by Ania Ahlborn
Rebel stepped inside the house a minute later, the bottle of Jim Beam already missing its cap. He took a swig before advancing further inside, then slid the bottle across the table prior to collapsing into his seat. He slouched, kicked up his dirty shoes, and regarded his family with a bemused look. He was like a king looking down upon his peasants, watching them toil away at the mundane.
“Makin’ another ugly belt?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at his sister.
“It’s a halter top,” she murmured beneath her breath. “Don’t see no reason for you bein’ rude, neither.”
Michael stared down at his feet. He made a move to exit the room, wanting nothing more than to pull off his soggy boots. But he stopped when Wade posed a question: “You went out like that?”
Michael turned to face the Morrows. Wade sounded as though he was directing his query at Reb, but he was surprised to see Wade staring at him instead.
“You have blood on them boots,” Wade said. “Probably have blood all over, but you went out anyway. Into town, right?”
“Not into town,” Rebel cut in, defensive. “Just a goddamn gas station. No big fuckin’ deal.”
“You think that’s smart, Michael?” Wade asked, ignoring Reb’s interjection.
Michael’s stomach twisted. He had made a mistake, and mistakes weren’t taken lightly in this house. He should have stood up to Rebel, should have insisted he had to change before they went anywhere. This stuff was a matter of staying safe or getting caught. He had put the entire family at risk.
“Are you gonna answer me, or are you gonna stand there lookin’ stupid?” Wade asked.
Michael’s jaw tensed.
Rebel rolled his eyes and grabbed the bottle, holding it just shy of his lips.
“I’m sorry,” Michael murmured, afraid to meet his father’s gaze.
Reb laughed, then took another swig.
Wade’s movement was sudden. He shoved his chair away from the table, stepped across the kitchen, and slapped the bottle out of Reb’s grubby hand. It thunked against the hardwood and slid across the floor, spilling precious amber liquid onto the planks. Reb made a move to grab it, an exasperated, almost childlike yelp escaping his throat, but Wade gave him a shove back into his chair.
“You mean to tell me that goin’ to the gas station was Michael’s idea?” Wade asked. “You tryin’ to lie to me about that?”
Reb bared his teeth at his father and pushed him aside, snatching the bottle off the floor. He stared at it, wild-eyed. Only a fourth of the way full now. “Son of a bitch!” Rebel slammed the bottle onto the table. Michael flinched at the noise. Misty jumped, but her eyes sparkled at the exchange. Misty loved drama. Next to her records, it was all that she had. “I had to drive forty miles round trip for that shit!” Reb roared at his dad.
“Might be cheaper to save on gas and pay for it in town, don’t you think?” Wade asked.
Misty breathed a soft giggle, prompting Momma to twist away from the stove and grab her by the hair. She gave it a vicious pull.
“You best shut up, girl,” she hissed into Misty’s face. “You ain’t part of this.” Releasing her, Momma shoved her daughter’s head down toward the surface of the table, as though trying to slam Misty’s face into the wood.
Michael swallowed against the lump in his throat. He pressed himself flush against the kitchen’s far wall. The last time the Morrows had exchanged words, Misty got it bad. She always got it bad, whether she had anything to do with it or not. Momma directed all her rage at her daughter and hardly ever at her sons.
“You really are stupid, Ray,” Wade said. “One day you’re gonna cost us big . . . riskin’ all of us gettin’ caught so you can drink your troubles away.”
“You’re my trouble,” Rebel bit back. “You ever think about that, old man?”
“Don’t be so hard on him, Wade,” Momma chimed in. “It’s just a rough patch. It’ll pass.”
But Rebel had been going through that rough patch for as long as Michael could remember. It had been easier to steal booze as kids. Nobody expected a ten-year-old to smuggle hard liquor out the door of their shop. Now the calls were getting closer, the cashiers bolder. Michael knew better than anyone that it was only a matter of time before he wouldn’t make it out of one of those stores, and Reb knew it just as well. It wasn’t a rough patch; Reb was just a rough kind of guy.
“You wanna protect him? Wait ’til the police show up because of stolen booze,” Wade said. “Wait ’til they start pokin’ around, and then you can protect him some more. Tell ’em he’s goin’ through a phase.”
Michael blanched at the idea. The meat was gone, but the bones were all still there, buried close to the shed.
“I don’t want any more of these field trips, you hear?” Wade said.
“It’s not your call.” Rebel sneered.
“Wade, you leave him alone,” Momma demanded. “Nothin’ happened. Nobody’s gone and followed them home.”
“If he gets caught, he gets caught,” Reb told his father, nodding at Michael. “I’ll just take off. They’ll have their man.”
Michael didn’t put his brother’s statement together until a second later: the he in this equation was Michael. He blinked, opened his mouth to protest.
I thought we were friends, he wanted to say. I thought we were in this together.
Misty Dawn stiffened in her seat. “You’re gonna leave Michael behind? Don’t you dare—”
Momma cut Misty off with another rough yank of her hair, this one so vicious that it pulled the girl right out of her seat. Her macramé spilled onto the floor as she stumbled backward. All the while, Momma shoved her toward the back porch.
“What the hell did I say?!” Momma screamed.
Rebel shot a glance after his mother and sister, then grabbed the near-empty bottle and stomped out of the room like a petulant child.
Wade exhaled a defeated sigh and sank back into his seat. He plucked up the knife he had been sharpening minutes before and got back to work.
There was a crack of leather against flesh.
Misty cried out from somewhere on the porch.
Michael’s mouth filled with the acrid taste of blood. He wanted to run up the stairs and shut himself in his room, but he didn’t dare move from where he stood against the wall. He waited for Wade to notice him instead.
When Wade finally looked up, Michael whispered, “May I be excused?”
Wade nodded solemnly, and Michael took the risers two by two.
3
* * *
LAURALYNN MORROW LOOKED just like her mother, right down to her gilded strawberry waves. Her hair was the color of wheat during a summer sunset, blazing with hues of honey and gold. She was ten when she told Ray her secret in the quiet of the backyard.
“I don’t wanna live here forever, Raybee,” she said. Her nickname for him always made Ray laugh, made him think of rabid dogs foaming at the mouth. Ray cupped one of Lauralynn’s baby rabbits against his chest, rubbing the fur between its ears. “I wanna be a teacher,” she said.
“How you gonna be teacher, LL?” Ray asked. “You can’t be no teacher unless you go to school. Real school, not just readin’ storybooks at the kitchen table the ways we do.” Lauralynn had read Where the Sidewalk Ends to Ray and the others more than a half-dozen times. She wasn’t great at reading—none of them were—but she’d practically memorized the poems. They came out smooth and lyrical whenever she’d recite them, turning each page with her pinkie finger raised aloft.
Lauralynn’s gaze wavered. Her mouth turned downward at the corners, as if genuinely considering her eight-year-old brother’s logic. “I guess you’re right,” she murmured after a moment, gingerly taking the rabbit from Ray’s hands. “But don’t you think it would be great, readin’ books to a whole group of kids instead of it just bein’ us?”
Ray liked it being just them. He’d like it even better if their six-year-old sibling Misty Dawn wasn’t involved. Misty was always butting in with
her dumb questions while Lauralynn read Peter Rabbit and Winnie the Pooh. The idea of there being even more kids and more stupid questions turned his stomach. Too many kids, and Lauralynn’s attention would be so diluted that she’d look right through Ray as though he wasn’t there at all.
“I thought you wanted to be one of them animal doctors,” he reminded her.
“I do,” she said. “But you gotta go to school for that too; and if I’m gonna go to school, I may as well be two things instead of one.”
Had anyone else made that declaration, he would have rolled his eyes. But Lauralynn was the smartest person he had ever met. She could do anything, and for the first time, the idea put fear in his heart. He swallowed hard as Lauralynn kissed the top of the bunny’s head and then released it back into its elevated cage.
“Do you think I can be a teacher?” she asked, giving her brother a questioning glance. But before Ray had a chance to answer, to tell her that maybe it wasn’t the best idea, because it meant she’d have to leave him behind, Momma stepped onto the back porch and yelled.
“Girl!” Her voice carried across the expanse of the yard, and the light immediately left Lauralynn’s eyes. “You do the dishes like I told ya, or are my eyes playin’ tricks on me?!”
Lauralynn shot Ray a wide-eyed look, which Ray returned in kind. Ray had been the one who had wanted to play outside despite Lauralynn’s chores. He was the one who had talked her into feeding the bunnies, just for a few minutes, before she cleared the breakfast dishes out of the sink. But Lauralynn was quick to replace her frightened expression with a brave smile. She ruffled Ray’s hair and rose from the ground, dusting off the front of her dress.
“I’m comin’, Momma,” she called out.
Ray’s mouth went dry as he watched her go, his fingers curling around the leg of the rabbit cage. Lauralynn climbed the back porch steps. She paused to listen to something Momma said, then disappeared inside. Ray tore at the wild grass that grew in tufts around the legs of the cage and fed it to Lauralynn’s rabbits through the chicken-wire fence. Once, when he had asked Lauralynn why she thought Momma got so mad, Lauralynn shrugged her shoulders and said that she didn’t know for sure but thought that Momma was sad. The answer hadn’t made sense to him then, and as he waited for the inevitable crack of Momma’s belt, it didn’t make sense now. Sadness, as he understood it, brought tears; but rather than tears, Momma dealt blows.
The arc of a thick leather strap was silhouetted in the kitchen window.
He shut his eyes tight and covered his ears, but he could still hear it snap against skin. Lauralynn was silent. Tears would roll down her face, but not a sound would ever escape her throat.
Ray worried. Sometimes he imagined waking up to find Lauralynn gone. Her clothes would be cleared out of her dresser. The small suitcase she kept beneath her bed would be missing. He imagined her leaving to go to school to be a teacher or an animal doctor and whatever else she may have wanted to be.
It was then, watching Momma’s belt slash through the air, that Ray decided he needed to do something to keep Lauralynn from running away. If Lauralynn wanted to be a teacher, Ray would find her a student.
• • •
That night, Ray snuck out of the house after the family had gone to bed. He pulled the door of Wade’s shed open just enough to creep inside. With his fingers wrapped around the handle of an old ball-peen hammer, he moved across the yard to the dog pen out back. Rowlf was an old Russian wolfhound. He and Wade had found him along the side of the road years before, soaked to the bone and skinny as a rail. His white coat had been so dirty it was black in places. That giant dog had struck Ray as pathetic. After a few minutes of Ray pleading, Wade pulled a U-turn and they piled Rowlf into the back of the truck.
Ray’s fascination with Rowlf was short lived. After a few days, Rowlf proved to be more trouble than he was worth. He barked all night, snacked on rabbit poop, and filled Ray’s room full of noxious dog farts whenever the boy was nice enough to let him sleep inside. Rowlf was a real pain in the ass, and he was eventually exiled to an outdoor pen, where no one paid any attention to him. But now, with that hammer resting heavy in Ray’s palm, he was glad they had kept Rowlf around.
If the Morrows suspected foul play when he tearfully told them Rowlf had disappeared, they didn’t show it. They had no reason to think that, rather than the old dog running away, Ray and Rowlf had gone for a long walk with Wade’s old hammer jutting out of the kid’s back pocket. Two quick swings and it was over.
“We gotta get a replacement,” Ray sobbed. “We just gotta.”
Wade had been reluctant—nobody had paid a bit of attention to that damn dog until he was gone. Momma was the one to succumb to his pleading.
“You go out with your daddy and get another after chores tomorrow,” she said. “Ain’t nothing could be bigger than that dumb dog anyhow. Stupid animal was starting to eat us out of house and home.”
• • •
Ray spotted him from the truck after it took a sharp curve along a tree-lined road; a kid, maybe four or five years old. He was rolling a big rock up a slight embankment to the soft shoulder, where he’d set out a line of stones, arranged from largest to smallest. He had propped up a little cardboard sign that read ROX 4 SALE against the largest of the bunch.
Ray twisted around the bench seat as the pickup took the corner. And then he settled back, shot his father a look, and spoke.
“You gotta turn around,” he said. “I just saw what I want.”
4
* * *
MICHAEL SAT ON the floor of his room, his back to the wall and his ear next to the crack of the bedroom door, listening for Misty Dawn’s footsteps on the stairs. When he heard the light padding of her bare feet, he nudged the door open another inch and whispered her name into the hall.
“Miss.”
Misty stopped to look his way, her face swollen with tears. Her hair hung stringy across her cheeks, as if she’d just come from the shower, but the moisture wasn’t water. It was sweat and saline—a ruinous mixture of self-pity and resentment. Michael’s heart twisted at the sight of her. She looked defeated, frail. Submissiveness was a trait they both shared. It afforded them a kinship that someone like Rebel could never understand.
“You okay?” he asked, afraid to speak any louder.
Misty gave him a weak nod and shuffled past his door. There was a familiar wobble to her gait as she ducked into her room. Her unbalanced stagger guaranteed fresh wounds on top of crosshatched scars. Michael peeked into the hall, shot a glance in each direction, and scrambled to his feet. He closed the door behind him as quietly as he could before tiptoeing into his sister’s room.
Although she looked up at him from her perch on the bed, Misty Dawn didn’t say anything for a long while. She just stared at him, roughly wiping at her flushed cheeks with the palms of her hands. Michael pressed his back to the wall and slid down its length to the floor. When it came to Rebel, Misty had a knack for speaking out of turn; but when it was time to speak to Michael, she considered her words carefully. It was as though she had a limited supply, but Michael didn’t mind. He liked to think that her hesitation was proof that she cared. The things Misty said to Reb were mostly barbs, while everything she directed toward Michael was laced with emotion. It was meaningful.
“Wade’s gettin’ tired,” she said after a drawn-out silence. “I don’t know how much more of Ray he’s gonna take. Ray’s pushin’ on purpose.” She didn’t call Rebel by his chosen nickname as an act of defiance, a small protest against her big brother’s cruelty. But no matter how paltry the uprising, Misty was more of a renegade than Michael would ever be.
Michael wasn’t sure how to reply. It seemed to him that Rebel had been pushing Wade for as long as Michael had known him. There was an unspoken resentment between Reb and Wade, as though Wade had done something black and unforgivable. Michael had made the mistake of asking why Reb hated his father only once, questioning why he called Wa
de by his first name rather than “Dad.” His inquiry was answered with a black eye and a kick to the ribs. Michael hadn’t taken the attack personally. Some hurts were just too painful to talk about.
Misty coiled her arms around her knees, hugging them to her chest. “Why do you do it?” she asked. He looked up at her, shook his head to say he didn’t understand the question. “Ray,” she said. “Why do you do what he says?”
Michael frowned. It was something he didn’t like to talk about out loud. It made him anxious. Afraid.
“Reb’s smart,” he murmured after a beat. “Smarter than Wade thinks, at least. He knows you can’t hit up a place twice unless you’re wearin’ a mask, and he knows how fast to drive if the cops are on your tail. Reb knows a lot.” He lifted his shoulders as if to tell her it was the best response he could offer.
“Except his name ain’t Reb,” Misty reminded him. “And he ain’t as smart as he thinks. What’re you gonna do if, tomorrow, Wade tells you to do one thing and Ray tells you to do somethin’ else? Who you gonna listen to?”
Michael was compelled to listen to Rebel. He was like one of those dogs trained to drool at the sound of a bell. But he also knew that Wade was what the TV called “the man of the house”; he was supposed to be in charge. The TV didn’t much talk about “the woman of the house,” which Michael thought was kind of funny. If anyone had power at the Morrows’ place, it wasn’t Reb or Wade—it was Momma.
“I don’t know,” Michael finally said. “I guess Reb?”
Misty was shaking her head, and he tensed at her response.
“Wade?” he asked, backpedaling. “Hell, I don’t know, Miss. I just do what I’m told, you know? I do whatever I think will protect you more.”
Misty smiled softly at that. “My knight in shinin’ armor,” she said. “All you need is a fast white horse.”
“And some armor,” Michael quipped.
“If you had a horse, would you ride away?” she asked. “Away from all this?”
