Free Bottom Feeder by Deborah LeBlanc Page A

trucker, heading into Louisiana,
gave her a lift. They hadn’t put a hundred miles under the wheels
of the big rig before he tried shoving a grubby paw between her
legs. She’d screamed so loud and long he wasted no time pulling off
at the next exit so she could get out.
    Too afraid to get into another vehicle, Nina
had headed south on foot, and kept walking until she collapsed in a
laundry mat in some remote Louisiana town. That’s where Lervette
found her, dirty, starving, and huddled beside a Maytag. When the
woman offered work, Nina jumped at the chance, never thinking to
ask what kind of work. All she’d been able to think about when she
got into Lervette’s rusted old pickup was money and the double
cheeseburger with fries it would buy.
    Nina weighed the cheeseburger against
Lervette’s sudden anger and snide remarks—against the eerie feel of
this place. Storm clouds gathered over the acres of barren fields
surrounding them, tinting everything gray—Lervette’s shack of a
house—the broken board fence that bordered her front yard—even
Maudwan. The air felt too thick, the boar’s grunts too loud, and
everything seemed to collect in Nina’s brain and insist she leave.
But without food or money, where would she go? As if in response,
her stomach grumbled loudly— Pick the burger . . .
    So she did.
    “The—the feed’s back in that shed?” Nina
asked quietly.
    Obviously taking the question as a positive
response to the work required, Lervette smirked, then took off in
the direction of the shed. “Come, I’ll show you what you gotta
do.”
    As Nina followed her, she caught distant
movement to the right out of the corner of her eye. She glanced
over and saw a little girl standing just outside Lervette’s front
door. She appeared to be no older than five or six, wore a faded
yellow, shift-type dress, no shoes, and had disheveled,
shoulder-length blond hair. Even from here, there was no mistaking
the sad expression on the child’s small face. She just stood there,
hands at her sides, watching Nina’s every step. Unless Lervette had
some kind of miracle womb, the child looked too young to be her
daughter. Granddaughter maybe? But Lervette had said she didn’t
have kids . . .
    Nina was about to ask the woman about the
child when Lervette pulled open one of the shed’s double doors and
an overwhelming, rancid odor yanked the question right out of her
head. It was a thousand times worse than what she’d picked up from
Maudwan. “Jesus, what’s that smell?”
    Instead of answering, Lervette waddled into
the shed, signaling for her to follow.
    With a hand clamped over her nose and mouth,
Nina stepped tentatively across the threshold. Lervette flipped a
switch near the door, and a single, bare light bulb that hung from
a cord in center of the ceiling flickered on—off—on. Pale white
light jittered through the thirty-foot building as if hesitant to
reveal what was inside.
    Two huge metal barrels stood side by side in
the middle of the room. Both were at least four feet tall, had lids
with rope handles, and the bulk of each barrel had bright orange,
vertical stripes. A long handled paddle and a metal bucket were
propped between them. To the right of the barrels, a pyramid of
plump burlap sacks with RICE-BRAN stenciled on them lay on the
concrete floor. Beside the pyramid were two, white plastic buckets,
each looking like oatmeal had sloshed over their sides. The wall
beyond the sacks supported rows of shelves, all of them filled with
various tools, boxes, paint cans, and other assorted junk left to
storage. A long, wooden table sat at the back of the building with
a large coil of garden hose on it and a straight-back chair on
either end. The table had an abrupt lean to it, as if both right
legs had been cut a few inches shorter than the ones on the left.
Beneath the table, the concrete appeared stained with something
dark, like oil.
    After coughing up a loogie the size of a
walnut and spitting it on the