The garbage truck came up beside the playground with a hiss and a sound of scraping metal. Some of the little boys stopped to watch, but Mistie only looked at it, then back at Valerie, who was heading for the sliding board.
“Hot, Valerie!” Mistie warned. “Don’t burn your legs!”
The garbage truck’s steel arms lifted the three Dumpsters in turn, the contents dropping into the huge maw on its back. Then the driver climbed out and opened the gate to the playground and strode to the back door where the extra bags and cans were strewn. He complained loud enough for everyone to hear, though it didn’t seem like anyone cared much.
“Put the trash where it belongs next time! I don’t get paid extra to lug this stinking crap to my truck!”
One of the teenaged baby-sitters, under the tree with a boyfriend, said loud enough for the trash man to hear, “You come when you’re supposed to it wouldn’t get all overflowing like that!”
No more words were exchanged. The garbage truck wheezed and thumped, then drove away.
Mistie went to the sand box while Valerie sat on the bottom of the slide and tried to catch a fly. The sand box was fun, except when one of the stray cats of the neighborhood used it as a litter box. Mistie found a cracked plastic shovel and she began to make a castle. The sand at the top was dry and didn’t stick together, but the sand underneath was damp from old rains and stuck together really good. Mistie dug up the wet sand and used her hands to claw all around to make the castle moat. She’d seen a T.V. show where a queen lived in a castle and the castle had a moat around it, full of snakes and snapping turtles and other things with teeth. It was a funny show, a cartoon, and the prince was so clumsy he kept falling into the moat and the queen kept pulling him out with her silk curtains. After the moat, Mistie formed the castle. A bucket would have been good to use, one little girl who played in the sand box a lot had a bucket but she’d taken it in. Mistie had to use her hands. But patiently she scooped and patted, pausing on occasion to pick a stone from outside the sand box to decorate the walls. Some dandelions grew in a grassy path by the sandbox; Mistie popped off the yellow blossoms and covered the top of the castle with them. She sat back on her heels and smiled.
“Valerie, look!” she said, turning toward the slide.
Valerie was not on the bottom of the slide. Mistie hopped to her feet, brushed sand off her knees and her bottom, and glanced around. She didn’t see Valerie.
“Valerie?”
She trotted over to the slide and looked at the ladder, but her sister wasn’t there, neither was she sitting in the shade beneath the slide.
Mistie stomped her foot. “Valerie, quit hiding from me!”
Up the bank behind the playground, a lazy freight train ambled by, clacking and clicking. Mistie called over the noise to the baby-sitter under the tree.
“Have you seen Valerie?”
The baby-sitter waved her over, unable to hear over the noise. “What did you say?” said the girl, squinting in the sun. Her boyfriend had his arm around her waist.
Mistie felt funny now. Her mouth was dry and her chest felt like someone was jumping up and down on it. “Have you seen Valerie?”
The baby-sitter took a drag on her cigarette and passed it to her boyfriend. “Valerie? That little girl with hair like yours? No.”
“She’s my sister.”
“So?” said the boyfriend around the smoke. “You lose your sister, that’s your problem, not ours.”
The baby-sitter shrugged like she agreed with the boyfriend. Mistie spun on her toe and looked at all four corners of the playground. Amid the few other children, there was no Valerie.
Then she saw the open gate. The garbage man had come for the trash, but had left the chain-link gate wide open. Mistie ran for the gate, laced her fingers through the wire and stared at the lot where the Dumpsters and the cars were parked. “Valerie!” she called. “You get yourself back here or we’re gonna get a whippin’!”
Valerie didn’t jump up, laughing, from behind a car. She didn’t peer, grinning and giggling, from behind a Dumpster. Mistie went out in the lot, her heart pounding now so hard she could hear it in her ears and feel it in her neck. The lot was hot, still steaming from the afternoon sun; starlings pecked at the dust and squawked at each other.
“Valerie, damn it, come here!” Mistie used her Daddy’s word. Daddy could get Valerie to behave when nobody else could. But Valerie didn’t come.
Mistie walked across the lot to the grassy embankment. The train had gone on, leaving only its echo. Mistie grabbed hold of brittle bank-side chicory and pulled herself to the track. “Valerie!” She was sweating, and her hair was flat against her neck, but under her skin she felt a quick, passing chill, like the ones she got the moment she hopped out of her evening bath.
Up the line there was a curve where the track rounded to the right behind a five-story cold storage building. Down the line it ran straight for a pretty long ways between rows of other apartment buildings toward the center of the city. Mistie walked up the center of the track, trying to pace her steps with the awkwardly-spaced wooden slats. She’d never seen things from this vantage point before; the playground seemed smaller, its grass more spotty and brown. At the bottom of the other side of the embankment, a stream trickled over rocks and broken glass. There were small houses on that side, each with their own fenced yards, clotheslines, doghouses.
“Valerie!”
Mistie held her arms out for balance and walked toward the curve in the track. Mama was not just going to spank them, she was going to take away T.V. for a long time, and Daddy was going to yell really loud and maybe jerk Mistie’s hair like he did before. Maybe Daddy would call the police to come put the two girls in jail. Daddy said police did that to bad little girls who didn’t do what they were told. Mistie’s eyes welled up at the thought of jail.
She heard a child giggle, and she stopped in her tracks to look down in the direction of the sound. It was a little boy in his backyard, teasing his puppy with a stick. Mistie said, “Shut up!” to the boy.
“You shut up!” called the boy.
Rounding the curve, Mistie could see the track stretching straight again, reaching out to the end of the city. The embankment was taller here, sloping sharply a good twenty-five feet, and covered with gravel instead of grass. The rear lot of the cold storage building was littered with cans and papers and what looked like little balloons. Rusted trash barrels stood upright and lay on their sides. The building’s windows were cracked and some were missing the glass entirely. A pile of old clothes lay against one of the upright barrels near the foot of the embankment.
Mistie lost her footing on the slats and stumbled, then caught herself before slipping on the edge of the embankment. She wiped her nose then sneezed in a sudden whirlwind of dust. “Valerie! Mama’s gonna be so mad! Where are you?”
She walked a few more yards down the track and stopped. She turned about, hands on hips, staring down both sides of the embankment. The little boy was still playing with his puppy.
“Hey!” yelled Mistie. “You see a little girl?”
“No!” called the boy. “And I said shut up!”
Mistie looked down at the trash barrels in the back lot of the cold storage building. Maybe Valerie was hiding inside one of the ones that was lying on its side. Back in the apartment, Valerie was always getting into the lower cabinets when Mama left them unlatched. Sitting on her butt, Mistie slid down the gravel with her hands pressed into the gravel so she would slide too fast. Her palms were cut on jagged pieces of the rock, and at the bottom she paused to spit on them and wipe the off. There were little bits of skin peeled up and little red lines of blood. It hurt, but not as bad as the whipping if she couldn’t find Valerie. Her shorts were traced in oil and tar.
“Valerie!” Her voice was wobbly now. She knew she was going to cry and didn’t want to. What she wanted was for her bratty baby sister to quit being a baby and hiding when she knew it was time to be home.
Misti
e squatted down and peered inside one of the rusted barrels. There was nothing in there but spiders’ webs and a rat’s nest. She looked in another and found the same. “Yuck!” she said, shivering. She hated spiders.
She looked at the pile of old discarded clothes over by one of the upright barrels. Who would leave their clothes here? Daddy said some boys and girls did a dirty thing where people couldn’t see them. The dirty thing meant they took off their clothes. Maybe boys and girls took off their clothes here. But they would get spiders on them, Mistie thought. And the people on the train could look down and see them.
She walked over, her feet slowing as she got closer, because something was odd, something was wrong. Something was familiar.
There were jeans, yes, big old jeans from some man maybe, and a torn blouse and boys’ underpants. There was a blanket that was crusted with months’ worth of dried, dirty rain. And there was something else, lumped up, twisted and crumpled, a white shirt drenched in red; a pair of blue shorts.
Mistie began to breathe through her mouth, short, puffy breaths that hurt her throat and her lungs. She couldn’t blink. Her arms stung with dread.
Ah, no no….
She stopped at the pile and knelt. She touched the back of the tee-shirt and found there to be a body within, and the body was warm. She reached over for the little arms that protruded from the sleeves, and rolled the body over. Legs flopped like little rubber dog toys, and one of the sandals was gone from the foot. The arms and legs were raked with scratches.
Mistie stared. The air around her went dark and poisonous. She put her hands to her mouth, trying to cry, trying to speak, trying to shout to Valerie to get up get up now quit playing this stupid game with me!
Valerie wasn’t getting up. Her head was gone.
Mistie found the head in some brush near the embankment. The eyes were open; the neck was ripped and ragged. Mistie cradled it in her arm and crawled back up to the tracks. She took it home, hoping Mama could fix it. Mama could put it back. Mama could make it right. And that Mama wouldn’t spank too very hard.
54
Kate threw the ax as hard as she could across the barn, where it struck the wheelbarrow, turned it over, and skidded into oblivion in the far side shadows. She stared at what was before her, ebbing and flowing in the simmering light from the wood blocks.
The girl. The severed cat head. The screaming child covered in cat’s blood.
Kate’s fingers were locked in place, paralyzed into position as if around the handle of a demonic ax. Her body was coated in sweat, dream sweat, waking sweat.
She took a step forward, and the girl clutched the child more tightly. The child held the cat’s head to her as if it were the grail of God.
And she was screaming.
“I…,” began Kate.
The girl bared her teeth. The child stroked the head and wailed as if her soul was being raked over hell’s coals. The sound pierced the rafters and echoed along the dark corners of the barn.
“I don’t….”
And then there was a thunderous cracking noise, gunfire, and the voice of a man shouting outside, “Who the hell’s in there? Who’s in my barn?”
The girl leapt up in a single motion, dragging the child up with her. The cat’s head flew away. Kate spun about and stared in the direction of the shout.
“Chuck, go around the side! Watch the windows! Could be that gang of rail riders we heard about!”
“Hope so!” came a second voice. “Got a ‘ward out on them suckers!”
“Shoot first, questions later!”
“Yeah!”
The burning blocks had lit the nearby straw, and a small blaze was starting to spread its fingers across the floor.
“C’mon!” said the girl, hitching her head toward one of the open stalls. Kate grabbed one of Mistie’s arms and the girl took the other, and they carried her off the main floor and into the tiny room where there was a square, latched window. With her free hand Kate knocked the latch open, then shoved the trembling, still crying girl out and into the rainy night. Kate went next, wondering for the briefest moment if the girl might ham-string her as an added bonus, but then she was out, face down in the soaking weeds, and the girl was behind her.
Her breath in her ears, thundering in sync with the hammering of her heart.
Get up get up!
She was up, she had Mistie by the forearm, the girl had the other. They were bolting through the steamy rain, across the black waves of grasses and the confused and snorting cattle, toward a stretch of forest at the far side of the field.
Behind them, two shouts, on the heels of each other.
“Damn barn’s on fire! Get the hose, quick!”
“I see ‘em! Out there, out the window! In my sights!”
A strange moment of silence, stretching oddly out across the field behind them, reaching Kate’s neck, stroking it with cold nails.
Then a blast, an impact in Kate’s left calf, and she went down again into the sharp grasses. No pain for a moment, stretching like the silence, waiting for the precise moment to reveal its full self.
Mistie fell as Kate fell. The girl Tony skidded to a halt and turned about. “Get up, bitch!” she ordered. “Get up and run!”
Then the pain came. It erupted in the whole of Kate’s lower body, blowing apart like a grenade, fierce, powerful, hideously real. She threw back her head in disbelief and agony. Fire raged through her vessels to her brain.
“Get the fuck up!”
Hands grappling for Kate’s hand, tugging her to her feet where she tripped, went down, and was dragged back up again. Another blast from behind and a hoot of joy, “They’re outa here, by damn! They’re faster’n jackrabbits!”
“I can’t…,” Kate began.
“Hell you can’t, ‘cause I can’t carry you!”
Kate bore down with her teeth and her mind, and made her legs move. Out, forward, out, forward, out, forward. She didn’t have hold of Mistie anymore, but she could see the little girl stumbling along beside Tony. The child was no longer screaming.
It was a life’s time before they found the woods and the sagging wire fence that separated it from the cattle field. Tony pushed the top of the fence down with her foot and threw Mistie across. “Over!” she shouted to Kate. Kate crawled over the fence. Her palms came down in a rain-soaked thistle patch.
Back at the barn, another muffled shot, and distant, incoherent shouts. Kate twisted her head back on her neck to see a faint glowing through the window. It’s going to be a Yule fire, thought Kate. Poor cows. All that hay.
Tony caught Kate’s upper arm and dragged out of the thistles, across roots and rocks a short distance. Then Kate was propped against the slimy bark of some lumpy Louisiana scrub tree. Kate closed her eyes against the pain in her lower body. She heard a knife clicked open.
Damn, she’s going to kill me after all. I guess I don’t really blame her, not after the ax.
There was a sound of ripping denim.
The sound of rain water, or was it shower water, in her ear? Thundering, pounding, drilling to her soul.
And then, silence.
55
“Truth or dare?” asked Tony.
The teacher was coming back around, but kept fading in and out, her head thumping against the bark of the tree to which she was tied, her tongue making brief appearances over her teeth. Tony sat beside Baby Doll on top of a flattened nest of some fuzzy-leafed plants, her arms wrapped around her knees. Baby Doll was leaning on her, but she didn’t push her off. Tony thought that DeeWee would laugh his retarded ass off seeing Tony in just Ace bandage and pants, sitting in the wet woods with a teacher in just bra and pants, propping up a sick kid in a torn up pink nightgown. He’d talk about it for months. As stupid as he was, certain things stuck in his brain like a thorn.
“You hear me, teacher? I asked you a question.”
The teacher didn’t say anything, but she moaned and it was a wide-awake moan, not a dreaming moan.
&nbs
p; Tony had done surgery, sort of. Flopped the teacher over, sliced the jeans leg up the back, and dug out the bullet. Good thing it’d been a rifle and not a shotgun. The wound was raw and bloody but not terribly huge. The teacher had groaned but didn’t wake up, and Tony had easily found the slug in the muscle. A few rounds with the tip of the knife and it had popped out into the humus beneath the trees. Tony had put it in her pocket for a souvenir. Then she ripped the jeans leg apart for a bandage and for bindings.
We look like those beat up guys on the American Colony Insurance ad, Tony thought. Only they’re carrying a flag, a drum, and a flute. And they’re standing up.
The teacher’s eyes opened, and this time there seemed to be some focus. “Mistie…?” she began.
“Here, with me. Got my knife so don’t try anything. Shoulda killed your ass when you were out. Truth or dare.”
The teacher sighed, and thumped the back of her head again on the tree trunk. “Not now.”
“You fucking tried to ax me to death,” said Tony.
Eyes closed, opened. The teacher looked up at the sky as if watching for more rain. She shivered, and tried to move her arms. Each hand was outstretched and bound to a low branch with leftover denim strips.
“Look like a fucked-up Jesus there, teacher,” said Tony. “Truth or dare?”
“I don’t…,” said the teacher. “Mistie. Is Mistie all right?”
Tony looked at Baby Doll. She was awake, but silent, curled up into her own knees, leaning on Tony’s shoulder. Her pale hair hung in a sheet around her face in a waterfall of yellow. Her body wasn’t as hot as it had been, but she still looked sick.
“I was shot,” said the teacher, seeming surprised by the sudden realization. She bolted upright against her restraints. “Oh my God, shot.”
“Not anymore,” said Tony. “I got it out. Call me Mark Green. I shoulda left it in, shoulda let you die, shoulda killed you like you tried to kill me.”
Tony and the teacher studied each other for a long minute, and then the teacher broke the stare and looked at the ground. She looked tired, beat.
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