AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The heat broke temporarily with a thirty-minute rain shower that evening, then the wind came up cool out of the south, scattering dead pecan leaves up on my gallery, and the late sun broke through the layered clouds as red and molten as if it had been poured flaming from a foundry cup.
We had a short-lived crisis at the bait shop. I was filling up the bowls in the rabbit hutches by the side of the house when I heard a loud yell in the shop, then saw Tripod racing out the door, his loose chain slithering across the planks, with Alafair right behind him. Then Batist came through the door with a broom raised over his head.
Alafair caught Tripod up in her arms at the end of the dock, then turned to face down Batist, whose black, thick neck was pulsing with nests of veins.
“I gonna flatten that coon like a bicycle patch, me,” he said. “I gonna wipe up that bait shop wit’ him.”
“You leave him alone!” Alafair shouted back.
“I cain’t be runnin’ a sto’, no, with that nasty coon wreckin’ my shelves. You set him down on that dock and I gonna golf him right over them trees.”
“He ain’t did anything! Clean up your own mess! Clean up your own nasty cigars!”
In the meantime, Tripod was trying to climb over her shoulder and down her back to get as much geography between him and Batist as possible.
Oh Lord, I thought, and walked down to the dock.
“It’s too late, Dave,” Batist said. “That coon headed for coon heaven.”
“Let’s calm down a minute,” I said. “How’d Tripod get into the bait shop again, Alf?”
“Batist left the screen open,” she said.
“I left the screen open?” he said incredulously.
“You were fishing out back, too, or he wouldn’t have gotten up on the shelf,” she said. Her face was flushed and heated, her eyes as bright as brown glass.
“Look his face, look his mouth,” Batist said. “He eat all the sugar in the can and two boxes them Milky Ways.”
Tripod, whose fur was almost black except for his silver-ringed tail and silver mask, didn’t make a good witness for the defense. His muzzle and whiskers were slick with chocolate and coated with grains of sugar. I picked up the end of his chain. The clip that we used to fasten him to the clothesline was broken.
“I’m afraid we’ve got Tripod on a breaking-and-entering rap, Alf,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“It looks like he’s going to have to go into lockdown,” I said.
“What?”
“That means let’s put him in the rabbit hutch until tomorrow when I can fix his chain. In the meantime, Batist, let’s close down the shop and think about going to the drive-in movie.”
“It ain’t my sto’, it ain’t my Milky Way. I just work here all day so I can clean up after some fat no-good coon, me.”
Alafair was about to fire off another shot when I turned her gently by the shoulder and walked her back through the pecan trees in front of the house.
“He was mean, Dave,” she said. “He was gonna hurt Tripod.”
“No, he’s not mean, little guy,” I said. “To Batist, running the bait shop is an important job. He just doesn’t want anything to go wrong while he’s in charge.”
“You didn’t see what he looked like.” Her eyes were moist in the deep shade of the trees.
“Alafair, Batist grew up poor and uneducated and never learned to read and write. But today he runs a business for a white man. He wants to do everything right, but he has to make an ‘X’ when he signs for a delivery and he can’t count the receipts at the end of the day. So he concentrates on things that he can do well, like barbecuing the chickens, repairing the boat engines, and keeping all the inventory squared away. Then Tripod gets loose and makes a big mess of the shelves. So in Batist’s mind he’s let us down.”
I saw her eyes blinking with thought.
“It’s kind of like the teachers at school giving you a job to do, then someone else comes along and messes it up and makes you look bad. Does that make sense?”
She shifted Tripod in her arms, so that he lay on his back with his three paws in the air, his stomach swollen with food.
