A Piece of My Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

at the rabbit, and didn’t say anything,though after a minute he noticed something about Leo he hadn’t seen before. The right back paw was missing at the low joint, the stub matted with thick reddish hair and sprawled behind the other one as if it contained the same big padded paw.
    â€œWhat come of his leg?” he said, catching his knees and staring at the cat’s empty leg.
    â€œBorned bad,” the girl said, looking at Leo the way he’d seen a salesman look at used cars. “Hillbilly give him to my dad in Missouri. Found him in a hollow log, starving.” She wrinkled her nose as if there were something nasty about it. She squatted on her heels and wiggled her fingers through the wires and called the cat, who rolled over onto his back and squirmed in the dust and stretched his forelegs straight up in the air. “C’mere, Leo,” she said, and the cat relaxed and looked at her with his head upside down, eyes half open and gleaming. The rabbit looked at her intently and squeezed back into the corner where she was.
    â€œHe thinks I’m calling him.” She giggled. “Don’t he wish.”
    â€œI wouldn’t doubt it,” he said.
    The rabbit went back to measuring the distance.
    â€œYou see my coons?” she said, standing and walking up the row to where the coons were decorating the wires.
    â€œI saw ’em,” he said.
    He looked back at the rabbit and had an impulse to kick the gate open, but the cat bothered him, lounging in the dust, half awake, waiting for somebody to make just such a move. He followed the girl back up the row.
    â€œGot the two old ones,” she said, “and the rest just come by themselves.” She looked at him as if she were waiting to see what he would say. “I’ll sell you one for sixty cents.”
    He could smell foulness drifting out of the first cage. “Don’t think so,” he said.
    â€œYes I will,” she said, looking at him professionally.
    â€œI’ll buy that rabbit,” he said.
    â€œAin’t for sale,” she said, and looked out across the empty road and slowly bent her line of vision toward the truck sitting in the dead sunlight. “That your truck?”
    He studied the truck. It looked like it had been dropped out of a passing airplane. “Yeah,” he said.
    â€œCan’t you fix your own truck?”
    â€œLady’s car needs fixin. Ain’t the truck.”
    â€œLonnie won’t be back here before tonight,” she said. “But he won’t work on nothing. Be too dark. He won’t have the right light.”
    â€œWho else is there?” he said, feeling put off.
    â€œNobody,” she said. “He’s in Tucumcari. Be roaring drunk when he comes back. Won’t work on nothin.”
    He looked at the sun, cerise and perfectly round, pushing a porous shadow from the raccoon cages over the tips of his toes, and thought it might be two-thirty.
    â€œIs that the woman in the truck?” the girl said.
    The back of the woman’s head was visible in the oval window. She was working on her face in the rear-view.
    â€œThat’s her,” he said.
    â€œYou’ll have to spend the night then, or go to Tucumcari,” the girl said, turning back to the cages. “There ain’t no mechanic from here to there. There ain’t nothing up that way.” She pointed up the road into the desert. “Lonnie’ll be good in the morning. He’ll fix it. He ain’t but twenty-two, but he ain’t a fool.”
    â€œWhere’s your daddy?” he said, looking up at the desolated back side of the house. A white tub washer was set outside in the dirt with one leg bent up.
    â€œGone,” she said, and pursed her lips.
    â€œAre they dead?” he said.
    â€œThey gone to Las Vegas. They ain’t come back.”
    â€œDo you expect them?”
    â€œI guess,” she said, and looked at him