“Blond Milton said him’n Sonya’d take Sonny. I tell you that? Raise him on up from here for me.”
“He did? That might help some.”
“But he’ll make Sonny what I hoped he wouldn’t be.”
“Of course he will. That’s why he wants him. That’s why they all want sons. What about Harold?”
“Harold don’t shine for him. Mom neither.”
“Well, what else can you do? You thought about that?”
Pills shunted the pain aside from her body but did nothing for her pained thoughts but slow them to a yawning pace, make them linger. The shotgun was upright between her knees and she choked the double barrels with both hands. She said, “Carry Mom to the booby hatch’n leave her on the steps, I guess. Beg Victoria’n Teardrop to take Harold in.”
Gail shook her head slowly, touched two fingers to Ned’s chest.
“Oh, god, I hope that ain’t the way it goes, Sweet Pea. I hope to hell it ain’t. I don’t believe Harold’ll be the type can hack prison.”
Ree stared ahead down the loose dirt rut while low dust dogs appeared alongside and chased the truck tires. The road was mostly straight and fairly smooth through the government trees. The truck crested a ridge and rolled downhill into a stark valley that narrowed to a springwater creek. Bluffs of dour stone shrugged above the bottoms, streaked black by ages of drip, with like boulders knocked low to the water’s edge. The bluffs kept the creek shadowed but for two hours on either side of noon. Turkey buzzards spanned their wings and wafted in patient tightening circles high above the creek bed.
“Is this where you’re takin’ me?”
“Yup. Bucket Spring. Remember Bucket Spring? The water here’s good for you.”
“That water’s colder’n hell!”
“That’s what makes it good. That’s what makes it help all your bruises’n bumps’n stuff.”
“It’s colder’n a goddam witch’s tit in there!”
“Trust me.”
Above the springhead there was a space to park, and logs pounded into the slope lengthwise made steps leading down to the clean, clean water. Where the spring boiled from the earth the water was a cool holy blue and rose to make jouncy plashes across the surface. As the water spread downstream the blue dimmed to crystal clarity and watercress grew in swaths of brilliant green along the bed. Boulders had fallen into haphazard stacks near the springhead and a few reached the pool of blue water and made angled sitting spots.
Gail helped Ree from the truck. Ree poked her way down the few dirt steps with their timber edges, leaning on the broomstick, while Gail carried Ned by the swinging handle of his carrier. They stopped on a gravel spit beside the pool.
“I’ll make us a little fire, first. For when we come back out wet. You just rest ’til I get some heat raised, hear, Sweet Pea? Then we’ll doctor you up good.”
“Okey-doke.”
“I’ll set Ned here.”
“Okey-doke.”
The water was a color Ree’d pick for the jewel in a meaningful finger ring. She leaned on her broomstick, the end sinking into gravel, zoned still by pills and staring into the pool of jewel-colored water. Where the stream ran from the pool the water was so clear she could appreciate individual rocks on the bottom, clumps of green that swayed, skittish tiny fish facing upstream.
She sat on the spit next to Ned and stared. There was a metal ladle on a rope hanging from a sapling by the springhead, a ladle the old ones still came and dipped and raised to drink from the freshest of water. At school teachers said don’t do that anymore, stuff has leaked to the heart of the earth and maybe soured even the deepest deep springs, but plenty of old ones crouched and sipped from the ladle yet. The pool of water loosed a scent, a blessed flavorful scent that folks couldn’t often resist, something in the bones and meat made them bend, drink, step out and drop into the flow.
The fire was slow in starting, but Gail fed twigs to the first tiny flicker and calmly raised a fine strapping circle of flame. The smoke bent with the breeze and trailed away downstream, low above the creek. The fire flung heat as wide as two spread arms and Ned was set where the farthest hand would be. Gail said, “On your feet, Sweet Pea. Time to get naked.”
“Other people could come here today, too, you know.”
“Oh, goodness, I sure hope not—they’ll see us both naked if they do.”
Ree stood and dropped Mamaw’s coat to the gravel spit, began to unbutton, and said, “I ain’t swam naked since I don’t know when.”
“I bet the last time was in that pond over the ridge behind Mr. Seiberling’s place. That was a purt-near perfect swimmin’ hole, back before he started runnin’ cattle and they filled it with flops.”
“Yup. That was when.”
Gail stripped to the buff quickly, then crouched to undo the laces of Ree’s boots, tugged them off and set them near the fire. Ree stood bare to the wind, looking up at the tall dour bluffs. Her many bruises were changing colors by the hour, nearly, all of them hurtful to see. Gail took her hand and they stepped into Bucket Spring, waded straddle-deep into the chill water, and shivered and clattered, looking at each other with eyes popped wide until both began to laugh. Gail led on, pulling Ree toward the deeper blue center, feet shifting in the gravel underfoot, cold numbing legs to the hips. She dropped her haunches, water rose to her neck, and she said, “Sit.”
“I already about can’t feel my legs.”
“Sit. Sit all at once’n get the shock over fast.”
Ree let herself drop into the spring, sat cross-legged on the stone bottom. She lowered her face to the water and held her breath, letting the cold embrace her knotted features and sore spots. The cold went through her like wind. When she looked up she said, “Man! It blasts the hurt right out of you!”
“Don’t it, though. Now get out’n get warm awhile. Then we do it again.”
They stepped from the spring, hands rubbing at their skin. The pink on their bodies had become red and the white become pink and ringlets of splashed hair clung to their necks. They squatted near the fire, wore coats like cloaks draped around their shoulders, leaned toward the heat and watched the flames ripple.
Gail said, “I’m gonna go home.”
“Home?”
“The trailer. Back to the trailer.”
“You are? Back? Why?”
“Ned’s gonna need more than me in this life, Ree. You had ought to know that real well yourself. Plus, you got all these troubles, and I sure shouldn’t be in the middle of ’em, not with my baby along.”
“I think most likely they’re done with me.”
“You can’t know what’s gonna happen. Me’n Ned need to get home.”
Ree threw Mamaw’s coat off, flung it at her piled clothes. She walked hunched over into the spring and fell in completely. She held her breath underwater and opened her eye and gained a clean misty view of rocks polished slick by ages and heard the murmur of a living spring in her ears, the mumbles and plops of water from forever rushing past. When she stood up, the breeze instantly made her soaked head too cold and she jumped from the spring toward the fire.
Gail said, “You’re movin’ better already.”
“I forgot where I hurt.”
“Might as well get dressed.”
“Do you really love him or somethin’?”
“I don’t know. My heart don’t exactly bust out the trumpets every time I hear his name or nothin’. Nothin’ like that—but I love Ned. I way, way love Ned.”
Once dressed, Ree raised her broomstick but hardly needed to lean on it. She pegged to the truck, sat on the bench seat and swallowed a yellow pill and a blue pill. Gail drove in silence to the crest of the hill and over, out of the valley, back to the flat road through government trees. Buzzards had massed to peck something fluffy crushed on the road ahead but took off in gawky flapping alarm as the truck neared.
Ree said, “You didn’t like it? You gonna tell me you didn’t like it?”
“I liked it. I
liked it, but not enough.”
The glum front from the northwest had seeped gray over much of the sky. Huffing wind made the forest sway, and a brastle of limbs knocking was joined to the soughing. The road seemed three times as long going this way. A grunting timber truck passing slowly forced Gail to wait where the dirt met the blacktop. Red flags were tied to the log ends and foul smoke roiled from the tailpipe.
Ree said, “Think Floyd’n his daddy’d like to buy our timber from me? Huh? ’Cause if we got to sell, I’d rather it to be to you-all.”
“Really? You mean that?”
They crossed the blacktop onto the rut road to home and Ree made herself look out the window the other way. “If I’ve got to sell these woods, Sweet Pea, I’d want it to be to you’n yours.”
Chapter 31
TWO KINDS of pills and a bedridden afternoon, evening, on into the night. The sky was dark and whistling, shaking windows and the horizon beyond, but Ree lay there immune to weather. The boys came home early and said, “More snow days!” but Ree merely grunted. The yellow pills had shown qualities worth appreciating, too. Seems like yellow ones shoved away hurt pretty good but left the mind on and lighted, while blue ones shut you down to an utter smooth blackness where time was sheared away in chunks without having to be lived through at all. Sometimes you want the mind on. Stuff dances around in there when the mind’s on, not often the specific dancing memories you tried to call up with actual specific thoughts, but generally even the uninvited dancing stuff tickled or intrigued or at least left a fuzz of feelings behind. Whiteness piled on the windowsill, snowflakes sashayed and darted and plunged past the glass panes, and she reached to the floor bedside, shook loose another blue, and lay back waiting on black.
Chapter 32
THE BLACK parted enough for a hand to reach through and shove her shoulder a few times, stand her up in her flannel nightie and knee socks and wrap Mamaw’s coat around her. The dream did not tie her boots but turned into a truck ride, a truck ride through a white tunnel in the night, with white puffs dribbling across windshield glass and puddling below the wipers. She could smell Uncle Teardrop even through the veil of sleep. His smell and sounds were there, right there, but she was thinking in a gear so low she did not believe she could be awake until he touched her leg and his fingernail scraped a hurt place. She felt the pang through the pills, saw his face, the whiskey bottle held clenched by his thighs, the paratrooper’s rifle and the sawed-off shotgun sliding on the cracked seat between his side and hers.
He said, “Let’s do it then, girl. Fuck this waitin’ shit. Let’s get out’n poke ’em where they live a little bit’n see what happens.”
Might be she said something, or maybe not, she wasn’t sure, but he kept looking at her and his eyes were burnt spots in a flickering face. He nodded, so must be words had come from her mouth, though what she had agreed to eluded her, puzzled her, until a few possibilities came together as thoughts and scared her. She flinched and sat up a bit more. She rolled the window down and put her sluggish head into the cold wind. Places went past in a white hurry and were gone. She raised the window, faced him and asked, “What’d I just say?”
“Huh?”
“Did I just agree to somethin’ or somethin’?”
“Haw-haw-haw, little girl. Don’t try that smarty shit with me. We’ll be there before long.”
She realized with a start that she could again see from both eyes. The one eye afforded only a slitty sort of keyhole view but helped plenty to steady the scenery. There was not much to see except a wilderness of white, white fallen and white thrashing to ground. At road crossings she’d stare for clues as to where he was taking her. House lights and yard lights were vague daubs of glow. When the truck skidded onto a bridge and tires thumped on raised seams in the surface, she saw the water below. The water ate the flakes as they fell and was visible as a black neck between spread shoulders of white, and she knew that neck of water by sight, knew they’d crossed Big Chinkapin Creek.
She said, “Oh, no. Is this really the right idea?”
“Only one I got.”
“You’re goin’ to Buster Leroy’s house, ain’t you?”
“I already told you that.”
“I didn’t hear you when you said it before.”
“You heard me now.” He raised the whiskey bottle and pushed it toward her, into her hands. “Have a snort’n buck up, girl. I been runnin’ on crank’n hardly no food for fuckin’ days now’n I’m tired of waitin’ around for shit to happen.”
She felt the burn in her throat and chest, then screwed the lid on and laid the bottle on the seat. He drove like the road was three lanes wide yet not quite wide enough. He drove the road from edge to edge and fast. The bottle rolled into her hip and she raised it for another swig at the top of a long hill, a long hill she thought they might well fly off of somewhere between here and the bottom. She closed her eyes and felt the swaying, sliding, heard the brakes heave, the gearshift grunt and Uncle Teardrop’s laughter. She closed her eyes and went away on whiskey and pills, sunk into a shallow willed sleep that quickly deepened, and when her eyes opened again there was a farmhouse and a dog leaping at the window glass her face rested against, his teeth bared and his lips frothy inches from her own.
Teardrop stood on the steps of a wide porch to a stone house and the porch lights were bright. Snowflakes churned all around. The dog ran back to the porch snarling and he kicked it tumbling over shrubs into the snow, so it returned to leap at her face and growl. Somebody in a red T-shirt stood at the door, holding a handgun that he did not point at Uncle Teardrop but did gesture with, move up and down. She guessed Buster Leroy. She guessed… she heard the truck’s tires crush fresh snow but wouldn’t open her eyes, wouldn’t when she heard a car horn honk, a mutt barking, gruesome laughter, wouldn’t until motion ceased and voices sounded near and she saw two women and a man standing by the headlights, talking stuff with Teardrop. Snowflakes gushed across the headlight beams, blowing sideways now with smaller flakes that sounded like summer bugs mashing into the windshield.
The man laughed and made big gestures in the light. The two women pulled their jackets over their hairdos and huddled together. This was the parking lot of a gas station, the one at BB Highway and Heaney Cross Road that was also a market and pawnshop. Ree drifted, then knuckles rapped her window and she lowered the glass. The two women had come close for a look at her face, and she knew the closest of them, Kitty Thurtell, born a Langan, light in her bones and a mighty good mountain-style singer. Kitty said, “Oh, you poor whupped little kid, you—them Hawkfall gals sure ’nough beat the pee-waddy-do out your ass, didn’t they?”
“Feels like it.”
“Looks like it, too.”
The other gal crouched to better see into the truck, and Ree recognized her as a Dolly, Jean Dolly from Bawbee. Jean lowered fogging stout eyeglasses and stared at Ree’s marred cheek and fat lip, her head shaking as she crouched, then raised upright and said, “I once had my own ugly-fuckin’ dustup with them lard-assed bitches. They ganged me the same shitty yellow-bellied way as they done her.”
Kitty grabbed Jean by the arm, jerked, and said, “Don’t you get too in the habit of sayin’ that out loud that-a-way, hear me?”
“It needs sayin’ out loud.”
“Be careful where you say it, honey.”
“I’ll say the truth any-damn-where I want.”
“Best say it in whispers about them.”
The women turned from the wind and walked backwards toward the gas station. Ree raised the window, leaned her face to the cold glass, and was quickly gone again. She was tucked into a blackness that was made incomplete by little pale lines of consciousness that buzzed around inside the black. When her eyes rolled open she was part of a cloud of some sort, a thick weary cloud that had settled to ground. Windows frosted and glazed, fog low outside the windows. Through the frost and fog there were red and green lights, and she scraped a peephole with a fingernail and saw a beer
sign over the door to a cement-block building, an unpainted tavern with no windows or name but for the beer sign. Ree knew it as Ronnie Vaughn’s place, and it probably had a proper name but she could not bring it to mind. Five or six vehicles were in the lot alongside the truck.
She was shivering, sniffling, and reached for the whiskey bottle. She drank and burped, then pushed the door open and stepped into the murmuring, fluttering weather. She pulled Mamaw’s coat together over her flannel nightie and shuffled in untied boots to the tavern. As she stepped inside eight or ten bleary men looked her way. The kind of clodhopper music she couldn’t stomach brayed from a garish jukebox and two mussed women standing far apart danced in wet boots. Teardrop glanced from the end of the bar, saw Ree, and pointed. He said to the bartender, “There she is now.”
“She don’t look all that terrible bad, man.”
“If you saw the rest of her, she would.”
Ree stood there, stoned sleepy and childlike, with Mamaw’s coat fallen open to reveal her little flannel nightie and bruised shanks.
“That girl oughtn’t be let in here, Teardrop. I mean, it ain’t gonna be three full minutes before one of these drunk peckerwoods takes a shine to her’n…”
The heated room of close withered air made Ree swoon. It was like all the air had been breathed many times before until shriveled and stinky from the mouths of chain-smoking drunks. She started to sit on a plastic chair but felt overcome by the place, the odors, the lights, that music, and she spun about instead and pushed outside again. The wind made her skin smart and she sat in the truck, leaned to the window, closed her eyes.
The truck started soon and Teardrop said, “Shit, girl, even lookin’ beat up I could’ve married you off to three fellers in there. Interested?”
“I think I might puke.”
“That’s how I told ’em you’d be.”
“Man—I’m gonna puke.”
Teardrop drove onto the road invisible beneath stacking snow, goosed the truck to a jaunty pace. He glanced her way, said, “Upchuck out the fuckin’ window, then. As much as you can, anyhow.”