When I arrived at his ramshackle roadside stand, I saw just how far he’d fallen. There was a basket of rotten peaches on the fold-out counter, and there were fruit flies buzzing everywhere. Also, Ridings himself was a hot mess, as Destiny would say, and he had BO that nearly knocked me over, even from yards away.
“Well, hey!” he called from the metal folding chair he’d set up alongside the lonely highway. He smiled, showing teeth in desperate need of dental care. “You bring me some veggies? That’s great, that’s great. Bring ’em on over and sit for a spell, why don’cha?”
Normally, I wouldn’t give a second thought to sitting and chatting with Ridings for a bit. But Ridings’s eyes were glassy, and his words were too fast, and there was no one around but the two of us. A car might drive past in the next hour, or it might not.
But I unloaded the beans and tomatoes and leaned tentatively on the wooden stand he’d set up for his vegetables. Remarkably, it didn’t collapse.
“What’s going on, gal?” Ridings said energetically. He scratched his arm, then his other arm, and then the back of his neck. The skin all over his body was raw, with blisters and gashes everywhere. “Durn chiggers. Worst summer I ever seen. Them bugs crawled up under my skin, that’s what I think. Burrowed in and laid their durn eggs.”
“Ridings, can I ask you something?” I said.
“Yeah, ’course. Ask me anything at all.” He scratched his scalp. “You wanna buy some peaches? My little girl, she loved peaches. Juice just dribbled down her chubby cheeks. You ever meet my little girl? You want to see her picture?”
“I’ve seen her picture,” I said. “She’s a cutie, all right.”
He was already digging into the front pocket of his jeans, hiking up one bony hip to get in deep.
“Oh yeah, here we go,” he said. He flipped to the first battered photo, which showed Ridings and his wife and their little girl, Melody. They were sitting stiffly in front of a blue background, all of them wearing crisp white shirts. Ridings wore jeans, his wife a denim miniskirt, and little Melody a teensy baby miniskirt. She had one of those baby headbands for when babies didn’t have hair yet, the kind that went around the baby’s forehead and had a bow on the front.
“It’s a beautiful picture,” I said. I tried to smile. “So, I wanted to ask—“
“They’re gone now,” he said. “My Danielle, she was at the Piggly Wiggly when the wind started picking up. She shoulda stayed put, but she wanted to get home to me and the baby.”
“She loved you, that’s why,” I said, feeling as if I was being sucked into quicksand. “She wanted to be with you.”
“A tree knocked out the windshield, right in our driveway. They say she didn’t feel no pain. That’s good, don’t you think?”
I sighed. I’d heard all this before. Everyone in town had. The first few times, it was heartbreaking. Then it was just sad. It never stopped being sad, but it was a broken record sad, playing again and again on endless repeat.
I’d hoped to skirt around it today, but watching Ridings rock back and forth in his folding chair, clutching that beat-up picture, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
“I think it’s real good,” I said, referring to his wife’s pain-free death.
“And Melody . . . my baby girl—“He choked up. “I tried my best. You know? I put her in her car seat. She took naps in it sometimes. I figured it would keep her safe.”
“I know. That was good thinking.” And it was. What else were you supposed to do when a tornado touched down right on top of you? Go to the basement, sure. But what if you didn’t have a basement?
“I strapped her in her car seat, and I put the car seat in the bathtub,” Ridings said. “And then I got in the tub with her. I lay my whole self on top of her.”
He shook his head. His eyes were red, and his sallow skin hugged his skull. The meth Wally had cooked up for him had gotten him bad.
“She died, too,” he whispered.
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
“Just a little baby. A tiny little baby.”
His lips were dry and cracked, with blood showing where some of the cracks had split open. Less than a year ago, he’d been handsome in his red neck, crew cut way. Then that tornado lifted his baby girl right out from under him, tossing her high and dropping her in a field three hundred feet away. She was still in her car seat when Ridings found her. No broken bones, just the life sucked right out of her.
“Why would God take a little baby?” Ridings asked, fixing his meth-addled eyes on mine. He answered his own question. “He needed another angel, I guess. She was too good for this world, her and Danielle both.”
“Um . . . Ridings?” I ventured.
“Yeah?” he said, the entire word a sigh.
If there was a right way to do this, I didn’t know it. So I said, “Didn’t you used to have a cow?”
His gaze drifted. It seemed like he was looking into the forest, but when I angled my head, I saw an open field. At the edge of the field was the shack where Ridings now lived, and also his pickup truck.
“I did,” he murmured. “She died, too.”
“How?”
“Lightning.”
“Lightning?!”
“Don’t that beat all? No insurance for an act of God, not when it comes to cows and lightning.” He thumped his bony chest. “I thought it was foul play, that’s what I thought at first. But nope, it was lightning.”
“Lightning. Wow.”
“I got her cut up into steaks and such, though I hated to do it.” He tugged on his ear, his face as scrunched and bewildered as a baby’s. “Least, I think I did. Man’s gotta eat, right?”
I had no response to that. Tommy killed his cow. Then Tommy had it butchered and got the meat to Ridings, either because Roy told him to or because his sins got to gnawing at him. Was Ridings’s brain so riddled with holes that he no longer remembered anything?
Ridings stood up from his folding chair. He came right up to me, and his confusion dropped away, replaced by a feverish intensity. I thought fleetingly that a person could do whatever he wanted if he knew he wouldn’t remember afterward.
“You’re a good girl, Cat,” he said. “A real good girl, just like my Melody. Don’t you let the world beat you down, you hear? Don’t you take no peanut butter and mayonnaise sammiches, even if someone gives ’em to you free, ’cause there ain’t no such thing as a free ride. Maybe they’re free at first, but then comes the strings. There’s always strings, and them strings, they tie you up and pull you right down to Satan hisself.”
I tried to step backward, but I couldn’t, because I was up against his produce stand.
“Bad things happen. Evil happens,” Ridings said. “Evil’s out there. I seen it riding right by me, like the riders of the apocalypse.”
I inched sideways. My bike was a foot away. I just had to get to it. Once I had the handlebars clenched in my hands, I felt a heck of a lot better.
“I’m real sorry about your cow, Ridings,” I told him.
He went still. Slowly, the feverish light left his eyes, and his body lost its rigidity, so that he was no longer up in my face. He scratched his arm and said, “Damn chiggers.”
“So . . . yeah,” I said. “Guess I’m going now.” I hesitated, thinking about evil. “Hey. You know Patrick, right?”
“Sure I do,” Ridings said. “He used to come talk with me.”
“He did? About what?”
“Just whatever. Tomatoes. The weather. Stuff like that.”
“Oh. Well, he got hurt, like bad hurt. Did you know that?”
“I sure did.” His eyes were mournful. “Satan.”
The highway Ridings set up his stand on led to the Come ’n’ Go. It didn’t get much traffic, but it did get some.
“Did you notice anything . . . odd?” I asked. “Not this past Saturday, but a week ago Saturday? The night Patrick got beat up?”
Ridings looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. Maybe I was, or maybe he
couldn’t think back that far, what with his brain eaten up from Wally’s home cooking.
I thought about Wally’s cooking, and then I thought about peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches, and my brain put them together in that way brains sometimes do: pairing ideas that shouldn’t be paired, yet nonetheless were.
Don’t you take no peanut butter and mayonnaise sammiches, even if someone gives ’em to you free.
We get all sorts of crazy orders. Peanut butter and mayonnaise, turkey with fried pickles, tongue with spicy mustard.
Shut up, Dupree. She doesn’t care.
Ridings’s brow cleared. “Oh. You want to know did I see something. Something suspicious.”
“Yeah, did you?”
“Naw. I packed up my stand, then went home and watched the stars some. Saw Beef pass by in his girlfriend’s truck a few times, driving folks around. I guess I watched the stars some more and called it a night.” He made a sound that for him might have been a laugh. “’Course the sun was coming up all red and teary by then. You ever notice how swollen the sun is so early in the morning? Like it got no sleep, either?”
Beef driving everyone home. That was all he’d seen.
Ridings yawned, his eyes closing. He opened them again and looked at me, his eyes glazed. “Hey. You ever meet my little girl? You want to see her picture?”
It was time for me to go, because just as sure as God made plump, juicy peaches, Ridings had left already. And just as sure as God made peaches, I knew he wasn’t coming back.
I SCREAMED WHEN I SAW IT: A SEVERED TONGUE on my pillow. It was jagged at the end, like it had been sawed off with a knife. There were bumps on the surface, like on a human tongue, but it was too big to be human. It was a cow’s tongue, flaccid and damp and on my pillow.
I screamed, and Aunt Tildy came running, Christian right behind her.
“What? What is it?” Christian demanded.
I tried to speak, and he grabbed my shoulders, because maybe I wasn’t making words come out so well, or maybe I’d gone pale. I was shaking so hard that he had to hold me up.
“Good Lord in heaven,” Aunt Tildy said when she saw. She peered closer, then drew back as if she’d been stung. “Why do you have a cow tongue on your pillow? Is that a note under there? Cat, what have you done?”
What have I done? I thought. What have I done!?
Christian eased me to the floor, my back against the end of my bed for support. He looked into my eyes and said, “You’re okay. You hear?” He stood and strode to my bed. “Aunt Tildy, move.”
I heard rather than saw what happened next. Footsteps as he strode to the front of my bed. The rustle of the paper as he grabbed the note. Then a whole stream of cussing before he came back into view. His face was stormy as he crumpled the piece of paper. “Who did this, Cat?”
“What does it say?” I said. I tried to rise, but I was lightheaded, and my balance was no good.
Christian was at my side in a flash. He squatted and pushed down my shoulders. “Sit down. Good Lord.”
“Give it to me,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Aunt Tildy said, her voice high. “Whatever it is, it’s no good, and just . . . give it to me. I’ll burn it.”
“Give me the note, goddammit,” I said to Christian.
Aunt Tildy gasped. “Cat! Language!”
I dug at Christian’s closed fist, and at last he relented, because that was the code of siblings, even when the relationship was fractured. We might keep secrets from our daddy or our aunt, but not from each other.
Stop flapping your tongue, or I’ll cut yours out, too, the note said. The block letters were as dark as congealed blood.
Christian grabbed it back and shook it. “Was it Tommy? When he was here, he said he wanted to talk to you, but then he claimed it was nothing important. Was he the one who fucking wrote this?”
I blinked.
Christian was furious. “I didn’t see him go into your room, but I guess the piece of shit could have slipped in when I wasn’t watching. So did he, or did some other piece of shit climb through your window and leave this trash on your pillow?”
I flinched and cried, “How am I supposed to know?”
Aunt Tildy shifted into efficiency mode. She disappeared into the hall, came back with one of the rags she uses for cleaning, and scooped the tongue up. Then she fast-walked to the front door and stepped out into the yard. I guess she flung that piece of meat as far as she could, because I heard it land, a faint plump in the woods.
“Thanks,” I said weakly when she came back to my room.
“It has to do with Patrick, doesn’t it?” Christian said. “I told you to leave it alone. But did you? No.”
“It’s late,” Aunt Tildy said. “You children ought to be in bed.”
“Should we call the police?” I said. “Get Deputy Doyle out here?”
“Why on earth would we do that?” Aunt Tildy said.
“To tell him what happened. About the note. About . . .” I swallowed, unnaturally aware of my own mouth’s inner workings. A wet thick muscle, that’s what it was. “About the tongue.”
“What tongue?” Aunt Tildy said. “It’s gone, et up by a fox.”
“But, Aunt Tildy, we all saw it.”
“Et up by a fox,” Aunt Tildy repeated stubbornly.
“There ain’t no point in calling anyone,” Christian said angrily. “Deputy Doyle’s either passed out at the hospital doing guard duty, or else he’s at the snack machine, stuffing his gut with those damn cheese crackers he loves. He ain’t gonna drive out here, not for a high school prank.”
“You think it was a prank?” I said.
“Hell no,” Christian said. “But that’s how he’d see it, or that’s how he’ll say he saw it. Deputy Doyle ain’t gonna do nothing.” He slowed the pace of his words. “So if you know who did it, if you even think you know, then fucking tell me so I can take care of it.”
My eyes went to Aunt Tildy. She wouldn’t meet my gaze, but instead fixed her stare on floating, invisible dust motes.
Christian, on the other hand, did look at me. His eyes burned so fiercely into mine that I felt a physical jolt, and the sheer force of it seared me and threw backward into the past. Time shifted invisibly and deeply, dropping me three years back to when Tommy got me alone on our living room sofa. The dead tongue spoke to me from the woods, insisting in the horror of the moment that ugly things couldn’t be thrown away so easily. They had to be dragged into the light, or they’d keep growing.
The ugly thing—the bad thing—happened when I was thirteen. It was a week before my eighth grade graduation, and Christian was outside burning the old smokehouse that had been next to our house since before I was born. Nobody’d smoked meat in it since my granddaddy was young, and we no longer had hogs to slaughter even if we’d wanted to. We once used the smokehouse as a shed, but that was when Daddy still kept the place up and needed somewhere to store the lawn mower and other tools.
By my thirteenth summer, the smokehouse was beyond repair, listing to the side like a carnival fun house. A feather drifting lazily from the sky could land on it wrong and make the whole thing collapse. So Christian decided to burn it to make room for a new shed. His Yamaha was old, and it would last a little longer if he could keep it out of the elements. Plus, a covered shed would give him a place to coax it to life on rainy days.
Beef was out there with him, both of them sitting in lawn chairs and sipping moonshine from mason jars. Aunt Tildy thought they were too young to be drinking, but Daddy let them, so Aunt Tildy couldn’t do a thing about it.
I was out there, too, sipping lemonade. I tried to make a case that I deserved a glass of shine, too, since I’d be turning fourteen in two months. I wasn’t a kid.
“The hell you ain’t,” Christian said. “And quit asking, ‘cause the answer’s no.”
I didn’t care. I just liked being with them. We were shooting the breeze and watching the fire, Beef telling me jokes that made lemon
ade come out my nose, when Tommy roared into our drive on his blue BMW R1200C, the make and model of which I knew because he bragged about it so much. Not a ding on it, and no doubt worth more than our house.
He did a power slide into the dirt yard and stopped a few yards from our chairs, his rear tire pointing our way. Then he clamped the front brake and cranked the throttle, spraying a rooster tail of dirt and grit on the flames. Some got on us, too, with Beef getting the worst of it.
“What the hell?” he cried, grabbing the metal arms of his chair and scrambling out of Tommy’s range.
Tommy laughed and cut the engine. The smell of motor oil hung in the humid air.
As Tommy toed down the kickstand, Christian said, “Hey, bro. You might want to park your Beemer somewhere else.”
He was offering friendly advice. He didn’t want Tommy’s fancy motorcycle that close to the burning shed.
But Tommy didn’t like being told what to do. “Don’t get your panties in a wad,” he said. “How long you think I’m gonna be here?”
It was a put-down, but Christian didn’t take the bait.
“Well, pull up a chair, man,” he said, and Tommy did. He grabbed a lawn chair and slung it down between me and Christian, and I giggled, because I thought Tommy was cute.
Christian poured Tommy a jelly jar full of moonshine, which Tommy accepted, drained, and held out straight away for a refill. I held my lemonade out and asked for a splash, too. Christian didn’t bother to respond.
The guys talked, and I listened. I felt shy around Tommy, that was why I clammed up.
After a while, Aunt Tildy came outside and said hey to the boys. She turned to me and told me to go put on my graduation dress, which she’d bought months earlier because it was on sale.
“Why?” I said.
“To make sure it still fits.”
“But why now?” I didn’t want to leave.
“’Cause I’m fixin’ to make jam, and once I get the berries boiling, I’ll have to stand watch over them.”
“But—“
Shine Page 17
