Hick. Andrea Portes

God himself had his heel into her back, holding her head down into the linoleum. She didn’t have to say it, my mama, when my dad tried to shush her sobbing into the tile, when she pulled back, recoiled at just even the inkling, the beginning, the thought of his hand on her arm. She didn’t have to say it. None of it. We all knew. We all knew.

      And Uncle Nipper knew to go to the house and get rid of that white crib with gold trim, before Mama could set eyes on it, please Lord, just do it. And Aunt Gina knew to take that baby-blue dress and just bury it, bury it deep in the back of her closet far, far away, before Sunday visits and swallowing basketballs and boys born the color coming off the moon. And I knew, this is when I first knew, this is when I learned how to throw myself over to the other side of the room and watch my dumb little life like I was watching a movie and you get the popcorn and we’ll sit a spell and see what else goes by.

      And there goes Dad, he’s been slumping around for three weeks straight with his head hanging off his shoulders. And there goes Mama, she still can’t eat but bring her this macaroni salad, just in case. And there goes most of my little-kid playmates, cause no one wants a fucking thing to do with this house anymore, that’s for damn sure. And here comes Aunt Gina and Uncle Nipper with a few kind words and making sure I got at least some Malt-O-Meal and Chef Boyardee to tide me over, they’ll be back tomorrow. And there goes my baby blue brother, somewhere into the night sky above me, and I wonder if I get to see him someday and tell him about the white crib he missed out on and that I know it wasn’t much but we were real proud to have him and wanted him to stay, just wanted him to stay a spell, and I would have played whatever silly little dumb game he had in mind, really, I was just happy to have him, my baby brother born the color of dusk.

      And you better just learn to throw yourself twenty feet across the room and let it play, just let it play. You better just learn to put each day and night up onto that screen and just keep on watching. Here’s what you’ll see. You get to see the incredible shrinking man. You get to see a man six foot tall turn in on himself and slump forward into nothing and then gone. Poof. You get to see a great tale of revenge and lust with a beautiful blond with flip-up hair. You get to see her get gussyed up each evening and put on lipstick and giggle loud and bat her eyelashes at strangers, straying a little bit behind the Alibi on a Saturday night, no, better, make that Sunday. Hell, she might run off with the devil himself if he walked in, leaned his elbow on the jukebox and tipped his hat just so.

      You get to see all these attractions and then some. You get to see Elvis-style dreamboats and slutted-up little girls and eyes swirling wild by the side of the road. You get to see naughty pink parts and coming attractions and wait, just wait, there’s more, keep watching, keep watching, let it play, let it play.

       THREE

      People think we’re poor but I made a list of things we have, just to set them straight.

      We have one seventy-year-old farmhouse, complete with barn, shack and an acre of tall wheat with weeds sticking up. We have all this luxury thanks to my grandpa who gave it to my mama when he died, on account of she was marrying a no good, ne’ergonna-make-nothing-out-of-his-skinny-bone-self like my dad. Despite the fact that it is, at first glance, a farmhouse, we don’t farm it or anything like that. We wouldn’t even know where to start. Tammy’s been trying to grow an avocado tree out of a pit for three years.

      All told, we got a yellow farmhouse and a green barn and a blue shack but they’re all faded to about the same color anyways. The paint’s cracked and the wood on each of these little monuments that make up our own private village is washed out to gray, light gray, gray-blue or dark gray. The barn has a huge loft in it full of hay and smelling like horses, even though there haven’t been horses here for twenty years. Just about the only animal life in there are the bats that flutter around thirty feet up top the loft making it Halloween all year round.

      It’s so thick with cobwebs up there I’m surprised the bats don’t get caught and eaten up by some imaginary spider of hideous proportion with sinister, darting eyes. On the other side of the cobwebs, facing out into the wheat dusk air, is a white-circle silhouette of a horse centered on each side of the barn, staring proud off into the setting sun.

      In front of the barn is our humble abode, which is faded yellow inside and out, with tiny-blue-flower wallpaper on a white-and-gold background in both the entry, which we never use, and the dining room, which we use even less. Everything in our rickety faded buttercup house, dead straight across from the biggest cemetery in Lancaster County, built around 1910, for the gravedigger and his wife, actually still runs properly, with the one exception of some hullabaloo about the water.

      Some orange-vested worker men from Lincoln came out here a few years back, noodled with the well tap and warned us that we had too much lithium in our water, declaring that it’d be best for everyone if we just relocated. This is something we never did, of course, because we didn’t have nowhere to relocate to, and Mama says, “Shit, wull, if we have lithium in our water we might as well see it as some kinda healing bonus and make the best of it . . . some people might even pay extra for that.”

      Sides all that, we got one RCA color TV with wood on the sides and that sky blue Chevy Nova my dad takes pride in scurrying around and underneath on weekends, fixing and tinkering and muttering to himself about trannies, alignment and pistons.

      And I know that these things may not seem like much to some la-di-da snooty-pants from Omaha but there are plenty of people in Lancaster County who have less than that, so I know, for a fact, that we’re not poor.

      Okay, this is what there is. Sometimes there’s macaroni and cheese, with tuna, for protein, but that’s pretty much as good as it gets. If you’re still hungry you can have blue frosting on graham crackers for dessert. There’s also the option, sometimes, of a sugar sandwich, which involves two slices of white bread, buttered thick and spread with plain white sugar. And then other times, depending on how many days my dad’s been gone, there’s even the possibility of me just stealing our dinner from the Piggly Wiggly in Fremont or Wahoo or Alliance in case it’s a special occasion . . . birthday, Christmas, Easter . . . usually something involving ham. Ham means it’s a holiday and wear a shirt.

      Tammy did a fairly reasonable job of teaching me how to steal when I was ten, but the knack I have for it comes mostly from my last three years of experience and has little to do with her slightly naive take on shopkeepers and advantage-taking. You may be thinking, oh my good Lord, what kind of a mother would put her own offspring up to such mischief and certain jeopardy? But, in all actuality, there’s a trick to it.

      You see, this way, if I get caught, she can scold me and pretend like she’s so ashamed, she raised me with the Lord Jesus Christ in my heart and how could I betray her, the baby Jesus and the blessed Virgin Mary like that. Believe me, she knows how to showboat.

      By the end of it, she’d have the shopkeeper so caught up in his own journey, or lack of journey, towards Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior that they’d just go ahead and let us go. They’d be too busy feeling sorry for me that I had such a pious mama that was surely going to spend this lifetime and the next dragging me through fire and brimstone before flying up to heaven on a puffy Charmin cloud.

      I am proud to say that, with the help of Jesus Christ and the Bible, I’ve stolen our special-occasion family dinner for three years straight and not once had to face up to any power higher than the day clerk at the Piggly Wiggly.

      It’s the little things like that I try to think about when I know I’m about to start feeling sorry for myself in my little yellow house with my stupid life and nothing to eat.

      Lookit, if you think you can just march out to the kitchen and say a fine howdedoo this morning, you got another thing coming, that’s for damn sure. No sir, here’s how it’s got to be if you know what’s good for you. Peek. Tippy-toe. Tippy-toe. Down the hall. Peek. Tippy-toe. Tippy-toe. Down the kitchen. Peek. Investigate the ashtray. You can read that ashtray like a weather-vane.

      You know how most people turn on the TV to figure out the weather and how the day’s gonna turn out? Well, round here the ashtray is gonna tell you who’s three sheets to the wind and if the storm’s