One More River by Mary Glickman Read Free Book Online Page B

a whole herd. You gotta bribe ’em. Sometimes you gotta outthink ’em, because, let’s face it, they may be smart, but they ain’t as smart as people, no, no, no, not by a long shot. You might not have noticed today, but I had feed ready for them critters, and that’s the only reason, I swear, the only reason on God’s good earth they left you alone long enough for me to dump it and get in there and take you and Dopey out unmolested. You understandin’ me?
    I think so.
    Bald Horace shook his head from side to side while he tied a bandage in a snug knot just under Mickey Moe’s knee. He was thinking his own thoughts. He came to a decision that had little to do with the goats and everything to do with life as he knew it. He decided to impart some wisdom to this poor, fatherless white child, who obviously, if he’d chosen of his own free will to spend time with a mess of hardscrabble goats on a fine April afternoon, was in need of guidance.
    Listen to me, son. Listen to me good. I knew your daddy. I knew him well. And this is somethin’ I know he’d tell you if he could.
    The boy’s head jerked up. Daddy had been invoked. He must take heed.
    Confrontin’ somethin’ head-on isn’t always the best way. Sometimes you need to run around things to fool ’em, to distract ’em. You get what I’m sayin’?
    Mickey Moe considered his experience that afternoon on the street in front of his house. It was an opening salvo, he knew that much. There would be more torment from Ricky Baker and his boys, if only to justify their prior cruelty. And miracle of miracles, here was his dear, dead daddy speaking through Bald Horace in order to tell him how to handle the situation. He shook his head with all the grown-up gravitas he possessed.
    Yessir, he said, aware his mama would be appalled if she heard him address the man with an honorific reserved for white men. But Bald Horace had just rescued him from a brute tribe, patched him up, and given him a great and powerful gift to boot. The boy thought he deserved the respect due a white man. Yessir, he repeated for emphasis, Yessir, I do.
    Bald Horace smiled wide enough for Mickey Moe to count the spaces in his teeth.
    Well alright, then. Alright.
    They nearly embraced, so powerful was their moment of man-to-man intimacy achieved amid an abandonment of class and race and age when another entered the house in a bustle of sound and fragrance. Mickey Moe looked away from Bald Horace’s melting eyes toward the front door and beheld for the first time the woman known as Aurora Mae.
    Aurora Mae was, without a doubt, the most imposing, blackest woman Mickey Moe had ever seen, and that covered quite a lot of human territory. When she entered the room, she had to stoop a little to make it through the door. She carried half a dozen grocery bags, and once she was inside, she seemed to fill the place up. Her head near brushed the ceiling. It would take arms twice the length of his own—or Bald Horace’s for that matter, as he was a spindly type, shrunken with age and hardship, more on a child’s scale of being—to hug her all the way around. Her chest could feed nations, her nostrils suck up all the sweet air of a spring day, and her deep brown eyes with their brilliant flecks of yellow reminded him of the great river itself and the way golden stones glittered up from its bottom in places near the shore. Every inch of her was doused in Sassaport Five and Ten’s violet toilet water, a scent his second sister favored. He’d only got such a strong dose of it up his nose once before, the time he’d knocked over a bottle she’d left on the edge of the bathroom sink and the contents entire spilled out.
    The woman spoke. Could that be young Mickey Moe Levy I see there settin’ at our table? she asked through a wide, curious smile as she bent over to greet Bald Horace with a kiss on the top of his smooth head. Her voice was deep as a man’s but soft, caressing.
    That would be him,