Bastard Out of Carolina - Dorothy Allison [98]
“They do everything their brothers do. Only they do it first and fastest and meanest.”
Reese still looked confused, but Patsy Ruth whooped.
“Yeah! I want to be the Rifleman’s mean sister.”
Patsy Ruth ran off to get Grey’s old broken plastic rifle.
All afternoon she pretended it was a sawed-off shotgun like the one on “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Reese finally got into it and started playing at being shot off the porch. I took Aunt Alma’s butcher knife and announced that I was Jim Bowie’s mean sister and no one was to mess with me.
I practiced sticking Aunt Alma’s knife into the porch and listened to the boys cursing in the backyard. I was mean. I decided. I was mean and vicious, and all I really wanted to be doing was sticking that knife in Daddy Glen.
That evening, Patsy Ruth entertained Alma and Wade by running up and down yelling “Ten-four, ten-four” until she knocked over Aunt Alma’s glass.
“What in God’s name are you playing at, child?”
“I was being Broderick Crawford’s mean sister,” Patsy Ruth wailed, wiping her nose.
“His what?” Uncle Wade started laughing into his glass. “His what?” He rocked back on his cane-bottom chair and ground his cigarette out on the porch. Aunt Alma shook her head and looked at Patsy Ruth like she had gone crazy.
“Broderick Crawford’s mean sister! My Lord, what they don’t think up.”
Patsy Ruth was humiliated and angry. She pointed at me. “She told me about it. She told me I could.”
Wade reached out and slapped my fanny. “Girl, you got a mind that scares me.” He swatted me again, but lightly, and he kept grinning. “Broderick Crawford’s mean sister.”
I didn’t care. I played mean sisters for all I was worth.
15
Mama let Aunt Raylene take Reese and me along when she went to visit Uncle Earle at the county farm. Aunt Raylene said he would be there another three months and he was lonely to see his nieces and nephews.
“Why don’t you take Grey and Garvey?” Mama asked her. “Show them what’s gonna happen to them if they keep breaking into telephones.”
“The hell with that.” Aunt Raylene was sensitive about Grey and Garvey, who had been picked up by the highway patrol for drag-racing in Uncle Beau’s truck when they were supposed to be staying the night at her place. Alma got mad at Raylene for not keeping a more watchful eye on them, and Raylene came close to slapping Garvey when he boasted that they were the youngest in the family ever to be arrested. Now Aunt Raylene folded some of Uncle Earle’s clean underwear and put it in a paper sack while her face flushed red with anger.
“They get into any more trouble, the law won’t have to send them away. I’ll send them so far they’ll never find their way home.”
“Shit you will.” Granny slammed a basket of food down on Aunt Raylene’s kitchen table. “You’ll visit them every month and take them sweet cornbread, just like you do Earle.”
“You’ll see what I’ll do.”
“I’ve seen it already.”
I waited for them to really start fighting, Instead Granny leaned over and kissed Aunt Raylene right on the mouth, her lips pressing Raylene’s with an audible smack. Aunt Raylene gaped in surprise, and Granny laughed until the tears came.
“Oh! Oh! Look at you. Raylene, I finally got you. Oh Lord! I enjoyed that.” She dropped down on a kitchen chair and wiped her eyes. “Well, never mind, you just tell Earle that I love him. And then tell him if I’d beat his ass more when he was a boy, he wouldn’t be where he is today.”
“Nothing you could have done would have stopped Earle from his fighting.” Raylene was trying to recover from the shock of Granny’s kiss. “Earle had a spirit of meanness in him when he was born.” I watched Aunt Raylene push her gray hair back up into her hairpins. Did I have a spirit of meanness in me? I wondered. It felt like it. It had felt like it for weeks. Maybe I hadn’t been born with it, but I’d come to it, as Granny would say. I’d come to it soon enough.
Earle was a little skinnier and a little grayer around the eyes. His hair had grown back some, into a short black brush that stuck straight up all over