by Ron Rash
“Go take this to her,” he said to Hubert.
“You all got a girl back there?” Shank asked.
Carlton nodded.
“Let him take it,” Hubert said, motioning toward Travis. “I bet she’d like that. Might even want him to visit with her awhile.”
Shank grinned at Travis. “Damn, boy. You might get all your problems solved tonight.”
Shank and Wesley pulled Travis up from the couch and Hubert handed him the plate.
“Go get her, stud,” Shank said.
Travis walked slowly down the hallway. Something bothered him. He thought it had to do with Lori but there was something else as well, something that wouldn’t quite show itself. At the doorway he stopped and saw the single bare yellow bulb on the ceiling, the Venetian blinds covering the window, the same ladderback chair Carlton Toomey had sat in that afternoon last August. He stepped into the room and when he saw her on the bed he was surprised only for a moment.
Dena lay on a bedsheet pocked with yellow stains. All she had on was a pair of soiled panties and a bra. She was on her back, legs slightly open, one arm at her side and one raised like a swimmer. She seemed posed, like a mannequin in a store window. A green-yellow bruise spread over her left cheek. Her eyes were closed and he was grateful for that.
An odor like soured milk filled the room. Travis laid the plate on the bed. There was a trash can in the corner and he was just able to raise it to his mouth in time. Travis set it back down and wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. He looked over at the bed and saw Dena’s eyelids had partially lifted, the eyes themselves dull, unfocused.
“What do you want,” Dena said, the gap between her incisors adding a slight whistle to her slurred words.
Dena’s right arm stretched behind her and he saw the baling twine that bound her wrist to the bedpost. A headache settled between his temples solid as an anvil. His stomach lurched again but there was nothing left to throw up.
“This is wrong,” Travis said. It was the only thing he could think to say.
“Why?” Dena asked.
For a couple of minutes he could not answer. Too much had happened tonight to keep it all straight. Everything was out of kilter, the world off plumb. It was like being on a ride at the fair, everything loud and bright and swirling around him. And in that swirling the faces of Lori and his daddy and Leonard, glimpsed for a moment and then gone like wisps of smoke. He sat down on the bed and closed his eyes, but that just made the dizziness worse. For a terrifying instant Travis believed he might somehow still be in the bear trap, everything that had happened since that August afternoon an illusion. He thought he heard the sound of the creek. No, I’m not there, I’m here, he told himself, and opened his eyes. He stared at the floor until it again settled solid beneath his feet. He turned to Dena.
“Because you don’t deserve it,” Travis said. “Nobody does.” Travis walked back into the front room. Hubert had pulled his chair close to the coffee table. He and Wesley played poker while Shank leaned back on the couch and sipped his beer. Hubert had a drumstick in his hand and Carlton was eating as well. For a few moments Travis watched them eat, amazed that the two men could feel anything, even if it was only hunger. Carlton raised a paper napkin to his mouth, then spread it out on his upper knee. It was a strangely dainty gesture.
Travis tried to meet Carlton Toomey’s eyes.
“You doing that to her is wrong.”
“She done it to herself, son,” Carlton said. “She called us. Said she wanted to live up here, that she wanted to sell pills for us. Turns out she was swallowing more than she was selling.”
Hubert laid his cards face up on the coffee table, raked four quarters to his end. The pills were still on the table.
“Sixteen hundred dollars’ worth,” Hubert said. “That bitch kept saying it was the customers who owed the money, then tried to run out on us when we found out the truth.”
“Had to do her like I done you,” Carlton said to Travis. “Treat her a little rough just so she’d know I wasn’t to be trifled with. But she’s learning. Sold two hundred dollars’ worth this week and made sure them two hundred dollars got back to me. I even let her have some pills tonight for a little reward.”
“That’s not such a big thing,” Hubert said, “especially when she still owes us fourteen hundred dollars.”
“She’s whittling it down,” Carlton said. “By the end of summer we’ll be square.”
“I can put the law on you,” Travis said. He was trembling and there didn’t seem any way he could stop. It was like so much welled up inside him that it shook his whole body trying to get out.
Carlton Toomey smiled.
“Why not talk to him in person? Sheriff Crockett comes by most every Sunday afternoon to get his cut.”
“There’s other law I could call besides Crockett,” Travis said.
“What are you-all talking about?” Shank asked.
Toomey laid his paper plate on the coffee table, leaned back in his chair. He knit his thick fingers together and rested them on his belly, let out a long slow breath, and shook his head.
“You’re like a little fyce dog. Barking big but not doing a damn thing.”
Hubert looked at his father. “We should have taken care of him last summer, the way I told you.”
“What are you all talking about?” Shank asked again.
“None of your damn concerning,” Hubert said.
Carlton Toomey stood up, and when he did it seemed to Travis as though a huge black wave had risen up to crest. Travis put his hand in his pocket, ready to pull out the pocketknife, but Toomey did not move toward him. He stretched his arms and yawned.
“You boys have done worn out your welcome,” Carlton said.
Hubert looked at his father.
“Not yet,” Hubert said. “Just a few more hands and I’ll have all his quarters.”
Travis was already up. He walked out to the car and sat in the Plymouth’s front passenger seat. A few seconds later Shank stepped onto the porch and lit a cigarette. Travis tried to remember when this day had been going well, and it seemed years in the past, hardly his life at all. He shifted his gaze higher, half expecting the stars he’d seen in the restaurant’s parking lot to be realigned into strange new constellations, but they were the same as before.
Shank walked out to the car and got behind the steering wheel. He flicked the glowing cigarette butt out the window. It lay on the ground and slowly dimmed.
“Don’t you reckon it’s about time you told your best buddy what’s going on?”
“Give me one of your cigarettes,” Travis said.
Shank lit a cigarette and handed it to Travis, who took a deep draw, pursed his lips around the cigarette, and exhaled through his nose. He closed his eyes and took several more deep draws, savored what he’d known before memory, a smell so omnipresent on the farm that he’d been in grade school before realizing the pungent odor of tobacco was not the smell of the air itself. The smoke began to warm his lungs. Soon he felt a light buzz off the nicotine because it had been so long.
“You going to tell me?” Shank asked.
“Yeah,” Travis said.
And he did, not just all of what had happened last August but what was going to happen as soon as the Toomeys went to sleep.
“You’re crazy,” Shank said. “What if she starts yelling or something? Maybe she wants to be up here.”
Travis pulled the truck keys from his pocket and set them on the dashboard.
“You just make sure my truck’s down at the river bridge come dawn.”
Shank pressed his forehead against the top of the steering wheel.
“Is there any way I can talk you out of doing this?”
“No,” Travis said. “You going to help me or not?”
Shank lifted his head and looked at Travis.
“You’ll do it regardless, whether I help or not?”
“Yes.”
“OK,” Shank said. “What else besides get
ting the truck to the bridge?”
“You got a flashlight?”
“In the dash.”
Travis got out of the car and quietly shut the car door before moving into the darkness. When he got to the shed he sat down and pressed his back and head against the rough splintery wood. There was comfort in that resting, wood the one solid thing he’d encountered the whole day. In a few minutes Wesley came out of the house and he and Shank drove off. Travis watched the red taillights grow smaller, fighting the impulse to run after them.
The light in the front room remained on. Travis checked his watch. Almost twelve-thirty. He wondered why it should matter to him what happened to Dena when she hardly cared herself. He set an open hand on the grass and felt his palm dampen with dew the night had summoned forth. Something moved near the creek, probably a raccoon, maybe an otter. A breeze came from the west, strong enough that the woodshed’s door hinge gave a rusty squeak. Travis smelled coming rain, looked up and saw clouds now concealed most of the stars. He remembered something Leonard had told him, that you weren’t seeing the stars but their light, the stars themselves no longer existing.
He pressed his hand firmer against the ground to feel the earth’s solidity. The taste of the cigarette lingered in his mouth. Travis wished he’d gotten a couple more and some matches from Shank, given himself something to do besides think bothersome things such as whether Lori would ever see him again. Probably not, he figured, probably not even talk to him if he went to her house to apologize. It wasn’t all my fault, he said softly, but he knew much of it was.
The watch hands had swept past 2 A.M. before the last light went out. Travis studied the house’s outline, a denser shadow among shadows. He hadn’t seen any guns, but he knew they were there, within easy reach and no doubt loaded. He almost hoped they were. If things went wrong, he’d rather be shot than have Carlton Toomey’s hawkbill slice his windpipe. Nothing could be worse than that. He got up to piss and realized the alcohol no longer hummed in his head. Which was unfortunate. What he’d planned didn’t seem near so easy sober.
Thirty more minutes passed before he made his way to the back of the house, the flashlight’s beam bobbing on the grass in front of him. He peered inside the bedroom window, let the beam crawl slowly across the covers to the foot of the bed, crossing only one pair of legs. He placed the flashlight in his jeans pocket and straddled the sill.
The half-raised blinds rattled as he brushed against them. Travis waited a few moments, half in and half out. When no one stirred, he set both feet on the floor and crossed the room, cupping the flashlight’s front with his hand to mute its glow.
Dena woke slowly, reluctantly, and when he told her why he’d come she at first seemed not to understand. He tried to unknot the twine, quickly gave up, and cut it with his pocketknife.
“My knight in shining armor,” Dena said, and when he told her to speak softer she laughed.
“They’re so drunk you couldn’t wake them with a two-by-four.”
“Come on,” he said, helping her to a sitting position. Travis swept the light across the room and found a blouse and a pair of jeans thrown on a chair, her shoes in the corner. Dena’s eyes kept closing as he helped her dress.
“You got to wake up,” he said.
“Quaaludes,” she said.
One of the Toomeys coughed and Travis froze. The house became still again and Travis finished buttoning her blouse, put her shoes on.
“Where’s your bridge?” Travis asked.
“I don’t know,” Dena said. “Hubert took it from me.” Her head drooped from the effort of putting together two complete sentences.
Getting her out the window took another five minutes, and the mile trek down the creek to the bridge seemed more daunting now than it had an hour earlier, likely impossible. Cold water was his one hope of waking her so he half-led and half-dragged Dena past the shed to the creek. He splashed water on her face and then put her whole head in the water but it made no difference. He dragged her onto the bank and sat down beside her. She was drenched, water matting her hair, yet within moments she snored softly. His watch said four-fifty. Even if he went alone, it would take an hour to get down the creek.
The hell with it, with everything and everybody, he thought. Travis began crying, his index finger’s bent knuckle digging into his cheek so hard it seemed he was not so much wiping tears away as grinding them deeper into his skin. Everything in the world was slipping away, and he had the feeling all of it, even parts of himself, might soon become so remote he’d never be able to bring them back, that he would be like those stars—nothing but light moving farther and farther away from what they had once been.
He decided to put her on the front porch and be done with it. Dena muttered that she was cold as he dragged her back up the bank. When the land leveled out Travis paused to catch his breath. He raised his flashlight and saw the flayed animal hides on the shed’s back wall. Then he saw the marijuana. The plants were no more than six inches high, nothing like last August’s tall thick greening, but they grew in the same place, the same configuration of rows.
Travis kept his upper body still as he checked the earth around his feet. But no steel spring tensed under him. He searched the ground with the flashlight before each step, staying on grass and walking wide of the tilled soil. Not hurrying despite his legs trembling from supporting two bodies. He finally got to the porch and laid Dena on the steps.
She opened her eyes.
“You’re leaving me, aren’t you?”
He would have if she had not spoken.
“I don’t know yet,” Travis said, and walked over to the pickup. No key was in the ignition so he checked the car. The key was in it and Travis immediately wished it hadn’t been because now he had a choice. The breeze had a damp feel to it, and Travis looked up and saw the last stars had been rinsed from the sky. Out near the creek a barn owl hooted. Nothing but the dark answered. He walked around to the passenger door, the hinge emitting a whine as it slowly opened. He helped Dena into the car and closed the passenger door just enough to hear a click.
Tears still wet his cheeks but he no longer wiped them away. It seemed more had happened in the last twelve hours than the whole rest of his life and none of it was good. Travis tried to imagine a way things could be straightened out. Maybe he was too tired or too hung over but he couldn’t even imagine such a scenario. Nothing left to lose, just like that song on the radio said. Travis whispered the words again and again as he walked back to the shed and searched inside until he found a hoe. He went around back, using the hoe to poke the tilled ground around the plants. No steel leaped from the soil to snatch the wood handle. Travis aimed the blade and chopped at the marijuana like it was a nest of copperheads. Not one plant remained rooted when he threw down the hoe.
He went back and knelt beside the pickup, cutting into the rubber with his pocketknife until the tire hissed and slowly sagged. Not much more meanness I can do to them, Travis thought as he closed the knife, knowing it was a good thing for the Toomeys that Shank’s matches weren’t in his pocket.
When he got in the car, Dena moaned softly and leaned her head against his shoulder. His hand was on the key but he didn’t turn it. For all he knew the car might not start at all. Two tries, he told himself, then I make a run for the creek.
But the engine started. He turned the car around and headed down the drive, a gray sunless dawn already seeping in through the trees. He looked in the rearview mirror and did not see the front door fling open and he reckoned the Toomeys drunk as Dena had said. He drove toward the river, glancing nervously in the rearview mirror.
His truck was at the bridge, keys on the right front tire where Shank said they’d be. Travis got Dena inside, then stepped up to the bridge railing. He smelled the creosote on the thick pine beams that held him above the water, the same smell as railroad cross ties. He threw Carlton Toomey’s key into the creek. For a few moments he stared at where the key had splashed, then let his eyes follow
the stream to where it disappeared into a stand of white oak and poplar. In the oaks mistletoe floated among the limbs like green snagged balloons. A gust of wind shook a flock of sparrows from the tallest poplar like an instantaneous unleafing, the birds quickly regathering in midair and flying away. Travis wondered if they were lucky enough to know where they were headed or if it was just something decided by what weather or field or big tree they encountered.
“Where we going?” Dena asked when he got in, her eyes closed as she spoke.
He turned the ignition and pressed the gas so the engine might stammer and catch hold, but he did not reach for the gearshift.
“I don’t know,” Travis said. “I didn’t figure us to get this far.”
For a few moments he thought he might not go anywhere, just wait for the Toomeys to come, go ahead and get whatever they would do to him over and done with.
“Go to Leonard’s,” Dena said.
“OK,” he said, because he could think of no alternative.
My frend Joshua Candler passed this evening neer suppertime. I
witnessed his final mortal breaths. His aggitation was lessoned
neer the end, a good death. Burried here at Big Creek Gap with
all Cristian writes. If it be the Lord’s faver to have me die I pray
you who find this leger get it to his wife Mrs. Emily Candler in
Marshall North Carlina.
FOURTEEN
When Travis had not come back by 6 A.M., Leonard was unsure what he should do, being neither parent nor guardian. He called the hospital but there had been no overnight casualties from car wrecks. There seemed nothing else to do after that but stay put in case Travis, or someone calling about Travis, telephoned.
When the pickup finally appeared, Leonard chided himself for getting so worried. Then Travis and Dena got out and stood before him. Both reeked of vomit and alcohol. Travis’s face was chalk white, his usually clear eyes webbed with red veins as if all the blood had drained from the rest of his face to pool there. Dena looked worse, hair greasy and matted, face bruised. A full minute passed as Leonard waited for Dena or Travis to speak, to begin to explain. The surrounding woods seemed to listen as well, no raucous crows or chattering squirrels, even the spring peepers silent.
