Thrown-away Child

tires in here!” Pirate’s eyes watered and he coughed. So did the other two.
    “Shut your face!” Faerie Princess shouted. He reheated the steel bar and continued counting. “Seven, eight, nine, ten…”
    When he had finished up with the fifteenth branding, Faerie Princess led the way back to the Jeep. Hobo took the wheel again, waited for a clear view, and then did a spinout from behind Fats Domino’s beloved old juke joint, over the sidewalk, back into the street.
    The tugboat crewmen down on the river decided to investigate the peculiar activity they had seen up on the levee.
     

THIRTY-ONE

     
    Picking herself up from the floor, Ruby felt puffed and weightless, as if she were a balloon on a slow rise toward the bedroom ceiling. She clutched hard at Perry’s ink-stained notebooks—anchors that would keep her from floating off.
    She took two wobbly steps around from the foot of Perry’s sloppy bed and flopped belly-down across the mattress, covered in a pile of twisted sheets and blankets that stank of cigarettes and liquored breath. Ruby rolled over, holding her nose. The ceiling swirled crazily.
    Flushed with heat, and an overwhelming guilt for leaving her family, Ruby closed her eyes. She had fled, she had tried to forget, she believed she had succeeded at both. Yet now the simplest wisp of memory—" lavender sachet—held physical power, rendering her helpless to do anything but wait for a return of equilibrium. As she waited, she remembered more.
    What was it Daddy used to sing to his babies that soothed them so? So long ago in the cottage, before Daddy grew so ill himself that he forgot their names— Ruby and Janny—and Perry, practically his son.
    Tighter and tighter Ruby squeezed her eyes, imagining her long-ago father; seeing his handsome profile; watching him putter in the garden, sweat breaking across his wide brown back, his hammer hands delicately working the soil and flowers and grass.
    In sweet delirium, her father’s hands now lay on Ruby’s fevered brow. And then she heard his voice, its deep and stony rich timbre. Daddy was not a man who often spoke. But when he did, his talk came like rain held too long in heavy clouds.
    Finally, her Daddy’s comforting song:
     
    Three little children lying in the bed,
    One most sick and the other most dead;
    Call for the doctor, and the doctor said,
    Feed them children crackling bread...
     
    Still more memory in Ruby’s spinning head:
    Mama out doors on a summer Monday—laundry day. All the neighbor ladies scrubbing clothes in tubs of steaming water set out on back porches, the sharp odor of Fels Naptha soap competing with the sugary bouquet of morning glories and snapdragons and periwinkles in the alley breeze.
    And Mama taking her part in lively woman talk up and down the alley. Everybody else taking their turns at tearing up some air, as the women said. Magpie chatter, Daddy said.
    Young Ruby, all ears and gangling arms and legs, receiving her first inkling of sexual mystery...
    Mama making a fanning motion with a free hand, telling the other ladies, My Willis — why, he thrill me to the thigh bone whenever he open his mouth. He got the sound of a African lion inside him, even when he whisper.
    The ladies all laughing in sisterly communion, husky laughs men are not meant to hear. There was no issue to take, for Mama had not bragged. The commanding beauty of Willis Flagg’s voice was a simple fact, as attested by a next-door lady. Oh, you so lucky, Vi. That man of yours could say night was day and we’d all be strapping on our sunglasses. If Willis was white — why shoo, he be at least the governor.
    Ruby opened wet eyes to the present.
    The ceiling had stopped spinning. Now she could do what she had come to do—snoop. She propped herself up against the headboard and riffled through the pages of the first of Perry’s four Big Chief notebooks, the one he had marked on the cover, “Thoughts from a Dirt Lane #1.”
    Perry’s private voice was indeed thoughtful, strangely eloquent and innocent for a man of his unfortunate experience. It was an inner voice freed of harshness and male bravado required by the streets of Perry’s life. His penmanship was likewise surprising, cleanly and artfully set onto paper. Perry wrote with a delicate and careful hand within the wide lines of what he clearly intended as a serious journal. His tiny letters slanted neatly rightward. Never once did his pen’s black ink overlap the faint blue