Jenna finally gulped air and screamed. She screamed as loudly as I had heard her and I gathered her in close. She shrieked as we stepped back inside and I locked the door behind us and she shrieked as I put her back into the papoose and straightened the blanket over her body. She shrieked while Carletta crawled across the porch, shouting her idle threats into the door.
“You fucking bitch,” she yelled. “Open this door this instant! Do you hear me, girl?”
I ran back into the bedroom where I had first found Mama, where Jenna had been sleeping so soundly when I left her in the trailer. I closed my eyes and hummed, but Jenna went right on shrieking. She shrieked while Carletta banged on the back door, and she was still shrieking after the banging stopped.
I was alone in the trailer with Jenna and after a time I looked out the window and saw Carletta wander off into the woods. It was still my instinct to chase after her. Despite everything that had just happened, part of me wanted to try and rescue her again—but I could not leave Jenna and focused on her instead.
I unbuttoned the top of her pajamas and she shrieked louder when my cold hands hit her skin. I fed her a knuckle and she chomped down hard and suckled as I searched her body for wounds. I didn’t feel any tears or bleeding but I was not foolish enough to take much comfort in that fact. I knew full well something might have happened inside, though I did not allow myself to dwell too long on what that might have been.
“Baby girl,” I said, and stroked her hair.
She worked my knuckle and I wished I had the bottle to offer. I wished I had one more scoop of formula, but that was gone now and there was only the blanket and the papoose and the two of us together in the dark room.
I buttoned her pajamas back up and felt the fever like a flame on her back. I needed to try and cool her down and carried her back to the porch, where I took a scoop of snow from the rail and brought it back inside.
I hated to do it, especially now that there were some stretches of breath between her screams, but I broke the snow up anyway. I put some to her lips and packed the rest to her forehead and stood there and held her through the howling.
I held her until the snow had melted and streaked her face in cold streams and then I dried my hands on my jeans and wiped the water away. I held her close and hard and after a time she finally stilled herself in my arms.
I smiled as I walked her back into the room, but there was no glint of recognition from Jenna. The fever was in her eyes now and she looked back at me without seeing anything at all.
I set her on the carpet and lay down beside her. I hummed a lullaby, though it was more for myself than Jenna. Jenna was already on her way back to sleep.
I knew I should stay awake to keep watch, to monitor the fever, but I turned in to Jenna and closed my eyes anyway. I held close to her and whispered that everything was going to be fine, though I doubted that it would be. I felt myself drop toward sleep and didn’t have the strength to fight it. I was drained of every reserve I had. I was pure empty.
Chapter Sixteen
The drive to the farmhouse was freezing without the windshield, but Shelton could not be bothered by such momentary discomforts, such trivialities. Shelton had just been through a metaphysical experience and for the first time since Jenna went missing he knew exactly what it was he was supposed to do.
Shelton had seen Old Bo’s spirit in the woods and it was no coincidence that he had collided with the buck only moments later. What had happened was this: Old Bo had somehow entered the buck, had somehow become the buck as it charged the Silverado. Then Shelton had struck the deer, in effect Old Bo, and killed his best friend all over again.
Shelton knew because he had felt Old Bo’s presence as he stood above the buck and watched it writhe in the bloodied snow. He saw Bo’s soul itself inside the animal’s darting, fear-crazed eye, and when he raised the shotgun to end the gruesome labor of the death he knew that everything that had happened since Bo’s passing was not bad luck or unrelated folly.
Jenna’s disappearance, his near-catastrophic pursuit of Little Hector, and now the dead buck: all of it stemmed from that one terrible, cowardly betrayal of his faithful companion. Shelton had left his dog to rot like some piece of forgotten meat and that single act would taint everything black until it was put right. What Shelton needed to do now, what he had needed to do all along, was return to the farmhouse and deal with the corpse of his beloved friend.
There was a thump beneath the Silverado’s hood as he drove, a rattling in the vents, but everything considered, the truck had come through the collision in fine shape. It had been a good-size buck, an eight-point and heavy for this late in the winter, and Shelton knew he was lucky the truck was running at all.
He crossed Jackson Lake for the farmhouse and remembered the day he’d come home from prison. He’d been nervous about seeing Old Bo, was afraid his best friend, and maybe his only real friend in the world, would begrudge him his absence.
He’d left Bo in the care of Uncle Rick, though care was a term Shelton applied loosely. What Uncle Rick did was come by the farmhouse every now and again, whenever he remembered, and set out some food in a bowl. But he did not take Old Bo out to play, or cuddle with him on the couch and watch football. He did not pet him or scratch behind his ears or tell him that he loved him.
Shelton thought Old Bo might sleep in the living room in protest upon his return from prison, or stalk around the house, punishing him with whimpers and plaintive barks. Shelton wouldn’t have blamed Bo if he was vindictive and withholding—Shelton deserved all that and worse—but instead he had come bounding off the porch the second Shelton’s tires hit the gravel drive.
Shelton gave the horn three taps, his customary greeting, and Old Bo ran headlong for the Silverado. Old Bo was so excited he ran himself in circles. He jumped and yapped, then ran more circles. He couldn’t help it, he was so happy Shelton had finally come home. Imagine that, to be loved so much you turned a friend in actual circles?
Shelton was parked out front of the house now, and for a moment he believed if he wished it hard enough Old Bo would come running through the door one more time. But, of course, Old Bo did not come running.
Shelton was alone. His heart was heavy and swollen with longing and he reached for his tank of nitrous. He did a balloon and then another. He drank some whiskey, gulped it, then reached for another balloon. He did that balloon and then another.
Oddly, the balloons had begun to bother Shelton. It was their celebratory nature, their brightness and whimsy, which he feared had become an insult to Old Bo. The balloons had begun to belie the legitimacy of his grief and finally he just mouthed the nozzle of the nitrous tank and released the valve. Sssssssssssss.
He felt the gas hit the back of his throat and explode out his ears and then the brightness opened in his brain like a just-birthed star unfolding.
When Shelton came to, Bob Seger was on the radio singing about being a ramblin’, gamblin’ man. Bob Seger was born lonely, down by the riverside, where he learned to spin fortune wheels and throw dice.
Shelton understood that he had been unconscious for only a few moments, but that time itself was not definite or linear and that each of those moments held eternities inside their soft, malleable edges and that he had fallen through them somehow and briefly touched forever. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did.
He sat up slowly. Goddamn, he was cold. And where the hell was he? His head hurt, but that wasn’t all that unusual and did not concern him as much as the cold. He was sitting inside his truck and he could feel the heat pouring from the vents, yet he was frozen solid. He was shaking like a baby chick. What in the world?
He noticed he was at the farmhouse, and a moment later remembered it was where he lived. But why was it so goddamn cold in the truck?
He reached out with his hand and felt the glassless air in front of him and then recalled the buck and how he’d killed him. Then he remembered that Arrow was dead and that Jenna was gone and that Ka
yla was inside, hopefully unconscious. He remembered something about Wolfdog taking the baby and how gentle Bo was dead and Shelton had left his carcass in a room to rot.
All these thoughts came to Shelton in a rush and carried with them the initial shock of discovery. It turned out the nitrous had taken him all the way under. He’d uncorked the gas and followed it into some deep, dark cave at the base of his primordial brain, a cool room with stone walls where he’d felt a vast blackness and empty peace, only to come back up and reexperience the horror of each tragic event as it arose in his waking mind. The sadness stunned him and came over him in waves. And then came the regret and the guilt. And finally, the anger. On the radio, Bob Seger had come to the part where the black girls sing. They went, Ramblin’, gamblin’ man.
Shelton stepped out of the truck and his vision was blurred and the hardwoods seemed to spin around him as he walked toward the farmhouse with the shotgun. His steps were heavy and labored in the deep drifts and he could hear his heart beat inside his ears like thunderclaps. He thought maybe he should have taken it easier on the anesthesia.
He was winded by the time he came up the front steps and stopped to lean against the porch rail. His head was throbbing. He wondered if he got worse headaches on account of how big his head was. It stood to reason that he would.
He walked in through the front door and there was Clemens, standing in the kitchen. The funny thing was, Clemens had his hands in Shelton’s secret drawer. The drawer where he kept his prerolled joints and the Glock he’d just pitched into the storm. The same drawer where he stuffed his extra cash when he had the good fortune to possess some.
It took Shelton a moment but then he recalled Clemens’s continuing role in the evening’s drama, how they were to meet back here at the farmhouse to discuss Jenna and the dead bodies. But Shelton couldn’t remember Clemens saying anything about rummaging through his secret drawer in the kitchen. It seemed Clemens had gone rogue on that front.
Shelton had walked right in through the front door, yet Clemens hadn’t bothered to stop for one minute to say hello. Clemens didn’t seem to pay Shelton any mind at all. Clemens was so focused on his effort that he never even bothered to turn around and realize Shelton was standing there with his weapon.
Shelton pumped the shotgun and turned it on Clemens, who finally froze and looked up. His arm was still elbow deep in the drawer.
“I wonder how long you’re going to stand there with your fingers in my shit,” Shelton said. “Now that the shotty has come into it.”
Clemens stepped away from the drawer and put his hands up.
“Now hold on one minute,” he said.
Shelton held the gun on Clemens while he bumbled through his ridiculous lies and explanations. He might have even begged, but Shelton couldn’t be sure. Shelton didn’t hear a single word Clemens said because Shelton was already gone.
Shelton had slipped outside of himself, had left his body so easily and without hesitation that he didn’t even notice he was gone until he looked down and saw himself aiming the barrel straight for Clemens’s heart. And still he rose. He rose until he reached some place of perfect stillness and symmetry that was both darkness and light, both love and animal rage. And from that distant, blissful remove he watched himself pull the trigger.
The shot hit Clemens at the top of the left shoulder and sprayed the wood paneling behind him. His head snapped back at impact and from the time-stilled heights from which Shelton observed he could see small shards of shoulder bone disperse, like a handful of tiny, gift-store shark teeth, and he could smell the powder and the singed wood as the buckshot burrowed into the wall. Clemens fell back against the kitchen counter and looked up at Shelton with big, scared-shitless eyes.
Shelton had meant to kill him and was both relieved he had not and embarrassed by his poor aim. Here he was, not ten feet away and couldn’t hit a man in the chest. Double vision, he supposed.
Clemens pushed himself up off the counter and held up his right hand and pleaded with Shelton as he eased toward the back door.
“Please,” he said. “Don’t shoot.”
Shelton set the shotgun down and leaned it against the kitchen table. He nodded at Clemens.
“All right then,” he said.
Then Clemens was gone and Shelton felt himself in dire need of a drink. He walked back to the truck for some whiskey and resolved to stay focused on what was important. Bo. That was what he’d come home for originally, before all this business with Clemens.
He heard an engine turn and looked up and there was Clemens’s truck, not ten feet away and stuck in the same little rut Shelton had been parked in earlier. He was just about to walk over and give him a shove when Clemens rolled out on his own and drove off toward the flat black of Jackson Lake. A shoulder shot for attempted robbery seemed about right to Shelton.
“Fair and square,” he said. “You old motherfucker.”
Shelton had his drink, then capped the whiskey and went back inside. He walked up the stairs and then paused near the top when he heard the screaming. For one hopeful second he thought it was baby Jenna. The sounds were coming from her room and he wondered if after all this time she might have just been hiding somewhere he never bothered to look. Had he even checked the closet?
He ran down the hall but it was only Kayla. She was sitting on the floor with her knees curled to her stomach and the screams were her own. She was clutching a butcher knife from the kitchen and Shelton realized she must have awakened and seen him shoot Clemens. She’d been frightened and gone for the knife, then run upstairs to discover Jenna was gone.
“Kayla,” he said, and stepped toward her. “Honey bear.”
She screamed again and sat there shaking. Her whole body vibrated like a plucked string, and when Shelton took another step closer she pushed herself along the floor to get away from him. Pushed herself clear across the room. He could see the fear and the animal fury in her eyes and she lifted the knife and held it pointed at him.
“What did you do to her!” she screamed. “What have you done to my baby!”
“I didn’t do anything,” Shelton said. “I’ve been out here looking for her.”
“You’re a fucking liar!”
What he wanted was to sit with her and hold her. He wanted to try and offer some comfort about Jenna, to resolve with her to find the child and somehow repair their ruined lives and start all over again, but Kayla only looked at him and raged.
“You shot Clemens!”
“Baby,” he said. “Let’s just calm down for a minute and talk.”
“You get away from me!” she shouted. “I fucking hate you! I fucking hate you so much!”
Shelton only stood and looked at her. He did not know what to say, suspected that whatever he said would only make things worse.
“Get away from me!” she shouted.
“Okay,” he said, and began to back away slowly. “Okay, baby.”
He walked out into the hall and then closed the door softly behind him. He listened as she continued to shriek and he understood that she did hate him. She was fucked up, high as she could be, but that didn’t change the fact that she believed he had taken Jenna and done the baby harm. And to even think he was capable of such a thing told Shelton all he needed to know. Kayla might have loved him, but she hated him too, and more than anything she was afraid of him. He put his hand against the door and knew in his heart that he would never see her again. In many ways, it was a relief.
He turned toward the other room now, toward Bo. He was through with the distractions and the messing around and he did not bother to cover his nose as he approached the corpse. Rather, he welcomed the stench. He breathed in its black truth and justice because it was exactly what he deserved.
He vomited when he reached the doorway, then staggered toward the body by the dim light of the hall. He stood over Bo and coughed up another mouthful of puke. He cried, as much from the vulgarity of the task as the sadness, then dropped down quickly and sco
oped the dog into his arms.
Old Bo stunk so bad that Shelton could smell it over the vomit that had come up from the back of his throat and burrowed down at the tops of his nostrils. The flesh hung loose and there were a few buzzing flies, though Shelton guessed the cold had helped some with that particular detail. Still, he could feel how bloated Bo had become and there were troubling bulges in his belly and Shelton feared his fingers might push through the spongy skin at any moment and introduce him directly to whatever horrors of decomposition were taking place inside. It was goddamn macabre, is what it was.
Shelton set the body down on his bed and wrapped Old Bo inside the very blanket he used to curl up and sleep on. There were dozens of black hairs in the fabric and the blanket still held the earthy smell of the living Bo. Shelton carried him to the truck and was greatly comforted by Bo’s return to his place of so many peaceful slumbers. It was the first fitting thing that had happened since his passing and Shelton wondered why he hadn’t thought to wrap him in the blanket right off.
He set Bo down in the pickup bed and was glad for his missing windshield in the front. It seemed right he should suffer the cold along with Bo. He took a pallet from the stack he kept out by the pole barn and loaded it with a jug of gasoline beside the dog.
He drank his whiskey and as he walked back inside for the shotgun he wondered why Kayla hadn’t gone for it instead of the knife. It was puzzling because he’d taught her how to load the shotty himself and she knew how to shoot it.
He remembered that gentle afternoon just a few short weeks prior, the way he’d held his hand around hers and eased them up the barrel and taught her to squeeze the trigger and how he was there behind her to cushion the kick. If she were going to threaten him, he would have preferred she pull the shotgun and do it right. He might have felt a touch of pride then, or at least taken some consolation in the fact that she had remembered that time they had shared and put it to some use.
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