“You ever think about going back to your family, Jimmy Ray?”
“Hey, no. Why should I? There’s nothing good for me there.”
She touched the match to the wick and, after the candle flamed, she shook out the match. “I wanted to be Cootie’s family. When I came back here, he told me that I would be enough.”
Jimmy Ray stared at the flickering candle as if he didn’t want to answer. “Nobody’s willing to do anything that makes us look weak.”
SEPTEMBER NIGHTS in Texas could be just as hot and breathless as the days. Tess laid awake waiting for Cootie to return that night and by three, when she heard him pound open the door, the sheets were knotted and damp around her. She unwrapped them, padded into the kitchen, and squinted into the bright light. “Coot?”
He slammed a kitchen drawer. “Hey, babe. You’re awake.”
“Yeah, I am. What did you do tonight?”
His hand stayed on the drawer pull. “I did good stuff tonight. Real good stuff.”
“Cootie, I found something—”
But he cut her off. “Did Jimmy Ray come here?”
“Yeah.” There wasn’t any reason to feel guilty, but she did.
“Why?”
There wasn’t any reason to lie, either, but Tess did anyway. “I don’t know.”
He eyed her for a moment.
“Cootie, I found—”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her against him. “Don’t go to work tomorrow. What do you have to say about that? Just stay here with me.”
“I have to work. If I don’t work, we don’t eat anything.”
“Call in sick. I made a little money tonight. Let’s celebrate tomorrow.”
“Do you mean, just the two of us celebrate?”
“Well, I was thinking we ought to have everybody over. We could cook out on the grill in the middle of the day.”
“I’d do it if it was just the two of us. I miss you, Cootie.”
He ignored her. “We could sit on the front steps drinking from cans and soaking up the sun.”
“We don’t have any grill.”
“We’ll go buy one. What would you say to that? What would you say to grilling steaks for everybody instead of hot dogs? What would you say if I told you that I made enough money to do that?”
“Cootie, what happened tonight?”
He kissed her hard, and didn’t answer her question. “I just keep gaining ground.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll do something just the two of us soon. I promise. You’re my whole life, babe. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Do you really think that, Cootie? Do you really? Because I need to know.”
He took her face in his hands and held her so close that she could see gold specks in his irises. “Look at me, would you? Look at me. You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Bad things go on sometimes, but you’re good. I’m hanging on to the good, babe.”
The confidence swelled in her chest. Tess would be willing to do anything if he kept saying those things to her. How she needed to hear that she was loved. Her heart drank it up and, still feeling dry, needed more.
COOTIE MADE GOOD HIS PROMISE to buy everyone steaks. The front yard filled with people before noon. The oily smell of charcoal permeated Bunyan Street for at least five or six houses in every direction.
It surprised Tess but, in the kitchen, the boys scrambled to help. One volunteered to salt and pepper the meat. One splashed steaks (and the kitchen cabinets) with Worchester sauce. They didn’t have many ingredients for a salad, but Tess managed to make do with a head of lettuce and grated carrots and mayonnaise.
Outside, the sky above them was a great vault of blue. The sun shone so bright that it made Tess’s head throb. Someone had a car stereo blaring, the hip-hop rhythm hammering, the fun of being together amping in their chests.
Cootie had deemed himself the master of steaks. When he laid them over the hot coals on the little hibachi grill, they hissed. In the dusty side yard, Jimmy Ray had inserted spikes and someone had come up with horseshoes. Cootie grabbed Tess and held her hip against his ear while he used his other arm to skewer and flip sirloins. She laid her hand against his threadbare T-shirt, felt the wrinkles beneath her fingers and the warmth of his skin beneath.
“You going to be cooking meat all day if that’s the only grill you got,” Jimmy Ray told him. “Going to take three hours to feed everybody on that thing.”
Cootie shrugged and Tess felt his muscles move beneath her fingers. “Guess I don’t have much else to do.”
“Tess.” Jimmy Ray gestured for her to come. “Come play horseshoes with us. You’re always the one who works. You ought to have a little fun.”
“I’ll bring out the salad. You wait for me.” She bent over and kissed Cootie on the top of his head, satisfied with everything he’d told her. After she retrieved the salad, she toted it outside to the cardboard box that they’d turned into a table, her mind happily engaged with a dozen challenges of entertaining. After she set it out, she wandered to Jimmy Ray’s side.
He handed her a rusty horseshoe and she balanced it against her chin, measuring the distance to the metal spike with squinted eyes. When she threw, the horseshoe missed. It hit the ground with a metal thud. She tossed it again. No better the second time.
Jimmy Ray jumped into the back of Cootie’s pickup and started mouthing the hip-hop words as if he was on a music video.
In this mind-state, set in an underground way, if you listen to the sound, it has to pay . . .
“Get that punk down,” Cootie shouted. “Nobody wants to hear that.”
“Hey,” someone called from the makeshift table where a line of people had begun dishing lettuce onto paper plates. “Where’s the beans? Cootie said he bought beans.”
Tess handed the horseshoes to Jimmy Ray. “I’ll get them.” She’d forgotten she had those beans heating on the stove. When she went inside, she spent a minute digging in a low cabinet for a large serving bowl. She dumped a huge glob of pinto beans into it. Before she carried this out, too, Tess stood in the doorway for a moment, fixing her eyes on each of them, measuring her life.
Someone had turned the music off. A sparrow flew low across the yard, its flight path straight and downward, like the slash of a knife. Cootie dropped a steak on an upheld plate. He rose, sauntered to Jimmy Ray, and held his hand out to try his hand at horseshoes.
“I love you,” she mouthed to him. He smiled back. In spite of her worry, she enjoyed being Cootie’s female; his position made her feel exalted. With no effort at all, he threw three horseshoes in a row and rung them all. The clamor of metal upon metal lingered between them in the silence, as she thought of her hand against his shirt, the warmth of his skin beneath. She loved the danger of him, the way he hung onto her when she was walking away.
“Hey,” he asked everyone in the yard, lifting his fist in victory over those horseshoes. “Where’s my guitar? I’m in the mood to write a song, something with a mean riff. I want to write a song for Tess.”
For the first time in her life, she felt shy in front of these boys. She cast her eyes to the concrete steps.
“Where’s my guitar?”
“I have it,” Jimmy Ray told Cootie. “I was fooling around with it last night in my room.”
“Get it now.”
Later, Tess would try to remember the last words Cootie spoke aloud to her. It wasn’t I want to write a song for Tess. He hadn’t spoken that to her. He’d said that to everyone in the yard.
Tess had forgotten a serving spoon. She turned around to go inside. Jimmy Ray walked in the house behind her. She set the beans down, opened the cabinet door again, and stooped low. They’d used all the silverware in the drawer, but Tess remembered tossing a wooden spoon in here. In the other room, she could hear Jimmy Ray strumming Cootie’s guitar, probably making sure he’d left it in tune. Tess leaned her forehead against the cabinet for a moment, getting her bearings back. She felt cared for,
and the warm happiness unfolded in her like a bloom.
She reached for the spoon just as gunfire erupted outside.
The shots were so rhythmic that, at first, she thought she might be wrong. But maybe she had expected something like this. Maybe she had lived for years expecting something like this. Windows shattered. Bullets sprayed the house in a pattern from left to right, pah! pah! pah pah pah pah! When she heard Cootie’s sharp cry of pain, she knew. She jumped to her feet; she had to get to him. But Jimmy Ray hit her hard and took her to the floor again.
“Don’t get up, Tess. You can’t.”
She let out a grunt, a lock-jawed note of distress that wasn’t so different from the moans she’d made in childbirth with Tansy. Hnnnh. Hnnnh.
When Tess lifted her face to look, sun streamed like lasers through the holes in the front wall. “Cootie!” she shrieked. Something whined past her face; she heard it zing like a rubber-band breaking. Ammo pelted the vehicles outside, rattling like hail.
“Stay down, Tess. Please, stay down.”
“They’ve shot him.”
“I know they’ve shot him.”
“Jimmy Ray.” She struggled beneath him. “I’ve got to get out there.”
“They’ll make another pass.”
“They’ll kill him.”
“If you go out there, they’ll kill you, too.”
Later when her nightmares would come, Tess would see this over and over again. She would know that the most horrifying part hadn’t been the second round of shots or the screams outside or the pinto beans showering their heads when a bullet shattered the bowl.
The most horrifying part was this sickening fear of being helpless. She kept staring at her trembling hand covered with bean juice, knowing she couldn’t go to him. She hid her face in the crook of one arm and whimpered.
When Jimmy Ray finally let her up, Tess almost flew out the door. The steaks had been dumped in the dirt. The smell of cordite hung in the air. One boy lay face down on the ground, lettuce scattered around him like fallen moths. Another sat in the dust staring numbly at the horseshoes, a red rusty stain spreading over his pants leg. The horseshoes were all three still ringing the spike, just the way Cootie had thrown them.
When Jimmy Ray ran out behind her, he’d dug out a 12-gauge shotgun. “Put that away,” she screamed at him, certain he was going to make it start all over again. But when the passenger in the silver Cadillac that was easing toward them again saw it, they heard him shout, “Floor it. Floor it. Floor it.” The tires squealed as the car made a U-turn and Jimmy Ray brought his hands together over the trigger as the car accelerated away. He aimed, but didn’t shoot.
Tess sat beside Cootie in the dust and cradled his head in her lap. His face was slippery with blood. “Shhh,” she whispered to him the same way she had once whispered to a sleeping baby in a hospital room. “Shhh.” She didn’t think he even knew she was there.
“We have to get out of here, Tess,” Jimmy Ray said. “When the police come, they’re going to find coke in the basement and a stockpile of guns. They’ll take us in for that.”
“I’m not leaving him, Jimmy Ray.”
“What difference does it make? He doesn’t even know.”
“We’ve got to call an ambulance or something. Everybody needs help.”
“We can’t stay.”
At last Cootie responded. He tried to grasp her arm but his fingers fell away, leaving bloody tracks. “Sh-h-hhh,” she whispered again. Somewhere, in another world, she was crying. And she knew, just as certainly as she knew that Cootie was dying, the last words that she longed for him to say.
I’m sorry, Tess. I’m sorry I didn’t want you to have our baby.
There was spit on his mouth as she held him. She pulled up the tail of her shirt and wiped his face. “Cootie, can you hear me?” But he never answered. Instead, as she held him in her arms, she felt the muscle go out of him for good.
“Tess,” Jimmy Ray urged her as the sound of sirens rose in the distance. “We have to go.”
She stared up at Jimmy Ray blankly. She stared at the yard again. And Tess saw everything that she’d thought she was, everything that she thought had given her merit, lying shattered and broken and dead in the dust.
PART THREE
Nora
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The late-afternoon storm swept across Butlers Bend in gusts of breeze, and the clattering of wind chimes and a wall of dark cloud coming toward them from the distance. A bank of black sky approached at unrelenting speed from the west. As Nora watched, flat bursts of lightning illuminated the clouds in sheets from within. Thunder rumbled, echoed deep in her soul.
Later, when Nora would remember it, she would think how odd this had been: As she waited for Ben that day, she did not think of Tansy missing with panic. This didn’t feel like the time when their granddaughter had disappeared in the sky tube at Chuck E. Cheese’s or the time Caroline Rakes had phoned from the Bargain Food Basket and shrieked, “Creede Franklin’s got Ben and Tansy up in that deathtrap of a plane. The engine’s sputtering and they just buzzed the parking lot so low I’m surprised Roy has any hair left on his head.”
How odd, all those times of worry, and now, in this instance, to start by feeling calm.
“We can’t find her, Ben,” she said as he rolled down the window of his yellow truck. “Tansy’s gone.”
He checked his watch. “She’s playing at Erin’s, isn’t she?”
“No,” Nora told him. “I’ve already phoned.”
Ben, too, must have felt unworried. “You might call the bus barn. If Carl Campbell drove, he’ll know if she was on the bus or not. He’ll know which direction she headed after she got off.”
Nora nodded dumbly. She couldn’t think straight and her fingers had begun to tingle. She couldn’t think how to find the bus-barn number in the phone book. “I don’t—” But she shook herself out of that one. She wouldn’t tell Ben she didn’t have the wherewithal to find one phone number. He had enough to think about without her losing it.
“Nora.” He winked at her. “It’s going to be okay. Think of all the times you’ve been afraid and there hasn’t been anything wrong.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
“Of course I am.” And he was grinning. “Hey, on second thought, I’ve got to park the truck at the house. I’ll call the bus barn, okay?”
Nora drew her strength from her husband. Now that Ben was here, they would certainly find their granddaughter. Tansy and her grandpa together; everything would be all right.
When the rain began, it smelled so sweet and the parched land needed it so badly, the drops pelting her, sliding down her neck and her arms, felt almost pleasant. She turned her face into it, water rolling across her cheeks and her eyelids. There she stood in precious oblivion until Ben came to join her in the street.
“What did the bus barn say?” she asked him. And her heart stopped when she saw his grim face.
“She was in class. Nothing unusual. Mrs. Cedarholm said she gave her report on deep-sea creatures. And then—”
“She’s here? You found her?”
“—she rode the bus. She was on it, Nora.”
That horrible rushing in her ears again, and she had a difficult time hearing anything past it.
“She got off—?” Nora started.
And Ben finished it, “—at her regular stop.”
The rain didn’t seem so friendly anymore. Another play of lightning backlit the clouds and the thunder wasn’t nearly so distant. “He’s sure of that?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him. It was the concern in her husband’s eyes that was her undoing. “Which direction did she go?”
“He isn’t sure.”
“Did she start toward the house?”
“He says he thinks so, honey.”
“He doesn’t remember?”
“He says he didn’t really see.”
“He didn’t see? I thought a bus drive
r was supposed to make sure everyone was safe.”
“He would have noticed anything unusual, Nora. He said that to me. He said, ‘If she had gone the opposite direction than she was supposed to, I would have noticed.’”
Ragged breath burned in her chest. At last Nora sank to the curb. She couldn’t keep herself upright any longer.
Ben said, “We have to get the sheriff.”
In spite of Nora’s unease, an odd sense of purpose filled her. “Maybe if we wait.” She didn’t know why she even spoke it. Ben’s suggestion had such an ominous finality to it; it was this she wanted to fight. “Maybe if we just . . .”
Tansy had gone missing an hour and twenty minutes ago. “Every minute counts in a situation like this. That’s what they say.” Nora felt Ben’s hand, cool against her arm as the rain began to plaster her blouse against her skin.
THE TRAFFIC SOUNDS, horns and bells and snippets of music, wove around the voices in her home. As if she observed someone else’s life, Nora watched numerous squad cars slide into place against both curbsides, their tires hissing on the wet pavement, fitting one behind another along the street.
In a larger town, this ordeal would have been peopled with strangers. In Butlers Bend it was Bill Mott and Gene Hansen in uniform. Donnie Crider and Merrill Horn. Why, Nora had taken a fistful of black-eyed Susans and a potato salad to Merrill’s mother only last Saturday when Tabitha Horn had broken her ankle.
“Don’t worry,” Donnie said now, kneeling beside Nora’s chair with a gallant smile. “I’ve been doing this for two years. There’s no way anybody can get away from us. We always find the kid.”
Gene Hansen asked questions about Tansy—her age, her size, any distinguishing marks they should know, if she had any idea where Tansy might hide if she got angry or wanted to tease them. He asked these questions even though Gene had known Tansy since she’d first appeared in the Butlers Bend Christmas pageant.
“Can’t somebody be out there looking?” Ben asked.
If I Had You Page 19
