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him of a baboon.
    Sharleen was a thin, nervous, sallow child with scabs on her arms and legs. Pesticide burns, Carleton thought they were, or fleabites, except they were hard and thick and she was always picking them off making them bleed to form new scars. She had a rat-quick face, narrow little eyes you couldn't judge were mischievous or malicious.
    “Hey, there: that ain't nice, contradictin your daddy.”
    Carleton spoke pleasantly. But Sharleen took warning.
    Clara was trying to feed two-year-old Rodwell. (Where the hell was Pearl's mind? The woman was just sitting there, damp-mouthed and dreamy at her own table.) The little boy, cornsilk hair the color of Carleton's as it had used to be, and pale blue wide-open eyes, snapped anxiously at the spoon and it fell clattering to the floor.
    “Piggy-pig-pig,” Sharleen sniggered.
    “He can't help it,” Clara protested. “He's just a baby.”
    “
You're
a baby. Baby asshole.”
    “Both of you, button them mouths.” Carleton lifted the jug to drink in that way he'd perfected: the hefty crockery jug you hook your thumb through the handle, heave it up behind your left shoulder so the mouth of the jug rests on your shoulder, bring your own mouth to it, lean to the right so the liquid runs into your mouth, and drink. And wipe your mouth afterward on the back of your hand.
    Sharleen and Clara giggled, watching their daddy do his cider-jug trick.
    Sharleen said, “How are we gonna go north? Some damn old bus? There's niggers and trash on them buses. I ain't goin.”
    Carleton was pissed, seeing the look in the kid's face. Without so much as snapping his fingers to warn her, he swung his arm around and cracked her sneering face with the back of his hand, sent her backward onto the floor. Rodwell shrieked, but it was a happy-baby shriek. Pearl turned languidly to look at them as if she'd been dozing with her eyes open.
    Sharleen began to bawl. Clara pressed her hands against her mouth trying not to giggle. Carleton caught Clara's eye and winked, she was her daddy's ally. Clara was five years younger than Sharleen but you'd never know it. More reliable, sharper-witted than any of them.
    The new baby, in his cardboard-box crib, was bawling.
    And Rodwell, fretting in his high chair, was sucking in air getting ready to bawl.
    “You, you caused this. Get the hell out.”
    Carleton poked Sharleen on the floor with the point of his shoe. Sharleen scrambled up sniveling and limped out of the cabin and Pearl looked after her with a vague frown. Carleton was waiting for the woman to start bitching, goddamned useless mother she was getting to be, but Pearl said nothing. Her mouth worked, wordless. On her plate tiny portions of mashed potatoes, boiled pork scraps, green beans lay congealing in a soupy gravy.
    Fuckin flies in the kitchen, buzzing Carleton's plate!
    Christ he couldn't wait to get clear of here. This supper that tasted like sawdust in his mouth, damn wobbly chair made the crack of his asshole ache, his wife he'd used to be proud of she was so sweet-faced and pretty as a doll, getting to be a mental case, and not a fit mother. And the kids driving him bats. Even Clara sometimes, looking at her daddy like she loved him so, she believed he was going to do something special for her, protect her or—what the hell she was expecting, he didn't know, and it drove him bats. “Goddamn zoo in here. Flies in the food, and nobody fuckin cares.” Carleton nudged Pearl, who looked, not at him, but at her pudgy forearm he'd nudged, where the impress of his hard fingers had made a mark. “It's dirty in here. Smells like burnt grease in here. Why's that screen got a rip? Fuckin flies comin in.”
    But Pearl wouldn't reply. Clara had ceased giggling. In mute appealshe pointed to something in her partly drunk glass of milk, something for her daddy to see not her momma, and Carleton saw to his disgust a fly was floating in the milk. The exchange between them was immediate and wordless
Daddy