Alligator Bayou by Donna Jo Napoli Page B

around. “This is my burial ground.”
    He’s come here to die. I pull my knees to my chest, wrap my arms around them.
    Frank Raymond goes over to Granni. He unties the rolled-up canvas from his saddle, and brings it to Joseph.
    Joseph inspects the painting, and smiles. “ Ya– deer. Are you hungry?” He goes into his shack and comes out with two blackish brown squares.
    Frank Raymond chews on his. So I try it. Salty and tough and wonderful.
    “Dried venison,” says Frank Raymond.
    Joseph goes into the shack again and comes out with a bundle wrapped in wet cloth. He opens it. It’s a large lump of gray clay. He uses a thin sheet of bark to slice off a hunk for Frank Raymond, and another for me, and a third for himself. Then he wraps up the rest and puts it back away in his shack.
    Joseph looks at me solemnly. “Every Tunica man knows how to make pottery.”
    “Every single one?”
    “I know how. So it is true.” He smiles.
    He caught me. I laugh.
    “ Wixsa . Every Tunica man knows how to joke, too.”
    Joseph and Rosario would like each other.
    We pass the afternoon making bowls. Joseph hums, but Frank Raymond talks a blue streak. He explains the clay came from the bottom of a stream. When we add handfuls of grit, he explains it’s crushed shells. Clams and mussels.
    We press the heels of our hands into the clay, then rock it down and press again. That removes the air bubbles so that the clay won’t explode in the fire. We pinch the clay to shape it, pinch and smooth.
    Cracks form in my bowl. Joseph gets a wooden bowl from his shack. He lines it with a fine net, sets my bowl in it, and goes back to working his own. I stare. Then I get it. I press my clay into the wooden bowl. The outer bowl gives the inner one shape. Now it’s easy to smooth out the cracks.
    We wet our bowls and run the blunt, fat-lipped edge of a clam shell over the surface to smooth even more. Joseph eases my clay bowl out of the wooden one. I peel off the net. It leaves a nice crisscross design.
    Then we decorate our bowls, using bits of antler to draw with. Frank Raymond hums with Joseph.
    I add pear-shaped loops inside the diamonds of my crisscrosses. The loops look like pawpaw fruit. And I hum, too—that song Patricia taught me about picking up paw-paws.
    Joseph sets the bowls on a wooden tray with a wet cloth draped on top.
    “That’s so they can dry slowly,” says Frank Raymond. “Then he’ll bake them in a pit fire.”
    I watch Frank Raymond and Joseph, and I understand why they’re friends. I understand why someone would go someplace to spend his last days making bowls.
    Joseph didn’t come here to die, after all. He came to live. In beauty.

nine
    M onday night the boys are waiting for us at the end of South Street.
    “What’d you tell him?” asks Charles. “The tall one. Frank.”
    He means Francesco. But I like it that he’s made the name sound American. I wish he’d do that to mine and not call me “Mr. Calo-whatever.” “I asked if we could go exploring.”
    “Didn’t tell him it was a ’gator hunt?”
    I shake my head.
    Charles smiles in approval.
    “That hairy bear?” says Rock. “He let you go that easy?”
    “He belong in Alligator Bayou with them other bears,” says Ben.
    The skin on my scalp tightens. “The bayou has bears?”
    “You scared?” Charles slaps my shoulder lightly. “Don’t waste your energy. Bears hide. You need a bloodhound to hunt them down, like what the sheriff have for tracking criminals. We ain’t hardly never lucky enough to see them.”
    “What y’all want to worry about…well.” Ben turns his back for a second and takes something from his pocket. Then he swirls around and goes, “Ahhh!” His mouth is open wide and full of cotton.
    I stare.
    Ben takes the cotton out of his mouth and laughs as though he’s the most hilarious person in the world.
    “Cottonmouth snakes,” says Charles. “In the swamps. By the time you see them, you already bit. So you might as well