Bill Cheng - Southern Cross the Dog

I swept them up with one hand and then they were in my pocket.

THEY WORE A LITTLE BIG, the bottoms slipping off my thin wrists. The fingers were cut away and didn’t cover near enough past the knuckle, so even when I was out in those woods, I was breathing into them, trying to keep the wool warm or rubbing the feeling back into my fingers. They itched and my hand would go sweaty and slick and the wool would start to stink. Still, even in the warm days, I’d wear at least one — the left usually since the right was for the mirrors. When Stuckey wasn’t around, I’d wear them around the house, dusting and sweeping and cleaning. Bits of chicken feed caught in the little curls and hooks. At night, I’d light a candle and peck out the little grains and bits of dead leaf and wood. Then I’d put them on, and you can sleep like that, those gloves around your hands, like them and you was both kind of holding.

STUCKEY DID NOT LEAVE HIS room. Not the next morning or the morning after — the space outside his door filling with sweet itchy air. Outside on the second day, the loblolly pines were starting to rust and bald, setting down their needles in a spiny carpet. It was a clear morning and I could see through to where the river purled behind blackgum and slash pine. I watched from the window, touching my knuckles through G.D.’s glove, thinking maybe that was his shadow cast across a far tree, melted into the bushes, and then gone.

I knocked on Stuckey’s door and told him I was going to grain the chickens. There was a rustle and a cough, but he didn’t answer. I put on a cape and I took the bag of feed from the hall closet. The morning nipped and chilled around my neck, and I followed the path down to the chicken coop. The dirt was pecked and feather-strewn, and there was the milky white at where they’d messed. I ducked under the wire and let it down careful so it didn’t catch on my clothes.

The chicken coop was small, and even for me; I had to stoop. The hens were all set in their rows, their beaks stuck into their puffs, clucking on soft.

Here, here, I said, and I scattered the feed across the floor, and they wiggled their heads. Here, here.

But then my mouth caught and there was a hand over it.

And I shook and I clawed, but it would not let go.

And then G.D. said, Dora, quit it now, quit it. You’ll have to be quiet.

And he let go.

You have to run away with me, he said.

Oh go on, I said, because I remember when you took Lita Kelley’s little hand and then made her cry afterward and played tricks like a bullfrog down her dress or throwing mean old clods of mud. So go on. Who you fooling?

He’s going to hurt you, Dora. If he hasn’t already.

Then he took my hand and he saw that it was his glove and let the hand drop.

I can protect you. He won’t find us.

This is a chicken house and you ain’t any kind of chicken, I said. I scattered the feed. The birds jumped off their warm little thatches, put-put-put ing on the wood. And then I looked at him, at how he still had his little-boy face, his hair all full of feathers and dust, the way the whites of his eyes looked near blue in the shade. He brought his hands up against his lips and touched the sides of his nose. He took a big sigh and stared up at me like he was doing a kind of measuring.

Be careful, he said, stooping under the opening.

He stood full up and dusted the feathers from his shoulders.

I have to salvage today. Will you feed the chickens tomorrow?

Then he was gone.

THE NEXT DAY, G.D. WAITED for me inside the chicken house, his shoulders rolled in, hunched under a low shelf of Rhode Island reds. He had cut a trap under one of the roosts that dropped him outside, under the coop so he could come and go without getting in sight of the cabin. He showed me how it worked, how easy it was. He showed me the foot-and-a-half step down onto the ground. We crawled under the floor, bits of feather drifting down, lighting on the grass blades and our hair and our clothes. When we got to the wire, he pointed at the grove of dogwoods, behind them, two days of hard travel, he said, then north toward Fitler, following the Yazoo up to Cary, Rolling Fork, then finally Anguilla.

Anguilla?

My older brother has a homestead there, he said.

I asked him to tell me about it and he said there was a creek out back, and a little pea patch behind the house, with the vines going all over, stretching across and across and across. His oldest brother cattled, and there were steaks and milk and honey on the bread. All of that in Anguilla. Across that wire.

There’s room enough for us both, he said.

Stuckey’s waiting for me, I said. He’s wondering where I gone to.

G.D. sighed and wriggled out. He stood up and dusted the front of his coat. He lifted the strip of fencing over his head and pulled it over the other side.

That’s all it takes, he said. Then he took off toward the woods.

EVERY DAY FOR TWO WEEKS, I saw G.D. Stuckey had stopped leaving his room except at night to leave his plate or a pile of his clothes in the hall. I spent longer and longer out in the chicken coop, an hour sometimes without anyone being the wiser. Sometimes I’d go out early and wait for the trapdoor to lift, G.D.’s round head pushing through on the other side. We’d get underneath the floorboards and stretch out on the grass — with those hens pecking around and pushing seed above us, the yellow dust coming down through the boards, on our hair and backs and clothes. We stayed down there, the two of us, like a couple of secrets.

G.D. talked on and on about Anguilla, and I showed him my little bird skull.

And he said there were all manner of birds in Anguilla.

Then in his pockets I found a little black rock and I said, What’s this?

It’s a piece of lodestone.

What’s it for?

He put his arms behind his head and shut his eyes.

Reckon it can be for you.

He told me how him and Stuckey had started to partnering a week after the rains. Stuckey had stacked hay on G.D.’s cousin’s farm, and on weekends, he’d take G.D. and his little cousins out hunting, the lot of them trekking back by sundown with a belt of squirrel skins or gopher or rabbit. They’d circled around to each other after the flood over in a camp out at Sunflower County. It was Stuckey’s plan that they work salvage, with Stuckey working the waters and G.D. going by foot along the countryside, in the camps and flood towns. They’d go off on their own for weeks at a time and meet once a month to trade on news and supplies.

He told me how he’d go around with his trousers rolled and his boots tied around his shoulders. Buzzards set down along the roofs, tracking him as he pushed through the shin-deep water. G.D. picked carefully around the deadwood, feeling through the mud with his toes to keep from stepping on a nail or a piece of glass. He learned to figure by eye which houses would hold and which were about to give at any moment. There were jewelry boxes, silverware. Tins of money stuffed under mattresses. Things left behind in the rush.

People only take what they can carry, he said. What they leave, it must not mean that much to them in the first place.

And then there was a pain in my stomach and maybe some dust got into my eyes, but he turned over on his side and put his hand over mine. Then he looked at me for a long time and he said, I’d carry you with me. Then he put his hand on my face and set it there gentle like, his thumb moving along the ridge of my eyes. And he was looking and he was looking and he took so long that I just went ahead and kissed him.

THE NEXT DAY, HE WAS waiting for me inside the chicken coop. He stood, stooping a little to keep from hitting the ceiling.