Free Body and Bread by Nan Cuba Page B

rope.
    Thirsty, he dropped his hoe, strolled toward the cooler. Unscrewing the top, he heard a shuffling come from the uncultivated area beyond the fence. A scrawny jackrabbit, short-haired with jumbo ears, tipped forward off its back legs, lifted its head, stared. Ears flattened, it lurched then loped—back legs folding, stretching—fifty feet along the fence. Between posts, it stopped, raised its stringy ears, checked Sam a second time. Another frantic toss of limbs, then it bounded across the field. Sam noticed small trails of worn undergrowth. Had rabbits made them? As if called, Cyril appeared.
    “Are those some kind of animal trails?” Sam asked, pointing.
    “Yeah,” Cyril said. He took the lid, poured.
    “ What kind?” Sam flicked a grasshopper off his sleeve.
    “Rats and field mice. They’re all over.” Cyril bathed his head and neck with his dishrag.
    Sam drank, pulled a Boy Scout scarf from his hip pocket, copied Cyril’s routine. “Saw a jack rabbit over there a minute ago.” Cyril’s eyes moved in close: telescopes. Sam shifted, his heel sinking into loosened earth. What was the guy thinking? Didn’t he ever blink?
    “You ought to see them at night while my father’s plowing. Even the babies get at the loosened roots.”
    “You ever eat any?”
    “They’re too tough. But Mom and Terezie fry up cottontails with garlic and onions. For rabbit, we say králík .”
    Sam pictured Cyril’s sister: tall, stomping, heavy-heeled shoes echoing, man’s shoes, he suspected. Her eyes, the same near purple as poker chips, glared at anything daring to block her way. A scar stretched from beneath her nose through her lip, from falling off a horse, someone had said, but Sam thought “cleft palate?” then “no, of course not,” and finally came to admire the lip’s puffiness, its exposed underside. Once, she leaned, listening to a friend; then out of some primitive, childlike need for stimulation, she stroked the rosy mark, back and forth, up to the nose, down again.
    Sam had overheard some girls at a football game giggling about Terezie. Apparently, her mother picked her up afternoons, kept her home on weekends. She was kept on a short leash. Except, she got a little on the side. According to the talk at school, Terezie was sneaking out with the band teacher.
    “I know your sister,” Sam said, his hands sliding into his back pockets, respectful. “Serious.”
    “Not particularly.”
    “Smart, though.”
    Cyril shrugged then shaded his eyes.
    “I been meaning to ask,” Sam said, picking up what looked like a piece of granite, specks flickering, “what’d happen if some guy called her? She go out?” He whipped the rock toward the tangled field of hidden animals.
    “Depends on who’s calling.”
    Sam wondered what that meant but wouldn’t ask. Not yet.
    As Cyril ambled toward the fence, his hat’s weave cast striped shadows across his shoulder. Climbing, he called, “Over here.”
    Sam followed until they reached a stand of trees and brush.
    “Remember this?”
    Sam didn’t.
    “Last summer. The owl. This is where he flew.”
    Was Sam supposed to remember something from a year ago? “Oak?”
    Cyril’s eyes kept steady, a silent note.
    “The tree,” Sam said irritably, “here. Looks like oak.”
    Cyril pointed, “Wild primrose. My father makes pipes out of the briar roots.”
    “No way. What’s that?”
    “Hackberry,” Cyril said, pointing, “mesquite, wild plum, and beodarck; over there, buffle, blue stem, and coastal bermuda.”
    Sam tried to memorize the names, noting the leaf and stem shapes, the textures, heights of grasses. The rotting stumps and broken limbs smelled dusty, the wildflowers spicy. He remembered Otis fertilizing with banana peels, splayed like starfish underneath topsoil. Then he spotted a green apple among flickering leaves, noticed seed heads on the grains. His nose itched, dripped.
    “The creek’s dry here, but my father left this place for quail and