This was a hill trick I knew from childhood: don’t stand and stare, but don’t be the one to look away too quick either. A glancing square-off. From inside the old stone house behind him I could hear the keening wails of his younger brother, a six-year-old. Their mother’s car was gone again, and when she was away the boys often spent too much time in their yard, worn bald by a chained dog, staring at ours. The six-year-old played in the dirt and a growing junk pile, while the former fat kid paced back and forth talking on his cell phone and smoking cigarettes, out of reach of the skinny Rottweiler pressing full chain for affection. He flicked the butts toward our house, and I had to police the yard to pick up the ones that made it across the border. I washed my hands immediately, because they had grazed what he had suckled.
I wondered what they ate when the mother was gone for long, up to several days by my count. What the inside of that house must have looked like, the darkness and stink of it. Some days I thought I could literally smell a stink coming off it, and I wondered what they did inside there, what poison they might have taken or produced.
“They seem too stupid and disorganized to be cooking,” John would say whenever I brought this up. “Taking, but not cooking.”
“You think it takes real smarts to cook meth?” I would say back. And we would watch on the news the ugliness unfolding night after night in the hills surrounding us, the broken and blank-eyed faces in mug shots and wailing, filthy children taken by child protective services.
My mother used to bring me to the homes of the needy families when I was a kid. We delivered donated clothes or canned goods from the church to people up in the remote hollows who squirreled their lives into whatever passed for a house. Velveteen couches and cigarette-charred La-Z-Boys, collections of Avon perfume bottles on every surface, plastic flapping on windows. They were grateful for the canned peas, the used coats, the fresh pears from our tree. Old, isolated communities in these Ozark hills were once sustained on this type of charity. They were just poor, either by bad luck or accident, but that wasn’t a crime. Lots of people were poor then. It didn’t mean they had to be assholes too.
Three months ago, Butterball and family had moved into the house that the realtor claimed was condemned when he sold us our land. The houses we could afford in town were all on small lots in cow pastures out by the interstate. No sidewalks or trees. No privacy from your neighbors who were close enough to piss on. No charm either in any of them advertised as such, their gold-flecked linoleum and taupe-carpeted floors felt as dull and cheap as the interior of a shoebox. We constructed our own charm then. Here in Wesley, Butterball and family were the only neighbors close enough to holler at, and the next home over was a bunch of Guatemalans in an old trailer who worked the chicken trade and kept to themselves. I’d suspected the Guatemalans of dealing because of the traffic coming and going at the trailer, but when I called the sheriff’s office a tired-sounding woman said, “Honey, they’ll see if they can get around to it.” Later I thought maybe all the traffic was partly because there were so many of them living there, but nobody ever came out to check. I called the sheriff again and the same woman said: “No telling what they’re up to, we got so much of that we can’t keep up. Whatever it is, they’ll probably stick to themselves.” If they weren’t going to do anything I was glad nobody had pulled up in a squad car mentioning drug-trafficking complaints from the nosy white lady up the road. Still, I watched them closely looking for signs. The men, and a few women, drove past packed in an old Dodge every morning and night, a steady rotation of shifts at the poultry-gutting plant in Lowell where they all worked.
“This’ll be paved in no time,” the realtor had said, looking at our curve in the road, rocking back and forth, sucking on something leftover in his teeth from lunch. “You got yourself a real deal here. Everything is shifting.”
Our view to the right was open fields and distant construction of gigantic homes in a subdivision, The Vineyard. There, the stones on the homes were imported, rounded and gray, like something in New England. To the left, a potpourri of crankheads, Butterball and family’s old river stone house, slumped on one side as if burdened, and past it the Guatemalan village’s single crusty trailer and a dried-out hillside striped with silver commercial chicken houses. I’d dreamt of living out somewhere far away from the chicken farms I’d grown up around.
“All that’ll be coming down soon,” the realtor had said. He had waved his hand at what was disagreeable, including the stone house.
Butterball’s mother hadn’t invited me inside the two times I’d gone over. Each time, I had stepped around a hole in the porch, something growling, menacing and low beneath my feet. The first visit was to introduce myself and bring a chess pie, my grandmother’s recipe, and the second to ask her to tell her youngest boy to quit slinging gravel at our roof. I’d never seen him do it, but I noticed a small chip or two in a window I blamed on him. Both times she kept the door tight to her shoulder and responded roughly the same to the greeting as the complaint. “Huh,” she said. “Yeah, okay.” I never got the pie plate back, and didn’t want to ask for it either. Anticipating this, I had used a shitty one that had a big chip in it. Sometimes I wished the sinking pile of rocks would burn to the ground to improve our view, and the family with it. I don’t have an endless supply of Christian charity and goodwill like my mother.
Turkey buzzards circled in the sky, spiraling down lazily into something rotten, probably improperly discarded carcasses cleaned off of commercial henhouse floors, waiting to be burned or turned into the litter dumps. The August heat was cranking up, the scent of chicken manure shifting with the warming breeze off fertilized fields. Inside our French Country Model #809 home (inspired by the elegant but simple lifestyle of Provence, it had said on the plans), I could hear shrill whistles and crashing, wonky noises of morning cartoons. John banged on something in the garage. I brushed the remaining scales from my fingers and walked around to the opening.
“Coons ate the fish,” I said. My voice lifted and cracked the way our daughter’s did when she announced a new disappointment in life.
John, bent over a riding lawnmower, looked up from under his armpit. “What?” he said, like I had asked him what he wanted on a sandwich rather than announced a tragedy.
“They just took ’em,” I said. I felt the heat of a tear slide from one eye, then another, and was immediately ashamed. John stood up, his hand cradling a socket wrench, and looked at me. He politely ignored my weeping over missing fish—he taught middle school biology and was accustomed to random outbursts of emotion.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m fucking sure!” I said, wiping my face. I hated it when he questioned me, like I had gone stupid since I became a stay-at-home mom. I had a graphic design degree from a softball scholarship at Arkansas Tech I was going to put to real use as soon as our daughter started kindergarten. “I know their ways.”
“Their ways?” he said, and laughed. He pulled a piece of material from his back pocket and twisted the oily wrench in it. I saw it was one of the fancy napkins my aunt had given us for our wedding. She said it came from India. I kept these in my grandmother’s antique buffet and used them only twice a year, at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. John looked down at the napkin in his hand and shoved it back in his pocket. I got gut-sick and sadder right there, felt the hate building in my neck where it liked to live, and turned and went into the kitchen.
Our kitchen was designed “family friendly” with a mud/ laundry room off the garage and an open bar looking out into the living room that made me feel like a fry cook. It seemed like a good plan originally, but now I saw it was designed to trap me in one area for labor. Alexis, seeing me in the work zone, yelled that she wanted more Cocoa Puffs. “Now!” she said. Being a mother wasn’t as fulfilling as advertised, not that I didn’t experience a raw ache in my guts when she genuinely hurt herself or was feverish, or melt at her sudden affections. Not that I wouldn’t defend her to the death from
a rabid, koi-thieving coon attack. But whenever I was bored and numb from demands, her tears just another task to be addressed, I experienced a flagging doubt that I was contributing anything all that much by being there all the time. I looked at the side of her ponytailed head, her eyes glowing from reflected TV, mouth slack, and tried to remember the last time she was sweet.
John came into the kitchen, gave me a peck on the head, and grabbed his keys. “We’ll get more, bigger ones, and they’ll eat the coons if they come back. I gotta go pick up some things in town.” Sometimes I had a hard time figuring if he possessed boundless optimism, or he simply didn’t give a shit. Either way I could admire it, and I felt the tension in my neck lessen slightly. Alexis ran to him and whined that she wanted to go too, but John did a little dance, whirled her around, blew fart noises into her tubby belly, and said, “Not today, punkin’.” He was an expert at waltzing in, both denying and delighting Alexis at the same time, with no ill consequences. After he left she lightly kicked the back door before turning her dissatisfaction back to me.
“Cocoa Puffs!” she said. She put her hands on her hips and made the pouty face her grandparents encouraged and photographed. We didn’t live far from where me and John had grown up in Huntsville, so our parents had full access to their five-year-old granddaughter. They claimed we continued some kind of family legacy by building in that same narrow stretch of valley. Ancestors had banded together in one section of hills and fought off whatever discomfort and outlaws to build a life that lasted generations. I wondered what beauty they had imagined here, versus what they found. At times this gave us comfort. Other times we felt like failures for not making it outside the valley. My parents had a photograph of Alexis on the mantel amongst the stern great-great-grandparents who had named each bluff, each hollow surrounding us. They wore overalls and severe black dresses as if they were ready to work in the fields or be buried. In her photo, Alexis wore a pink tutu and T-shirt that said Princess (something they had never encouraged me to be), in that exact pose she now struck before me. I hated that fucking picture.
“You already had your breakfast,” I said. And then listened to the many reasons why the first breakfast was insufficient and more sugar was necessary to survive. “Nope,” I said. “Not open for discussion. Why don’t you go outside and play?”
Alexis made indistinct noises, words stretched into whine, and stomped back into the living room for more cartoons. We’d purchased a slide, tire swing, monkey climber combo jungle gym and put small, rounded landscaping pebbles beneath it. “What are them fucking rocks for?” my father had asked. “For safety,” I said. “From what?” he said. Wasps built nests in the tire swing that I was obliged to hose out every week in case Alexis learned to appreciate it, and the crossbeams gave the crows a place to perch and pick at the cornbread I threw out for songbirds. Next door I heard the rumblings of Butterball’s rusty Z28, a car that didn’t look like it had the capacity for movement, the catalytic converter removed for added annoyance. He slung a spray of gravel with his dramatic exit.
Within ten minutes after Butterball’s departure the littlest one from next door was on the porch, pretending to look at my decorative ferns. Sometimes when his brother abandoned him, the boy showed up. I didn’t encourage it. His mother was none too friendly the few times she had come over to get him, smoking and tapping her foot, scratching herself and ashing on my porch like I had inconvenienced her instead of the other way around. I don’t know why people act like if you have one kid it’s okay to dump strange ones on you like stray kittens. All kittens are cute. Not all kids are. When his older brother would fetch him he’d linger too long, adjusting his crotch and making statements that merited no response: You like fish or I seen you was planting flowers. No one ever bothered to apologize for abandoning the child to my care without notice.
There was a faint scratching noise at the door. I opened it and stared down at the kid, who, rather than make eye contact, broke off a fern leaf and looked past me into the house like he had forgotten something in there. He was puffy, like his brother used to be, and barefoot.
“Where’s your mama?” I asked.
He shrugged and stuck the edge of the fern leaf in his mouth.
“Come on in,” I said. The kid walked into the house with the halting uncertainty of a stray cat, but nosed his way straight for the kitchen. “Gimme that,” I said. I took the sodden fern leaf away from him and threw it in the trash. He tiptoed along the countertop until he saw the Cocoa Puffs. “Want some?” I asked.
His head did a slight tilt forward and back, and then he stared at his dirty feet while I poured out a bowl. Alexis heard the sound of sugar nuggets hitting porcelain and came trotting into the kitchen. She drew back when she and the kid made eye contact and hid halfway behind the door jamb. I didn’t care much for her going anywhere near that house or those boys, and had told her so many times.
“I want some too,” she said.
They settled in with their bowls, far apart in separate corners of the den, and watched cartoon animals beating the shit out of each other again and again. Almost two hours later, after I guiltily looked at curtains online, and one altercation over the boy touching Alexis’s coloring books on the coffee table, John came back toting bags from both Home Depot and Lowe’s. He also had a bucket containing three koi, bigger than the last.
“Too big for coons to wrestle,” he said. He spotted the kid in the living room and nodded toward him, raising his eyebrows.
“Yup,” I said.
“We should call somebody,” he said.
“Yes, but you’ll be asking for trouble.”
John stared at the kids in the living room, considering the balance between trouble and civic responsibility. He reached into a sack on the counter, tossed me a beer, and walked to the French doors opening onto our backyard where Lola streamed away. “Pissing in perpetuity,” he said.
I didn’t hear the mother return, but noted Butterball wasn’t back when she rang my doorbell. She picked at a scab on the side of her head with her pinky. “He here?” she said, smoke sliding out of her tired face as if she was too weary to exhale. I opened the door wider where she could see the boy in the living room. He looked up from a coloring book, like he’d been caught, and started to scoot over toward us.
“He’s too little to be left alone like he is,” I said. “You need to see to it that there’s someone looking out for him when you leave.”
“You got a pretty room here,” the mother said. “Like out of a magazine.” She said this as if it were an accusation rather than a compliment. She poked her scratching pinky at a dark chocolate loveseat sitting by a front window, lined with striped pillows in varying pale blues. I’d gotten it at T.J. Maxx. It looked to be waiting for a lady to relax there and read poetry in the soft light, or gaze out at the passing chicken trucks and Guatemalans and contemplate the sanctity of her home. I’d never sat in it since I’d put it there.
“If his brother can’t see to him then he needs good day care,” I said.
The mother sighed and tapped ash onto my porch, then looked dully at her spent cigarette and flicked it into my azaleas. She craned her neck to see what was taking the kid so long. He was gathering the pictures I had forced Alexis to allow him to color in her Sea Friends book, a scribbled squid and great white shark, both in orange. “That’s real good,” I’d said in that bullshit way everyone praises children now. He had stopped coloring, wiggled slightly, and ducked his head, pleased but uncertain what the correct response to praise was. It made me feel shitty that I didn’t mean it.
“Well, come on,” she said to the boy, and lit another.
Neither of them looked at me as they turned from the porch; the boy dragged his feet as if afflicted. I watched them walk back to their askew house, her hand gripping the back of his neck, smoke trailing from behind her frizzy head. The dog barked at them, high-pitched and insistent, until the woman said something sharp and low to make it shut up. Butterball was now back
and standing in the yard, gazing in the general direction of Lola, love-struck, scratching his dick. A small garbage fire burned at the edge of our borders, stinking of plastic and chemicals.
I stuck my head into the garage. John was back at his lawn-mower, but with a new pack of utility rags open beside him. “Call whoever you need to call,” I said.
The gravel started hitting the top of the roof again later that afternoon. First a single plunk, followed by a rattling drop into my flower bed, something I could have mistaken as a pine cone. Then a buckshot rain shower. I ran outside to yell at the kid, a single stone still making its rattling way to the azaleas below, but there was no one there. The dog lay limp from the heat in a burrowed-out hole, halfway under the foundation of the house. John offered to go talk to them, but I figured him making a call Monday morning was enough.
By Wednesday the new fish were dead. I found their swelling bodies, iridescent gold and white, floating sideways under the indifferent gaze of Lola. On Monday, with the help of Alexis, we had named them after Disney princesses. The sharp scent of bleach was apparent. I called John at work, and he told me to just calm down until he got home.
“And then what?” I said. “After I’m all calm and you’re here, then what?”
I called the sheriff’s office and got the same tired woman I had spoken to before about the Guatemalans. “Honey, we’ll try and send somebody out to look at it,” she said. I went to the pond and turned Lola off. There was something about her pouring that didn’t seem right while the bodies were still there, bobbing lightly, floating only for John to witness. I took photographs of the fish for evidence before burial, digging a big hole over near the neighbor’s yard by their burn pile. The skinny Rottweiler about to strangle itself to get at me, barking hoarse. A darkness could be seen behind one of the windows. No one came outside. The dog twisted and strained against the chain, its barks no more than raspy air.
The Speed Chronicles Page 12