Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley: Novellas and Stories by Pancake Ann

Author:Pancake, Ann [Pancake, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781619025103
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2015-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

COOP

THEY BUNKED IN old chicken houses jammed with older iron beds, lumpy-ticked, stained, summers and summers of homesick child urine, then the rat and the swallow dirt all empty winter. The beds pressed so tight the girls who brought suitcases had to sleep with them, so tight Carly could shift an elbow and touch the girl beside her. Feel the girl’s night breath on her own cheek. Carly held her pee as long as she could before she dared the dark walk down the splintery floor past forty-three sleepers and their forty-three dreams. After, kneeling on her bed, she peered at the cousins from Honeyvine heaped alongside her. Found the face of the littlest one and wondered again about what the bigger ones said.

The camp was six miles off the highway down a dirt road, an old farm donated to the county by a dead bachelor. School buses carried them there, the road so narrow, the woods so close, in places leaves crushed against the windows. It was a free camp for girls, with sweaty surplus cheese in the dining hall and gallon tins of peanuts. The milk always this side of turning, and the raisins. Some girls brought their things in plastic bags, and some brought nothing at all, and behind the ruined piano on the dining hall porch were piled big garbage bags of donated clothes. The littlest Honeyvine found an ankle-length football jersey she wore like a gown until it tripped her in a kickball game, pitching her on her face. Carly watched her struggling there. Live thing in a sack. And a girl named Izzie came every year, a retarded kid with a finger missing, hard to tell if it was the second or third. She’d lie with her head at the foot of the bed and seize through the bars at the little girls passing. And if she was mad at somebody, which she generally was, she’d throw that stump like a middle finger. Only the finger wasn’t there.

Community Action had a hard time recruiting counselors, but for the three years Carly had come, they’d always got Debbie and Royal. Both had been campers themselves at one time, and Debbie was the darker, her skin pillowy, Carly saw, calling you to touch it. Like it needed your finger pressed into it. But then, underneath, Carly understood, a hardness harder than bone. Royal was leaner, lighter, a high fine freckled, berries or seeds, her beauty more boy than Deb’s beauty was. They were a kind of girl Carly had never seen outside of camp, you felt it the second they stepped off the bus, and you could not help but watch them. Carly watched.

Mrs. Junkins, the camp director who was often tired, always called Debbie and Royal her right-hand women. Mrs. Junkins, with her plum-mottled calves under floppy dresses, and how the hug-thirsty little ones would climb all over her, poking in her pockets, palming her cheeks. How the older ones would have to remind her about the next thing on the schedule.

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