Free Flying Shoes by Lisa Howorth Page B

Produce.
    In deep summer or early fall the produce department was a wonderland overflowing with the bounty of local farmers. In the dead of winter, other than greens, there wasn’t much: dinged-up apples, expensive avocados in a basket with a sign saying adovacods , slightly wrinkled, flaccid peppers; the usual stuff trucked in from wherever they grew and trucked that stuff in from. Mary Byrd lusted for the summer’s beautiful chartreuse cranberry beans streaked with magenta, or the fat, mottled Georgia rattlesnake beans; crisp, tart, lopsided York apples; Nancy Hall sweet potatoes from the town of Vardaman, the Sweet Potato Capital of the World; vaguely sexual yellow squash with fused necks and the not-so-vaguely-sexual Big Boy tomatoes with mutant, Nixon-faced protuberances. She’d give a lot, in February, to see the JFC’s grungy bushel baskets piled with the sweetest Pontotoc peaches, tomatoes labeled slicers , rusty carts full of bowling ball–size lopes , and yellow meat melons lined up on the dirty floor. And pint baskets of figs and blackberries, and sometimes muscadines and scuppernongs packaged in cellophane meat trays. All of it piled high, overflowing, a carnival of fresh, brightly colored, delicious fruits and vegetables brought into town every day, summer after summer, from the same Mississippi hill country farms.
    Mary Byrd frowned, picked out a less-wrinkled pepper and a muddy onion, paid for her stuff and the two Jungle Juices that the children had already absconded with, and stopped at the bulletin board. She tore a big piece off her grocery sack and wrote:
     

     
    and stuck it up with a pin, hoping Teever would notice but not too many other people would. She hurried to the car outside, where in just the few minutes they had been in the store it had gotten nearly dark, and much colder. As they pulled away toward home, the light inside the Jones Food Center glowed greenly on the empty, wettish sidewalk outside. There were no trays of flowers, fern baskets, tomato plants, or herbs in pots, no bales of hay or pine straw, no pumpkins and gourds and cornstalks and homecoming mums, no fragrant Christmas trees, no stacked firewood, even. This really is the dead of winter , Mary Byrd thought. The dead, the dead, the dead . She sighed. She hoped Teever would see his message tonight, or at least in the morning. If he was even around.
     
    Teever Barr watched from the County Co-op as Mary Byrd parallel-parked her car and entered the JFC across the street. It would be an hour or so before it was dark enough to sneak back to his hooch in the cemetery, and he couldn’t stay there in front of the Co-op because Mr. Jimmy, the Co-op boss, would run him off. He had about one swig of Amos’s shine left but he would save that for later. Mudbird might have some smokes; she always shared and bought him beers at the bar, but she wasn’t regular with her smoking. He did have a couple half-smoked ones down in his sock. Best thing about Mr. Jimmy was he could only have a few drags before he started coughing. His cough was way worser than Teever’s—man, did he look pretty ill—and he would stop and throw his practically unsmoked butt in the coffee can where lots of folks would get ’em—Dees, Pokey, some of the water-heads from the halfway house, if they came around.
    Teever thought he’d stand there a little longer near the space heater ’til they put the chicks and ducks and seed sacks and tools up for the night. He liked to watch the little birds under the heat lamps. Too bad one of the halfway-house dudes did, too; one of them who thought he was a rock star—liked to dress up like a hair band—had bit a head off a chick one time. Teever had heard from Joey at the sally port that that dude had been sent back to Starkville to the big rutabaga ranch where they couldn’t go around normal folks. Or chickens. Teever did want to speak to Mudbird, just to check on her, see how she doing, what’s going on, she need