Gnawed Clean

The rib had been smoked with pecan. He could taste it in the first pull of meat, that rounded sweetness with the faint bitterness underneath, and he worked it against his back teeth and identified the cut as St. Louis trim, the cartilage cap removed but the membrane left on, which meant whoever prepared it either did not know or did not care that the membrane holds smoke out instead of letting it in, creating a seal that keeps the fat from rendering properly so it sits on the surface in a slick that the tongue registers as grease rather than the slow dissolution of collagen that constitutes actual tenderness. The rub was garlic-heavy. Paprika, brown sugar, black pepper, and too much garlic powder from a bulk container where the granules had caked and been broken apart so the distribution was uneven, producing hot spots of garlic on the bark and dead zones where the sugar had caramelized without anything to cut against. The bark itself — what a professional would call the pellicle — was thin and brittle rather than the dark, flexible crust that comes from low heat held steady for six hours, the Maillard reaction progressing at the pace it requires to build the hundreds of flavor compounds that distinguish smoked meat from meat that has merely been near smoke. Whoever ran that kitchen had turned the heat up past two-seventy-five. Pruitt would have put it at two-ninety, maybe three hundred. Impatient or understaffed or both. The fat had boiled instead of wept.

He sat with his back against the concrete piling and the bone in his right hand and his legs stretched out on the packed clay that had been wet three days ago and was now dry enough to crack in small polygons like the bed of a lake that had given up. Above him the overpass carried the evening traffic of Interstate 59 toward Bessemer, a pour of noise that changed pitch with the weight of what passed so that the loaded trucks shook the concrete and sent a vibration down through the piling into the ground and into the bones of his spine and the sedans were a higher hiss and the city buses had a particular diesel grumble that he could feel in his back teeth where the rib meat was dissolving. The sky to the west was the color of a bruise going yellow at the edges. On the southern horizon the stacks of the Sloss Furnaces stood against the fading light like the ribs of something enormous that had died standing up. The furnaces had not operated in fifty years. They were a landmark now. A place people took photographs.

The camp held fourteen people on a regular night and sometimes more. The tarps were blue and silver and strung between the pilings and the chain-link fence that bordered the drainage easement and the pallets beneath them were arranged with a knowledge that did not come from planning but from the accumulated errors of people who had slept in water and learned where water went. Pruitt’s pallet was on the west side near the first piling where the concrete overhang extended farthest and the rain reached only in a hard wind from the south. He had been there since April. Seven months. He did not count them. Other people counted. Shiloh, who collected aluminum cans in a shopping cart with one bad wheel that made a sound like a small animal in distress, counted days. Bette, who knitted scarves from yarn she unraveled from other scarves she found at the Salvation Army, counted weeks. Pruitt did not count because counting implied a destination, a number at which the counting would stop, and he had no such number.

He gnawed. The meat was nearly gone. What remained was the periosteum, that membrane closest to the bone where the smoke had penetrated deepest, and here the pecan asserted itself most clearly, sweet and dense and carrying a ghost of the nut meat itself, and he scraped it with his lower teeth and the taste was the taste of competence. Not his own. The kitchen that had produced this bone was a competent kitchen. Not good. Competent. A good kitchen would not have left the membrane on. A good kitchen would have held the temperature at two-twenty-five and let the collagen do its work over seven hours instead of five. But the bones were sound and the trim was clean and the rub had been mixed fresh, not from a batch, because the sugar was still crystalline in places where it had not fully dissolved into the fat. He could taste all of this. He could always taste all of this. The knowledge did not go away when the kitchen did.

She came up the slope from the service road dragging a rolling suitcase, the kind with a retractable handle and hard sides in a dark red that had been scuffed along the bottom edge by years of airport carousels or bus station floors. The wheels stuck in the clay and she pulled harder and the handle made a sound like a joint popping and she stopped and looked at the camp and then at the suitcase and then at the camp again.

She was wearing a blouse with a lace collar and a skirt that came below her knees and shoes with low block heels that were already dark with clay. Her hair was gray and set in a style that required rollers and time and she was carrying a purse over her left arm in the crook of her elbow the way women carry purses when they want you to know the purse is real leather.

I was told this was the place, she said.

Pruitt looked at her. He had the bone in his hand.

Which place.

Where you can sleep. The man at the bus station said under the overpass on First Avenue and someone would show me where.

He looked at the suitcase. He looked at the shoes. He looked at the blouse with the lace collar and the purse held just so.

The ground’s dry on the east side, he said. Stay off the drainage line. There’s a pallet open next to Bette.

She peered toward the east pilings where the newer tarps were. What happens when it rains.

The drainage runs through the center. If you’re east of it you stay dry unless the wind shifts.

She absorbed this with the expression of a woman receiving directions to a restaurant she did not intend to eat at. I’m only here tonight, she said. My son is coming to get me tomorrow afternoon. I just need somewhere to put my things until then.

The word things arrived with a weight she had not intended. Things. As though the suitcase contained belongings being stored rather than everything she had left.

East side, Pruitt said again, and pointed with the bone without thinking about the bone, and then looked at it and set it on his knee.

She straightened her back. The straightening was visible — a decision made by the spine before the mind consented — and she lifted the suitcase over the drainage rut and carried it by the side handle toward the east pilings. Her shoes sank in the clay with each step. She did not look down at them.

Her name, she said as she passed him, was Dovie. Dovie Stovall. She said both names with the emphasis of a woman filling out a form.

She was seventy or thereabouts and she had opinions. This became clear within the first hour. She had an opinion about the tarp Bette helped her rig between the pilings — too thin, she said, the blue ones were thinner than the silver, anyone could see that. She had an opinion about the pallet, which she tested with her shoe before sitting on it the way a person tests a hotel mattress. She had an opinion about the portable toilet at the far end of the camp, which she inspected and returned from with her mouth set in a line that was itself an opinion.

She unpacked the suitcase. From it she produced a nightgown folded in tissue paper, a ziplock bag containing a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste, a jar of bread-and-butter pickles sealed with a band lid, a transistor radio the size of a deck of cards, a Bible with a cracked spine and a ribbon marker, and a photograph in a brass frame which she set on the pallet beside her and did not explain.

The church van comes Tuesday, Pruitt said. First Baptist. Sandwiches and water. No prayer requirement.

She looked at him. What day is it.

Wednesday.

So I won’t need the church van. My son is coming tomorrow.

All right.

He said it the way you close a door that does not latch.

What are you eating, she said.

A rib.

What cut.

He looked at her. Nobody asked what cut. People asked if you had food. People asked if you would share it. Nobody asked what cut.

St. Louis trim, he said. Spare rib section, cartilage removed, membrane left on.

She tilted her head. They left the membrane on.

Yes ma’am.

Lazy or ignorant, she said. My husband smoked ribs every Fourth of July for thirty-one years and he would not have left that membrane on if you paid him. You peel it with a paper towel. You grip the edge and pull. It comes off in a sheet if you do it right and it comes off in strips if you don’t and either way it comes off because if you leave it on the smoke just sits on the surface like paint on a wall.

She said this with the authority of a woman who had peeled a thousand membranes and watched a man peel a thousand more and had buried that man and still knew what he knew about ribs.

You cook, Pruitt said. It was not a question.

Forty-three years, she said. Three meals a day for my family and I don’t mean opening cans. I mean cooking. I had a four-burner gas range and a cast iron Dutch oven that was my mother’s and an oven that ran cold by fifteen degrees but I knew that. I adjusted. She said this last part — I adjusted — as though it were an oath of office.

Pruitt set the bone on the clay beside his pallet. Where’d you get the pickles, he said.

I made them. Last August. Bread and butter. My recipe.

She unscrewed the lid and the smell came up from the jar, vinegar and sugar and turmeric and the faint green of cucumber that had been sliced thin and salted and pressed. She held the jar out to him.

He reached in and took a slice and put it on his tongue and closed his eyes. The brine was sweet. Too sweet. She had used white sugar instead of brown and the ratio was off by a quarter cup at least, and the turmeric was there but the mustard seed was missing, or present only as powder rather than whole seed, which meant the brine had a flat yellow warmth instead of the small bursts of heat that whole mustard seed provides when you bite through them. The cucumbers had been past their prime. Not bad. But the flesh had that slightly hollow quality that comes from a cucumber left on the vine two days past its moment, so the pickle was softer than it should have been, yielding against the teeth instead of snapping.

He opened his eyes. She was watching him.

Your sugar’s high, he said. And you used ground mustard instead of seed.

She stared at him.

How would you know that, she said.

I cooked, he said. Eleven years. Line cook at Locklin’s on Second Avenue.

She thought about this. I don’t know it, she said.

It closed. The building got sold. They turned it into office space.

She processed this the way she might process the news that a church she had attended had changed denominations.

Did you like it.

I was good at it. That’s different.

She took a pickle from the jar and ate it and looked at nothing. Then she said: The sugar IS high. I’ve always known the sugar was high. My husband liked them sweet. So I made them sweet. And now he’s dead eight years and I still make them sweet because that’s the recipe and the recipe is the recipe.

She put the lid back on the jar and set it between their pallets.

The night came on. The traffic thinned until Pruitt could hear individual vehicles approaching from the east, the sound building and cresting and falling the way a wave falls on a beach you can’t see, and in the silences between them the camp produced its own sounds. Bette’s knitting needles clicking. Shiloh sorting cans by size into separate bags, the aluminum ringing against itself in tones that depended on whether the can had been crushed or was still whole. A radio somewhere playing R&B turned low enough that the words were gone and only the bass line remained, a pulse in the dark like a second heartbeat laid over the camp’s own rhythms.

The temperature dropped. Birmingham in November has a cold that comes on slow and sits in the concrete and does not leave until the sun clears the overpass the next morning. Pruitt felt it in his hands first, then in the joints of his knees. He had a blanket, Army surplus, wool, and he pulled it around his shoulders and the wool held his heat the way a good pan holds heat, banking it, releasing it slowly.

Dovie’s phone rang. The sound was startling in the settled dark — a factory ringtone, bright and synthetic, as out of place as her lace collar. She answered it and stood up from her pallet and walked to the edge of the camp where the light from the streetlamp on First Avenue reached the chain-link fence.

He could hear her voice but not her words. The voice had a controlled brightness, the voice of a person performing normalcy for an audience of one. She said of course. She said that’s fine. She said tomorrow afternoon is fine. She said I’m fine. She said the word fine four times and each time it meant something different and the fourth time it meant nothing at all.

She came back and sat on her pallet and smoothed her skirt over her knees and said: He’s coming tomorrow. Something came up today but tomorrow is definite.

Pruitt said nothing.

He has a lot on his plate, she said. His wife has the children in activities every afternoon and the car is — it’s a scheduling issue. It’s not a question of whether. It’s a question of when.

She said this with the precision of someone who has rehearsed a statement and delivered it exactly as planned and is now waiting for the court to accept it.

Pruitt looked at the bone on the ground beside his pallet. In the partial dark it was pale and clean, the meat and membrane and periosteum all gone, and it lay on the clay like a small piece of architecture, a column or a beam, the structural element of a larger thing that no longer existed.

How long have you been here, Dovie said.

Seven months.

The number sat between them. She turned it over the way she had turned the pickle jar, examining it from various angles, not liking any of them.

Have you tried the programs, she said. At the shelter. They have programs. My friend Willa’s nephew went through a program and he’s in an apartment now. He has a lease. It took eight months but he has a lease and a job at the Piggly Wiggly and he’s doing fine. She said fine again and again it meant nothing.

The shelter has a clipboard, Pruitt said. A man with a clipboard calls you by your first name. He calls everyone by their first name. He learned your name from the clipboard and he uses it every time he sees you because someone told him that using a person’s name establishes dignity. So he says your name and you feel the clipboard behind it. The lights go out at nine-thirty. The bathroom has a schedule. The food is provided and you eat it and you say thank you and the thank you is required, not by the rules but by the air in the room. The air in the room requires you to be grateful. The camp does not require you to be grateful. The camp does not require anything. The camp is a place. That’s all.

She was quiet. Then: A place is not a life.

No ma’am. It is not.

Then why do you stay.

Because a place is a place and a life is a thing I had and the having of it is over and the place is what remains.

She picked up her Bible and held it in her lap with both hands and she did not open it. She held it the way a person holds a bag of ice against an injury, not for what was inside it but for the pressure and the weight.

Late. Past midnight by the change in the traffic, which had thinned to a rhythm of one vehicle every two or three minutes, each one audible from the moment it entered the overpass to the moment it left, the whole arc of its passage readable in the sound. The camp had gone still. Bette’s needles were quiet. Shiloh was asleep in his tarp, his breathing heavy and regular. The R&B radio had switched to a gospel program and a woman’s voice sang about a river with the plainness of someone giving directions to a place she had actually been.

Dovie was lying on her pallet with the blanket Bette had given her — wordlessly, the transaction completed by Bette setting the folded blanket on the pallet and walking away without eye contact, the way you leave a plate of food outside a door — and her hands were folded on her sternum. Her lips moved. She was praying. The same prayer she prayed every night, the words automatic, worn to smoothness by forty years of nightly repetition, a prayer that had been said in a bedroom with a ceiling and a nightstand and a lamp and the sound of the refrigerator through the wall. The prayer had always gone to a known height. It had risen from her mouth and met the ceiling and the ceiling had given it shape the way a jar gives preserves their shape, the container defining the thing contained.

The prayer went up and met the underside of the overpass, the concrete stained with decades of exhaust and oil seepage, and a truck passed and the vibration traveled through the concrete and through the prayer and the prayer continued upward past the overpass into the open sky where the stars were washed out by the ambient light of Birmingham and the glow from the Sloss Furnaces lit up at night now for tourists and wedding receptions, and the prayer did not stop. It went up and the words were the same and they meant what they had always meant but they arrived somewhere vast and uncontained and the vastness was not comforting.

Her lips kept moving. Her hands, which had been laced, unlaced. Her fingers separated and her palms turned upward on her chest and her fingers curled inward slightly the way a leaf curls when it dries and the curling was involuntary and she did not notice it and Pruitt, lying on his pallet six feet away, noticed it.

He had seen this before. Not this woman, not this prayer. But the unlacing. The hands opening in the dark. Everyone who arrived prayed the first night and the prayer undid something in the hands, some tension that the hands had been carrying, and the undoing was not peace.

He did not think about this. He lay on his side and looked at the drainage line where a thin skin of ice had formed at the edge and the ice caught the light from the streetlamp and held it in a line like a filament.

Morning came as the absence of a particular darkness. The concrete above went from black to the gray of woodsmoke to the gray of newsprint and the traffic resumed its daytime pour, the individual vehicles merging back into the continuous sound that was the overpass’s weather, its permanent climate.

Dovie was sitting on her pallet. She had changed into a different blouse, also with a collar, and she had combed her hair and the comb was back in the ziplock bag and the bag was back in the suitcase. The suitcase was closed and the handle was retracted and it sat beside the pallet like a piece of luggage at a bus stop.

She was looking at the photograph in the brass frame. He could not see the photograph from where he sat but he could see the way she held it — both hands, the frame resting on her knees, her thumbs along the bottom edge. She held it for a long time and then placed it in the suitcase and closed the lid and pressed the latches and they snapped shut with a sound like two small bones breaking.

Pruitt heated water over his Sterno. He watched the surface of the water in the tin pot for the small bubbles that formed along the bottom edge, the bubbles that meant the water was approaching but had not yet reached the temperature at which instant coffee should be mixed, which was one-eighty, maybe one-eighty-five at the outside, because above that the crystals did not dissolve so much as burn, the proteins in the freeze-dried coffee undergoing their own small Maillard reaction, the same chemistry that browned meat and toasted bread, so that the coffee tasted scorched instead of merely bitter, and the difference between scorched and bitter was the difference between a mistake and a choice.

He poured the water at one-eighty. He stirred the crystals until the color was right. Then he poured half into the second cup, the cup he kept under his pallet and did not use, and he looked at the two cups and could not have said why his hands had divided the coffee. He had not decided to divide it. His hands had done what hands do when they have spent eleven years plating food, portioning, dividing, apportioning with a precision that lived in the muscles and not in the mind.

He carried the second cup to Dovie. She took it with both hands. The heat went through the tin and into her palms and her fingers closed around it.

She drank. She lowered the cup and looked at it.

You got the temperature right, she said. This is the first instant coffee I’ve had in my life that doesn’t taste like it was made with boiling water. Everyone uses boiling water. You’d think people who can boil water could figure out that boiling is the problem but they never do.

Pruitt drank his half. The coffee was sufficient. Not good. Sufficient. He could taste the freeze-drying process, the industrial removal of moisture that left the ghost of flavor where flavor had been, and he could taste the water, which came from the spigot at the back of the gas station on First Avenue and carried the mineral signature of Birmingham’s municipal supply, which was drawn from the Cahaba River and treated with chloramine and the chloramine was there at the finish, faint and clean and completely wrong.

Dovie held the cup on her knee. My son is coming this afternoon, she said.

All right, Pruitt said.

She looked at the camp. In the morning light it had the look of something that had been there longer than the people in it, the tarps and pallets and bundled shapes like formations of sediment, like strata.

I’ll be out of your way by three, she said. Four at the latest.

She said this to the camp, not to him. She said it with the conviction of a woman reading a departure time off a board.

Pruitt picked up the bone from the night before. It was on the clay where he had set it, pale and dry and clean. He had gnawed it past the meat and past the membrane and past the periosteum and what was left was calcium and phosphorus and the mineral architecture of a living thing, stripped of everything that had made it food. He held it in his hand and it weighed almost nothing.

The gospel on someone’s radio gave way to a man selling car insurance. The sun cleared the eastern edge of the overpass and hit the camp in a bar of light that moved across the clay like a hand sweeping a table. It crossed Dovie’s pallet and the suitcase and the jar of pickles sitting between their two spaces and Dovie herself, who sat in the light with her cup of coffee and her posture and her plans and her blouse with the collar, and the light did not distinguish between her and the concrete that held her and the overpass above that held them all.

Pruitt set the bone down. He set it on the pallet, in the space beside his blanket.