still a few flakes of the original white paint clinging to the picket fence in front of the house. The rest had weathered to gray.
Leonard picked up the bag with the money in it and got out. DeWayne followed. The two men got out of the truck and walked towards the white house, with DeWayne leaning on Leonard’s shoulder for support. He was singing again: “Heyyyy, hey, look at little sisterrrr…” All of the shades were drawn. Had it not been for the car parked out front, the house would have appeared deserted.
Leonard pushed the doorbell button beside the door. There was no sound of a bell inside and no answer. He knocked. He knocked harder. No answer. Leonard began knocking steadily, monotonously, like a man pounding nails in Hell. Finally, a slurred female voice responded, “All RIGHT,” God damn it, I’m coming.” There was a creak of footsteps. DeWayne stuck his face up to the peephole in the door and grinned maniacally. “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” the voice said. It sounded very weary. There was a rattle of a chain, the solid snick of a heavy deadbolt, then the snap of the door lock. The door opened a crack.
“The hell do you two want?” the girl said.
“C’mon, sis, let us in,” Leonard whispered. There was a heavy sigh and the door swung wide. The two men stepped inside. DeWayne wrapped his arms around the girl and lifted her up off the ground in a bear hug. “Put me down, asshole,” she said, the words muffled against his shoulder. There was no anger in her voice, just a kind of weary amusement. DeWayne put her down and stepped back.
She was a tiny woman, a little over five feet. It was the breasts that men noticed first, an unfortunate fact that had shaped most of her adult life. They seemed overly large for her thin body and thrust against even the shapeless cloth robe she wore, demanding attention. Her hair, cut short and parted in the middle, was dyed a dark reddish-brown. The hair was rumpled, as if she had just gotten out of bed. Her facial features were small and regular, but just enough out of proportion to one another that she missed beautiful by a narrow margin and had to settle for cute. Her mouth was drawn in a perpetual affected pout that she thought was sexy, but served only to give the impression of a sulky child. The year since they had seen one another had not been kind to her. Leonard noticed her pallor, the bags under her eyes, the slight trembling as she took a cigarette out of the pack on the hall table and lit it.
“We need a place to stay for a couple days, sis,” Leonard said. “Can we come in and talk about it?”
“You are in,” she said, then sighed. “Okay, c’mon. I think there’s some beers in the fridge.” She turned and walked back into the house. DeWayne and Leonard followed. A short hallway led towards the living room. A door to the right about halfway down the hallway opened into the kitchen. Leonard dropped the bag on the floor across from the kitchen door.
“Look like you’re sleepin’ late, Crys,” DeWayne said. “Livin’ a life o’ leisure, huh?”
“Fuck you, DeWayne,” she said. She sat at the kitchen table, which was piled with newspapers. She gestured at the fridge. “Help yourselves.”
There was no beer in the refrigerator, and no food other than a jar of mustard and a can of cat food with a plastic lid. Finally, DeWayne located a half-empty bottle of Popov Vodka in the freezer. He made a happy noise and sat down at the table across from Crystal. He took a drink straight from the bottle.
She looked from one to the other with a mixture of resentment and resignation. “Well?” she said. “What’s all this about?”
Leonard explained the situation to her. Her expression never changed. He finished by saying, “So we just need to lay up here for a couple days, till we can figger out where to go. Okay, sis?”
She blew out a long streamer of smoke. “Yeah, okay,” she said finally. “But y’all gotta be careful. This is a quiet neighborhood. People work nights, sleep days. You start raisin’ hell,” she looked at DeWayne, “and you’re gonna have the cops all over this place.”
DeWayne gave her a lopsided grin and took another pull from the bottle. “No problemo, sweet thing,” he said.
There was a muffled beeping noise from the handbag hung over one of the kitchen chairs. “Shit,” Crystal said. “What time is it?”
Leonard looked at the clock over the stove. It was stopped. “Ahhh…about five-thirty,” he guessed.
Crystal swore under her breath. She pulled a small black beeper out of the purse and looked at the screen. She shook her head. She picked an old-style rotary phone up off the floor next to the table and dialed.
“Yeah, it’s me,” she said. She listened for a moment. “I can’t tonight,” she said. “I got company.” There was a burst of angry speech on the other end. “No, no, it’s not¼I’m not¼_ she was having trouble getting a word out. Finally, the voice on the other end said something that caused her eyes to widen. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’ll be there as soon as I can. I just got up. I will. I will, I promise.” She hung up the phone and looked off
into the distance for a moment, chewing her lower lip. “I gotta go,” she said, and stood up. “I gotta go to work.”
Leonard and DeWayne looked at each other. “Hey, Crys,” DeWayne said finally, if your boss is givin’ you any trouble, we can, you know…”
“No, no,” she said. “It’ll be alright. It’s okay. They’re just-- short-handed.”
“At a titty bar?” DeWayne said.
Her eyes narrowed and snapped around to bear on DeWayne. “You mind your own damn business, DeWayne, you hear?”
Both of the men put up their hands. “Easy, Crys, take it easy,” Leonard said. He used the soothing tone of voice he had developed through years of intercession between his sister and their cousin. Crystal got up and walked out of the kitchen.
“The fuck’s eating her?” DeWayne wondered. Leonard shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “We need to get us some food. And we’re outta beer.” He stood up, put his hands in the middle of his back and stretched. “Gettin’ too old for this shit,” he muttered. He walked into the living room, with DeWayne following.
The old farmhouse was in the middle of what John Lee referred to as “Bum-fuck Egypt.” It fronted on a narrow two-lane road and was surrounded on the other three sides by tobacco fields. An enormous oak tree dominated the front yard. A row of crepe myrtle obscured the lower half of the screened in porch that ran along the front of the house. The crepe myrtle was beginning to bloom, with long strings of bright-red and pink flowers bowing down the branches with their weight. The thick greenery had been allowed to grow long, so that the screen door in the center seemed to peek out from a flowered jungle.
As the truck pulled into the driveway, an old man came to the door. He was of medium height, with white hair that stuck out in unruly tufts from beneath an ancient gimme cap from a long-defunct seed company. The cap was as lined and creased as the hand that rested on the jamb of the screen door, holding it half-open as the man waited. In contrast, the old man’s bib overalls seemed brand new, with a knife-edged crease in the pants.
“Stay here,” Raymond muttered. John Lee nodded once. Sanchez looked worried.
Raymond got of the truck and walked towards the old man, smiling like a door-to-door salesman. “Hep you?” the old man said as he approached. His voice was neutral, but his eyes flickered warily between Raymond and the two men in the truck. A Latino traveling with a pair of Indians was an unusual sight outside of the realm of manual labor. People tended to stick with their own kind. Raymond was too well-dressed for picking cotton or priming tobacco.
“Nice farm,” Raymond said, still smiling.
“Ain’t mine no more,” the old man said. “Got too old to work it. Had to sell ever’thing but the home place.”
Raymond nodded. “That’s too bad.” The old man said nothing. “DeWayne around?” Raymond asked.
The old man’s face seemed