“Did it come with lamps and such?”
“You’re crazy, mister.”
“Did it?”
“Yeah, couple. One that works and one that duddn’t. I ain’t stayin here, be goddamned if I will. He tell how he don’t want to move back in with my mama down Mozelle, but tough titty said the kitty. I ain’t stayin here. You smell this place?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That ain’t nothin but shit, sonny jim. Not catshit, not dogshit,that’s peopleshit. Work with niggers, that’s one thing, but live like one? Nosir. You done?”
I wasn’t, quite, although I wished I were. I was disgusted by her, and disgusted with myself for daring to judge. She was a prisoner of her time, her choices, and this shit-smelling street. But it was the rollers under the yellow headscarf that I kept looking at. Fat blue bugs waiting to hatch.
“Nobody stays here for long, I guess?”
“On ’Cedes Street?” She waved her cigarette at the hardpan leading to the deserted parking lot and the vast warehouse filled with nice things she would never own. At the elbow-to-elbow shacks with their steps of crumbling cinderblock and their broken windows blocked up with pieces of cardboard. At the roiling kids. At the old, rust-eaten Fords and Hudsons and Studebaker Larks. At the unforgiving Texas sky. Then she uttered a terrible laugh filled with amusement and despair.
“Mister, this is a bus stop on the road to nowhere. Me’n Bratty Sue’s sailin back to Mozelle. If Harry won’t go with us, we’ll sail without him.”
I took the map out of my hip pocket, tore off a strip, and scribbled my Jodie telephone number on it. Then I added another five-dollar bill. I held them out to her. She looked but didn’t take.
“What I want your telephone number for? I ain’t got no goddam phone. That there ain’t no DFW ’shange, anyway. That’s goddam long distance.”
“Call me when you get ready to move out. That’s all I want. You call me and say, ‘Mister, this is Rosette’s mama, and we’re moving.’ That’s all it is.”
I could see her calculating. It didn’t take her long. Ten dollars was more than her husband would make working all day in the hot Texas sun. Because Manpower knew from nothing about time-and-a-half on holidays. And this would be ten dollarsheknew from nothing about.
“Gimme another semny-fi cent,” she said. “For the long distance.”
“Here, take a buck. Live a little. And don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
“No, you don’t want to. Because if you forgot, I might just be apt to find my way to your husband and tattle. This is important business, Missus. To me it is. What’s your name, anyway?”
“Ivy Templeton.”
I stood there in the dirt and the weeds, smelling shit, half-cooked oil, and the big farty aroma of natural gas.
“Mister? What’s wrong with you? You come over all funny.”
“Nothing,” I said. And maybe itwasnothing. Templeton is far from an uncommon name. Of course a man can talk himself into anything, if he tries hard enough. I’m walking, talking proof of that.
“What’syourname?”
“Puddentane,” I said. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”
At this touch of grammar school raillery, she finally cracked a smile.
“You call me, Missus.”
“Yeah, okay. Go on now. You was to run over that little hellbitch of mine on your way out, you’d prolly be doin me a favor.”
I drove back to Jodie and found a note thumbtacked to my door:
George—
Would you call me? I need a favor.
