Desperation Road(13)

I made it, he thought. It finally come on.

The house was a modest one-story that Russell had helped his father paint the year before the wreck. It sat at the front of twelve acres that was wooded with patches of pines and oaks that had become less dense over the years with each passing hurricane or tornado. There had once been cows and a few horses and a couple of acres of corn but Mitchell had given all that up after Liza died. He’d sold everything but the tractor he used to bush hog and the two-man boat he used to sit in out in the middle of the pond when the sun was low and the sky was lavender and there was that particular kind of loneliness that came with a fading day. The small pond was a hundred yards behind the house and had been stocked with catfish when Russell was a kid and had spent summers sitting on the same bank that Mitchell sat on now, drinking orange sodas and eating oatmeal pies. And now there was a new roof and a different porch swing and he wondered how much of this Russell would notice.

He watched his boy stroll along, looking around at the house and the shed and the barn and out toward the pond as if it were the first time he had seen the place. Russell had always been tall and thin but Mitchell noticed that his shirt hung on him as if it had been borrowed from an older brother. Russell walked along the worn path between the house and pond and when he was halfway Mitchell stood. Russell came across the pond bank and said how you doing old man and the old man grinned with his lips held tight to keep it from getting away from him and he gave Russell a solid handshake as if he’d just sold him a calf. Then Russell looked at the darkhaired woman who looked back at him with brown eyes.

“This here is Consuela,” Mitchell said. Russell nodded to her.

“Es mi hijo,” Mitchell said and he waved his hand toward Russell.

“Yo se,” she said.

Russell looked at his father as if he were an impostor. His father scanned him from head to toe. “You look all right,” he said.

“I feel all right.”

The woman dropped the peas into a pail. Russell pointed at her.

“That’s Consuela.”

“You said that.”

“She helps out some. Come on and sit down.”

They sat down in the chairs and Mitchell opened the cooler and took out Cokes for both of them and he set the halfpint in his lap. He handed Russell the can.

“Nice day,” Russell said.

“Hot, though,” his father answered.

They sipped their Cokes and stared across the pond. Not speaking for several minutes with the years having separated them from the things they used to talk about. Things like the rental houses that Mitchell owned or the cows that he bought and sold or the dinner Russell’s mother had just made. The dropped peas tapping the bottom of the pail was the only sound.

“She speak any English?” Russell asked.

“Sí,” she said.

“She picks it up here and there.”

“You too, sounds like.”

“Got to, I reckon.”

“I reckon,” Russell said and he grinned. “You’re a sly damn dog.”

“What you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“It ain’t like that.”

“Where does she live?”

Mitchell didn’t answer. Sipped at his Coke.

“You’re a dog,” Russell said.

“She lives in your old room out there over the barn.”

“I bet.”

“Consuela,” Mitchell said. “Duermes donde?”

She turned and pointed at the barn.

“Okay,” Russell said. “You coulda told me.”

Mitchell shrugged his shoulders. “I coulda.”

“How long she been out here?”

“About a year or so.”

“She just walked up the road one day?”

“Maybe she did.”

“Maybe she didn’t.”

Mitchell shifted in his chair. “If I tell you got to promise you can’t tell nobody.”

“Who am I gonna tell?”

“I don’t know. That’s something I had to say.”

“Fine. I won’t tell anybody.”

“She came from your uncle Clive’s sugarcane farm down in Bogalusa. He’s got a ton of them. Living in shacks and shit. Kinda rotten if you ask me. A modern-day plantation. I went down there to see him and we was looking around and I saw her. I asked her if she wanted to come up here and she said yeah.”

“You asked her?”

“In a manner of damn speaking. You know what I mean. I told somebody to ask her and they did and she came on with me.”

“So she’s a slave,” Russell said.

“No. She was a slave. You should see how Clive has got them piled on top of one another. And pays change from his couch, seems like.”

“You pay her?”

“Some.”

“So you pay her to work and whatnot and she lives in the barn and I’m guessing she’s not exactly a voter but she’s not a slave.”

“If you don’t shut the hell up I’m gonna call the damn sheriff and tell him to take you back.”

Consuela finished with the peas and she set down the basket and wiped her hands on her long denim skirt. She then stood up and said something quick and Mitchell nodded and she walked toward the house.