Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan

here’s a seventy-four. Lots of seventies tonight. It’s looking pretty good.”
    Alice said, “I took my class to visit a sick child today—”
    â€œThey’re tricky, an obituary,” Runt told Alice. “It’s not as easy as it looks, reading one, if you do it right.”
    Alice said, “Uncle Runt, have you got a minute to talk to me?”
    Runt looked up from his newspaper, over the top of his glasses.
    Runt said, “It ain’t too long, I hope, is it, peaches, I got me a business appointment I don’t want to miss.”
    Alice knew that her uncle was not through drinking for the night, and then there was this whole obituaries business that had to be attended to.
    She said, “After school, when I was walking home, I thought I saw a child. In a raindrop.”
    Runt said, “Well, I guess I don’t know nothing about a child in a raindrop.”
    She said, “You’re going to be seeing this one in the obituaries. The one in the raindrop was dead.”
    Runt looked at Alice as if he might be seeing her for the first time. Runt’s face looked like, Did you say dead?
    He said, “What child was this you say you seen?”
    She said, “I’m not sure. Maybe the Gregg child, the one that got burned. But the child in the raindrop was dead in a river, somewhere, seemed like he got drowned.”
    He said, “A dead child in a river?”
    She said, “Seemed like he was.”
    He said, “Solon Gregg’s child?”
    She said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”
    Runt put the newspaper aside.
    She said, “I was walking home from school today, Uncle Runt, and just when I passed by Lord and Lady Montberclair’s Mexican mansion, I happened to look into a raindrop and saw this dead child in a river.”
    Real slow, Runt folded the newspaper. He laid it on the table beside his chair.
    He said, “In a river.”
    Alice said, “Yessir.”
    Runt got up from his chair and went to the parrot’s cage. He opened the big wire door on the front. He put his hand in the cage and jiggled the little bar where the big bird was sitting. The parrot stepped up off the bar and onto the back of Runt’s hand, with its strong claws holding tight.
    The bird was heavy. Runt put it on his shoulder. It spreadout the long red feathers of its tail, down Runt’s back like a cape. The topnotch stood up like a question mark over its head.
    Alice said, “Uncle Runt?”
    Runt decided he would call Fortunata, his wife. He would beg her to come back, though he did not expect her to do so. It didn’t take a magic raindrop to see that sad scrap of the future. Fortunata was allergic to the parrot. Maybe if he promised to get rid of it, find it a good home, she might be enticed to come back home. Runt doubted it, but he could try.
    Runt said, “I ain’t partial to fortune telling.”
    Alice said, “It’s more like a dream, I think. I think I’ve got this boy on my mind, this Glenn, and so I thought about him in water, instead of fire. Like a regular dream.”
    Runt said, “These Delta rivers are full of niggers, honey.”
    Alice said, “Colored people?”
    Runt felt sorry for Fortunata, getting mixed up with a drunken gravedigger. Long time ago Fortunata had a chance to move to Illinois, get away altogether, but she stayed with him. He wished he could have spared her falling in love with him.
    Their last fight was typical, awful.
    â€œYou never—”
    â€œYou always—”
    â€œYou drunk—”
    â€œYou bitch—”
    â€œYou impotent pig—”
    â€œYou stupid whore—”
    â€œYou’re drinking yourself to death, and you blame me.”
    For Fortunata it was one fight too many.
    At the end of the fight, Fortunata said, “You’re not a bad man, Runt, you truly ain’t. It’s God and nature that’s so damn bad.”
    He