Ree knew better than to say another word, but was going to anyhow, when Victoria grabbed her hand and held it, squeezed, then said, “Now,
“Next birthday.”
“Then you’ll be off from here?”
“I hope.”
“Good for you. Good deal. But, what’ll the boys and —”
Teardrop lurched from his chair and snatched Ree by the hair and pulled her head hard his way and yanked back so her throat was bared and her face pointed up. He ran his eyes into her like a serpent down a hole, made her feel his slither in her heart and guts, made her tremble. He jerked her head one way and another, then pressed a hand around her windpipe and held her still. He leaned his face to hers from above and nuzzled his melt against her cheek, nuzzled up and down, then slid his lips to her forehead, kissed her once and let go. He picked up the crank bag from the lazy Susan. He held it toward the skylight and shook the bag while looking closely at the shifting powder. He carried the bag toward the bedroom and Victoria motioned Ree to sit still, then slowly followed him. She pulled the door shut and whispered something. A talk with two voices started low and calm but soon one voice raised alone and spoke several tart muffled sentences. Ree could not follow any words through the wall. There was a lull of silence more uncomfortable than the tart sentences had been. Victoria came back, head lowered, blowing her nose into a pale blue tissue.
“Teardrop says you best keep your ass real close to the willows, dear.” She dropped fifty dollars in tens on the tabletop and fanned the bills. “He hopes this helps. Want me to roll a doobie for your walk?”
6
SHE TOOK to pausing more often to study on things that weren’t usually of interest. She sniffed the air like it might somehow have changed flavors and looked closely at the stone fencerow, touched the stones and hefted a few, held them to her face, saw a rabbit that didn’t try to run until she laughed at it, smelled Victoria on her sleeves and hunkered atop a stump to think. She spread her skirt taut across her knees and tucked the extra under her legs. Those stones had probably been piled by direct ancestors and for a long while she tried to conjure their pioneer lives and think if she saw parts of their lives showing in her own. With her eyes closed she could call them near, see those olden Dolly kin who had so many bones that broke, broke and mended, broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead in a single evening from something that sounded wet in the lungs. The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can’t, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup. Yup.
The sky lay dark and low so a hawk circling overhead floated in and out of clouds. The wind heaved and knocked the hood from her head. That hawk was riding the heaving wind looking to kill something. Looking to snatch something, rip it bloody, chew the tasty parts, let the bones drop.
Dad could be anywhere.
Dad might think he had reasons to be most anywhere or do most anything, even if the reasons seemed ridiculous in the morning.
One night when Ree was still a bantling Dad had gotten crossways with Buster Leroy Dolly and been shot in the chest clear out by Twin Forks River. He was electric on crank, thrilled to have been shot, and instead of driving to a doctor he drove thirty miles to West Table and the Tiny Spot Tavern to show his assembled buddies the glamorous bullet hole and the blood bubbling. He collapsed grinning and the drunks carried him to the town hospital and nobody thought he’d live to see noon until he did.
Dad was tough enough but not much on planning. At eighteen he’d left the Ozarks planning to work for big dough on the oil rigs of Louisiana but ended up boxing Mexicans for peanuts in Texas. He slugged them, they slugged him, everybody bled, nobody got rich. Three years later he came back to the valley with nothing to show for his adventure but new scars ragged around both eyes and a few stories men chuckled at for a while.
Dad could be anywhere with anybody.
Mom’s mind didn’t break loose and scatter to the high weeds until Ree was twelve and around then is when she learned about Dad’s girlfriend. Her name was Dunahew and she taught kindergarten down across the Arkansas line at Reid’s Gap. Her front name was April and she wasn’t so hot to look at but she had sweet fat ways and a steady paycheck. Ree had once been taken to Reid’s Gap and left there for most of a week to nurse April through a sickness in her stomach. That was two years ago and she’d not heard Dad say April’s name since or smelled her on his clothes. April owned a pretty yellow house just west of the main road down there, and Dad could be anywhere.
7
HALFWAY BETWEEN Uncle Teardrop’s and home Ree turned west on the creek road and climbed a snowy ridge, crossed a white meadow. The Langans had a single-wide trailer that was tan and sat on a concrete pad behind their junk barn. The barn was made of wood that had been drenched by generations of weather and rendered gray and rickety. It tilted one way near the front and another near the back. Junk items unlikely to be needed ever again were tossed into the barn and forgotten. The single-wide had a raised deck and men could piss from a corner to the side of the barn and a short frayed shadow of discoloration had been splattered there.
Gail Lockrum, Ree’s best friend, had been required by pregnancy to marry Floyd Langan and now lived in the tan single-wide next to his parents. Gail and Ree had been tight since the second-grade field trip when they’d bumped heads chasing the same frog under a picnic table at Mammoth Spring and stood to rub their ouches, then took a shine to each other and since spent the idle hours of each passing year happily swapping clothes and dreams and their opinions of everybody else. Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she’d overnight become glued to her spot.
Ree heard Ned squalling as she stepped onto the deck. She stood a moment in snow crust, paused at the door, then knocked. There was the slam of a La-Z-Boy footrest being lowered, mutters. The door seemed stuck by ice and had to be bullied open, and when it was Gail stood there holding Ned, and said, “Thank god it’s you, Sweet Pea, and not Floyd’s goddam mommy’n daddy again. Them two watch me like I done somethin’ wrong or at least maybe I’m fixin’ to the first day they
Floyd said, “Would you hush your mouth about them? Just stick a pickle in it. They put a roof over your head, ain’t they?”
Ree smiled and reached to pinch Ned’s little cheek but recoiled from his demanding mottle-faced squalling and dropped her hand. She looked at his baby face all scrunched up sour by wants he’d been born bawling for but might never be able to name or get for himself, and said, “You goin’ to ask me in, or do I gotta stand out here?”
Floyd said, “She can come in. For a little.”
Gail said, “Hear that?”
“Yup.”
Floyd sat in the front room of the trailer, lying back in his chair, holding a snow-day beer, headphones on a long cord resting in his lap. He was almost twenty and Ree knew most girls would call him handsome or dreamy or some such. Sandy hair, blue eyes, put together strong, with bright teeth and one of those smiles. He’d been steady in love with Heather Powney since junior high but once when Heather was away he’d gotten drunk and come across
