Winter's Bone

32

THE BLACK parted enough for a hand to reach through and shove her shoulder a few times, stand her up in her flannel nightie and knee socks and wrap Mamaw’s coat around her. The dream did not tie her boots but turned into a truck ride, a truck ride through a white tunnel in the night, with white puffs dribbling across windshield glass and puddling below the wipers. She could smell Uncle Teardrop even through the veil of sleep. His smell and sounds were there, right there, but she was thinking in a gear so low she did not believe she could be awake until he touched her leg and his fingernail scraped a hurt place. She felt the pang through the pills, saw his face, the whiskey bottle held clenched by his thighs, the paratrooper’s rifle and the sawed-off shotgun sliding on the cracked seat between his side and hers.

He said, “Let’s do it then, girl. Fuck this waitin’ shit. Let’s get out’n poke ’em where they live a little bit’n see what happens.”

Might be she said something, or maybe not, she wasn’t sure, but he kept looking at her and his eyes were burnt spots in a flickering face. He nodded, so must be words had come from her mouth, though what she had agreed to eluded her, puzzled her, until a few possibilities came together as thoughts and scared her. She flinched and sat up a bit more. She rolled the window down and put her sluggish head into the cold wind. Places went past in a white hurry and were gone. She raised the window, faced him and asked, “What’d I just say?”

“Huh?”

“Did I just agree to somethin’ or somethin’?”

“Haw-haw-haw, little girl. Don’t try that smarty shit with me. We’ll be there before long.”

She realized with a start that she could again see from both eyes. The one eye afforded only a slitty sort of keyhole view but helped plenty to steady the scenery. There was not much to see except a wilderness of white, white fallen and white thrashing to ground. At road crossings she’d stare for clues as to where he was taking her. House lights and yard lights were vague daubs of glow. When the truck skidded onto a bridge and tires thumped on raised seams in the surface, she saw the water below. The water ate the flakes as they fell and was visible as a black neck between spread shoulders of white, and she knew that neck of water by sight, knew they’d crossed Big Chinkapin Creek.

She said, “Oh, no. Is this really the right idea?”

“Only one I got.”

“You’re goin’ to Buster Leroy’s house, ain’t you?”

“I already told you that.”

“I didn’t hear you when you said it before.”

“You heard me now.” He raised the whiskey bottle and pushed it toward her, into her hands. “Have a snort’n buck up, girl. I been runnin’ on crank’n hardly no food for fuckin’ days now’n I’m tired of waitin’ around for shit to happen.”

She felt the burn in her throat and chest, then screwed the lid on and laid the bottle on the seat. He drove like the road was three lanes wide yet not quite wide enough. He drove the road from edge to edge and fast. The bottle rolled into her hip and she raised it for another swig at the top of a long hill, a long hill she thought they might well fly off of somewhere between here and the bottom. She closed her eyes and felt the swaying, sliding, heard the brakes heave, the gearshift grunt and Uncle Teardrop’s laughter. She closed her eyes and went away on whiskey and pills, sunk into a shallow willed sleep that quickly deepened, and when her eyes opened again there was a farmhouse and a dog leaping at the window glass her face rested against, his teeth bared and his lips frothy inches from her own.

Teardrop stood on the steps of a wide porch to a stone house and the porch lights were bright. Snowflakes churned all around. The dog ran back to the porch snarling and he kicked it tumbling over shrubs into the snow, so it returned to leap at her face and growl. Somebody in a red T-shirt stood at the door, holding a handgun that he did not point at Uncle Teardrop but did gesture with, move up and down. She guessed Buster Leroy. She guessed… she heard the truck’s tires crush fresh snow but wouldn’t open her eyes, wouldn’t when she heard a car horn honk, a mutt barking, gruesome laughter, wouldn’t until motion ceased and voices sounded near and she saw two women and a man standing by the headlights, talking stuff with Teardrop. Snowflakes gushed across the headlight beams, blowing sideways now with smaller flakes that sounded like summer bugs mashing into the windshield.

The man laughed and made big gestures in the light. The two women pulled their jackets over their hairdos and huddled together. This was the parking lot of a gas station, the one at BB Highway and Heaney Cross Road that was also a market and pawnshop. Ree drifted, then knuckles rapped her window and she lowered the glass. The two women had come close for a look at her face, and she knew the closest of them, Kitty Thurtell, born a Langan, light in her bones and a mighty good mountain-style singer. Kitty said, “Oh, you poor whupped little kid, you—them Hawkfall gals sure ’nough beat the pee-waddy-do out your ass, didn’t they?”

“Feels like it.”

“Looks like it, too.”

The other gal crouched to better see into the truck, and Ree recognized her as a Dolly, Jean Dolly from Bawbee. Jean lowered fogging stout eyeglasses and stared at Ree’s marred cheek and fat lip, her head shaking as she crouched, then raised upright and said, “I once had my own ugly-fuckin’ dustup with them lard-assed bitches. They ganged me the same shitty yellow-bellied way as they done her.”

Kitty grabbed Jean by the arm, jerked, and said, “Don’t you get too in the habit of sayin’ that out loud that-a-way, hear me?”

“It needs sayin’ out loud.”

“Be careful where you say it, honey.”

“I’ll say the truth any-damn-where I want.”

“Best say it in whispers about them.”

The women turned from the wind and walked backwards toward the gas station. Ree raised the window, leaned her face to the cold glass, and was quickly gone again. She was tucked into a blackness that was made incomplete by little pale lines of consciousness that buzzed around inside the black. When her eyes rolled open she was part of a cloud of some sort, a thick weary cloud that had settled to ground. Windows frosted and glazed, fog low outside the windows. Through the frost and fog there were red and green lights, and she scraped a peephole with a fingernail and saw a beer sign over the door to a cement-block building, an unpainted tavern with no windows or name but for the beer sign. Ree knew it as Ronnie Vaughn’s place, and it probably had a proper name but she could not bring it to mind. Five or six vehicles were in the lot alongside the truck.

She was shivering, sniffling, and reached for the whiskey bottle. She drank and burped, then pushed the door open and stepped into the murmuring, fluttering weather. She pulled Mamaw’s coat together over her flannel nightie and shuffled in untied boots to the tavern. As she stepped inside eight or ten bleary men looked her way. The kind of clodhopper music she couldn’t stomach brayed from a garish jukebox and two mussed women standing far apart danced in wet boots. Teardrop glanced from the end of the bar, saw Ree, and pointed. He said to the bartender, “There she is now.”

“She don’t look all that terrible bad, man.”

“If you saw the rest of her, she would.”

Ree stood there, stoned sleepy and childlike, with Mamaw’s coat fallen open to reveal her little flannel nightie and bruised shanks.

“That girl oughtn’t be let in here, Teardrop. I mean, it ain’t gonna be three full minutes before one of these drunk peckerwoods takes a shine to her’n…”

The heated room of close withered air made Ree swoon. It was like all the air had been breathed many times before until shriveled and stinky from the mouths of chain-smoking drunks. She started to sit on a plastic chair but felt overcome by the place, the odors, the lights, that music, and she spun about instead and pushed outside again. The wind made her skin smart and she sat in the truck, leaned to the window, closed her eyes.

The truck started soon and Teardrop said, “Shit, girl, even lookin’ beat up I could’ve married you off to three fellers in there. Interested?”

“I think I might puke.”

“That’s how I told ’em you’d be.”

“Man—I’m gonna puke.”

Teardrop drove onto the road invisible beneath stacking snow, goosed the truck to a jaunty pace. He glanced her way, said, “Upchuck out the fuckin’ window, then. As much as you can, anyhow.”

She thrust her head into the cold and broadcast the hot mush of old swallowed food toward the snowbanks. But wind turned the hot mush pouring from her mouth back onto the side of the truck and splats of puke melded to the fender. She hung her head out the window until her cheeks could not be felt and water drawn from her eyes thickened in her lashes. She pulled inside, raised the glass, let her head sag and eyes close. She said, “I ain’t lookin’ to marry.”

Teardrop abruptly skidded the truck to a stop in the middle of the fluffed white road. He stared into the rearview mirror while his thumbs tapped a short flourish of rhythm against the steering wheel. He drummed with his thumbs, looking in the mirror toward the beer sign lights behind him until he said, “I just don’t think I like the way he said somethin’.”

Teardrop clanged the truck into reverse and it whined as he pushed on the gas. He aimed for his own wheel ruts going backwards but twisted all over the road. He was going a bit fast for the turn into the tavern lot, so he just stopped where he was and got out, leaving the door flung open. He grabbed an ax from the truck bed, then walked through a border of drifts to the line of vehicles parked in the lot. They were all obscured by snow, and he walked along the line past two trucks and one car until he came to a certain large sedan. He cleared a hole and looked inside but seemed unsure. He then leaned across the hood and pulled the snow away with big sweeps of his arms, pulled until the front end was swept clear enough. He stood back, studied the grille and hood ornament, then raised the ax and crunched a hole through the front windshield. Snow sagged and sank inside the hole with the ruined glass. He hit the windshield again to speed the sinking, then casually returned to the truck, pitched the ax thudding into the bed. He got behind the wheel and said, “Sassy. Sort of sassy-soundin’.”

Ree saw the tavern door open, and one, two, then three men stepped outside into the snow and watched as Teardrop drove away. She thought they might blast a few deer slugs or something toward Teardrop’s truck, but these men made no gestures, yelled no words they wouldn’t want heard. She faced backwards, watching them until they fell from sight. She turned forward, opened the bottle, had a quick drink.

“Can we go home? It’s fuckin’ cold out here, man.”

“Those pills of mine Victoria gave you was what used to knock me off the mountaintop to sleep whenever I’ve been too far high too long like this.”

“I didn’t bring none.”

“Can’t catch no sleep by myself when I’ve clumb this high. Whiskey works, too, but slower.”

“There’s a few left at home, man.”

The snowfall had nearly tuckered out but the wind remained brisk. They met three moving vehicles in ten minutes, and Ree spotted the yellow lights of a snowplow shoving along the main route distant in the valley. Teardrop left known roads and turned down little woodsy lanes Ree’d never seen before, spun tires up mounds and slid around curves. They made the first tracks everywhere. He finally turned at a flat white space between leaning rock columns, pulled past the columns a few feet and parked. It was an abandoned family cemetery on the back side of somebody’s farm and headstones dressed with snow were lit by the high beams.

Teardrop said, “There’s always been favorite places.”

The headstones were the old sort that turned gray-green with time and often split in cold weather. They split at sharp angles, or fell apart in shards that were scattered by decades. More had fallen than stood. Ree stepped out of the truck to follow Teardrop’s footsteps wending among the graves. Passing years had not rubbed the names to blank space on all the headstones and the name Dolly was in big letters on so many that Ree’s skin spooked.

“Where the hell have we got to?”

Teardrop changed directions rapidly, stomping through the snow, first this way, then that, and she followed him, drunk in flopping boots. He stopped, held a hand to his ear, said, “This is where… I shouldn’t say where this is.”

“What’re we doin’?”

“Lookin’ for humps that ain’t settled.” He scanned the graveyard, his breath puffing hard from his mouth and flying toward the treetops. He crouched beside a headstone, held a flaring match to a cigarette, then blew smoke across the nearest name. He patted the stone, slid his fingers over the remaining letters, said, “It’s a lonely ol’ spot—that’s what makes it a favorite place.”

“You sayin’…”

“It’s been done, girl.”

She stumbled backwards, watching as his fingers tenderly traced the letters above the grave. She turned and felt a powerful need to run, run to the truck or farther, but her loose boots slipped from her feet and flew. She had to calm down in wet knee socks and hunt them in the snow. She carried the boots to the truck, got inside, and laced them tight, fashioned snug bows. She sat straight and stiff, raised the whiskey, poured.

When he sat in the truck, he said, “This ain’t the right night. Snow.”

“Uh-huh. All over.”

He pulled from the graveyard, started back the way they’d come. Their path was rankled by ice clods and cracked branches. The snow had stopped and half the sky was the color of a spring pool and as clear. Ree looked to the stars shining so brightly, so plain and brilliant, and wondered what they meant, and if they meant the same thing as rocks in springwater.

“Can you push if we get stuck?”

“Not enough to help.”

“You could drive, though, if I pushed.”

“I’ve never had a car, man.”

“I don’t much feel like pushin’, anyhow.”

They reached the main route in the valley, drove closely behind a snowplow. The snowplow displayed bright yellow lights and the plow bellowed a dragon’s roar scraping the road. A white fury was tossed up by the plow and made a hectic cloud of spindrift snow that broke low to ground and spewed. Teardrop turned the wipers on, then began to fall back from the snowplow. His eyes kept lolling shut, bursting open, lolling. When his eyes lolled, the truck hogged the center of the road. The snowplow was getting farther and farther ahead, and his eyes were about closed when flashing lights whirled over the truck from behind. Teardrop glanced in the rearview mirror but did not stop. A siren squawked briefly and he pulled over, rolled his window down, turned the wipers off.

Ree craned about to look out the back window. The flashing lights were dizzying and the headlights behind shined fiercely into the truck. She shielded her eyes and squinted. It was Baskin in a green deputy’s coat and official smokey hat. He approached on Teardrop’s side but halted at a distance of several feet and said, “Turn the engine off.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Turn it off’n get out with your hands where I can see ’em.”

Teardrop kept his head straight but angled his eyes to watch Baskin in the side mirror. His right hand eased toward the rifle. He said, “Nope. Tonight I ain’t doin’ a fuckin’ thing you say.”

Ree watched Teardrop’s hand close around the rifle and she felt somehow instantly all sweaty on her insides, and her sweaty insides jumped into her throat. She saw Baskin drop a hand to his holster and step nearer the rear of the truck. Ree looked at the sawed-off shotgun on the seat between her uncle and herself and quaked.

In the brightness of lights and swirling colors, Baskin was mostly a shadow wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He said, “Get out, Teardrop. Get out now!”

Teardrop said, “Who’d you tell about Jessup, huh? You fuckin’ prick. Who?”

For several seconds Baskin stood silently, his posture beginning to ebb, then inhaled hugely and drew his pistol from the holster.

Ree slid her fingers toward the shotgun, thinking, This was how sudden things happened that haunted forever.

“I’ve given you… that’s a lawful goddam order. I’ve given you a lawful goddam order.”

Sounds like singed laughter burst from Teardrop, and he jerked the rifle onto his lap, curled his trigger finger. He seemed to have caught Baskin’s eye in the rearview mirror. He looked intently into the mirror, flicked a fingernail repeatedly against the folded wire stock on the rifle, flick, flick, flick, then said, “Is this goin’ to be our time?”

Teardrop lifted his foot from the brake and calmly rolled onto the scraped road and began to drive away toward home. Ree watched Baskin, and he stood alone there in the road behind with his pistol hand dangled to his side, then he crouched to a knee on the thinned snow in the gusting wind, facedown, and his hat popped off his head, but he caught it before it blew away.