Charles Davis - Drifting South

“You haven’t been sleeping like everybody else, just watching what everybody is doing and looking out your window like me.”

I grabbed her by a shoulder easy as I could to move her toward her ma when she turned back toward me. “I just want to know what that picture is on your hand.”

I cleared my throat again loud, this time waking the old woman up in front of me, who turned around shaky with a scared sneer, and then I decided I best show my hand to the little girl if I was to get back my quiet. I turned it the right way so she could tell what it was and said, “It’s a big oak in the middle of a field.”

“Why do you have it there?”

“Something nice to look at from time to time, I reckon.”

“Frank is a war hero. His is an army picture of a parachute with wings. Momma said Dad was a drunk. He had Momma’s name on his hand, though.”

“Frank sounds like a fine feller and sorry about your daddy. Now go on. I need the rest.”

She slid down and as she took a step across the aisle and jumped back on the seat beside her ma, she said, “He’s not nice but Momma keeps saying he’s got a job and a house with a big yard and a dog, and lots of other stuff.”

I looked at her ma, who was still sleeping while trying to hold on to a baby boy on her lap through the whole conversation. She looked like a woman who could use a house and a big yard, and especially a lot of other stuff, minus Frank most likely, as her daughter pulled out a pad of paper and coloring sticks from a sack.

For a good while the girl kept asking me questions and telling me things about her and her ma and brother and her dead daddy and Frank, and drawing pictures and wanting to show them to me. I kept playing possum with my eyes closed through all of it. I didn’t want them closed, I wanted them open to see what I’d been missing all of those years out that window. But I did feel safe that I could close them without worry of harm, because I’d studied every set of eyes at every stop that bus made and never saw a threat. And I could always tell the blazing look trying to be too still, or almost always.

I did notice, watching everyone on that bus earlier that evening, that I was different in ways I hadn’t figured on, even when so many seemed not to be much more prosperous than I was, like that little girl and her family. But not so different. So much had changed, but some things surely hadn’t.

I guess Frank was waiting for Grace and her family in Carlisle because that’s where they all got off in a hurry, but not before she laid a picture on the seat next to me. It was a nice colored drawing of a green tree in a yellow field. I ignored it at first but then gave it a good look over after they got off, and then I put it careful in the paper sack with the rest of my things.

With no more commotion beside me, I was able to not pretend I was asleep anymore. On the half-hour stops in Hagerstown and Chambersburg, I did a lot of walking around and spent over five dollars buying Coca-Colas and Zagnut candy bars. Things I hadn’t tasted in quite a while and they tasted so good I couldn’t get enough of them.

Between the stops and just looking out my window and trying to figure how I was gonna fit in any of it, I had a lot of time to think about Shady while watching the quiet miles of highway go by and drinking my odd-looking bottles of Coca-Cola. The pop tasted the same, maybe even better, at least to me, but the bottles and machines they came out of were a lot different.

For some reason all of the new around me made me not think about what was to come and all of the things I was gonna do; it made me do a lot of remembering on being a young’un and growing up in Shady Hollow, and the bad that happened there on a nice Sunday evening, September 28, 1959.

September 28,1959 was the last day before my life ended, and I never saw it was coming.

Ma did, though.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.