by Ninie Hammon
“It sure is, Sweetheart.” Sarabeth noticed that even Kelsey was smiling.
A loud squeak split the air, followed by several seconds of static before a voice intoned, “It’s tiiime for Ellllsie Bingo.”
“Come on, somebody,” Ben pleaded. “Tell me! What’s Elsie Bingo?”
“See those marks spray-painted on the ground?” Kelsey pointed to a checkerboard of lines on the grass inside the pen, 10 across and 10 down. Then she indicated a big sign set by the fence. A design of the grid was drawn on it with each of the squares numbered. “It’s real simple. You buy a number, like placing a bet.”
“Ok, but what am I betting on?”
Kelsey gestured toward the gate in the far end of the pen where a small cow was tied to the fence just outside. “In a minute, they’re gonna put that heifer into the pen. You win $100 if she craps on your square.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Am not, am I Daddy?”
The look on Ben’s face was unreadable. “All these people are betting on where a cow takes a sh—” He caught himself in time. “Dump?” Then he threw his head back and laughed, a merry, musical sound that warmed Sarabeth’s heart and won Billy Joe as an instant, lifetime friend. “Not a soul I know in California will believe this happened.” He turned to Sarabeth. “You gotta take pictures, Sis, lots of pictures.” He whirled toward Kelsey. “Where do I go to buy a square? Show me!”
She turned wordlessly and led him away to the booth.
“Daddy! The quarters?”
Her father dumped out a pocketful of change into Bethany’s outstretched hand and she was gone. Sarabeth watched her go, and a sudden lump formed in her throat so big she was afraid to try to talk around it.
“Your girls are gorgeous, Billy Joe.” Her voice was ragged. She looked away so he couldn’t see the tears that had instantly welled in her eyes. “You’re a lucky man!”
“I am, aren’t I. Sometimes I forget that. A teenage girl …” he shrugged and glanced toward the spot where Kelsey had disappeared into the crowd.
Sarabeth blinked like she’d gotten something in her eye and wiped the tears away quickly. Billy Joe didn’t pick up on it. “It’s just adolescence, Bije. Give her a few years. Whatever issues she’s got, she’ll grow out of them. They always do.”
Bethany crashed into her father again. Did the child ever just walk?
“I forgot. I want cotton candy, too, Daddy, and you didn’t give me enough moneys for that. Will you get me some cotton candy?”
“I gotta go feed the beast,” Billy Joe said to Sarabeth.
She’d had time to regain her composure, time to shove the pain back down into the dark where it lived in its own little world, so her response was warm and sincere. “We need to get together, B.J. We didn’t have a chance to talk the last time …” She didn’t finish, didn’t want to mention the hearing. “I’d love to get caught up on your life. You and Becky and the girls need to come over for a bowl of my famous Hamburger Helper homemade soup.”
She saw him wince when she said Becky’s name. She’d been about to ask where his wife was, but thought better of it.
“That’d be great. Sometime. I’ll give you a call.”
He let Bethany drag him away as the announcer instructed the cow’s handlers to, “Let that heifer loose and leeeet’s plaaaay Ellllsie Biiiingo!”
Sarabeth did as Ben had instructed, took lots of pictures, though there was precious little to shoot. How many pictures can you use of a cow wandering aimlessly around a pen?
The fellow standing beside Sarabeth told his wife, “They fed her some high octane alfalfa a little while ago and it’s gonna work through her real fast. She’ll start going any minute now.”
With no Elsie action to speak of, Sarabeth focused on the faces of the crowd cheering the cow on, yelling when she came near the square they’d bet on, moaning when she walked away.
When the beast finally bingoed, it came all in a rush. Elsie made a grunting sound and a brown, viscous substance streamed out at a 90-degree angle from her backside.
Somewhere in the crowd, a woman squealed, “That’s my number, that’s my number!” and ran toward the betting booth with a ticket stub.
But Elsie wasn’t finished. She continued the deposit non-stop, in something like a spray now, splattering on numbers in a wide arc around where she stood, causing an eruption of “No, it’s on my square—see!” from no fewer than a dozen ticket-buyers.
Out of nowhere, Ben appeared beside Sarabeth.
“She get anywhere near your number, Ben?”
“Nope. There weren’t many squares left by the time I got there. Mine’s waaay over in the corner. That cow couldn’t have hit it if she’d been aiming at it.” He took the number, tore it in half and pitched it on the ground.
“Where’s Kelsey?” Sarabeth asked.
“Don’t know.” Ben looked puzzled. “Turned around and she was gone.”
“Sarabeth! Oh, Sarabeth, Honey!” Harmony Pruitt’s voice was shrill. She raced up and grabbed Sarabeth’s hand. “You don’t know, do you? Oh, it’s so awful.”
“Know what?”
“About Gabe. Gabe Lee. He’s been … hurt. They had to Stat Flight him to Louisville. A head injury.”
• • • • •
While Ben was concentrating on the number board, Kelsey slipped away into the crowd. She didn’t like ditching him like that. Truth was, he seemed nice. Wholesome. Not like the boys she knew. But she needed to get away. Had to get away.
Half a dozen white Port-A-Potties were lined up on the far side of the baseball diamond and she hurried to one with a green “vacant” sign showing above the sliding latch. The stench hit her 50 feet away. When she opened the door, the rank, heat-intensified sewer smell, overlaid by a sweet chemical stink made her gag. She felt vomit rise in the back of her throat but she swallowed it down, stepped inside, latched the door and immediately shoved the toilet lid down. That helped a little with the smell, but there was nothing to be done about the heat. Had to be 110 degrees in here.
She sat down on the closed lid and from the inner zipper pocket of her purse, she removed a paper towel folded to the size of a playing card and laid it in her lap. Lifting each of the folds carefully, she revealed the object in the center. A shiny new single-edge razor blade lying on a pile of Band Aids.
Kelsey heaved a huge, trembling sigh; relief flooded over her as refreshing as a spring rain. Pent-up tension, squeezing tighter and tighter, had been building all day and just the sight of the blade began to release it.
Somebody tried the latch on the door and Kelsey jumped, almost dropped the paper towel and blade on the filthy floor.
“Can’t you read? It says ‘occupied,’ moron!” she cried out, and ignored the mumbled words outside the door as she removed the bracelets from her left arm. Beneath them were dozens of thin, white lines.
With a trembling hand, Kelsey placed the sharp edge of the blade against the soft skin there. She pushed slightly and grimaced when the blade sank in. Then she slowly drew it across her arm. She threw her head back, squeezed her eyes shut and held her breath to keep from crying out as a red trail of warm blood chased the razor’s shallow wound.
Two inches across and she stopped, panting, from the heat, which had drenched her in a full-body sweat, and from relief so pure it sang like the perfect ping of a crystal glass struck with a fork.
Kelsey had been a cutter since right after she turned 13. For over a year now, she’d been slicing into her inner arms and thighs to let off the pressure that often felt like it was about to blow off the top of her head. Only cutting brought sweet relief.
Every now and then she wondered how she’d gotten here, to this, and she’d try to trace it back, to find the very last time things had been good, normal and real. Then she searched for the point where life first felt hollow and empty and scary. And looked between them, to find the spot in the middle where it all had changed. She wanted to examine that place, the in-between pl
ace, the railroad-switch place that routed a train from one track onto an entirely different track going in the opposite direction.
She never could find the in-between place, of course, and finally came to understand there wasn’t one, that the good/normal/real life just naturally transformed into the hollow/empty/scary life. Like a caterpillar into a butterfly. That’s what happened to everybody. It was called growing up.
Careful not to let the blood drip onto her shoes, Kelsey sliced slowly across her arm again, crying softly from the pain. Her tears mingled with sweat and black eye makeup to form a dark sludge that oozed slowly down her cheeks.
It hurt!
But that was the point. She did it because it hurt. In the pain, Kelsey Reynolds felt alive. The rest of the time, she felt numb.
• • • • •
A large man approached the minister, who was still wet from the waist down from the baptisms he’d just performed in the river.
“Yo, Preach,” he said. “’Bout time for the circle, don’t you think?”
The man was breathing hard. The early afternoon heat had slathered him in sweat, sticking to his considerable belly and wide chest the white Sunday shirt he’d worn to services that morning. It was now so transparent he looked like a contestant in a wet t-shirt contest.
The little girl standing next to the minister looked up at the man and asked, “Didja go fwimmin’?”
“Did I what, Sugar?”
Gracie’s tongue was so enlarged most people had trouble understanding her. And every now and then, that was a good thing!
“Why don’t you go get everybody gathered up under the willow tree,” the minister said to the man, then turned to distract his daughter. “Would you put my Bible in the car for me, on the front seat where it won’t get lost?”
He handed the 9-year-old the worn New Testament out of his shirt pocket and watched her make her way across the field, past the kids digging rounded spoonfuls of watermelon out of the rind, around the handful of old men playing horseshoes, and behind the gaggle of women cleaning up after the meal. The child headed as unerringly as a bird dog on point to the brown Ford Tempo parked in front of the three neat rows of vehicles, probably two dozen of them. It wasn’t a big congregation. But if it had been, they could have afforded a full-time minister and Sonny wouldn’t have had a flock. Things worked out the way they were supposed to.
As the minister passed by the food table on his way to the crowd gathering under the willow, Brodie Jenkins fell into step beside him. His whole right arm was encased in a massive cast that stretched from his collar bone out past his fingertips. His face was thin and gaunt; the ordeal of the injury and the three surgeries that followed had been hard on him.
“You heard about the Lee boys?” he asked.
Sonny nodded. He’d heard.
“Don’t s’pose there’s anything you can do ’bout it.” It wasn’t even a question. Brodie already knew the answer, but it was just hard not to grasp at straws. Brodie had played ball with the Lee brothers’ daddy in high school, had been a groomsman at his wedding and a pall bearer at his funeral.
The preacher shrugged. “Barn where they got busted was in Landry Hollow, Baker County side,” he said.
“Dang shame. She’s good people, that Wanda is. Worked hard to raise them boys right all by herself.”
The men had reached the gathering of the congregation under the swaying branches of the willow tree that grew along the riverbank. Sonny looked around for Gracie. She often wandered off, got lost. Then he spotted her talking to her grandmother.
A tall, black man stepped out to greet Sonny.
“Hear Gabe’s got a closed-head injury,” he said, picking up the thread of the conversation. “Could kill him or leave him paralyzed. They say he might not ever wake up.”
“And ’course they got Jesse locked up … ” Brodie paused, then spit out the next three words in a harsh whisper. “ … in Baker County!”
The talk died right there. Baker County prosecuted dopers to the fullest extent of the law.
Sonny took advantage of the sudden silence to redirect the group focus. He smiled at the two newest members of the congregation, the young couple he’d just baptized in the river.
“We’re not a real formal church, as I’m sure you’ve seen by now,” he began.
“You probably picked up on that when we passed ’round that hubcap to take up the collection,” Brodie said and everybody laughed. He’d always been a joker. Since his accident, though, his humor seemed forced. It was obvious he was still suffering a lot of pain, but he wasn’t the kind of man to complain.
“And we have this little tradition,” Sonny continued. “It’s our way of letting you know that you’re family now.”
The 50 or so people stood when Sonny nodded, stepped forward to form a circle around the young couple whose hair was still wet with river water.
“Why don’t you start,” Sonny said to the tall, gawky man standing to his left.
“I’m Will Dunlap,” he said. “This here’s my wife, Margie. Two of my three girls are here, but Shelly … ”
Shelly was Gabe Lee’s girlfriend. Everybody knew she was at the hospital in Louisville. “I drive a school bus for a living but I’m real handy with engines. I can fix most anything runs on gasoline. So if you ever need help, your car won’t start or your muffler comes loose or anything like that, just give me a call and I’ll see what I can do.”
Then Will stepped forward and handed the couple an envelope. Inside it was a card, like a Christmas card, with a little-kid-drawn picture of a car on the front. The elementary-age Sunday School class had supplied cards for the whole congregation. Will’s name, address and phone number were printed in large block letters on the inside.
And so it went around the circle.
“I work at GE in Louisville, but I’m a fair enough plumber,” said a middle-aged man with a narrow face and bushy eyebrows. “So if you ever get a clogged sink, or your toilet’s overflowing … ”
“I teach piano lessons … ” said an elderly woman with her white hair in a bun.
“I’m unemployed right now,” said a tall, broad-shouldered man. “But I’m strong’s an ox. You need to move sumpin’—a piano or a frigerator or a chifferobe… ”
Sonny stood back from the circle and watched the newly-wed couple, whose eyes were wide with wonder. He loved the old church’s traditions, especially this one. In some ways, it felt as profound as the baptism itself. The young man and woman had come up out of the water clean new creations, members of God’s family in Heaven. Sitting here together, holding hands and smiling, they were being welcomed as new members of the Church, God’s family on earth.
“Ya’ll know me and what I do,” Sonny stepped forward after the person to his right finished speaking. “I wear a couple of hats that seem real different to some people. But they’re not different at all, at least not as I see it.” He smiled, reached into the same shirt pocket where he’d kept his New Testament and pulled out an envelope. “If you’re ever in trouble, this is how to reach me.”
He handed the young man a card like the others, with his name, address and phone number on the inside. A child’s drawing of a cross and a star decorated the front. “I’ll help you any way I can. That’s my calling as ‘Preach.’ He turned to grin at Brodie and Will, who’d given him the nickname years ago. “’Course it’s also my job, which is the calling I get paid for.”
He reached into his other shirt pocket, opposite the one where he carried his New Testament, took out a badge and pinned it to the front of his shirt. It was a gold star emblazoned with the words: “Callison County Sheriff Sonny Tackett.”
Chapter 8
Jimmy Dan Puckett figured to walk out of the courthouse this morning a free man, and it was about danged time, too! He hadn’t been able to make bail so he’d been sitting over there in a jail cell for four months, ever since they busted him where he’d camped out on the creek bank to look out for the weed he and hi
s partners had planted in the edge of a meadow about 50 yards away.
He’d been at the campsite for a couple days to make sure the two dozen plants they’d pulled up out of another doper’s seedling bed had taken root.
He’d been sleeping in his pickup truck, had just got up and stretched, built a fire and made a pot of coffee. He was about to pour himself a cup and smoke a cigarette when he heard them coming, but it was too late by then. The sheriff came stomping out of the woods with two deputies and some real pale guy in a suit.
J.D.’d dropped the coffee cup, turned and bolted around the side of his truck and into the woods by the creek. He didn’t know if they saw him or not so he just kept running until his side hurt so bad he couldn’t run any more, and he looked back and didn’t see anybody. So he sat where he’d collapsed in the weeds under a sumac, panting, and tried to think.
What was he going to do? All the sheriff had to do was kick back and wait. Jimmy Dan’s truck was right there, and sooner or later he’d have to go back for it. Or leave it where it was and have them check out the license plate and come looking for him later. Either way, they had him. He stuck his hand in his overalls pocket hoping to snag a cigarette, though he knew he’d left them on the ground by the coffee pot, and pulled out a bunch of lint, a quarter, a safety pin, a nut, bolt and washer off his bathroom sink, and a 6-foot length of fishing line.
Then he sat there in the weeds for a long time figuring out what he was going to do.
• • • • •
Sarabeth saw the sheriff pass by on the wide expanse of marble-floored hallway outside the courtroom where she’d stopped off to watch a few minutes of the Monday morning proceedings in district court. She slipped out and caught him as he was heading up the nearest of the two sets of stone stairs at each end of the courthouse.
“Sheriff Tackett.”
Sonny stopped and turned toward her. He was taller than she remembered but just as tough-looking. Built like a professional wrestler, he had huge, muscular arms and a head that almost seemed to rest on his shoulders, with no neck at all.
