Shit. It was just after noon, the sun would only go down from here; there was another load of snow on the way if the clouds were any indication, not to mention the flat metallic taste of the air. If Horace was running around in the woods, there was nothing more to be done for the old man.
Lee eased the back door open and edged inside. Ol Bastard was crooning vigorously, and it sounded like Ginny was talking back. Hounds were vocal creatures, and Ol Bastard was talkative even for them. Living with Horace, maybe he had to be.
“…was in the Army,” Juju was saying. “Tip and me, too.”
“So you’re friends.” Her tone changed. “Who’s a good boy?” Ol Bastard replied with a modulated, happy little yowl. “Get you dried off…there. Yeah, he seems pretty…well-respected.”
“Well, he’s quiet, is Little Lee. Call him that on account of his daddy being Lee Senior and his grandaddy what raised him being Big Q for Quartine. They’re all quiet, Tipton says. Said.” There was a rattle—Ol Bastard’s food bowls, being packed up. Lee stood in the utility room, closed his eyes, and shut the door softly.
A few moments of silence. Even Ol Bastard didn’t make a sound.
“I’m so sorry,” Ginny said, softly. “You must’ve loved him very much.”
“He was my brother, ma’am.” Juju cleared his throat. “Saved my ass in Afghanistan—sorry, ma’am. Well, we was always lookin out for each other.”
“Was that where you knew Lee?”
“Oh, naw, not with us. He was in—”
Oh, hell no. He grabbed the door, wrenched it open, slammed it and shot the lock. Serve him right for eavesdropping, Nonna would say. You never learned anything good that way. “Juju.” It was back in his throat, the burr-snap of the Army, and he had to swallow twice. “We got everythin?”
When he stepped into the kitchen, nobody looked guilty. Why should they, just makin conversation? Ol Bastard, in fact, looked about as satisfied as a hound could without someone rubbing his belly; he was on the orange Formica counter, his snout buried in one of his metal bowls, happily crunching on kibble.
Old man Slipot would have a fit.
Juju gave him a thumb’s up.“Any sign of Horace?”
Lee shook his head. The old man was a lost cause, and Lee had the living in front of him to deal with. “Let’s go.”
“Lee?” Ginny slid the bowl away from the dog, who made a chagrined sound but was too well-mannered to protest more when a human moved the food. “What’s his name? Juju won’t tell me.”
Oh, shit. He tried to remember what Mrs Slipot had called the dog. Ever since she died, Horace called him ol bastard, and that stuck. You didn’t argue with grief, and a man could call his dog whatever he liked. But it wasn’t something he could say to her.
Lee could not, for the life of him, remember the dog’s original name. Instead, his brain latched on to a nasty little kid from his elementary school days at Ridgeline under the benevolent, myopic gaze of Miss Prudence on the playground. The kid had freckles running together like they’d been baked on, all over his thick cheeks, and the spots on Ol Bastard’s sides reminded him of that.
He hadn’t thought of that kid in years. What was his goddamn name?
“Trav,” he said, finally. That’s right. Travis McKinnock. His people moved away after the mill closed. Why the blue fuck was he thinking about that kid? He needed to get home, and have a little peace and quiet and some hard thinkin’ that wasn’t his brain just doing the rabbit-chase.
“Is that short for something?” Her color was back, and she rubbed behind the dog’s ears. He gazed at her adoringly, and another hot, almost unidentifiable feeling smacked Lee right in the gut. Shit, he probably looked at Ginny that way his ownself. He was an idiot.
But a useful one, maybe. Now he had both her and Juju to look after, and the damn dog as well.
“Traveller,” he decided. Since that may be what we’re doing.
“I never knew that,” Juju piped up. “That’s what the missus called him?”
Lee nodded. It would take too much time to explain, and the dog might as well have one name as another. “You got his chow?”
“What about a leash? A collar?” Ginny framed the bluetick’s face with her hands. “A handsome boy needs a handsome collar, yes he does!”
The dog waggled all over and licked her nose. Lee, his neck tight as load-bearing cables, decided he would, after all, snatch the Wild Turkey from Horace’s cabinet on their way out.
The old man, wherever he was, didn’t need it anymore.
Under the Shade
Percy Blotzer was in a bad way.
The sheriff of tiny Cotton Crossing, reporting to Lewiston because it was the Haggard County seat, was a large man. He reeled drunkenly from side to side, a shoulder hitting first one wall along the stairs, then the other. The fever had him, and it was a dilly. He wasn’t quite sure why he was here, except for the fact that things had gone all to hell and this was where he belonged, not in the house where Manda…
Oh, but Christ, he couldn’t think about Manda. Home from the hoity-toity college, snappin off the ends of her words just like a damn Yankee, but still sittin next to her pa in church. Daddy, I have something to tell you. The picture on her phone. We’ll get married after college. Her wide-open smile, with the gap between her front teeth closed up good now. He could remember her at eight, with one of those teeth gone and her hair like two hanks of honey yarn. Best thing to come out of that marriage, for God’s sake, and she was marrying…
“Oh no you ain’t,” Percy said, and tripped. He went down hard on the last three stairs, falling into damp, rancid darkness. Lights were out, he had to yodel up the stairs to one of the deputies. “No you ain’t, no ma’am.”
You can’t stop me, Daddy. Manda, with her wide blue eyes, and the boy staring out of the phone had smooth caramel skin and a wide nose.
“Didn’t raise you to marry no—”
That’s racist, Daddy. Please stop. And the way she looked at him, her nose a little up just like her mother’s. God damn but he hated that, the way Cindy stuck her face up and looked at him like he was some sort of lower creature. She’d remarried a lawyer, out Tallahassee way, and that caused some talk in town. Oh, Percy knew the jokes made at his expense, and sometimes he grinned his big ol aw-shucks grin at them while somethin deep in the back of his brain ticked each one in a column.
A Blotzer would get his own, come the end of the day.
“You get on out of here!” he yelled, thrashing on the floor, and the fever was all through him. It was cold but he couldn’t shiver, sweat pouring off him hot and rank, and why was he even here?
Left the house. Slammed the door and out into the snow, yelling at Mandy. “You get on outa here! You marry that boy you don’t come back, you hear me? You hear me, Manda Jane?”
Big blue eyes fulla tears, the way they were that day in the courtroom, when Judge Vickers asked her who she wanted to stay with, her ma or pa. Sometimes Percy thought it wasn’t right to make a kid choose like that. But that was later. At the time all he felt was hot justification when Manda said My daddy.
Of course, Cindy wasn’t even in the courtroom. God I gotta get out of this one-horse town, why did I ever marry you, we were supposed to get out of here, Percy!
It was just that he was under the weather. That cold going around. That was why he’d grabbed his gun, drew a bead on Manda Jane’s little red Toyota that he’d scrimped and gouged for so she could go off to college in style. The realization of just what he was doing hit him all at once in his icy driveway.
Pointin his service revolver at Manda, for God’s sake. At his own flesh and blood, his own little girl.
Sheriff Blotzer found himself upright, weaving terribly as he tacked across the dark concrete-floored hall. Nobody in the cells down here, middle of the week and everyone indoors. Power was out. Why was the power out? His phone hadn’t rung since yesterday, and now he realized, dimly, that it wasn’t normal. His cellphone—paid for by the
county, because by God, he kept the law around here, and everyone knew their place when Percy Blotzer was in uniform, yessir—had been on the fritz too. Maybe he should ask them Army boys. Why couldn’t Manda have liked one of those boys?
Daddy, you look a little under the shade, Manda had said when she arrived, hugging him. You been eating? Taking care of yourself? Fixing him dinner, and after that, sitting him on the couch. Daddy, I have something to tell you…
If he drew his service revolver now, he knew what he’d find. Manda’s car had zigzagged, but he was sure…
There would be a bullet missing. He’d broken the law. He’d shot at his own daughter, his little girl. His head throbbed, fit to burst. He was sick. And he had broken the law.
Percy Blotzer’s brain, hovering on the edge of 103.9 degrees Fahrenheit, began to cook.
Familiar in the Past
Lee’s little yellow house looked like a fairytale, alone in a wide, bright white meadow dwarfed by wooded, snowy hills, the trees hooded and secretive as cloud cover thickened again. A muffled shape on one side of the driveway looked like an old truck, but it was hard to tell under the cold white blanket. There was a long low corrugated building to the right, and that was what he aimed the truck for, bumping out of what felt like ruts. The house itself was a trim, snug manufactured, freshly repainted and obviously cared for. Maybe he even had a garden. You could probably grow plenty out here. Tomatoes, it got hot enough in the summer. All sorts of things. Maybe even weed, who knew?
Ginny was just grateful for the prospect of a bathroom, and to get the dog’s head off her lap. Trav had passed out as soon as the car began to move, snoring unconcernedly, and while she didn’t begrudge him the rest—the poor thing probably hadn’t slept much last night, if the state they found him in was any indication—she didn’t really like the suspicious warmth under his jowls.
Eventually, she’d shifted his head enough to be sure, and…yeah. He’d drooled on her.
Every once in a while, Lee took a hand off the wheel and patted the sleeping dog’s hindquarters, gently. He didn’t look away from the snow in front of them while he did so, it was a simple, reflexive movement. That was, Ginny thought, just what she’d come to expect from him.
When he cut the engine, the dog twitched, and the ticking of cooling metal was very loud in the sudden quiet. Juju’s black four-by-four bumped up on her side, a nice neat parking job. It was kind of funny, the way cars huddled together just like people, even when there was plenty of space. The corrugated building looked like a barn, and she thought of horses—or a cow? Maybe he milked his own?
She searched for something applicable. “It’s beautiful.” Ginny patted Traveller’s head, smoothing marbled fur. “Whose woods these are I think I know.”
“Huh?” Lee stretched his hands out, probably aching from clutching the wheel. “About twenty acre, from my grandfather. He done him some business in his time.”
“Oh.” She absorbed this. “No, I mean, it’s a poem. Robert Frost.”
“He any good?” Lee’s eyes were bloodshot. No wonder, squinting into the snow-glare all day.
“Sometimes.” She shifted on her side of the bench seat. “You’re a good driver.”
“Thank you, Miss Virginia.” A small movement, like he wanted to tip his hat. Where had it gone?
“You lost your hat.” Was it that she didn’t want to get out of the truck this time? Clinging to the familiar, even if it had only become familiar in the past few hours?
“Yeah. The diner.” Lee leaned back against the seat, and it was the first time all day she’d seen him relax.
The four-by-four’s door slammed, and the dog pricked his ears. He was awake now, one eye half-open, watchful. She’d always wanted a dog, but certainly no animal would ever dare step foot in her mother’s house, not even a cat. A cat would have been nice, maybe. “You look better without one.” She reached for the door, and Traveller scrambled upright, his tail whapping frantically.
A few desultory flakes of snow whirled down. Juju was already at the sliding door to the shed, or barn, or whatever it was, obviously familiar with Lee’s place. Was this the actual house, and the yellow one something else? She peered curiously inside the corrugated building, finding a bunch of equipment, neatly hung tools, tool chests, and a couple worktables. Traveller, sans leash and collar—because, Juju said, a good hound would stay with you, really—roamed inside to sniff everything, despite Ginny’s cry of caution.
“He’ll be okay.” Juju opened a metal cabinet to show extension cords neatly coiled. “Lee, Imma plug both these bastards in, aight?”
“Power could be out. But might as well.” Lee slammed the truck door. “Genny’s just for the house. We can move ’em later, if we gotta. I don’t smell no ice comin.”
Juju nodded. “Me either.”
She might as well have been invisible, even to the dog. Ginny hugged herself, her red leather purse bumping her hip. Her cooler was in the back of the truck, and her suitcase was probably damp from flying snow. It was a hell of a time to wish she was still at home—but no. Alone, in her house, knowing what was next door, having to go up and down the stairs and imagining the large wet splotch on the wall on the other side…no. She stared across the snowy meadow, and a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature grabbed her from shoulders to heels.
She wanted to keep going, heading for her parents. The trouble with pausing was that all of a sudden your brain got full of the fact that something awful had happened, eating every other thought and replaying terrible things, like the pockpockpock of bullets all around you, or the groaning, growling sound Amy and Hank both made, or the heavy clicking of teeth snapping together, or Tipton’s body lying on a bed, his hands crossed on his chest and his head horribly misshapen—
“Ginny?” Lee was right next to her. His hand fell back to his side—had he meant to touch her shoulder? “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
She had to swallow twice to get her pounding heart out of her throat. She’d just been staring into the distance, thinking about dreadful things. Was it a coping mechanism? If it was, it sucked. “Christ. I’m sorry. What can I do to help?”
“Go on inside.” He pointed at the yellow house. “Ain’t locked.”
Good Lord, they didn’t lock their doors out here? Of course, what would break in? A wild moose? Did moose come this far south? Ginny couldn’t remember. “My suitcase—”
“I’ll get it.”
She set her shoulders and lifted her chin. “No, I’ll carry it in. And…the dog. We can’t leave him outside.”
“No ma’am. Been a while since I had a dog in the house.” The corners of his eyes fanned with crinkles, but his mouth was a straight line. “All right then.”
It was an unexpected relief. She nodded, briskly, and got moving.
As long as there was something to do, she wouldn’t have to consider what might have happened to Mom and Dad. And Flo, who might even have gone into labor.
Oh, God.
Son
His place still had power, go figure. The temperature dropped sharply as night fell, but the woodstove did its work well, and dinner was a far sight better than anything Lee ever cooked for himself. Juju leapt to help clear the table—Ginny had sat where Tipton usually did when he was over for coffee, and the other man’s eyes had teared up—so that meant Lee got up too, and Ginny left them with the KP. Which was all right, but Nonna would have shooed them both out, not trusting them with dishes. Of course, Nonna would have double-scrubbed every plate Juju touched, too, being Mississippi gentry. Her great-great had fought with Stonewall Jackson; Big Q’s had signed on with Frémont, finished with Sherman, and maybe even done some jayhawking on the side.
His grandparents didn’t talk about the war but once or twice Lee could remember, and both times ended with frosty silence on Nonna’s part. For his own part, Lee followed Poppa Q. And the Army tended to cure a man of bigotry, if he let it.
Lee had the idea Ginny, being a
Yankee and a city girl, might not have gained all Nonna’s approval, but that was a minor consideration. He didn’t realize what she was up to until Traveller, his dinner bolted and his throat full of yodels, made his going-outside sound and the front door opened. “Shitfire,” he muttered. “You go on out and watch, Juju.”
“Huh?” But Thurgood was no slouch in the brains department, so a hot second later, the man’s brown eyes widened and he stiffened. “Oh, man. You think they out here, too?”
“Been talk about things in the woods for a week now.” Lee plunged his hands into soap bubbles and hot water, wincing a little. “Better safe than oh, fuck.”
“Amen to that.” Juju strode for the dining room, halted, and turned back. “Lee?”
“Ayuh?” Get on out there and make sure she don’t get no harm. But he set his jaw. That would be damn impolite.
“Tipton allus said you were good folk.” He cleared his throat, and stumped away.
That meant something, and Lee stared into the soap bubbles, his neck tensing up again, as the front door closed again. Good folk. Well, that was easy when you had a steady job or a little put by, or a monthly from the Army. It was a damn sight harder when you were hungry. Or afraid.
Fearful people did fearful things, and if the three of them had survived so far, there were bound to be others. Those others might be dangerous as rattlers, especially if they were scared enough to shit peach pits. How far did this thing spread? Canada? Mexico?
Now he was getting ahead of himself. All during dinner, he’d been conscious of Grandon’s package in the coat closet, full of God-knew-what. Lee couldn’t decide if it would be better if the damn thing had no connection to the current bitch of a situation, or worse.