A Southern Exposure Read Free

a poet, and a father. I wanted Russ.
    Russ is driving too fast. He is dying to get back home, Brett knows, just as when they’re heading west, to L.A., he’s dying to get out there. It’s always the next place, with Russ. The thing ahead. The new poem. The unborn child.
    Too fast.
    Sometimes beside the road there are people walking along, bums with their clothes on a stick—or, less frequently, women with kids. Farm women, from the look of them; gaunt and bony-faced, maybe heading west for some fruit- or some cotton-picking. They all look up as the big car passes them in the wrong direction, and then, seeing all the kids, sometimes they smile. You’ve got your troublestoo, is what Brett hopes they’re thinking, not just ugly mad jealous thoughts about rich folks in too large cars. “We’re not all that rich,” is one thing Brett would like to say to them. “But here, here’s what I’ve got in my bag”—and she imagines a flutter of dollar bills trailing after the car, a woman and child bending down to pick them up, and then going on walking to the next town for a couple of good big meals.
    They now pass an enormous hay wagon, coming from the other direction, east. All the kids reach out; they believe that a piece of straw from a wagon like that brings luck. On the other side of the road, Brett’s side, she glimpses a tall thin person, she thinks a woman, in big dark clothes, and beside her something small and dark and round. A very small child, probably.
    In the next instant several things happen: Russ swerves just slightly to the right, to avoid the hay wagon, probably (Russ is allergic to hay, a secret fact), the car bumps into something heavy, and two horrendous shrieks burst into the air, one obviously a woman’s, the other crazed, inhuman.
    The car stops.
    Russ opens the door, and in addition to the screams, which hardly stop, there is an explosion of foulness, a ghastly smell. Fecal—worse than fecal.
    “Doodoo!” the kids all shout. “Throw up! I’m sick! Icky doodoo!”
    “You kids just shut up!” shouts Brett, over all their voices, even as she thinks, I’ll cope with the kids, it’s all I can do, and more. Russ can deal with whoever he’s managed to kill.
    It was not the woman. Brett now sees Russ rounding the front of the car, and the large dark woman moving toward confrontation, the woman no longer screaming but sobbing loud, holding a red bandana across her face—whetherto catch tears or to keep out the horrible smell, no one can tell.
    Oh Christ, good Christ, he’s killed her child, thinks Brett. But why did the child smell so?
    She can hear nothing of the interchange between Russell and the woman, can only see their impassioned pantomime; the anguished woman weeping still, implacable, so gaunt and tall—and Russ, in his gentle phase; Russ explaining, Russ very country charming. But his smile, is it possibly overdone? A dead child there in the road, and he smiles?
    Another minute, and Russ walks around to the window on Brett’s side, and motions her to roll it down.
    He whispers, “It’s her goddam pig.” He has said this too loudly for the children not to hear. “I’ve killed her damn pig, that’s pig shit you smell. Jesus Christ. Give me the money, will you.”
    “Pig shit!”
    “Daddy said shit—”
    “Oooh—smell—”
    This chorus comes from behind her as Brett reaches into the voluminous cracked patent-leather handbag that she insists on hauling around, as Russ puts it, including to Hollywood poolside parties. She pulls out some bills, not looking at them, not counting.
    “That’s not enough. It’s the only pig she had, and it was very big. Her husband’s dead.”
    Brett hands him more bills. She is unable not to think, Suppose it had been a child?
    Out in front of the car Russ is immersed in further colloquy with the woman, who has now stopped her weeping. Who even looks at Russ with a semi-smile. And Russ, smiling too, is backing off. Even from this distance,