Fallen Angels Read Online Free Page B

the side of the road. Angel yelled, “Get back in the Ford!”
    The car engine turned over and Winifred took off.
    “She's leaving us!” Angel saw that Ida May was empty-handed. “Where is the bag, Ida May?”
    “In the car. That Miss Mock yelled and made me get out. You didn't hear it? She scared me half to death. I think she's lost her mind.” Ida May watched the car disappear around a turn. “I'm glad she's gone.”
    Angel and Willie stared at one another.
    “The money, Ida May! I knew something was strange about her the minute I laid eyes on her. Whoever heard of a poker playing schoolteacher? We're busted, don't you see?”
    The hardness of Ida May's eyes dissolved and she cried.
    “Angel, you got to stop yelling,” said Willie.
    “She even took our food. We don't have a blessed thing, not nary a thing to our name! And here we are stuck in the middle of nowhere.” Angel started walking like she might just leave Ida May on the side of the road. She put on an I-don't-care face but watched from the corner of her eye to make sure the little chicks followed. The day was still new enough. She'd have to study about how they might survive through another ruinous day.
    The outskirts of Nazareth sunned in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains just a leap and a skip before Hope and Texarkana.
    The road strung out like a dusty snake of clay and rock. Angel led them across a field and down a little road that paralleled the main road. Not too far down the road she found relief in knowing that other youngens had been put out. Three boys stamped along hurling rocks and fighting. She watched them knock on a door and beg for food. Knowing that about the road colored her ideas about Daddy.
    “When folks are hungry, the first thing to go is the family dog,” she complained to Willie. She did not mean to infer that they ate the dog, but Willie got a picture of just that in his head and told her so.
    “That's what cannibals do, Willard. Don't be a goof!”
    Willie said, “I don't want you to ever call me that again, Angel Minerva Welby. You know I hate it.”
    Angel smiled at him, owning everything that was said. “Here's the way it lays, Willie Boy—you can just stop feeding the dog and then he takes off to go and fend for himself. But the second thing to go is the ones who don't rake in the dough. I got this little deal all figured out. If you have too many mouths to feed, you send out your oldest. With John and Darrell dead, and Claudia married off, I was the next best choice to be put out. It's common sense. The way things go. Daddy did best he could by us.”
    “But me and Ida May saw how you cried and shoved your raggedy underthings into a paper bag. Daddy did wrong by us.”
    “I didn't cry.”
    Willie cocked his head to the side but he didn't, argue.
    Angel remembered mat black’ crease around Daddy's eyes that coal miners acquire down in those caves of death. He had worked the mines down in Paris, Arkansas, until he had saved enough to get them back to Snow Hill where his momma lived. Even after he had taken the sharecropper job in Snow Hill, the black hadn't faded, and for Angel Daddy was forever fixed in her mind as a raccoon, a comic-strip animal with a headlight on his hat.
    The sharecropper's shack was a lesser place even than the old crumbling miners’ row house in Paris. Once they had settled in Snow Hill, Momma had: lost all of her yearning to fix things up. Daddy didn't seem to notice a thing about her—not the way she stared out the window or left supper dishes dirty in the tub until sunup. As far as Thorne Welby was concerned, while Lemuel had stuck more magazine pages to the wall to cover the cracks in the pine, he'd hauled off and turned his back to the cracks in their everyday lives.
    Lemuel Welby had stared at Thorne's picture the morning he had packed them all off with Lana. He had said no farewells, only how he wished that Momma had stayed to take on her share of the load. Angel had tried to