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Excerpt

Chapter 1

It is all happening so fast  it feels slow, runny as the  midday heat in the alley, and for a fact Knot can see the sun  beaming down from the top of the world. A block of sky like  bought ice in the shimmer stage of melting. Shimmery too, at  the other end of the alley, is a giant with a warped booger­man face. He is hugging a brown paper sack and running  Knot's way, coming to rob him maybe of his play-cousin  Lee's bicycle. Knot starts panting like a dog to the strumming of haywire on the front wheel spokes.

No brakes on the bike and Knot has to drag his hurt foot  over the hot cobblestones to stop, eyes on the man likewise  stopping before the green dumpster midway up the alley  between Patterson and Ashley streets. Shucking off what looks like one of Aunt Willie's stockings from his head. Yes,  a stocking. Black face, stung lips, teeth white as his eyes. Running again, the big man, big as Winston Riley, back  home, makes straight for Knot but keeps close to the rear  walls of the street-front stores.

Knot starts to drop the bicycle and run the other way,  back toward Patterson Street where he had been cruising,  cool and easy, but he can tell the man isn't after him by the  way he kind of slinks along the wall, slow now, cool and  easy, with his left hand in the pocket of his brown jeans and  his right arm encircling the stuffed brown paper sack with  the top neatly folded. He looks scared, maybe afraid of Knot  because Knot is so ugly—buck teeth, ball head, skinny as a tobacco-stick scarecrow.

Sudden sirens rage along Patterson Street, all around,  like peepers before a rain, and the man loops around and  heads back the way he came, running hard, and the paper  sack slips from his arm and drops to the cobbled brick.

"Hey, mister," says Knot, "you drop yo sack." He just  says it because he should say it, to be polite like his rich pretend-kin he's been visiting all summer, but doesn't yell it  out and anyway the man knows and the man is turning the corner onto Ashley Street, gone, and Knot is glad he's gone.

Still straddled the bicycle, Knot walks it over to the spot  where the sack landed—top still folded down. The kind of  sack Aunt Willie carries her groceries in from Harvey’s  downtown all the way over to Troupe Street. Sirens shatter  the time-ticking of haywire on the bike spokes. "I ain't into  this," Knot mumbles, "I ain't into this." And Knot is pedaling  fast up the alley, good foot bare and nail-jabbed foot in a  white sock, then north along Ashley Street, past the stalled  cars with horns beeping and shoppers dodging his bike. One  block away from the screaming of sirens that makes his  gums itch.

So hot, and he would like to be on the east side of town,  where he longs to belong, in the shady quiet of row houses  whose front yards spill children onto the gravel street. But at  the next intersection, he steers the bicycle west, rather than  east, and pedals along the sidewalk toward Patterson Street,  where not ten minutes before, which seems more like a long  fevered sleep, he had been minding his own business:  cruising over spilled cola  steeping on hot concrete and  exploding pigeons the color of courtyard statues.

"I ain't into this," he says to a stout blue-haired woman  weighted down with shopping bags. She is scurrying toward  a parked car the color of her hair, trying to unlock it while  gazing off across the street at the train of black and white  police cars with lights flashing and sirens wailing. People are gathered around the door of the bank—FIRST NATIONAL  BANK, according to the sign on the white stone facade atop  the building at the corner of Patterson and Hill.

One more turn down the alley and Knot brakes with his  socked foot, stopping next to the paper sack and scooping it  up, packing it into the bicycle basket, then pedaling again, up  the alley again, onto the sidewalk running parallel to Ashley  Street, turning east this time and flying away from the sirens  and car horns with pigeons the color of courtyard statues.

He should look, he should look in the sack, but he is  afraid he will find money, afraid he will not find money.  Looks like old magazines, the  squared-off corners of the  sack do. "How do?" he says to the brittle old black men  seated on the store-front bench, corner of Troupe and  Gordon. Hieing south, toward Aunt Willie's house. He  knows that the man in the alley was a bank robber, that what  is in the sack has to be money. He doesn't have to look, can't wait to look. Instead he looks behind, pedaling regular and  sure, south along Troupe Street, and his looking behind  causes the bicycle to veer left where three black children are  playing with a litter of black puppies. The happy kind, regardless of their station in life.

A tiny girl stands with a puppy hugged up to her bowed  belly, hard tail switching at her stubby brown legs.

"Go on, Knot," says her brother, an eight year old with  square hair. "This our dogs."

"What I want with no old dogs?" Knot pedals straight up  the street to prove he can drive this bicycle right. "What I  want with no old dogs?" he repeats to himself and laughs.  Then cries. What he wants is to stay at Aunt Willie's house.

He doesn't really belong to Marge, so why can't he belong to her sister?

An old auntie is sitting on one of the row house porches,  fanning with a hand fan. Her stockings are rolled at her  parted knees. High floors, up and down the street, so high  that a boy can play underneath and hear the grownups  walking around and talking  inside—somebody older over  him to protect him from the po-lice, mad dogs, and himself.  Big square houses with peeling paint and metal gliders on  spacey front porches where people sit in the sunshine after  supper. Scraggly crepe myrtle trees with frilly cerise flowers  that decorate the order of things that Knot can't name. Just  summer on Troupe Street.

Again he checks behind him, for the black and white  cars downtown, stretching the distance between them and  him and the street opening up ahead, and checks too for  anybody who might happen to be listening—he has to keep  talking to himself so that the words won't bank in his overloaded head.

"I ain't ask for no money, don't want no money. What  business a lil ole knot like me got with money?" All lies  ticking off through his teeth to  the tempo of the haywire on  the wheel spokes.

He can see Marge's celery and rust car parked in front of Aunt Willie's roomy old house, waiting to take him back to  the one-room shack in the quarters of Statenville, twenty-five  miles east of Valdosta. That’s where Marge has to live till  she gets cured of drinking and  cussing. All of  Knot's rich  pretend-kin are on the front porch: Aunt Willie sitting in one  of the high-back rockers, taking the hem on Cousin Judy  Beth's white baptism dress; the old granddaddy in the next  rocker with his puffed pinkish lips and white hair; Lee on the  end of the porch, watching for Knot and his bicycle around  the twine trellis of nooning purple morning glory. Marge,  rawboned and tall, is standing  on a baluster of the doorsteps  in her walked-down black shoes and the black-and-navy  striped dress that looks all-black, which she always wears to  town. Won't wear color, Marge won't. The women are  laughing, hooting, and Aunt Willie play-spanks the seat of Judy Beth's flare-tailed dress. She scoots forward with her  bony shoulders slumped and arms limp alongside, play-mad,  and stomps through the front screen door, slamming it.

Knot swerves the bike onto the sloped dirt drive, north  of the house, and coasts on toward the back yard.

"What you got in the basket?" calls Lee.

"Books," says Knot, passing  the chimney with mortar  sifting like hour-glass sand from between the red bricks.

"Bunch of old books."

Say  books, Knot has found out, and nobody will look inside a box or bag.

"That boy do love his books," says Marge and hums a  laugh. She tells everybody that, and though she doesn't read  herself, she is proud he does read, proud of this lil ole knot,  as she calls him, who she had taken to raise after somebody  fished him out of the trash twelve years ago. "Get yo stuff,  Knot," she yells, "we gotta go."

"Knot step on a nail yesterday, stick it in his foot," says  Lee, who figures Marge might care for a change.

Knot is in the back yard, at the sloped edge of the porch,  standing straddled the bicycle. The uneven boards of the hip­roofed house used to be painted either green or red; you can't tell which because the paint is scaling, blending, and the effect is a rich tapestry. The  fact that Knot is long-gone,  hiding out from the po-lice with his stolen money, makes no  difference to his family out front. They are still mouthing at  him as if he is right there with them. Get Aunt Willie and Marge together and they'll talk.

"What all them sireens about?" calls Aunt Willie.

"Ain't seen  no sireens." Knot wipes his eyes on the  sleeves of his brown striped shirt, then lifts the paper sack  from the basket and lets the bicycle drop on its side. Wheels  spinning and haywire clicking on the spokes.

Up the tall wood doorsteps, past the daisywheel of  yellow cats eating oatmeal from a bowl and through the door  to the sunny yellow kitchen. Toasted bread smells—one  more thing Knot loves about city living, about being at his  rich pretend-kin's house. Money buys the smell of toast and  money buys color. He will buy Marge a toaster and some  color for her shack.

*

He is still holding the sack of money, or maybe books— now that he has said it he wonders and wouldn't be surprised  or even disappointed if it were books. He stands on the curb  next to the old car that reeks of mildew and burnt motor oil.  Aunt Willie and Marge are loading paper sacks of Lee's  hand-me-down clothes into the trunk.

"Be enough clothes to start him back to school," says  Aunt Willie and rubs his head hard. "Like Daddy always say, Marge, put a brick on that head if he keep growing."  Mourning doves purl, locusts hum. Way-off rumble and  toot of a freight train Knot has seen with his own two eyes.  The three black children with the black puppies linger along  the street. A slow car passes. Their mother steps to the edge of her wide front porch with her hands on her hips. "Git off  that hardroad fore a car run over you."

"You gone nuss them books all the way home, or put em  back here?" Marge asks Knot. She has one hand on the  raised trunk with a long  brown finger hooked through her  key ring. Bunch of keys. Though only one serves a purpose.  She slams the trunk, hugs and hums over Aunt Willie,  Granddaddy and Judy Beth, then goes around to her side of the car.

"Kiss em all bye, Knot," she says.

He hugs the books and kisses Aunt Willie and Judy Beth on the cheeks as they pass along the curb before him. "You  behave yourself," says Aunt Willie.

"I'm gone miss yo ugly mug," says Judy Beth.

"That boy be a fool bout them books," hums Marge over  the car roof.

Knot is truly ugly, and he likes Judy Beth—maybe loves  her—because unlike everybody else she never pretends that  he's easy to look at.

The old granddaddy pokes over with his cane and slaps  Knot on the shoulder. He wears a suit of gray twill work  clothes, starched and ironed. His skin is the gray of his  clothes. "You be back here fore you know it. Mind Marge,  you hear?"

“Yessir." Knot likes him too—no, loves him—wishes he  were his real granddaddy.

Lee is inside, outside, somewhere. The fact that he doesn't come to say good-bye says how sorry he is to see  Knot go. All summer they have quarreled over the bicycle,  drove Aunt Willie crazy, but now that Knot is leaving, Lee is  sorry to see him go. May be crying right this very minute.  Knot grins, shining his great white teeth.

*

Knot is almost safe, almost free, perched on the front  seat with only his eyes moving. But Marge has to run by the  drugstore downtown to get  her blood pressure medicine.  Knot cannot believe that he  is downtown again, traveling along Patterson Street again.  Light traffic slow-motoring  along all four lanes of the one-way street and not a cop in  sight.

It has to be books in the sack. Old magazines, probably.  Marge is changing lanes, merging left, turning the celery  and rust car onto West Hill, pulling up and backing into the  corner parking space with the bank on the northwest corner  behind them.

"You coming in with me?" she says. "Too hot out here  in the car."

"I'll just sit here."

"You ain't sick?" She feels his forehead with the backside of her hand. "You just sad," she says. "Hating to  leave everybody, right?"

"Right."

"Cause they rich, right?" She hums a laugh because she  doubts that. "Well, read you one of them books while I'm  gone." She opens the door, checks for traffic, lumbers out  and around the rear of the car.

He watches her pass through the glass side door of Bel­Lile Drugs next to the stairs that lead up to the doctor's office where Marge took Knot when he had what’s called coronals  on his neck, and where there were two waiting rooms—one for blacks and one for whites. Long time ago, and now he  goes to school with the whites who treat him okay because he is clean and honest, makes good grades, and never says  po-lice, sireen, loot or cop.

Now he can look in the sack; he has to look. Is afraid to

look.

He stays stiff, unblinking, as he unfolds the brown paper  cuff, peeps inside. He looks up and blows. "Ain't books," he  says, biting back a grin.

Stacks of dirty-green hundred-dollar bills with narrow  bands like brown paper-sacking marked "1000" in red print.

He blows at his forehead again. Folds the top of the sack down, grips it tighter. Stares straight ahead. He wonders how  much money he has. Starts to get out and leave the sack with  the loot on the doctor's stairs. Waves of high tight happiness  and terror pass over him like hot and cold water.

Suddenly, the driver's door swings wide, and Marge is  getting into the car with a white cup of fountain soda in one  hand and a white sack of rattley pills in the other. "Here," she  says and hands him the cup. "Perk you up."

"Thank you," he says.

"Say somebody rob the bank this afternoon, get 25,000  dollar."

He is sipping the fizzy cold cola and has to bite down on  the cup lip to keep from gurking. Sinks his buck teeth into  the Styrofoam leaving horseshoe impressions he can see with the tip of his tongue.

Almost out of town, juddering south past the ABC  Liquor Store on his right and checking Marge's long brown  hands on the steering wheel to see if they will turn the wheel  right. Then over the railroad overpass, from which point he  can almost see Aunt Willie's fine house and can see her church with the fancy white steeple and cross. He will buy a  house like that, he might even buy a church like that, but  knows he probably never will—even with all this money— when Marge stops at the Dixie Station and has to count out  her dollars and dimes for gas and he cannot so much as hand  her one of the hundred-dollar bills from the sack for fear of  getting caught.

*

Knot dozes with his left  hand on the paper sack of  worthless money between his cot and the unpainted wall and window of Marge's shack in the quarters. It’s too hot to  sleep.

But Marge, in the next bed, is snoring—sounds like a  small engine sputtering—and next door, in the shack on the  right, Winston Riley is beating up his wife Boots. Children  scream, flesh splats, a chair overturns, Boots hollers, “No,  Winston, no!” In a minute, she will be over here. In a  minute, Marge will be doctoring her battered head while  preaching to her about leaving Winston.

A door slams. Knot sits up, swings his feet over the edge  of the cot and waits for Boots, waits for the heat to let up. Dim light through the screened window facing the woods— starlight thick with the ringing of katydids  and the hulled  whine of mosquitoes. Rooty smell of hogs in the pen out  back, or maybe it's the rotting potatoes in the bag by the front  door. Ask Marge why she doesn't clean up the combination  kitchen-living room-bedroom and she'll tell you quick that she gets enough of cleaning other people's houses. Besides,  she adds, my own dirt, me and mine, don't bother me. Knot feels good when she says the part about "me and mine,"  because then and only then does he feel he belongs. She's  never even hugged him. But she has let him borrow her last  name—Crews—same name as the old gray granddaddy.

Knot slaps a mosquito on his arm and scratches the itch  till it smarts. Marge has quit snoring, is waiting too.

Feet bound on the porch floor, shaking the entire shack  and rattling the windows. Bap bap bap on the door. Ragged  breathing, mewling. A baby stifles crying.

Marge moans, stands, pulls the cord on the overhead light. White light showers down on her broomed peroxide hair. She is almost forty, but looks younger because she is  skinny, all legs in her man's white T-shirt (Knot cannot  remember which man, only that once upon a time there was  a man), except for her belly, which is bloated and tight from  what the doctor calls liver trouble.

Long bare feet in motion,  Marge lumbers over to the  front left corner and picks up her old rabbit-eared shotgun,  then goes to the vertical-board door and flips the metal latch.  Boots with her antennae braids and wild eyes, and a baby on  one hip, shoves past Marge and into the room. Three guinea  children are clinging to her legs. Boots's nose is leaking blood to her blue cotton smock trimmed in red rickrack; her  broad flat nose looks flatter, spattered.

Rotten potatoes scatter and roll across the filthy wide  floorboards and out the door where Marge is standing with  her shotgun pointed barrel-up to the night sky. She breeches  the shotgun and fires. A flashette of orange, the color of her hair, then smoke curling back  into the room with Marge. "Come on over here, Winston," she yells in her braying night  voice. "I'm waiting on you." Much cussing. Then quiet  outside as she slams the door and sets the latch in its hook.

Inside, the children are sniffling, whining, drying up  their crying. And Boots has one forearm pressed over her  nose, blood leaking over and around it and drip drip dripping  on the floorboards.

Marge ambles over to the corner and leans the shotgun  against the unceiled wall, then picks up a white washrag  from the second-hand yellow dinette table by the door and  tosses it to Boots.

"He oughta break your neck for you staying with him."  "I got younguns to feed,"  Boots says, burbling blood.  Then presses the rag to her nose.

Winston shouts through the double walls of his shack  and Marge’s shack: “Boots, you better get yo ass back over  here. Don’t, I come in there after you.” Sounds like he’s in a  next room, though neither has a next room.

“Come on,” Marge shouts back. “We waiting on you.”  “You ole mess-making bitch!”  “Shut up, you S.O.B! Go to sleep.”  Winston quits shouting and starts mumbling.

Marge takes the baby from Boots. He wraps his thin, sore-crusted legs about her waist and rests his curly head on  her bosom, sucking his thumb. "You babies climb on up  there in my bed," she says to the other children, who are  variously wandering, gnawing  on fingers and staring fix­eyed at their mother. "Boots, you sit here." Marge points to  one of the chrome-legged chairs at the dinette table by the  door. "Let Doc Marge see to that nose," she adds in a kinder  tone.

Boots sits, tilting her horsy face up and holding the  towel under her chin to catch the drooling blood. "Yeah, look  like he break it this time," Marge says to her. Then to Knot, "Here, buddy, come take this baby."

Knot crawls across his cot in his underwear, goes over  and takes the baby. Wet diaper settling on his left arm. The baby cuddles close as Knot pats his warm brown back. There  is a living wreath of night beetles and moths around the light.

"Hold still now," Marge says to Boots and stands  straddle-legged before her knees, sighting the nose-bone  alignment with the precise center of the wide bridge between  Boot's inky eyes. Marge yanks hard, Boots grunts. Marge  holds the nose between both hands like a caught bird, then steps away. Sighting again.

"I ain't taking it no more," says Boots and sprawls in the  chair.

"Yeah, you will," brays Marge. "You gone take it till the  undertaker take you."

"You a hateful old thing," says Boots, dobbing blood  from her precious fixed nose.

"How come I ain't beat black and blue and you are."  The baby is limp, heavier asleep in Knot's arms; he lays  the leggy boy on his wallowed-out cot and lies down beside  him. Bony knees and elbows in his back as he turns facing  the black window and the paper sack of money. He listens to  the two women talking low and the children in the next bed  breathing shallow, regular. All but one who is snoring: bad adenoids, according to Marge, who would know, because she  used to work for a baby doctor in Valdosta before she got  fired for drinking on the job.  Then, she had lived in the  house with the old granddaddy and Aunt Willie and was welcome as the flowers in May, they said, as long as she  didn't drink and raise sand. It has been at least six months  since she pitched her last drunk, but the fact that she stays on  in the quarters of Statenville means she could very well pitch another drunk at anytime.

Knot lulls himself to sleep with thoughts of moving in  with Aunt Willie and her family and how to use the money  without getting caught.

*

When he wakes the next morning, everybody is gone,  his bed is wet, and sunlight is streaming through the double  east windows each side of the door. One pane is missing from the window on the right and in its place is a cardboard patch, a blank square in the fifteen-pane window stencil  spread across the fused junk  and clothes on the wide floorboards. Smells of blood and urine, like mold and  ammonia.

Beyond the wall at the head of Knot's bed, Boots is  fussing with the children. Back to normal. Winston has gone  to work in the pulpwoods, and for two or three days they will  get along, then BOOM! all over again.

But life is good now: dogs bark, children play, women  hang out their wash, and Knot has finally come up with a  way to use the money.

Wearing the same khaki shorts and brown-striped shirt  he wore yesterday, same white sock on his injured foot, he  limps to the door, out the door, with two of the stiff hundred­dollar bills in his left pocket—one for Marge and the other for Boots—plus chiming coins from Marge's change jar for  postage.

It is about ten o'clock and already the sun is heating up  the quarters, shining through rags of moss in the oaks.  Flocked shadows on the packed gray dirt that hatches broken  glass and trash like fleas.  Locusts hum and bandy-legged  children scamp yard to yard of the unpainted, close-set  cabins. Old women on porches rock and swat flies and wait.

Knot takes the gravel horseshoe road along the west  curve where the yellow buses  will soon circle the school  grounds. The softball field on his right is grown up in red  bitter weeds, looks like tilled clay. Hands in his pockets, he  limps along, past the giant oak that divides the road at the  side entrance to the schoolyard. A checkmark breezeway hooks the old portwine brick building to the new red brick  building that still smells of wet cement.

At the end of the road, he turns left along the sidewalk,  passing the row of white people's white houses, where Marge  works now but won't have to work after tomorrow. He  doesn't cross Highway 94 to the other side till he gets to the  red brick, flat-topped courthouse, directly across from the  red-brick, flat-topped post office.

*

Just as he'd expected, on Friday evening when Marge  gets home from work, she is scooting in her black shoes with  the walked-down heels and saying "Hoo-oo-oo!" Hum­laughing. Around the rear of the parked car, across the yard,  and onto the porch, calling  "Knot, Knot . . . hoo-oo-oo!"  Through the open door with the white envelope Knot sent  yesterday loved-up to her flattened breasts.

It is sunset in the quarters and the orange light slanting  through the west woods outshines the trash fires. Smells of  smoke and supper cooking as if from the same pot. So hot  that the heat seems textured of the locusts' hum. Pickups come and go, delivering the men home from work. They  wander cock-sure through the knots of merry children and  dogs. The old women on the porches wait for tomorrow,  when it will start all over again. That kind of evening.

"Honey, you ain't gone believe what's in here." Marge  speaks secretive and low. She dances in a circle with the envelope in the air. Shuffling her big feet to an imaginary  beat. "Hoo-oo-oo!" An old-timey dance shuffle that used to  embarrass Knot, but now with only the two of them around  makes him proud. He feels like Santa Claus.

How many times has he  daydreamed about finding  money, giving Marge money to make up for her sacrifices:  all those cold nights when he'd be sick and she would get  bundled up like a witch in her black coat and headscarf and  go out to find wood to feed to the hungry black heater.

"What is it, Marge? What?"  "Money, baby, that what."

"Where you get it, Marge?" he says. "How much?"  "A hunderd dollars, baby.  One hunderd dollars!" She  takes the clean dollar-green bill from the envelope and kisses it. Then fans it at him. Has forgotten the first part of his  question.

She dips up and down like a carnival duck, then holds  her knees. "We in the money, honey," she says. "Gone get  you some new shoes, gone get my hair back like it was— gone get it dyed black, baby." Her brittle orange hair stands out, looks gnawed or singed, for a fact. "Gone get us a TV,  baby. Gone get us some new  tires on that old jalopy out  there."

"And a bicycle," says Knot.

"And a bicycle," she shouts, then shushes herself.

He doubts that one hundred dollars will buy all that, figures he'll have to mail more to her—if all goes well. After all, Christmas is coming up. As for her hair, he doubts that  black dye will cover the orange. Last summer, she had gotten  Boots to peroxide her hair. They left the bleach on too long  because the man who owns the water system in Statenville  was waterlogging the pump and Marge couldn’t wash it out.

Knot, in the yard, had watched Marge sitting on the  porch with her hair growing lighter, brighter—strange shades  ranging from sulfur yellow to fire red. She had a round  mirror in one hand, and with the fingers of her other hand  she was plucking at strands. Boots behind her chair had been  warning her that it was time to wash out the peroxide. Lots  of yatter and back-and-forth.

“That bleach liable to burn up yo hair.”  “Naw—ain’t light enough yet.”

“It’s yo head.” Boots laughed and scooped a dollop of  white foam from the small blue bowl she was holding and plopped it on Marge’s tangerine crown. “It done about all it  gone do. Ain’t never hear tell of nobody leave it on over a  hour.”

From the yard, Knot could smell the gunk like the Red  Devil lye women used to scrub their porch floors. Marge  stank and she looked in pain. Forehead wrinkled and eyes  red and watering. Her spiked hair changed before his eyes  from tongues of fire to orange Jell-O. Even the gnats  wouldn’t go near her. Boots had given up on her and taken  the children next door for lunch. Still, ever so often Boots or one of the children would pop through their door  to look at  Marge in agony for the sake of beauty.

Finally, she stood and walked  into the house, and next  minute she began cussing and  screaming. “That sorry SB  pick some time to turn the water off.” Stomping the floor, she yelled out, “Knot, hurry, run go tell him to turn the water  on. Run.”

Bare feet digging into the dry  dirt of the yard, spinning  dust, Knot took off toward the  paved road, westside of the  school. Behind him, Marge was  still shouting and cussing,  Boots trying to calm her. Knot’s heels were kicking high,  elbows pumping for speed. He could feel bugs peppering his  face like BBs, hot air whizzing in his ears and his heart  keeping time with the slapping of his feet. Breathing,  breathing, running to save Marge’s hair from burning up.

He used to run all the time, it seemed, until Marge pointed out that running kept him skinny.

When he got to the sidewalk, leading uptown, he took  the bend without slowing, outrunning a pulpwood truck  rocking west along 94.

Almost to the house of the man who was master of their  water, Knot began yelling, “Turn on the water, sir. Pleasesir,  turn on the water.”

He could see the slight bald man, dressed in khaki twills,  at the concrete block pump house behind the white frame  house where he lived. He was leaning in the doorway,  watching Knot come.

When Knot reached him, trying to catch his breath to 

explain, the man said calmly,  “Now, boy, what’s all that  fuss? Y’all got a fire around there or what?” His spoked blue  eyes were like marbles but didn’t roll.

“Turn on the water, mister. Boots put peroxide on  Marge’s hair and she can’t wash it out.”

The man smiled. “Don’t say.” Behind him, inside the  pump house, water trickled; it was cobwebby, dim and hollow as a tomb. Cool air breezed through the door.

Then Knot recalled Marge blessing out the waterman  last time he had drained the pump. Knot had made a  mistake—a big mistake—but one he’d never make again. He  learned never to give ammunition to the enemy. They had no  water for two or three hours.

So, having hair that barely grows, Marge is stuck with  the cap of blinding orange hair.

She grabs Knot now, waltzing, humming, around the  walk-space of the small room being daily reduced by junk.  Suddenly she stuffs the bill into the bosom of her brown  blouse and says, "Now you stay here. Mama Marge gone go  get us something fitting for supper—ain't gone eat no beans  tonight, baby," and she is out the door, shuffling toward the  old celery and rust car. Gets in, coaxes it into starting, and is  gone.

*

She doesn't come back and she doesn't come back, and it grows dark, darker. Knot had been expecting that too.

And expecting that next door all hell would break loose  when Winston got home and found Boots and the babies  gone. Hell is breaking glass and wood.

Knot latches the door, turns off the light, and sits on his  cot with his socked, throbbing foot atop the money sack, and  listens to Winston slam about the house, cussing and  threatening to cut out Boots's liver when he finds her.

Knot smiles.

*

He stops smiling when he  wakes during the night to  Marge pawing at the front door and calling him. Her braying

night voice now slurred.

He pulls the cord on the overhead light, unlatches the  door, and she wobbles in with her eyeballs rolling up and her  lids rolling down. She starts to cry as he leads her to her bed,  helps her lie down, and takes off her shoes with the walked­down heels. The second toe of her right foot overlaps the big  toe. The paler soles of her feet are grained like wood, smell  like scorched ironing.

"I forget you, baby, didn't I?"  Knot nods.

"I spend all my money and forget you."  "All of it?"

Right arm bent at the elbow, she rocks her hand side to  side. "Give it away, throw it away—I ain't have it nomore."  To stop her blubbery crying, he starts to tell her not to  worry, there is more money. He starts to show her how much  more. Is already walking around the spindled iron foot of her  bed, but stops. Knows he'll never give her more money, can't give her money. He looks around at the colorless gloom of  the shack, at the dingy light showering down on Marge's few  dark dresses and coat hanging from the broomstick rod in the  right corner, next to the bathroom door. Even the bloody rag  with Boots's blood on it, in the middle of the floor, looks like  a dead rose. If he gives Marge money, she will never be  welcome as the flowers in May at Aunt Willie's house.

"Poor lil ole Knot," Marge says and places her forearm  over her eyes so that her whiskey breath smells stronger, her triangular lips look greedier. "First I chunk you in the trash,  then I take off and spend my money on liquor and men."  "Marge," he says and goes to the head of her bed again,  "you ain't chunk me in no trash. You the one take me to raise  when somebody else fish me out and bring me to you."

Arm still over her eyes, she says low, "Ain't how it  went, boy. I had you, didn't want you. That the truth of it."  She moves her arm, smeary brown eyes full on him.

"Why you act like I ain't yours then?" He kneels on the  floor beside her. "Why you  make up that story bout me  belonging to somebody else? Say how sorry my real mama  be."

"You know me . . ." She moans, cries, chugs crying,  then, "Know me like my ownself, and know I ain't never  want to be tied down to nobody. Be easier, better, to make you think you don't belong to me."

She rolls over, facing away from him, sobbing. Bony  back shaking under her sorry brown shirt. "At first, I don't  tell you mine cause I don't want you to know I stoop so low.  Then, I don't want you to know for the same reason I chunk  you in the trash in the first place." Her hot hoarse voice goes  suddenly cold: "Now go on. Go on and stay up yonder with Sister and them. I ain't have no claim on you."

“You just sorry for yourself, Marge." He is the one  crying now. "You just looking for a excuse to get drunk and stay drunk."

For a fact, she always blows up at him when she is drunk, and for a fact, the next day all is forgiven and  forgotten, but this time is different.

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