Free Cavedweller by Dorothy Allison

side of it. On Granddaddy Byrd’s right hand the fingers were the same length all across, the nails of the middle three flush with the nail of the pinkie. In each he was missing at least the length of one joint.
    Cissy looked up at his face. He was looking right back at her. She flushed with embarrassment. Those fingers hadn’t been chopped off, the nails were intact. No, Granddaddy Byrd had been born without those joints, and she had been staring. She dropped her eyes. She hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, she hadn’t known.
    Cissy curled her fingers into fists and locked her gaze on the mock-Indian face on the tobacco bag. “Looks like you,” she said, her voice sounding unnaturally high. “Just like you.”
    “Humph!” Granddaddy Byrd used one of those short fingers to flick tobacco flakes from his lower lip. “Don’t be stupid.” His tone was flat, his glance indifferent. Cissy remembered then what Delia had said about him, that he was old when he took her in. How old was he now?
    When he had smoked the first cigarette down to a nub, he took his time rolling another. Cissy sat there, unable to look at his hands and unable to look away. She kept comparing him with the Indian on the label. The feathers of the headdress above those painted features were fat and tapered like unsmoked cigars. The features themselves were sharp, angular, and shaded to catch the eye. The Indian was handsome, with his prominent cheekbones and pale blue-gray eyes. Granddaddy Byrd was not handsome. His cheeks and eyes were sunken like the faces of the mummies in some pictures Randall had once shown Cissy after a trip to Mexico.
    “It is so dry down there,” her daddy had told her. “It’s so godforsaken parched and dusty, the dead dry up and last forever. They turn to statues that get leaned up against the walls of the caves near the missions. It’s something to see, all the dead lined up wearing the same expression, openmouthed and tragic. Makes you think. Makes you think how precious life is.”
    Granddaddy Byrd did not look as if he thought his life was precious. He looked impatient to be past it. A walking dead man.
    Cissy studied the little warts in the cracks and wrinkles that ran down his neck. She shuddered. Ugly, she thought, ugly and older than God. She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He watched. He had a way of watching as though the eyes of the world were in his head—an infinitely cruel world. I know who you are, his eyes seemed to say, while his lips remained pressed together, flat and thin. I know things you don’t know. I know how cold and mean the world is.
    Cissy felt her insides shift. Fear tickled below her belly. The embarrassment she had felt earlier, the faint thread of pity, had steadily burned away and become anger. This old man had called her stupid. He had pushed Delia off him like a stinky dog. Now he stared straight ahead as if she were not even there, contempt radiating from him like the heat still rising from the hood of the Datsun.
    Creepy old man, Cissy thought, but her anger did not quite cover her fear. She kept her head down, not wanting to be seen by those eyes, spoken to by that caustic tongue. Delia had told her the man was hard but fair. No. He was mean, just mean.
    “He’s had a hard life,” Delia had said. Granddaddy Byrd looked hard. Just as hard as the parched red dirt of his empty front yard, the kind of hard that only accumulates over a lifetime. There was no crack in him. He was of a piece, this old man, a piece of flint.
    Granddaddy Byrd’s hands creased and recreased that tobacco pouch. His eyes flickered off to the distant horizon and then came back to Delia’s Datsun. So far he had taken more interest in the car than in either Delia or Cissy. In the kitchen Delia made small noises, the clink of a glass, a splash of liquid, a cabinet opening and closing. A slight breeze picked up dust from the yard and brought it up to pepper the steps. Granddaddy Byrd’s