Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [85]
Sammy chuckled, shaking his head. “Deanna Wolfe. You.” He chuckled some more. “You’s just as funny as you ever was.”
“You, too, Sammy.” She kept up the smile, waiting. She knew this routine. They were almost finished.
He seemed to have a bright idea. “Hell, I wasn’t aiming on shooting nothing today, I’s just looking for sang,” he said. “Got me a alimony payment due.”
“Oh, well, then,” she said, nodding seriously, “good thing you brought that rifle. Sang plants can get real mean in breeding season.”
He chuckled and chuckled, Sammy Hill. Tilted his head back and gave her a little wink, and then in a flash she saw him at age sixteen, in a different body altogether. Lean and confident, the cocked wrist tossing a wad of paper into the trash can—that Sammy Hill, the basketball player. He had a stuck-up sister, Regina, whom the boys called Queen of the Hill.
Sammy scratched his cheek with a knuckle, betraying a missing molar in his embarrassed grin. “No, now, I needed this rifle for protection,” he said, with make-believe conviction. “Bears and stuff. After I heard what happened to you.”
“Well, yeah, I can sure understand that. But now, Sammy, you could take a bear one-handed. Athlete like you. You still sink a jump shot like you used to?”
His face brightened. “Naw,” he said, blushing under his stubble.
“Well, now, here’s the bad news. There’s no sang hunting up here, either, anymore—the governor’s trying to let everything on this mountain grow back. I’m sorry, Sammy, but I’ve got to send you on out of here.” She truly felt sorry for this heavyset version of Sammy, so early to ripen and now gone so badly to seed. “Maybe there’s some sang up on the back of your dad’s farm,” she suggested, “up there by the fork.”
“You know, I bet there is.”
“How is your dad?”
“Dead.”
“Oh. Not so good, then.”
“Not so ornery, neither.”
“Well, OK,” Deanna said. “Nice to see you, Sammy. Say hey to Regina for me.”
“Well, hell, Regina don’t speak to me no more but to nag. Since I busted up her Camaro. I reckon you’ll have to tell her hello yourself.”
“I’ll do that,” Deanna said, raising one hand in a coy little wave. Sammy touched the brim of his camouflage cap and headed downhill, slow and awkward with his head craned far forward in the way of tall men with potbellies and bad backs. He had to watch his footing carefully on the steep slope.
She stood waiting a long time for the molecules of Eddie Bondo to reassemble out of pine boughs and humid air. He wasn’t behind her now, it turned out, but above her, standing a little to the rear of where Sammy had been. She spotted his grin first, like the Cheshire cat’s.
“Well hell, Deanna,” he mocked, and spat.
“Watch it. That’s my mother tongue.”
“I bet those boys were all in love with you.”
“Uh-huh. Not so much that it interfered with their general disdain.”
He moved down the slope toward her as if he’d been born to slopes. Short men really had the advantage in the long run, she decided, admiring his grace. Their backs held better. And then there was the matter of shoulders and narrow hips and that grin—the matter of Eddie Bondo. She felt a strange little interior pride, that this beautiful male was her mate, at least for a season.
“What the heck is sang?”
“Ginseng.” She began picking her way toward the Egg Creek trail, and he followed.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
“You ever seen any?”
“I don’t know. What’s it look like?”
She thought about it. “A five-fingered leaf, littlish plant, dies back to the ground in winter. It’s particular about where it grows. Only under sugar maples, on a north slope.”
“And it’s good for ex-wives?”
She was puzzled. “Oh, right, alimony payments. Good for payments of all kinds. It’s hard to find, though. It’s been overharvested for about five generations, I guess.”
“Daniel Boone had an ex-wife?”
“No doubt. They could always sell it for good money even back then, get it packed off to China some way.”
They walked quietly for a while. “Sammy Hill wasn’t