Winter's Bone

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 ain’t watchin’ me.”

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 Gail at the Sonic in town and sat with her in his car listening to thrash metal while the windows fogged. He saw Gail the next night, too, but that was it until Old Man Lockrum came over months later redassed and huffing. Suddenly Floyd became a husband with a kid and Heather Powney didn’t always take his calls anymore.

Ree said, “Hey, Floyd—been gettin’ any?”

“Nope. Learned my lesson on that.” He raised the headphones and held them spread near his ears. “Don’t hang around too long. She’s got that kid now.”

“Yeah, I noticed him.”

Floyd let the headphones snap closed and waved her away.

Gail stood in the kitchen with Ned held to her chest. Gail was thin in the hips and limbs with sharp smart features and freckles. Her long hair fell straight and was of a ruddled hue matched to the freckles dusted across her nose and cheeks. Somehow her skinny body had hid the baby behind a merely rounding tummy and she’d looked more pooched than pregnant until her seventh month. She never did get waddling pregnant and had been skinny again within a few weeks of delivery. She still seemed stunned by this sudden wife-and-mother business and disbelieving that it mightn’t all go away as quickly as it’d come.

Ree smelled the grease leavings in the skillet and the cloth diapers soaking in the washtub. She saw plates gunky in the sink and pork for tonight thawing pink trickles on the sideboard. She threw her arms around Gail with the baby between and kissed Gail’s cheek, her nose, her other cheek. She said, “Aw, Sweet Pea, shit.”

“Don’t start. Don’t start.”

Ree brushed her fingers into Gail’s hair, pulled the long strands apart and picked between them, picked gently and many times.

“Sweet Pea, you got sticky-burrs.”

“Still?”

“I sure keep findin’ ’em.”

The baby was taking a moment to rest and slobber between outbursts and Gail hefted him along the narrow hallway to the main bedroom while Ree followed. Big posters of race cars shiny inside shrinkwrap were taped to the walls. A giant beer mug filled brown with pennies sat on the dresser. The bed was an unmade wallow of yellow sheets and patchwork blankets. Gail laid Ned on the bed, then sat beside him and said, “Been a while, Sweet Pea.” She fell stretched backwards beside the baby with her arms flopped wide and her feet on the floor. “It’s like I make you too sad for you to come see me.”

“That’s only part of why.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Things stack up, is all.”

“So talk to me.”

Ree sat on a stick chair and lifted Gail’s feet to her lap. She hunched over with her eyes down, rubbed her hands along Gail’s calves and ankles, all the while telling of Dad and the law, Dad and the house, her and the boys and Beelzebub’s fiddle. The light in the window passed from dim to gloomy and back to dim while Floyd now and then raised his voice to join the chorus in his headphones and drone thrash lyrics unattached to music behind Ree’s words. She rubbed with bracing vigor until she’d said enough.

“Reid’s Gap? Where exactly’s that?”

“Past Dorta, on the Arkansas side. She’s a kindy-garden teacher.”

“I got to ask him. He keeps the keys.”

“Tell him I can spring for gas.”

Gail rolled from the bed, fell to her feet, and walked toward the droning voice. She was gone but a moment. When she came back to Ree, she said, “He won’t let me drive.”

“You tell him I’ll spring for gas?”

“I told him. He still won’t.”

“Why not?”

“He never says why not to me. He just says no.”

“Aw, Sweet Pea.” Ree shook her head. The features of her face seemed to curdle together. “I hate that.”

“What? What’s so awful wrong to make that face?”

“It’s just so sad, man, so fuckin’ sad to hear you say he won’t let you do somethin’, and then you don’t do it.”

Gail fell stiff like a tree limb to the bed, crashed her face flat into the sheets.

“It’s different once you’re married.”

“Must be. Must really be. You never used to eat no shit. No shit at all.”

Gail turned and spun to sit on the edge of the bed. Ned gurgled, churned the air with tiny clenched hands. Gail’s head sagged and Ree leaned to pick at her hair, pinched between the long ruddled locks, brushed strands back with her fingertips, lowered her face and inhaled the smell.

Gail said in a low voice, “What’re you doin’?”

“Pluckin’ sticky-burrs, darlin’. You got a mess of sticky-burrs.”

“No, I don’t.” She pushed Ree’s hands away but did not raise her eyes. “I don’t got sticky-burrs. And Ned’n me need our nap. I feel tired of a sudden. We’ll see you next time, Sweet Pea.”

Ree slowly stood in the dimness, kicked a boot against the stick chair, pulled the green hood up around her head, then said, “Just, I’m always for you, remember.”

When Ree came out the front door Floyd stood at the corner of the deck lashing an arc of piss to the junk barn wall. The piss hit the wall and steamed, steamed and bubbled brief suds sliding down the wall to the snowbank. Hot drops burrowed into the snow and left jaundiced dots and scrawls. He continued to piss, shivering in shirtsleeves, shoulders hunched against the breeze, and said, “Reckon it’ll ever turn cold today?”

“If it don’t today it will tonight.”

Steam rose from the barn wall in light wisps and Floyd glanced over his shoulder at Ree. He said, “You think you get it but you don’t. I mean, you oughta try it your own self sometime. Get drunk one night and wind up married to somebody you don’t hardly know.”

“I know her real good.”

“Yes’m, girl, you oughta go’n get yourself good’n drunk one night and have you a kid. I mean it.”

“No thanks. I already got two. Not countin’ Mom.”

Floyd’s arc of piss slackened and slackened until he shook the last drops loose.

“Nobody here wants to be awful,” he said. He hopped a little as he zipped up. “It’s just nobody here knows all the rules yet, and that makes a rocky time.”