The Sharpshooter Blues by Lewis Nordan

Author:Lewis Nordan [Nordan, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1995-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

Esequeena Street was the rutted trail that ran through the Belgian Congo like a jungle stream, the Darktown section of Arrow Catcher, beneath the African-seeming moon. Poor cabins, some of them windowless, lined Esequeena, some on slabs, most on stilts, some shingled, some thatched with bundles of swamp grass or sheaves of purloined rice gathered from the flooded paddies. Every house was a shack, an unpainted cabin with a crumbling chimney, a cockeyed stoop, a cinder block or two for steps.

A few trees still stood, a cottonwood here or there for shade, but most were stunted shrubs, chinaberries, an occasional willow. No grass grew in the yards, which were swept clean each day with straw brooms.

Morgan woke up in one of those houses, his mama’s house, the necromancer’s cabin, thinking about Ruthie McNaughton.

It was breakfast-time, and Aunt Lily had mixed up some pan bread out of cornmeal and lard and water. She had built a fire beneath a tripod in the yard. Her hands smelled yellow and clean, with the meal and lard.

Morgan lay inside, on the pallet where he had spent the night, on the floor in a corner of his mama’s house. Aunt Lily found Morgan in a canebrake when he was a baby, like Moses in the bulrushes, and raised him up as her own, although he was white.

Morgan wished he hadn’t talked so mean to Hydro out at William Tell, wished he hadn’t let the others shoot at the cantaloupe. He didn’t know what got into himself sometimes. He tried to think about his real mama and daddy, carnival workers was what people said. A man who ran the merry-go-round and a woman who swallowed swords and fire. So that meant he had show business in his blood—that could explain a few things, he supposed. And that was why suicide had never seemed like much of an option to him, maybe. He came pretty close to it when he let Hydro shoot at the melon on top of his head, but he’d been pretty confident he’d be all right.

There was a breeze in the eaves this morning, and so the limbs of a chinaberry tree were scratching at the wall outside. The birds in the eaves kept up their evil racket, cowbirds. Morgan couldn’t stand them.

Aunt Lily came in to get something. She was carrying a black skillet with hot grease in it, from the fire she’d built outside.

She was all worked up about something. She said, “Cain’t eat no Mexican. Cain’t eat no lovely children. Have to eat this sorry bread.”

Morgan sat up on his pallet and leaned back against the bare wood wall. He had never claimed to kill anybody, just to steal a truck.

Still, he said, “You done got so hoity-toity you can’t eat a Mexican?” He just meant to make a joke.

Aunt Lily flung the pan of hot grease in his face.

Morgan leaped straight up out of bed. His cheek and fore-head were burning like fire. He said, “Goddamn, Mama!” He grabbed up the tattered quilt from the pallet and pressed his face into it.

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