“Like what?”
“Did you hurt him?”
This was the part where he could really push the story if he wanted, throw in all kinds of nasty action. Hanging somebody in the shower stalls with the elastic from their own underwear, setting them on fire and locking the cell door. Making a gun with a twelve-penny nail, a steel tube, and a rubber band.
But he decided his time as a conversation piece was over. “I taught him how to read.”
She drew her chin back like he’d slapped her. “What?”
“Tush always stole books and tore them up, flushed them down the john. He hated them because he was illiterate, like everybody in his family, and he lashed out.”
“That sounds familiar,” she said.
Half the county did the same thing. Kept their kids home from school because they thought it was a waste of time. Put them to work on the farm or hauling moon by the time they were eleven or twelve. The best runners were about fourteen years old-young, stupid, and juiced with immortality. Almost everybody had a relation who had died before hitting sixteen. Rolling over down an embankment, broadsiding a semi, head-on into a tree and rupturing the gas tank.
Burning moonshine, if it was the good stuff, couldn’t be put out. The flames just kept going for hour after hour. Scorch marks and rusted, burned-out GTO husks littered the hogback paths of the hollow.
“So I taught Tushie to read. Prison libraries have an extensive catalogue of children’s literature. The Dick and Jane, A is for Apple type of stuff; and the middle-grade books. He picked it up quick, quit trashing my stuff and we started hanging out together a little, talking about the stories. Got to be okay pals.”
Night swarmed around them, alive and malleable. Water lapped across the flat stones and grumbled in the weeds. There were still people who brought their cats down to these rocks in croker sacks and drowned them in the shallows. Elfie shuddered against him and it reminded him of where he was. A cloud of her breath burst against his chest.
She looked into his eyes and he stared back, thinking of how he’d first beaten the hell out of Tush Kline. The guards had urged it on for a few minutes before stopping him. He remembered the troubled looks he’d gotten from other cons in the library later on, making Tush practice his alphabet, the guy’s tongue prodding the corner of his mouth as he struggled to spell out Dog. Money. Gun.
Elf had her lips slightly parted, perhaps welcoming a kiss or just feeling him out, see what he’d do next. Shad wasn’t certain they’d ever actually been in love, though they’d come pretty close. Maybe they’d been on their way to some kind of happiness, as much as anyone could hope for in the hollow, before she’d become pregnant. It had shocked them both but also infused them with a tenuous sense of joy. Something to look forward to, a new significance that might count for more than they’d believed.
Shad had walked around for about a week wearing a stunned smile, and by the time he’d finally come to fully accept the situation, that he was actually going to be a daddy, she’d miscarried.
Elfie had cried for three days straight until her electrolyte balance was shot. He had to force-feed her salty soup and clean up the constant vomit. Her mama stared out the kitchen window at the trailer but only came over to read the Bible, pray, and order things off the late-night shopping channel without her husband knowing. Painless Nostril Hair Waxer. Anti-snoring Throat Lubricant with Uninterrupted Airflow Pillow. A four-gallon tub of Dissolve’a’Grit.
Elf spent another week mostly unresponsive and staring through the ceiling. He’d heard about this sort of thing before but watching her lying there inert and totally silent, only her lips moving a little, scared the shit out of him. Even more so because when she wasn’t holding herself responsible for the baby, he knew she was blaming him and hating him to death.
One morning she came back a little and started dressing herself again. She cleaned the trailer constantly, dusting the high corners. Prying up the floorboards with a spackle blade, really smearing on her mother’s Dissolve’a’Grit. You didn’t have to be Freud to figure it out.
Eventually she became herself again, never mentioned the baby, and acted as if none of it had happened. Shad played along. They continued seeing each other until he took his fall, but they both must’ve felt some relief that it was done with.
Now he wondered if enough time would ever pass for him to bring up the kid. If he could tell her what he needed to say. It grieved him to have this secret burden. He always felt it did an injustice to the child as well, without so much as a whisper about it.
“Are you planning to get a job?” she asked.
“No.”
“I suppose you’ll just run moon like the rest of them.”
“You know me better than that.”
“It’s what everyone does. A few years ago, they still had the option of farming, fishing, working the fields or the cane. But it’s different now.”
“Is it?”
“It’s all make liquor or run liquor. All your old friends are working moon, except for Dave Fox. Jake, Luppy Joe, even Tub sometimes moves whiskey when he’s not doing the road shows or the stock car derby.”
She mentioned more names. The ones he hadn’t thought about since he’d left, coming back to him one after the other. It went to show how elated he’d been to get out of the hollow, even if it was only into the slam. Maybe he’d have time enough to do what needed to be done.
“It’s not their fault,” he said. “It’s just the way things are.”
“Don’t you want to do more?”
“I haven’t thought about it much lately.”
“I assumed you would’ve thought of nothing else.”
“You shouldn’t have,” he told her, and there was more indignation in his voice than he’d meant.
“I see that now.”
Naive, a touch too judgmental, but resolute in her convictions. It saddened him some, how much he’d learned behind bars, how forgiving it made him.
“Why’d you come back?” she asked. “You were one of the few people who actually got out of this town.”
“I wasn’t exactly out,” Shad said. “I was in prison.”
“For being a man of admirable qualities. You stood up to that Zeke Hester when nobody else would.”
“My intentions weren’t exactly noble. I just wanted to kill the son of a bitch.”
“That’s noble enough around here.”
Maybe anywhere. She could always crack through the bone of any conversation, reach right in and get to your deepest place. Even if she was wrong, she never let you pull any shit with her. He probably still needed that in his life, even though he’d been waiting two years to find someone he could be soft with once more.
“Shad? You didn’t answer me.”
He looked at her with the blue awareness that whatever had once held them together had already departed. He could hunt for his passion for the rest of his life and never find it again.
“Why’d you come back?”
“To find out what happened to Megan,” he said.
The sound of his sister’s name had an unearthly quality to it, ephemeral as an echo. He suddenly felt thirsty and glanced around hoping to see one of Luppy Joe Anson’s jugs nearby. The need for moon was suddenly on him.
“I was awfully sorry to hear about her.”
Shad wanted to ask a dozen questions, but he couldn’t go about it that way. The proper place to start was with his father. All the rest would be rumor, hearsay, and gossip.
“You’re a very stupid man, Shad Jenkins.”
He shrugged and gave her the grin that used to make her tilt forward to nuzzle his chest. Now she just stared at him, wary and nettled. “You’re not the first to tell me that, Elf.”
“It’s no surprise. You’re going to get yourself into very bad trouble in the hollow. You ought to leave. You have to go.”
“I will,” he said, feeling the rage fragment until slivers prodded his neck, his wrists, “as soon as I find out what happened to Mags.”
