The Wages of Sin (10 page)

“Mostly.”

“Where did you live?”

“In the trailer.” She chewed her index finger. “Now I live in town. In a house.”

“Did your mother work?”

Ivy shrugged. “Some. She worked at Smokey Dean's and she'd bring me barbeque home. But she got too big and her feet swoll up.”

Parsons leaned back in his chair and motioned to Elsie, speaking in a loud whisper. “How could a woman with AIDS work in food ser­vice?”

Elsie answered impatiently. “ADA protection, I guess. AIDS is a disability protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act.”

She turned away from Parsons, hoping to end the commentary. She heard him say, “But—­food?” She ignored it.

Nixon asked Ivy, “Did Larry work?”

“Larry? At a job?”

“Well, yes. Work.”

“No way.”

Nixon leaned back in his chair. “Never?”

“Nah. He couldn't hold no regular job. He was always broke.”

Nixon fell silent for a moment, scribbling a notation in pen. While he checked his notes, Ivy said, “If it cost a quarter to shit, he'd have to throw up.”

Parsons let out a squawk. Nixon tried to catch Elsie's eye, but she wouldn't look his way. She scooted closer to Ivy, hoping to provide support through physical proximity.

Nixon asked, “Where'd you hear that?”

Ivy's face took on a hunted look. “I don't know. Everybody says it.” After a pause, she added, “Not to his face,” as if imparting a rule of etiquette.

“What's it supposed to mean?”

“Huh?”

“What you said. About if it cost a quarter—­you know.”

Ivy blinked at him behind the glasses. “It means he don't got no money.”

“But who said it?”

Ivy stuck her middle finger in her mouth and chewed on it. Elsie could see blood seeping from the torn cuticle of the girl's hand.

She spoke up. “I object. This has been asked and answered.”

Nixon waved Elsie off, looking irritated by the interruption. “This is a deposition.”

“I know it is.”

“Judge Callaway isn't here to rule.” Nixon focused on Ivy again. In a voice that was deliberately casual, he said, “What do you know about Larry Paul's employment history? His earning capacity?”

“Don't answer, hon,” Elsie instructed Ivy. Turning to the court reporter, she said, “I want to make a record of my objection, for the court to rule upon at a later time.”

Nixon threw up his hands. “Why are you doing this?”

“Did you think this was going to be some macabre digging expedition? At the expense of a first grader? If so, you shouldn't have invited me.”

Sam Parsons whistled between his front teeth; an admiring sound.

“Okay, all right; let's chill out. I'll move on. No problem.” Nixon sounded deliberately cool. Elsie opened her mouth to frame a retort, then shut it. She had won this round.

Nixon leaned back, regarding the child. Elsie could see the wheels turning in his head. She didn't like that look; she didn't know where the inquiry was headed next.

“Ivy. You told the police that you weren't in the trailer the night when your mother was hit.”

“I told her.” Ivy pointed her finger at Elsie. The cuticle oozed blood.

“Okay. But if you were outside, how did you see what happened inside the trailer?”

“I looked. In the window.”

Nixon regarded her with solemn eyes. “What did you see?”

Elsie's heart did a thump in her chest; involuntarily, her hand reached out to cover Ivy's, but she pulled back and folded her hands tightly in her lap.

“He hit her. With the bat.” The eyes blinked fast behind the glasses, but her voice didn't break.

“Where?”

Ivy didn't answer immediately. She cocked her head. “Everywhere.”

“No, I mean—­where were they in the trailer? Tell me what you saw.”

“They was all partying. And Mama was on the couch, looking at TV. They wanted Mama off the couch, so they could see their show. She said her feet hurt.” After a pause, she said, “Her feet was swoll up. Because of the baby.”

“Did you hear this? With your own ears?”

Ivy nodded. “Yep.”

“How, if you were outside?”

“Window was open. It was hot.”

“Were there curtains? Or blinds?”

Ivy shook her head. “Got no curtains in the trailer, except Mama put a tarp over the window in the bedroom. So ­people can't see us naked.”

“When did he hit your mother with the bat?”

“I told you. She didn't get up right away when he said to. Because she was going to have the baby. Said she was wore out and swoll up.”

“And he hit her with the bat because she wouldn't get up.”

“She would've got up if he'd waited a minute. He was mean.” Under her breath, she repeated, “He was mean.”

Elsie was pawing through her notes with a frantic hand, trying to see whether the facts Ivy had just revealed in her deposition were consistent with her prior statement. Was the swollen feet/television scenario a new revelation? That was the problem with repeated opportunities to question a witness, particularly a child. Inconsistencies invariably cropped up.

Nixon paused, leaning back in his chair and scratching his head. Ivy leaned back and scooted her lower body down in the chair, touching her toes to the floor.

“Where did he get the bat?”

Ivy struggled to regain her position in the chair. “By the door.”

“What door?”

The child blinked. “Trailer only got one door.”

“Who did the bat belong to? Was the bat yours? To play ball?”

Ivy laughed. The sound made Elsie jerk in surprise. She studied the girl's face, amazed to see genuine mirth.

“I don't know nothing about playing ball.”

“Who was playing with the bat, then?”

Her face darkened. “Nobody playing with the bat.”

“So it was for protection, then.”

“Huh?”

Patiently, Josh set his pen down. “Was it there in case a burglar came? An intruder?”

Ivy stared at him through the glasses, her face inscrutable. “It was for if somebody come that wasn't suppose to.”

“All right, then.” Casually, with an encouraging look, Nixon asked, “Did your mama and Bruce do some work on the side? To make extra money?”

An alarm went off in Elsie's head; rising to a half stand, she exchanged a look with Parsons, at the end of the table.

He jerked to attention. “Objection. Irrelevant.”

Nixon smiled and nodded. “Your objection is noted. Ivy, you can answer.”

“Oh no I can't.”

The court reporter stopped tapping the keys on her device, and gave Josh Nixon a questioning look. He drummed his fingers on the table. “Don't worry about the objection, Ivy; this is a deposition. Answer the question.”

“No.”

The single word filled the room with tension that was palpable. Elsie scooted her chair closer to Ivy's. Nixon shot Elsie a pleading look, but she turned a blind eye, looking to Parsons for direction.

He shrugged. “Your witness,” he said.

Elsie sighed. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she turned and leaned her head down, trying to make Ivy look at her, but Ivy wouldn't meet her eye. “Ivy, you can go ahead and answer. In court, we'd have a judge to say whether Mr. Nixon is asking questions that go outside of what was done to your mom. But in this room, there's no judge here, so you just answer now and we can try to fix it later.”

Nixon was tapping the pen on his pad with a rapid beat. “Who used to come to the trailer, Ivy? To see your mother and Larry?”

She lowered her head and peered at him over the top of her glasses, a mulish expression on her face.

Long seconds ticked by. Elsie's hands started to sweat; she left a moist print on the wooden table before she wiped her hands on her skirt.

“Ivy,” Nixon said, in a voice of command. “Tell me.”

The child met his stare. “I don't never tell who come to the trailer.”

“Why?” Josh asked. “Why not?”

The girl swallowed before she said, “Because I don't want to die and burn in hell.”

 

Chapter Twenty-­One

Nell approached the
front door of her house on foot, walking across the high weeds of her yard. Under dirty aluminum awnings, two large signs, hand-­printed on cardboard, covered both of the windows facing the street. They read:
NO TRESPASSING
.

A big yellow dog was chained to the lone tree in the front yard, a large ginkgo tree. It littered the lawn with foul fruit in autumn, pods that emitted an animal stench when they were trodden upon. Nell walked through them, not bothering to tiptoe through the ginkgo berries. There were too many to avoid, and she had grown accustomed to them over the years. At her approach, the dog jumped up and barked ferociously, straining at its chain.

“Oh, hush your mouth,” Nell said. “Shut the fuck up,” and poised to aim a kick at the dog's ribs. The dog slunk back under the tree, its tail between its legs.

She opened the screen door, two panels of net sagging in a wooden frame. A boot-­sized hole gaped in the bottom half of the screen.

“Bruce!” she said. When she heard no response, she raised her voice to a shout. “Bruce!”

“What?”

From the kitchen, Bruce ambled into the front room carrying a pizza box. “Jesus, Ma. Your shoes smell like shit.”

She pointed a finger at the pizza. “Where'd you get that?”

“From Pizza Inn. What you think?”

Through the hole in the screen, the black ringtail cat entered the house with a dainty leap. It sidled up to Nell, rubbing against her ankles.

“When you gonna fix that hole,” Bruce asked, dropping onto the couch in the front room and balancing the pizza box on his belly.

Nell reached down and slid her hand down the cat's sleek back. It walked between her legs and nudged her with its head.

“Funny you say that,” Nell said, walking to the screen door and poking the hole with a dirty white athletic shoe. The sole of the shoe was gummy from the fruit of the ginkgo tree. “You done it.”

“Go get me a piece of screen and I'll patch it.”

“Nah.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Cat likes it.” Nell kicked the cat away from her feet and walked up to the couch. She stood over her son, watching him sink his teeth into the remaining crust of his pizza slice.

He chewed and said, “I can't fix it anyhow, cause you won't give me no money. Go get me a piece of screen and I can fix it right up.”

Taking care not to upset the balance of the box, he picked up another slice and opened his mouth to receive the pointed end. Before he could bite into it, Nell slapped it out of his hand.

The pizza fell onto the tile floor, top down. Bruce looked at it with a woebegone face and then jerked to a sitting position, keeping a tight hold onto the remainder of his pie.

“What the fuck you do that for?”

Nell pointed at the soggy Pizza Inn box and asked, “How you done pay for that pizza?”

“Huh?”

“What'd you use for money? You're so broke, if it cost a quarter to shit you'd have to throw up.”

Gingerly, Bruce picked the slice of pizza off the floor. Plucking a tuft of cat hair with his thumb and forefinger, he pulled the fur off of the slice and tossed the hair back onto the floor.

He took a bite. “From you,” he said.

A battered handbag of faux brown leather hung from her shoulder. “I took my purse with me. So where'd you get that pizza money?”

He finished eating, swallowed, and cleared his throat. “From the stash.”

Her eyes flashed; with a vicious swing, she flung the handbag into his face. “You goddamn fool. You don't touch that money.” She pulled the bag back to strike again, and he covered his head with his arms, letting the pizza box tumble to the floor.

“Goddamn it, Mama. Stop it!”

She was poised to strike again when a ringtone sounded inside her bag. She dropped the purse on the top of the sofa cushions and dug inside, pulling out the phone and inspecting the caller identification.

“It's him,” she said.

She glared at Bruce as she answered. She adopted a respectful tone as she said, “Hey, big boy.”

As she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, she walked over to the rust upholstered recliner and dropped down in it, stretching her legs out in front of her.

“Nah,” she said. “Bruce is right here. Ain't left the house. Don't talk to nobody.”

She nodded into the phone. “Like I told you before. The police come by. I said I ain't seen him. They come back with a warrant and tore through the house. I said I figured he done left town.”

Bruce rolled over onto his side and watched her with a worried face.

“I don't know what they know,” Nell said into the phone.

Bruce tried to communicate with a frantic gesture, but she waved at him in dismissal.

“How would I know what the kid's saying? They got her in a foster home.”

Covering the phone with her hand, Nell nodded at the pizza crusts on the carpet. The cat was nosing around the box, sniffing it. “Pick that up,” she said to Bruce, her voice a hoarse whisper.

Into the phone, she said blankly, “You want me to do what?”

The voice crackled though the cell phone. The cat jumped on Nell's lap, and she rubbed its head.

“We been watching. Been keeping a close lookout. You really think I need to go?”

After a moment, she ended the call with a weary sigh. Bruce sat up on the couch. “What he say?”

“He wants to know if you're keeping your head down. Maybe I should've told him you're getting pizzas delivered to the house. When you're supposed to be long gone. You don't watch it, he's gonna stick you in that hut behind the plant again. Where they do the real cooking.”

“Some pimple-­face kid brung it. He don't know me. What about Ivy?”

Wearily, she dropped into her recliner and pushed the footrest to an upward position. “We got to keep tabs. He says they're taking her to the Baptist Church, letting her talk to the preacher there.”

“Huh. So what?”

She closed her eyes. The cat tiptoed up and settled on her chest.

“He wants me to stop by the church. Make sure she sees me. So she'll remember what's what.”

Bruce hooted. “Mama's going to church! Damn!”

She opened her eyes. “I'd rather go to a goat-­gutting.”