bust in on me?” he asked. “You know this doxin got me moving slow.”
“Dioxin, Doc,” Rachel said and laughed. “And ain’t nobody trying to see nothing you got!” She put her bike helmet away and fluffed her flattened hair.
He opened the door and waved away her helping hand. “I got more than plenty.”
“Come on out of here, Daddy,” she said, and chuckled, opening the window. “It’s stuffy in here and too hot today to be fussing. I done cooked this food and I need you to eat it,” she said, side-eying his linen-less bed, “so I can get on back to work.”
“Y’all still protesting?”
Rachel sighed, forehead nothing but a crease. “Some of them still out there. Not as many as before.”
“Ain’t gon’ do no good,” Doc said. “You can’t shame the shameless.”
“Well, I don’t know one way or the other,” she said and bit off a hangnail. “It is good to know somebody still trying …”
“Even if these muthafuckas ain’t listening?”
“Daddy!” Rachel said. “Don’t start up again. Last time you made a ruckus, your pressure went up.”
“My pressure didn’t go up, my patience just low!”
“Exactly! And either way, we got to get these coins, so …”
Doc stiffened, lowered his voice. “I ain’t mad at you, baby girl. You do what you can. And I appreciate it. I’m just saying …”
“I know, Daddy. I know.”
Doc stared out the window, frowning at the silhouette that overshadowed his land. He raised a clenched fist up and covered the water tower with his knuckles.
“Did you crank the truck?”
“Not yet,” she said, and watched him lower his bony arm to tie his robe around his waist.
“When you gon’ do it?” he asked. “When I finally get ready to go, I want to be able to get on down. Big Daddy can’t crank hisself.”
“Soon, Doc, you act like I’m getting my nails done here.
Let me clean up this kitchen after you eat, and then I’ll start up Big Daddy. You and I both know that ole truck is just fine. Big Daddy gon’ outlast both of us. Besides, you been up and about, I see. But you looking frail. Don’t you want something to eat? Don’t look like you ate all day.”
Doc scratched his beard, avoided her eyes. “Not hungry.”
“Doc, you got to eat. Can’t be sitting up in here, nibbling on leaves, and that jug of water still half full.” She clapped her hands, brass bracelets singing like wind chimes. “I’m going to fix you something extra, for later tonight. Put some meat on them bones,” she said, and headed for the kitchen.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with my bones,” Doc whispered, muttering under his breath. “Ground is wrong.” He mourned his garden and his empty fields, soured burial ground of what used to be. His last crops had come out so scraggly, he finally gave it up. Yield so bad, neither a weevil nor a worm would want it.
Anyone that knew him knew his family’s roots had run deep in that land. Now he and Rachel and that rust heap he called a truck was all that was left. Outside, the wind whispered and sounded like somebody was calling his name. He wrapped the robe tighter around his waist and peered through the window. Nothing but shadows and wind. And that poison plant’s tower.
He glanced over his shoulder and remembered the muddied linen he had hidden. No need to worry Rachel. Besides, he had no idea where he had been.
When Rachel came in with that smile of hers, the smile that never quite covered the worry in her eyes, he decided he would go ahead and eat whatever she had taken the time to make. No sense adding his worries to hers. The girl had enough.
“This is good,” Doc said, licking his fingertip. “I don’t think I could eat a mite more.”
Rachel took the tray of pancakes from him and frowned. “You ain’t ate nothing but syrup!”
Doc shrugged and drew the sheet around his shoulders. He couldn’t seem to get warm. “I’m sorry, Slick Bean. Ain’t had much appetite. Them hotcakes are good, but whatever I eat these days feels funny in my throat.”
Rachel grunted. “Funny, huh?” She shook her head and eyed the empty Aunt Jemima bottle, as if she might answer back. “You ain’t getting a fever, are you?”
Doc waved Rachel away. “Go on, girl. Don’t want you to be late.” He lay his head on the flattened pillow and closed his eyes, whispered all night in his sleep.
The radio coughed and sputtered. “… administration dismisses EPA scientists … Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 gutted …” Doc reached up and turned the channel. “There’s an old flame, burning in your eyes … that tears can’t drown, and makeup can’t disguise …” Alabama and a chorus of cicadas filled the front yard with song. Doc turned, confused. He climbed out of his bed, big toe searching for his house shoes.
He stood up. The wave of sound droned around him, the rhythm filling his head and clouding his eyes. The food Rachel had prepared him was resting on a plate on his nightstand. The window he swore he had closed was wide open, gaping like a dark mouth.
The hair on his arms rippled, and he caught himself from crying out. He hadn’t been afraid for so long, he had forgotten how fear might feel. Rachel kept one of those drugstore cell phones for him, but he rarely used it because there was no one left to call. He thought about picking it up and calling Rachel, but he wasn’t so sure what he would say once she answered. Hey, daughter, a haint chasing me all through my sleep. Hey, daughter, I got mud on my clothes and mud all cross the bottom of my feet. Rachel wouldn’t understand none of that. And she had already started to watching him out of the corner of her eyes, when she thought he didn’t notice. He knew what his most loyal child had been searching for, and he was determined to hold back the fatigue that kept calling him to linger longer in his sleep. Whatever was chasing him would have to come harder than that.
When Doc put on his knock-around boots and stepped out into the yard to greet the day, he liked to fell down when he saw the ruckus in his yard. A big-ass crack, zigzagging long like Moses in the mountain high, had separated what was left of his family’s property. “Sweet geegee, great day in the morning,” he said, and stumbled down the porch steps so fast, he nearly flipped over.
He had never, in all the long minutes and hours of his days, seen a sight like this.
The yard was all torn apart, as if a great hand from above had reached down and unzipped the dark earth. He walked over to the crack nearest him and eased over, his knee and his whole leg tense. Doc craned his head to see how far the hole went, and realized there was no bottom to see, just darkness leading down and thick, twisted roots and stones and things he wasn’t sure he actually did see.
What he did recognize was the same source of all his and the town’s troubles, that red-stained poison that the Viscerol plant had cursed them with. At one point, everyone and their mama had worked at Viscerol, and the money was good, too. But one by one, family by family, a sickness had come down on each of them, until finally, the only healthy families left had packed up their things and got on down the road. Only a few stubborn, hard scrabblers stayed on, Rachel included. That bloody water ran through each dark vein across the town, until only a few families remained. Rachel was all of Doc’s own, the others, he knew, long gone, perhaps to sweeter grounds. Silver citadels of columns and pipes, smokestacks and tanks rose along the town’s skyline like rusted spikes. “Relocate Fair Property Buy-Out” signs dotted abandoned lawns, jagged yellow teeth. Houses,