During her 2:30 break on Tuesday, Lucy saw a flash of purple ahead. She turned the corner into the gardening section, and there was LouEllen, camped out on the patio furniture. Used to be, before they’d stopped talking, LouEllen could be found three days a week using the swing and chairs set up in the gardening section as her own front porch, chatting with whomever she happened to run into that day. Lucy hadn’t seen LouEllen in months, since she asked her to leave the house. She’d heard her voice a couple times an aisle or two over but had turned the other way so she didn’t have to talk to her. Lucy’s stomach knotted, both fearful of what LouEllen might say and missing her so much it hurt. But Lucy remembered that she and Jeptha were ready. He had a job. She had only one job. The house was ready. LouEllen had been sure they would fail, but she was wrong.
“Hi, LouEllen,” Lucy said.
“Lucy!” LouEllen yelled so loudly people turned around. She stood up, waving Lucy over. “Come here. Let me look at you!” She looked Lucy up and down, her eyes lighting up when she got to her huge belly. Her hands reached out, but she stopped short of touching Lucy. “Can I?” she asked.
“If you want.”
“You look great. And—oh! It kicked.”
“Yeah, he does that.”
“He? Wait, what am I doing? Sit down, sit down,” LouEllen said, gesturing to the chair beside her.
As they settled in, Lucy said, “You know, LouEllen, I don’t think they set this up for you to use.”
“If they don’t want me to sit in them, they shouldn’t put them up. If they have a problem, they can talk to me about it.”
Lucy laughed at the thought of Teresa, who could be such a pain as a boss, taking on LouEllen. Teresa was fierce with her employees, but Lucy knew she didn’t stand a chance against LouEllen. Lucy allowed herself to relax against the green-and-white-striped cushion, thrilled to put her feet up for a minute.
“So … it’s a little boy? Do you have a name picked out yet?”
“Jeptha and I haven’t decided.” Lucy noticed LouEllen’s hands clench at the sound of Jeptha’s name.
“How is Jeptha?” LouEllen asked.
“He’s good. We’re good. He got on at the plant full-time. And I quit Judy’s and am only working full-time here now.” Lucy heard the note of smugness in her voice, and she didn’t care. It gave Lucy no small amount of pleasure to prove LouEllen wrong.
“You quit Judy’s?”
“Yeah, last week. Judy brought it up. And Jeptha and I had been talking about it. Seemed silly to be working two jobs when Jeptha had one.”
“But what if something happens?” LouEllen asked. It was a question, but her tone sure made it sound like a certainty.
“Nothing’s gonna happen. Besides me having this baby. We’re good. You don’t have to worry. We’re a family. We’ll take care of each other.”
There was no trace of a smile left on LouEllen’s face. “I hope so, Lucy. I’m glad for you. I hope it stays that way.”
“Do you want me to let you know when the baby comes?”
LouEllen’s face softened into a smile. She took Lucy’s hand and squeezed it. “I’m counting on it,” she said. “Good luck, Lucy. You know I love you.”
“I love you, too, LouEllen,” Lucy said, her eyes filling with tears.
“Okay, then. Well, now. We can’t be crying in Walmart. You know that’s one of my rules. You probably need to get on back to work anyway.”
“I do,” Lucy said, lumbering out of the chair. “But I’ll see you soon.”
“Oh, hey,” LouEllen said. “I keep meaning to ask—are Jeptha and them buying that land across the road from y’all?”
“I haven’t heard a thing about it, if so. Why?”
“Just things I’m hearing. It’s a good piece of property. Be smart if they did.”
Lucy thought to herself that that was a sure sign the Taylors weren’t involved but shoved the thought away. Things were good now, she reminded herself. “It would be, but it ain’t us. We hardly got anything out of last year’s tobacco crop.”
“Serious? I heard it was a good year.”
Lucy shrugged. She knew what Jeptha had told her, what the check on their kitchen counter had said before she’d deposited it. Two thousand dollars had gone quick. But it didn’t matter now. Jeptha had a steady job.
“Guess not for us,” she said. “I’ll see you, LouEllen.”
When Lucy looked back before she turned the corner, she saw that LouEllen’s face was creased with concern and lit with joy, like a mother’s might have been.
15
JEPTHA SAT IN FRONT of the trailer after his shift ended, picking at his mandolin and waiting for Lucy to get home. He’d been on at the plant for three weeks and, for the first time ever, life seemed good. He liked his work all right and had found there was something steady and boring, but in a good way, about getting up to go to work every morning. He guessed it was how normal people felt every day, but since he’d never been sober enough to be a part of the working world in any kind of routine way, it was a new and surprisingly pleasant feeling for him. He went to work, did his job making sure the shells were lined up before another machine inserted the shot, and came home to his wife, who was generally a much happier person now that she wasn’t working sixty-five hours a week, especially since she was literally due any day now.
Jeptha put his mandolin down and watched three deer cautiously nose their way out of the tree line on the next farm over. It was dusk, the time when they preferred to reveal themselves in search of food. It was growing cold in the shadows where he sat, but Jeptha could still see the sun lighting up the eastern part of the valley. Every part of him—his hands, his lips, his stomach, his mind—craved a beer, but it had been five months, the longest he’d ever gone, and he pushed the thought away. Lucy liked him sober and working, and he loved Lucy. So, sober and working he’d be, even if it was a struggle every single minute.
Jeptha looked around for Crystal Gayle. This was usually the time of day when his dog nudged her head under his arm and rested her muzzle on his lap. He didn’t see her anywhere. She’d taken to hanging out at the bottom of the driveway now that Lucy was so close to her due date, grumpy with concern for her, and he guessed Crystal Gayle was down there.
Just then, brakes squealed on the road. Jeptha heard that high, lonely whelp that dogs make only in the face of a moving car grill. His heart fell into his stomach as he took off running, praying it was some other dog but knowing it was her, knowing she’d bolted out into the street, thinking she saw Lucy’s car. He might have forgiven the driver, knowing how hard it is to see at that time of day, but whoever it was peeled off in a screech of tires and stinky rubber and was over the next hill by the time Jeptha got down to her. Skinny as he was, and with a haircut so short it suggested a fit military past he didn’t actually have, he was out of breath when he got there. He skidded to a stop beside Crystal Gayle’s heaving, misshapen body, panting along with her as blood seeped from her nose into a shiny red puddle that slowly soaked into the variegated roadway.
Jeptha knelt down in front of her, knowing from the way her eyes tracked his that it was hopeless. He stroked her head, starting right above her green eyes and going back past her still-alert ears to the top of her neck, trying to soothe her in her moment of bewilderment.
“Hey girl … it’s okay, girl,” he said. “You’re going to be okay.”
Jeptha eased one hand under her belly and the other under her chest, nearly crying as he listened to the whimpers Crystal Gayle made with each movement. He kept talking to her, trying to keep her calm as he struggled up to his knees, her broken body in his arms, and then stood, his left leg faltering under her weight. She cried out then but didn’t make another sound beyond labored panting as Jeptha walked up the driveway, aware of every piece of gravel crunching underneath his feet. He laid her down as gently as he could on a soft piece of earth up by his trailer that was carpeted in grass turned soft by last week’s rain. It broke Je
ptha’s heart to watch Crystal Gayle try to nose her injuries. Bested by pain, she gave up and laid her head back down on the ground, her submissive and beseeching eyes turned up to him.
“I’ll be right back,” he told her.
Jeptha walked over to Deanna’s house. Crystal Gayle had really been his dog, but he figured he ought to tell his brother and sister and see what they wanted to do. Deanna’s kids had all loved her too, and he figured they’d want to say goodbye. When Deanna came to the door, Jeptha simply said, “Crystal Gayle’s hurt. Bad,” and walked off the porch to Bobby’s house. When he got down the hill, with Bobby in tow behind him struggling into a wife-beater, he saw Deanna standing over Crystal Gayle, her face marked only by an absence of emotion.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Got hit by a car just now,” Jeptha said.
“She wasn’t never the smartest dog,” Bobby said.
“It wasn’t her fault,” Jeptha said, his voice rising with anger. “She didn’t ask to get hit. Some asshole just couldn’t see shit and ran her over. Didn’t even have the decency to stop.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Deanna asked. “I mean, is she gonna die or what?”
“How the hell do I know, Deanna?” Jeptha said, although he did.
“Guess we could take her to the vet,” Bobby said.
“I ain’t paying five hundred dollars for some vet to tell me this dog’s gonna die,” Deanna said. “She ain’t gonna make it. Y’all are better off putting her out in the woods and letting her go peacefully.” With that, Deanna walked away.
“Don’t your kids want to see her?” Jeptha yelled at her back.
She didn’t even bother turning around. “Nah. I asked ’em, but they said they’s watching something.”
Jeptha shook his head, frustrated with himself for imagining that those kids might be better than their mama. They were mean as snakes, just like her. She had never cared enough about anyone to get involved if it required the tiniest bit of inconvenience to herself. It was a wonder she had ever managed to keep her children alive, come to think of it, given how little regard she had for any life outside of her own. And yet, Jeptha could see them through the window, silhouetted against the light of the television, their faces so fat with McDonalds that their eyes were nearly squeezed shut.
“Well, what do you want to do?” Bobby said. “I’ll take her over to the vet in the morning, if you want. Let them put her down.”
“No. I’ll take care of it.”
“You sure?”
“No. But I’ll do it.”
Jeptha watched as Bobby walked back to his trailer, slowly shedding himself of his shirt as he went, so that by the time he mounted the stairs, his corpulent upper body was fully revealed, his shirt crumpled in his hand. The screen door slammed shut behind him, and Jeptha saw the blue light of the TV flicker for a moment as Bobby crossed in front of it before settling himself in his chair.
Alone in the night, Jeptha listened to the cicadas drone around him, their song a low, quiet dirge. He knelt down by Crystal Gayle, petting her from her nose down to her tail, shushing her quietly and trying to convince her it was going to be okay. She played along, her body relaxing as his hand swept over her in a rough rhythm, but she seemed to know this game was as much for him as it was for her. She’d known as soon as the car hit her.
Although he had never found himself in this situation before, Jeptha knew the truth of the matter: a real man shoots his own dogs. A real man doesn’t, like Bobby suggested, pay some over-educated, clean-shaven guy, probably a Yankee moved down here for the weather and the hospitality, five hundred dollars to send his dog off into that good night with some namby-pamby concoction of drugs shot through a delicately placed IV. Looking into Crystal Gayle’s eyes, he could see that she knew the truth as well—hidden deep in her wolf-like genes, she knew that the world was violent and that death, properly delivered, ought to be violent too. Jeptha thought that dogs, maybe even those pink-bow-wearing lap dogs, felt cheated of the last measure of their long-suppressed feral natures by a drug-induced death. Jeptha would take death at the end of a barrel any day over floating away in a hospital, delirious and confused.
“Okay, girl,” Jeptha said, putting his hands on his knees and pushing himself up. “It’s all going to be okay. You’re not going to be hurting anymore.”
Jeptha shuffled over to his trailer, stumbling over one of his wife’s sneakers lying in the grass. Lucy had given it to Crystal Gayle in frustration—she thought if the dog had one that was specifically hers, she would stop taking all her others. To Jeptha’s surprise, it had worked. Much as Jeptha knew that Lucy would want to say good-bye, he could not countenance the idea of his dog suffering through the next two hours in excruciating pain while Lucy finished up her shift. Crystal Gayle’s eyes were already beginning to slip backward in time with the shakes that were racking her body, and her long shaggy coat, the reason for her name, was matted with blood. While Jeptha had been wasting time talking with his siblings, she had begun to hack up a bloody foam, her gums gone pale. It was only a matter of time, Jeptha knew, and he would not wait for Lucy to do what needed to be done.
Jeptha emerged from his trailer with his pistol in one hand and, in the other, the only dog toy besides Lucy’s shoe that Crystal Gayle had ever had. The squirrel’s stuffing puffed out from a hole in the side where she had ripped out the squeaker before she’d had it an hour. He laid the toy and the shoe down beside her nose, and she smelled them briefly before resuming her eye contact with Jeptha. He scratched behind her ears, rubbed down the full length of her body, and stood up.
“Alright, girl. It’s gonna be okay now,” he whispered as he loaded a bullet into the pistol’s chamber. “You’re gonna be alright now, girl. Yes, you are. I love you, Crystal Gayle. Always will.”
He kept talking nonsense as he crouched down close to her, the pistol mere inches from the spot where her mouth and her ear nearly met. He took aim, although it was hardly required at such close range. Still, he was determined to do this right, determined to avoid causing his dog any more pain than she already felt.
“Goodbye, girl,” he said. Tears crept down his face as he took a deep breath. Then he exhaled and squeezed the trigger.
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Jeptha had buried Crystal Gayle, along with her squirrel toy and her shoe, in her favorite spot by the trailer where she could see the whole valley pass before her. He washed his hands, changed his clothes, cleaned his gun, put it away, and made his way to the Minute Market by the highway.
“Hey, Jeptha,” Bill said from behind the counter. “Ain’t seen you in months.”
“Yeah.” Jeptha made his way to the back. He had no more tears. Just a hard-headed desire to be as drunk as possible, as quickly as possible. A row of coolers lined the wall. He pulled open the door in the middle where the beer was stocked in between Styrofoam containers of night crawlers. It was awfully optimistic to stock bait year-round, but he guessed there must be some guys who fished every day regardless of their chances of actually getting anything. The upturned dirt in the containers made him think of the grave he’d left behind, the dirt still caked under his fingernails no matter how much he’d scrubbed. Worms like these would soon be tunneling their way into Crystal Gayle. He straightened his shoulders against the tears that were trying to come back and grabbed two cases of Old Milwaukee.
“How’s Lucy doing?” Bill asked. The cans clunked against the linoleum countertop.
“She’s all right.” Jeptha withdrew the rubber-banded stack of cards and cash from his back pocket and withdrew a twenty.
“Due any day, ain’t she?”
“Couple days more,” Jeptha said.
“You sure about this?” Bill said, nodding at the beer.
“You want to shut the hell up and sell me this beer, or do I need to go somewheres else?” Jeptha asked. It wasn’t any of Bill’s business what he did. Bill had no idea what Jeptha had just done, how hard it had been. He
deserved as many drinks as he could possibly put down.
He pushed the twenty at Bill, who paused for a moment but finally took it with a sigh.
“Tell Lucy I said ‘Good luck.’”
“I will.” Jeptha clenched the cases under his arm and walked out. He threw himself and the beer into the front seat and ripped open one end of a case. Three beers spilled to the floor. Jeptha swore, knowing he’d forget and spray them all over himself at some point. Still, three beers seemed as good a place to start as any. He grabbed a can from the inside of the pack and popped the top.
The first beer went down so easy, he was halfway through the second before he even realized the first was gone. Jeptha surveyed his body, pleasantly awed by the buzz that went from his fingertips to his toes. He reclined his seat slightly, enjoying the comfort of his bucket seats. He drank another. He wished he had his mandolin. His fingers picked at invisible strings, and he sang a few bars of “Shady Grove” before grabbing another beer. He checked his phone for the time. A black screen was all he got. Dead. He never remembered to charge it. It didn’t matter anyway. Crystal Gayle was gone. There was no reason to hurry back.
He grabbed another beer. “A road soda,” he said to himself. It was gone before he found the song he wanted to listen to. When he found an old Alan Jackson song that had never failed to make him happy, he cranked it way up. He sang along to “Chattahoochee,” feeling like he was on that hot, hot river, and laughing his ass off every time Jackson said “hoochie coochie.” He was twelve again, free, and the world was hysterical. He pounded two more beers, his months-sober head going straight to ham mered. He wanted his mandolin, bad. He wanted to sit on the porch with Crystal Gayle, play some music, and wait for Lucy. So he turned on his car and pointed his wheel toward home.
Holding on to Nothing Page 18