Wire Mesh Mothers Read Free

almost 11:30 in the morning. The Pippins Hot Heads had been riding around since just after ten, trying to keep warm since the car's heater didn't work very well, shooting road signs and a bum-legged skunk with Leroy's bb gun, drinking the beer Tony had stolen from her mom, and having a half-hearted on-again off-again belching contest. Everyone's breath was cotton-smoke on the cold air in the car. Tony could see spit in Little Joe's breath smoke and it pissed her off. Idiot should learn to breathe without spitting; it was gross.  
    Today's car was a green-and-rust Chevelle. It was Whitey's aunt's but she didn't go to work today, she was in bed with the cramps, so she didn't know it was making the rounds. The thing groaned and thumped and smelled of private, auntish things like perfume and sex. The sex smell pissed Tony off even more than Little Joe's spit did.  
    "Shit, Little Joe, get them goddamn boots away from me!" Tony shouted suddenly, slamming her heel onto the top of his foot. "Keep them away from me!"
    " Ow !” whined Little Joe. “Can't just cut my damn legs off just to give you room. Where you want me to put my feet? Whitey ain't complaining."
    Whitey turned his attention from the flat countryside out the window and looked at Little Joe. "That's 'cause I got control of myself. Tony don’t know nothing ‘bout control. If I was Tony, I'd tore ‘em off long ago."
    "I’m ready to cut your feet off inside those boots and throw ‘em all out the window!” swore Tony. “Those boots’s pussy, Little Joe.”
    Little Joe's eyes drew into slits and he slumped against the back of the seat. "Fuck." But slowly he pulled his feet together as closely as he could. "Ain't pussy."
    "They's pussy and they’s queer, too," said Leroy from the front seat. He fingered the buttons on the radio, sending a mad barrage of song clips yelping out through the speakers in the rear. "We'll find you a good pair of shoes soon, baby boy, and you can kiss them high heels good-bye."
    "These boots cost a lot," said Little Joe. But his voice was almost a whisper, and Tony was the only one who heard him. Little Joe was the bottom of the Hot Heads pecking order and knew it.
    "Damn radio," Leroy hissed. "Can’t get nothing but old shit and preachin ’. And on a Tuesday."
    “Bent antenna,” said Buddy. “It wasn’t bent we’d get something better, maybe from up at Richmond.”
    Leroy drove his fist into the on button; the music died. "Yeah,” he said, “if we had a good antenna we could get Richmond stations with rap and shit. Whitey, tell your aunt get her antenna fixed."
    Whitey grunted, then let out a long, crisp belch that threw DeeWee into a temporary fit of laughter.
    They drove a few more minutes, down a stretch of frozen country road, with no sound other than Little Joe's raspy breathing and Buddy's occasional sniffs and curses. Silently Tony counted the rails of the fences they passed so she wouldn't jump out of her skin. The day was frosty and clear. It was December tenth. Good little boys and girls were in school. But not the Pippins Hot Heads. They were in a beat- up Chevelle, driving around the county looking for something to do. Usually, if they could get a car, the something to do was stealing folks’ mail then smashing their mailboxes and whacking cows in the butt with a crowbar to watch them run. When that got wearisome, they'd pool their cash for a couple gallons of gas at the Exxon, swing by Whitey's trailer at MeadowView for some of the doughnut sticks his aunt always had hidden in an upper kitchen cabinet, and go eat behind the old chimney in the woods back of the trailer park.
    Here, in the farmland back roads between the tiny towns of Pippins and Capron, fifteen miles from Emporia and Interstate 95 that ran north to Richmond and south into North Carolina, it was real easy to hang out and not go to school. There weren't many police around except for troopers and not many of those, either, and they watched Route 58