A Cry of Angels by Jeff Fields Page B

to her face.
    "Ma'am, the puppies . . ." Then the realization hit me.
    I looked back at her, still standing with her face to the sun. "Em, there ain't any puppies. There never was any puppies!"
    "What?" Em rubbed his bleeding hand on his pants. "Where's the dogs, old woman? Look, we ain't got time to . . ."
    A spidery hand leaped to her apron pocket and suddenly the pistol was leveled at his nose. The blue eyes blazed from the funnel of her bonnet.
    I struggled to keep my voice steady.
    "Let's go home, Em. It don't matter. Come on, it's gettin' late."
    Em was outraged. "What do you mean? She said she would give you the dogs! We moved the goddamned furniture so she wouldn't kill the dogs!"
    "Never mind about the dogs. Let's go."
    "You mean that crazy old woman . . ." She was eyeing him curiously, as though he were some animal that had suddenly started speaking. "She ain't crazy. She's just puttin' on. She knew what she was doin'."
    I pulled him close, trying to keep my voice down. "Em, if there wasn't any dogs to shoot, why'd she bring a gun down to the fence in the first place?"
    Em stopped blustering. I could see the logic taking hold. He looked at me, and back at Miss Lilly. If she wasn't going to shoot dogs, there was the very real possibility that she had fully intended to shoot us, and when she found we weren't prowlers, decided to trick us into the work.
    The anger drained out of Em's face. We started backing away. At the edge of the field we broke and didn't stop running until we were across the fence and into the safety of the woods. When we looked back she was gone. The old house looked undisturbed and calm.
    But the more I thought about it, the madder I got. "No, she set the whole thing up, made pure fools out of us."
    Em's mood, on the other hand, seemed to reverse." Aw, let it ride," he said. "She only done it 'cause she hadn't no money. Pulled it off, too, she did."
    "Now look who's taking up for her," I said.
    "Craziness was all she had to bargain with. She's proud, and folks like that would rather cheat and steal than beg."
    "She didn't have to beg. She could of asked it as a favor."
    "That's the same as beggin' if you got no way of payin' it back. 'Sides, you can't take no pride in somebody doin' you a favor. But now, you trick somebody, outsmart 'em, well, that ain't nothin' but good business. You can take pride in that." He sauntered along shaking his head, chuckling, whipping at milkweeds with a stick.
    With a full afternoon before us and nothing to do, we decided to stop off at Mr. Teague's for a frozen Pepsi and pass a little time with Tio. Through some malfunction, Mr. Teague's drink box had one corner that froze drinks solid. I have never encountered another one with that characteristic, though I still look for it in every box I open. He could have charged double, even triple for those drinks, and got it. I have known boys to sit on his curb for hours waiting for their drinks to freeze.
    Alvah Teague's gray brick wedge of a grocery store had sat on that knoll in the Ape Yard longer than anyone could remember. It had been there, and run by Mr. Teague's grandfather, when it was hardly more than a trading post in the hollow north of what was to become the town. Captain Mcintosh's mule-mounted cotton farmers supplied themselves at the store before they forded the Little Iron and shot up half a regiment of Union regulars at the battle of Social Rose. When Alvah Teague inherited it, people were still riding half a day by wagon to shop there. That was before Roe Mill changed hands, and the infamous quarry was dug, and everyone who could moved out.
    Now supermarkets were climbing the foothills—there was a new one opening in Galaxy Plaza that afternoon—and Teague's place was dying. The half-moon lettering, Teague & Son , had peeled to mere tracings on the window. The floor sloped dangerously under the meat cases, and the pine bench along the outside wall, worn slick and grainy by generations of weather