Shiner

by Amy Jo Burns

  Briar, the storm wrangler, had come to visit. He was seated at Ruby’s bedside, that tale of lightning girdling his blond head like a crown. Ivy watched them from the doorway.

  Ruby had never looked ugly before. Poison ivy sores pitted her face, her lips chapped as a boar’s hide. Even her mama couldn’t look at her, but Briar drank her in. His blue eye slid into her while that white eye vaulted to the sky.

  Goose bumps sailed across Ivy’s arms, and she laughed at herself. Briar had been credited as the mountain’s miracle worker, but Ivy had never wasted her time on stories of magic. Then Briar went about proving her wrong. He cupped his mama’s mintweed lotion into his hands and spread it over Ruby’s screaming skin. His palms swept across her like a swallow skimming the morning creek. Then he blew on her neck, a soft breath so gentle that Ruby moaned and opened her eyes. A chill scuttled across the room, even though the sun pressed in through the open window. And Ivy—despite herself—swore she felt a spike of ice hit the base of her spine. She shivered.

  When Briar left, Ivy took his place at Ruby’s side. Ruby turned toward her, her face aglow.

  “Your daddy.” Ruby’s voice, a scratch. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe more than one miracle happened that night the lightning came. Maybe Noble’s gone for good.”

  Ivy’s stomach curdled. “And now we don’t have to leave. Is that it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. I can see it all over you.”

  That unspoken word—“escape”—hung between them again, dangling like a dead fish on a hook. Ruby caught the despair in her friend’s voice, sought to calm it.

  “I’ve finally let go of the breath I’ve been holding all my life.” She sighed, raptured. “I never knew.”

  “Never knew what?” Ivy asked.

  “I never knew how much I’ve been longing to be touched by someone. Felt. Ain’t you been hungry for that, too?”

  Ivy couldn’t answer. What Ruby spoke of seemed too precious to be real. She didn’t know that the worst thing about a man wasn’t his malice. It was his kindness, which he used in order to get what he wanted. Briar, Ivy knew, was about to take everything Ruby had—every last, good thing.

  “It’s better than leaving, Ivy,” Ruby said. “It’s peace.”

  Ivy released a laugh, dry and floundering.

  “You don’t have to tell me that sounds crazy.” Ruby watched Briar follow the dirt path from her window. “I know it does. But I don’t care.”

  Ivy hadn’t laughed because she found it funny. She hadn’t even laughed because it was sad. She laughed because for the first time since she’d grown, she was scared.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for Ruby and Briar’s love story to settle in Ivy’s chest like a summer sickness. She wilted as Briar’s grandeur swelled alongside the August heat. In six weeks her best friend would be married, and Briar’s engagement to Ruby marked the first of a hundred tiny losses. While Ruby dreamed of white dresses, Ivy fumed. Ruby’s romantic heart had failed her, and Ivy determined she’d do something about it.

  The day Briar proposed to Ruby, Ivy slipped to the Saw-Whet in the back of her daddy’s truck. He’d returned after three days away, and no one demanded an explanation. Noble hightailed it down the mountain to waste the evening playing euchre at Teddy’s Tavern, and Ivy hid herself beneath a tarp next to the pickax he used to chisel ore from strip mines.

  She loved going to town. In the past the parking lot between the tavern and the motel had been a good friend to Ivy while she waited out her father’s rounds of cards. It gave her a smattering of pocket change, a weekly crop of strangers for Ivy to fool into buying her a Popsicle at the Shop ’n Save while she filched extra cash from their wallets.

  That day Ivy wanted to abandon the thought of Ruby as a young and troubled mountain wife. Instead she met the man who would turn her into one.

  Ricky Reynolds found her on her hands and knees in the Saw-Whet’s back lot, where the loggers liked to trade opioids in the ironweed. Sometimes they’d spill a dollar here, a nickel there. Ivy had her fingers on a quarter when a body sidled up behind her.

  “Just how I like to see a woman,” a voice said. “On her knees.”

  “Spoken like a boy,” Ivy said as she stood to face him, “who ain’t got what it takes to be a man.”

  Ricky tried to laugh, his body fragile like a tomcat’s caught in a squall. He’d spoken words that belonged to someone else, a brute who had taught him that the best way to lasso a woman was to put her down. Long and lean, Ricky slouched as his dark hair fought against the wind. A cloud of smoke from a lit Marlboro plumed his head.

  “What are you doing here?” Ivy asked.

  “Scouting streams for fish,” he answered.

  “Why ain’t you?”

  “Just about to start, once I find my way.” Ricky looked forlorn and aimless, and it gave Ivy a thrilling kind of pity for him.

  She smiled. “I’ll leave you to it, then,” she said as she turned slowly toward the mountain. She knew how fine her profile looked in the late-afternoon sun.

  “Come fishing with me.” His hand grazed the nook of her wrist before he pulled it away. “To hunt for streams.”

  “Is that a command or a request?” she asked.

  “Your choice.” Ricky crossed his arms to hide the stains beneath his armpits.

  “You ain’t from around here.” Ivy slid the quarter into her pocket and stepped toward him. “You don’t know nothing about fishing holes.”

  “So show me.”

  Ivy relished this moment with every man she met. The tides between them would rear until he found himself at her mercy.

  “Tell the truth,” she said. “Fishing ain’t really what you want to do with me, is it?”

  “No, it ain’t,” he said, all red-faced and hopeful. Ivy knew then that she had him.

  He took her to his motel room, and she commanded the clothes off his body. He lay flat on his back, palms upturned as if he had something to offer. Ivy hitched up her dress and rode him hard. It gave her no pleasure. She stared straight into his eyes as he dug deep, clutched her hips, and cried out. Her lip snarled as he came, and she didn’t blink, not once. If there was one truth the men Ivy had been with knew, whether they’d spent one night together or a hundred, it was this: She would not be forgotten.

  Ricky was scared, he was kept, he was fervent, he was spent. And something else—he was older than he should have been. Ivy hadn’t turned eighteen yet. Ricky was twenty-four, and no lawman or daddy in their hills would stand for it if they knew. But Ivy was no victim. She pitied any foolish boy who thought he could run away with her heart.

  “Marry me. Please,” Ricky said as he panted.

  “No,” she said. She would not let him kiss her mouth.

  It wasn’t about love. It was about power. And Ivy had just gotten some.

  * * *

  The night before Ruby’s wedding, Ivy floated townward in the back of her father’s truck for the last time. Twilight had hit the woods, and not half a mile away Ruby stomped up the hill to insist that Flynn come to her wedding.

  Don’t bother, Ivy had told her earlier that afternoon. He ain’t gonna come.

  She rode toward Trap with her back arched against the truck’s wheel well and her arrowhead necklace clutched to her chest. Made from black flint, the arrowhead had a mossy patina and hung from a gray chain.

  A pretty little necklace for a pretty little thing, according to the squat logger who had sold it to her along the broad side of the Saw-Whet. Ivy relished the look of it hanging just above her breastbone, sharp and slight. Her father had laughed when he caught sight of it around her neck.

  “That’s nothing but a trinket. Who you think you’ll hurt with that?” he asked as he heaved his steel-toed boots to the floor, and Ivy thought of only one word in
response.

  You.

  With or without a weapon, Ivy knew to fend for herself. Mountain men had done her no favors. She had no need for a knight in a Carhartt jacket. Instead Ivy wanted a phantom.

  She found one that sweltering night, cruising through the parking lot that split the Saw-Whet and Teddy’s. His devil’s silhouette cut into the dashboard of his truck. A green-eyed city boy with auburn hair, Lovett Quick had the kind of name Ivy dreamed of while she slept. Love her quick, love her hard.

  Make no mistake—Ivy knew he was trouble. She’d seen Lovett seep out of room 4B after her father disappeared into Teddy’s for his card game. Noble wouldn’t stagger out until last call at two a.m., which gave Ivy hours to find some entertainment of her own.

  Ivy licked her lips. Naive city boy was a male breed she had yet to try. A mountaineer would never dress like a cowboy, and this boy didn’t know the difference. Lovett’s brisk Stetson saluted, his new Wranglers stiffened, his checked flannel went soggy in the heat. Lovett had stumbled into Trap from elsewhere, the very place Ivy longed to go.

  “Hey, girl,” Lovett called to her from the side of his truck.

  “The name’s Ivy,” she answered, resting her hands on her hips. “Ain’t you got any manners?”

  Lovett whistled, and Ivy pretended not to hear. She let him smile first, introduce himself. When he did, she strutted up to the Silverado’s window, lifted the cigarette from Lovett’s fingers, and took a slow drag.

  Lovett Quick had eyelashes for days. He stroked the side of his door, and Ivy ran a finger against the truck’s shiny white paint. She felt not one speck of dust. Here sat a man, she thought, who knew how to care for what he loved.

  “Hey.” She took another pull from the cigarette and slid it back into Lovett’s hand. The Silverado throbbed in the heat. “You think you could give a girl a ride?”

  A girl: what Ivy knew to become when asking for what she wanted.

  “Depends,” Lovett said. His voice sounded feathery and sick, like the dirge Harper liked to play on her fiddle.

  “On?”

  “Where you want to go.”

  Anywhere, she thought. Anywhere but here.

  Ivy lusted after no man the way she lusted after a chance to escape. Ruby couldn’t see the noose she was tying around both their necks. Ivy knew of only one remedy to cure such an illusion, and it was pain. That was another lesson her grandmother had taught her. Suffering is the only friend you’ve got, Harper had said. Because it don’t lie.

  Ivy knew then what she wanted from Lovett. She wanted him to find Ruby on that forsaken road that led to the razorbacks. She wanted him to slow down just enough so Ruby could see Ivy coming, standing brazen in the back of a quicksilver truck. She wanted Ruby to hear her laugh flying in the sky as she sped up the mountain and left her behind.

  Ruby was about to make the worst decision of her life by marrying Briar, and Ivy wanted her to buckle beneath its burden. She wanted Ruby to taste, and envy, that Ivy was free.

  “Drive past my friend who’s walking the hidden mountain road,” Ivy told Lovett. Ruby was bound to be whipping down the hill by now, reckless and untamed after talking to Flynn. “So she can see us riding high.”

  Lovett considered it.

  His teeth clenched his cigarette. “She pretty?”

  Ivy stared him down and did not answer.

  He ashed the flame and sighed. “Long haul up there,” he said, “and I don’t know my way.”

  “I’ll show you, if you can keep up.”

  Lovett laughed, tossed the cigarette to the asphalt. It flared orange before it choked.

  “Get in the back,” he said.

  From the minute Ivy climbed into the back of Lovett Quick’s Silverado, she knew she’d made a mistake. The moon hung like a scythe in the sky, the deadly kind of pretty that Ivy once loved best. Pretty kills, Harper liked to say. Or pretty gets killed.

  * * *

  Ivy set Lovett on a secret path up the mountain toward the razorbacks. Those mountains, sprawling upward like stone geysers, spiked above the trees in the distance. Over them the night brimmed with fireflies. Outsiders had never been welcome this far north, but Ivy cared nothing for tradition. She’d pay any price to see it rust. Already the night felt rare as the sun fell away, the moon no wider than a blade.

  Ivy thought it would feel fast and fatal to ride in the bed of a stranger’s truck as the wind whipped her hair. Instead she felt a quiet panic nest in her throat. Her hills felt chilled now, distant. As Lovett fought the elbow turns and his truck pitched up the mountain, Ivy tried to settle into the cool steel of the truck’s frame and watch the stars blur above her.

  To her left Ivy spied what she couldn’t have seen if Lovett had invited her to ride in the Silverado’s passenger seat.

  A tackle box.

  Most mountain men carried tackle boxes in their trucks, but Lovett’s was a museum. When Ivy lifted the lid, she found a different kind of ornament in each compartment. The first held mismatched earrings—pearls and gold hoops. The next housed twinkling bracelets. The third had platinum necklace pendants, an opal ring. Like someone trapping butterflies in jars, Lovett was out to collect pretty things.

  In the back of Lovett’s truck, Ivy clung to her necklace. She knew she was in trouble, and so was Ruby. For the first time in her life, Ivy wished she’d never dared to dream of what lay beyond her mountain.

  * * *

  The Silverado was still two miles off from Ruby’s path when Ivy decided to act. As the truck slowed around a stiff turn, Ivy leaped over the side. Lovett screeched to a stop, and Ivy sprinted to the white ash trees at the edge of the woods. She heard Lovett jump out and slam the door. Then she skidded into the brush. Close behind her, Lovett wrapped his arms around Ivy’s waist and jerked her toward his chest.

  “It ain’t got to be like this,” he said.

  But it did. His muscles heaved against her back, and Ivy prepared herself. The longer she could stall him, the better Ruby’s chances of reaching home. Ivy tore her arrowhead from its chain and thrust it behind her. The arrowhead sank into Lovett’s right earlobe, slicing it in two.

  Blood spilled down his neck. Lovett howled, wrestled Ivy’s arrowhead away. Tossed it into the trees. Then he took her by the wrists. Ivy wasn’t a praying woman, but she prayed then. Please, God. Let him leave me in the woods.

  The saddest mercy of Ivy’s life: God listened. Lovett left her in the roadside ditch. The Silverado’s engine rumbled. The sound withered away as the truck headed north. Ivy felt relief, she felt panic. She was safe, for the moment, but Ruby was not.

  A few minutes later, a car approached. Ivy lay flat, prayed for a stranger who wouldn’t see the fresh skid marks the Silverado had left behind. She once prided herself on her ability to conquer, but this she couldn’t win. If Lovett had returned, there would be hell to pay tonight. If someone else found her, there would be hell to pay tomorrow once Noble discovered she’d been out after dark.

  The motor hummed, then cut.

  Lovett had come back for her—she could feel it. Ivy tried to scream, but no sound came out. She couldn’t see the man who lifted her beneath the armpits and slid her out of the dirt. They reached an Impala, and the man threw Ivy into the passenger seat and sped down the mountain without his headlights. The spare moonlight caught his silhouette, frail and mussed.

  Ricky’s profile appeared. He cast a glance at her, then kept his eyes to the road. Once he caught the dull glow of Trap’s city lights, Ivy started to shout.

  “Turn back!” she yelled. “Ruby’s up there.”

  But Ricky would not. He parked the car at the motel.

  “I ain’t no hero,” he said.

  Ivy slapped him. She’d never been so relieved to be rescued, and she’d never forgive him for it, either.

  “You were following me,” she said, her vo
ice gone hoarse.

  “You’re lucky I was.” Ricky tried to touch her cheek but then thought better of it.

  “You have to go back.”

  “I’ll call the police,” he offered.

  Ivy shook her head. It would take close to an hour for police cruisers to arrive from the county seat, and once they did, they’d notify Ruby’s father. If Hasil Day knew that his daughter had left the house, he would humiliate her in front of the whole mountain.

  While Ricky returned to his motel room, Ivy paced through the Saw-Whet’s barren lot. Her father was still playing his rounds of euchre at Teddy’s, and would be for another two hours. Never had Ivy been so ransacked with dread. She wanted to scream until she woke the town.

  Eventually, Ivy knew, what rose up the mountain would fall back down again. Lovett would return to Trap, and then Lovett would leave. He had no reason to stay, and Ivy didn’t care to watch him go. Revenge hadn’t crossed her mind. For now Ivy longed only to reach Ruby’s side. She wished she’d never left it. So she did what she had always done, the one thing she knew she could—she climbed into the bed of her father’s truck and hid beneath the tarp. An hour and a half later, her father floundered out of the bar and fishtailed his truck up the mountain’s crooked road.

  When Noble slowed for a swift turn not five yardsticks from Ruby’s dirt trail, Ivy held her breath, closed her eyes, and hefted herself once more into the ditch.

  * * *

  She raced to Ruby. Early yet, the day still held shades of blue. Overnight Ivy had grown into a kind of mountain woman she’d not yet seen, the kind with enough fast-hearted fury to outrun the morning. Stiltgrass swarmed her thighs as she paced her sprint. Just a little farther now, Ivy whispered to herself. Just a little more. Her body ached to see her friend.