LANIER GOT OFF WORK right at six, not waiting around to talk with Robert and the younger guys coming on shift. He pulled the small Ford truck out of the lot quickly; the cab was already hot, the windshield full of dry light and bright floating dust. The dawn didn’t take but a minute to make a day in August, he thought, no messing around with haze and low clouds to burn off in a few hours. Serious hundred-degree days, and he wanted to get out to the place and fill the wallows with water.
Nearly all the other cars were going the opposite direction on the freeway, fenders flashing in the low sun. They were heading into L.A., had an hour to go, and he was already cruising down the slope into Rio Seco, taking the offramp just past the old railroad bridge to the Westside. He drove parallel to the tracks for a few minutes, putting his head out the window when he came to the citrus packing house, looking for the too-small, unsaleable oranges and grapefruit that Perez sometimes left in a pile for him. The dirt was bare, hard-packed by the feet that stood and rubbed there during lunch. All the Mexican workers peeling and licking at oranges; he saw them if he woke up early and went to talk to Perez.
The ’49 Chevy dump truck was in the alley behind his house. He checked to see if Red Man’s Apache was there, too, the one he parked behind Lanier’s because his own yard was full of cars, motorcycles, and junk. The two-ton was half-full, flatbed covered with splintered wood, chunks of plaster and wallboard, concrete. Red Man must have cleaned out another old building for one of the contractors. The dogs heard Lanier now and threw themselves against the bent fences all up and down the alley, did it every morning at 6:20 knowing it was him. From the sandy path, he could see into the backyards, long and narrow, through the chainlink or barbwire braced with cardboard and scrap wood. The old sisters across the way, on Picasso Street, had put in corn again this year, when they’d sworn it was too much trouble and they were going to buy it at the store. Their tomatoes flopped, too hot already, against the wire cages.
Unlocking the shed that opened onto the alley, he heard Lee Myrtle’s ducks murmur and shift on the other side of the wood. Every morning, he had to load the shovels onto the Chevy and then put them back into the shed at night, or the gangs that ran the alley would take them, take anything: chicken wire, trash cans, hoses, hoes. On the wooden slats that closed in the flatbed, he’d had to paint a black rectangle to cover LOS DEMENTES DE WESTSIDE SECO.
Through his fence, he could see the back porch, where the light was on. When he was younger, Lee Myrtle would sleep during the day, while he did, but now she woke up as he came home. He turned before he saw her, because he wanted to hurry.
“Lanier,” she called just when he’d gotten up into the seat. “Ain’t you gon eat?”
“I got a load to get,” he shouted, firing up the engine, listening close when it popped and stopped. The truck was huge and scarred as a rhinoceros he’d seen on TV, and in the rearview mirror he saw the shreds of lettuce and carrot tops hanging from the gates, dangling and jumping with the bumps in the dirt.
The fish market was only a few blocks away, next to Top Cat Liquor. When Lanier started to pull around the back, he could smell the clams and oysters from the street. They were piled by the wall, some scattered on the asphalt close to the open door, and after he’d scraped the spilled ones into the boxes, he leaned into the doorway to holler. “Hey, Jim, ain’t you got no shrimp? You know they love some shrimp, them big ones you be lettin go when they get green. Don’t be stingy, now.”
“Shut up, Lanier,” Jim said. “Too many of them Louisiana niggers makin gumbo or whatever they want to cook with that big shrimp. Goon.”
The L&L Market had left a heap of smashed watermelons and a mound of empty smiles, cut rinds that rocked back and forth on the ground when they fell off the truck. Lanier was sweating, his work shirt wet all down the back, and he pulled himself away from the seat now and then to let the wind touch there. People always shook their heads at him, said, “Man, you just get off a nine-hour shift and want to shovel up all that stanky stuff? You ain’t got no sense. I’d be in the feed, no questions axed.”
“This my cocktail time, fool,” he would say. “You don’t come home from work and get in the bed, you gon sit there with your beer. Red Man gon sit there with his twelve-pack.” They all laughed. Red Man said, “Well, shit, what you drinkin for relaxation, then? Hog slop? You’s a crazy nigger.”
The truck blew dust along the frontage road, and now he was driving along with the traffic still going to L.A., but he was higher up on the bank. When he shifted gears to turn down the curving dirt road, the cab shook and roared; he saw four of the pigs out again, waiting for him, pushing through yesterday’s boxes and a pile of cardboard. The sow with the broken hind leg stood alone, a shadow near the pepper tree.
He didn’t want to kill her yet. She wasn’t nearly the fattest, and no one would want meat for months. He’d just done a sow, one that hadn’t had a litter for two years, for somebody’s Fourth of July.
This one kept her distance, not letting him near to examine the leg; she was wild as ever, running jerky when he tried to get near. Big, about two-hundred-fifty pounds, her hair thin as brown summer grass, and she seemed happy to be separate from the others, fed by herself. He dropped a heap of rinds near the straw mound where she usually hid from the sun.
The others kicked up puffs and trails of dust, running for the food he threw over the fences: first the babies and females, in the pen to the east with the tin-roofed shelters, then the males and yearlings in the large, free-range section. They ran in close to the wood that squared around the rocky ground and baby tumbleweeds, still blue green now and the only plants left anywhere in the heat.
The males screamed and fought over the clams, and the new piglets, dog-sized, snuffled into the watermelon meat, almost buried in the fruit, then shoved out slimy-pink by their impatient mothers. Lanier sat under the ancient pepper tree, branches hanging limp and dusty as a sick rooster’s tail feathers. Across from him, the killing shack was empty and silent. He fed the pigs corn and water there for a few weeks before they were shot and pulled to the cement slab. The smaller pepper tree’s limbs stretched over the slab, dangling the chains that lifted the meat.
He would wait until the pigs were finished with the first frantic crunchings, listening to them click the clamshells together, before he checked the fence. New holes had been pushed out somewhere, because the twin piglets ran across the dirt road to the hillside. Lanier threw a rock behind them. Black faces, black butts, with a white stripe wide as a sash circling their middles. He hadn’t seen two so perfectly matched, running so closely together, for a long time. They darted into the fence and Lanier stood up to follow them, find the opening, but the heat waved in the dust, and he sat back against the tree. Another wooden pallet would have to be stood on its side and pounded into the dirt between the rotted gray posts that were on the land when he bought it. The plywood and scrap he jammed into the gaps always came loose, but he fixed only the largest holes. The pigs never went anywhere, never strayed far from the food. They nosed outside, rooted in the scatterings of junk Red Man dumped, the bedsteads and fenders and cookstoves he had found and insisted he’d need later, and if they found no leftover tatters of cabbage or a clamshell that still smelled, they walked back inside and lay under the shelters or slid into the deep furrows they’d worn in the earth, the pits he filled with water. When he closed his eyes, he heard Mississippi, heard himself fifteen and trying to hide from the plow and his father’s field; he was fifty-four now, but when he leaned his head against the pepper tree, the hair at the back of his neck was still thick enough to cushion against the rough bark, and the police helicopter, probably swooping over the Westside as usual, was just a hummingbird. The sounds of sirens and the rushing cars from the freeway weren’t loud enough to cut through the pigs’ hollering and threatening each other over the oysters.
When he woke up, at about two, he went out to the front porch for a few minutes to clear his head. The fan turned back and forth behind him in the kitchen, where Lee Myrtle sat writing a letter to her sister. Lanier heard the deep hum from down the street, mixing with the fan, and then the vibrations separated into drumbeats, quick, echoing, metal-sharp; they pounded in his head for a moment, a blacksmith hammering mule shoes back in Grenada. He shook his hand, which he’d slept on, felt the tingles in his palm and then his ears. “Damn sideshow. Why I always gotta listen to what they do?” he said. The customized Toyota pickup, speakers in the covered bed, pulled into the yard next door and parked diagonally across the dirt.
“One or another of em was in and out all night,” Lee Myrtle said, not raising her head. “They been up there hollerin for the girl, bout she owe them.”
The driver sat, unmoving, and his doors vibrated with music. Lanier touched the side of the house, went into the backyard to check the melons and tomatoes. Two ducks ran from the pounding drums, past Lanier when he stood next to the peach and plum trees. The girl next door was out now, in her robe, talking to the boy in the passenger seat. She must don’t sleep till I do, Lanier thought, cause she wake up about the same time. Lee Myrtle had said the stereo was loud until long after she gave up and went into the extra room to sleep, and the girl’s three children ran the streets after dark. Rencie, that was her name. The house had belonged to her Auntie Viola, a widow who’d never remarried. Viola was from Jackson, moved in only a few years after Lanier and Lee Myrtle. Picasso Street was all Mississippi then—Biloxi, Mayersville, Grenada—only Red Man and Lonzo from Oklahoma.
This Rencie was from L.A. He’d heard her talking to another girl one day, while they sat on folding chairs in her yard. “I can’t believe Mama sent me to take care of this country-ass house. This a backward place, Rio Seco.”
Huh, Lanier thought. This country? Best not send you to Grenada.
“Shoot, yo cousin told me the court was tired a seein you. He said you had to get out the county.”
“I only had to get outta Compton. She didn’t have to send me all the way out here and shit.”
She never even spit on the greens tree that her aunt had planted ten years ago, along the chainlink fence. It yellowed and shrank away from the wire, and the apricots on the side-yard tree near Lanier’s morning glory fell and turned see-through brown, fruit flies misting everywhere.
“Ain’t you gon pick em?” he asked her once, walking over to where she sat against the wall, watching the street. It was May then.
“It’s too many. Keta the only one like em.” She had two girls, Naketa and Fatima, and a boy, Teddy.
“You know your Aint Viola put up twenty-one jars of preserves offa that tree last year.”
“Shit, it’s too hot to be in the kitchen. I buy me some preserves. And they givin em away at the government program, with that cheese. Grape jelly.”
“That stuff just thick-up Kool Aid,” Lanier said. “It ain’t no good for your kids.”
“They eat it. They ain’t dead. Why you so nosy? Ain’t you got cows or pigs or somethin to feed? Somebody told me you the original Old MacDonald.”
“Just some hogs. People want fresh meat now and then, stead a that Burger King.” He looked at the empty bags near her chair.
She half-closed her eyes. Her arms were thin, glistening iridescent in the folds at her elbow. “You must want to get in the kitchen for me, huh? I ain’t all up in your face. My kids stay on my side of the fence. Why you don’t do the same?”
Now she said loudly to the boy, “Come on. I swear.” He shook his head, patted the pinstriping on the door. Rencie glanced at Lanier and turned back toward her house. “It’s plenty other niggas in the world,” she yelled at the boy, and the driver sped off the yard, leaving only faint marks in the packed-hard dirt. When the drums were gone again, Lanier could hear her kids further down the street. Even her cat lived on grasshoppers, came to Lanier’s yard to drink from the puddles around the peach tree.
He was waiting for Floyd. Lee Myrtle said Floyd had come by the night before to borrow ten dollars.
The aqua truck pulled up after four. Roscoe was with Floyd, who waved the money when he got close to the porch. “Shoot, almost had to send one a them boys home with heat stroke. Lee Myrtle got ice tea?”
“Who said I want you on my porch? Take your stanky grass-smellin truck down the street where it belong,” Lanier said, going into the house for the sun tea.
Roscoe sat on the steps, his baseball cap on his knee. “Been out to your place, Lanier,” he called. “Took a load of extra pallets about a hour ago. Seen two white men out there, pokin around.”
“Don’t tell me I’ma have to get Tique out there again, put him in the trailer with a shotgun,” Lanier said.
“Remember when that dude from Del Rosa tried to sneak up there, what was it, two years ago? How many he get?” Floyd asked.
“He got four till I moved Tique in the trailer. Boy ain’t got no sense, but he do got ears,” Lanier said.
“Naw, listen,” Roscoe interrupted. “These cats was from downtown, man. Ties, white shirts, county car. They was checkin fences and shit, lookin for you.”
“Wasn’t they bulldozin that land on the other side of you, up on the ridge, Lanier?” Floyd asked. “Raisin all kinda dust.” He looked past the house from where he stood on the grass. “Uh oh, I see another cloud of dust. Red Man headin down the alley to what he call a garage.”
After the grinding gears had stopped, Red Man came through the side yard. “You gon do a hog for me next month? We got that family reunion down at the park. Ain’t but once every five years, and all them people from Tulsa and L.A. some greedy eaters. Give em some to take home.”
“Goddamn, don’t you even speak?” Floyd shouted. “Could say hello and shit.” He pointed down the long street, to where the end was hidden in the smog. “Ain’t you never gon clean up yo yard? Don’t you know I live near here?” He turned to Roscoe and Lanier. “Fool done brought home another truck, one a them king cabs.”
“Hell,” Roscoe said. “Your property value ain’t shit anyway. You live there, and look at you.”
“Man, you think you safe with that shit? Don’t you know they was down there at my end of Picasso last week, talking about a beautification project? Call theyselves about to build some big cement flower boxes all along the bank where it go up to that new development, where Green Hollows use to be.”
“You a lie.”
“Serious, now, they was walking all up and down in front of my yard, pointin and starin. Told me and Maitrue next door that in New York City, people did some study bout flowers and window boxes.” He imitated a woman’s voice. “People were so much more willing to spend time on upkeep when they had flowers, Mr. King.” Floyd put his hands behind his back. “Then she want to go and pull on my greens tree. ‘Now rather than allowing weeds to front yo fence, why not try flowers?’ she said. I told her, ‘Man, that’s my dinner you tuggin on! That’s one a Red Man’s greens trees, been there ten years.’”
“Bout as long as his Cadillac been in the side yard,” Roscoe said, and Lanier laughed, but he thought about the city men and the holes in the fences.
They came again the next week, while he stood in the truckbed. He had brownish heads of iceberg lettuce, soggy, dimple-skinned grapefruit, and more watermelon rinds. The men picked their way around the straw heap, and he could tell they didn’t see the sow’s twitching ears.
“Mr. Chatham,” the taller one said, after shaking Lanier’s hand. “Your lot here is worth much more than you paid for it originally, I’m sure. When did you acquire the property, what is it, just over an acre?”
“Long time ago,” Lanier said, watching the other one who shook his head slowly near the fences.
“Was it around 1969?”
If he know, why he askin? Lanier thought.
“Have the, uh, hogs been here all that time?”
“No. Twelve years.”
“Well, I’m sure you know the situation. People are moving out to Rio Seco for affordable housing, people from L.A., and on a piece of acreage like this, ten houses could be built. That means your land here is going to bring a remarkable profit, I’m telling you. Is this farm running at much of a profit? How many hogs do you have?”
“I don’t know, last count,” Lanier said, and the man’s head dipped like a bird drinking. “About a hundred, probably. It ain’t about profit.”
“Huh,” he said. “Well, as you probably know, the city has owned the land abutting yours, here to the west, for years. We’d like to purchase yours in order to offer a parcel that would extend from the edge of the hillside there to the frontage road.” Lanier swung around to look at the steep ridge where the baby piglets tried to climb every year and rolled back down, their bellies sliding over the squirrel holes. He turned to the west, where the bulldozing was done.
“That yours, too?” he asked the man.
“That parcel’s already been sold. The developer has people lined up for the lots there, and he wants this adjacent parcel, too.”
Parcels. This ain’t about no parcel post. The shorter man was behind him now. “How do you keep track of them all? It looks like you’ve got several holes, and they’re well used.”
“They don’t run far,” Lanier said. “Always hungry.” He stared away from the two men, at the straw heap that looked like it was breathing, shuddering.
The water pump was out on the Ford. Lanier pulled it under the spreading carob tree at the edge of the street so he could work in the shade. The heat was all day, all night, now, like Mississippi. His wrists and shoulders seemed to buzz warm after he got off work, and he couldn’t sleep in the sweat that coated him when he lay down.
Naketa watched Lee Myrtle pick peaches for a cobbler; she leaned against the fence, staring at the shaky leaves, the June bugs that whirred out angrily.
“Here, baby, take a coupla these. I got too many. My kids ain’t comin out for the weekend,” Lee Myrtle said. Naketa edged around the fence. “You got kids?” “Two daughters and two grandbabies. They live in L.A.” “My birthday is next week. I’ma be eight.” Lee Myrtle laughed from inside the branches, Lanier heard. Naketa stood under her now. “Can I have some plums?”
Lee Myrtle filled the lines of Naketa’s arms where they pressed against her belly in a cradle, and then Naketa walked across the yard, backward-slanted as Chuck Berry to balance the fruit against her chest.
“Go on and give them to your mama, Keta,” Lee Myrtle called. Lanier saw the girl’s head turn quickly to the open door of her house, where the sounds of laughter came from the television, and then she scuttled past, to the far side of the yard. She rolled the plums carefully onto a piece of cardboard by the dying rosebush and crouched, eating the fruit so fast the juice dripped from her elbows into the dust.
He washed his face with cold water inside, and Lee Myrtle followed him into the back room. “You know, Maitrue’s daughter told me Keta’s mama on that stuff they put in the pipe and smoke. She said they be sellin it at that pink house, down the way off Tenth. I swear, Lanier, a pipe. My mama smoke a pipe back in Grenada, remember? I like to died every time people seen her, so country.”
“What they puttin in the pipe?”
“Maitrue’s girl talkin about some rock cocaine, somethin crazy.”
Lanier brushed her shoulder on the way outside. “Goin out there to check the fences.”
“That’s all you ever worry about now—them fences.”
He stopped for a moment. “That girl, Rencie, she think this is country.”
On Sunday, he drove past the place and down the road to where the new model houses were being framed. The land was cut in flat squares up the ridge, like descending rice farms he’d seen pictures of somewhere.
“He said they was waitin in line?” Floyd said a few hours later, when they brought the beer and dominoes. He squinted at the crow screaming from a telephone pole.
“Man, you done told us a hundred times, all last month,” Red Man said, righting a barber chair that had tipped over. “What you fittin to do?”
“Shoot, they slow,” Floyd said. “I knew L.A. was a nutcase back in 1965. Didn’t want my boys in all that, niggas shootin each other for a quarter.”
Roscoe stood and threw a peach pit at the crow. “Westside was the only place we could buy. Now look, Carnell and Retha’s boy, what’s his name? Trent. Yeah, he bought into that fancy tract, the other side of the hill.”
“Grayglen,” Red Man said. “I had a couple of yards up there.”
“Trent probably the darkest thing even drive up there. Even they maids is all Mexican now,” Floyd said.
Lanier thought. “Lee Myrtle used to work up there, in the older part. The Culvers. Ten dollars a week.”
“What you mumblin and grumblin about, Lanier?” Floyd said. “Start countin your money. Give it to me—I’ll count it.”
“I ain’t sellin,” Lanier said. The Snuffle-talk from the pens drifted through the slats into the quiet.
“You a fool,” Floyd said. “You gon get you some cash.”
“You ain’t makin no money off these hogs,” Red Man said. “I seen you pay for them damn pig pellets, if it wasn’t nobody givin you trash to feed em. And you always talkin about that corn cost money, when somebody finally poke you into killin one a these suckers.”
“Meat taste fishy as seaweed he don’t give em that corn,” Floyd said. “Shit, he gon get enough money to buy lobster and who need pig?”
“Shut up, man,” Roscoe shouted. “Play.”
The city men came again, came to the porch of his house. “You really need to decide, Mr. Chatham. The developer is anxious to get started.”
Like it ain’t no question, Lanier thought, but what bothered him more was taking the food morning and evening and not knowing whether they’d been at the place while he was asleep, touching the fenceposts, kicking at the pallets, laughing at the piglets with sashes widening around fat bellies. He couldn’t even put Tique out in the tiny trailer; Tique would love to shoot anyone. He couldn’t guard anything from the two men, and Lanier bet they breathed in the smell from the wallows and still frowned, many times as they’d stood there.
In November, Red Man woke him early one morning, wobbling sheets of paper near Lanier’s face. “They done put notices on the trucks, both of em,” he shouted.
“Don’t be hollerin,” Lee Myrtle said, standing behind him.
The papers said that the trucks were public nuisances, that property owners in the neighborhood had complained about their being parked in the alley. The owners had thirty days to move the vehicles.
“And ain’t put nothin on your Cadillac been in the street for a month now?” Lee Myrtle said. “Huh.”
“Don’t start,” Red Man shouted, and Lanier grabbed the papers from him.
“Catch yourself,” Lanier said, angry. “That’s my wife. Go on home.”
His wrists ached from work, felt wider and wider, like the bones had tiny jacks inside pushing them apart. He went to the back, saw the dust still hanging ankle-high where Red Man had driven down the alley. He could hear Rencie’s music all the way back here, now that the too-early morning pulled away from his ears and eyes.
The Mexican market on Seventh Street had been happy to give him spoiled loads now, too, because the city had closed the dump. He drove from there to the L&L, shovelled up the cabbage, carrot tops, cheese without thinking. But when he drove along the freeway, he remembered the dump, how far away it had seemed when he moved to Rio Seco. A few years ago, a new tract had been built across the arroyo from the landfill, and the houses were big, with bay windows, garages the size of his yard. The new people had complained about the smell when the wind blew from the east. Now it was twelve miles out to the county sanitation, and ten bucks a pop, Red Man told him, so the market had gotten word to him.
“They gon change the zoning on you,” Floyd said every day. “Ain’t nothin you can do.”
“Shit, change the zoning for us we don’t watch out,” Roscoe frowned. “Build all around the Westside and have them people complain about the smell of barbecue. They rewrite that zoning faster than you can holler ‘Got him by the toe.’”
Lanier drove faster, the engine roaring so loud he could feel it in his hair. Make yo Mississippi ass feel at home, Roscoe had laughed. Lanier remembered driving out from L.A. with Lee Myrtle, seeing the miles of tumbleweeds pillowing over the fields. It had been November then, too, and they were round as his daughters’ Afros, thick at the centers.
When he touched the fences, listening to the scrape of the pigs’ feet and the thuds of their bellies hitting each other, he pulled out the notices, balled them up, threw them into one of the greenish wallows where they floated light as popcorn on the water. One of the younger males ran frantically for them, splashing in to eat them quickly.
“You see the signs?” Floyd asked. “What they callin it?”
Lanier was silent. The three model homes had lawns now, instant sod, wrought-iron fences all around the yards. “Morning Ridge,” he said.
“Shit,” Red Man laughed. “Been Rattlesnake Mountain down to this side since we got here.”
“You can’t sell no rattlesnakes,” Roscoe said. “You have to name it right.”
“I call it Traffic Ridge,” Red Man said. “Get up in the morning and face the traffic to L.A.” The dominoes clicked in his hand, and he slammed down the big six. “Go to the bone yard, Floyd. You ain’t got none a that,” he shouted.
Floyd took three pieces from the scattering at the edge of the table and added them to his hand. “Lanier, feed this dog of yours. You and your strays. This one so hungry he trying to eat the dirt off my pants cuff.”
The chain hanging from the pepper tree laid a shadow over the table. “You pull out that Cadillac engine yesterday?” Lanier asked. “I still don’t believe it.”
“I still don’t believe you gon make me move all my stuff off this place,” Red Man said. “My boys gon be moanin and groanin if they have to help me.”
“You want the city to move it for you?” Floyd said. “Keep throwin away them notices, they do it. Only charge you thousands of dollars.” He slammed a domino on the table. “Which is what Conklin here could have tomorrow, dollars. Fore they take it away.”
“Ain’t nobody takin nothin away,” Red Man said.
“Talkin bout a eyesore and a health hazard? Shit,” Floyd shouted. “He better get him what he can now!”
Every time he saw them, it was the same, and he heard their voices behind the machines at work, alongside the cars from the freeway, and in the crunching of dried out tortillas the pigs ate. He stood up, thighs bumping the table and making wide cracks between the lines of dominoes. “And if I fix all the fences? If y’all come out tomorrow and move all Red Man’s leavings…” He paused, felt the tickle of an ant crawl up his ankle. “If I act like the place ain’t even mine? They ain’t gon want it? I don’t want y’all out here. Don’t come. It ain’t your land, it ain’t your meat. Go sit on the Westside and jaw till hell freeze over.”
Just before New Year’s, when the wind blew the pepper tree branches against his face like stockings hanging from the shower curtain, he and Lonzo, who always butchered the pigs, did two of the largest males. Feet, frosty-white tripe, chitlins and hog maws. Only two this time—Lanier took the meat around to the people who’d ordered it, and gave some to the Streeters out in San Bernardino who didn’t have the money this year. It was quiet at his house the day after New Year’s, when his daughters had gone back to L.A. already because they didn’t have any time off work. Lee Myrtle held a plate of shiny chitlins, grayish from the long cooking and then pink with Tabasco sauce. She called out to Rencie, who stood in her yard looking down the street for her kids.
“Come on and slide some a this down your throat. Bring a shine of good luck to your forehead,” she shouted. Lanier looked up from the table, saw Rencie laugh. Rencie came closer to the fence, and her legs were thinner, narrow as new mulberry branches, pearly-ashed. While she grew smaller, her eyes seemed to expand, rounder and shiny, moving faster than her mouth or her hands.
“Huh! I might as well be in Oklahoma with my daddy’s uncles. Always talkin bout luck and gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer. Play them old-timey songs.” She turned back to the street for a moment. “Beer ain’t gon give me no luck or nothin else. And ain’t no pig’s foot got enough meat on it for me.” Her voice trailed off, and she went back to the front of the yard, looked down the darkening street again. Closing the grimy door, covered with the children’s dark handprints, she looked at Lanier where he stood in the kitchen screen, and then the TV light, tinged pale blue as winter sky cleared by the wind, leaped into the sheets covering her windows.
He lay in bed for three days, not going to work, his wrists aching. Someone had brought Lee Myrtle chocolate candy, and the smell filled the room, murky-sweet as the time one of Red Man’s sons had dumped a truckload of carob pods and the pigs had crushed them underfoot to chew out the sharp, sugary powder. Red Man’s junk was still there; Lanier had been slowly moving it out to the edge of the land. He closed his eyes, heard their voices, the cars and pigs and shouting, and then he got up, threw the phone across the room at the candy. The dial tone hummed when he picked it up; he called Lonzo again, picked up his .22 and got into the big Chevy.
At Floyd’s house, he was still for a second, then felt his heart beat so loud it hurt his skin, the way it did when he woke up from deep day sleep because someone was shouting at Rencie’s or the telephone rang. He waited for the pounding to stop, but it felt harder, harder.
The pigs weren’t used to anyone but Lanier moving around inside the pens and the men moved as a group: Lonzo, Red Man and Floyd and Roscoe, even Floyd’s brother Charles. Lanier and Lonzo cut out the largest male first, the huge black hog, and when Lanier shot him in the head, the other pigs called and screamed but it was almost practiced, like they hollered when he fed them. Then when he and the men shot again and again in the males’ pen, the females and younger ones raised their screeching immediately, high and long, like cars that waited at a red light and then accelerated, bursting forward together.
They carried the slabs of back meat and ribs, the tripe and feet, all night and all the next day, driving; blood stiffened in the hair around his ears, in his knuckles, dried in the webbing of his thumbs. Lonzo drank two pints of Yukon Jack, screwed his grindstone onto the edge of the table where they’d played dominoes. The sisters on Picasso said, “You didn’t clean out them pigs with corn, and this smell fishy, full a that garbage,” but he left meat with them, with Maitrue and Frank Brown, Floyd’s wife, and there was still more. Viola was dead, Tates gone, too, and some of the older people were in homes now. No room in those senior citizens’ apartments for meat, small as the studio rooms were. Neither of Lanier’s daughters, none of Red Man’s or Floyd’s kids knew how to cure the meat or salt it, cook it either, unless it was already cut up and pancake thin, dry as old sponge under plastic in the store. Like the girl next door, Lanier thought, his fingers refusing to bend under the coat of blood; she’d looked at those apricots like they were strange, something she’d never seen.
Floyd loved being right. He said carefully, “The zoning, man, they was gon get you.” Lanier looked at the sun rising just over the freeway. He drove toward the Westside with another load in the back of the Ford. Lee Myrtle was wrapping, tying, marking words on the sides, he knew. When he pulled onto Picasso Street, he saw that the door to his house was open, and then he saw Rencie’s door open, too.
She sat near the jamb, in the still-dark living room, only the light tumbling from the TV so the bare walls seemed to close in and then recede. Lanier realized after a minute that the pounding rhythm wasn’t coming from the screen, but from the huge radio set beside it on the floor, and when he looked carefully at her face, her eyes weren’t focused on the flashing faces at all, but on the bar of red light that pulsed on and off at the radio’s face. He listened, watched, and it reached out a long line when the drums hit hard, weakened in their absence.
“What you want, old man?” she said suddenly. “I thought you was somebody else, bringin me… What you bring me? You don’t know what…”
Lanier molded the rough brown paper Lee Myrtle had split from countless grocery sacks, made it tight around the meat, and placed it gently in her lap.