Tomato Red by Daniel Woodrell Read Free Book Online Page B

her hip. There was no makeup now. Her hair had been wetted and combed down slick.
    “I’m gettin’ it back,” I said. “With a hike in pay, too, and a few special fringe benefits. The man said I’ll be startin’ the very next day after hell freezes over.”
    “That sounds promising.”
    She stepped backwards, into the house, and let the door shut between us. It was passing strange how different she looked in her own true clothes and her own true home, swaddled in her own true history. A big share of her sparkle dulled as that pooched-out screen door slammed her inside.
    Then she moved backwards, deeper into the shadow. All I could see was that she was barely there, like something you
almost recall: the Pledge of Allegiance, your daddy’s real name.
    “Come on in, Sammy. Share the stink.”

7
    Transferred to a Period
    JAMALEE AND JASON were living together like a brother and sister who’d maybe once tended to play a lot more “Doctor” together than is considered sightly. They acted familiar with areas of each other that most siblings probably keep private, but this knowledge seemed to bond them together even better instead of wedging them apart.
    The house was nearly a coop; you could’ve paced it off and counted the paces on fingers and toes. Jamalee had set up housekeeping in the dining nook, closed her zone in with a blanket curtain hanging from a clothesline she’d hammered to the walls. Jason had an actual room with a double-deck of bunk beds in it. He gave me the top, which is the new inmate’s rack in so many circumstances.
    I made do.
    I always have just wanted to fit in somewhere, and this is the bunch that would have me.
    The house belonged to a timber hauler who worked off the books and only showed his face two or three times a month to crash in my bunk. He was yonder and all over knockin’ down forests and hauling them to sawmills. His wife had hit the highway and taken the three kids with her. They’d been holding those kids as hostages to the welfare machine and drawing decent ransom checks. His name was Rod, and Rod wanted those checks to keep coming, so he’d installed Jamalee to answer the phone and mimic his woman. A piece of paper had been taped to the wall above the phone,
and it had files, sort of, on his kids: birth dates, eye colors, school situations, excuses: so Jamalee could talk straight to any social welfare snoops.
    She got a cut, but I don’t think a big one. Her main reward was the free inhabiting of this coop.
    The Merridew kids shared the coop with Rod’s dog. It was a shaggy lazy dog named Biscuit who had the personality of a defeated old alcoholic uncle, more or less. Biscuit mainly just laid there and thumped his tail pleasantly. Once in a while he goes to the screen door and stands there scanning the street like he’s hopin’ to see the mailman bringing his disability check, then moans in disappointment and flops back down.
    It was as though I’d never left, I’d always been here.
    Jam and me split a cream soda on the porch stoop that first afternoon. Bev came strolling out from next door on the arm of a fella who was hard to remember. There was nothing to him at all except a green suit jacket and a Japanese car.
    “I reckon your mom’s payin’ the utilities with that fella.”
    “We don’t say mom, we say Bev.” There was a sharp bite to her sentence. “Bev’s a porcupine, Sammy. Know what that is?”
    “I’ve heard this one, but I forgot.”
    “If Bev had all the dicks that’ve been stuck in her stickin’ out of her, she’d look like a goddam porc-u-pine.”
    The man held the car door for Bev. She’d put on a nice print dress and those tall heels. I thought she gave us a glance, a short fox glance over the shoulder.
    “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it. I’d forgot the punch line.”
    “You want to keep your distance from her.”
    Jam’s comment made no nevermind with me.
    I’m not the type who can exclude people socially just because they