as though he were putting her face to memory.

“Let's go over to that café and get us something to eat, Angel,” Willie begged. “I'm starving.”

Angel ignored her brother and studied a male customer who gathered food into a crate. He turned and glanced at them and returned to his shopping. “There's a man that looks like he's about to do some traveling. Let's see if he'll take a couple of dollars for letting us hitch a ride.”

“Two dollars is too much,” said Willie.

The man in denim bent over a stacked crate of canned goods next to his collected heap of flour and sugar. He looked a lot like the feller who broke ponies down at the auction barn in Snow Hill—nice face bones, but a little troubled around the eyes. He tapped each can, counting and recounting as though he could not remember the number of the items. Angel had not known many fellers with eyes so thread blue, like the stitches on her daddy's work pants. Sweet creases at the corners, but not so badly aged, although they made him look puckish. Angel gave her hair a combing through with her fingertips. It came to her that she should cast herself in the best light possible to Sweet Eyes.

She composed herself in the manner of a near-grown girl and said, “Excuse me, Sir.”

“I don't have anything for beggar kids,” he said.

“You don't know who I am?” She pulled on her earlobe whenever she lied, a habit her daddy had always called her on. Angel was not a name to give a girl who told her kind of lies. But anyone in her situation had to have resources or resort to invention. Through the storefront window she saw a Ford truck parked near the door and she noticed the decent set of tires, like Daddy always did. “My father is, well, he's the right-hand man to Henry Ford.” The apple counter stopped her counting and stared at Angel. Angel spoke more quietly. “Matter of fact, Henry Ford's my uncle.” She noticed how the man's eyes thinned, two rinds. He assessed her tattered green dress, the loose braiding at the yoke. She pressed the loopy part against her chest with one finger. “Our better clothes are at the hotel being—warshed.”

“You're staying at the hotel?” Sweet Eyes asked.

The key was still in Angel's pocket. She held it up. “The Ouachita, of course. Nothing but the best, Daddy says. Anyway, Daddy sent us ahead to visit relatives and, truth be told, our mistress done got herself sick with the flu. Flu's been going around like nobody's business. Poor lady.”

“What relatives?” asked Sweet Eyes.

“Our older sister, Claudia,” said Angel. That was not a lie.

“She's married with a kid or two. Old enough to take us in, I reckon.” Willie stood holding his hat. As though coached by Angel, he hung his head. Ida May bit her lip. She had been on the very edge of bawling all morning. So her lip quivered just by the very act of anyone looking at her.

“We're stranded as can be, but we got the money to pay our own way. If you think you could give us a ride to a place called Nazareth, we'll pay.” She held out a single crisp dollar bill, considering Willie's caution that two dollars was too much.

“I don't know what you got for an angle but I'm traveling alone and I don't have any place to put kids.” Sweet Eyes glanced up at the Ford pickup loaded with food and supplies. “Besides, if your daddy works for Ford, you should give him a call and tell him you're in dire need of his assistance.” The man's crackling voice rose in pitch. His attention drifted, and then he lost interest altogether.

“Excuse me. Did I hear you say you're traveling to Nazareth?” A woman in a shapeless dress hovered near the apple crates, listening to everything Angel had said. Her skin had a pink cast blending into whiter eye sockets with feathery white brows for a topper. “I'm Winifred Mock. I'm a retired schoolteacher and I'm on my way to Bluff City. Appears to me Nazareth is a rock's throw from Bluff City. You say you'll pay for the ride?”

Angel held up the dollar.

“There's three of you?” She counted them with her nose.

Angel pulled out the second dollar.

“There you have it. A ride with a retired schoolteacher,” said Sweet Eyes. He jerked a crate up and arched his back to brace the weight of the flour and sugar bags.

Angel watched him pay and leave. “We need to find a place to eat,” she said to Winifred. “My brother and sister need some breakfast and then we'll be ready to leave.”

“Best to grab some bread and apples then here at the store. You can eat in my car on the way, ‘long as you mind not to clutter it up.”

Small relief spilled over and Angel said, “I told you I could take care of us, Willie.” She gathered a whole loaf of bread, a half dozen apples, and laid them on the counter, a paying customer.

Winifred Mock whirred in a monotone. She droned instead of conversing and it occurred to Angel the woman had a terrible way of talking. She strung her syllables out, running words into other words until the whole of her sentence became a sticky lump of tedious slurs.

“How long did you teach school?” Angel finally asked her.

“Twenty years.” Only it sounded like “twennyers.” Winifred pulled a cigarette from her cumbersome black purse, a bag so deep it reminded Angel of Doc Campbell's medical bag in Snow Hill. Inside, beside a pair of red gloves, Angel saw a deck of cards.

“My uncle plays poker. You a poker player, Miss Mock?” Angel asked.

The woman reached and closed the bag with a snap. “Your uncle. You mean your Uncle Henry Ford, the millionaire?”

Angel tugged her right earlobe.

“You don't have to keep up the front on my account. You kids orphans or some such, I figure. You really got family in Nazareth or you just looking for the next meal ticket?” Winifred's cigarette pulsed in Morse code beats when she spoke.

“We're not orphans.” Willie sat up from the rear seat. His annoyance blustered out of him and he grabbed the back of the seat to pull himself forward.

“Fine, fine. You're not orphans,” said Winifred. “I guess you right about it. You got money. Least you had some before you gave it to me. How you come by the money for this trip?”

“We got almost ten dollars and we're not orphans,” said Willie.

Winifred stared straight ahead. “I'm glad you got means. Shame to see chil-dern like you without means.”

“Things'll pick up for us in Nazareth,” said Angel.

“You must have a good little wad to be traveling on yer own.”

“We don't have that much anymore. Our aunt—that is, the lady who dumped us—ran off with all our money,” said Angel. It came to her they ought not to give out particulars that were nobody's business.

“Folks like that ought to be tied up and left for the crows,” said Winifred.

Ida May huffed, an anxious dove's sigh that drew her sister's eye.

“You don't look old enough to take care of two little ones,” said Winifred.

“I'm thirteen,” Angel told her and it was true.

“Old enough to marry, they say. I guess you'll do then.”

“I need to go bad,” said Ida May.

“Course you do, honey. It's been a while since I been around little ones. Best to remind me of things like that. I'll pull over and you can find you a place to go out in this field. No one around. Your sister can take you.”

The car rolled to a stop.

“Come with me, Ida May. Willie, you just wait here, I guess.”

“Where are we?” Willie asked Winifred.

“Somewhere between Camden and Chidester,” said Winifred.

Angel, who had kept the sack full of their belongings in her arms, opened Willie's door and handed him the bag of apples and leftover bread. “Ida May, let's go. You take too long.”

Out of all of the Welbys, Ida May always took the trophy for being the household sissy. She had grown up around outhouses, but never wanted to go into one. Many nights Angel had stood outside the sharecropper's outhouse at midnight listening to her sister sniffle and complain about odors and wild things looking to grab a-body. This field, with its prickly weeds, offered Ida May a whole new crop of complaints.

“I hate this place. I can't go here, Angel. I want to go home,” said Ida May.

“Ida May, you hate doin’ your business back home, too. Just go.” She opened the sack containing the money and counted the roll of bills again.

A faint sigh lifted from the bramble. Ida May emerged as though all her self-respect had been left in the weeds.

Angel pushed back a stock of goldenrod and let Ida May pass. When they entered the clearing, Willie waved to them from behind the car. “Miss Mock's car won't start. You all get in and I'll push it.”

“Like you're the one with all the muscles.” Angel helped Ida May into the backseat. “Hold on to this bag.” She closed the door.

“Sometimes this car is hard to start up if I let it set too long.” Winifred lit another cigarette. “You think your little brother can give it a push while I gun the engine?”

Angel climbed into the front passenger seat. “Give it a go, Willie!”

Winifred turned the key and pumped the gas pedal. Willie pushed against the rear bumper but the car didn't move. Angel opened her door and joined him at the rear bumper.

The car made a grinding sound and then an exploding roar. Angel looked up and saw Ida May staring at them from the side of the road. Angel yelled, “Get back in the Ford!”

The car engine turned over and Winifred took off.

“She's leaving us!” Angel saw that Ida May was empty-handed. “Where is the bag, Ida May?”

“In the car. That Miss Mock yelled and made me get out. You didn't hear it? She scared me half to death. I think she's lost her mind.” Ida May watched the car disappear around a turn. “I'm glad she's gone.”

Angel and Willie stared at one another.

“The money, Ida May! I knew something was strange about her the minute I laid eyes on her. Whoever heard of a poker playing schoolteacher? We're busted, don't you see?”

The hardness of Ida May's eyes dissolved and she cried.

“Angel, you got to stop yelling,” said Willie.

“She even took our food. We don't have a blessed thing, not nary a thing to our name! And here we are stuck in the middle of nowhere.” Angel started walking like she might just leave Ida May on the side of the road. She put on an I-don't-care face but watched from the corner of her eye to make sure the little chicks followed. The day was still new enough. She'd have to study about how they might survive through another ruinous day.

The outskirts of Nazareth sunned in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains just a leap and a skip before Hope and Texarkana.

The road strung out like a dusty snake of clay and rock. Angel led them across a field and down a little road that paralleled the main road. Not too far down the road she found relief in knowing that other youngens had been put out. Three boys stamped along hurling rocks and fighting. She watched them knock on a door and beg for food. Knowing that about the road colored her ideas about Daddy.

“When folks are hungry, the first thing to go is the family dog,” she complained to Willie. She did not mean to infer that they ate the dog, but Willie got a picture of just that in his head and told her so.

“That's what cannibals do, Willard. Don't be a goof!”

Willie said, “I don't want you to ever call me that again, Angel Minerva Welby. You know I hate it.”

Angel smiled at him, owning everything that was said. “Here's the way it lays, Willie Boy—you can just stop feeding the dog and then he takes off to go and fend for himself. But the second thing to go is the ones who don't rake in the dough. I got this little deal all figured out. If you have too many mouths to feed, you send out your oldest. With John and Darrell dead, and Claudia married off, I was the next best choice to be put out. It's common sense. The way things go. Daddy did best he could by us.”

“But me and Ida May saw how you cried and shoved your raggedy underthings into a paper bag. Daddy did wrong by us.”

“I didn't cry.”

Willie cocked his head to the side but he didn't, argue.

Angel remembered mat black’ crease around Daddy's eyes that coal miners acquire down in those caves of death. He had worked the mines down in Paris, Arkansas, until he had saved enough to get them back to Snow Hill where his momma lived. Even after he had taken the sharecropper job in Snow Hill, the black hadn't faded, and for Angel Daddy was forever fixed in her mind as a raccoon, a comic-strip animal with a headlight on his hat.