‘Welcome to Three Crutches, baby doll! Now let’s go.’ She yanks me forward.
I walk, clutching Pooh with my left hand while flailing at my dripping eyes with my right. ‘Up, up…’ Pooh says as my feet hit stairs and she pulls me up from a topple.
Then it hits me harder. A horrendous acrid odor engulfs us. All sorts of issue start running out of my nose.
The sound of aluminum steps echo under my feet. I’m grasping for a rail to hold but find none and end up clasping Pooh with both arms. ‘Please help me, Pooh, I’m blind!’ I sob.
‘Quit your whining. You wanted to come here, didn’t you? You asked for this!’ She lurches me up a few more steps. ‘Playing all cutesy with Le Loup!’ I hear the jingle of bells on a door and the warmth of inside hits my wet face.
‘I can’t see!’ I cry in a panic, hoping someone will take pity and call a doctor and save me. ‘I can’t see! And my face is melting!’
‘Pooh, you’re worse than a boy with a box of matches and a stray cat!’ a woman’s husky voice calls out. ‘I know Le Loup wouldn’t like to know you’d be torturing his greenhorn, now would he?’
‘I didn’t do anything, Stella!’ Pooh spits.
‘Give her here…’ Pooh releases me into someone’s arms. I am instantly hoisted backward onto her lap like an amusement park ride that lifts you with G force.
‘Hand me the spray bottle, Lymon!’ Her limbs are so bony and protruding and her scent has a damp muddiness to it, it feels as if I’m cradled in a twig nest. I desperately rub my eyes.
‘Hi, honey. I’m Stella and Pooh’s just toying with you some. Bad Pooh, bad… Here ya go…’ A fine jasmine-perfumed mist coats my face. ‘Open your eyes, open…’ She pulls my lids up and I feel the tiny mist droplets hit my eyes and immediately soothe them.
‘Pooh didn’t give you no lemon wedge, did she?’ Stella sucks her tongue. ‘Tsk, tsk.’
I begin to blink, my eyes sopping up the sweet spray like graham crackers in milk. ‘Pooh!’ she scolds again. ‘Here…’ She slips something so sour under my upper lip that my mouth curdles. I try to spit it out. ‘Uh, uh … keep it in … it’s a lemon wedge and if you want to see again you best keep it in.’ She puts her earthy-smelling hand over my mouth.
‘Here now, close up your eyes and let them heal up.’ She presses my lids down and runs her hands over the jasmine mist coating my face like a fine sweat. ‘Pooh’s just afraid you’ve got a sweeter tang than she does, but no one has a sweeter tang than Pooh, ain’t that right, Pooh?’ I hear laughter around us.
‘Don’t pee down my back and tell me it’s raining!’ Pooh yells. ‘Y’all just too bored and forlorn! Well, I’m not! I got things to get done!’ Pooh stomps away down the aluminum stairs.
‘Pickled tang is more likely,’ someone calls out.
‘I would be worried if I were Pooh,’ a high-pitched man’s voice says. ‘I’d like a taste on ya…’ I feel fingers in my hair that carry on them a whiff of the biting odor that makes my eyes well up again.
‘Lymon! Get back in the kitchen. She ain’t even got her bite marks and you’re ready to take a piece of her?! I should tell Le Loup! Now get!’ Stella motions so hard with her arms shooing Lymon away, she dumps me out of her lap. I hit the floor with a thud and the lemon wedge shoots out of my mouth like a bullet. I open my eyes and through a haze see the wedge fly into the face of a raptor that sits on the windowsill.
‘Oh, damn … dropped my lap baby … shoot.’ Everyone laughs until the stunned raptor starts flapping its wings and cawing like a sat-on cat. Then everyone rushes to soothe it, making barnyard animal sounds to remind the insulted raptor of its favorite prey and put it in a good mood.
And suddenly I start to cry. Not from the fiery smell that makes me want to rip my eyeballs out of my head. Not from being dropped with a thud and hearing a roomful of people I could barely see laugh and then ignore me for a raptor. I cry deep disconsolate wails from suddenly missing Sarah, even if she often forgot she was my momma.
‘Oh, I hope I ain’t broke ya. Le Loup would just kill me if I broke ya brand-new! Did I break ya?’ Stella’s twiggy fingers lift and twist my limbs like I’m a rag doll.
I try to tell her I’m not broken, but when I open my mouth all that comes out is, ‘Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.’
‘Sarah, that your name? That’s a sweet name. Maybe you’ll be like Sarah in the Bible, and the Lord will knock you up when your tang is as leathery as a sow’s purse.’ Stella pats my head.
‘The Lord can give the curse of life to the most unlikely being,’ says another woman.
‘That’s why I didn’t even bother having my tubes done in! I just know Jesus will make an example out of me, just like he done Sarah,’ Stella says and pats my head again.
‘Now why would he impregnate you? I never miss services and my vagina is as dry as a well dug in the Sahara! Plus the Lord knows I would not laugh at him finding myself pregnant like our friend Sarah here did.’ The woman leans over and pats my shoulder.
‘I’ve never been pregnant before,’ I say between sobs.
‘Well, you know, you can’t get lard unless you boil the hog.’
‘I had my triplets using five layers of rubbers with a layer of tin-foil gum wrapper thrown in for good measure…’ says a woman so narrow and white she looks like a body-of-Christ wafer. ‘So why isn’t that just the same as what did Sarah here?’ She pats my neck.
‘I don’t believe I was ever pregnant…’ I wipe at my face.
‘Well, Mary Grace, did the Lord tell you what he was gonna do to you?’
‘Did you hear
Him
?’ Lymon yells as the raptor swooshes and dive bombs over our heads.
‘I could’ve been with baby and didn’t even know.’ I blink some tears back and press my hands into the hollow barren feeling I’m used to in my gut.
‘Well, I thought one night I heard
Him
when I was with my babies still in,’ Mary Grace says. ‘My stomach was moving and heaving and voices were coming from my person, but it turned out just to be gas.’
‘Mary Grace, you just got hit with very acidic ejaculit,’ says another woman. ‘I heard of truckers’ juice so full of strip-mine slag they can burn through a wooden condom!’
‘That can produce very unsettling gas,’ Lymon agrees.
‘I know I’ve felt the movements inside me sometimes,’ I whisper remembering those times when one of Sarah’s boyfriends would come at me, when she was out late working. They’d kick over empties in the dark, pull back my blankets, and move into me, taking me over with silent invasive thrusts. I liked the ones that lay with me after, held me so tight to them with hands that could easily break me in two but didn’t. They’d stroke my stomach and whisper in my ear, ‘Sweet baby, sweet baby, I’m inside ya baby.’ I also remember the blood after, after they take it all out of me. It felt like they must of pulled out the sweet baby and all my innards. Then they’d take it away with them.
I make a fist and punch at the loss inside myself.
‘Why’re you hitting at yourself?’ Mary Grace says and slaps my hands down. ‘Don’t do that. Here, have a lemon wedge.’ Mary Grace slips a sour slice under my lip.
I suck on the lemon and let the bitterness wash everything down my throat.
‘Hey now.’ Mary Grace pats my head. ‘Your eyes better yet?’
I nod.
‘Let’s get you off that floor.’ Stella picks me up under my arms. ‘You’re gonna have to keep that lemon wedge in your mouth until you’ve eaten here enough so you’re immune.’
I nod again.
‘Best to remember to take it out before oral sex though. Most of these truckers drive varnishing the flagpole, one hand on each of their sticks, steering with their knees, so by the time they get to you, it’s damn near whittled down to a toothpick, covered in blisters and sores. When Pooh started here she gave so many men lemon head, the infirmary was filled with men with concussions from hittin’ their heads on the cabs’ roofs.’ Stella cradles me up in her bony, bruised-up arms.
‘You’ll get used to the taste before your face gets frozen in that expression,’ Mary Grace says, floating by.
‘I’m gonna start your immunity now. Lymon, bring us out a big plate of livermush fry topped with red-eye gravy, a slab of fatback with some sorghum syrup, and hoe cakes to sop it all up,’ Stella calls out as she carries me into the dining room. ‘And of course a whole mess of ramps!’
‘Ramps…’ everyone mutters and half chuckles.
‘Do you think Le Loup wants her on the ramps?’ another girl says. ‘He might be designing to advertise her as one girl without the ramp flatulence. Be an awful big draw…’
‘Well, Petunia, that might well be,’ Stella says while moving us into a ripped up Day-Glo-orange dining booth. ‘But if she does not partake of the ramps, she’s gonna be fart-free sucking on stick shift ‘stead of the weasel, she’ll be so blind! I know our boys rather have a tube-steak shine then a deodorized whore. If that ain’t the truth, you’d have no business.’
Stella pulls out a bunch of napkins from the dispenser and mops up what’s left of my tears off my face.
‘The more ramps you eat, the more you won’t be bothered by them,’ Stella says, blowing my nose for me.
I nod.
‘You never had ramps?’ Petunia asks incredulously.
I nod no.
‘You ain’t a West Virginian girl, then,’ Stella laughs. ‘Ramps is like onions…’
‘Only a hundred times stronger!’ Petunia says.
‘Lymon picks ’em wild and we have big old ramp feeds,’ Stella says, pouring out handfuls of salt and tossing it over her shoulder.
‘But them ramps, when they’re getting cut, before they hit the bacon fat, mercy me! They burn like the clap, that is if you got the clap in your eyes, which I heard told can occur on occasion,’ Petunia says.
‘So you gotta eat the ramps, then the stink of the raw ones won’t bother you. You’ll be immune. Poor little girl never had ramps…’ Stella tsk-tsks.
‘Oh,’ I say. I want to tell them about Bolly at The Doves and the fine French shallots he sautés in a delicate saffron-infused lobster-chocolate-reduction sauce, but I say nothing.
‘Here ya be…’ Lymon says, and puts in front of us three steaming plates on the oilcloth table cover. My eyes start watering again. Before I can even get my hand up to rub them, Lymon is spraying my face with the soothing mist while Stella pulls out the lemon from under my lip and forks a shovelful of ramps into my mouth. I chew the greasy, pungent onions and blink up the spray.
‘Gonna send you back with a spray bottle of your own. How you like them ramps?’ Stella says through a mouthful.
I nod and reminisce about Bolly’s sweet-onion mint pesto served on house-cured sturgeon.
‘And for dessert you can have tomato and ramp sorbet with mayonnaise crème!’
‘I even have pawpaw cookies!’ Lymon whispers into my ear, his tongue reaching into the inside of my Eustachian tube. He blasts my face fast with spray to preempt the tears from his ramp juice musk.
Stella keeps feeding herself and me. I’m chewing and swallowing as fast as I can, but she’s picking up speed, till finally I keep my mouth closed and she stabs my lips with her fork.
‘Mmmm!’ I cry while keeping my mouth sealed.
‘Ooh, sorry, sorry … are ya bleeding? Oh, just a bit, here…’ Stella shoves napkins at my mouth.
‘Le Loup is gonna ask why his new girl’s mouth sprays out cum like a watering can and I’m gonna tell him he’s got Stella to thank for the extra holes!’
‘Petunia, you’re ‘bout to lose the remainder of those teeth … though I would be doing you a boon to your fellating capacity.’
‘Humpf!’ Petunia says.
‘You stopped your bleeding, Sarah?’ Stella takes the napkin gag off my mouth. I nod yes and wipe at the cut. ‘Did I overhear you say you had a baby?’
I clear my throat and say, ‘I’ve had babies inside me, but I didn’t think that could be. Just like Sarah in Genesis. My mom had the same thing happen to her it seems like.’ They nod their heads.
‘The Bible is very handy for teaching love and understanding of one’s kin,’ Stella says, nodding at Petunia.
‘Did they take your baby to harvest body organs?’ Petunia asks, showing a tongue full of gray liver-mush.
‘I would bleed after,’ I tell them and open my mouth for a bite of cornbread ‘hoe cakes’ that Stella’s fingers are bringing to me.
‘If you bled, then you can be assured it was a Yankee come and stole it with their sticky-as-crap-cooking-on-tar fingers. Your baby’s innards are long sold off and the carcass tossed in some incinerator without a decent Christian burial!’ Petunia shouts, launching bits of fat-back into my face.
‘But
my
mother didn’t know she had me, and I don’t think I had my innards taken by Yankees. They were truck drivers mostly,’ I tell them.
‘I bet they were just Yankees posing as truck drivers!’ Petunia says.
‘My mother whipped me if she saw the blood. She’d cry that I steal all her sweet babies from her,’ I say, picturing my underwear with the little clots of scarlet I’d leave out for her to find, to feel that moment of importance before she reached for the strap.
‘Oh, Petunia, this is so woeful,’ Stella says. ‘That’s a travesty, your mama blaming you for those Yankee thieves stealing her granbabies and your innards.’
‘I knew there was something missing from inside me,’ I say.
I remember after some of the truck drivers left, and they always left, how Sarah would sit and wail while punching at her stomach.
‘We have a real tragic figure on our hands here. We better warn Le Loup that Sarah here might drop dead at any time so to be easy on her.’
‘No, if we tell Le Loup that she is of precarious health, he might work her doubly hard, seeing as he would want to get his money’s worth!’
‘Who’d he buy you from?’ Stella asks, scooping a big fork of ramps into my mouth.
‘He didn’t buy me. I met him at the Jackalope.’
‘So he stole ya!’ Petunia gasps. ‘Well, no wonder he put a black snake belly-up on the freeway divider!’
‘Why?’ I say and savor a spoonful of surprisingly tasty tomato and ramp sorbet with mayonnaise crème that Lymon had silently placed on the table during our conversations.
‘A black snake belly-up on a fence or freeway divider brings rain, no matter how blue the sky! Everybody knows that!’ Just then a flash of lightning races through the diner, followed by an ominous thunderclap. ‘And when it rains we all get busier than a one-armed paper hanger!’