American River Review 2022 - copy - Flipbook - Page 37
hurt my feelings good.
I hiked down to the creek, my shoes
slipping on the dirt on account of
I was weak with hunger. I knew
Ma was up there, fixing Ryker the
chipped beef we just bought. Probably making him mashed taters too.
We was supposed to be rid of him by
now. Now he’s gonna be sitting up
there, full as a tick.
Stupid. He’s stupid. Ma’s stupid.
Gram probably died on purpose, so
she don’t have to put up with stupid
no more.
By the time I got down to the
water, all the screams I’d been
keeping inside busted out. A
bunch of Townsend Warblers and a
Black-headed Grosbeak scattered in
the sky. I screamed and screamed
and screamed until I was certain they
was too afraid to ever bring their
sorry asses back home. My legs grew
numb and my thoughts was fist-fighting and smashing stuff inside my
head. I stayed there until the shadows
grew long, until the night was fixing
to slap the sun clean out of the sky.
“Hey, kid,” I heard a voice behind
me say.
A man with a handlebar mustache
held one of them plaid thermoses in
one hand and a brown bag in the other. He stared at me like he ain’t never
seen a boy before.
“You okay?” he said, taking his
hat off and tilting his head the way
Bucky used to when I’d whistle for
him to get in the house. When I didn’t
answer, he looked down at the empty
patch of dirt, asked if he could sit a
spell.
“It’s a free country,” I said, hoping
he’d move on.
He made it to the ground like his
bones hurt to bend. He opened the
bag, pulled out some kind of sandwich wrapped in tin foil. Garlic and
the smell of barbeque crawled up my
nose and down into my stomach, stirring the hunger and making it growl.
“Want half?”
I knew Ma’d have my hide if I
took food from a stranger, but it sure
smelled good and I was hungry. I did
have to hike back up the ridge to the
house and I sure as hell knew Ma
didn’t want me ending up face down
in the same creek as Blaze.
“I s’pose I could eat a bite or two.”
Try as I might, I couldn’t muster
up any manners. I tore into that
sandwich, sauce dripping down my
cheeks. Ain’t never tasted a sandwich
good as that in my life.
I looked over at the man, waiting
for him to ask if I’d missed feeding
time; if somebody’d hid my trough; if
I knew that if all the starving children in the world had as much food
as I ate, none of them would ever be
hungry again. But he wasn’t looking
at me, just staring over the creek,
watching a tornado of no-see-ums
dance the night in.
“Name’s Walt,” he said, glancing
down at the other half of his sandwich which was sitting there untouched. “I’m not that hungry. You
don’t eat it; it’ll just go to waste.”
I thought about Gram and all her
back-in-my-day stories, about cleaning her plate at the dinner table,
about not knowing where her next
meal was gonna come from.
“That’s mighty nice of you, mister.”
He waved his hand away like he
was shooing a fly.
“My name’s Toby, but most folks
call me Bug.”
“Bug.” He seemed to be rolling
my name around in his head as he
snapped the cup off the top of his
thermos. He unscrewed the cap and
filled the cup near to the top and
offered it over. “You like being called
Bug?”
“Not really.”
He took a swig from the thermos
and I took a sip from the cup and we
sat there listening to the bullfrogs
start up their early evening singing.
The lemonade was cold and sweet.
He reached into his shirt pocket,
pulled out a pack of Marlboros.
“Smoke?” he asked.
“No thanks, Walt. I’m a cigar man,
myself.”
He gave me a side-glance and let go
a chuckle.
A splash come up in the water and
we both turned. Walt said something
about the bullfrogs, but I knew it
wasn’t no bullfrog. Carp, more likely.
Not all that common around these
parts, but every once a while, one
of them trails on over from the Haw
River. An awareness come to me, one
as sharp as the creases in Walt’s pants
and my mind got set to thinking.
“You ever smoke one, Toby?”
“What?”
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