Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [153]
“Well, hot damn,” the child declared. “Shit fire.”
“Hey. Don’t use them all up in your first five minutes.”
Crys picked up a small stone and tossed it toward the crowd of butterflies, just to see them rise.
“Come on,” Lusa said, “let’s hunt moths. Today I’m going to find you a luna moth or bust.” They walked slowly toward the puddle, passing straight through the cloud of quivering butterflies the way Lusa remembered Superman walking between the molecules of a wall in the cartoons. She and Crys were hiking up the old cemetery road into the woods behind the garage, for no reason in particular, just out for a little adventure while Lowell napped on the parlor couch. Jewel was having a very bad day and had asked Lusa to watch them for the third time in two weeks. Lusa was happy to oblige, though she wondered what kind of a parental substitute she was—encouraging Crys to swear like a tinker, for instance. She didn’t know the first thing about kids. But no one else in the family could get a word out of Crys at all. You get what you get in this world, as Hannie-Mavis had once told her. Lusa and Crys had gotten bad luck and the judgment of the righteous. And apparently, each other.
“What’s that?”
Lusa looked into the woods where Crys pointed. Birdsong rang like bells in the rainwashed air, but Lusa couldn’t see anything in particular. “What, that plant?”
“Yeah, ’at booger one climbing up the trees.”
“‘Booger one’?”
Crys shrugged. “Uncle Rickie says ’em’s boogers. Them vines that gets all over everwhere. He hates ’em.”
“This one’s nice, though; it’s supposed to grow here. It gets covered with white flowers at the end of summer, and then it makes millions of seedpods that look like little silver starbursts. It’s called virgin’s bower.”
“Virgin’s like Jesus’s mama, right?”
“Right. Or any girl or woman who’s never gotten the pecker business we were talking about.”
“Oh. Virgin’s power?”
“No, virgin’s bower. It means her bed.” Lusa smiled. “Same thing in this case, actually.”
Crys leapt ahead of Lusa with a dozen or so strange, stiff giant steps. She seemed to like trying out different ways of walking, which Lusa just watched, bemused. She was wearing the same outgrown pair of jeans she always wore now, and also, today, a strange, ragged creation over her T-shirt. It looked like a man’s denim work shirt with its tail and sleeves cut to ribbons with a pair of scissors.
“I like bugs better than flowers,” Crys said decisively, after a while.
“Good, then you’re in luck, because I know a million times more about bugs than I do about flowers. And we’re looking for a luna moth, remember? Look on the trunks of the trees, on the side that’s in shade. Do you know what a hickory tree looks like? With the really shaggy bark?”
Crys shrugged.
“Luna moths especially like hickories. Those and walnuts. They lay their eggs on the leaves because that’s what their caterpillars eat.”
“How come?”
“That’s just how their stomachs are made. They specialize. You can eat the seeds of wheat, for instance, but not the grass part.”
“I can eat all kinds of stuff.”
“Other animals should be so lucky. Most of them have pretty specialized diets. Meaning they can eat only one exact kind of thing.”
“Well, that’s dumb.”
“It’s not dumb or smart, it’s just how they’re built, like you have two legs and walk on your feet. A dog probably thinks that’s dumb.”
Crys didn’t comment.
“But yeah, specialization makes life more risky. If their food dies, they die. They can’t just say, ‘Oh, never mind, my tree went extinct, so now I’ll just order a pizza.’”
“Lowell has that.”
“Has what?”
“The special-food problem.”
“Yeah?” Lusa was amused by this analysis of her brother. “What does he eat?”
“Just macaroni and cheese. And chocolate malted-milk balls.”
“Well. That is a specialized diet. No wonder he didn’t eat my lentil soup the other night. I should have put malted-milk