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Family Dinner

Angel Propps

    Collard greens simmering low, cheap and fatty but deliciously rich side meat mixing its oil into the water and red pepper that bubbles around the tender leaves. Cornbread baking away, the smell of bacon and sugar wafting from the oven. A poor man’s plate of sliced Vidalia onions, backyard garden grown and vine ripened tomatoes, cucumbers that still wear their dark skins. One of those three for a dollar rounds of cheap margarine, sitting greasily in its crinkled and worn wrapping
    Standing in the doorway looking at these things is a small girl. Her hair is the white blond seen on fashion models, her face is narrow and clever in the way that the faces on trapped animals are clever. She is sly and her face says so. Her weak blue eyes look at the stove, look at the plate sitting there on the table, at the fly busily washing its legs on a slice of tomato.
    “Shoo fly,” she says but the fly does not shoo, it is as unconcerned with her as everyone else seems to be. “Go on, now, you shoo damn you.”
    She looks over her shoulder furtively, if her folks hear her cussing she will get it for sure but there are no yells at her to come here right now coming from anywhere and she turns and stares back at the kitchen, at the fly, at the greens and the margarine.
    The kitchen is a lousy affair, her mama says so all the time. She stands at the stove cooking or at the sink washing dishes and biting her cigarettes nearly in two between her lips and she says, “This here kitchen is one lousy affair. This whole place is lousy. Why I stay here I don’t know. It ain’t like I couldn’t find some better place to go. Look at me, I got looks still, not like those old hags from down the road, don’t you think so Punkin?” Then she twirls, her fine white hair spinning out from her narrow head and her blue black blotched arms held out wide for balance.
    “Yes Mama,” Punkin always agrees and Mama will spit that tooth imprinted cigarette into the sink and shake her head if some blood comes out with it and ask, “How ‘bout my teeth Punkin? They still trying to bleed?”
    Punkin looks close and always says no even when the blood is gritted into the gums like dirt into a fleshy neck fold. She sometimes wonders what hurts her mama’s teeth more, the punches or the cigarettes she holds but she doesn’t ask cause she’s a kid and kids don’t put their nose anywhere but a corner if they don’t want it cut off. She doesn’t want her nose cut off, she is afraid to death of that, of being maimed and sent out into the world ugly and scarred.
    The greens stew on and on. She’s hungry, her belly rumbles and growls and she can smell the bottom of the bread blackening. She looks over her shoulder at the silent hallway again then creeps to the counter where they keep the big chunk of torn up towel they use to handle pots and pans. She is not supposed to fool around with those things but Mama won’t like her bread burning and neither will Red, her stepdaddy.
    The oven is a blazing hell, it is powered by propane gas and she can see hungry flames licking up at her. She feels her fear in the back of her throat, it feels like the odd tickle she gets when she starts to catch a cold. Her hands shake as she pulls the ancient black skillet out of there, its heat baking her hands right through the worn thin towel. She almost drops the pan, a moan comes low and pained from her throat and some superhuman ability unlike one she has ever known kicks in. She spins to the side and the skillet does not fall from her hands, it goes trundling along the trajectory she sets for it and slides along the tiny iron triangle called a trivet that sits on the table a short distance from the vegetable plate.
    Her breath hitches and catches. She is covered in sweat and her cheeks turn a brutal red as she struggles to catch her breath. Dots dance in front of her eyes as she glances back down along the jacklegged hallway to the door that leads to the room her mama and stepdaddy sleep in.
    “They’re sleeping,” Punkin whispers and a shiver snakes up her spine. It s a funny little thing, that shiver, it makes her want to curl up but it also makes something inside her, something down deep in her belly, feel like it’s blooming. It’s scary but she likes it and that scares her even more.
    She stands there, thinking hard and the strain it causes shows on her clever, clever face. Her forehead wrinkles and seams. Her mouth tucks itself inwards, sucks along her teeth and her cheeks hollow out and flatten. Her eyes narrow and droop. She looks like a crone who has been somehow caught in a child’s body. The fly lifts its head and gives her along buzz, it reminds her of the sound a dress her mama once wore and the sound it made when Red ripped it off of her.
    She is dizzy and trying to think of what comes next. There is something...yes, the stove. She gets a chair and goes to it, at nine she is too short to reach the buttons that lurk behind pans but she can do it if she kneels on the chair and she does. She stares down into the pan filled with greens with a mild wonder. She is hungry, she wants to eat but something is missing.
    “We ain’t never gon’ get to be like other folks!” That was her mama’s constant complaint. She wanted to move closer to town, move into what she called a real house instead of this rusted out trailer that perched so uneasily on the red clay hill that overlooked a long abandoned secondary road. She wanted to go shopping at the Piggly Wiggly instead of the discount grocery out past the old peach orchards. She said it wasn’t right, eating expired food all the time. A person could die doing that.
    Red would listen to those complaints and then he would start yelling and soon enough they would both be yelling. Punkin never understood what it really all meant, she just knew her mama was not content. That was what Red said, she did not know how to be content. The words would become shouts, the shouts would become blows and she would crawl into some temporary shelter; the arm of the humped and sprung couch, under the coffee table or into the narrow closet where Mama kept her broom, until the battle ended with either one of them saying sorry while tending to the one who was bleeding or with them running down the hall for the bedroom.
    She would be left alone to clean up the mess, to try to make things nice again cause she knew Mama wanted things to be nice, that was what she really wanted, she said so a thousand million times, she wanted things to just be nice.
    The greens are a glistening lump of foliage in her chipped white bowl, they make her think of the trees and the way the leaves on them shine on a rainy night. She dishes them up until the pot liquor slops over the rim and then she sits down at the table and begins to dig in. She gets two bites in before she had to quit. Something is not right. She is not sure what but something isn’t.
    She thinks, it ain’t nice... and her eyes fall on the plate of vegetables that are starting to go tacky and dry at the edges. She looks at the pan of golden brown bread and the cheap margarine and she thinks of how on television the whole family sits down to dinner at a table with plates already sitting neatly at each space and...
    “A family dinner,” she says in her thin treble. In the stillness that sound is too loud, it startles the fly from his self satisfied stupor and he buzzes away down the hallway. She wants to call him back but can’t, she is afraid to talk too loudly.
    She frowns at the table and wonders how a table is set. She sees the kids on TV do it all the time, it doesn’t look too hard. She gets up, goes to the cabinet and fetches plates and hauls them to the table. She put one in front of every chair so there are five. That does not seem right and she stands there, her lips moving as she counts to five over and over again silently.
    Punkin looks up as the sound of a car crunching across gravel growls into the house. Red laid that gravel good, he is always on the run from the cops and if he has just a minutes warning he can be gone through the woods before they ever roll to a stop. The gravel has kept him out of jail for awhile now, he is still on the run. Punkin is not sure what that means, in her mind’s eye she sees Red lacing sneakers onto his pale thin feet, taking a deep breath and running into the woods as fast as he could run. She has seen him run a lot, but mostly he wore cowboy boots. She wasn’t sure if he ever wore sneakers but she wishes he would. Those boots hurt when he kicks her.
    She hears him enter but she is busy setting the table, she is arranging cups next to each plate and bowls above them, ringing the silverware around the whole setting like some aluminum moon.
    “Hey Punkin,” his voice quivers and she turns slowly, still counting that five silently,” Punkin, where is your mama at honey?”
    “She’s sleepin’.”
    “Sleepin’ huh? You...uh...you okay here?”
    “We’re gon’ have a family dinner. A real one. I got five plates and bowls. I think that’s wrong. I ain’t never set a table before.”
    He feels bad for her right then. She is stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with a drunk, drug using mama and an equally addicted stepdaddy who is always on the run. She gets picked on at school, he knows that because he has seen her walking across the playground hunched and quiet while kids laugh and jeer at her clothes, her hair, her shoes. She is a slow learner, a daydreamer and prone to lie.
    “You know how to set a table?” she asks and her tongue is a triangle as it catches between her lips. That gesture makes her look unbearably innocent and somehow sexy, it repulses him and he turns away to block that sight out of his mind.
    “I’m gonna go look for your mama,” he says and she doesn’t answer, she just hums a tuneless melody that whistles as it passes between the gaps where she is losing and growing teeth. The sound sends chills down his spine. He practically runs down the hallway to get away from the memory of her catty tongue.
    He stops at the doorway, the holes are jagged and raw. Splinters bleed from the cheap pressed board of the door. He remembers the frantic phone call,” Help! Help! We’re in the bedroom, we locked the door but...” oh and then there was the booming belch of a shotgun and screaming, so much screaming...
    He opens his eyes and put a trembling hand to the door, it swings open and he stands there, not wanting to see anymore.
    The woman is on the floor, her face and head a mess of brain and jagged bits of bone. Her eye, there is only one left, stares up at him in terror. He wants to weep, to puke, to run away. The quiet is total and he feels his hands sweat, the dripping moisture under his arms. He can hear the steady and too loud, too alive beat of his heart. It is as if his heart is making itself louder to let the nonbeating hearts in the room know that that one is doing A-OK.
    Lightning has struck in this room. It has struck and he can smell it, smell that fried armpit sweat, cracked asphalt stink. It furs his tongue and he is reminded of a poem he once read. Something about a hooker who wants to be brought back from a heroin sleep by Prince Charming, provided he has needles and a sack that is. He stands, trying to become a distant observer, to divorce himself from it all but he can’t. A fly has landed on the gooey runnel of blood splashed onto the makeup and cheap perfume bottles that lay in a careless heap on a broken and battle scarred dresser. The sight of the fly washing its fuzzy legs makes his flesh creep right off his bones.
    Outside he can hear more cars pulling up, more cops he thinks wearily. And the ambulance. That makes him grin, a hard and razor wired grin, what the hell do they think they will be able to save here?
    He goes over to Red. Skinny, ugly, beleaguered with a set of meth made teeth. In life he had been a runner, in death he had made it to the closet, he was sprawled half in, half out of it and Officer Roberts saw with some pity that the man’s face was coated with the silvery tracks of tears. Why the closet? Officer Roberts does not know, in life the bastard has always made for the woods. He stood there listening to cars crunching on gravel, understanding finally how Red had always known they were outside and seeing the way the window had been cut wide so he could make his great escape through it. Only someone had...had what? Blocked the window? Had Red, in some awful burst of fear run like a terrified child for the one place he thought he might be able to hide? The shotgun blast has gutted him and his mouth hangs agape and stupid. He wants to kick that stupid, useless mouth closed.
    He examines the scene, hears the other cops coming in, the kid talking and he wonders how she got away. How she managed to escape, was she outside playing? Did she see the whole thing? He thinks of her clothes, of her face. He sees that tongue licking at her lip and the blood; the blood that is on her face, her hands, her clothes and he feels his breath fall into some unknown lower level of his chest.
    He staggers out into the front end of the ragged and too small trailer, the smell of blood and violence hanging around him like a haze. He walks to where the kid sits at the table; the table with its off center, non conforming number of plates, its mismatched bowls and cups and wild array of silverware.
    “Punkin,” he says in a thick and choked voice and she looks up at him. Someone has cut her a piece of the still steaming cornbread, out of pity, he suspects and he looks at it. A thick sponge of perfect golden bread. He can smell the burn on it, knows if he flipped it over the bottom would be the color of charcoal and the bottom crust could be peeled away like a second skin and tossed into the trash,”I need you to tell me what happened.”
    “I set the table,” she says. Her sly eyes laugh and her pink tongue catches a shivery crumb as it falls onto her blood grimed bottom lip. There is blood on her teeth. “You wanna say Grace with me?”
    He looks to the corner where the rookie is bagging and tagging the shotgun. Everyone in the room is deathly still, there is a sense of things so wrong here that nobody can even think of where to begin.
    In the bedroom the fly finds a spot in Red’s hollow belly and begins to wash its feet. In the kitchen Punkin smiles, eats her cornbread and hums tunelessly. Officer Roberts looks at the table and thinks of his wife. Of the pretty, blue rimmed plates she sets their dinner table with and remembers that she was washing greens when he left. He sighs and reaches for a piece of bread.
    “Y’all come eat,” Punkin says in her little girl voice, “Come on now. I got these greens and some cornbread. The bottom is burnt but it tastes fine with a bit of extra butter...” she breaks off and her eyes cloud and wander back to confused.
    “Family dinner,” she says into the silence and Officer Roberts scoops up cheap margarine with his butter knife and smears it thickly against the bread. He takes a big bite and the girl laughs out loud in true pleasure, “I like family dinners,” she says to everyone and no one at all.
    Officer Roberts says, “Yeah, me too.”
    “Family dinner,” she croons and the night comes pressing in at the windows, promising relief from the heat, promising many things. Punkin says a belated Grace. The fly buzzes. Officer Roberts eats and the rookies do the work of cleaning up the crime scene.

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