The Big Both Ways by John Straley

the bed, and when she stood at the window and watched them drive away she only thought about whether there was enough birdseed in the house.
    The night passed as it usually did for Annabelle. Ellie was out. The sounds of the street secreted their way into her dreams, so that she sometimes saw birds driving milk trucks and when newsboys threw their papers they would become fluttering moths before hitting the porch. So it didn’t seem odd to Annabelle that Ellie was home around daylight and was in a hurry to leave that next morning, just as the bruise across her aunt’s face hadn’t frightened her. Annabelle packed up her gear: a small bag of books, underwear, socks, two shirts, two pairs of pants, her heavy coat, and her umbrella. Ellie packed more of her clothes, furiously stuffing them into suitcases, and Annabelle walked slowly down to the kitchen and took down the big package of birdseed from the pantry shelf.
    The car they were riding in was the same one in which they had driven away the day before. When Ellie opened the car’s trunk, Annabelle saw a hand that looked kind of waxy white with blood on it. The rest of the person was covered with a blanket. All Ellie said was, “Don’t look at that now,” and she slammed the trunk shut. When Annabelle got in, she saw the sad man holding a cloth to his nose with blood dripping down on the seat. He said “hello” to her in a polite voice. It was then that Annabelle knew they were going on a very long trip and she was sorry she hadn’t brought more books.
    They drove on various small roads, trying to stay away from other cars or houses. Just before the sun came up, they came to a small yard near a muddy, fetid section of river. There were smokestacks behind them and rusty pieces of iron scattered in the mud. Ellie made a big point of talking to Annabelle while the man got out of the car and opened the trunk. Annabelle looked at her bird, the black dots of his eyes jittering around his cage,while just faintly along the edge of her perception she listened to the sound of someone dragging something across the mud.
    Ellie started to cry and she couldn’t stop. Her nose got all snotty and her chest heaved up and down with those big
boohooing
sounds that little kids make when they fall off the swings and get the wind knocked out of them or when they step on a bad rusty nail and know that they might die of lockjaw. Ellie cried like that, hard and sad, but when she was done crying, she acted as if nothing at all had happened. Annabelle kept one hand on top of Buddy’s cage and she put the other hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, looking only at the bird.
    The rest of the morning they drove around not going on any big street or in any one direction for very long. They stopped at a little house. Annabelle didn’t even get out of the car because people were yelling and Buddy sat with his feathers ruffled as if the sound of the angry voices were a spray of cold water. The girl looked up over the bottom of the car window toward the house where the man with the broken nose was yelling at someone, while Ellie sat off by herself on the porch smoking a cigarette. An ugly man who looked like a strongman from the circus, only about four feet tall, came out and threw a case down on the ground. The case was empty and it sat on the wet lawn like a broken clamshell. The little strong man was saying that they would be lucky if they got caught by the cops. Buddy pecked at his bell and looked at his curved reflection in his little mirror and Annabelle cooed to him to reassure the bird that everything was going to be all right.
    Then the ugly man told them all to get off his property, which they did.
    They drove until they came to a spot where a bunch of cars were stopped and there was a police car. The sad-looking man said a bunch of bad words and turned the car around. Then he wanted to get out of the car once they got around the corner but Ellie wouldn’t