I also knew Peanut, a tiny old man with black spots on

his skin and eleven fingers who stood next to the brandnew silver garbage cans in front of the Western Auto and answered nine, no matter what you asked him. He wore a toy sheriff's badge on his pajama shirt and dipped Sweet Peach snuff. Even though I was only in the sixth grade by then, I was almost as tall as he was.

One Saturday, while Daddy picked up some bags of fertilizer, James and I cornered Peanut. We took turns asking him stupid questions so we could laugh at his one stupid answer. How many moons does Earth have? How many times have you kissed your sister? What's your mama's name? What town are you from? James looked around to see if Daddy was coming, and asked as quickly and softly as he could, "How many buttholes ya got?" And Peanut smiled and said, nine, nine, nine, nine, nine, flecks of brown snuff damp in the corners of his mouth, dotting his teeth. He

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wanted us to like him. Then he showed us his extra finger, holding out his blotchy hand, the tiny finger pointing right

at us crookedly and James asked, "How many fingers ya got, Peanut?" for one more laugh.

The guys who lived in the hospital were really crazy.

There were two kinds of crazy—the crazy we could live with and the crazy we couldn't live with. I wasn't always sure what the difference between them was.

27

A

Mama said she heard that Rae Miller s mother was nutty

as a squirrel and I thought Ha! talk about the pot calling the kettle black. But her Mama was one of those you run and hide from. Just like mine. Right after the Millers moved

to town, I spotted Mrs. Miller shuffling around the Dollar Store with her messed-up baby-doll hair, dragging her pink flip-flops over that dusty checkered floor, her dress stained with something brown. She was scary looking. It was hard to believe she was kin to Rae.

On the first day of sixth grade, I fell in love with Rae the minute I saw her because I could tell she was a girl like me. Not meant for the narrow streets of Chattahoochee. I saw

her shadow first, stretched black like a stocking across the wooden floor of Mrs. Glisson's sixth-grade class. When I stepped into the room, there stood Rae next to a window,

her face streaky as if she might have cried that morning, but later I found out it was just dirty. She wore an ugly beige vinyl coat, one button dangling from a thread. Her head glowed like a lamp, her hair was so white.

She acted like she was tuned in to a radio station, maybe LU V I C K E RS

WOOF out of Dothan, Alabama; she swayed back and

forth, kicked her scuffed-up go-go boots against the floor. Next to her, bent over the teacher's desk signing papers, hulked her big fat mama. Looking at them, I thought of how children love their ugly mothers no matter what. I always saw those mothers at the Halloween carnival—bucktoothed, crosseyed, or just plain ugly, standing in the grass next to the fishing booth, beautiful babies clamped onto their hips.

From the first day, Mama didn't want me to be friends

with Rae because her father raked yards and her mother was a lunatic, a concern I thought odd coming from her.

Maisey chimed in, too, talking double time without even breathing, "Her daddy stinks like wet cigars and his eyes," she said, "you can't see the whites in them. Like Mr. B on Hazel" she said. "Remember when he played in that movie The Man with the X-ray Eyes and put that x-ray potion in his eyes so he could see naked women but how he ended up in a tent at a Holy Roller revival and the preacher screamed,

'If thine right eye offend thee, pluck it out,' and Mr. B. did because by then all he could see was skeletons? Her daddy's got eyes like that."

Mr. Miller was whip-thin and brown as snuff—I saw

him pumping gas at the Tom Thumb—but x-ray eyes or not, by the end of the week Rae and I were best friends. We sprawled out on the orange clay hill at the playground and

watched clouds skim across the sky while the other girls ran screaming from boys and pushed each other on swings. No one else wanted anything to do with us. When we got in line to go to the lunchroom, a couple of the girls made a show of looking at Rae's go-go boots, then giggled and whispered to each other. I didn't care. Rae and I were headed for bigger 30

B R E A T H I N G U N D E R W A T ER and better things than the school cafeteria.

She told me she lived in a shack on River Road and

that she owned a horse named Blazer. Soon I was riding out there every day. I lied to Mama, told her I was going

to play with Brenda, and she thought that was wonderful.

I knew she'd never catch me because she'd rather die than talk to somebody normal like Brenda's mother. Mama never answered the telephone, and sometimes she hid in her bedroom when someone knocked on our door.

Rae and I rode Blazer round and round the shady backyard next to a field where Mr. Miller grew stalks of corn as tall as men.

"Watch my daddy walk my horse over me," Rae said one day. She leaned her head back and hollered "Daddy? at the corn field. "Daddyl"

I heard a rustling, like paper bags rubbing together, like

an animal rooting through the field, then Mr. Miller parted the thick green stalks and stepped into the yard. Rae handed him the reins without a word. She flopped down in the dark green grass beneath the limber branches of a mimosa tree and closed her eyes. She was so white and still she looked dead. Pink flowers delicate as hula skirts blew across the blades of grass. Mr. Miller tugged the worn leather reins and gently led Blazer one gray hoof after the other over Rae's body. I held my breath. A deerfly landed on Blazer's silky brown back and her whole skin twitched. She lifted her

last hoof and placed it on the ground just past Rae's belly.