Freddie Owens - Then Like the Blind Man - Orbie's Story

“Playing,” I said.

“Playing?” Granny said. “Looks to me like you fixing to kill Nealy’s chickens! Scare’em so bad they won’t never want to lay! What about Elvis and Johnny. You supposed to be taking care of them.”

“I am Granny. I’m freeing them from the Injuns.”

“Injuns?”

“Uh huh. All them other chickens. Geronimo’s the chief.”

“Can’t you find anything else better to do?”

“No,” I said.

Geronimo and the chickens had scattered out across the yard. One chicken stood at the door of the chicken house, looking in. Elvis and Johnny were right near by, their heads going side to side, looking up at us as if waiting for the answer to a question nobody had asked.

“They’re my friends, Granny. I’ve been feeding them like you said. They follow me around.”

Granny seemed to relax a bit. She looked at me. “It ain’t been easy down here, has it hon, what with me and Strode so busy and all — and you with nobody to play with? Things will get better though.”

“You always saying that,” I said.

“I know, but they will. Wait and see if they don’t.” She walked off toward the house. When she got to the chicken yard gate, she turned and looked back. “I catch you pestering Nealy’s chickens again, I’ll cut me a switch!”

I lay with my chest flat against the ledge of the well, my elbows sticking up on both sides. I had the thought I might be like a cricket with big elbow legs and a head with big antennas that could feel things in the dark. I looked over the ledge like that — like a cricket.

You be careful about that well. Storm blowed that roof cockeyed and I think some of them stones is loose.

The well was a tunnel hole of dirt and rock and tree roots reaching out like claws. It went way down in the black part. I could hear water dripping, and my cricket-antennas were feeling down there, feeling the cool air — trying to see inside the black part.

I wanted to go in there. Cool in there, cool water and rocks and slippery things in the dark, out of the sun, the sun that was so hot and bright it made you feel like you couldn’t hide anywhere, people’s eyes, even the animals’, the cows’ and the chickens’ and the pigs’, all of them on you, baking you, making you hot. If I could get down in the black part wouldn’t nobody look at me, wouldn’t nobody know where I was all the time either and it would be cool and wet and it would smell like plant roots and dirt and it would be like leaves.

Why we’d be worried to death. Not knowing where you’d gone off to!

I pushed myself down from the ledge, walked around to the other side and gave the post there a kick. It staggered back, loose at the bottom. The flowered roof moaned and wobbled to where it was almost flat again. Then it went back like before, like a church lady’s hat in the wind.

Daddy’s dump truck sat next to the well. Granpaw’s cross was there too, the burnt snake crawling along its arms. I dragged the truck to the road, filled the bed with gravels and dragged it back to the well — got the cross and stuck it in the gravels.

Spooky like a grave. Daddy’s grave.

I liked it like that. I lifted the truck and everything onto the well ledge and climbed up after it. I backed the truck so the dumper part was hanging out over the well hole, and I sat next to it on the ledge, my back to the hole, mostly out of the sun except for my legs. I let my eyes move up Bounty Road, up the hill in the direction Momma and Victor had gone — to the place where the road made a way through the cornfields. Momma and Victor had so far been gone only a few days. I thought about St. Petersburg and The Pink Flamingo Hotel, what it might look like rising up out of the white sand. I thought about sailboats and the blue ocean waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

A rumbling sound came from the other side of the hill, low and far away at first, barely a grumble, then louder and louder, until it was thundering at the top. A black something-or-other — some kind of motor vehicle — shot out, smoking and rattling between the cornfields. “A car!” I thought. “Momma’s Ford!” Dust exploded, boiled up behind and out the sides, spreading out wider than the road.

It could be. Yes it could be Momma’s car! Maybe her and Victor changed their minds! Maybe they were coming back to get me after all!

Behind the car the dust kept opening out like a fan, a church fan, Momma’s yellow fold out fan she used on hot summer days when the preacher wouldn’t shut up. It flattened and spread out over the cornfields.

It could be them!

And then I was sure it was. And I waved my hands and shouted, “Momma! Momma! Momma!” I thought my heart would jump out my mouth. The rumble became a roar so loud I couldn’t hear anything else — not even my own shouting — and I thought for sure it was them and I waved and I waved and I shouted “Momma!” and I’d have jumped off the well and gone to meet the car, except I saw it didn’t have all its side windows. All Ford cars had side windows in the back except of course if they were trucks and Momma didn’t drive no trucks.

Who it was, was somebody else, I’d have to wait to see, and I did, and it was a truck, an old pick-up truck, and it zoom-rattled by without even slowing down. A man with a wide cracked face — a colored man’s face — a straight line for a mouth, straight blue-black hair down along his shoulders, sat up behind the wheel. A dusty black cowboy hat crouched like a duck a top his head, hind end tail feathers up in the air. He wasn’t even looking at me, but he waved anyway, like he didn’t have to look to know I was there, to know it was me. And he drove that truck fast, roaring on up the road with all the dust exploding, blowing out the rear end. By the time the dust cleared, he had gone all the way over the next hill.

My truck, the red dump truck — still with the dent over the driver’s side window — sat on the ledge of the well piled up with gravels from the road, the cross leaning backward now like a man looking up in the sky with his arms spread wide. What had been a roar had gone back to a rumble — low and far away — and even that was almost gone. Suddenly I wanted to dump everything, throw all of it in the well, all the gravels with the cross and the creepy snake.

I hit the lever on the dump truck hard, but it wouldn’t go. I hit it again harder. Still nothing. It seemed to be waiting for something or someone, maybe for some little man to come and drive it away. Then that whole part of the ledge dropped an inch and busted apart. Exploded. The cab of the dump truck, Daddy’s gift, flipped back and over and into the well. If I hadn’t caught hold of one of the posts I’d have gone in too. The truck bashed against a rock on the other side, fell, silver headlights, bumper, mud flaps and all, spinning over and under with the cross and the rocks and the gravels, banging against the dark wall of roots and rock all the way down — splashing inside the black part — where I couldn’t see it anymore.

Granny’s voice cracked like a tree limb in a storm. “Orbie! What are you doing up there!”

I jerked around so fast I almost lost my grip. Granny had slipped out onto the front porch and was standing with her fists on her hips, arms turned outward. Always she was catching me at something. I jumped down from the well. “Nothing Granny; I ain’t doing nothing.”

“Don’t look to me like nothing! What did I tell you about that well?” Granny came down from off the porch, brushed past me and over to the well. “They Lord Orbie! Did you do this?”

“What?”