Winter's Bone

26

THERE WAS an echo in her eye. She looked from the speeding truck, and everything she saw—house, fence post, goat, cow, songbird, or shining sun—had an echo of itself standing at its side. The echoes all wavered a little, and if the real object moved the echo might fall behind and disappear from sight for a second or two before catching up again to stand close and make shimmering doubles in her eye.

Uncle Teardrop stared into the rearview mirror until the truck crested a hump and on the downside he slammed the brakes, then backed off the pavement onto a vague dirt path. He sped backwards across deep jarring ruts in a fallow field, past a fallen barn and into a thicket of dead apple trees. In the orchard he’d found darkness in daylight, a veiled space between rotting trees with a view of the road from Hawkfall.

He opened his door, stepped from the truck to bend and better reach under the seat. When he got back behind the wheel he held a paratrooper’s rifle with a folding wire stock and a long clip, and a shotgun with the barrel cut short and a small white handgrip. He laid the shotgun beside Ree, tapped a finger on her knee, said, “For if they come.” He leaned to her, turned her face up, and looked inside her mouth. He was sweating and his breaths were short. “That Gail girl really saved your bacon.” He raised her shirttail, twisted the very end into a thick coil and stuck the coil into her mouth. “Put this where you’re bleedin’n chomp down on it. Don’t talk or nothin’, just keep that thing chomped down good ’til the blood lets up.”

She could sense blood driven by heartbeats pulsing from the torn places beneath her skin. She saw four eyes and two ears and a flurry of blue drops on Uncle Teardrop’s face. She eased her hand toward the shotgun, located it by feel rather than by sight. She touched a finger to the cool barrel and clenched her jaw and nearly cried smelling the rising stink of herself.

Teardrop reached across to the glove box and grabbed a baby-food bottle of crank. He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, “You got to be ready to die every day—then you got a chance.” He sat in shade cast by the limbs of a dry orchard, staring toward the road. “You own me now. Understand? You purty much own me now, girl. You do wrong, it’s on me. You do big wrong’n it’s me that’ll pay big. Jessup, he went’n did wrong, the poor silly shit. Jessup went’n turned snitch, and that’s only the biggest ancient no-no of all, ain’t it? I never thought… but he couldn’t face this last bust, couldn’t face a ten-year jolt. Plus there’s your mom, sittin’ home crazy forever. That was heavy on his mind. Them boys. You. He started talkin’ to that fuckin’ Baskin—but I want you to know, Jessup, Jessup wasn’t givin’ up no Rathlin Valley men. Huh-uh, huh-uh. He said he wasn’t. Wouldn’t do it. He said… shit, he said all kinds of… If I could do any of my days over, girl, that very first asshole I killed’d still be walkin’ around. But… hell, never been found and I’m… You’re forcin’ me out into the open, girl. Understand? You’re puttin’ me into the exact picture I been tryin’ to dodge. They been waitin’ to see if I’ll do anything. Watchin’. Listen… the way it is… the way I feel… is, I can’t know who killed Jessup. I can suspicion a man or two, have a hinky feelin’, but I can’t know for a certain fact who went’n killed my little brother. Even if he did wrong, which he did, why… it’ll eat at me if I know who they sent. Eat at me like red ants. Then… there’ll come a night… a night when I have that one more snort I didn’t need, and I’ll show up somewhere’n see whichever fucker done it sippin’ a beer’n hootin’ at a joke and… shit… that’ll be that. They’ll all come for me then… Buster Leroy… Little Arthur… Cotton Milton, Whoop Milton, Dog… Punch… Hog-jaw… that droopy-eyed motherfucker Sleepy John. But, anyhow, girl, I’ll help you some, take your back so you can find his bones, but the deal is, even if you find out, you can’t ever let me know who did the actual killin’ of my brother. Knowin’ that’d just mean I’ll be toes-up myself purty soon, too. Deal?”

Ree slid her hand from the shotgun barrel across the seat to Uncle Teardrop’s arm, and squeezed, squeezed again. He turned his head away and started the engine. Dead limbs scraped the truck and broke to the ground. He drove out of the orchard and across the bumpy field to the road. He said, “You’re a mess, let’s get your ass home.”

The world rippled in her view until she shut her eye and let her head loll to the window. Teardrop drove the dirt roads, the nigh cut to the house, and as the truck rattled down the rut he began to honk the horn. Ree opened her eye. He stopped just below the undulating porch with the shimmying rails and went around to open Ree’s door. Gail jumped down the porch steps and ran with her echo to the truck and the boys echoed to a four-part stop in the doorway behind her. They appeared stunned to sickness by the sight of Ree’s face. Gail instantly began to cry. She and Teardrop lifted Ree from the bench seat. Ree spit the stained coil from her mouth, rested her head on Gail, and whispered, “Help me wash. Burn my clothes. Please. Help me wash.”