“Wonder where’d he get that armor from?”
Chapter 10
COYOTES HOWLED past dawn, howled from far crags and ridges and down the valley to the end of the rut road where the school bus stopped. Ree, Sonny, and Harold stood next to the county blacktop that led everywhere, beside white levees the plows had built with scraped-aside snow. The morning was clear but bone-cracking cold, and maybe the weather had kept those coyotes from doing what had to be done in the night so they carried on into the day. Wild crooning yips and moans beneath a sun that warmed nothing. Ree kept the boys huddled close together, watched the breath spewing from their mouths like those little clouds that carried words of thought in cartoons. Harold’s cloud might say, “Hope they don’t eat people much.” And Sonny’s, “Got’ny more of that syrup?”
The Junction School sat six miles distant, next to the main road that led to West Table. The bus was like a big bus but cut short, not half the size. It was yellow with black warnings painted front and back and carried maybe a dozen or a few more kids each day. It stopped at rut roads, skinny rock lanes, certain open spaces between trees. A lot of the kids were cousins to some vague degree, but that didn’t keep them from roughhousing, name-calling, and all the rest. A couple times a week it seemed the bus ride got out of control and Mr. Egan would pull over and swat somebody.
Harold said, “Could be we should set food out, Ree.”
“For them coyotes? Nah. Don’t fret. Not much chance they’ll eat you.”
“Wouldn’t be no chance if we set food out.”
Sonny said, “Just shoot ’em. They come sniffin’ close, just shoot ’em ’tween the eyes.”
“But they look like dogs,” Harold said. “Dogs are okay by me even if they’re hungry.”
Ree said, “Settin’ out food’ll draw ’em close—that’s likely how they’ll come too close and get shot, Harold. Don’t set no goddam food out. It looks like you’re doin’ nice, but you ain’t. You’re just bringin’ ’em into range, is all.”
“But you can hear how hungry they are.”
The bus broke the horizon above the next ridge and rolled downhill toward them faster on the blacktop than looked safe. Mr. Egan stopped beside them, flipped the door open, said, “Quick. Quick.”
The boys stepped up and got on and Ree followed.
“Can I ride today?”
Mr. Egan was about fifty years old, a settling heap of flesh with extra chins loose below heavy gray face stubble and thin pale hair. He had a bad leg, a leg he had to drag, and when asked about it he’d say, “If ol’ Four-Eyes Orrick ever up’n asks you to go jackin’ deer with him, don’t go.”He smiled at Ree and pulled the door closed.
“Startin’ back to school?”
“Nope. I could just use a ride.”
“Okey-doke. I miss havin’ you on here.”
“You do?”
“Yup. Damn near quit drivin’ when you quit ridin’.”
“Applesauce.”
“No applesauce, princess. There just about ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone.”
Ree sat behind Mr. Egan. She grinned at the boys across the aisle. She pointed a finger at her head and made circles near her ear. The bus lunged along the blacktop at a good clip. She said, “Are you hopin’ to get in my britches, man?”
“Don’t be disgustin’, Ree.”
“Oh. Kind of sorry to hear you say it all final that way.”
“I’ve hauled you since you were six years old.” The bus rushed past the forest so fast the woods seemed to be streaming. The long morning shadows from the tall trees spoked the light to spin vision from dark to bright, dark to bright, dazzling the eyes on the bus. “I’m a happily divorced man with a shaky pump. Don’t tease me all around tryin’ to mix me up.”
“Okay, but thanks, though.”
“Well, princess, I know damn well how just about everywhere is too far to walk to from out here.”
The school area consisted of two buildings and both resembled automobile-repair garages of a giant sort, prefab metal sheds divided into several classrooms and offices. The larger shed was the Junction School, painted off-white with a black roof, and it held the grades below high school. The Rathlin Valley High School sat across the schoolyard, with its own parking lot, and had russet walls with a white roof. The sports name for all grades was the Fighting Bobcats, and a large picture of several toothy cats with extended claws raking red slashes into a blue sky was painted on a billboard set beside the blacktop. The bus stopped next to the other buses just past the billboard.
Ree said, “Don’t fight if you can help it. But if one of you gets whipped by somebody both of you best come home bloody, understand?”
Ree crossed the schoolyard snow toward the scraped hard road that led north. She saw pregnant girls she knew huddled by their special side entrance holding textbooks and bumping bellies. She saw boys she knew sharing smoke, crouched beside their pickup trucks. She saw lovers she knew kissing back and forth with enough wet kisses to hold each sated and faithful until the lunch hour. She saw teachers she knew watching with sad eyes as she left the schoolyard alone to stand beside the north road with her thumb out. She waved once to Mrs. Prothero and Mr. Feltz, but wouldn’t look toward the school again.
The landscape of freeze framed her so pitifully that she had a lift within minutes. A Schwan’s food delivery truck stopped for her, and the driver said several times he wasn’t supposed to give rides but, jeez, that wind, that wind sort of blows the rules away, don’t it? He carried her past the ramshackle wide spots of Bawbee, Heaney Cross and Chaunk, past the turn to Haslam Springs, and on to the y-fork above Hawkfall. His route and hers split there, and Ree climbed down and watched the truck drive away north.
The Hawkfall road had not been plowed below the crest. Ree came down the great steep hill, walking in the lone set of swerving wheel ruts pressed into the snow. The houses of the village sat in the bottomland and perched low or high on surrounding slopes and ridges. The new part of Hawkfall was old to most folks, but the old part of Hawkfall seemed ancient and a creepy sort of sacred. The old and new places had mainly been made of Ozark stone. The walls of the old places had been pulled apart, the stones torn asunder and tossed furiously about the meadow during the bitter reckoning of long ago. The stones had ever since been left lay where they fell and now raised scattered white humps across three acres. The new places had smoke churning from chimneys and footprints in their yards.
Keening blue wind was bringing weather back into the sky, dark clouds gathering at the edge of sight, carrying frosty wet for later. A fat brown dog came waddling through tummy-deep snow to investigate Ree, sniffed and barked his findings until three more dogs came springing across the road to bounce around her. She was escorted by frisky mutts as she walked past the meadow of the old fallen walls and into the village. The low stone houses had short front porches and tall skinny windows. Most places still had two front doors in accordance with certain readings of Scripture, one door for men, the other for women, though nobody much used them strictly that way anymore. At the first house a woman came out the man door onto the porch and said, “Who’re you?”
Ree stood on the road in a drift that touched her knees. “My name’s Dolly. I’m a Dolly. Ree Dolly.”
The woman was young, maybe twenty-five, wearing a tie-dyed bathrobe over a gray fuzzy sweater, black jeans, and boots. Her hair was nearly black, cut short and smart-looking, and she wore sort of burly eyeglasses that made smartness look cute on her. A stereo played behind her, a song with guitars strumming jangly and wild horses running free in the words. She said, “I don’t guess I know you.”
“I’m from Rathlin Valley? Down on Bromont Creek? You know where that is?”
“Might just about as well be Timbuktu to us,” she said. “What’s your business here?”
“My dad, Jessup, he’s pals with Little Arthur, and I got to find him. I been here before. I know which house is where Little Arthur lives.”
T
he woman lit a crooked yellow cigarette, flicked the match into the snow. She kept her eyes on Ree and her breath and the smoke spun white into the air. The dogs had climbed the steps to sniff her feet and she nudged them back with her boots. She said, “You stand right there ’til I get my hat. Don’t go nosin’ ’round anywhere.”
Houses above looked caught on the scraggly hillsides like crumbs in a beard and apt to fall as suddenly. They’d been there two or three lifetimes, though, and cascades of snow, mushes of rain, and huffing spring wind had tried to knock them loose and send them tumbling but never did. There were narrow footpaths wending all about the slopes between the trees, along the rock ledges, from house to house, and in better weather Ree thought Hawkfall looked sort of enchanted, if a place could be enchanted but not too friendly. Up the road she saw tire tracks that left the hollow in the other direction. It was the long way to get to most useful places but there was no hill of snow to climb before the blacktop in that direction.
The woman came out the door and down from her porch, careful of the crusty steps, wearing a pearl-colored cowboy hat with a blue feather in the band. Her joint had smoked small and she held it to Ree, who took it and inhaled. The woman said, “I do know you, really. I seen you at some of the reunions at Rocky Drop.”
“We don’t always go.”
“You one time smacked fire out the ass of a fat Boshell boy who flicked a booger on your dress, didn’t you?”
“You saw that?”
“Knocked his plate of deviled eggs flyin’, then made the boy say uncle with his mouth in the dirt. And you got the momma who went daffy in her head, too, right? Live close by Blond Milton out there?”
“Yup. That’s all me.”
“My name’s Megan. And I knew Jessup when I seen him, too, but never did talk with him none.”
“You knew him?”
Ree had smoked the joint down to scrap and held it to Megan. Megan popped it into her mouth and swallowed, then said, “Knew him when I seen him around, I mean. He does stuff I hear about.”
“Oh. Well, he cooks crank.”
“Honey, they all do now. You don’t even need to say it out loud.”
Ree and Megan began to walk toward Little Arthur’s, boots squeaking into snow, and the dogs rallied about them, flicking tails against their shins, then bounding ahead to break the drifts. As they passed other houses folks opened their doors to look. Megan would wave to them and they’d wave back and the doors would close. The stone faces of the houses had caught snow in their burls and creases and looked like small ideal cliffs in the wild.
Little Arthur’s place was up the slope, nearly to the top of the ridge. His house was built more of wood than stone but there was plenty of stone. On the steepest side of the house there had been a porch outside the kitchen door but the stairs and pilings had broken away to leave the floor unsupported above a hellish plummet, a beguiling bad idea lying in wait for somebody high to give it a try. Two bullet-riddled barrels and other metal debris rusted near the house and a battered beige car seat had been set against the wall as a summer bench. A silhouette moved in the front window as the women approached.
Megan said, “If he’s been runnin’ on crank for a day or two, you should just leave, honey. Don’t try’n make sense to him when he’s like that, ’cause he just can’t do it behind that much shit.”
“I know Little Arthur. He knows me. I got to find Dad.”
The door opened and Little Arthur smiled at Ree and said, “I knew it—I been in your dreams, ain’t I?”
“She’s lookin’ for Jessup—you seen him?”
“You mean she ain’t lookin’ for me? Ain’t you really lookin’ for me, Ruthie?”
“It’s Ree, you asshole. And I’m only out to find Dad.”
“Asshole? Hmmm. Now, I like a girl that calls me bad names, like her a lot, like her a whole precious bunch, right up ’til I don’t like her none at all no more. That’s always a weepy fuckin’ time when that time happens.” Little Arthur was a little-man mix of swagger and tongue, with a trailing history of deeds that vouched for his posture. He had a mess of dark hair and dark bristly eyes, with sparse curly whiskers and bitter teeth. Even without crank in his blood he always seemed cocked, poised to split in a flash from wherever he stood. He wore a couple of checked shirts, one tucked, one open, and a black pistol grip showed above his belt buckle. “Come in, ladies—or’re you leavin’, Meg?”
“Think maybe I’ll stay a bit. Kind of cold.”
“Suit yourself. Sit anywhere.”
The house smelled of old beer, old grease, old smoke. No fresh light made it through the windows at this time of day and it was as shadowed as a sinkhole. The main room was long but narrow and a big square table had to be edged past to go from one side to the other. Pie pans had been used as ashtrays and sat full of butts on the table, the floor, both windowsills. A glistening pump shotgun lay broken open across the table.
Megan sat on an edge of the table and Little Arthur did the same. Ree skinnied past them to stand near a window and said, “This don’t gotta take long, man. I need to find Dad and thought maybe you’d been seein’ him, maybe you two had got up to stuff together again.”
“Nope. Not since in the spring, babe. At y’all’s place.”
When he said “spring” Ree turned away, looked out the window onto the gray view. Dad had let Little Arthur, Haslam Tankersly, and two Miltons, Spider and Whoop, lay low at the house for a springtime weekend. Dope of many kinds and an air of excitement came with them. Little Arthur helped Ree make sandwiches for lunch once, and seemed sort of cute going about it, then gave her a handful of mushrooms to eat, saying they’d make fried baloney taste the way gold looks, and she ate them.
“You ain’t seen him nowhere since then?”
“Huh-uh.”
“He kept leavin’ the house goin’ someplace, though—you don’t know where?”
“Got cat shit in your ears, girl?”
When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in dirt until she felt China through her skin.
“I’ve got to find him—he signed over all we got to go his bond. If he runs, we’ll be livin’ in the fields like fuckin’ dogs, man.”
“If I see the dude, I’ll tell him that. But I ain’t seen him for quite a spell now.”
He’d come along behind her on the slope, and they’d bounced smiles off each other in the forest shade for a bit, then he’d hugged her to the ground and she’d felt a tremendous melting of herself, a leaking from one shape into some other form, and she’d been turned about by his hugs to kneel, and her skirt flipped up and Little Arthur knelt to join in her puddling embrace of gods and wonder.
“I got them two boys and Mom to tend, man. I need that house to help.”
Little Arthur tapped a cigarette loose from a pack and struck a match.
Megan said, “Oh, good lord, baby girl—your daddy left you to do all that?”
“He had to, the way things go, you know.”
“But all by yourself?”
Little Arthur said, “Maybe he met him a gal and went off to Memphis. He liked Memphis, I remember. That street there, all the ol’-timey boogie music’n shit. Or, wait, where else was it he liked? Texas! He had a real hard-on for Texas. Probly went to Texas, that’s all. Or Montana—or someplace else cowboy boots look right in.”
Ree never mentioned the god goo moment kneeling in the forest and he didn’t, either. If not for her ripped panties she might not have later been sure it happened at all. She likely could’ve buried Little Arthur before the next sunset if she’d merely held those panties out to Dad and let a tear fall.
She said, “He’s got other shoes, man.”<
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“Then maybe he’s wearin’ ’em just about anywhere, babe—wanna snout some crank?”
“Nope.”
“Blow some smoke?”
“Nope.”
Little Arthur crushed his cigarette in the pie pan on the table and stood.
“Then I guess I got nothin’ for you, babe. There’s the door. Don’t y’all bust your sweet asses goin’ down that slickery hill.”
Ree and Megan left together, picked their way down the steep slickery hill without sharing words. The dogs had waited on them and crashed about their legs as they stepped through snow and slid on ice, hands slapping against tree trunks for balance. At the bottom Megan grabbed Ree’s shoulder, stopped her, pulled her close.
“That’s sure a bad boat you been left in, ain’t it?”
Ree pulled away stumbling and slipped flush to the snow. She landed with her knees splayed, skirt blown above her reddened legs, head bowed. She used both hands to raise a vast heaping of snow she mashed into her face. She blubbered her lips against the cold and rubbed her face roughly. When she lowered her hands melt and snow clung to her eyelashes, eyebrows, nostrils, lips. She said, “I’m startin’ to think maybe I do know what the whole goddam deal is now—somebody killed Dad, and everybody knows it but me.”
“Get up from there.”
“He promised he’d be back with plenty for us all, but he’s a promiser.”
“Baby girl, I feel for you, I do, but don’t do your figurin’ sittin’ in snow.” Megan sighed, glanced at the near windows, then bent and hooked her arms under Ree’s, pulled her to her feet, brushed snow from her skirt and legs. “Come on now—stand up.”
“He’s a goddam promiser. He’ll promise anything that sets him loose.”
They walked together along the unplowed road.
“Don’t tell nobody it was me told you this, okay? But, the way I’m gettin’ it is, you’re goin’ to have to go up the hill’n ask for a talk with Thump Milton.”
Winter's Bone Page 4
