Fallen Angels (6 page)

“What that lady said don't mean nothing, Jeb Nubey, you know. Claudia's on the porch waiting for us. I know she is and don't you try and say she's not.”

Jeb remained quiet until Angel yelled out the hand-painted sign that read only “Boll.” The truck turned onto Boll Avenue. The sun had melted into its own ebbing remains. The sky greened from the last storm, while the wooded land looked bleak, like a quiet place where no one lived.

3

I
f the youngest had not wailed while she held on to the doorpost, Jeb might have thought the whole story about the sister Claudia had been concocted by Angel. She had a fast tongue and he knew she kneaded her words, massaged them to obtain the desired effect.

“If Claudia moved, why didn't she tell us?” Willie talked over Ida May and then shushed her, a bite in his tone. That made her yank away and run out into the yard.

“Not a stick of furniture inside, not nothing to tell us where she's gone to,” said Angel. She pressed her hand against the front door, which looked as though it had a whitewash of paint over a turn-of-the century layer of blue. Paint chips feathered to the porch. She went inside.

Jeb watched her go room to room. He pulled out a flask; one Big Brother had won in a crapshoot, and closed his eyes as the Camden-bought whiskey washed over his tongue and down his throat. A truck motored down the same road that ran in front of the old house.

Jeb followed Angel inside. In one corner of the room lay a child's toy—a doll's head tossed against the baseboard, eyelashes missing, starting up open-mouthed with what was once blond strands of hair curled in the only two remaining wisps on its scalp. Jeb wearied of the littlest one's crying out on the porch. An old mattress lay against the wall in one small room.

“You all can sleep here tonight. Won't hurt you.”

“You don't mean you're leaving us here?” Angel stepped out of the kitchen where she had picked up a discarded letter and two wooden spoons.

“I mean you got a roof over your head and it beats sleeping in the back of my truck. I don't have no room for kids if you haven't noticed.”

“You is a plain mean man, a hateful killer.” She moved around him as though he had a plague. “You're dangerous, that's what.” She said the last part only so Jeb could hear.

“I can't let you ride no more with me, you kids.” He hoped a dollar would appease her. The youngest, Ida May, pressed her face against the window, hiccuping through the smoky glass of the cab. She'd heard him tell Angel they had come to the end of the road and had climbed inside the cab to resist desertion. She closed the door and her head dropped Her feet appeared in the window. She had taken to calling Jeb “Dud”—ignoring his Fred Judson alias. She'd made up a song about it that sounded like a cereal jingle. She sang it now. She ignored him when he yelled for her to get out.

“I'll pull you out by the feet, then!” Jeb ran through the open door. The whiskey made his face warm.

“Is that what you plan to do, Mr. Nubey, or whatever you call yourself?” asked Willie. “You going to leave us here? This place, it don't have a scrap for my littlest sister. Me and Angel, we get by, like we always do. But you can't mean you'd leave Ida May without food.”

Ida May's feet clicked together at the toes to the beat of Dud's jingle.

“I'll leave you food, then. But don't ask me for nothing else. Willie, you can be the lookout. You wait for a nice family to pass by, then you tell them you been left behind by your kin. That's what has happened here. I'm not to blame for your mess. This sister of yours, she was the one who left you all here. This Claudia, or Whatever. I'm the good feller, the one who gave you a lift. That's all you honestly got to say about me. But this is as far as I take you. You think you can be the lookout for these girls, Willie?” He slipped him a buck.

“We all going to be the lookout, Jeb Nubey,” said Angel. “Looking out for the law. When we find a law feller, see, we tell them everything we know about you—how you killed a man in Texarkana, used us for a front like you was our daddy, then left us here for bobcat food. Know what else? I'll tell him how you a shaved man now and they looking for the wrong face. That kind of lookout, you mean? The kind they pay a reward for, you know. Fix us up with some big bucks for your ugly head.” She tore the dollar bill from Willie's hand and threw it in Jeb's face.

Jeb mulled over how the demon girl had ever locked onto him. It must have been that sympathetic smile he offered her back in Camden. He grasped for one last bluff. “Back behind this house is nothing but woods. I'll tie you up, you and your whining brother and sister, throw you in a hole. You Want to see a killer. I'll give you a good taste.” He took another drink, closed his eyes, and waited.

Willie flew off the porch and hied over a crackling stalk of last fall's mums. Wet at the mouth, he banged on the truck door. “Ida May. We got to run off. This man, he's wild, like Uncle Jack's ace of spades. Now get your hindend up ‘fore I drag it out!”

“Your brother, now he got some sense. How about you, Angel? Am I going to have to throw you all down in those woods?” Jeb had a pocketknife he used for peeling apples. He drew it out and showed it to her.

“Go ahead, then! Cut my throat,” she said.

“I Will.”

“Do it! You can't make me cry.”

“Hold still.” He wrapped his right hand around the back of her neck.

“No, please, Lord, save my sister! We know she ain't right, but save her anyway!” Willie fell to his knees.

Ida May's feet went down and her head appeared. A piercing soprano scream, like a young rabbit in a snare, split the quiet pastoral woodland.

“Willie got hisself religion, Angel. How about you? You a praying little gal?” He pressed his fingers around the sides of her neck. For a moment, he felt a notion rise, like he could snap her in two.

“You won't do it, I'll bet.” Her voice quivered.

Jeb held her neck so hard she grimaced. He lost himself. That was the only thing he could blame on bringing the tip of his pocketknife close to her throat, just like he had took old Hank Hampton down.

“They'll find you. You'll be strung up,” Angel said. Her face was softer, more childlike.

Thunder trailed from the southeast, from Texas. A black veil, thin but threatening, curtained the eastern rim beyond the hills. Jeb smelled rain. The knife tip touched Angel's skin. Her bottom lip tucked under the top lip like an envelope.

“I'll take you into tows; let you ask around about your sister. If you find another way to get to her or if you don't, I don't care. You're not my charges. Ain't my responsibility. You think I know how to care for you kids? I don't, so don't be looking at me with those big sad ones of yours. I'm not the one to get you where you need to be.”

“We're not riding with you no more!” Willie charged up onto the porch and into the house. “Let's go, Angel! He's a crazy, done got let loose from the looney house.”

Angel rubbed the pink markings around her throat. “I knew you couldn't do it. Let's take some of that stuff from out of the back. We can fix us a bite to eat then go into town. Don't look at me like that, Willie. I know what I'm doing. Bring Ida May inside. We're having us a dinner.”

Jeb watched Angel lead the other two around, a miniature of her momma, most likely, parroting older women in the kitchen.

She found a box that shook with a few matches. She asked Willie to heft Jeb's big iron skillet onto the top burner while she-diced up potatoes. Once the potatoes sizzled nicely in a dollop of lard, the girl stirred up a pan of bread and got it ready to cook inside the oven. She took several trips to the truck and back before she addressed him again. “We need milk for the little one.”

“You see a cow around here? I'll go see if your sister's old man dug her a well. Water's just as good.” He wanted her to disappear from his life, but the potatoes smelled enticing. He figured she was good for at least one meal. He glanced over at Willie, staring hard at him from the corner.

“I guess water will have to do. Maybe in town we'll find someone with milk for Ida May. She has weak bones, and my momma always fussed after her with milk.”

“You keep coddling her like that and she'll never grow up,” said Jeb. “I don't know much about kids, but I know you treat a kid like a baby and they'll grow up to be a whining complainer of a person—no good to anybody.”

“You right, Jeb Nubey. You don't know nothing about kids. My sister nearly died when she was born. That's why she's so small. Doc said she needed to be kept on lots of milk and meat every few days or so. I know those things about her. I don't need no advice taking care of my sister.”

“That's what you tell yourself, ‘cause you just a kid. Makes you feel bigger than yourself to think you can take care of Ida May. But truth is you don't know nothing more than me on raising that kid. If I hadn't of come along, what would you have done then? I can answer that for you. You would have starved like everybody else in Arkansas.”

The kitchen was all grease and dust, a mash that smelled of old biscuit batter and milk gone bad. Jeb lit the fire inside the oil stove that had just enough kerosene for one night's worth of cooking. Angel slid the pan of cornmeal batter into the warming oven. “Don't know how this'll taste without milk,” she said.

The sun had stopped shining through the glass. The storm from the east obstructed the glow of evening that settled on the outskirts of Nazareth. Night came early.

“Let's put this grub out and get to business. I don't plan on staying here all night. I'll be gone before tomorrow.” Jeb opened the door to the rear porch to allow some of the smoke hissing from the overhead stovepipe to escape.

“You only got two plates,” said Angel.

“One for me. One for all of you. I never said I was set up for company.” Jeb watched her pile extra potatoes onto the plate. Finally the bread browned. He used an old shirt to pull the cornbread from the oven. The hot iron branded his hand through the shirt.

Angel seated herself, Willie, and Ida May near the door where the air was fresher. She had a nervous shake, a way that she tossed her head to make her too-long bangs part around her eyes. Often throughout the meal, she passed the plate back and forth between Willie and Ida May, tossing her head between the feedings. Her fingers, like everything about her, were long and brown. She might have been taught the way of grace had her mother stayed longer. Whenever she lifted her spoon to her lips, she did not eat with the same ravenous air as her siblings. Instead, she paused, a fraction of a pause that gave her the chance to study what she was about to ingest. Then she lifted the spoon as though she lifted a butterfly poised on her black little fingertips and tentatively deposited the food into her mouth. After that, she chewed as though every morsel gave her something to think about.

“I need to know what you think your plans might be if you can't find hide nor hair of this sister, Claudia. If you got it in your head I'm the passage back to your daddy or wherever you plan to go, you got some refiguring to do.” The potatoes tasted fair to Jeb, something like what the cook fixed back at the cotton plantation, only without onion.

“Why you care what we do next?” Angel showed Ida May how to use the corner of her sleeve to wipe her mouth.

A wind blew in through the screens and across the porch, a cool breeze that smelled as though it had traveled from Alaska.

“We going to have us a storm again all right,” said Willie.

“Even if it rains, we're going into Nazareth.” Jeb wanted no more nonsense out of the Welbys. They were trouble enough in good weather, let alone the dead weight they would be in the bad.

“Good folks won't be out. We won't find a soul out in bad weather.” Angel told Ida May to finish the last spoonful of potatoes. She nudged the bread in her sister's direction, too.

“Grab your gear. We're leaving now,” said Jeb. “Don't dally. And you, Biggest, don't give me none of your looks. You must not have been slapped enough by your daddy or else you'd be respectful like girls is supposed to be.”

“We're still eating,” said Angel. “Ida May, you go on and finish your supper.”

Jeb blew out a sigh. “Girl, don't you hear a thing I say? We're leaving now!” When he grabbed her plate, she held onto it. He yanked it. When she let go he could see the spark in her eyes. The greasy plate smacked up against his shirt. “Get your scabby selves out to the truck or I'll kick you all the way out there myself.”

Angel marched. Her arms swung back and forth along with the legs that she straightened as though she marched on stilts, flouting his instructions. “How we going to have our food settle now? You carry on like your momma never said nice things to you.”

“Mr. Jeb Nubey, I think I ought to say something right about now,” said Willie.

“Say it on the way into town then.”

“That's the thing, you see. We just lost our ride into town. See them fellers out in your truck? I think they's leaving with all your good belongings.” Willie lifted a shiny finger and pointed through the front door.

“What fellers?” Jeb pushed the boy out of the way. A curtain of black sky blew wet wind across the porch. He slid out and leaped onto the overgrown grass and saw the truck lights brighten the rain that he could only feel smacking his face. “You, come back here! Those is my things!”

A big slack-jawed youth not older than his own brother drew his face back into the cab, laughing. “We's just borrying it for a while, brother!” The thief manning the steering wheel gunned the engine just as Jeb reached the street. He chased them until the rain stung like mosquitoes. On and on he went, until his breath was long gone and his legs turned to rubber. His scalp was soaked. He heard breathless cries running up behind him.

“I see him!” Willie yelled. “Here, standing out in the rain.”

“I'll say this for you, Jeb Nubey: you got some legs that can run. We thought we'd never catch you,” said Angel. “We better call the police.” Ida May finally chewed the potato she had saved in the side of her mouth.

“They took my rifle—my best hunting rifle! My hat. I never go without my hat.” Jeb counted off every possession according to importance.