Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [97]
“We don’t use my cap in this one. We only use my cap when we play Johnny Yuma.” I was losing patience, and I certainly didn’t want to give up my rebel cap, the one Uncle Earle had brought back from the Fort Sumter general store. It was beautiful—gray, soft, with a slouched brim, and the Stars and Bars stitched in yellow thread.
“Johnny Yoo-ma,” Little Earle started singing again, trying hard to imitate Johnny Cash’s deep voice, “he roamed through the west ... Johnny Yoo-ma the rebel ... he wandered alone ...”
“You always wear it.” Grey swatted Little Earle’s rear end and turned back to me with a look of sweet reason. “Don’t matter if we’re playing Frankenstein’s monster, and you know didn’t nobody wear no cap like that in the Frankenstein movie.”
“Oh, for crying out loud.” I let Grey wear my cap, but I lost interest in the Swamp Fox. Who’d ever heard of him before he showed up on Walt Disney?
Grey and Garvey would only play with us about half the time. They had taken up smoking and were busy practicing pitching pennies. When school started again, they planned to wipe out the lunch money of half the sixth grade. Meanwhile, they kept their distance unless I proposed a plot they really liked.
“Let’s play Dalton Boys again,” Grey kept suggesting. He’d perfected the trick of diving off his bicycle after pretending to be shot, and he loved to show it off.
“It’s the Dalton Girls,” I insisted. Reese and I had seen the movie and had told everybody the plot in such detail that the cousins would argue over just what did and did not happen even though they’d never seen it. All of us girls loved the idea of the gang of sisters who had robbed banks and avenged their dead brothers, but the boys preferred to play at Jesse James or the Younger Gang.
“In that movie maybe, but everybody remembers the real Dalton Boys.” Garvey had seen the movie too, and hadn’t gotten over how the Dalton brothers were killed off in the first scene so the women could learn to shoot guns and rob banks. “I don’t think that movie was real anyway. I bet you their sisters never robbed no banks.”
“What you want to bet?” Reese challenged. She’d loved that movie. “You think a girl can’t beat your ass? You think I can’t beat your ass?” She snatched my cap off Grey’s head.
“You couldn’t scare a chicken off a nest of water moccasins!” Grey tried to get the cap back, but Reese kept running and twisting out of his reach, yelling at him over her shoulder.
“You’re the one scared of water moccasins. Aunt Alma said you pissed your pants when she took you blackberrying, all ’count of you stepped near a little green snake thinking it was some old water moccasin.”
“You shut your chicken-piss mouth.” Grey jerked the cap back.
“You shut yours!” Reese kicked at his ankles.
“Girls!”
“Boys!”
“You give me my cap.” I pulled it out of Grey’s hands as he tried to hop out of the way of Reese’s hard little feet. I was hoping she would really hurt him when Aunt Alma broke the fight up. She sent the boys to play in the backyard and told us girls we’d have to stay in front.
“If you can’t play together, I’ll keep you apart.”
“I don’t want to be around no stupid boys anyway.” Reese spit in Grey’s direction. Sometimes I agreed with every word out of my little sister’s mouth.
“But what we gonna play now?” Patsy Ruth whined. “We can’t ride the bikes in the front yard. We can’t do much of nothing in the front yard.”
I spun my rebel cap on my fist and had a sudden inspiration.
“We’re gonna play mean sisters.”
“What?” Patsy Ruth kept wiping snot off her lip. Mama swore Patsy Ruth had had a runny nose since she was born. “She’ll be wiping snot the day she’s married, wiping snot the day she dies.” I gave Patsy Ruth the handkerchief I’d sneaked out of Daddy Glen’s drawer for a bandanna.
“We’re gonna play mean sisters,” I told them all again, and I could see in my mind’s eye Shannon Pearl’s twisted mean face. “First we’re gonna play Johnny Yuma’s mean sisters, then Francis Marion’s mean sisters, then Bat Masterson’s. Then we’ll think of somebody else.”
Reese looked confused.