Cannot Wait to Get to Heaven - Fannie Flagg [28]
“What is it?”
“I’m not telling you, but it’s something you’ll like, and you’ll be sorry if you don’t come here and get it.”
He narrowed his eyes at her and wondered what the old lady was up to. He was highly suspicious of anybody who was nice to him. He had thrown rocks at her stupid cat, so maybe she was trying to get him to come close enough so she could hit him. But whatever it was she wanted, he was not taking any chances.
He called back, “You’re a liar, you don’t have nothing to give me.”
“I do, too.”
“What is it, then?”
“That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”
“Where’d you get it at?”
“The store.”
“What store?”
“I’m not telling, but I bought it just for you, you don’t want me to have to give it to somebody else, do you?”
“I don’t care. I don’t care what you do.”
“Well…it’s up to you, if you want your present, come over here and get it, and if you don’t, don’t, that’s fine with me too,” and with that Elner went back into the house and shut the door.
Luther walked over and sat on the curb in front of Merle and Verbena’s house and tried to figure out what the old lady was up to. He did not go back over to her house that day, but a few days later Elner looked out the window and saw him skulking around across the street, kicking at the ground. She wondered how long it was going to take him to make up his mind. Finally about three days later, when she went out to pick up her paper, he was out in her yard there and said, “You still have that damn present you said you had?”
“I might, why?”
“I just wondered.”
“I still have it, but if you are going to talk ugly, then I don’t think I want to give it to you. Now if you ask me nicely, I’ll give it to you.”
She went back inside and waited. About ten minutes went by before she heard a little knock on the door, and it was all she could do to keep herself from laughing. She had shamelessly bribed an eight-year-old child, and she knew it, but what good is it being an adult if you can’t outsmart children. Besides, she really did have a nice gift for him. A few weeks before, the minute she had given him that Ex-Lax candy, she had been sorry, and had prayed to God every day since to forgive her.
At the time, she had been so mad at him for hitting poor old Sonny in the head with a rock, and almost killing him, that she’d wanted to get back at the boy, but now she felt so horrible about what she had done, she wanted to try and make it up to him. After that day, when she gave him the big red kite she had bought him at the hobby shop, the two of them spent hours out in the fields behind her house flying it. When Macky asked what had made her pick a kite instead of something else, she said, “Well, Macky, the boy was always looking down, and I wanted something that would make him look up for a change.” After Elner bought him the kite, Luther would come by and see her almost every afternoon. She was the first person who ever gave him a gift, the first person who treated him nice. His father was a lowlife mean drunk who could never hold down much of a job, and according to him, if he hadn’t had to marry Luther’s mother because she was pregnant with him, he might have become a famous race car driver like his idol, Junior Johnson. When Luther was seven, his mother, tired of being beaten up, had run off with some stranger she met at a bar, and had been killed in a car wreck six months later. No wonder Luther had been throwing rocks at everybody and everything.
And it did not get better. When he was thirteen, his father had gotten drunk and thrown him out into the yard in the middle of the night. Luther had gone over to Elner’s house, and later, when his father, still drunk, had come banging on her door looking for him, she had run him off with a broom. The next morning, as he sat at her table in the kitchen, he had been so despondent, he’d said, “Don’t nobody want me. I’m gonna go back over and get his gun, and shoot my brains out. The hell with it, I’m no damn good nohow. I don’t have nothing, never will have nothing.