Pamiętniki, t. 1. Jan Duklan Ochocki
Читать онлайн книгу.
hollered.”
And then he threw his head back and did it again. I could hear the echoes from it ringing on down through the woods on both sides of the road, bouncing off sweetgums and stands of pines and moving further off toward the creek bottoms and wetlands.
Weldon’s face was as red as I’d ever seen it, clear from his hairline on down to where his neck was covered by his blue shirt and overalls, and it was glistening with sweat like it had just been rubbed with a wet dishrag. The shade of his face was an important thing. I knew it, and Nancy knew, and anybody living around Camp Ruby and acquainted with the Overstreets knew it.
“He looks just like fire,” Nancy said, beginning to ease into a backwards shuffle. “He looks like he’s fixing to have a fit any minute now.”
“Don’t you run back,” I told her. “Listen to what I said now. Backing up won’t do it, I flat guarantee you.”
By this time Weldon had moved out almost into the exact center of the highway and was standing facing us with his arms stretched out like a human barricade. His fingers all looked the same length to me and as big as pork sausages dangling there from the palm of each plate-sized hand.
“Y’all are going after milk,” Weldon yelled in a voice loud enough for a deaf man to hear. “Up at Miss Sleetie Cameron’s.”
The echoes came back from both sides of the road, Cameron’s, Cameron’s, Cameron’s, like a Houston station fading out on the radio.
“Yeah, we are,” I said, picking up the milk jug and reaching out to grab Nancy’s hand. “We got to go and do it now.”
“Y’all got to get by me first, you kids,” Weldon yelled in a voice loud enough this time to spook the two buzzards that were perched in a dead tree waiting for us to get away from their armadillo. All three of us watched them flap off, slow at first and then catching an updraft, beginning to circle up and up into that blazing sky until finally they were just two black marks against the blue background.
“I wish I was a buzzard,” Nancy said in a whisper.
Weldon had thrown his head so far back watching the birds rise up that I could see the roof of his mouth, pink instead of red, the lightest shade of skin I could see anywhere on his body.
“Nancy,” I said out of the side of my mouth, “when I say so, you run toward that left ditch over yonder and I’ll run toward the right one. That way he won’t know which direction to jump and we can slip on by him to Sleetie’s.”
“Say it quick,” said my sister. “Before I pass out here on the shoulder of the road.”
“Now,” I said, and we broke like a covey of quail in opposite directions, Nancy going to the left with her sandals slapping the pavement like rifle shots and me aiming for the far right ditch, the grass burrs I had been avoiding no longer a consideration.
We’d have both made it, too, if it hadn’t been for the milk jug. It began to slip because of the sweat all down my right side and when I looked down to grab it with my left hand, I took my eyes off where I was going and stubbed my right foot against a sweetgum root and started to fall. As I did I got my left hand under the milk jug and turned sideways in the air as I went down in full gallop, sending the milk jug flying like I was deliberately trying to throw it up after the buzzards.
The sun caught it in its rise, and it glittered in the air like a block of clear ice in a blue lake. That’s what took Weldon Overstreet’s eye, and he went to his left like an outfielder after a line drive and speared it with one hand as it started down for the roadbed of Farm-to-Market 1276. With the other hand, he scooped me up and in what seemed less time than a lightning bolt I was opening my eyes about two inches from the side of Weldon Overstreet’s head and looking deep into his right ear which I could see had a tangle of stiff red hairs growing right in the middle of it.
“Uh-huh,” Weldon said, and I could feel his voice rumble all through my chest and stomach where he had me grabbed up against him, “uh-huh, I caught you and the milk jug both.”
That close to him, the main thing that came to my mind was the way I was afraid Weldon was going to smell when I finally had to take a breath. I tried to push away from him with my free arm, the one that wasn’t stuck under his, but when I did he just tightened up, and I took that breath I was dreading before I realized it.
It wasn’t much at all, the smell, even hot and sweaty and worked up as Weldon was. It was like hot metal, maybe a pan that had been left out in the sun all afternoon and I had to pick it up and bring it in the house to wash. Just flat and even, not a stink to it at all.
I looked over the top of Weldon’s head for Nancy and saw her about twenty feet away, walking back toward me and Weldon and the milk jug at a steady pace, her bangs down in her eyes and a frown on her face that made her bottom lip stick out.
“Run,” I started to tell her, but about then Weldon cut loose with a bellow that filled up the pines and the yaupons and the sweetgums and the underbrush on both sides of the road, and my voice got lost in his and the echoes he set ringing.
“Holler,” was what he was hollering. “Holler, holler, holler.”
“Weldon Overstreet,” Nancy said after about the eighth or ninth bellow, “quit saying holler, and put him down on the road.”
She was standing right in front of him when I turned my eyes away from looking down into Weldon’s mouth where all the noise was coming from, and she was reaching up to grab at the bib of his overalls to get his attention.
“Put my brother down and hush up that racket,” she said in the crossest voice I ever heard her use.
“Nuh-uh, Nancy,” Weldon said. “I ain’t. I got him and the milk jug both. holler.”
“All right, then. If you won’t, you got to pick me up, too,” said Nancy and put her arms down stiff by her sides to be lifted up.
“Take the milk jug and don’t let it tump over and bust,” Weldon told her, leaning forward to hand it to her and then after Nancy had taken it and put it on the blacktop, sweeping her up in the air on his other side.
I didn’t know anything to say. I just hung there, smelling hot metal and looking back and forth from the wad of red hair in Weldon’s ear to the pooched-out lower lip of my sister.
“Hum,” Weldon said. “Hot, hot.”
“Yeah, it is,” Nancy answered and twisted around to get more comfortable underneath Weldon’s left arm. “Weldon,” she said, “I know that wreck you had with your daddy’s pickup wasn’t your fault.”
“No,” Weldon said in a long drawn-out syllable and the woods came back with the same sound, “Noooo.”
“I was coming to where the little road runs into the big road,” he said, “and I looked and there wasn’t nobody either way. No truck and no car. So I speeded up and put in the clutch just like Daddy said I was always supposed to do when I shifted them gears. It was to make them smooth. And then I turned the wheel to go to Livingston, but the pickup wanted to go straight off into the woods. And then the trees came up and hit at the bumper and the fenders and made the pickup stop and not run no more.”
“I don’t know nothing about shifting gears yet,” said Nancy and threw her head back to get the bangs out of her eyes, “but I know it wasn’t your fault, Weldon, that the trees hurt the pickup.”
“I bumped my head when it happened,” Weldon said. “It made the bleed come out and made a mark. Mama made me put a big bandaid on it. It was a sore place for a long old time.”
“Where?” Nancy said. “Right there where the scar is?”
She reached out her hand and touched a finger to a white line right in the middle of all that red skin on Weldon’s forehead and then she leaned forward and kissed the spot. Just a touch of her lips that made a little smacking sound in the center of that hot day on Farm-to-Market 1276.
“Now,”