PART ONE

Chapter One

A ROOSTER AIN’T NO JOB

They followed the Frisco tracks with their bodies bent and
hooded, the pebbling wind audible on the back of her
father’s old mackinaw.  To the west, a line of T-poles
stretched to a dim infinity before a setting sun that melted
and bled and blended its sanguinary light with the red dirt
and with the red dust that rose up like Hell’s flame in
towering streaks and whorls to forge together earth and sky.

Great deal on land! her father called over his shoulder. 
Bring your own jar!

They came out to the highway and paused there as though to
orient themselves before turning west, the windblown dust in
spectral fingers reaching across the blacktop before them. 
First one car passed without stopping, then another.

You gettin hungry?

No sir.

The next vehicle that passed was a slat-sided Ford truck
that slowed and shimmied and veered crazily onto the
shoulder, and as they hurried to meet it she saw through the
swirling loess the crates of pinewood and twist-wire stacked
beneath its flapping canvas tarpaulin.

Her father worked the latches and lowered the endgate and
vaulted into the truckbed.  She reached a blind hand for him
and felt herself rising, weightless in a grip as hard as
knotted applewood, his mangled finger biting into the soft,
white flesh of her wrist.

A bonging sound on the cab roof riled the chickens, and a
voice called out from the lowered window.

Get on up front, you dumb Okies!

The man looked across her lap and studied her father’s
shoes.  He said his name was Palmer, and that he was a
Texan, and a cowboy.  He wore sharp sideburns and a clean
Resistol hat cocked forward over pallid eyes gone violet in
the fading glow of sunset, and she could see that he was a
small man -- perhaps no taller than she -- and that there
was something fiercely defiant, something feral, in his
smallness.

You get a gander at them gamecocks? the man asked without
taking his eyes from the roadway.

Look like right fine birds, her father allowed.

The man chuckled.  Mister, them’s the gamest fightin
roosters this side of the Red, for your information.

That a fact.

Damn right that’s a fact.  He nodded once.  Damn right it
is.  You know fightin birds?

Her father shrugged, and the man leaned forward to study his
profile before dropping his eyes first to her sweater and
then to her lap, returning at last and again to her father’s
shoes.

How long you been outside, cousin?

How’s that?

The stranger’s smile was sudden, and unnaturally brilliant,
and hot on the side of her neck.

So that’s how it is.

Do I know you? her father asked, leaning now to face the man.

Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, the man said, his ghost
reflection grinning in the darkened windscreen.  But I
surely do know you.

They’d built a fire in the lee of the ruined house, and her
father squatted before it stirring red flannel hash with a
spoon.  The temperature had dropped with the sun and she
wore his mackinaw now like a mantle while he sat his heels
and rubbed his hands and warmed them over the skillet, the
tumbled walls around them shifting and changing, moving
inward and then outward again as though breathing in the
soft orange glow like a living thing.

Embers popped, running and skittering with the wind.  To the
north she saw other fires speckling the void, and she
studied their positions as an astronomer might chart the
nighttime heavens.

More tonight, she said.

Her father followed her gaze.

These is hard times, honey.  Ain’t nobody hirin.  Least not
in Hugo, anyways.  I was thinkin I might light a shuck for
Durant come sunrise.  Man said a mill out there was lookin
for hands.  Miz Upchurch could mind you for a day.

I don’t need no mindin.

He studied her burnished profile, her cheek and lashes
luminous in the fireglow.

Tell you what then.  You can mind Miz Upchurch.  Haul her
water and such.  You tell her I’ll be back by nightfall.

She wielded a long twig, tracing random patterns in the
dirt.  Somewhere beyond the firelight, a car passed on the
highway.

Who was that man?

Just a man.

He said he knowed you.

Oh, he didn’t mean like that.  More like my kind is what he
meant.

What’s your kind?

Her father stirred the skillet, and paused, and stirred it
again.  He tapped the spoon on the iron rim.

Only the good Lord knows what’s in a man’s heart, Lottie. 
Happy is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked
nor walks in the way of sinners.  He wiped his nose with his
wrist.  That there’s from Psalms.

She poked her stick into the fire and withdrew it and blew
out the flame.  Then she wrote a secret in the air, and
studied it, and watched it disappear in the wind.