 
Troublesome Creek

By Janice Daugharty

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty
Part One

Chapter 1

Daff was looking out the front glass of the Delta store, at the leached light and night bugs ringing round the gas-pump island, when she spied a southbound white, two-ton truck gearing down at the dip of Troublesome Creek and slowing for the blinking red light at the crossing. The cab of the truck went from red-tinted to white again as it veered diagonally beneath the traffic light and coasted onto the asphalt strip before the gas pumps. A foot closer and it would have dozed down all three pumps, Premium, High Test and Regular. On back of the truck were stacked crates of white chickens, boxed-in between slat side-bodies, scrunched with their wings tucked as if bracing for a crash.

Guessing this was another trucker off 129 after gas, Daff got ready to switch on the pumps, a busy apparatus on the plywood counter underneath the window. Suddenly either a boy or a girl about Daff's own age leaped from the passenger side and landed flat and solid on the soles of combat boots, posing like a soldier off to war. Same kind of boots Daff was wearing, so for that reason only, and on a hunch, Daff labeled the person a girl. She was slim and boyish in a long-sleeved plaid shirt and faded blue jeans and wore her long brown hair fetched back in a ponytail like an outlaw country singer's. Daff could hear over the drone of the store's air conditioner the girl hooting in a strained voice and the man on the driver's side bouncing it all back at her.

She hiked one long leg and kicked the truck door shut and the chickens on back came alive with clucking, white feathers flying and swirling into the moths and beetles circling the pump lights.

The truck lurked forward onto the highway, roaring south toward the Georgia/Florida line, some ten miles away.

Squatting, the girl began gathering up gravel and bottle caps and whatever she could lay hands on and pitched each like baseballs into the dark and the vanished truck, as if it had stopped just out of sight on the other side of the red brick two-story Masonic lodge next door to the Delta. Though she was shouting loud enough to wake up the entire little town of Statenville, Daff couldn't make out a word for the roar of the air conditioner.

Working night shift at the Delta, Daff had been witness to many a fight, but usually between the local bad-boys just showing out. This girl was a stranger at the mercy of the bedded-down town.

Alone now, she sat on the curb of the pump platform, took out a pack of cigarettes from her shirt pocket, shook one out and lit it up and sat smoking, head hung and elbows on her knees, as if waiting for the driver to make some routine turn-around coming back to get her. Maybe a husband or a boyfriend. Or possibly the girl was a hitchhiker, Daff thought, and the man driving the truck might have gotten rough with her and she'd bailed out at the first stop to get away from him. But she looked tough—toughened—and mean enough to handle any man.

Daff walked around the ell-shaped counter to the double glass doors and shoved through, going from cold to hot. It was always freezing inside and why she was wearing her camouflage jacket. "Hey, are you alright?" she called out.

The girl gave her a long look, as if she'd just seen Daff, though she'd been standing in the window all that time. "Yep." The girl stood and hung her head and began kicking at the pavement, wandering end to end of the gas pumps. Then she waved Daff away with the hand holding the cigarette, looking ready to cry or explode.

Back inside, Daff began leveling the edges on the stacks of the day's newspapers butted up to the gray-painted counter wall. Tuesday, June ninth, 2002, nine months since the disaster at the World Trade Center in New York and still all three North Florida and South Georgia papers were milking the event for headlines: charities beating the bushes for money to donate to the victims' families; more potential terrorists' threats; U.S. government threats of retaliation. Memorials were being planned; people were trying to locate missing family members in the rubble. The latest news—the discovery of Anthrax in post offices and other public and private places around the nation.

Standing behind the counter again, Daff watched the girl smoking with her head tilted back, fogging the night bugs. So far, the man, whoever he was, hadn't come back for her, but still she peered off in that direction, then alternately at the red brick courthouse across the street.

Mirrored in the window glass, Daff could see herself overlaid on the girl outside: camouflage cap bill shadowing her green-gray eyes; blond hair brushed back and ponytail pulled through the hole in back of the cap she was wearing; wide mouth set in a perfectly symmetrical face. Everybody said she was pretty, everybody said she was smart, everybody said she was gutsy and clever for playing down her looks by wearing camo and combat boots. Not that she didn't like being pretty, having boys chase after her, but in her junior year in high school, what started out as fun—the boots mainly—had developed into a fashion statement, all in fun, and she hadn't been able to drop the image for fear of not being taken seriously now. And too, with little money, it was a look she could afford to maintain. Her mother, whose feet were permanently warped from wearing pointy-toed high heels, would say she'd been going through a silly phase. Her daddy would say I told you so, after telling her at the time that she was kick-ass cute.

So, Daff still wore the boots to keep everybody from thinking she'd made a mistake, that she had changed her mind; she'd only worn them to be different, and now she was stuck wearing them forever or as long as she was stuck living in Statenville. She wouldn't be caught dead in combat boots at the university in Valdosta, because the students there might call her a redneck. At home, she was locked in to who she had been in high school, when it was time to move on and be Daphany Rowe, Miss Rowe, soon-to-be elementary teacher at the same school she'd gone to since first grade. Mrs. Lane, her landlady, who considered Daff her protégé, her charge, was determined to make a lady of Daff, to refine her—bless her stuffy old heart. Daff was a project, a stubborn dog in need of training: Sittee! Go Fetch! Up up up on your hind legs, if you want the bone! So, if Daff got rid of the boots, the retired old English teacher would think she was giving in and Daff would become a replica of the teacher she used to love but now almost hated.

When Daff had been named Star-student in her senior year, she had picked Mrs. Lane for her Star-teacher. Unless she'd been brainwashed by her daddy and mother, who felt sorry for Mrs. Lane having never been selected before, Daff couldn't imagine why. Mrs. Lane and Daff had had their picture taken together and published in a Valdosta newspaper; Mrs. Lane had cut it out and framed it and hung it in her den.

Daff left the window to begin clearing out her cash drawer on the counter facing the blank north wall and put the cash in the safe under the counter, all that she had taken in for the day. It was ten o'clock and probably nobody else would be coming in, and in an hour she would close up and walk home to her tiny rented trailer east of the crossing. It drove Daff crazy how the last hour of her shift dragged on. During college, from Sept through March, she would generally bring her books and study, but studying while getting paid--$4.50 an hour—made her feel guilty for studying on company time. Still, she had to keep up her grades, maintain at least a 3.50 or lose her HOPE scholarship, which was funded by the state of Georgia with the very lottery tickets she sold, mostly to the poorest of the poor—her own mother and daddy, for one.

On Fridays they would come in to get their lottery tickets, always in the mornings, always coming like some people in the habit of going to church on Sundays. Her mother Delia wearing red lipstick to kiss the tickets for luck. Charlie ever insisting that Delia with her froth of bleached hair picked the lucky numbers from the set of digits scrolling up in her made-up head. Though she'd never won even a cheap dish tossing quarters at the county fair where Charlie took the whole family each fall. Neither had Charlie, her down and out second husband, who doted on Delia like a queen. A queen with a court of eight noisy, bothersome children—all belonging to Charlie except for Daff and her year-younger brother Bud. Charlie, who never made a difference in the children, was the only daddy Daff and Bud had ever known. So, they had fallen heir to his kingdom of hard-and-fast rules. They loved him all the same.

But straight out of high school, Daff had been allowed to leave home to ease into being on her own. Well, sort of. Mrs. Lane had simply taken over where Charlie left off, bossing her around. More rules, a combustion of rules. Mrs. Lane had agreed to let Daff move into the travel trailer in her back yard, providing she... Well, the providings were endless. But at least Daff could study without the family TV full blast and children popping in and out of doors. Besides, Charlie and Delia wouldn't let her live anywhere else except at the Lanes. They knew she'd be leaving soon anyway and were hoping that her "judgment would develop"—Mrs. Lane's words—while in a "safe environment"—Mrs. Lane's words.

The sleek black lottery machine, on the counter before her, was alive with clicking and blinking and a mouth ready to spit out the next ticket for another sucker.

In back of the store, just inside the small storage room, smelling of sour mop water and pine oil, Daff stepped up to the black wall phone with its curly stretched and twisted tail and dialed her best friend Cassie's number. What had seemed normal in high school, reporting to friends every detail of the day, now seemed foolish. But still it was a habit she hadn't yet broken with. She could tell Cassie was already talking and had been interrupted by call-waiting by the way she answered abruptly.

Daff told her about the chicken truck and the girl and Cassie said for her to be careful—could be her boyfriend had put her out to case the "joint" and was coming back to rob the Delta. Daff laughed, feeling Cassie had missed the point of the interesting story. But really Cassie was eager to get off with Daff and get back to her other friend Nina, she figured, which really kind of ticked Daff off. Not that she was jealous, but ever since graduation, a best-friend threesome since starting high school, Cassie and Nina had been pairing off. Cassie was taking a beauty course and Nina was about to get married, so Daff going to college had placed her in another category altogether.

Used to, they visited each other and cruised the streets of Valdosta when Daff wasn't working weekends. Too, Daff living in the Lane's backyard, instead of home where kinfolks and neighbors were out and in the house and something was cooking on the grill, had its drawbacks, because the Lanes didn't like anything going on that had to do with disorder and noise (no music allowed, no telephone, no loud talking, no visitors unless they were willing to watch T.V. news with Mrs. Lane and her deacon husband in their dull brown den).

When Daff returned to the window, she could see the girl picking up change tossed by people who had bought gas that day. Pennies mostly, and usually before going home at night, Daff would pick up the change herself. As much as she needed money for food and rent, she mostly picked it up in case her folks came by to check on her and shamed her for other people's waste. Pennies add up, Charlie would say, though Daff had found that two or three nights' pickings amounted to about a roll of fifty cents and wouldn't even buy a loaf of bread. Next to the cash register was a cup of free pennies for anybody who needed one to round off to the dollar.

Done picking up Daff's pennies, the girl sat as before between the pumps, bugs swirling over her, smoking and watching the red light blink at the crossing, the courthouse across the highway, then south as if expecting the truck to come back. Smoking one cigarette after another, held between her right thumb and first finger, like a hard practiced smoking man, she finally crumpled the empty pack, wadded it up and tossed it hard as if tossing it at the missing truck.

She stood, feeling inside her bulging jeans pockets, long legs stretched, took out the change and began counting it. Change in one hand and the finger of her other hand sliding the top coins aside to count the ones underneath. Suddenly she looked back at the window. Daff turned quickly so the girl wouldn't know she'd been watching. Next thing, the girl was walking around the south side of the building, into the dark. In a few minutes she came back around the corner, passing the window, then pushed through one of the double doors and stepped inside.

In the florescent lighting, up close, Daff could see that she was pretty with pore-less fair skin and gray eyes. Just a little makeup and she could be stunning; she could be a cover-girl model. She had true shoulders and her elongated waist tapered to gently curved hips and legs like stilts. But when she spoke her gruff voice startled Daff, who was hugging herself to keep from freezing. She hoped she didn't look scared.

"You got any Skoal?"

"Skoal, yes." Daff turned and reached up to the shelf next to the stacked cartons of cigarettes on the wall behind her. Because of state taxes, the cigarettes were forever going up; Daff couldn't keep up with the prices. Same as with lottery tickets, mostly the poorest of the poor were buying them.

She placed the green round can of Skoal on the counter. "$2.18," she said.

The girl began counting out her change—a few quarters, some nickels, but mostly pennies.

While Daff rang it up, the girl banged the can on her palm to pack the tobacco.

"My brother." The girl rolled her r's, pausing. "Me and him had a fight, how come me to get out here."

"He'll be back." Daff hoped so anyway. She leaned on the counter, propping on her elbows and forearms.

The girl doped her bottom lip with a pinch of Skoal, stringy brown and chicory scented. She laughed low. "I ain't betting on it. He lets them chickens get out on the hardroad, it's me and him when I run up with him again."

"Where are y'all from?"

"Up north Georgia way. Lil ole place by the name of Cartersville." She locked her lips to keep the wad on bottom in place. Then, "Chicken farming. Got four houses."

"They say there's money in that." Really Daff had no idea.

"Handle it right, they's money in it. Family looks to me for the biggest part of it." Like pulling a gun, her slim white hand with dirty, gnawed nails shot out towards the counter. "Name's Normal. Normal Wells."

Daff shook with her though she hated to. "Norma."

"Normal. N-O-R-M-A-L."

"Oh." Daff took back her hand, flattened it on the counter. "I'm Daffney Rowe. Daff for short. What everybody calls me." She was hoping for some explanation for the odd name Normal; she got it.

"How come them to go to calling me Normal..." She held up her right hand and dashed to the door, spitting out to one side, then back again. "When I was a sprout, little bitty thing, my folks was always telling people I was normal cause I wadn't. You know, I was into mischief and stuff, didn't cotton to being no sissy. Name was Norma so I went to calling myself Normal." She laughed, dashed to the door and spat again, booted foot hung just inside the door.

While she was out there, she checked for the chicken truck.

Inside again, she leaned on the counter, facing Daff, standing straight and stiff. This had to be the weirdest person Daff had ever met, and she'd met some weird ones. Her whole family was weird. She herself was weird, when it came right down to it.

"Well, I reckon I'll get on back out there. Wait for Mose. Hell, I was just messing with him, he knowed that." She swaggered toward the heavy double doors, shoved both back as far as they would go.

Before the doors could close, Daff heard her belting out a line from a popular rock song: "'Who let the dogs out? WHO! WHO! WHO!'"

"Mose, come on," Daff sang to herself, checking her watch. Fifteen till eleven and closing time.

Could she just leave this Normal waiting out front when she started home? She looked like she could handle herself, and besides nobody in Statenville would bother her. But a passing trucker might pick her up, crazy as she was, and then she would be in trouble.

There were no motels in town and short of calling up the sheriff, and letting him bed Normal down in the jail on the south end of the courtyard, there was nobody else to call for help. Christian as Mrs. Lane was, if Daff took Normal home with her, she'd probably report it to Charlie and Delia and they would make Daff move back home. Since his stroke, just prior to 9-11, Mr. Lane considered everybody a potential terrorist.

Daff could call Charlie and Delia and maybe they'd let Normal spend the night—what was one more body in a bed, one more mouth at the kitchen table? But they would only accuse Daff of hanging with the wrong kind, or as her family always joked, "Look what Daff drug up this time." And the truth was Daff had given her folks reason to doubt her judgment: In second grade, first day of school, she had followed a little gypsy girl home to her caravan in the woods on the west edge of town. When the school bus arrived at Daff's home on the south end of the county, and she didn't get off, Charlie and Delia had gone searching for her.

Somebody told them they'd seen her walking along the edge of the highway with the little girl belonging to a band of gypsies—pick-pockets and thieves—who had pitched camp not too far from the schoolhouse. When they found Daff, near sundown, she was wandering around the camp, going wagon to wagon with the little gypsy girl. What Daff recalled of the adventure was her new friend's sad dark eyes when nobody played with her at recess. She remembered the rich mixture of music and voices surrounding smoky fires at the camp, the black shellacs of the circled wagons, the bright colors of the gypsies' clothing, and best of all the jingling bells around the necks of handsome horses.

Try as she might, Daff couldn't go any deeper than that.

She shook her head, thinking how terrifying that must have been for her parents. But this was different; Normal was pitiful. Her trying to act brave and unconcerned after her sorry brother had left her was sad. Daff would have to take her home with her and hope the Lane's didn't find out.

The phone rang again and Daff hurried to the back of the store to answer it. Cassie again, wanting to know if the girl was still there, if the chicken truck had come back. "She's still here," Daff said. Then she told about her coming in to buy some Skoal.

"Skoal? Are you sure she's a girl?"

"Well, she dresses like a boy, but she's a girl."

Daff had been just about to tell Cassie about the girl's strange name and her wearing combat boots, but the fact that Daff herself was wearing combat boots too made her stop. Cassie had been scandalized by Daff's wearing combat boots in the school's beauty contest under a red-sequined pageant gown belonging to Cassie. Said she would never again wear that gown because Daff had cursed it with the boots. In Cassie's opinion, frankly stated, Daff in the boots looked like a lesbian. At Valdosta State University, Cassie would be called red-neck, homophobic, intolerant and shallow and superficial for going to beauty school. To Daff's way of thinking, those labels were just as intolerant. After the beauty contest—which by the way she had won—when time had passed and Daff was still stubbornly clinging to her "new look," plus a boyfriend, Cassie had relaxed her stance and grown close again, assuming, Daff guessed, that everybody would weigh the facts and figure that if Daff had a boyfriend she likely wasn't lesbian.

Well, the boyfriend, Tom-Tom, was on his way out. Actually he had been going for quite a while. His calls to the Delta had dwindled and Daff could count on her fingers the number of times he'd visited since she moved into the Lane's backyard. At first he'd seemed to think that Daff's being on her own, alone in the coffin-of-a-trailer, meant that he could come and go as he pleased, that S-E-X would be unconditional and free. But Mrs. Lane had seen to it that when he came "courting" the young couple would be required to watch TV news in the den with her and her husband. Mr. Lane's Lazy-boy recliner, set close to the TV, at low-volume, and Mrs. Lane in the chair next to the couch so that she could chaperone and make proper conversation while embroidering. Her motto: a proper lady never lets a silence drop.

Tom-Tom, star basketball player in high school, and still feeding off that image after graduation, had to sit with his white athletic shoes flat on the floor and his hands clasped between his long legs. Daff would sit next to him, but no making out, as they'd done all through high school. They had come so close to having sex in his pickup truck that it made Daff's eyebrows sweat just thinking about it. How close she had come to making the same mistake as her mother, winding up with two husbands and eight children—his, hers and theirs—broke and chasing after her lost looks, without which she could lose husband number-two. Daff did wonder though if she wasn't depriving herself of too much and one morning she might wake up and find herself as proper, self-conscious and dried-up as Mrs. Lane, who considered herself Daff's role model.

Outside Normal was shouting, outbursts of cursing and calling out to her brother in the long-gone chicken truck. Daff wondered if maybe she had that disease—what you call it? Tourette. She had heard of people doing that.

Finally it was eleven o'clock, closing time, and Daff switched off the lights inside, leaving on the frost-dimmed lights in the refrigerated cases in back and the strong lights at the gas pumps outside.

She went out the front and locked the doors, testing them before she started for the gas pumps and the girl sitting there, tobacco spit like wet wads of coffee grounds drying in on the asphalt.

Suddenly Daff was hot. The air was humid and dense with bugs and night sounds of humming electricity, dogs barking in the distance and muted voices from either TV or real. Smells of cooling asphalt, dirt and the green of trees were so familiar as not even to be, something forgotten or never known, unrecognizable and absorbed into place—home. She would never leave here. She could lie to herself and say she would, she could shame Tom-Tom for not moving on—college was for sissies, he said. There was nothing to keep either of them here, in Statenville, Echols County, 300,000 acres of trees but nothing, less than 3,000 people in the entire make-do county, and yet it was where she belonged and why she would come home to teach.

She'd have to reach deep inside to recall a sadness to equal her feelings for the freaky but pretty girl seated between the gas pumps with her back to Daff. Far from home and lonesome for her simple chicken farm and her family. That is, if she truly had family. Maybe the man in the chicken truck wasn't really her brother and she'd only been saying that for the sake of pride.

"I don't think he's coming back tonight," Daff said, standing before the slumped back of the girl, calm now, defeated.

She turned her head, face pale in the pale light. "Don't look like it, does it?"

Daff started to tell her to try the breezeway of the courthouse; sometimes they leave it open and she could sleep on the bench. But without thinking she said, "You can come home with me. That is, if you don't mind sleeping on my couch. Folks I rent from, a church deacon and his wife, are real picky, so you'll have to be quiet." Up close, the girl looked more like a misfit. She smelled of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. White chicken feathers and bugs were caught in the webbing of her long hair.

Daff laughed to hide her sadness, her pity. "Tomorrow, after your brother's had time to think about it, he'll be back."

"Yeah, I reckon." Normal stood, brushing the dirt from the seat of her jeans and the hard-shell night beetles from her shirt. The cuffs were unbuttoned and swallowed her hands. She set out walking beside Daff, crossing the street to the courthouse sidewalk and the harsher hum of the halogen lights overhead.

"My brother Bud and I fight sometimes."

"Yeah?" Normal sprang to her toes with every step.

"Well, he's kind of timid. Usually I boss him around. Trying to get him to go to college like me after he graduates next year."

"Don't look like they's no college around here to me." Normal gazed at the locked-down courthouse, the dark post office on the left side of 94, as they walked east. Boot soles scuffing on the sidewalk along the white pipe railing of the courthouse.

"No, I just live here because I always have, I guess. I go to college in Valdosta, a ways back behind us."

Dark facing frame houses stood each side of the highway. Night lights in the yards of every other house—neighbors shared on the extra charge to their electricity bills.

Normal spoke up in that gruff voice: "What's people do for fun around here?"

"Shh. They don't like to be woke up. People have been kind of edgy around here since 9-11. All that terrorists' stuff, you know?"

"Yeah, I heard about that."

For something to say, and hoping to get a little background on abnormal Normal, Daff asked, "Where were you when it happened?"

Normal stopped walking to think. Then, "I ain't got the slightest.'

Daff didn't believe that. She could ask anybody and they would immediately know where they were that contradictorily bright blue morning when the planes broke the Twin Towers into storm clouds and flying people instead of birds.

Dogs were barking in the black quarters behind the schoolhouse up ahead. Normal sang out, "`Who let the dogs out? WHO WHO WHO!'"

Normal was the loudest person she had ever heard. "You can't do that around here."

'Who says?"

Katydids keened in the live-oaks each side of the sidewalk.

"I say." Daff wished she'd never allowed this crazy girl to go home with her.

"Okay. Okay. Don't get your panties in a wad." Normal laughed, but she was speaking lower.

Mention of Daff's panties made her shrink. Not that she was afraid of the girl, but she sounded so vulgar and, truth be told, she wouldn't want to be seen with her in public and have people assume what they were bound to assume. All she wanted was to keep her life moving in a straight line till she could get out of college and start teaching and move out of the Lane's back yard.

Daff was sweating inside her jacket but she wouldn't take it off.

"Hey, a school house." Normal stopped on the sidewalk. "You go there?"

"Shh." They were at the side road where two doors down the Lanes lived. Most of the facing houses were dark, except for the bluish glow of TVs. Picture windows and crisscross sheer curtains. "I used to go there," Daff whispered, walking up the paved road on the left with Normal on her right. "I'm planning on teaching there once I get out of college."

"Hey, a teacher! Who'd of thought it."

Past the Baptist parsonage, a corner house with mown grass and swept dirt, Daff cut across the yard to the rear of the Lane's house. Everywhere were plastic or concrete statues of deer and chickens, even a small decorative windmills.

Lord, don't let anybody be up, Daff thought. Tomorrow she would get rid of Normal if she had to take her savings for college and buy a bus ticket home for her. Her small aluminum trailer glinted like a big egg in the yard light belonging to the preacher. Cut grass smelled like melon. Daff walked fast to keep Normal walking fast.

At the door to her trailer, Daff stepped up, springing wide the door and rankling the chain that prevented it from banging against the aluminum wall. The trailer was stuffy inside and hot as a tin can in the sunshine. But very neat. Smelled of Mrs. Lane's Nivea hand cream, always a sign that she'd been over during the day while Daff was gone.

She switched on the light to the left of the door and stepped inside.

Normal rocked the whole trailer as she stepped up. Then slammed the door shut.

"Hey," said Normal, "ain't you scared you'll tip this thing over?"

"I'll get you a shirt to sleep in."

"I'll just sleep in what I got on," Normal said.

Daff turned around and went to the other end of the trailer, bypassing Normal just standing in the doorway. She looked taller inside. And stranger. "I'd make you something to eat but lights have to be out in thirty minutes.

"Hope you don't mind sleeping on the couch there." Daff pointed at the nubby brown tweed couch with three brown gingham-checked pillows covered by Mrs. Lane.

"Don't mind if you don't." Normal plopped down on the couch with her legs spread and began unlacing her combat boots.

"I'll get you some sheets and a pillow," Daff said and headed for the built-in cupboard over her bed at the other end of the trailer. Everything was built-in, head-bumpers.

Normal had taken off her plaid shirt and was wearing a dingy white t-shirt, which revealed small unbound breasts. Her boots were off, squared at the door, and she was lying on the couch with her bare feet crossed at the ankles.

"Hey, this ain't bad, teach," she said. "Mighty white of you to let me sleep here."

She was talking too loud again.

"Tomorrow your brother will probably be back by, don't you think?"

"I don't think." Normal was talking too loud again, twitching her long toes with her arms thrown back and her head resting on them.

Daff took her the pillow and sheet. She was not absolutely sure—it could have been a shadow—but she thought she saw dark hair in Normal's armpits peeking from the sleeves of her shirt.

"Don't need no sheet, hot as it is in here." Normal was sweating, a fine mist on her fair forehead. When she reached out for the pillow, Daff saw a bruise-blue tatoo—"HELL RAISER" –on her upper right arm.

"I'll turn the fan on you." Daff was allowed to use a fan. Mrs. Lane said just to be sure to turn it off when she left the trailer.

She turned the floor fan on, adjusting it to blow on Normal, and then headed for the closet-sized bathroom to get ready for bed. In the mirror with fading filigreed gold leaves, her face was white, and she had dark circles under her eyes. "My Lord!" she whispered. "I've got to get rid of her."

She started to take a shower, but decided against it. She had only about fifteen minutes before lights-out. Besides, the door slid into and out of the wall and there was no knob or lock. She washed her face instead, drying it and sliding open the door. "Bathroom's in here if you need to go," she said, "but make it quick."

"Naw," Normal said loud, to be heard over the fan," I peed out behind the store a while ago."

Daff turned off the light to keep her from talking, then turned back the spread on her own bed and lay down easy.

Light from the preacher's yard shone through the high jalousie window above her bed. She tried not to breathe.

Tomorrow she had promised to work from eight AM till end of the shift for the other clerk whose baby was sick. If Normal's brother didn't come by before she knocked off work, Daff was definitely going to give her the money to get home on. Daff would get somebody in Statenville to drive her to the bus station in Valdosta, about a half-hour away.

When she woke up, first thing she saw was Normal sitting on the couch with her hands dangling between her spread knees, watching Daff sleep. Her head was low and she was gazing up in that way that a man looks out of his eyes.

Daff closed her eyes tight. This couldn't be happening. She could hear the toilet tank continuously refilling, meaning it was stuck and she needed to get up and tamp the handle to drop the float in the tank. This was a no-no, according to Mrs. Lane. How long since Normal used the toilet? Daff wondered; it was scary thinking that she had been unaware of Normal so close while she slept.

In a few seconds she heard her slipping on her boots. Daff opened her eyes, peeping at Normal as she stood and stomped her feet down inside them. Dishes clattered in the kitchen cabinet and the whole trailer shook. She sat and laced her boots, then stood again, stomping, looking down at her feet like a soldier getting set for inspection.

Daff was just about to sit up when Normal stepped to the window facing the back of the Lanes' statue-decorated lawn and neat brick house. Pulling one of the curtains aside, the bottom half embroidered with flowers. Then she threw open the door and stood looking out.

Daff hated to say it. She had to. "Normal, you can't part the curtains. Mrs. Lane said leave em like they are."

Daff had not been allowed to touch the white café curtains since she had accidentally left one pulled aside one day, not knowing the rules about keeping them even so that they would look nice from outside.

"You're kidding!"

"I can get kicked out if you touch the curtains."

"Well I bedogged!"

Daff went over the rules with her, just in case she had to stay another night: Don't touch the curtains, turn off the fan and the lights, readjust the float in the toilet tank so that water doesn't run through and waste. No cooking and no leftovers in fridge. No music or loud talking. Lights out by eleven PM.

There was more but Daff didn't go into the rest because Normal's eyes had glazed over.

When Daff came out of the bathroom, dressed for work, she was shocked to see the front door open and sunshine pouring into the tiny living room. She was more shocked to find Normal leisurely whittling a Popsicle stick while sitting on the doorstep.

Motioning her back inside and closing the door easy, Daff whispered a warning: "You can't be seen here, understand?"

Brushing wood curls from her brown plaid shirt, Normal nodded, whispering, "Sorry, teach." Then, still whispering, Daff told her to stay inside till she saw Daff pick up the Lane's newspaper from their side yard and go around to the front door. She explained that she would distract them with talk of Anthrax till Normal could slip out and head on toward the Delta to wait for her brother.

The couple had become so terrified of exposure to Anthrax, they had started letting Daff pick up their mail, as well as their newspaper. Also, they let Daff drive them in their long blue Buick to Valdosta for groceries on her afternoons off from work at the Delta.

So far their newspaper was uncontaminated. They could be grateful for that. And as Mrs. Lane had pointed out to her wispy, anxious husband, a newspaper was so sterile you could wrap a newborn baby up in it without fear of germs.

Normal rimmed inside her mouth with her tongue. "I have a question."

"What?"

"How will I see you if I can't part the curtains or step out the door?"

Chapter 2

Daff walked faster, coming up on the small red-brick Methodist Church and the highway intersection, and then crossed over to the sidewalk along the white courtyard railing. Beyond the crossing and the blinking red light, she could see Normal leaning near the right of the store doors, one boot sole braced on the wall behind her. Waiting on the chicken truck.

The sun slanted and blazing on her made her look sharper, shabbier.

A small red pickup and an old green car were parked one each side of the gas pumps. Eyes on the misfit by the door.

Done gassing up his truck, a young man in a cap nodded to Normal while taking his wallet from his hip pocket and passing through the door.

Already thirty minutes late, Daff had to wait on the hot asphalt on the shoulder of 129 for a northbound semi to brake and slow at the red light, then ratchet gears and speed up on the slope at Troublesome Creek.

Normal now stood just across the highway, gazing south with her fingers slid in the pockets of her tight faded blue jeans. No sign of the chicken truck, so again she took to her post, right side of the door. Booted foot back, propped against the white concrete-block wall.

Daff would have to feed her. She'd never felt so sorry for anybody in her life.

The woman from the green car was still pumping gas, while two children inside tumbled over the seats, bouncing and laughing. "Don't knock over my pocketbook," the mother yelled at them.

Gas fumes rose in the heat, a heady smell mixed with the tar of broiling asphalt.

One of the children knocked over the woman's pocketbook on the front seat, and all hell broke loose, as the woman yanked open the driver's door and began slapping at them while gathering up change and lipstick, records of immunizations and other proof that they were legalized humans with potential to be civilized.

Normal spat tobacco juice off to one side.

"He'll be on soon," Daff said to Normal and passed through the door, freezing coming in out of the June heat.

Charlotte Parker, the usual morning clerk, was standing behind the counter, ringing up the young man's gas, a yellow cigarette lighter and two lottery tickets.

The stale refrigerator case reeked, a smell that Daff had come to associate with air conditioning.

As soon as the young man left, Charlotte asked what Daff thought the boy by the door was up to.

"He's a she," Daff said.

Charlotte leaned into the window for a better view. She had dyed black, permed hair and a flat face.

"Had a fight with her brother last night and got out of their chicken truck. He'll be back by for her today, on his way home from Florida to North Georgia."

Charlotte, eager to be gone, didn't ask any more questions. So, Daff didn't offer more information.

After Charlotte and the lady at the pump had gone, Daff went to the wall of lit refrigerator cases, at the back of the store. She took out a ham and cheese sandwich in a hard cellophane pack and a 7-Up. Normal just looked like the type who would drink 7-Up.

On the south wall was a microwave, cups and coffeemaker. Daff heated the sandwich for 15 seconds, and then carried it and the drink out to Normal still standing by the door.

"No sign of him yet?" Daff knew that was a stupid question, but she could think of nothing else to say while she handed Normal the sandwich and drink.

"Thanks," Normal said. She looked worried, loose-limbed and awkward, all funny business aside.

"Maybe you oughta call your mother and daddy. Let them send you some money for a bus ticket home."

"Nah," she said, chomping down on the sandwich. "They'd just say Wait on Mose."

"Okay," Daff said, going back inside. "You get too hot out here come on in."

Actually Normal wouldn't stand out like a tough security guard if she'd come inside to wait. Still, Daff didn't want her inside alone with her, which she supposed might make them look more like girlfriends, or whatever, two women together, you know, would call themselves.

Daff was mopping spilled coffee from some accident before she got there, when Normal pushed open the door and shouted, "Hey, teach!"

Daff thought surely Normal's brother had shown up at first.

"Back here," she said, peeping over the shelves of expensive canned meats: potted meat, corned beef, Vienna sausages—salt and fat.

Normal was holding open the door to show she wasn't coming in and getting in the way. She had taken off her long-sleeved shirt and was wearing only her white T-shirt; it was wet with sweat. "You got any Windex and a rag I can borry?"

"What for?"

"To clean these doors and windows, "she said. "They're a mess."

"They won't pay you." They was a he, manager of the store, but Daff always thought of the pale, lardy district manager of the Delta chain as a they. He acted like he owned the entire Delta chain.

Through the door to the storage room, to the right of the refrigerator cases, stacked boxes of soft drinks stood along one wall. Next to the stack was the bucket with dirty mop water and a roller on top for squeezing the heavy mop.

She took an old ripped T-shirt from the top of a cardboard box and a bottle of blue window cleaner, an off-brand, and took both to the door, opened it and handed the cleaner and the rag to Normal. Felt like a hundred degrees outside.

Every time Daff looked up she could see Normal through the window, spraying glass and wiping. She looked like she was waving.

A two-ton truck pulled up to the pumps and they both stopped and looked. Not the chicken truck.

Daff headed to the front of the store to switch on the gas pump.

By one o'clock, two more customers had been by and Normal was done cleaning all the windows and doors and was drinking water from the green garden hose on the grassy south side of the store. Then, she began spraying down the asphalt between the front door and pump islands with water. White chicken feathers rolled into wet duff. Two boys on bicycles passed and she sprayed water on them. They turned and looked curiously back at her, but in a few minutes they were back for more spraying. Other children on bicycles joined the boys, circling and laughing while Normal, laughing also, showered them like playful animals. Finally, she held the nozzle over her own head and drenched her hair and shirt.

Made Daff shiver it was so cold inside.

Next thing, Normal, wet all over, was picking up the change tossed at the gas pumps; pinching Skoal between her thumb and first finger and doping her bottom lip.

Four o'clock, and still no chicken truck, and Normal was still making herself useful, Windexing customers' windshields. A couple tipped her, probably with the same change they would have tossed anyway.

Local people who knew Daff would ask who she was. Daff told the story of Normal and her brother's fight, sparing details, over and again. She felt guilty for not mentioning that the girl was now her responsibility, like a dropped-off dog. She was quite sure now that the brother had taken a different route home, that he had no intention of coming back for his abnormal sister.

Between customers, Normal popped the wipe rag in the hot air between the gas pumps and the front of the store. The water had evaporated from the asphalt except for a few puddles skinning over with oil.

Later still, Normal sat on the curb of the gas island and whittled on a small wood paint paddle lost from a customer's car. Looked like a dagger or stake to drive through a witch's heart, or a brother's.

Daff rang up a ham and cheese sandwich, a pack of barbeque chips and a Coke, plus the sandwich and 7-Up she'd taken out to Normal that morning. Then she took a ten dollar bill from her pocket and put it in the cash register, taking from it her change. She sat on the high wooden stool behind the counter, eating and watching Normal whittle with her wet, bedraggled ponytail turned in Daff's direction.

The sun had now slid to the backside of the building and the front was in the shade.

Face it, Daff, she thought, this girl is going back home with you. The brother's not coming back

***The Lanes had gone to prayer meeting when Daff got home with Normal.

On the oval white table in the trailer's kitchen there was a broccoli-chicken casserole with cheap, pale melted cheese and a white acorn-patterned plate of fudge brownies in tiny squares, covered with stretched-tight cellophane.

The trailer was so hot that Daff and Normal could barely breathe. The breath from the floor fan felt driven from an oven.

Sitting at the table in the quiet heat, they drank sweet tea from Mrs. Lane and ate the bland casserole, then the brownies, down to the bottom of the plate.

Normal was silent, brooding. Daff thought she was the most thrown-away person in the world. She could smell her swampy underarms and her sour damp clothes.

"Why don't you take a shower and I'll slip over to Mrs. Lane's and take these dishes back? Put your clothes in her dryer, for you." Daff wouldn't have time to wash the clothes before the Lane's got back from prayer meeting

Normal went into the tiny bathroom, slid the door shut, then in a minute or so, she parted the door and pitched the wet stinking clothes out and turned on the shower.

In the Lane's neat white kitchen with its purring white refrigerator, Daff stuck Normal's clothes in the dryer and added three perfumed dryer sheets. While the clothes dried she washed the casserole and white dish, and then rinsed away all traces of the cheese sauce and crumbs in the stainless steel sink. She dried the dishes till they shined; she always did this even knowing that Mrs. Lane would re-wash and polish the dishes after Daff was gone. It was just the right thing to do. Usually she put each dish up in the proper cupboards, but this time she was leaving them out on the counter to show she hadn't been sneaking around the Lanes' house and them gone. Also, more importantly, Mrs. Lane wouldn't be coming over to the trailer on the excuse of picking up the dishes and find Normal there.

When the clothes were dry, Daff took them back to her trailer and placed them by the bathroom door, along with a pair of her own clean white panties. She had forgotten that Normal would have to wait in the stifling bathroom until Daff got back with her clothes. Daff was so grateful, yet guilt-stricken, for Normal's silence and modesty that she could have cried. She seemed almost normal, she was so quiet. She didn't touch the curtains, she tapped the handle on the toilet to keep the water from running through; she didn't make a peep.

She was sitting on the couch with her elbows on her knees, head hung, peering up when Daff got out of the shower.

"Tomorrow," Daff said. "He'll come tomorrow."

"You wouldn't have a radio handy, would you?"

Daff was standing there in grey jersey shorts and T shirt. "I don't. Sorry."

"Thought I'd check on the weather. This heat'll kill the chickens if Mose and them don't run up the air in the houses."

Really, she was a good person, thought Daff, worried about her chickens. "I'd go over and get today's newspaper form the Lanes but they're due back anytime."

Normal stood, walked over to the window, started to part the bottom tier of curtains, but peeped over instead.

"They'll charge me extra for rent if they know you're staying here," said Daff. She couldn't tell Normal that her parents would make her move back home for breaking rules and hanging with the wrong kind of people—again.

Normal looked at Daff, then went back to the couch and lay flat on her back, fully dressed, long-sleeved shirt included. She crossed her long white feet, one atop the other.

"Normal, I'll get you a pair of my shorts to sleep in if you want me to."

She twitched her toes. "Me in shorts? Huh uh."

Whine of fan. Lights out.
Chapter 3

Thursday morning, and again Daff distracted the Lanes till Normal could sneak out of the trailer and head to the Delta to wait on the chicken truck.

Tall, slim and neat in navy pants with an elastic waist, a white knit shirt and furry pink slippers, Mrs. Lane met Daff at the front door with the newspaper in its protective plastic sheath.

"Hot already, my gracious!" Mrs. Lane stood holding to the heavy wood door and reached out to Daff for the paper.

Usually she stepped aside and let Daff go on into the dim hall. A framed picture of a bouquet of pink flowers hung above a small brown table and on the table an exact plastic arrangement of the bouquet.

"This heat's rough on my poor lil ole geraniums," she said in a baby voice as she stepped out on the red-painted concrete stoop and began plucking dead leaves from the plants in clay pots.

Any minute now, Normal would come loping around the south side of the house and be caught.

Daff talked loud to signal Normal that the coast wasn't clear. "That casserole was mighty good, Mrs. Lane. And the brownies."

"You must've been some kind of hungry." Mrs. Lane laughed and fluffed her short gray-brown curls.

"Who's that at the door, Mildred?" Mr. Lane called from the kitchen on the back.

"It's just Daphany," she called inside. Then low to Daff, "He's all up in the air over this Anthrax business. Watched the news channel till way out in the night. Of course, it's terrorists."

"Yes, ma'am." Daff started down the red-painted concrete doorsteps to make her go inside.

"Nobody in the US of A would do anything like that. I feel sorry for those people in NY, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am." Daff longed to look up and around the corner of the house but was too terrified that she would see Normal hiking out from the trailer across the preacher's yard.

Earlier, she had seen his dumpy wife out watering her tomato hills in the garden plot between their house and the other neighbor's.

"Well," said Mrs. Lane, "it's good to live in a peaceful place and not have to worry about terrorists."

"Who's that at the door, Mildred?"

***When Daff got to the sidewalk, straight stretch to the Delta, she could see Normal trooping ahead, almost to the Methodist Church, like she was off to work and late.

This had to be the day. She had to go. She couldn't keep staying at the store and at Daff's trailer.

In front of the post office, Daff saw the same woman in the old green car who had bought gas yesterday. Used to, Daff knew everybody in the county, but since high school it was as if new people were always moving in.

The woman, with blue-veined legs in thin yellow-checked shorts, started to go into the post office, leaving her two skint-head little boys in the car. Spying Daff, she waited. "Since when did Delta start hiring somebody to clean windshields?" she asked.

Daff didn't answer, made to walk away.

"Course it's another job created by the govermunt for minorities. Bet they made the owner hire that." She butted her head in the direction of the Delta, where same as yesterday, Normal stood to the right of the double doors.

A blonde teenage boy on a bicycle, whizzed past. "Hey, Daffodill," he called out to Daff.

Daff had gone to high school with his sister Suzy and used to when her parent's would let her, she would spend the night after basketball games at Suzy's house because she lived in town. Daff's mother and daddy would always come up with some reason not to let her stay overnight with friends—find something wrong. And this brother only ten then, had been it. He had been caught breaking into the public library, on the southwest corner of the courtyard square, to retrieve a book in which he'd accidentally left a note card with dirty words written on it. The sheriff, whose office was across the gravel road from the library, had caught Casey trying to jimmy the lock on the back door, said Casey was the first kid ever caught breaking into the library to steal a book. He'd better come up with a better excuse, said the sheriff. So, Casey had confessed about the note card with dirty words written on it. As it turned out, once the news was all over town, he had written what he'd like to do to Daffodil and it wasn't kissing.

Word got back to Daff's mother and daddy and when they confronted Casey's really cool mom, she defended him. Said he was just being a boy and had no intention of doing what he'd written. He was only fooling around with words.

All was forgiven till the next row between Delia and Daff. Then mother accused daughter of using poor judgment in the matter by being too quick to forgive "the little pervert." And what about the time Daff dove off the river bridge? Jumped, Daff corrected. But Delia was off and running, going down a list of her daughter's risk-takings.

If they found out about Normal, that example of risk-taking and using poor judgment would be at the top of the list.

The gas pump area was vacant and hot, but Normal still stood there, waiting for a customer. Rag and window cleaner in hand.

"Normal," Daff said, walking across the blistering asphalt, "I think you'd better quit cleaning windshields for tips. I'm afraid I'll get in trouble with the boss."

"You kidding, right?"

"No." Daff rattled the ring of keys in her hand as she unlocked the door and went inside.

Following her, Normal said, "You must have to write all this stuff down."

"How come you to say that?"

"All these rules." Normal's voice switched to mocking: "Don't touch the curtains, don't let the water run through the toilet. Turn off the fan, turn off the lights." She threw up her hands.

It made Daff mad, after all she'd been through for Normal. "I tell you what, I think you'd better call up your folks and have them send you some money for a bus ticket home."

"Yes, ma'am." Normal saluted her.

Daff was glad she was mad; it made things easier. She should have done it before. "You got change for the phone call?" Daff pointed at the glass booth in front of the courthouse. "Have them wire it to Mailboxes Etc in Valdosta and I'll have the woman who works with me take you in to get it and catch the bus."

Normal handed Daff the rag and window cleaner. She stuck her hands in her pockets, rattling change. "I got change." She started out the door, but then stepped back. "It's like they're all trying to stomp a rat, the same rat that keeps getting away. And guess who the rat is? You, teach." She slapped through the door and loped off across the highway with her head high.

Daff was unlocking the cash register when she saw Normal through the window walking fast and stiff, back across the highway. She'd been gone all of five minutes, which Daff guessed was time enough to get the message across to her folks in Cartersville.

Again, Normal sat on the curb out front, whittling on a small chunk of wood Daff couldn't identify; off and on all day, talking to drivers of trucks, heading north. Asking if they'd seen Mose, the brother, Daff guessed.

Her friend Nina dropped by later that morning. She was on her way to Valdosta with her mother to be fitted for her wedding dress. Again. She'd come by for a Coke—she couldn't live without her Cokes. She had been trying to lose weight for her wedding, but so far, no luck, she said. She was pretty, shapely, and stylish. In Daff's opinion, she didn't need to lose weight, but Daff had never known a bride who didn't want to lose weight for her wedding.

Daff listened to her talk about her wedding—truly goofy stuff, like getting fake nails, like exact up-dos for all the bridesmaids; body-shapers under every dress. On and on.

"When do you plan to get measured for your dress?" Nina bent at the waist, flipping her thick brown hair toward the floor, and shook it like a rug.

"We've got another two months."

She slung her head back, her hair sliding like silk into place. "Daff, please don't wait till the last minute, pretty please. I'll be a wreck." She was wearing a brown sundress with spaghetti straps and brown sandals with thin high heels.

Daff had an important announcement. She'd put it off about as long as she should, but she still couldn't bring herself to tell Nina that she couldn't be in the wedding. She didn't have the money for the bridesmaid dress, for one thing. For another, she didn't have the time, or the dressy clothes, for all the bridal events. These things had gotten out of hand. She simply could not understand why anybody would pay a fortune and work so hard to be perfect for one perfect day, then wake up the next and the next, ever after, to what would be merely ordinary days.

"And don't even think about wearing those dumb boots." Nina laughed, pushing through the door with her Coke. But Daff knew she meant it. Watching her get into her mother's car out front, and seeing the top of Normal's head above the bottom edge of the window, it struck Daff that Nina, unlike everybody else in town, had walked right past Normal without even seeing her. But neither had she once mentioned Carl, the groom-to-be.

Around noon, Daff got a pimento cheese sandwich and a 7-Up from the cooler and carried it out to Normal.

Looking down at her whittling—the wood now nothing but a chipped cube—she shook her head no before Daff could ask the usual.

Daff placed the drink and the sandwich on the curb beside her. "What did your folks say?"

Still looking down, sweat on her upper lip and it quivering, she said, "They wadn't home."

After Normal had finished the drink and sandwich, she set out across the highway again, went into the phone booth, leaning up with her back turned to Daff watching from the Delta window.

The last Daff saw of Normal that day, she was standing on the northeast corner of the crossing, in front of the closed-down garage, hitchhiking with her thumb out, backing toward the dip at Troublesome Creek, when a semi passed. A little white dog with a brown patch over one eye was following her.

Daff was ringing up milk and lottery tickets for a customer, and when she looked out again, Normal was gone, the dog was gone.

Daff thought maybe Normal's brother had come back by for her. Or maybe her folks had driven down from Cartersville to get her. Either way, Daff was glad she was gone, relieved to be alone in her little hot trailer and have the floor fan all to herself. But she couldn't help worrying that Normal had hitched a ride with somebody who could do her harm.

***She was late going to work the next morning, Friday, having taken the Lanes their newspaper and listened to the latest TV news about terrorists and Anthrax.

Walking fast toward the crossing, along the side walk, under the row of huge live oaks, the insides of her fingers grew warm and tingled. She could not believe her eyes.

Beyond the Methodist Church and then the post office, she could see somebody sitting on a yellow crate in front of the old garage on the corner of the crossing.

It could only be Normal.

Getting closer she saw the little white dog from yesterday sprawled on the apron of concrete at her feet.

So, she was still here.

Daff started to cross over to the courtyard sidewalk as usual and pretend she hadn't seen Normal, but she decided that was silly and unfriendly. After all, Normal had done nothing to offend her. Besides, for all Daff knew, she could be hungry. Had she slept last night in the old garage? Today, Normal's folks would probably wire her some money for a bus ticket home.

Normal had a dip of Skoal, and every now and then she would spit. The dog's ears twitched at a fly, but he slept on, paws out before him.

"Hot, ain't it?" Normal said, looking up at Daff with hooded gray eyes. Her skin looked pure and poreless in the sunlight.

"I thought you were gone. I..."

"Nope. Still here." Normal slapped her knees in blue jeans. Then yawned.

"Where did you sleep last night?"

Normal pointed over her right shoulder with her thumb at the garage with broken windows and patching of corrugated tin sheets.

"I'm sorry." Daff felt especially guilty about the floor fan.

"Hey, you ain't responsible for me." She crossed her arms in a huff. "What you sorry for?"

"What about your folks? What did they say?"

The dog let out a puff of air like a sigh. The brown patched eye opened, then closed.

"I ain't got em yet. They're gone. They do that sometimes."

"You still have some change for a phone call?"

Normal reared back and slapped her pockets, wad of tobacco in her lip, both boots flat on the sloping concrete. "Yep. Just waiting for the phone booth." She butted her head in the direction of the phone booth where a young man stood inside.

"You need to eat," Daff said. "Come on over and let me get you something."

"Done eat, teach. But I thank you all the same." She spat to her right, away from Daff and the dog. "You get any scraps though, my old dog here could do with some." Normal scratched the twitching ear of the dog. The dog snapped at a buzzing fly.

The man in the phone booth, turned facing Normal and Daff, was still talking. Leaning on the wall with one hand pressed against the glass. The flattened flesh of his palm and fingers were yellow and magnified.

If Normal had eaten already, Daff couldn't imagine what. Cars and trucks passed on the way to post office and the courthouse, people staring out at Daff, Normal and the dog.

After opening the Delta, during a break between customers, Daff crossed over to the canned meats' shelf and took a can of corned beef, two cans of Vienna sausages, and two cans of tuna. On the shelf near the rear, she took a loaf of fluffy white bread and some saltines, then a five pound bag of dry dog food stood along the rear of the store wall.

Punching in the prices at the cash register, she found that the total was $12.06 with taxes. She would have to write a check from her money market account, but that was okay. Somehow the groceries made her feel absolved of guilt, blameless and redeemed for having enjoyed the fan and her solitude. She hated Normal's brother. Beat the heck out of hating herself.

The phone booth was empty now, the man gone, his pickup gone. But Normal still sat with her elbows on her knees, the sleeping dog at her feet, watching traffic and the people inside their automobiles watching her.

The old garage had been built in two connected sections, the rear part possibly tacked on after the tall, angular front had been built. The back was more of a two-room apartment, where various people had lived at various times. To the right of the garage, out front, a tin shelter covered the concrete up to a strip of high grass and weeds between the entire building and the post office next door. The concrete flared out to Highway 94 on front and 129 on the west side. Behind the building more weeds and high grass led down to Troublesome Creek, a gorge of thick vines, trees, reeds and elephant ears the size of real elephants' ears. Inside the garage, half-painted in greasy blues, and the apartment overlooking the Creek, was stored junk belonging to the owner who lived in a fine house near the school house. Maybe a bed, some furniture—who knew what-all?

Actually, the garage had stood there so long that Daff, and probably others, had ceased to see it. It was just landscape, foreground for Troublesome Creek, so named for a troublesome gang of sawmill workers who almost a century ago would get drunk while playing poker at the camp there and the sheriff and sawmill owner would have to go in and break them up. Another back-story on the Creek, this by Mrs. Lane, the teacher, was that before U.S. Highway 129 was paved, heavy rains would wash across the dip in the road and cause wagons, and later automobiles, to have to detour or risk getting stuck or washed away.

Daff, crossing the street, knew Normal couldn't stay at the garage long, and in all likelihood she would have to let her stay with her again. For now though—today—Daff could rest easy knowing Normal had a place to stay and something to eat.

She shifted the paper sacks in her arms.

Normal sat straight, coming out of what appeared to be a deep study, watching her cross the highway.

Daff set the bags on the grease-spotted concrete next to Normal's crate.

Instead of a thank you, Normal said, "Teach, what do all these people do for a living around here?"

"Mostly the men farm or pulpwood, logging, you know. Women teach or work at the school lunchroom or the courthouse. Some work in town, Valdosta." Daff pointed west toward the Alapaha River bridge, white concrete aglitter in the faint morning sun. "Valdosta's about thirty miles from here. Mostly they're housewives, what you're seeing this time of morning."

"I ain't afraid of a little hard work. I could work in the pulpwoods. Might be I could open this garage. Got tools in there and everything; I could rent out this place and start mechanicking."

Daff didn't tell her that the pulpwooders wouldn't hire her, not and her a girl. "I've got to get back over there." Daff nodded toward the Delta and a pickup parked at the gas pumps. The driver, a heavy-set man wearing a cap, stood waiting for her to come switch on the pump.

"This is the nosiest bunch of people I've ever seen," said Normal.

Like everybody driving past, the man was eyeing Normal and Daff like a circus sideshow.

"Hey," he called out to Daff as she trotted across the street and bypassed him on the way into the store. "Who's that over there at Abe Guess's garage?"

"A girl from up in North Georgia. Had a fight with her brother the other night and got out here. In the chicken business."

"Don't look like no girl to me. But these days you can't tell." He placed a hand on the gas nozzle stuck in his gas tank.

After he'd filled up his truck and come inside to pay, he said, "I was you, I'd be careful of that gal over there. Looks suspicious to me."

"Her folks are going to wire her some money to get home on."

"Still and all, could be she's on the run from the law."

When Daff looked outside again, Normal and the dog were gone, but the yellow plastic milk crate was still there.

A couple of boys, out of school for the summer, were walking slowly in the high green grass between the garage and the post office, heading for either the back of the garage or Troublesome Creek.

The dog began barking at them and ran out the open garage door. Normal appeared on the sheltered slab where autos used to park to be worked on. "'Who let the dogs out? Who, who who'!" she sang out, laughing, with her hands each side of her mouth to help carry the sound of her rough voice.

The boys scattered in the direction of the post office, then east up the sidewalk.

No, Normal would have to find another place to stay. She was now the object of everybody's imagination. Before 9-11, last September, she may have been welcome, but now she was the snake in the chicken yard after everybody's eggs. No, snakes weren't wanted in this town.

After noon, Normal moved her crate out of the sun to the garage shelter, next to the post office. It was so hot that hardly anybody in Statenville was out. Even the children, who often skated or rode bikes on the sidewalk around the courtyard, were staying inside or out in their yards playing under water sprinklers.

Taking a break and eating an egg salad sandwich brought from Mrs. Lane's, Daff watched Normal across the street.

Soon, she went inside the garage, and then came out with two plastic gallon jugs held by the handles in each hand.

Dog waggling behind, she crossed under the blinking red light, walking diagonally toward the Delta. Seeing Daff through the window as she passed along the front, she lifted a jug in greeting. Around the south side of the store, she disappeared.

Daff could hear over the air conditioner's racket the splashing of water at the spigot, the jugs filling.

And then she saw her daddy's brown and tan converted van appear from behind the red-brick Masonic building and coast to a stop on the asphalt strip, store-side of the gas pumps.

Her mother on the driver's side was sitting high, her long bleached hair like a light. Daff's daddy was a head shorter and wore his brown hair in bangs, which made him look sweet and boyish, more like Delia's son than her husband.

Getting out of the van, Delia closed the door and stood there, adjusting the waist band of her white shorts. Her legs were very tan, a baked brown extending to her feet in black thong sandals. She was a white-shorts woman in summer and a blue-jeans woman in winter.

Charley, in long green shorts and a Hawaiian print shirt, came walking around the other side of the truck and fell in step with his wife. Headed for the Delta's doors they almost collided with Normal rounding the corner with her jugs of water held out for balance and her little dog trotting at her heels.

"Thanks, teach," she yelled at Daff in the window.

Charlie and Delia just stood there, watching as Normal passed on across the highway, underneath the red light, then they walked on over and pushed through the doors.

"Who is that?" asked Charlie.

Daff started to tell them the same story she'd told the man getting gas that morning, but instead said, "Just some stranger passing through."

Her daddy stood at the door, peering out at Normal going through the side door of the garage with the dog and the jugs. "What's his name?" he asked without looking at his wife or Daff, his innocent little girl.

"I don't know." No way was Daff about to tell them that the boy was a girl with the iffy name of "Normal."

"Cute kid, looks to be about Bud's age. Wouldn't you say?" Delia was standing at the counter, fingering a half-box full of colorful cigarette lighters.

Daff walked around and hugged her mama, who hugged her back. She looked lumpy but felt solid, hard-muscled.

"Hot isn't it, Mama?" Daff said.

"Not in here, it's not." Delia chuckled, cutting her pale eyes around to take in the whole store as if searching for something or somebody. "The house is where it's hot at," she said, skimming her sheer hair off her jointed neck. "Been putting up corn."

Charlie, done with checking out Normal, placed his hands in his shorts pockets rattling knife, change, nuts and bolts from his tractor.

Locking her arms around his neck, Daff said, "We need rain, don't we, Big Ears?" She laughed and kissed him on his left ear. He had huge ears that stuck out; she loved his ears. When she was little she used to play with them while sitting behind him on the fender of his tractor as he drove along the timber tracts near their house.

"I mean!" he said. "How's my big girl?" he added.

"Good, been doing good. Working hard though." Daff stepped around to the other side of the counter.

"And the Lanes," said Delia. "How're they doing?"

"You know them," Daff answered, making a face.

"He's had a time of it since his stroke. They both have."

The corn-freckles on Delia's face made Daff feel guilty for not helping her put up corn, as she'd always done. Like a bitch in heat, the corn would come in and go out within a few days, so there was always a rush from garden to house to blanching pot.

"Tom-Tom stopped by the other night..."

Daff wondered whether she would like Tom-Tom more if her parents liked him less. She wondered if she would be less apt to dress for shock-effect—the boots and camo jacket she was now wearing, for example—if they didn't view it as another form of misbehaving. She could look prettier, more feminine; with a bit of makeup and some dangly earrings, she could sparkle. But for now she didn't care to sparkle. They were always threatening to make her move back home if she didn't "behave."

Misbehaving could stretch to mean anything. And though Daff was nineteen years old and making her own way, she still felt like their property, while at the same time feeling she'd squared with them: all through high-school she had raised show hogs and cows for 4-H and FFA clubs to earn money. She'd gone to church with her folks and worked in the fields alongside her younger brother Bud. The irony was, whenever it suited their side of the argument, they would always bring up the fact that she was a girl and that was why she couldn't go out on Saturday nights with her friends. A girl couldn't go swimming with the boys in the community. A girl should be married by the time she was twenty.

Tom-Tom, the part-time boyfriend, was their only hope. Only Tom-Tom seemed willing to put up with Daff's over-statements, her misbehaving.

Charlie stepped up next to Delia and leaned into the counter with her. "We don't get to see enough of you. Why don't I send Bud to get you this weekend and we'll put something on the grill?"

"Bring that boy over there with you," said Delia, cutting her eyes around again. "We'll feed him. He can fool around with Bud a while."

"Try this egg salad, y'all." Daff passed across a triangle-cut half of the sandwich. "Mrs. Lane makes the best egg salad."

Her mother, holding the sandwich, bit into it, then held it for Charlie to take a bite.

"I used to be a fool about egg salad," said Delia, dabbing at the corners of her thin wrinkled lips with the tip of a finger. She got the lip wrinkles from smoking; before she quit, she seemed unable to speak without a cigarette.

A terrible hammering sound was going on at the old garage.

Charlie and Delia turned, watching through the double glass doors. The light from outside shined through Charlie's ears.

Normal stepped out of the garage, shaking what looked like a rug.

"Looks like he's setting up housekeeping over there," Charlie said to Delia.

"Well, I wish him all the luck." Delia spoke to Daff again. "That place's a mess."

""Now I've got a better look," said Charlie, "looks like he's a she—something about her shape from the back, you know?"

"Mr. Guess wouldn't of rented out that place to one of them, Charlie." Delia was eyeing Daff for confirmation.

"She's human as you, Mama." Daff suddenly felt angry, awakened from the dull stupor her parents always inflicted on her.

"Don't tell me you're buddying with her."

"Delia, y'all," Charlie raised both hands in the air, "before you get going good, let me get my lottery tickets."

"Judge not lest ye be judged." Daff couldn't believe she was saying that.

Charlie dug in his pockets for some doubled dollar bills, while Daff juggled the bible drill with ringing up the tickets. He was outside now, lost and alone.

Delia: "You're siding with her because she dresses like a freak, like you."

"Kiss for luck, sugar." Charlie held one ticket up for Delia to kiss, then the other.

"Well, maybe I don't like the way you dress either. Shorts and jeans at your age."

"You could do something with your hair."

"You could do something with your hair."

"Don't get ugly, y'all," Charlie interrupted. "Talk!"

"Yeah, talk," said Daff, knowing she shouldn't say what she was about to say, but all their arguments wrapped up this way and she was eager to wrap up. "Talk to me about who my and Bud's real daddy is."

"Charlie."

"You know what I mean."

"Charlie." Delia wouldn't let her stare drift, but Daff could tell she wanted to. She always did.

"I don't know why y'all even come." Exasperated, and ashamed, Daff covered her face with her hands.

Normal's dog started barking across the way.

She sang out, "'Who let the dogs out? Who who who!'"

***On the way home from work, about seven that evening, Daff made a point of walking along the courthouse sidewalk, rather than crossing over and having to talk to Normal. But when Normal waved her over, she didn't have the heart to shun her.

Daff felt physically sick about having insulted her mother, who she loved and pitied and admired at the same time. Delia worked hard and had always cared for her family; she'd given what she had to give. Charlie too. Poor Charlie—of course he was Daff's real daddy. Maybe Delia didn't know who Daff and Bud's biological father was, or maybe the man hadn't wanted them and Delia didn't want her kids to suffer knowing that. Maybe, in light of Charlie's loving and kindness toward them, they didn't need to know.

At some level Daff believed that Charlie and Delia tried to get along with her, to say the right things and do the right things, but she felt she did too. She knew too that she was going to break up with Tom-Tom and likely she was doing it in part to hurt Charley and Delia. She felt unable to help herself, unable to change. She didn't even want to. What she did want, she didn't know.

She had been glad when Charlotte showed up for her shift; she wanted only to be alone to lick her wounds. Her shins ached; she felt feverish. Her head was pounding like a heart. Her heart was pounding like her head.

Looking at Normal seated on the milk crate, scratching the hiked ears of the mutt that had taken up with her, she felt sure that that Normal didn't have any folks, no mother like Delia to love her no matter what. No easy-going, funny daddy like Charlie. Normal would probably love to have a family like Daff's; she probably wouldn't even think they were weird.

The setting sun blazed a field of orange around her. The place smelled of rancy motor oil, cankered grease and dust. Crows were squabbling in the trees and vines along the creek gorge at Normal's back. "Hey, teach," she said in that over-strong voice, "got a question for you."

"What?"

"Who was that funny-looking couple come by the store this afternoon?" She gestured with her hands for hair and ears. "You know that big woman with the white hair and that man with the ears?"

"That's my folks," said Normal stopping nearer the post office than the garage property.

"Sorry." Normal twisted away to standing position and slunk off toward the open garage door, vanishing into the tomb of silence and oily dark.

Chapter 4

Daff feared that Normal might wind up living with her again. Abe Guess would rent to anybody and cheap, knowing likely they wouldn't last but a couple of months; it was like getting paid for storing his own junk. But he wouldn't let Normal pay at the end of the month and she had no money to pay at the beginning. Over the years, a dozen men—men, mind you!—had tried and failed.

It would have been cheaper to buy another floor fan and let Normal move back in with her than to do what Daff was about to do.

For selfish reasons, and also because she had come to believe that the chicken-truck wait was like waiting for Santa Claus, and that Normal's folks weren't coming or maybe she didn't even have anybody, Daff didn't even allow herself to reconsider loaning $50 to Normal to rent the old garage.

"Offer him $25. He'll probably take it," she told Normal the next morning. "Then you'll have enough left over to turn on the electricity."

"I can't take your money, teach." Normal twisted and spat to the side. She smelled of the cankered dust and grease that permeated the whole place.

"You can pay me back." Traffic was backing up at the gas pumps across the street. Daff had to go. Quickly she gave Normal directions to the house where Abe Guess lived and pressed the bills into her palm.

***All day, from the Delta, Daff could see Normal setting up shop. Grinning, with the dog at her heels, she put out a plywood sign, stood against a five gallon can, the lettering spray-painted red: TROUBLESOME CREEK GARAGE. She brought out a rusty metal chest of tools, going through them one by one and polishing each like her good silver with a blue grease rag.

Another time, between chores, through the window, Daff saw Normal using the phone in the booth across the highway. Maybe calling to have the power turned on at the garage, or maybe trying to reach her folks again. Daff had about as much faith in Normal's folks as she did in the chicken truck. She was beginning to think that Normal was a runaway.

Twice, she came after water from the Delta, lifting the jugs and grinning at "teach" in the window. The dog seemed to get into the mood of celebration by twitching his tail as he trotted ahead, listing left and eyeing Normal in case she turned in a different direction.

"Teach" was freezing to death inside, but outside the heat fumed like gas off the blazing gravel and asphalt. That morning, she'd dressed in cut-off khakis with white athletic socks showing above the tops of her boots. Tomorrow, she would bring a pair of shorts for Normal—if she would wear them. She had to have more clothes and Daff's jeans would look like peddle-pushers on her stilt-ish legs.

At the window again, close to sundown, Daff nixed her notion that Normal had called to have the power restored when she saw her unrolling and stretching a long black extension cord from the garage shelter to the back of the red-brick post office. Cord hidden in the high grass.

A dim bulb blinked and shone down from the ceiling of the shelter to the grease spotted concrete floor.

Normal stepped around the rear corner of the post office, grinning. "`Who let the dogs out? Who who who!'"

Grinning herself, Daff went on to the rear of the store to rearrange the jugs of milk in the refrigerator case and check the dates. She was always having to double-check the dates because the milk man often failed to pick up milk with expired dates. She figured it was less trouble for him to pick up than to let her do it.

She set out two jugs with expirations of 6-30-02—yesterday's date.

"Daff?" somebody called out from the front.

"Just a jiff, Cassie." Daff pulled her camo jacket close, walking to the front of the store.

Cassie, in blue jeans and a blue oxford shirt, was leaning on the counter, one leg cocked and a foot in white Nike's stood on the toe and rocking.

"How you been?" Daff walked around behind the counter, facing her.

"Good. Beauty school's good." Cassie had long bleached-blonde hair, flat on top and parted down the middle. Same style since junior-high, and Daff never looked at her without wanting to fluff up her hair. Her face was thin and triangular, the shape of her lips following the same line. Lots of makeup and black eyeliner.

"That the chicken-truck person?" Cassie slung her head back to look through the glass doors at Normal standing on the yellow plastic crate, reaching up to the tin ceiling of the shelter.

"Normal," said Daff.

"Well, she's anything but." Cassie never smiled, only smirked; she never used the word "maybe."

Outside her shiny new, blue Volkswagon bug was parked store-side of the gas pump island. Her daddy gave it to her for high-school graduation, and it still had the bouquet of white plastic daisies attached to the steering wheel. Daff loved the car!

They talked a bit more about Nina, about giving her a bridal shower—she'd be getting married in August.

Finally, almost closing time, Cassie went out and pumped her gas and came back in rattling keys on a ring stuck on her right pinkie. She paid for the gas with a gold credit card slipped into her jeans' pocket. "Daddy got it for me."

"Wow!" said Daff, sliding the card through the slot of the card register. "I hope you know how lucky you are."

"Think about it, Daff. I see him once a year since he divorced Mama. He's just paying me off to keep me away from his new family."

Daff stared at her friend's black-ringed green eyes. "Maybe."

"No maybe to it." Cassie turned around and pushed through the door. "See you."

***After closing, after dark, Daff crossed under the tall lights with swirling bugs out front, heading for the too-bright bare bulb shining down on the drab concrete of the garage shelter.

Normal was sitting on the crate against the inside wall, eating corned beef with a bent old fork from the can Daff had taken to her yesterday. The dog by the entrance to the inside was eating pellets of dry dog food from the filthy floor.

"Hey, teach," Normal said. "What you think?"

"Looks good," said Daff.

Normal stood. "Here, take a load off. I got another crate just inside."

Now the smells of grease, dust and motor oil were mingled with the hot-rubber smell of electricity. Could be a short in the garage wiring. Then remembering the extension cord, Daff decided that was where the smell was coming from.

Normal disappeared into the dark interior of the garage with the dog following close. In a flash she was back with another crate. She slammed it on the floor and straddled it, facing Daff, who was eager to get home, take a shower, eat and go to bed.

She felt like she was melting after freezing all day inside the Delta.

Normal was scraping the bottom of the beef can, eating the fatty, spicy beef. "I'd offer you some but..." She held out the can to show it was empty.

Suddenly she dropped the can and fork and stood, still straddled the crate, and began fishing in the right pocket of her tight faded jeans, which were filthy with grease on the knees. Gleaming tools lay in rows on the work bench along the left wall.

"Got $25 back, teach, just like you said to." She handed it to Daff. "Didn't need the lectricty turned on."

Daff didn't tell her she had seen her running the extension cord to the rear of the post office. As much as the government took out of her $4.50 per hour per week, she figured they owed her. Besides, a homeless young woman like Normal could easily get food stamps and a welfare check and not have to work at all.

Normal crossed over to the metal work bench, stooped down and pulled from beneath it what looked like some grease-crusted musical instrument. "A bullhorn," she said. "Found it in some old junk." Then lifting the mouth of it to her mouth, before Daff could stop her, she demonstrated: "`Who let the dogs out? Who who who!'"

"Normal, quit. You can't do that. You'll be run out of town."

"Hey, I been run out of town before."

So, she was homeless. There was no brother in a chicken truck.

She set the horn down beneath the work bench again and then straddled the crate and sat again.

"I guess you have a bed and stuff," Daff said, nodding toward the open door of the garage office.

"Come on. Come on. You gotta see the inside." Eager, standing, Normal swung a long leg over the crate.

The dog followed and then Daff as they went inside.

Sheets of tin blocking the span of broken glass facing Highway 129 and the dip at Troublesome Creek, the room was so hot and dim Daff could barely see. Just as well. She could make out an old narrow cot along the left wall of the room. The place smelled of croaker sacks and rats and grease. The top of the mattress was covered in a quilt of orange and white rags.

"Ain't got no lights in here but I'm working on it."

"You need a shower, come to my place," said Daff.

***Next morning, after the newpaper routine with the Lanes, Daff headed up the sidewalk, carrying her floor fan, hidden beneath her camo jacket, and one of Mrs. Lane's white covered casserole dishes with the remainder of the banana pudding she'd brought over last night for Daff. On top of the dish was a stack of fresh shorts and tee-shirts she'd put together for Normal, including underwear, deodorant, soap, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, and a couple of disposable shavers—maybe Normal would shave under her arms.

Neither she nor the dog was anywhere to be seen at the garage, so Daff left everything on the metal work bench to the left of the open door. Tomorrow, she would bring a pillow and bed linens and towels and such, though she could not picture Normal sleeping on the scratchy, pink curlicue-embroidered linens, stored with sweet sachets, with hems that read: "What are little girls made of," and "Angels watching over you."

Crossing 129 Highway, to get to 94, where she would cross over to the Delta, she heard down by the creek Normal singing "`Who let the dogs out? Who who who!'" The little dog was barking and Normal was laughing in that powerful bass voice. Daff turned and saw Normal deep down in the gorge, squatting and dipping her one pair of jeans into a stream of water, neck-high in reeds and rich-green elephant ears.

"Hey, teach!" she hooted, spotting Normal up the hill.

Daff waved. She could smell her own clean clothes and the sweet soap from her shower. She had on a denim sundress. Clean brown sandals on her feet, for a change, though she supposed she would get a case of frost-bite.

Before unlocking the Delta door she stood and looked at her reflection in the glass, her pretty scrubbed face and her freshly shampooed hair, ringlets caught back in a ponytail.

Her green eyes were glassy with tears. Had she broken with being daffy Daff in combat boots, camo and cap? Had she broken with the image to prevent being paired with abnormal Normal? Daff, who had so much, and Normal who had nothing but a single pair of jeans, a borrowed dog and a song.

At her back, in the mirror of glass she could see cars passing, slowing at the garage to check out the new mechanic.

Still Friday, the woman in the green car came by Normal's garage to get her "oil changed." Normal was on her back on a dolly while the woman's two little boys tried to play with Stubborn the dog.

The woman was staring down at Normal's long legs sticking out from beneath the car. She was wearing the khaki cut-offs Daff had brought that morning along with the white athletic socks showing from the tops of her boots. Of course, she was still wearing the brown long-sleeve shirt to hide the hell-raising tattoo. Earlier, Normal had come over to the store to get oil—charge it. Deltas didn't charge, but Daff hadn't said so. She believed with all her heart, she hoped, that as soon as the woman paid for the oil change, Normal would be back to pay for the oil.

Sure enough, after the woman had gone, Normal was cleaning her hands on a blue rag, crossing the highway, coming to pay up her "account."

A water hose had burst on a semi at the Delta. Daff sent him over to get Normal. In less than thirty minutes, she had it patched up and ready to roll. Half price because she didn't have a new hose in stock. He could make it to the next town and get it replaced, she said.

An old man and woman, on the way to Florida, had had a flat on the left rear of their big blue car. Just like the Lane's. Coasting up to the Delta to ask about a place to repair the tire, the car was sitting lop-sided, rolling along on what looked like a bicycle tire in place of the tire that had blown out.

Normal came running with the dog and within minutes was rolling the tire with Stubborn the dog chasing it back across the highway to her garage. A while later she came running, rolling it back, patched with a kit she had found, a can and some rubber squares and cement, put it on and had them ready to go.

"Get y'all to the next town," Normal said and waved them on. No charge.

But other than the travelers and the nosy woman in the green car, on Friday and Saturday, nobody stopped at Normal's garage. None of the locals.

Nothing new in that, Daff explained to Normal. They were always leery of anything new—she didn't say anybody new, but that's what she meant, that's what she thought.

On Saturday morning, a new sign, lettered in black spray paint appeared next to the TROUBLESOME CREEK GARAGE sign. Both propped up against empty five-gallon oil buckets. The latest read CAR WASH $5.

Yes, Normal had water. Maybe the only State-funded water to a private business in all of Georgia, routed from an outside spigot behind the post office through a dull green garden hose buried in the dandelions and dog-fennels.

"You can't do that," said Daff, when Normal came over for lunch.

"I already have." Eating a pimento cheese sandwich from the refrigerated case, Normal was sitting on the stack of rag rugs, along the north wall, a stack that never went down—nobody wanted the overpriced handmade rugs, made in China, bought wholesale for a dollar. Her hair had been shampooed—honeysuckle scent—and was sleeked back in a ponytail. Her skin shone from washing.

"Well, I don't know anything about it. Understand?" Daff was arranging the cigarette cartons on the wall shelves behind the register counter. One carton was missing a pack—Menthol Marlboros.

Daff took it down and peeped inside and then showed it to Normal.

"I didn't do it," Normal said.

"I never said you did."

"Did you think it?"

"No." But Daff had thought about it. She'd seen her smoking that first night in front of the Delta.

"You ruther I didn't come back over here, I won't."

"I didn't say that, Normal."

"But you've thought it."

"You've got a paranoid streak, you know that?"

"Maybe. But I been around and I know people think I'm a freak."

Facing her across the counter, Daff said, "Then why don't you change how you look and act if you don't like people's reaction to you?"

"Why don't you?" Normal dropped to her feet from the tall stack of rugs. "Oh, that's right. I forgot. You're wearing dresses now and I'm wearing what you wore two days ago." Fishing money from the khaki cut-offs, she took a couple steps forward and slapped two dollar bills on the counter. "Keep the change, teach." Then she pushed through the door and swaggered out to the gas pumps, looking down at the scattered pennies, and loped on off across the street.

The little dog, who had been waiting by the door, followed, dodging her flying boot heels.

Saturday afternoon, her half-day off from work, Daff convinced the Lanes that they should have their blue Buick washed at Normal's garage. It was the Christian thing to do. Already Daff had driven the old couple to the firehouse, two doors down from the courthouse, for them to buy barbeque dinners at $2 each from the Baptist Church. One of the church members had cancer and maybe the little dab of money earned would help out with his medical bills; Daff had heard that the daily cost for ICU was over $2,000 a day. It made no sense to Daff. But she decided to make good of it since the Lanes were in a giving mood. Even stove-up pale Mr. Lane in the back seat.

Mrs. Lane, in fake pearl "ear bobs" and matching necklace, sat up front with Daff. She pulled the car up the concrete slope and stopped at the start of the tin shelter where Normal was sitting on the milk crate, looking at one of the magazines Daff had brought her from the Lanes. Mostly magazines on embroidering, Reader's Digests and Southern Livings.

"Oh, my!" Mrs. Lane said, hands going up to her rouged cheeks, when she saw Normal.

"She's really nice." Daff buzzed down her window. "Normal, you got time to wash Mrs. Lane's car?"

Charcoal smoke rode the hot northerly air from the firehouse to the garage. Daff had not seen so many people in town since post-911 when they were making money for the victims in New York. They had been on a charity roll then, especially since the Valdosta Democrat had sent a photographer out with a camera while they were gathering up carnival-issue teddy bears for the 9-11 victims' children.

Normal stood, gawking, rolling a wad of tobacco on her tongue, then reeled out the water hose, whipping it like a snake on the concrete to shake out the kinks.

"That's normal?" said Mr. Lane, peering out from the rear seat.

Daff buzzed the window up. She knew she had made a mistake. Cars and trucks were parked on both sides of the road and people were wandering around the courthouse square, eating barbeque from paper plates, drinking cola from plastic cups, and viewing abnormal Normal. No wonder she looked mad.

Pushing a metal bucket of sudsy water by the long handle of the brush inside, Normal set about her business, rinsing the car down with the garden hose first. Her right cheek was bloated with Skoal and she was smirking, seemingly gone inside her head where some mischief was in the process of hatching.

The storm of water outside made Daff feel truly shut in with the old couple, their heavy breathing.

"Where did she come from?" Mrs. Lane fingered the pearls at her neck; she had on an old-time satin blouse the color of the pearls. Not a hair out of place.

"Cartersville." Daff was going through her pocketbook for change. This car wash would be on her; she would pay for her mistake.

"That Georgia or Tennessee?" asked Mr. Lane.

"Georgia. North Georgia."

"How come Abe Guess to rent to somebody like that?" Mrs. Lane again, speaking loud, heating up.

"I've seen that dog before." Mrs. Lane's hooded gray eyes were stretched. She didn't take her eyes off the windshield and Normal peering in through the soap bubbles snapping under the brush.

When Normal started to rinse, clear water sheeting down the windshield, Mrs. Lane sat forward. "You know, I do believe that's my white acorn Martha Stewart bowl on that shelf there." She let go of her pearls to point at the work bench to the left of the door.

At K-Mart, Martha Stewart bowls were sold in multiples, and cheap. Like those pearls, thought Daff.

Mr. Lane's dark hair was shaved to look "clean cut." But instead he looked like a death row inmate prepared for execution.

"She was starving," Daff said to Mrs. Lane, holding up a ten dollar bill and waving it. "I took her the rest of that banana pudding you gave me."

"Oh." Mrs. Lane sat back.

"How much longer, how much longer?" Mr. Lane began ranting, same tone as "Who's at the door, Mildred?" ever single morning of the year that Daff had lived there.

"I'll bet she's really lovely when you get to know her," Mrs. Lane said too sweetly to be believed.

Normal was now waiting at the streaming window on Daff's side. Daff buzzed the glass down.

"That'll be three dollars," Normal said stiffly.

Mrs. Lane made a big show of going through her stuffed silver purse, looking for exact change, one dollar bill, quarters, nickels and dimes. She laughed feebly, snapped her purse shut. "Well, I guess my banana pudding's worth something."

Daff handed the ten to Normal.

"How much longer? How much longer?"

"Just a jiff. I'll go get your change," Normal said, speaking to Daff while watching Mr. Lane shifting in the back seat.

Daff started to tell her to keep it, but seven dollars was a hell of a tip in the opinion of these tightwads. Not that Daff cared. She could feel her face growing hot, she felt queasy, even with the air conditioner blowing on her face.

"If that's not our floor fan I'll eat my hat," said Mr. Lane, leaning forward.

"You don't wear a hat, Mr. Lane," said Daff. "Mrs. Lane won't let you."

She didn't know where her courage was coming from, or even whether it could be called courage, but she knew she'd be leaving the Lanes' dinky trailer. She didn't know where she would go, but she damn well wasn't going back to the farm while the corn was in and Delia was on the outs with her. No, never. She might not even go to church with Tom-Tom tomorrow morning. She wondered why she'd ever gone in the first place. She felt slapped by the realization that she couldn't come up with a single reason why.

Like God hooting a warning down from heaven in response to Daff's unholy thoughts, a voice boomed from out of somewhere, "TAKE COVER! EVERYBODY TAKE COVER!"

Mr. and Mrs. Lane at once burst from the car, her in high heels and him snapping open the legs of his walker, clomping it ahead, faster than he could follow, heading for the courthouse and the people standing stunned and at attention.

"TAKE COVER! EVERYBODY TAKE COVER!"

Crowds congregated, covering their heads with their arms; paper plates and barbeque and Solo cups went off like a bomb at a picnic.

"TAKE COVER! EVERYBODY TAKE COVER!"

Lop-sided on one silver high heel, the other lost like Cinderella's slipper, Mrs. Lane was screaming, gazing back at the shoe in the middle of the highway.

Only Daff sat in the same place, in the car with the air conditioning chuffing on her flushed face, leaning into the steering wheel and gazing up at the open transom above the door of the garage. The sound-end of Normal's bullhorn was poking through and rested on the window ledge.

"TAKE COVER! EVERYBODY TAKE COVER!"

Funny as the whole take-cover prank was to Daff, after it was over, she knew it was serious—there would be hell to pay and she would probably be paying along with Normal for befriending her. And the price would likely be high, blood maybe.

***Saturday night, and Daff was sitting on the living room floor of her trailer, painting her toe nails red—"Barely Red," not that the muted shade would save her from the town's wrath once the river of rumors began raging. In spite of the floor fan, blowing directly on her, her face felt as hot as it had in the car that afternoon. Her nails were drying, permanently.

Head on the steering wheel of Mrs. Lane's car, half-laughing, half-crying, at the garage that afternoon, she had been on the verge of getting out and running over to the courthouse to announce that the alert was a prank, when out stepped Normal with the bullhorn, standing right next to the Lane's car and roaring out an all-clear. Well, what she said was, "THIS IS A TEST! THIS IS ONLY A TEST!" Her awful hooting had been so loud that Daff had had to hold her ears.

Last toe, little toe, on her right foot, Daff painted with trembling hands. She felt shaky inside and her head felt inflated. Every light in the trailer had been on since sundown, and now it was twenty till midnight.

Mrs. Lane had come over about eight, hobbling on a sprained foot wrapped in an ace bandage and wearing the fuzzy pink slippers she always wore on mornings when Daff fetched the newspaper and took it in and listened patiently to the Lanes' discussion—lecture—about the evils of the world.

In an attempt to make up to Daff, or more likely to demonstrate her abused generosity, Daff thought, Mrs. Lane had brought over another fan.

Her dark gooey hair was stuffed beneath a shower cap stained purple with hair dye, 100% ammonia. She had a purple towel draped about her shoulders, over a green vinyl cape, the purple towel bought just for that purpose. Beneath the cape she was wearing a ratty pair of khaki shorts, purple-spotted—her hair-dying attire.

The lecture that evening, girl to girl, Star-teacher to Star-student, knee to knee, sitting on the couch and holding hands, four hands, had gone like this:

"A woman's good name is to be had over rubies or gold. Sometimes we girls make the wrong choices and they stay with us for the rest of our lives."

Water was flowing through the toilet tank, had been flowing through.

Daff wanted to let go of Mrs. Lane's frail, purple-stained hands. She wanted to slap her and she'd never slapped anybody in her life.

At the same time she wanted to hug and beg her forgiveness because she knew what was coming up and damned if she would move back home. Marrying Tom-Tom was not an option. No, it wasn't.

"Now," said Mrs. Lane, letting go of Daff's hands and patting her bare knees below the hem of her denim mini-skirt that she'd never worn except to the university in Valdosta. "Mr. Lane and I think it best if you move on back home with your family. We'll miss you of course." Her small head on her jointed neck reared like a snake's about to strike, and dummy tears welled in her sterile gray eyes, and she smoothed her green-figured plastic hair-dying cape, her hair going from purple to black beneath the clear shower cap.

"I'll take the liberty of calling your parents since it's obvious you won't...can't. Your mother will certainly understand."

"Thank you." Daff leaned forward, peering up and sidelong at Mrs. Lane.

"I understand you are angry but in time you'll come to appreciate my and Dub's taking charge like this. I was a girl once.." She covered her face with the purple towel, feigning embarrassment—just to think of her many mistakes! She stood, her purple hair pressed down, all that represented what she looked like by day. Her public hair.

"May I ask you something, Mrs. Lane?" Daff still sat humbly, leaning, peering up at her. Her neck hurt.

Mrs. Lane dropped her hands to her lap. Then she took up a corner of the purple towel and began dabbing at dribbles like veins running down her temples, below her purple ears. "Of course, sugar. Ask me anything."

"Was that a lie—what you said in Sunday school about judge not lest you be judged?"

Mrs. Lane stood, suddenly huffy. "Lights out."

Daff had to repaint her little toe nail twice before it looked right. A little tiny nail, a crescent moon, from having been stumped on an oak root in her folk's backyard when she was about twelve. Her mother had been chasing her with her daddy's doubled-up belt. The buckle had struck her on the neck. She couldn't recall the offense but it, the beating, was of the same caliber as the other beatings.

Daff was still sitting on the floor after midnight. The lights were still on, water still flowing through the toilet tank. Any minute she expected Mrs. Lane back with the law. By now she would have shampooed the oily purple from her hair, set it on plastic rollers and dried it under her ancient bag-hood dryer, and be presentable enough to face the sheriff when he came.

Would Daff go to jail for aiding and abetting a terrorist?

She thought about her political science teacher at VSU, a blushing squat woman whose slip always showed beneath the hem of the soft print frocks she wore. Dr. Nelson would charge into the classroom only after all students were seated and perch on the edge of her desk and begin every class by saying in a wheezing voice, "If anybody, anybody, tries to violate your civil rights, don't let them. Memorize the constitution, the words penned by your founding fathers, and recite them to the authorities. Ask for a warrant, write to your congressmen, your governor, the president. Protest until all your resources run out. These people are your elected officials. Use them, use them, use them."

At first, Daff had been amused by Dr. Nelson's antiquated clothes; she'd looked around for a teleprompter when Dr. Nelson began lecturing without a book. She'd been terrified on that huge campus after going to school in Statenville, only fifteen in her graduating class. She couldn't take notes fast enough, and all that Dr. Nelson said sounded foreign. Daff couldn't recall much of what she had understood come test time. Her grades would drop and she'd lose her HOPE scholarship. She felt lost.

Dr. Nelson didn't care, Daff had felt sure. She was an old tenured professor who had been there so long she was just spouting off memorized rules that didn't really apply to anybody. She was just waiting to retire, putting in time.

One day Daff had been sitting on the curb outside the building where two of her classes, political science and philosophy, were held for an hour each day. She was waiting for her ride; the rural mail carrier would pick her up everyday and she could ride home with her for $5 a week.

Daff began crying silently, head on her arms, arms on her knees. She felt a tap on her shoulder. She looked back and saw the dingy lace hem of a slip, the knee-length blue print skirt. Dr. Nelson's legs needed shaving. She was wearing flat brown lace-up shoes that had gone out of style—how long Daff couldn't say.

Dr. Nelson was old and stale and out-of-step. Forty-five years at the most.

"Just do your best," she said, standing there on the curb. "The quarter's new." She looked smaller outside of the classroom, less menacing. More human.

"If you need extra help," she added, "drop by my office."

Daff did, again and again. Not to whine and not to beg, but to warm and gain confidence in the little woman's presence. Her blushing face was like glowing coals; she knew her rights and she had the right to just be—to be who she was and wear what she liked and nobody could take her rights away. Daff made an A for that course; she earned that A.

Daff hadn't realized it before but she'd always feared accidentally breaking some rule and going to jail for life. The Lanes' trailer was that jail.

Toe nails done, Daff stood to get ready for bed when she heard knuckles knocking on her front door.

The sheriff and Mrs. Lane, maybe. "Just a minute." She felt nervous but not scared. She knew her rights; because of Dr. Nelson she knew her rights. Asserting her rights was another matter though. And would she have the guts to stand up to authority? She'd never even talked back to an irate adult customer in the wrong.

Braced for whoever was at the door, she opened it.

There stood Normal holding Mrs. Lane's white bowl. It was washed and gleaming in the preacher's tall yard lights. "I brung back the bowl."

The wind was blowing, blowing shadows of trees and smells of hair dye escaping through the trailer door.

"Come in." Daff stepped back for Normal to step inside.

Normal walked over and set the bowl on the kitchen table and then turned to go back through the door, still open and swung wide on its rankling chain. "I'm sorry, teach. I shouldn't of done that; I got you in trouble, I reckon." She slid her fingers into her pockets. "I always do that. I can't tell you why. It just seems like I've got a right to blow up at people looking down on me. What you said about me changing if I don't like people's reaction to me. Well, I might. I might try."

"Was that really your brother in the chicken truck?"

Normal wiped her face down with one hand, looked ready to cry. Or laugh. "Well, teach, the answer's no." She snorted, shook her head. "Ole boy give me a ride out of Chattanooga got a little rough with me. On the way to Orlando, figuring I'd maybe get a job at Sea World. You ever been there?"

"No."

"Chattanooga—you ever seen that marine place where they got all them fish?"

"Your folks—do they really live on a chicken farm in Cartersville?"

"Well. Not exactly." Again she wiped down a smile, snorting like a kid amused at getting caught. Proud to be the act that was bringing all the acclaim. At last having gotten some attention, even if she'd be hung for her crime. Take your pick, or all of the above: Normal.

"You won't laugh? Promise?"

"I won't laugh."

"I run away from home to join the rodeo."

"How old?"

"Fourteen. Then."

"How old are you now?"

"Twenty-two. Honest to God."

"Where did you live before? Where's your family?"

"My daddy and brothers is in Abilene. That's Texas."

"Why did you leave?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "Same reason I done what I done today. I take a notion, I'm just gone."

"Your name—Normal. Did your folks give you that or did you make that up too?"

"That was true. They kept telling everybody I was normal. Didn't fool nobody. My two little brothers started calling me Normal. Looked like it got away with people. They'd laugh, you know?"

"Norma's your real name, then?"

"Norma Webb."

"Norma, you're different, okay? You're not abnormal, so quit calling yourself that."

She looked embarrassed by the change in tone, in Daff's sudden attention to her plight.

"Well, I gotta be getting on back. Left my dog shut up in the garage to keep him from following me and barking and getting you in more trouble." She started down the wobbly metal steps.

Daff stood in the doorway. "Wait. What about the rodeo?"

"Aw, I did okay. Nothing special."

"Why did you quit then?"

"Found out I wadn't special, nothing special." She loped off through the blowing shadows on the lit mowed grass.

Chapter 5

Sunday morning, Daff's day of peace and rest, she woke up with warring on her mind.

Clothes packed, an old hard silvery-gray suitcase by the front door, she went into the close bathroom to get her dime-store cosmetics and shampoo, scrappings of makeup, smudged hair ribbons and other "stuff."

She had no intention of going to church; she had no intention of going home to the farm.

Looking up in the spotted mirror, above the small round lavatory bowl and scrubbed white counter, she was shocked to see that she looked the same—Daffney Sue Rowe, cute and freckled with curly blond hair snatched back in a ponytail. But her green eyes glowed from the fire inside.

She had to be gone when Tom-Tom came to take her to church. Well, not exactly had to. In fact she would like to stay and tell him face to face how sick she was of him and his selfish ways. When she pictured him in her mind, he would be bending to comb his gold-brown hair in any mirror that would accept him. But the very thought of such a confrontation made her shake inside.

She yanked the black elastic band from her ponytail and her hair spilled wild around her face, made it look fiercer, wilder, smaller.

"Ouch!" She had pulled her own hair and her scalp stung.

Without realizing it before, she had spent her whole life believing that her goal had been to hook up with Mr. Right, marry and raise a family.

Well, Tom-Tom was not Mr. Right.

She didn't know what her options were but she did know she had a head as well as a heart. Look where her heart had gotten her: she had only been doing the right thing—the Christian thing—by befriending a stranger. What she'd been taught in church and Sunday school her whole life.

She took the roll of toilet paper off the tacked up roller next to the toilet. Then she flushed the toilet one last time, leaving the float stuck and water gushing through the tank. So there!

Going out of the bathroom and walking the short distance to the front door, she looked at the prissy white hand-sewn curtains gathered perfectly. She started to disturb them out of spite, but kept walking. To stop now, she might change her mind and beg Mrs. Lane's forgiveness. She might repent and not mean it and be just as hypocritical as her landlady.

Plastic bag of stuff in one hand and suitcase in the other, she stepped out into the dewy morning. Blue sky and birds warbling and tittering in the live oaks of the preacher's yard. She stepped over the Lanes' bloated Sunday newspaper in its damp plastic sleeve and kept walking.

She didn't look back, and when she got to the sidewalk, facing the closed redbrick schoolhouse across the highway, she turned right, her usual route to work, hearing her white sandals slapping on her heels and grinding sand on the concrete.

Already the sun was casting shade from the huge live-oaks along the sidewalk.

Nobody was out. No cars or trucks or even anybody out picking up their newspapers. Soon, they would be up and getting ready for church. If she really were brave and vengeful she would have waited thirty minutes or so to leave. If she really wanted the Lanes and Tom-Tom and the whole town to see her leaving and going where she would go, she would have lingered in the safe jailhouse trailer till everybody was out and about.

She could smell coffee and maybe pancakes, and at the lofty old house next to the Methodist Church she heard a TV or radio. For some reason she never passed that house without remembering the time she missed the school bus and went there to visit the new Methodist's preacher's daughter, who was in her seventh grade class. Daff always chummed with the new girls in town because nobody else did. They were outsiders, just as Daff was an outsider, or so she felt.

She had walked through the paling gate and up the wide sloping porch, getting set to knock on the wooden door, when their German Shepherd dog suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, jumped up and placed his paws on her shoulders and began barking in her turned face.

Not long before that her brother Bud had been attacked by a rabid dog that tore his cheek from his ear to the corner of his mouth. He had to be stitched up and injected with rabies shots in his stomach every day for a month, or so it seemed to Daff.

Now there she was staring into the mouth of another dog, a huge monster, with fang-like teeth for what seemed like Bud's month of rabies injections. She recalled that her mouth was open too, trying to scream but nothing came out. The dog had black, jagged rubbery lips, in the corners where the other dog had ripped Bud's lip.

Daff could not recall how it ended, what had kept the dog from attacking her, but only the fear of staring into the mouth of that dog; that picture was stamped on her brain. But what stood out, this Sunday morning, was the fact of her befriending outsiders, herself an outsider, an insider/outsider. Was this what was going on with Normal? Had Daff finally risked all for this latest outsider?

Up ahead at the crossing she saw the red light blinking and heard a big truck rumbling out of the north.

Just past the closed one-room post office, she heard Normal's dog strike up barking, sending a jolt like lightning through her body. Maybe her parents were right to fear for her and not trust her judgment.

Starting across the greasy wedge of concrete beneath the garage shelter, she saw Normal standing in the doorway; only standing there, leaning like a man, watching Daff come, suitcase in one hand and bag of stuff in the other.

"Hush up, Stubborn," Normal shouted to the dog, now backing away and barking. She was wearing clean khaki shorts, the boots with white socks, and a blue-striped Oxford over a white tee-shirt. Okay, so the blue shirt was on loan from to Mr. Lane. No, he didn't know about it, but Daff didn't own a shirt with sleeves long enough for the unbuttoned cuffs to partially cover Normal's hands. Besides, it was an old shirt, one he never wore anymore. Daff felt like a thief. No, like Robin Hood.

The dog tucked his white tail and dropped to the concrete, dingy eyes tilted up, watching Daff coming on.

"Where you off to, teach?" Normal spat between her front teeth and wiped her mouth on the shirt cuff.

"I decided to move," said Daff, setting the suitcase down. "Thought I'd see if you would let me rent that little room back there for right now." Daff nodded toward the tacked on dilapidated section behind the garage. The trees on the creek were nodding in a breeze that Daff couldn't feel. She was sweating already.

Smelled like Normal was cooking something inside.

"Bunch of junk in there, rats and all, but have at it."

"I can clean it up. Rats are welcome after living with people."

Normal laughed and stepped back. 'Come on in and have some hash, teach."

An old hot plate on one of the shelves lining the tinned-up west wall was rigged with dangling extension cords. Salty-fat beef smells rose from a make-do skillet, a cloudy chrome hubcap.

They sat on the cot with paper plates on their laps, eating the spicy beef and mush of potatoes. The cot was made up with Mrs. Lane's white sheets edged in pink embroidery—"What are little girls made of."

Outside cars and trucks, light Sunday traffic, began moving at the crossing. At the Methodist Church, the bell in the steeple clanged and spread a melancholy greeting over the town.

"They tell you to leave, teach, or you just up and volunteered?" Normal sucked air through her teeth.

"A little of both." Daff got up and set her empty plate on the shelf next to the hot plate. Then went back to sit on the cot next to Normal.

"I reckon I had something to do with that."

You had everything to do with that, thought Daff. "No, it was just time to go." Which was true also.

Normal laughed and sailed her empty plate to an empty oil barrel at the foot of her cot, ringing it.

"Man, I don't know what come over me yesterday. Hollering out on that ole bullhorn."

"Anybody get on to you about it?"

"Oh, yeah!" Normal stretched her long legs and fished the can of Skoal from her hip pocket and packed her bottom lip, then slipped the flat can back into her pocket in the precise circle imprint on her shorts. "Sheriff said next time it happens he's gone lock me up for disturbing the peace."

"Well, you were...disturbing the peace?"

"Ain't nothing new." Normal placed one boot atop the opposite knee. "I hate it about you though, teach. Good as you been to me."

"Don't hate it about me; I was out of there anyway. I mean, the Lanes. But I would like to ask you to tone it down. Go better on both of us if you'd lighten up a bit."

"Hey, gotcha!" Normal slapped Daff on the back. Hard.

"I have to keep my job, you know. School's coming up in September. I have to have the money. I'm going on a HOPE scholarship but they just pay for tuition and books."

"Hope? What's Hope?"

"Funded by the Georgia lottery. But only if you keep up your grades."

"Count me out, teach." Normal got up and crossed over to the shelf and cut the heat on the hotplate. "School never agreed with me, you know?"

Daff started to ask if Normal had finished high school, but considered that a touchy subject, private business. Besides she couldn't very well have gone to school while traveling with the rodeo. Fourteen!

"Hey, teach. You can put up in here with me long as you want to. I mean till you get settled somewhere else."

Daff looked down at the cot, over at the oily workbench in one corner. "Thank you, but I'll just move on back there for now."

"Yeah, people get the wrong ideas about me."

"It's not that."

"For the record, teach, I ain't gone bite you. I ain't no lezzie."

Daff believed her and was relieved, but knew it didn't matter; the town would believe what it wanted to believe.

"Truth is, I ain't nothing." Normal looked back at Daff.

"Normal, that's your business."

"What say we go look at your new apartment. Might be you won't want to stay once you've seen inside."

Wading through the thick, high weeds and grass of the alley between the garage building and the post office, Daff hoped the county didn't decide to mow, because somewhere underneath all that green were Normal's garden hose and extension cord.

They had to shove open the splintery, paneled door to get inside, Normal first, and then Daff, stopping between a round oak table stood on its side and a dark wood dresser with a mirror duplicating their twin outfits of khaki shorts and boots with white sock-tops.

"All this junk, where you gonna sleep, teach?"

"Looks like he filled up from the back all the way to the front."

The place smelled of dust and chemicals—a nauseating rotten-egg odor. But Daff liked the light from the many wood-framed windows, which she would open right away when she reached them. But like Normal's front section, the old garage area, all west windows had been broken and were blind with patching of corrugated tin.

"I'll call and have the electricity turned on tomorrow."

"I can do that, teach." Normal laughed.

"No, I don't want trouble, Normal. I'll pay for it." She wondered about the wiring and hook-ups. "Help me stand this table on its legs, will you?"

Daff was glad to be out of the mirror, which not only duplicated their look-alike shorts and boots, but also duplicated her odd feeling of major, permanent change. Could she ever go back to the way things were? Did she want to?

Table stood on its legs, Daff could see that there was a small, white very-old cooking range to the left of the southeast corner and a dome-topped refrigerator to the right. She doubted either would work but it was good to see her kitchen in the making.

"I guess the idea is to keep working our way through," Normal said, peeping from behind an old mattress.

As far as Daff could see, there was "stuff." It all looked daunting, impossible to arrange so that she would end up with enough room to move around. But by the same token, most of the furniture looked to be in fair condition. Where to start? At the beginning.

Normal was thinking along the same line. "Hey, this stuff ain't half-bad. How come you think he got rid of it?"

"I guess he bought some more."

Piece by piece, they moved and shifted, pulled and pushed and set things up and over, along the walls and away from the walls till the two rooms became kitchen and bedroom/living room. Along the south wall, separating Daff's place from Normal's place, was a teeny bathroom with a rusty toilet, lavatory and shower. Surprise!

But more surprising was a time-warp in the southwest corner of the bedroom—yes, Daff's bedroom, she decided —of ancient clothes and shoes, an odd leather lace-up boot, mildewed and hardened to an almost petrified state; a small woman's small black ballet slippers with rat-gnawed bows; an old grammar book with the name "Lou Jean Scurvy" penciled inside the front cover; and scattered lined notebook paper, each with drawings and the name "Alamand" on the bottom.

Daff figured this stuff hadn't been eaten by roaches and rats because of the chemicals Abe Guess had stored in there all those years.

Normal, on one knee, was stacking the papers as she looked through them. "Man, whoever this Alamand was she sure liked to draw."

Daff, transfixed by their find, said, "What makes you think this Alamand's a she?"

Normal didn't answer; she was turning one of the papers, finally settling on which was top and which was bottom. "Hey! This looks like the phone booth over there at the courthouse. Yeah, look, you can even see the courthouse in the background. I think."

She passed it to Daff. "My gosh! There's a boy inside the booth. And look at the detail on his shirt—tiny little checks, perfect lines."

"Teach, look on the back. What's that writing?"

"E-A-R-L, Earl. Wonder who this Earl was?"

"Must of been a buddy of this Alamand, don't you think? I mean, for him to take such pains to draw him."

"Okay, lets save what we want, put it in that cardboard box over there—behind you, Normal. We still got a lot of work ahead of us." Daff took the box Normal handed to her. "We'll go through this stuff again later."

"I'm burning up. And that poison-mess is driving me crazy. Let's go drag the sacks out and put them in a capped barrel I got at the garage." Normal stood and headed for the two windows overlooking the green of the creek. She stopped halfway, between a small pine rocking chair with narrow slats on the seat and back and a black, cast-iron,wood-burning heater burnished gray from the heat of many fires. "Alamand," said Normal and sighed.

"What?" Daff was done placing the old-finds in the box. She stood, walking over to where Normal was standing.

Before them, on the narrow strip of tongue-and-groove, between the windows, was a drawing of an elephant's head, with ears mimicking the plants growing along the creek.

"Whoa, this is strange," Daff said, laughing.

"Yeah, it's like seeing what Alamand was seeing while drawing it."

Daff ceased to look at the drawing and began to study Normal. She never seemed to be affected by time—where to be, what to do when—or lack of family. None of the things that ordinary people are concerned with, and she never really seemed unhappy. Discovering this made Daff feel like crying. But she couldn't decide whether this was a good or bad condition to be in. She did know though that she herself would be better off like Normal, more abnormal.

Normal had rigged an old radio in its green plastic case, and while they worked throughout the day, they listened to Country music.

Twice, Daff had to turn the music down. Normal must be deaf, she thought. But the music at least kept Daff from having to hear the slow Sunday traffic.

She couldn't help wondering what happened that morning when Tom-Tom came and found her gone. Probably he talked to the Lanes and got their version of the truth. Would they assume that she was at the garage or would they think she'd gone home or on to Valdosta?

About one o'clock while she was scouring the stove, it came to her that Tom-Tom hadn't even cared enough about her to stop by the garage and ask Normal if she had seen Daff. One thing for sure though, soon if not already her family would have heard that she was no longer at the Lane's.

Earlier, Normal had tinkered with what she determined to be an old "ice box," rather than a fridge, and got it running, then decided to have a go at the stove with its keen lamp-oil smell. "Kerosene! Talk about an antique!" she'd said, rubbing the filthy flat front with Mr. Lane's blue-striped sleeve cuff. One thing the apartment didn't need more of was antiques, but every old thing was an antique to Normal and she acted as if she and Daff had struck it rich. Daff had to keep reminding her that they were just borrowing the furnishings when Normal insisted on selling something.

Finally, it dawned on Daff, while Normal was popping up and down in a split-leather reclining chair, that these were riches to her.

When she had finished cleaning the stove, Daff swabbed down the living room and bedroom with a solution of pine oil, from the Delta, and water, from the post office. Then they sat out on the grassed slope of Troublesome Creek with their backs to the garage and Highway 94 and ate baloney on white bread, from the Delta. Trucks and cars passed on Highway 129 as seen through the giant green elephant ears and vines leading down to the creek and its hidden stream. The vines were so thick they were like a wall or green leaf-print curtains.

Along the road shoulder and the ditch, a sunny patch of wild brown-eyed Susans nodded in the hot breeze of passing automobiles, and in the west the sky bloomed with cottony clouds, so white against their blue background they made Daff's eyes ache. In the lapse of traffic noise, katydids hummed in the sweet-gums and pines steeping in the heat along the creek.

Done with her sandwich, Normal pinched off pieces of baloney and tossed them to Stubborn sitting before her with that brown patch over one eye.

Daff asked her, "Don't you ever miss your family?"

She hawed and flipped a whole slice of baloney to the dog. "No, but I bet they miss me!"

Then she turned solemn, looking behind her at the unpainted wall of Daff's apartment broken by the two windows like eyes. "Hey, that place ain't so bad after all."

"Why didn't you do this before and move in there yourself?"

"Huh uh. I like my garage, keeps me humble."

"Well, I don't know how much humbler you can get than that old apartment."

"You ever slept in a box under an overpass?"

"Normal, tell me." Daff sipped from her can of Coke. "Why are you staying here? Here of all places?"

"I ain't planning on rooting down here."

"Well, nobody's been all that friendly to you. I mean, it's not like you belong here."

"This is the closest I've ever come. I got me a dog." She laughed, swinging an arm around the dog now sitting next to here. "Hell, I might win the lottery, who knows?"

Daff was glad that Normal hadn't owned up to the fact that Daff was maybe her only friend ever, her only reason for staying in Statenville. But she belived that was likely true.

"Back to work," said Daff and got up from the grass.

***It was almost sundown when Daff attacked the tiny bathroom. It looked nasty and smelled nasty, but thankfully not human-nasty. The shower was a narrow cubicle with flimsy metal walls that gave off a tinny sound when the spray beat down on them. Somehow, Normal had rigged the water to the shower as well as the yard-type spigot in the old white sink in the kitchen and the identical one in the bathroom. The toilet with its stubborn rust stains even flushed.

Yes, Daff had okay-ed the water and even electricity hookups from the post office to her apartment. Normal had had to rig a dangling bulb in the doorway to Daff's kitchen, and now the night beetles and mosquitoes from the creek were frolicking in the light. The bulb was caged in a metal basket, a mechanic's light; it must have been 200 watts and gave off the heat of a fireplace in the already hot apartment, every inch of which had been cleaned except for the kitchen floor when Daff flapped the white sheet she had brought with her pillow from the Lane's trailer.

"Hey, this ain't half-bad." Normal plopped on the bed, on her back, with her boots hanging off the side.

"It's your place. You can stay here, you know."

"Naw, I'm already over there." She sat up and nodded toward the garage beyond the south bead-board wall and the head of the white iron bedstead.

After sundown, when the church bells rang, just beyond the post office next door, Daff was too exhausted to move. She ached all over. But she was proud of her little place behind the garage, its clean smell, the camouflage of pine oil.

While going through a pile of trash, Normal had found more links to what might have been the history of Alamand and Lou Jean's family: post cards with faded pictures of various street scenes in New Orleans, signed by somebody named Annie Bell and another named Rosanne—all addressed to somebody named Louella; she found a calendar from the year 1960. But best of all, most miraculous, were two mended cook pots of dry dirt, one with dead thistles of a houseplant, the other with a single withered, fleshy cactus with enough juice to still be called alive.

"Maybe Abe Guess's wife's, you reckon?" Normal tested the hair-like thorns with the tip of a finger.

"He's not married, never has been. And he doesn't strike me as a house-plant type. You?"

"I wouldn't know about that kind of stuff." Normal set the pot of cactus down easy, tenderly, in the cardboard box with the post cards, calendar, papers, grammar book, and the three shoes. "Can a cactus last that long? Without water for forty-odd years!"

***Daff planned to tack screens outside the broken windows. Inside she would hang roll-up shades maybe. Shades were cheaper than curtains, and she'd had enough of curtains to last her a lifetime.

All afternoon she and Normal had been carrying loads of rags and paper trash to a clearing between the apartment and the creek, a green damp space where they could burn without fear of fire getting out and spreading to the pine woods north of the creek.

First dark, the trash pile was smoldering, a leaning smoke that helped thwart the mosquitoes.

On overturned five-gallon cans placed away from the leaning smoke, they sat sipping Cokes and eating Barbeque potato chips, taking a break, listening to the frogs embedded and chirruping along the run of the creek. Normal's dog was lying with his head on his paws next to her can.

Inside, a cleansing smoke drifted through the open windows of Daff's apartment. Maybe she had overdone the pine oil in the closet-size bathroom. Smoke combined with the tangy pine smell made her eyes burn, as she mopped the raw boards and the scrap of old yellow linoleum in the kitchen, her last job of the day.

Bundling in her arms some trash tossed out the door to the alley, she headed for the low-burning fire near the slope to the gorge.

Normal, sweaty and filthy, was standing before the smoking heap, punching at it with a long stick, separating, splitting the pile in two parts to burn into the center. With the dew rising, the trash had almost quit burning.

Daff dropped the trash in her arms onto the pile and instantly the paper flared and curled; the rags scorched and turned to brown clots, then flared up too.

"Hey, you don't reckon we'll get in trouble burning without a permit, do you?" Normal poked at the dying blaze.

"People burn all the time around here."

At the Methodist Church, they were singing; the piano music seemed to drift on the smoke. Daff thought she could even hear singing from the Baptist Church, her church, south of the courthouse. It made her feel displaced, like homesickness, thinking about everybody at church and her here with Normal, possibly the most outstanding misfit the town had ever known. Maybe Daff would go back to church as soon as she got settled in. Had she gone too far? Risked too much? Much of her life she'd gone to church on Sunday mornings and nights, and now she was on her own finally and felt afraid of not knowing where she would be tomorrow morning, afraid of waking up and finding that truly she was on her own, now that she had broken with the expected.

Once again she was staring into the mouth of the dog.

"Is that all the trash?" Normal poked at the burning rags with her stick and they flared again, fire nibbling at the piles she had divided, working from the center out.

"I'll do that," Daff said. "You go take a shower in my apartment." Just the thought of the cold water made Daff feel refreshed. What would she do when winter came? She could be gone by then; she could be dead. "I left some fresh shorts and a shirt on the bed for you."

Normal lifted her right arm and sniffed at her armpit. "Yeah, I reckon," she said and handed the stick to Normal. "Too late to jump in the creek with the gators and snakes."

When she was gone Daff poked at the fire, facing the direction of the creek. Frogs peeped and katydids shrilled in the tiers of trees and vines in the gorge.

Almost dark, and the caged bulb under the garage shelter burned brighter, making the alley between the post office and the garage look darker, a gap of darkness between the garage and the light hung in the doorway of Daff's kitchen. Light, thanks to Normal! But tomorrow Daff would have her own electricity legally connected. She didn't want to get in trouble. There were still rules to abide by. Normal was new in Statenville, just passing through, and had nothing to lose, but Daff had to hold to the local rules. She could tell herself that it didn't matter, but it did.

By now the Lanes would for sure know she was gone. Probably they thought she had gone home to the farm; maybe they were eating supper this minute and discussing her leaving.

Behind her on the highway she could hear traffic slowing at the crossing, turning left and right. And along 129 she could see headlights of automobiles flickering through the screen of leaves and vines. Maybe the Lanes were coming home from church, passing right now and seeing her standing before the fire.

Normal's dog was down in the gorge, barking, maybe chasing a rabbit.

Inside Daff's apartment, Normal was hooting a song while the spray of the shower sang on the metal walls. Now and then the music was punctuated by Normal drumming on the walls with her fists.

A few minutes later, the water and the singing stopped, and a few more minutes later, the wood floor quaked with Normal stomping into her boots, then bounding across the kitchen floor.

Daff looked around and saw her stepping into the light on the grass by her kitchen door, vanishing into the dark gap and then showing under the garage shelter, packing one of Daff's white t-shirts into knee-length, green twill shorts. And of course, boots with white sock-tops. A blue-denim long-sleeve shirt, belonging to Mr. Lane, was slung over one shoulder.

Daff had found this shirt in a warm pile of her own clothes, fresh out of the Lanes' dryer and never took it back to keep Mrs. Lane from over-analyzing in that accusing tone, turning the shirt in her hands, maybe scratching at an imaginary stain—How in the world did that happen? My word! –not talking about the non-existent stain, but how Daff had really come into possession of the shirt.

Standing under the shower of light and bugs, Normal gathered her wet hair back in both hands and snatched it through the elastic band that she wore on her right wrist like a watch when not in use.

With Normal out of the apartment, Daff could go inside and shower and get ready for bed. She had to open the Delta at six the next morning and she was tired from cleaning and jittery about her new move. Tomorrow, her folks would come and she would have to explain why she left the Lanes and moved in here. They might make her miserable but they couldn't make her go home. The idea had been for her to live there in safety till her good judgment had formed—blah, blah, blah. Well, it was probably about as formed as it was ever going to be. She was sick of thinking about it. She was sick of that trailer and Mr. and Mrs. Lane. She felt a brightening of gladness, making her less tired.

Securing the fire by poking the two heaps together, Daff started to go inside, when she heard shouting, grunting and feet pounding the ground in the dark part of the alley.

"Ho now! What you up to?" Normal hooted in that muffled voice.

A man shouted back. 'Hey! Hey, let go of me."

Daff knew it was Tom-Tom.

In a few seconds, she saw Normal and Tom-Tom rolling on the grass into the funnel of light from her kitchen doorway. Both grunting, heaving; Normal straddled his back, him facing the ground and his long arms in a white oxford shirt yanked behind him.

"What you mean sneaking around here?" Normal shouted.

Daff ran from the trash pile and stopped standing over them.

"Caught me a peeping tom." Normal laughed out, snorted and then spat to one side. Her eyes were shining, her teeth were shining; she looked truly wild.

Her little dog came streaking up the slope, past the fire, and stood barking and backing away from the fight.

"Daffney?" Tom-Tom sounded like he was drowning, staring up at her with a dark look.

"Y'all two know each other?" Normal still straddled his back and held his arms behind him.

"It's Tom-Tom, Normal. My old boyfriend."

"Boy friend?" Normal laughed out, then scrambled to her feet, smirking with her hands on her hips. "I told you I caught a peeping tom. Get it? Tom-Tom." She seemed to be trying to turn things around with her play on words.

Tom-Tom popped up, brushing the grass and dirt from his khaki pants.

"Sorry, mister." Normal hung her head in an exaggerated show of shame. "Name's Normal." She stuck out her hand to shake; he ignored her. He had grass in his brown wavy hair.

"Sorry, teach," Normal said, twisting away as if to hide her face.

"Normal's new around here. She's letting me stay in this little place back here till I can find something better."

"Mrs. Lane said you went home. I called and your mother said she hadn't seen you."

"I'm not going home, Tom-Tom."

"You can't stay here."

"Well, I am. You're welcome to come in if you want to."

"Y'all two's got stuff to talk about, said Normal, loping off down the alley toward the garage. "I'll just mosey on round there and make myself scarce."

Daff headed for her kitchen doorway and the light hanging down; she had to part the tangle of cords to get through.

He followed.

"I don't like the looks of this," he said, batting at the night bugs. His face was red.

"That's too bad," Daff said.

"I've been all day looking for you."

She had never seen him so outside himself, so focused on somebody else.

"I'm sorry." Immediately she was sorry to have said I'm sorry. It seemed that she had always said that about every other line in conversation with him. With anybody. "No, I am not sorry. You don't need to know every move I make."

"Since when?" He looked like he did sometimes singing solo at church—body and soul centered in his eyes, like green water shimmering in soft light.

"I don't know since when; this morning, last night, I guess."

"Don't tell me what I think you're about to tell me." He was always serious, but this time he was seriously serious.

"I don't know what you mean."

"I think you do."

They were facing off with one another just inside the kitchen door. As upset as she was she had room for awe in how the apartment had turned out. Or maybe she was thinking that to keep from facing what she was now facing—she hated Tom-Tom, while at the same time feeling drawn to him, attraction like a magnet.

"Go on, Tommy. Just go." Tommy was what his mother called him; Tom-Tom was a carry-over from high school. Daff would miss his mother, Miss Linda, who was as selfless as he was selfish.

He propped one hand on the wall to his left and wiped his face on his shirt sleeve. "Okay, just get your stuff and let me take you back to Mrs. Lane's. And we'll let bygones be bygones."

Her voice slid up an octave. "I'm not going anywhere."

"We'll still get married, right away if you want to."

"I don't recall ever even discussing this."

"We both knew...I did. I thought you did." He butted his head in the direction of the garage where Normal was banging on something metal. "You're just mixed up," he said, quieter. "All that 9-11 business and you trying to stay in college got to you. Then she, whatever, comes along."

"I hope you aren't insinuating what I think you're insinuating."

"Well, I am, dammit! But I'm willing to marry you anyway." He ducked his head again, wiping his forehead on his white shirt sleeve. "You can quit college; you've never been the same since you started college."

"Get out, Tom-Tom." Daff uncrossed her arms and pointed to the door. "Out!"

"The hell I will." His voice registered at highest decibel. "This isn't just you getting your reputation ruined."

"Ruined?" She shouted at him. "Oh, so you don't want people to think I left you for a woman, is that it? Besides, she just whipped your butt."

"So, you are having things to do with her?"

"Out, Tom-Tom!" Duff felt sick, her grit was going. Her face burned. "Out before I throw you out." She'd had enough of this day, was ready for it to be over.

"Normal, huh?" he laughed, sneering. "Man, I can't believe this. This is some kind of nightmare." He shook his beautiful head with ugly bugs circling round it. "Lord help!"

"Normal is my friend and that's all."

"She's a freak! A fucking freak."

Daff knew that Normal had heard. "Why? Because she doesn't look and act like everybody else around here?"

Daff, you're getting crazy."

"I'm so glad." She began pacing, shouting and waving her arms through the bugs drawn to the light. "I am so glad that finally I can be crazy enough to look at things from a different angle. I am so glad you think I'm crazy so then you'll get off my case."

"I'm out of here." He wheeled and ducked under the light and stepped out.

In a couple of minutes, Daff heard his pickup start and pull away, spinning wheels, north down the slope of Troublesome Creek.

She started toward the bathroom when she heard a knock on the south wall. "Hey, teach?"

Daff was about to cry. "What, Normal?"

"I'm sorry, teach. I hate it."

"Do me a favor, Normal."

"What, teach?"

"Never say I'm sorry to me again."

"Right, teach."

Chapter 6

Normal was still asleep when Daff headed out at six the next morning. The garage was dark and silent and smelled of motor oil and grease. The dark was thick, relieved only by the night lights on at the post office, the courthouse and the Delta, diagonal of the crossing.

Smoke from the trash fire of the night before mingled with fog and smelled bitter and damp as Daff crossed under the blinking red light, seeing its reflection in the front window and on the doors like an alarm system signal at the Delta.

She had just put on the coffee when a pickup load of Mexican migrant workers trooped in.

Fall quarter she would be taking Spanish. For now, their only exchange of language was money: they would hand over a ten or a five dollar bill; she would ring up their chips and candy and cold drinks (they never drank coffee) then hand their change across the counter. They never counted the change to see if she had made a mistake. If they grumbled about their long days in pepper, tomato, and squash fields she couldn't tell. For the most part, they just smiled and babbled, bought their junk and left.

They were the worst customers she had about tossing paper wrappings and cola cans and bottles on the floor and the pavement outside.

She figured they didn't know any better and until she could tell them in Spanish she would have to just keep on picking up behind them. She might even tell them that they were wasting their money on junk, nothing nourishing. But after harvesting vegetables all day they probably didn't want to eat them.

On Saturdays and Sundays they would line up at the phone booth in front of the courthouse, taking turns calling home. All day they would be in and out of the store for change to make their calls to Mexico. Most of them lived across Troublesome Creek in shacks or trailers at the old site of the abandoned Samson Camp where the Samson Powder Company families used to live before Daff was born.

Maybe a dozen young men camped out at an old lean-to tin building that used to be a place to buy gas and get your automobile inspected. Their living quarters were worse than Daff's place, and somehow that made her feel better. Even the black people in the quarters felt superior to the Mexicans, just as white people in Echols County had always felt superior to the blacks.

It struck Daff with a wave of hot pity that Normal didn't fit in anywhere, and by association with her, Daff may not fit in either.

She was still fuming about Tom-Tom's insinuation that she and Normal were lovers. No, she did not believe that Normal was a lesbian, but she didn't not-believe it either. She was human, regardless, and deserved to be treated as such.

Daff saw her folks' brown and tan van pull up outside between the gas pumps and the store. Doors flew open and kids rolled out, scrambling for the change on the pavement. And then Charlie eased out, speaking to Teeny, Patches and Knocker before making his way to the Delta's doors.

Daff kept watching for Delia to get out on the other side—the tinting on the windows was so dark she couldn't see inside.

"Where's Mama?" she asked Charlie as he came through the door.

"Don't try to change the subject."

"What subject?"

"Your leaving Mrs. Lane's like that after all she's done for you. Not even letting us know your whereabouts." He looked out the window at the garage and Normal squatted on the concrete, prying a tire from its rim. "Taking up with that."

Daff's ten year old sister popped through the door. "Daff, can I have some bubblegum?"

"No." Daff darted her eyes from her sister Teeny in a high-waisted print dress and no shoes to her daddy. "That happens to be my friend, whose name is Normal."

"See." He pushed his cap up on his forehead with his bangs. "Anybody normal doesn't have to say so. Now, you'll go on back to Mrs. Lane's or else home with us."

"You go stay at Mrs. Lane's, you think she's so wonderful."

"I ain't said she's wonderful, but she's a lady and I expect she's done her dead-level best to make one out of you."

"I don't want to be a lady."

"So I hear."

"From Tom-Tom—right?"

"He's not the only one talking."

"Let em talk." A loud crash sounded from the back of the store and she saw that her two younger brothers, who she hadn't even seen come inside, had over-turned a rack of fruit juices. "Knocker, y'all. Get away from there."

Her daddy dug a twenty dollar bill from his pocket and slapped it on the counter as if to show that nothing would interfere with their discussion. "Now, I want you to come on home soon as you knock off here. I'll send Bud to pick you up with your things."

"I won't go. You can't make me."

"Daff, can I have a cocoaler?" Knocker with his daddy's big ears and close-cut brown hair popped up from behind the counter next to Charlie.

"No."

"You'll do what I say do or I'll take my belt to you."

"You'll play hell doing that."

"I've had about enough of your lip." He stood tall, bowing out his chest. 'Hey, you younguns, put that stuff back and let's go."

The little boys fussed and scrambled, but except for the Bubblicious already in their mouths, they handed over their candy and stuff. "Y'll get one thing each," Daff said. "And that's all."

How would she ever figure what had been used up and broken and deduct from her daddy's twenty? Impossible. Finally she got them lined up, their Cokes and chips and Popsickles registered in the cash register.

Teeny with small dirty hands on the counter asked, "You really a lesbian now, Daff?"

"No."

"Then how come you living with one?"

"I'm not. I have my own place. You can come spend the night soon as I get settled."

"Really?"

The truck horn tooted. The kids blew out the door.

Teeny made a u-turn when she got to the truck and burst back through the store door. "Daddy says tell you he's disowning you."

"Tell him, good. Tell him I say good."

From her lookout at the window of the Delta, all day Daff would see Normal and the dog sitting out or standing around the garage. Her sign out front now read: $2 car wash. $5 oil change.

But nobody came.

Finally, around three that afternoon, Normal came over for a can of Skoal, an egg-salad sandwich and a drink and bought a lottery ticket.

"Business bad, huh?" Daff rang up her purchases and took the five she handed over. "That'll be seven dollars, Normal."

She felt inside her pocket. "Dang! Hold on a minute, teach." She went out and began kicking around the pumps. Came back with only a penny.

She slid the can of Skoal to one side. "Reckon I can live without it. Bout to rot my mouth out anyhow."

Daff didn't tell her but she was still a dollar short. Daff figured that soon, between Normal and her family's doing business at the Delta, she would have to join the Mexicans in the produce fields on her days off and work to cover the costs.

***Daff knew her daddy hadn't disowned her. He was just bluffing. So, when her seventeen-year-old brother Bud drove up to the garage that evening she was expecting him.

He pulled his white pickup up to the hem of shade from the garage shelter and got out, walking with his head down, going to do what he'd been sent to do though his heart wasn't in it. That was Bud, tall and thin with a timid smile, always being sent on some mission, when he'd like to be left alone to work until this disease called Underage wore itself out.

Where she and Bud got their small heads had to be from their real daddy, who over the years was never mentioned except by Daff when she was fighting with her mother. He was just part of "mama's past," so long ago he'd been struck from their minds. They weren't supposed to mention him, and for a fact he seemed unimportant to Daff and Bud. Charlie was their father and, bossy and down-on-his-luck as he was, he'd been a good father, a daddy, and they had never gone without food and clothes and a roof over their heads. Not a one of them. Daff loved him; she was almost ready to go home. But if she left now, if she gave in, she would end up quitting school and maybe getting married and her own children would mix in with her brothers and sisters until she wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Their combined racket and mischief-making would drive her crazy. She would have nothing left but the day-to-day of eating and making love, making more babies, who would in turn, make more babies, and it wasn't enough.

She couldn't give in; she couldn't give up.

"Hey, Bud," Daff called out from the kitchen door. "I'm back here."

He pocketed his hands, eyeing the garage. "How do?" He nodded at Normal, hidden from Daff's view by the inset wall of the garage front.

Daff called out again,"Bud, that's Normal. Normal, Bud."

"Hot, ain't it?" she said in that put-on base voice that was for real.

"Dang hot!"

Daff was barefooted in white shorts and a navy halter-top. Too hot for a bra. She hung in the kitchen doorway, smiling at her brother.

The late evening sun blazing on the tin of her west wall had heated up the apartment like a furnace.

"Got some tea made." It had been weeks since she'd seen Bud and she had missed him. He was so sweet, sweetest in the family.

When he got to where she was standing, she reached out and hugged him. She kissed him on his soft-bearded cheek, the dog-bit one with the thin silvery scar, like a metal zipper, from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth. There was something about defects in people that drew her to them.

"Sweet tea?"

"You know me." Big-sisterly, she caught his right hand and tugged him behind her into the kitchen. "Come on in. See my place."

"Ain't bad," he said, stopping in the kitchen and looking around.

"Hot though."

"Dang hot!"

"I brought ice home from the Delta." She took a red Solo cup from the counter and carried it to the drumming icebox and filled it with chunks of ice. Then she took out the clear plastic jug of sun-brewed tea and poured him a glass. "Let's sit outside, want to?"

"Yeah." He swigged the tea. "Good. You make good tea, Daff."

He followed her out to the crates in the eave-shade of the building, facing the red brick post office wall. The grass and weeds were now knee-deep and buzzing with crickets and grasshoppers. Its sweet green scent overwhelmed the odors of grease and oil and the hot dank from the open door of Daff's apartment.

"He sent you after me, didn't he?"

Bud laughed low and drank some more tea. Long legs in blue jeans folded before him. New white tennis shoes!

"Where'd you get the new shoes?"

"Wal-mart."

"Still working in tobacco?"

He had small brown eyes, looked like Tim McGraw without the shoulders. He had showered, clean in faded jeans and a cheap white polo, and smelled faintly of Clorox used to bleach the tobacco stains from his hands.

"Ever day. Can to can't. Knocked off early today cause we got all the barns full."

"That's good."

"You ain't going, are you?"

"Home? No. I can't, Bud. You know I can't."

"I know." He drank the rest of the tea, and then pressed the sweating cup to his forehead. "He don't mean no harm."

"I know that." Daff patted his sharp knee. "You don't believe that about me being a lesbian?"

"Heck, no. And he don't neither. Daddy's just being Daddy."

"And I'm Daff being Daff, right?"

"Least you ain't wearing them old combat boots."

She kicked at his leg. "Boots don't go with the shorts, you know?"

"Oh. I just thought..." He scratched his head.

"What? I wouldn't want to wear my boots no more—anymore—now that Normal and I are friends? Daff laughed. "I mean, me and her both wearing boots does look funny."

He laughed. "You right about that."

A small blue car turned in off the highway at the post office. Reminded Daff of Nina, who she'd been trying to reach by phone to discuss plans for Cassie's bridal shower. So far, she hadn't returned the calls.

Bud shook his ice down in his cup and drank the melted water and tea. "Always gotta make a point."

"Seriously, little brother, I do hope I don't embarrass you. I mean, it was one thing to wear combat boots under my gown dress in the beauty pageant."

He held up one tar-stained hand. "Didn't bother me. Everybody thought it was cool. Besides you won."

"But not cool anymore, right?"

"I don't know, Daff. I honest to God don't know. I just love you and wish you and Daddy would get along."

"What about Mama? You heard about our fight at the Delta awhile back?"

"Daddy'll be okay. But Mama—this time she's really pissed. Won't even talk about you with the rest of the family."

"We'll make up, we always do."

"I think you went too far this time, Daff, seriously."

"I hate asking that about our real daddy." Daff stung with grief inside.

"Yeah. Well." He turned the cup of ice in his hands. "I got a feeling she never told who our real daddy was because he didn't want us and she didn't want us to be hurt by that."

Daff could never recall Bud talking so much; she could never recall him offering his opinion that way. She hadn't even known he was capable of such thinking.

"I'm sorry about Charlie putting you in the middle of this." Daff stood. "Want some more tea?"

"Naw, I gotta go."

"I'd go rent us a movie from the Delta and we could watch it. But I don't have a TV."

"Don't matter. I gotta go."

"I got a radio though. "She kissed his cheek again. "Give Mama my love and tell the old man I love him, will you?"

"He done knows that."

"He already knows that," she corrected. "Soon as I get through college and get a job teaching, I'm going to help you go to college."

They walked together through the alley of sweet grass toward his white pickup out front. "Ain't going to college, Daff. I'm going in the Army. I expect."

"Nothing wrong in that. You can go in the Army then they'll put you through college, when you get out. Or so I hear."

Normal was standing at the shelf along the wall, tinkering with a greasy, clunky carburetor. She looked hot in the tight jeans and brown plaid shirt she'd been wearing when Daff first met her.

"Don't I have a cute brother, Normal?"

Normal looked around. Wiped her face on her sleeve and laughed. "Bet he's gotta whole bunch of girlfriends."

"All over him."

"Naw."

"You need anything done to your truck, I'm your mechanic, hear?" Normal said.

"Old man's truck, but I'll tell him."

"Yeah, right!" Daff laughed, then whispered through the door as he got inside and closed it. "She's alright, Bud. Really she is. Just had a hard life. No place to go. I've been helping her out. Now she's helping me out."

"Well, I'm gone." He started the truck, shifted the gears and backed out.

Daff started to walk off toward her apartment.

Normal turned around again, wiping her hands on a greasy blue rag. "Listen. I'm thinking about moving on. Ain't nothing going in this town and business ain't doing so good."

"Where will you go, Normal?"

"Same place I always go—Somewhere."

"You don't have any money."

She stuck out her greasy thumb. "I got this, same as I had when I got here."

"Normal, it's too dangerous out on the road like that."

"I can take care of myself. I been taking care of myself."

"You're leaving because you think people are shunning me because of you, right?"

"Ain't that...it's just..."

"Yeah, it is." Daff stopped with her hands on her hips. "And I won't lie, it's a problem. But I don't run from trouble and I never figured you for the kind would run from trouble. So, if you leave now you are doing it for yourself, not me. Besides, I can't afford this place by myself. I can't move back in at the Lanes' and I won't go home."

"I don't wanta go yet."

"Well, don't. Stick it out and see what happens. You're a fine mechanic and cheap to boot. Once people get over thinking you're a freak they'll start doing business with you."

"You really believe that?"

"I do." Daff walked away. "Come on over and I'll fix you some tea."

***Daff had all intentions of having her electricity legally connected before Nina and Cassie twisted her arm into check-writing position for the bridesmaid dress costing $300.

Nina started it when she dropped by the Delta the next morning and flatly stated that she would not be needing Daff's help with Cassie's bridal shower. Out front, her electric-blue bug with the tacky bouquet of plastic flowers still attached to the steering wheel sat waiting to fly while Nina stood talking to Daff over the counter inside. Her bleached hair was still parted in the middle and hung straight down on her shoulders. She still wore the ridiculous white athletic shoes, dress jeans and blue oxford shirt—her uniform.

"So, I just wanted you to know ahead of time. The shower's off."

"Off or you don't want me helping with it?"

She wouldn't look at Daff and Daff couldn't take her eyes off the dumpy blue car through the window. "Cassie's decided not to have one."

"Cassie would have the shower even if she decided not to have the wedding."

"That's a low blow."

"The low blow is you—y'all—turning against me because I've moved in back of the garage where Normal lives."

Daff could tell Nina wanted to look behind her, through the glass doors where Normal could be seen working on somebody's truck. She was finally working again, converting an eight-cylinder engine to a six-cylinder to save on gas for the truck's owner.

"To be honest," Nina said, now looking square at Daff with those eyes too full of blue iris, "Cassie asked me to come by and break the news. She said to tell you not to bother about getting fitted for your dress. She said you waited too late."

"Oh, wait," Daff said, spreading both hands on the counter. "This is Tuesday and the wedding is on Saturday. So, that means you've already had the shower." She held up her right hand. "Tell me if I'm wrong about this, Nina."

Normal with a blue grease rag flagging from the hip pocket of her khaki shorts, popped through the door and headed straight for the medical aids aisle, picked up a packet of Goody Headache Powders. On her way to the doors she stepped around in front of Nina and slapped a dollar bill on the counter and walked out the door, gone.

Nina looked down, rocking up and back from the counter. "Okay," she resumed, as if Normal's entrance and exit hadn't happened. "But that was Cassie's idea; her feelings were hurt because you hadn't been in to get your dress fitted."

"Well, yes I have. Tell her after spending all that money on a dumb dress I'm definitely going to be in her wedding."

Having said that, Daff had to get to town right away, before her shift was even over. She had to borrow Charlotte's burgundy Ford Taurus and speed to get to the brides' shop before Cassie could call and check on whether she'd really been fitted for the dress.

***Downtown Valdosta, where the bridal shop was located, was busy with traffic from people heading home from work. The sun, at five o'clock, was still blazing on the baked pavement, steeping hot tar. One parking slot left, a few shops down from the bridal shop, and Daff had to pull forward and back up a dozen times to ease the long bulky car into the space. The car was then her number-one enemy, ranking ahead of Cassie and Nina, and that was saying something.

The manager of the shop was a blowsy older woman wearing her glasses on a black cord around her neck.

When Daff explained why she was there, the woman said that really there was no way to get the dress altered in time for the wedding.

Mirrors everywhere multiplied Daff in combat boots, khaki cutoffs and white tee-shirt, as she insisted on trying on the dress—maybe it wouldn't need altering. Besides, she reasoned, if the dress had been ordered already wouldn't the owner of the shop prefer to sell it rather than have to send it back.

Well, yes," said the manager, sizing Daff up. "Maybe with the shape-wear underneath..."

The bridesmaid dress was the same color as Charlotte's car, in velvet, sleek in front and gathered in back over Daff's butt. Hideous! And it would have to be hemmed. But the manager said that they could handle that in time for Saturday coming up.

When the seamstress with a mouth full of straight pens asked if Daff had brought her dyed-to-match heels to have the hem taken, Daff said she'd forgotten them. But really she had no intention of buying the heels. She would be wearing her boots.

Part Two

Chapter 7

Middle of August and the nights are as hot as midday and Daff lies in the partial dark listening to country music on the green radio. It helps to take her mind off her problems and to muffle the racket of semis jake-braking at Troublesome Creek. The tin west wall of her apartment acts as a vibrating conductor for traffic sounds and even bounces the music back at her.

It is okay that Tom-Tom has ruined her reputation by spreading the rumor that he broke up with her because of her lesbian relationship with Normal—though not in those words exactly.

It is okay that Nina and Cassie have shunned her and really okay that Cassie has threatened to kill her for spoiling her wedding. It is even okay that Daff has humiliated Bud and the rest of the family, that her own second-hand daddy isn't speaking to her.

She can fix all that in time.

But it is not okay that she has lost her job at the Delta and may not be able to afford to go back to school in the fall. And it is not okay that Normal is now sleeping in the jail on the south-end of the courtyard. If Daff had known what was coming up she wouldn't have squandered her money on luxuries such as food; she wouldn't have squandered her money on necessities such as the bridesmaid's dress. She smiles at the thought—luxuries—but really she would like to cry.

In her heart of hearts she feels bad about spoiling Cassie's perfect wedding; what she did was cruel and pointless. But that was nothing compared to how she'd used poor innocent Normal.

All three days before Cassie's wedding had been devoted to disgracing Daff's old friend to Normal.

Daff showed Normal the dress and the price tag; she showed her the tight tan body-stocking that she would have to wear beneath the dress.

Normal hawed, holding up the ridiculous garment. "How you get into this thing anyhow."

"Squirm and tug, that's how." Daff and Normal were in Daff's apartment, where the dusky maroon dress was spread on the bed like a church choir robe.

"Man, I'm glad it ain't me going to that wedding."

"Have you ever been to a wedding before?"

"Nope. Ain't planning on it either."

"Would you go to this one for me?" Daff suddenly had an idea.

Normal tossed the body-stocking on the bed. "Teach, ain't much I wouldn't do for you, but not that."

"You won't have to dress up, I promise."

Normal looked down at her filthy khaki shorts. She had a grease-streak that ran from the left leg of her shorts all the way down to her hairy tanned knee.

"Naw." Normal shook her head. "I don't even know why you want to go after her and that other girl treating you so mean."

"Actually, Normal, I think we're the ones people would call the mean girls." Daff laughed. "And yes, you do know why I'm going."

"Pay-back. Still it don't seem worth it." Normal scrubbed at her greasy knee with the blue rag from her hip pocket. "Well, what would I be doing there? She don't even know me."

"Trust me on this one, Normal."

"Right, teach."

***On Saturday afternoon, in the dim bell-ringing chamber of the Methodist Church, where Daff had been hiding for well over an hour, the thick hemp rope connected to the bell in the steeple overhead hung down between her eyes, the hairs of the fibers tickling the tip of her nose. It was all she could do to keep from holding to the rope, to move it, but she was afraid she might set the bell ringing and give away her hiding place. The chamber was closet-size, stifling and musty, and the velvet dress was like wearing a stage curtain.

The first chords of piano music struck fear in her heart. Was she really going through with it? In the vestibule beyond the wall where she stood scrunched, squeezed like a sausage into the body-stocking thingy, she could hear people talking, trailing in. She heard Mrs. Lane whispering to somebody about how "lovely" the church looked. Then, Daff imagined, when one of the ushers stepped up to escort her to her seat, she gushed surprise; it nauseated Daff imagining her springing alongside one of the young men as if he'd asked her to dance.

Then Daff thought she heard her mother speaking to her daddy in that husky, low voice. She hoped not. She shuddered imagining them just beyond the white door with twenty-two raised wood grains in it and too she had to pee.

Next came the tittering bridesmaids, who had dressed in one of the Sunday school rooms in back of the church, where the bride waited. Their high-heeled shoes click, click, clicked on the slick floor. "Does this dress make me look fat?" one said. "Not at all," Nina lied. Yes, it was Nina; Daff was sure of it.

She started to brush the rope aside but her left hand stayed her right. She had to pee.

By the time the wedding march started, Daff had made up her mind not to go through with her plans. She hadn't expected Delia and Charlie to be here. But she took a deep breath and opened the door a crack and peeked out at the velvet-draped behinds of the bridesmaids, the first one already marching down the candle-lit aisle. Then another. Cool air rushed through the crack in the door with incense of candles, flowers and perfume. Her ponytail felt humped up from pressing into the wall but she dared not move to rearrange it.

She couldn't see to the left where the bride would be waiting her turn to march down behind her eight bridesmaids, only the rosy-hued entrance to the chapel.

Girls in plush velvet were bunched around the chamber door, so that when Daff slipped through she became just another maroon dress. She didn't look behind her but listened for Cassie or her daddy to call out her name. Four bridesmaids behind the next marching up the aisle, Daff felt her fingers growing hot, then heat streaking from her toes to the top of her head. She almost panicked—she had to pee—almost darted back through the door to the bell-ringing chamber, but no, she'd come this far and she would make it up that aisle when her time came if she had to crawl the distance to where Nina and six others were posing with serious men in black tux at the altar banked with white glads, ferns and flickering candelabras, their maroon-lipstick smiles changing to bow-loops when before them stood Daff in boots set to walk.

Smiling her best, her beauty pageant smile, Daff stepped in time to the piano music, all around her hearing sharp hisses and gasps from the slick pine pews. And behind, Cassie sobbing and her daddy shushing her. On Daff's left, about half-way up the aisle, she saw Mrs. Lane in lavender lace, right hand over her heart as if pledging the flag. "My word!"

Almost there, set to step into place alongside Nina with her long bleached hair finally up in a do of curls. Curls with tiny star-shaped flowers sprinkled among them. There, Daff wheeled and faced the bride in white, voile veil tenting her fiery face, as the wedding march reached its crescendo.

And then she spotted Delia and Charlie on her right, both gone pale, staring at Daff. Delia was blinking, maybe about to cry. Charlie bowed his head. To Daff they looked merely sad, not-disbelieving or even angry, the way they usually did when Daff forced them to stare into the mouth of the dog.

If the shape-wear had allowed it she would have squatted to hide her boots under the maroon velvet skirt, but if she did squat she would pee on herself. She'd gone too far this time. The preacher was speaking before she realized it; all she could think about was stopping Normal, hidden in the choir robe closet beyond the white altar wall.

The chugging sound of Cassie crying filled the little church. Nobody else made a peep or even moved, which caused the spasm-ing of her ribcage under the fitted satin bodice of her strapless dress to be an inevitable focal point.

Cassie and Nina had been at Daff's house, watching "The Wizard of Oz" on video, when Cassie's period first started. They were twelve years old then and both Nina and Daff had already had their first periods, old pros with pads and Tampons. Daff had put the movie on pause and gone into the bathroom to get a Tampon for Cassie, then gone back to the living room to finish the movie, with about forty-five minutes left to go. Cassie came back to join them after maybe ten minutes, then about ten minutes later she went back to the bathroom. Back to the movie, back to the bathroom. Neither Daff or Nina had thought much about it till the end of the movie when Cassie hadn't come back.

Drunk on the magic of the movie, Daff had found her crying, long coltish legs bare and chill-blained, standing in a puddle of bloody water and puked Tampons from the overflowing toilet. It was as if, Daff thought, they had been through a disorienting tornado themselves, along with the character Dorothy, and they could never go back to who they were before the movie started.

Daff now cut her eyes at Nina's profile and could see through one teary blue iris like glass.

Daff sucked in her breath and with it the sweet smells of flowers, the smoky candle wax and the maroon dye of the dresses. She longed to cover her ears to keep from hearing what was coming up. Oh, Lord, close Normal's ears to the preacher's next words.

"If anyone has reason why this couple before us should not be joined in holy matrimony, let him speak now or forever hold his peace."

Decent pause, then, "WHO LET THE DOGS OUT—WHO WHO WHO?"

***But Normal hadn't gone to jail for that bit of mischief.

On the radio, in Daff's apartment, Martina McBride is singing her favorite sad song, "Love's the Only House."

Love's the only house big enough for all the pain in the world.

The song goes on to tell of "teenagers living together alone in a culture of darkness." Daff had seen the video on the ever-running TV at home. McBride, a struggling store cashier, in a blond wig, bemoaned the fact that she herself has on a clean white shirt and a dollar in her pocket—luxuries—while her poor customers are begging for food. One pitiful pregnant girl steps up to McBride in the checkout lane with a small carton of milk. She needs a little milk but she doesn't have any money. "I'll cover you, honey." On and on in that clear strong soprano. On and on...

Chapter 8

Daff had been sitting on her stool at the window of the Delta on Wednesday of the week after the wedding, watching Normal touch up her cardboard sign in front of the garage with red spray paint: FREE CAR WASH WITH OIL CHANGE.

"Pretty soon she'll be giving away the oil change too." Talking to herself Daff laughed.

Looking down at the counter under the window, she had begun filling out the grocery-order list, listening to the hypnotic chirring of the air conditioner. She was wearing her camo jacket over her white T-shirt and still she felt too cold. Somehow, Normal's dog had rubbed his oily body on the right sleeve of the jacket. Times like that, Normal missed Mrs. Lane's washer and dryer and questioned whether she should have left the tiny hot trailer.

When she looked up again, through the window she could see the postmistress in a straight navy skirt and white blouse burst through the door of the post office and begin running across the highway toward the court house, a look of alarm on her flat face.

Normal's little dog chased after her.

Normal was standing under the shelter of the garage, scratching her head, watching them go.

Daff got up and went around the counter and pushed through the door, cold air rushing to hot. Then she could hear the dog barking and the post mistress shouting, "Anthrax! Anthrax! Help!"

The woman in the green car with the two bouncy kids was on her way into the post office. She jumped back into her car and clapped a hand on the horn. Sounded like it was stuck, which reminded Daff of the time, just starting high school, when she'd sneaked off in her Daddy's truck to go to Nina's house, and the horn had stuck and she couldn't get it unstuck. Half the town had come to help—including her own daddy.

Within minutes now, sirens were blaring and blue lights flashing and half-the-town was congregated again, this time on the concrete slope of the post office, keeping their distance and hugging themselves, while the sheriff and two deputies strung yellow plastic KEEP AWAY tape across the front of the post office.

Normal walked across the street to where Daff was standing just outside the doors of the Delta. "Must've got one of them letters they been sending with Anthrax," she said, leaning against the building and crossing her arms, watching with Daff, both in combat boots, as the sheriff strolled among the crowd, either trying to calm them or asking questions.

"First time I ever seen that post office woman move." Normal laughed and spat to the offside, away from Daff. "I was beginning to think she was a picture behind that window."

Daff laughed too. "What'll they do now?"

"No tellings," said Normal—chewing on something, rolling her eyes.

"I saw on TV where they called in something called the Hazmat in Washington—gets real complicated, takes forever. These men in white suits and hoods go in and sterilize the whole place."

Normal spat again, then crooked her voice to show something clever coming up. "What'll people do here for fun if they can't go after their mail?"

Daff wondered if Normal was one of those people who enjoy a crisis—something to stop the roll of time. Again, she thought about how people liked to tell where they were, what they were doing, when the two planes flew into the Twin Towers. Charlie and Delia always added where they were when President Kennedy was assassinated. "Where you reckon Stubborn ended up?"

"Wherever the post office lady ended up. Man, she had her panties in a wad."

Teenagers especially, Daff had noticed, like to dredge up old sorrows: a friend killed in a car wreck or even some teacher they hated before she died. Nothing of moment to the world. As adults it takes more momentous events to summon feelings of melancholy and shock.

Like everybody else in town, for three days Normal and Daff turned disaster into celebration: the Hazmat team's arrival was the biggest thing ever to happen in Statenville. Like rare white elephants in a circus, they performed for the crowd.

Slow traffic from all over funneled north to south, east to west and back again.

Like birds on a line, the locals sat on the white metal railing surrounding the courtyard. Some grouped on spread blankets along the side walk, while others wandered, watching the men in white like astronauts pass in and out, with their umbilical cords of creepy-crawly hoses feeding oxygen to their puzzling brains. They moved slow, methodical. Two-way radios inside the white vans pumped staticky voices into the swelting air.

Newspaper reporters from Georgia and Florida hit town with their cameras and notepads, asking questions and hovering with their cameras along the yellow tape—DO NOT CROSS THIS LINE—seeking original, provocative shots of the Hazmat team.

Radio station vans set up live! And between country songs the DJ's would call some of the locals over for comments.

The TV stations likewise set up round-the-clock camps enlarging the crowd with sidelong camera angles—multitudes appeared on the monitors. Among the multitudes was Cassie, carefully avoiding Daff, who was likewise avoiding her.

She hadn't felt what she thought she would feel about the prank. She wouldn't even talk to Normal about it when they met up at the garage after the wedding. And that had been wrong too, because poor Normal had seemed afraid that her part on the bullhorn had flopped. She'd asked Daff what happened after she had bellowed out in answer to the preacher, but there was nothing to tell: the wedding party and the guests had been forewarned by Daff in boots, so, expecting anything, they hardly even flinched.

The weather was overcast, gray days with the heat hovering around one-hundred degrees.

One TV commentator, a woman with stiff auburn hair and enough makeup on to mask all the women in Statenville, singled out Normal.

"What's your name, sir?"

Normal, in a long-sleeved shirt with unbuttoned cuffs covering the backs of her hands, was standing next to Daff on the oily concrete of the garage. She pointed to her own chest, surprised. "Me? You mean me?"

"Yes. I'm sorry." Apparently the roving reporter with the black foam microphone and thick legs and hips seemed to catch on that maybe Normal was a she and not a he. "You. Yes. Would you step over here a sec?"

The cameras on black metal perches moved closer. The auburn woman stepped closer. "For our viewers what's your name."

"Name's Normal—Normal Webb." Hands in pockets, and lips working Skoal inside her mouth, Normal stepped side to side, remaining in the same place, as if standing on something hot.

"Norm, what do you think about Anthrax showing up in your little town?"

"Ain't my town." Normal shrugged. "Ask her." Normal, red-faced, nodded to Daff.

Daff's combat boots seemed the object of the camera's focus; hers and Normal's for that matter. She wished she hadn't worn the boots.

"Your name?" asked the woman.

"Daff...Daffney Rowe."

"And where do you live, Daff? To help us get some perspective."

Daff hesitated, then pointed to the apartment behind the garage where people were seated on blankets on the grass outside her kitchen door.

"Right next to the post office? Oh my!"

"For now," Daff added. Her mind was reeling with confusion—what to say, what not to say; there seemed to be no short or right answers.

"So this sudden Anthrax disaster has you afraid, right?"

"Well...I... Not really. I mean, it's a little bit exciting but..."

The woman turned, facing the cameras set up on three sides.

"So, ladies and gentlemen, you can see how the locals have been affected by all this..." She began strolling among the crowd in the alley.

The cameras panned the members of the Hazmat team, one holding up and out a Ziploc bag of something unseen.

All the strange reporters and their cameras clamored toward the van and the two men dragging white hoses like tails inside.

"Ladies and gentlemen, looks like the team has finally located the Anthrax."

On and on.

On and on. Until later when it was announced that the Anthrax sample turned out to be only a spilled Goody Headache Powder.

Prank or accident, two days after, the sheriff and his deputies came for Normal, prime suspect in view of her previous alert to the town to take cover. Take cover!

The logic was that Normal had gotten the headache powder from the Delta during Daff's shift, that the two of them had planned the prank, like they'd done for Cassie's wedding. Like they'd done the day of the firehouse barbeque. Like they'd done everything else they'd done and who knew what else.

So, Daff was fired from the Delta because of her association with Normal.

Determined to fret out a story from the Anthrax-turned-Goody-Powder event, the press lingered on in Statenville: The auburn haired TV reporter asked Daff, "Do you feel that you are being persecuted for your uh...alternative lifestyle?"

"I know what you mean by alternative lifestyle. But my lifestyle is what it's always been. I am not a lesbian."

"Certainly not—I didn't mean to imply..."

"And neither is Normal, as far as I know. I mean, I know she's not."

"Certainly not, and even if....no one's..."

"Cut!"

A newspaper reporter was standing under the garage shelter another time when Daff headed out, this time to visit Normal and take her some clean clothes.

"Miss Rowe, may I have a word with you?"

"No."

"I'm just curious as to how you met Norma Webb."

"Normal. Her name is Normal—N-o-r-m-a-l."

He wrote it on the slender pad in his hand. "N-o-r-m-a-l, right? So how did you two meet and what do you think of the rumors that Normal is a possible member of the Al Qaeda organization?"

"Al Qaeda?"

"Terrorists."

"Let's get this straight," Daff said, "once and for all. Now write it down, because this is it: Normal Webb came into town on a chicken truck."

"A chicken truck?" He was writing.

"Yes, hitchhiking, I think."

"When was this?"

"June."

"June what?"

"I don't know. I don't remember. She got out at the Delta over there"—Daff points across the way—"where I was working. I let her go home with me because she had nowhere else to go.'

"So you brought her here, to your...uh...apartment."

"No. Not exactly. It doesn't matter. All that matters is I took her in because she had nowhere to go, no family maybe. I don't know."

"So, she's just a drifter?"

"I don't know."

"Miss Rowe, weren't you afraid? Didn't you think it odd that this person just happens up and stays?"

"No. I figured she'd had a hard life and maybe had done this a bunch of times."

"What?"

"Tried to start a business—she's a good mechanic. I helped her get started."

"Gave her money? Is that right?"

"Some, not much. I don't have much."

"Has she paid you back?"

"Many times. I'd do the same for anybody down and out."

"So, it's kind of a crusade with you, right?"

"No. I didn't think about it. I just did it."

"Why the combat boots, Miss?"

He'd made such a sudden change in direction that Daff felt hot and dizzy. "Why not?"

"Your brother says you wore boots under a pageant gown."

"My brother?"

"Yes ma'am."

"You've been bothering my brother with this?"

"It's a serious matter. You're aware of that, aren't you?"

Next morning the headlines in the Valdosta Democrat read: TROUBLE AT TROUBLESOME CREEK.

Chapter 9

Daff rises early. Gets dressed in a rose-print halter-top dress and puts on her combat boots. This is war! In the deep pockets of her dress are a small plastic bag of dried dog food and a can of Skoal. She feels dull, her senses jaded by the long hot sleepless night.

The radio is still on: Alabama—"Play me some mountain music." Out of tempo with her mood, or maybe not. Fiddles gone wild, then winding down. "News at the top of the hour: suspected terrorist, Normal Webb, accused of planting a Goody Headache Powder in the Echols County post office..."

Daff slams out the kitchen door and stands breathing in the muggy air off Troublesome Creek. Checking for reporters in the alley, she listens to the rattling of locusts on the creek. Slow gray clouds drift above the thicket of trees and vines. She dreads reaching the garage port. She dreads going over to the jail while everybody in town watches from their passing cars.

At the crossing, waiting for traffic, she sees her family's brown and tan conversion van wheel off 129 and motor up to the gas pumps at the Delta.

Daff thinks at first that it is her daddy. Then she recognizes her mother's brilliant bleached hair—a tumble of long thick curls.

Delia gets out of the van, not even looking Daff's way, but she knows her mother has seen her. While pumping gas she faces the Delta. Just like her—once she's made her point, to her husband and her children, she will turn her back, as if to deny them that face that her husband makes such a fuss over. "I swannee, Delia," he says, "if you don't look like a girl still." She doesn't. She has bulging eyes and wrinkles are creeping up from her pleated, sunned chest and neck. Her mirror must tell her the truth, but Charlie makes over her so much, she seems perfectly satisfied. They are always slipping off to their little dim messy bedroom in back of the house, and what is going on in there is more riveting than HBO with all its sexual hoopla, violence and vices.

Turning her back on her own daughter, her first-born...it makes Daff so crazy that she crosses the highway, intent on making Delia face her. Though for a fact, she would rather not grace the site of her blessing-out by the Delta manager.

Walking behind the van, smelling its motor oil and hot vinyl upholstery, Daff can see pennies, dimes and nickels glinting on the blacktop. For something to do, and because for a fact she needs the money, she begins stooping and picking up the change, all the way around to the strip of asphalt between the gas pumps and the front of the Delta.

The pumps are humming and she can see through the window the new clerk who has taken her place.

In a minute Delia will have the van tank filled with gas and she will have to hang up the nozzle and walk right past her oldest daughter to go inside and pay.

Daff picks up a quarter—first quarter she's ever found there—and drops it into the side pocket, with the can of Skoal, of the dress her mother has sewn for her.

Delia is a good hand to sew. Like her husband, she can do anything and she has done everything to help make a living over the years. She has set out pine saplings in the woods for the local tree farmers; she has sat with the elderly, which she hates because most of them are ornery and stingy and, Daff figures, reminders of her own aging.

Suddenly, it seems, the gas nozzle clanks into its slot and the pump quits humming. Gas cap is screwing onto the tank of the van.

Daff doesn't look, keeps picking up pennies. Only two at her feet left, except for the space underneath the van.

She cannot believe it when Delia passes at her back without speaking, stuffed black bag slung over one shoulder and dainty brown sandals slapping at her heels. Pushing through the door, she begins laughing and talking with the new clerk, who has taken Daff's job.

Stunned, Daff stands, change rattling in her pocket and tugging down the waist of her dress. Her own mother shunning her! Crying surges in her chest, a stinging hot sensation. She blows at her eyes to get rid of the gnats and the tears.

What business does she have defending Normal, a stranger, a mere friend? No telling how much trouble her family is going through. They have probably, surely, been besieged by the press, and shunned by the people of the town. She knows from what that reporter said that shy Bud has gotten caught up in this.

She has to ask herself seriously whether she is really doing what she is doing, and has done, to make a statement, a point—like wearing combat boots to Cassie's wedding. Is it worth it?

She doesn't know. But already she is crossing the highway again, heading for the jail to see Normal. She feels childish, foolish, shortcutting at the phone booth and left up the sidewalk to pass through the breezeway and right along the sidewalk to get to the jail.

She can see herself in the jalousie windows of the courtroom on the east end.

Normal's dog is lying before the door of the sheriff's office. When he sees Daff he gets up and stretches, then comes trotting to meet her, turning around and walking with her as if taking her to see his master.

To the left of the door, with SHERIFF'S OFFICE in gold lettering, she takes out the plastic bag of dog food and shakes out half the brown pellets and watches the little dog sniff and nibble.

When she goes through the door, the stout red-headed sheriff's wife and his secretary looks up then turns away, scrolling a sheet of paper into the typewriter roller. Clack clack clack—she begins typing.

"She's still here I guess?" Daff stops in front of the gray metal desk.

"Not for long, she's not. They're moving her to Valdosta."

"Valdosta?" Daff has been expecting this; all dangerous criminals get moved to the Valdosta jail where the security is better.

The woman quits typing, eyes Daff, then begins typing again. "You can go on in, but leave your package with me."

"It's just dog food."

"Right." She takes the bag of food, unzips the top, and sniffs inside, then sets it on her desk next to a picture of a young man in military uniform.

Daff can always claim that the sheriff's wife is cold to her because Daff's daddy had planned to run against the woman's husband in the next election. Well, he had planned to; now Daff has ruined his chances at getting elected.

She walks through the heavy metal door on her left to a dim hallway, barred cells on each side.

Normal is sitting on her cot, elbows on her knees and hands dangling between them.

"What's up, teach?"

"Normal."

She stands, hands in jeans pockets as she wanders up to the bars. She is wearing Mr. Lane's blue striped shirt, a white tee-shirt and her own blue jeans.

"I brought you some Skoal," Daff says low, looking around to see if the sheriff's wife has followed her as she passes it through the cell bars.

Normal takes it. "Thanks, teach." Normal takes it. "I reckon you expect me just to spit on the floor, huh?"

"You can use a cup."

"Yeah, right!"

"I'll go ask for one." Daff starts to turn.

"Don't do me no more favors, how bout it?"

"What does that mean?"

"You and this damn sorry town is how come I'm in here."

"You're in here for creating suspicion after you shouted for everybody to take cover."

"TAKE COVER," Normal suddenly shouts.

The chair the sheriff's wife is sitting in squeals as she pivots.

"Stop it, Normal. I'm leaving if you don't."

"Leave, go! You bout the one said I spilled that Goody Powder in the post office."

"You know better. I've tried to be your friend. You just can't stop trying to get attention is your problem."

"Me? What about you? What about that Cassie girl's wedding?"

"Hey, I lost my job over this, you know. I'll probably have to stay out of school for a quarter to make up for the money I've spent on you." Daff thinks but doesn't say what is there behind it all: my own mother's not speaking to me because of you.

"Now the truth's out in the open; now we're saying what we mean."

"Y'all don't quieten down in there," calls the sheriff's wife, "I'm gonna quit letting y'all visit."

"Old bitch!" Normal spits on the floor.

"I'm leaving, Normal. You've got by without me this long, you can keep on getting by without me."

Daff charges out into the office and crosses the small square room to the door.

"Hey," Normal shouts, "you just jealous cause I'm the one getting all the attention." She is laughing. "A lil ole Goody Powder."

***At her apartment, Daff lies across her bed with her chin on her arms. She is so mad, she is shaking. But inside she feels quiet, calm, relieved to be done with Normal and all she stands for.

She sits on the edge of the bed and begins unlacing her combat boots, throwing one and then the other across the room. No more statements. She is through.

Kneeling on the floor, she looks underneath the bed at her lined up paired shoes. Takes out her white thong sandals with daisies on the toes, shucks off her white socks and slips on the sandals.

What she has to do now is humble herself: call home and call her friends and maybe even Mrs. Lane and apologize. She's said I'm sorry before and what has it cost her?

Again, she goes out, checking around the corner of the garage shelter for reporters. If they are there this time, she will tell how she's tried to befriend this freak named Normal and how sorry she is for forcing her on the town.

But nobody is there under the shelter, and only a couple of cars pass as she slaps across 94 and takes to the sidewalk along the white railing of the courthouse. Change rattling in her pocket, she steps inside the phone booth. It smells of heated plastic and sweat, so hot she can barely breathe.

Idle people have scratched out their names on the black box phone, and looks like somebody has even tried to jimmy the lock to rob the coins.

From her sundress pocket, she takes the quarter found at the gas pumps that morning, lifts the receiver from the hook and drops the quarter in the money slot. Dial tone.

She is just about to dial the first digit of her folk's home phone when it suddenly hits her that Normal had been trying to get rid of her to keep her out of trouble. Maybe. Yes, she hadn't meant a word she'd said.

Daff dials information for the number of Dr. Nelson, her old political science teacher.

She answers in that mewing voice. Without being asked, Daff begins introducing herself, back-tracking over the facts of who Daff is—just another student among many. Surely Dr. Nelson won't remember her.

But she does.

Daff feels strange, fishing around for the right words. The story feels over-long, exaggerated and confusing. This was her teacher she is talking to. Every time Daff feels she's thoroughly explained her reasons for the call, she begins to feel she's left out some important detail.

As it turns out, Dr. Nelson does remember her and knows all about "the case." She asks a dozen questions about Normal's arrest and incarceration. Have her constitutional rights been violated?

Daff is sweating. Outside it starts to rain, hot and swift and lightning streaks the gray sky. She can barely hear Dr. Nelson for the heavy rain drops thumping on the glass walls of the booth. For some reason she feels embarrassed about the racket of the rain, as if a teacher of such stature would never be caught in a phone booth, broke and pleading for a misfit like Normal. She sticks one hand out the door, cupping it to fill with rain, and then brings it up to her face and down to her throat,

No. Yes. I don't know. This Daff says over and over, though she can't be sure she is giving the right answers. She is almost relieved when Dr. Nelson hangs up.

Had she said she was on her way? Or had she said have a good day?

Through streaks of lightning and slanting rain, Daff dashes out and heads for the courthouse breezeway, where she used to play with Cassie and Nina as kids. She wishes she had her life back, the sane sameness of every day. So what if half the time it wasn't real—if she said and did things that meant nothing or was an outright lie. At least her life before had been normal and she hadn't been hated. The smart thing, when she first met Normal, would have been to let her hitchhike out of town like she hitchhiked in.

An open corridor leads to the north side of the courthouse. She takes it and heads across 94 to the garage shelter, rain pelting on the tin, then shishing on the weeds in the alley, then tin pelting again as she steps inside her kitchen door.

She takes a white towel from its nail on the wall next to the sink in her bathroom and begins drying her hair. Her dress is dripping wet and stuck to her skin, but feels cool and good to her body. Her white sandals are speckled with mud as if the rain is made up of liquid dust.

Again, she sits on her bed and turns on the radio next to it. Rain beating on the tin west wall of her apartment is deafening. She has to turn up the volume on the radio to hear the song. Pity for Normal wells up inside. Or is it compassion? The difference is in the song—McBride's compassion for the hopeless and the helpless.

Only the little dog truly loves Normal. Only the little dog has stood by her—really stood by her.

Daff has half-heartedly stood by Normal and tried to help her. But mostly she just wanted to be rid of her. She had been ashamed to come out in the open and announce to the town that Normal is as worthy of love as anybody...well, anybody normal. Anybody in stylish clothes trying to fit in and look like everybody else.

"Love's the only house big enough for all the pain in the world—say you need a little money, come on over to my house, honey."

Daff turns off the radio. The rain has quit, shut off like a spigot.

On the wall with the two windows framing the wet green of the creek, she studies one of Alamand the Artist's pictures she had tacked up there: the boy in a perfectly detailed plaid shirt standing next to the phone booth. Daff is sure it is the same phone booth in front of the courthouse with the breezeway behind him. Who was the boy? Who was this Alamand? Was the boy his or her friend, Alamand's brother?

You have to care a lot about somebody to go to such trouble to draw them, to leave a picture as a message—you're special to me.

Daff gets up and puts on her boots, laces them, then goes out the kitchen door. Rain is dripping off the tin eaves but the sun is out, blazing on the trampled wet weeds and grass, more yellow than green now since the Anthrax incident at the post office.

Under the garage shelter, on a shelf near the closed door to Normal's quarters, she finds an old white rag and a full can of red spray paint. Carrying them in her hands, she walks around the front of the sloping apron of concrete to the west side and the corrugated tin wall covering Normal's and her own windows.

Steaming in the sun, the tin sheets are drying in patches. Reaching as high as she can, she begins drying the tin with the rag, working end to end, starting with the vertical tin sheets covering her windows. When she is done, she walks down to her end again. Birds are tittering and warbling in the trees and vines on the creek. A green piney smell following the rain and she can hear water gurgling through the gorge and the pipe running under highway 129

She shakes the paint can, hearing the bead inside rattling. Then in popular graffiti font, like the kind found on the outer walls of freight-train cars, she begins painting an enormous red message—to hell with what anybody thinks. Let them make of it what they will. She knows that Normal and she aren't lesbian lovers. Normal knows. The message is that loving doesn't always have to mean being lovers. Love is what it is and it isn't ashamed and love is the only house big enough for all the pain in the world: LOVE'S THE ONLY HOUSE

When she is done, on the last letter, "E," she backs along the steaming concrete slope for a better look. To see what anybody at the Delta, or passing on 129, or at the crossing, will see. And laughs out loud at how the message might be perceived, the message that will surely be her doom, and maybe the doom of her entire crazy family.

"So, when did you take up sign painting?"

She wheels to see Dr. Nelson standing behind her, hands on her hips. Short, squat and square with the dingy lace trim of her slip showing from the hem of her dowdy print dress.

The low sun at her back shines through her reddish curls. She is not at all attractive, but at the same time she looks like God. God in Statenville. God at Daff's sorry garage apartment. God witnessing Daff doing the dumbest, boldest thing she's ever done.

"I guess you're making some kind of statement. Am I right?" That mewing voice—Dr. Nelson.

"Yes, ma'am." Daff's trigger finger is numb and she cannot decide what to do with the can, with her hands. "I was just working on..."

"A welcome home sign for your friend Normal Webb."

"Well, not exactly. I mean she's..."

"She'll be on in a minute." Dr. Nelson laughs, staring at the writing on the linking tin sheets. "Had a little mess she has to clean up by the door before the sheriff would let her go."

"You got her out. How?"

"Nothing to hold her on. No proof. Actually she can sue if she is of a mind to." Dr. Nelson cocks her head, eyeing the sign. "You sure you want to leave that there?"

Daff hesitates. "Yes ma'am."

"I doubt anybody will get the meaning."

"Maybe they will. It's a popular song."

"Just remember your constitutional rights." She shakes her finger, like in class. "And use them, use them."

She turns, crossing the street to her little plain white car parked in front of the courthouse.

***Even innocent and free, Normal was still guilty in the eyes of the town.

Whether from the Anthrax scare, or the sign on the west wall of the garage, anonymous threatening letters were left on Normal's and Daff's doors.

Only Abe Guess was indifferent to the rumors. As long as they paid the rent on time, he said, he didn't give a hang what they did. "To each his own." In other words, where else could he get $25 a month for his rundown storage room and garage?

Come August, Normal was broke and Daff was going broke after paying the rent in advance to keep Abe Guess happy. No way would Daff be able to go back to school. In fact, she was almost certain she would have to get a job in Valdosta. In Statenville, the courthouse and school house offered the only job options for women and those were filled by the respectable church-going women, who stayed on those jobs till they either retired or died.

Daff could go to Dr. Nelson for help but she'd been there enough. She wouldn't beg.

Except for Bud, who stopped by now and then, miserably visiting, Daff's family didn't come. Daff was forced to admit that the little kids were embarrassed about her and Normal, what they perceived to be two girls having sex with one another. Daff hadn't suspected that they were old enough to know such, but of course they did. TV was doing its job.

"Daddy and Mama—what about them? she asked Bud.

"Oh, they'll jump on anybody in a minute says a word against you."

"But..."

"But they ain't about to give in. Waiting for you to come to them."

"Is Daddy still planning to run for sheriff?"

"No."

She didn't ask why. She knew why.

"That sign hadn't hoped things none."

"Helped, Bud. Not hoped."

***Daff hears a knock on the door and when she opens it Normal is standing there. "I'm ready to quit now." Normal braces herself by pushing against the door jam.

"You mean leave? Is that what you're saying?"

"No, stay. Ready to grow up and quit harassing people for the hell of it."

Daff stepped back into the kitchen then sat in one of the chairs at the table. "Well, that's news." She pulled out the chair on her right for Normal to sit. "But why would you want to stay here?"

"Cause I might as well." Normal plopped in the chair. "Besides I want to give the garage an honest go."

"Okay. Fine by me. But I'm gone when I can find a way to go. I mean, money."

***What happens next is so improbable, so against the odds, the chance of getting struck by lightening is greater than winning the lottery, as they say.

But that's just what Daff and Normal do. With, of all things, a ticket bought with change tossed around the gas pumps of the Delta.

It had been a lark, a joke, buying the ticket.

Actually Normal had bought the ticket; Daff didn't darken the Delta door, so to speak, since she had been fired after Normal was arrested for planting in the post office a Goody Headache Powder, mistaken for Anthrax, and not having been re-hired after Normal was cleared, forgiven and beholden for not suing the county because there was no proof—no proof! Nobody came to her and apologized, of course, but the fact that she was no longer harassed by the sheriff at every turn, said it all.

Also, it was Normal who remembered they had bought the ticket and who went to the Delta to check the five or six numbers (Daff couldn't even recall which, five or six), and learned that they had won the jackpot —not the big one. The "big one" brought people from Florida in droves and Daff used to dread them: long lines of poor people, men in tarry and dirty work clothes coming straight from work; women with babies on their hips and bawling, begging kids; her daddy and mother who never missed a week buying "our tickets." They always reminded Daff of how down and out and unlucky they all were. Their tickets were like cigarettes or beer—addictions. And they never bought a single ticket that they didn't believe would change their luck. Charlie always had Delia pick the numbers and then kiss the tickets. Sweet Delia who still looked like a girl, her blood-red wrinkled lipstick prints on losing tickets scattered about the house like blotting paper or religious tracts.

Daff had hated the lottery, while at the same time loving it because of her HOPE Scholarship—funding for money from the State. The lottery, to her, was never something won but something used. She never believed in luck until....

That hot August Monday she was sleeping late because she might as well. No job to go to and school, if she got to go, if some miracle like winning the lottery didn't happen, would soon be starting.

Soft, hesitant rapping on the kitchen door woke her and the sudden start of the little dog—yipping, yipping. Probably a snake and Normal would want Daff to come out and see it, even knowing how terrified she was of snakes, large and small, poisonous and non. As scared as Daff was, Normal was just as fascinated with their colors flowing through the grass. Nobody in Statenville that Daff ever knew of liked snakes. They were evil and if Normal thought people were against her for looking different, she had no idea how against her they would be if they knew she'd caught a red rat snake and let it slide up and down her arm.

The little dog was yipping, yipping.

"If it's a snake, Normal," Daff yelled through the door, "I don't want to see it."

Daff in only a t-shirt and panties was almost to the door of the kitchen. She stopped. If it was Normal, she would answer. If it was anybody else, Bud or the enemy, they would answer.

"Who is it?"

"Me."

Daff opened the door and there she stood, hands in her pockets and eyes wide with shock. Pale around the mouth and pale crescents along the curve of each nostril.

"What's wrong, Normal? What happened?"

"You better set down, teach," she said and nodded toward the kitchen table.

Daff backed up and sat in one of the two chairs.

Normal rarely came inside Daff's apartment, though she'd invited her often. She looked uncomfortable and out of place doing so now. She reminded Daff of a yard dog.

She pulled out the other chair and sat, hands on the table holding the ticket. "We won," she said.

"Won what?"

"The lottery."

"You're kidding."

"Look." She held up the ticket to Daff.

"So?"

"I just checked. We won it."

"What did you buy? Daily Double?"

"No. The big one."

"The big one?"

"A hunderd thou."

At first it didn't sound like much because either Daff was so accustomed to hearing one million, two million, or the only way her mind could cope with such shock was to down-play it.

She placed her head on her arms on the table. Her heart was racing, her mind was racing. She could go to school now. What else? What else was changed by this news delivered in her dismal kitchen this very moment? What did she want? What else did she need? What would everybody say, do or not-do now?

And Normal....What about Normal?

She looked up. "We're rich, Normal. Do you realize that?" She reached across the table and covered Normal's oil-stained hand holding the ticket. 'Do you know what it means?"

Daff thought she was laughing, but realized she was crying. She had heard about tears of joy but had never seen it except in movies which she hated because it was so melodramatic. Any actor who ever laughed and cried at the same time was on Daff's shit-list.

"I ain't never had no money," Normal said cold. "I don't know how."

"Normal, it's not a dance you have to learn. You just buy stuff, pay rent, travel..."

"Where?"

"I don't know. Wherever." Daff's voice was rising as her excitement rose higher and higher. Money makes you loud. Bright sounds and lights pop before your eyes. It's a sound and a sight and a knowing mixed up in one. Till it peaks and falls because you cannot believe it's true.

"They must be some catch," Normal said, having peaked and fallen.

"Normal, people win all the time. A lot more than this. Somebody has to win. You know?"

"I'm scared, teach."

"Scared?"

"I'll have to change and I don't know how."

Daff jumped up, hysterical. Laughing and crying. "No. Now you can be yourself and everybody'll just say you're eccentric. Not a freak."

Daff thought she should back up and delete the last part—what if she had hurt Normal's feelings? What if she had inadvertently said to Normal that what's important, and all that is important, is buying people's approval.

Normal was still sitting, stunned, numb—normal.

"Oh, you know what I mean," Daff said.

It comes to Daff that when they walk out the door to go get the money, everything will be different. Nothing will ever be the same. Not this minute, but when they walk out the door, meaning when others find out that they have won the lottery. Though it's not at all how she feels. What she feels is that her mother can get her hair bleached at a beauty shop; her daddy can for sure run for sherriff, and for sure win. Bud can go to college instead of the Army. No more worrying about food and rent and getting from here to there. What dulls her excitement is the fact that she won't even have to teach now, she won't have to work, so she won't have to go to school.

"I reckon I could use me a truck." Normal taps the table top with the edge of the ticket. "I wouldn't mind that."

The sun through the kitchen window beamed onto Almand's picture of a perfect red rose—so real-looking it should smell.

"What you say, old dog?" Normal laughed and scratched the dog's ears.

Now Daff was not laughing; she was crying. Sobbing loud, sitting, head on her arms on the table. She couldn't stop.

Normal just sat, watching her. Then, "Why are you crying, teach?"

Daff didn't answer. All she knew was a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders then set down again, crushing her. She'd never felt so happy in her life; she'd never felt so sad.

***Now she can envision all the TV and newspaper and radio people coming back and it all starting over again.

Daff and Normal are sitting out by the creek the next morning, sipping large black coffees in paper cups, fetched from the Delta by Normal. Really, they can only see the creek bogged in elephant ears, reeds and vines when the lemon sun glints on the winding stream. But they can hear it risping through the reeds, a mindless tune in which to think.

On Daff's crossed legs, in khaki shorts, is a yellow steno-pad, and she is twiddling a black ballpoint pen between two fingers. Now that they have settled into the idea of having money, they have to plan how best to use it. Because, the reality of it is $100,000 won't go that far; they have to write down a plan, priorities. Their bubble of happy disbelief over winning the lottery has burst, and they are left flat, facing facts.

So far, on the list are Daff's money for school and dorm—just one quarter, to begin with. Then Normal's truck, a good used one, say, $20,000. The money is spending fast, so they revise the cost of the truck to $10,000.

"A good clunker," Normal says, draining her coffee into her mouth with her head tipped back. "Garage don't work out here, I can head out."

Daff lifts her pen tip from the pad. "I still don't understand your wanting to stay, after all..."

"I don't wanta stay, I just don't wanta go. Not ready yet." Normal is wearing a pink tee-shirt with a white logo reading, SGLG. It was a gift from Tom-Tom to Daff, so long ago that the explanation has faded. Pretty in pink, Normal still looks like a boy.

"Okay, it's your life," says Daff. "I'm out of here."

Except for a truck or car now and then slowing at the crossing, the only sound is a small plane droning overhead, the risping of the narrow stream, birds singing in the trees and vines each side of the creek, perfect stillness, perfect peace, the kind that money can buy.

Suddenly their peace is blown by the blow-out of a tire near the highway dip of Troublesome Creek. They can see through the huge elephant ears between them and the highway an old white van parked lop-sided on the shoulder of the road. Three doors crank open and then slap shut, but neither Daff nor Normal seated on the grass can see who had opened and shut the doors. When they stand, sighting between the elephant ears, they can see what looks like three children with oversized heads gathered around the back of the van, talking low in squeezed voices.

"Let's go," Normal says, and strikes out through the high bushes and grass between Daff's apartment and the highway, down the ditch and up and hiking along the edge of the highway toward the van.

"Little people," says Normal and laughs. "Will you look at that!"

"Midgets," corrects Daff, holding to her pad and pen. They look like elves, two women in long skirts and a man wearing a black hat.

Walking slower, moving closer, Daff can tell that they are old, very old. Large, smiling faces—as they spy Normal and Daff coming to help—are wrinkled as wet-spotted, wrinkled brown paper sacks.

The tiny man pushes up the black hat on his broad forehead, either to see better or in greeting. The tiny women, identical, twins maybe, latch their hands behind their backs and sway in their long print skirts. White patent little-girl pocketbooks are hooked on their thick wrists.

"Got a flat, huh?" Normal says in that gruff voice.

The man in little khaki pants and a brown belt walks toward them, smiling. "Morning." He holds out his large hand on a stump of an arm. "Name's Eddie. Eddie Buresh."

"Normal's the name." She has to bend low to shake.

"I'm Daff, Daffany." Daff bends low and shakes too. His hand is as dry and tough as sunned orange peel. His hair is brown and deckled on the ends.

Eddie turns and starts back toward the van and the women, walking fast, quick mincing steps. Daff and Normal have to creep to keep from stepping on him.

"That's my twin sisters there"—he points to the two women, standing, watching, swaying—"Christie and Lida." He sounds winded.

A north-bound new green car slows and shifts to the other side of the road; two elderly couples stare at the midgets. Or is it Normal in her pink SGLG tee-shirt.

"We're on the way home to Lakeland, just up the road a few miles," says Eddie motioning with both hands. "Coming back from Disney World."

Moving in with the man, Daff and Normal walk stooped. Daff speaks to the women like children, in a child's voice, clears her throat and tries again. "Nice to meet you."

"First thing," says Normal, "we gotta get your van off the road. Semis come through here doing ninety to nothing."

"Good point," says Eddie, splaying both hands on the bumper and heaving into it with his whole body. The women do likewise, pocketbooks, dangling from their wrists, but the van doesn't budge. All seem nervous, flustered, like kick-shy dogs, and Daff imagines with good cause.

Normal looks at Daff over their heads and signals her to move in with him and shove on the double back doors, which means leaning over the heads of the three midgets, grunting and blowing.

"Mr. Eddie," says Normal, "why don't you go around and get in and steer us onto the road shoulder?"

"Good point," he says, already halfway there.

"You ladies," says Normal, "take a breather."

They step away, backing to the road shoulder and take up their swaying and smiling where they left off.

When the van is safely off the highway, Eddie shows Normal where the spare is located. When Normal rolls it from the back doors, the tire is almost head-high with the three midgets. Normal keeps dodging around Eddie, trying to help.

The women are wiping sweat and blowing at gnats around their eyes. One wears thick lens and keeps taking over her glasses to wipe them on her dress tail. Daff walks over and fans them with her steno-pad. They bow, thanking her.

"You wouldn't happen to have a sup of water, would you?" asks Lida, the twin wearing the glasses. "And a bathroom if you don't mind."

"Sure," says Daff. "I live just up the hill there, back of that garage. You can come in and rest if you like while Mr. Eddie and Normal change the tires."

One on each side of her, like children, they trudge up the hill, down the ditch and up again, panting, struggling through waist-high weeds and dog fennel till they reach Daff's kitchen door. The walk has taken thirty minutes and Daff is bushed too, but mostly from trying to breathe for them, to walk for them. Her neck aches from looking down.

They go to the bathroom together, like kindergarten girls, and from the kitchen, where Daff is picking ice for water, she can hear them talking sweet and low. When they come back they have to climb up the rungs of the chairs to sit before the table. Christie wipes spilled salt from the table top while Lida is climbing up, as if to distract Daff from noticing her sister's awkwardness. Finally they are seated with their legs in stockings and tiny white sandals sticking straight out.

Daff has to take a deep breath and focus before speaking to keep from a natural inclination to talk in a teeny voice. But she loses her focus in worrying that the glasses of water in her hands are two large for them to handle. "So, was Disney World fun?" she says.

Lida to the left of Christie laughs low. "Don't worry about the glasses being to big, not with these hands." They both chuckle and hold up hands as large as Daff's."

"I'm sorry," Daff says and laughs and places the glasses before them. Deftly, they pick up the glasses and sip, nickel-blue, surface eyes set on Daff.

"Don't be," says Christie. "We're used to it."

"Used to bother me, but not anymore." Lida sets down her glass.

"More water?" Daff sits across from them at the table.

"No, no, thank you."

"So, you live in Lakeland?"

"Yes," says Lida. "Traveled all over—Canada, Cuba—with the circus. Finally settled down with a trapeze artist on her farm in Lakeland."

"Joan Register. Almost 90 now. Like a mother to us, you might say. Although we're just a couple of years younger, me and Christie. Eddie's 92." They fill in for each other as if the two heads are one.

Daff is so interested she forgets the women are midgets. She wants to show how interested but can't think of anything intelligent to say. Actually, the women seem so intelligent, and worldly, she's embarrassed to ask the usual questions: Where are you from? How long were you with the circus?

Lida is speaking again. "Joan was famous for what's called a `plandge'."

Before Daff could ask what a `plandge' is, Christie chirped up. "Making a plandge is done by hanging from a suspended rope with one arm, then pulling your body upward into the air, then falling over the arm without losing your grip on the rope."

"Broke her back one time while performing a difficult aerial stunt."

"No safety net. Wasn't that Ringling Brothers, sister?" asks Lida, spinning the ice chunks in he glass.

Daff thinks she hears the van pulling up at the garage out front. She doesn't want them to go yet.

"We were born in Czechoslovakia and when our visas ran out, Joan successfully fought to keep us in the U.S."

"She sounds amazing," says Daff, hearing now Eddie's squeaky voice and Normal's booming voice in the alley between the post office and the garage.

"A wonderful woman, yes," says Christie.

When Normal comes in with Eddie behind him, heaving up the doorsteps, Daff fixes two more glasses of ice water and pulls up two more chairs. Eddie climbs the rungs as his sister had done and sits with his legs straight out and places his hat on his lap. His stringy gray hair is matted to his square, dimpled skull.

Lida wants to know what the SGLG stands for on Normal's shirt. Normal pulls the front out from her body, staring down. "I don't know."

They all laugh. Normal looks at Daff. "SGLG. Stands for Southern Girls Love Grits," says Daff.

"So, you're a southern girl?" Christie, turning out to be the most proper and articulate, seems earnestly interested.

"Yes ma'am. I guess." Normal blushes, either from her earnest interest or from her recognizing right off that Normal's a girl.

"Pink looks good on you, Normal," says Daff. "Keep the shirt."

Lida pipes up, squirming to sit deeper in her chair. "Do you mind if I ask why your name is Normal?"

"No ma'am, not atall."

When the story is told, with Daff filling in details missed by Normal—much like the twins have been doing—she tells how she and Normal became friends, leaving out the town's tormenting them to keep from sounding self-pitying. And too Daff is enjoying the company of people in the present who don't know their pasts. She can tell Normal feels the same by the way she isn't trying too hard and not trying to one-up anybody by shocking them or putting herself down.

Mr. Eddie frames Normal with his squinched eyes. "To my way of thinking," he says, turning his hat in his massive hands, "the rodeo's not that much different from the circus, all that moving around and getting laughed at for falling down."

"I reckon," says Normal, looking down. "I just wadn't all that good at it, how come I got out."

"We weren't all that good in the circus either."

"Ha!" says Lida, "Speak for yourself."

They all laugh.

"Well, I'm going to school to be a teacher," says Daff. "Talk about dull!"

"Not this day and age," says Lida. Talk turns to problems in education and student discipline, but all agree that things haven't really changed, that kids are no more disobedient than they've ever been.

Mr. Eddie says, wheezing, "It's like 'The Wizard of Oz,'" he says, "you just have to keep following the yellow brick road."

"I love that movie!" Daff claps her hands.

"I guess the girls told you we..."

"No, don't start that Eddie, please." Christie laughs, banging the table with her fists. "We'll be here all day."

"What? Please do," says Daff.

"We were main actors in 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

Chapter 10

It is a clear winter morning when Daff comes home to visit her family, but first she'll drop by to check on Normal at the Troublesome Creek Garage. Fall semester is over and Daff is pleased with her first time teaching. Except for a couple of trouble-making freshmen, her students had worked hard and been kind and helpful when Daff messed up: she'd had trouble putting the right names to faces; now, she would never forget them. Fortunately for Daff, her students had proved true to human nature by seeking out the same desks everyday. Good students!

Crossing the Alapaha River bridge, in her silver Honda Civic, she can see Normal's garage and her old apartment, sun spiking on the polished glass of the new windows replacing the sheets of old tin with her hate-inspired message in graffiti font—"Love's the Only House." Now a new sign in black and white block lettering stands on a black metal post out front, angled to be seen from both highways US 129 and State 94. The sign reads: OUTSIDERS WELCOME TO TROUBLESOME CREEK GARAGE AND INN. Love's the only house is understood.

Up until a year ago, when Daff had graduated from school, they had continued to rent the property (of course their lottery money had long been gone). Then when Normal finally settled into making a living with her garage business, and decided to stay on permanently, she had made an offer to buy and Abe Guess accepted. Well, it wasn't that simple really: he hadn't needed the money and was in no hurry to sell, as he said, but the county commissioners had persuaded him, complaining that his rundown place had been a blight on the town and Guess would have to doze the building and clean up the lot if he didn't sell to Normal and Daff. Really, the churches had gotten behind the commissioners claiming that "a sort-of inn" was just what the town needed. Besides, the place had become a tourist attraction since the regular visits of the three little people, stars from the movie, "The Wizard of Oz." Stopping by the Delta, the courthouse or any other place of business, you'll find signs boasting to that effect. Not to mention word of mouth and word of media—the Anthrax crowd. When Eddie died, most of the town turned out for his funeral in Lakeland.

Passing the Delta, and seeing the same two gas pumps with what could be the same customers in pickups, Daff feels as if nothing has changed. But gas is now almost three dollars a gallon and Normal is loved and needed by the town; she is one of them now. Oh, there are a few people, like the Lanes, who still shun her, but that is about them, not her.

***Normal is standing out front of the garage, talking to a strange young woman holding a baby. The woman has new-baby-mother's hair, thin and brown and cooped at the ears. Hair down to her shoulders and a troubled face for one so young. Pretty except for a gap between her top front teeth. One hand is pressed to the back of the baby draped in a faded blue blanket. The baby looks to be about six months old, perched on her mother's free arm with her head turned around, regarding Normal. This baby has taken her mother to the limits of joy and pain. It's her cross. Hers is a crucifixion of self; this baby is both life and death.

At their backs there is still lots of green among the shed leaves of the vines and trees on the Creek. The sky is clear and deep, as blue as spring water.

Both turn and begin walking along the curving yellow-brick walk between the post office and the garage. Normal kicks at a fire-ant bed on the edge of the walk she laid by hand to honor the three little people from "Oz." Well, there's more to the story but Normal never was much on the sentimental stuff. She still wears faded blue jeans and long-sleeved plaid shirts with unbuttoned cuffs covering much of her hands, and of course, the boots.

"Dang fire-ants," she says to the woman. "Y'all have em where you come from?" That's about as far as she will go to find out where visitors to Troublesome Creek are from. If they tell her, fine; if they don't, that's their business.

The woman answers only, "Yes." Her pretty bald baby with its stain of red hair is beginning to fidget and whine.

Normal steps ahead and opens the kitchen door to the apartment. The woman follows her inside and drops her pink-print shoulder bag to the yellow dinette table.

"Just make yourself at home," Normal says. "I've gotta set this thermostat. Feels like somebody left the frigerator door open."

"It's fine really," the woman says, adding, "I like it. I have a little money; I can pay."

"Wait'll you get on your feet," Normal says. "Then we'll talk about it."

Expecting maybe to see the room rates posted on back of the door they've just entered, the woman steps over and reads the typed message on a white sheet of paper: "Know your constitutional rights and use them, use them. If you need help, call Assistant Professor Daffany Rowe, at 333-2940, Department of Political Science, Valdosta State University."

Patting the fussing baby's back, the woman starts to sit in a chair at the table, but instead passes on into the next room where Normal is adjusting the thermostat and opening the blinds on the windows overlooking the Creek.

The heating unit clicks on and warm but faintly dusty air chuffs from the floor vents in each corner of the room. Yellow pine flooring with a slick finish and scattered taupe chenille rugs. The full-sized bed along the garage wall is steep and plush with a white down comforter and four pillows. Above the head of the scrolled brass bedstead are two black-framed and matted hand-drawn pictures: The Boy in the Telephone Booth, and A Rose, both by "Alamand."

But what catches the eye of the troubled-looking woman is the 3'X5' movie poster in hot and dark tints of gold, red and green hanging between the two mullioned windows on the west wall. On the forefront of the busy scene, Eddie, in the lead along the yellow brick road, has his mouth wide open and both hands spread before him. Scrawled across the face of the poster are several signatures, previous guests, including Eddie, Christie, and Lida Buresh, Normal and Daff.

Below the poster squats three little wood chairs of different styles that Daff had picked up from thrift and antique stores. Said she'd never again be without chairs for little people to sit in.

"That's Eddie right there, the one with his mouth open." Normal stands behind the woman, looking with her. "Sign it before you leave if you want to."

"The Tin Man," she says. Then to the baby, "Look, sweetie, it's the Tin Man."

