by Gale Massey
Jamie grabbed the keys to Jack’s car from under the counter, said, “Goddamn you,” and kicked open the front door.
CHAPTER
33
FUCK HIM. THE words looped maniacally in her brain. Fuck them all.
Her mind replayed the image of herself in the video—on her knees, on her back, naked and writhing—and Billy laughing in her face, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe, and she felt filthy. Her face burned as though on fire. Rage liquefied her muscles, made her want to hit things, brought forth involuntary tears, buzzed inside her ears. It would take a lake, a river, an ocean of water to ever feel clean again. Fury funneled into a kind of lucidity that she recognized as fate, as though the next twenty-four hours were already history.
It was clear what she needed to do, where she had to go. She aimed Jack’s car north and gunned it up Main Street.
Betrayal wasn’t a state of mind where her brain could rest. It wasn’t static like death or defeat and already its alchemy began to change her. Already, she felt the heat inside her chest cooling into something new, something wary and wild. Something that could stand flat-footed in the middle of a burning house and calculate the next move.
She passed the courthouse and the jail, Keating’s Cadillac and Garcia’s crappy sedan, the hospital. The streetlights ended at the edge of town. She gunned it on the highway. She rolled down the windows. Cold air was life and she breathed it in, screamed it out, “Fuck you all!” If she survived the next day she’d get those words tattooed on her arm.
The first billboard for Mimawa lit her windshield with a yellow glow and she passed it going eighty. The next billboard was a neon rainbow and she eased up on the gas. The last one was a pot of gold and she let the car slow. She cruised past the exit and took the underpass where the road narrowed and turned to gravel.
The shoulder dropped off to the right, but she remembered how her weight had shifted to the left that night on the floorboard of Loyal’s truck. She found a flashlight in the console and shined it out the window as she drove slowly, hoping to see a bend in the road, a crook in a tree, something to trigger the memory of this place. The pavement ended and turned into a dirt road. She remembered potholes and weeds slapping at the fenders. The county didn’t maintain roads this far outside of town, or on private land.
A black silhouette stepped onto the road and Jamie braked. Her heart banged in her throat. Anyone could be out here. A hunter, a lunatic, an escapee from the penitentiary one county over.
A massive head swiveled on a giant gray torso. A stag stared unblinking into the headlights. Her throat turned to ice. Insanely she thought of the stag from all those years ago, but it couldn’t be the same one. They’d eaten venison that whole summer. And this one was even bigger than the one she’d killed.
He was unfazed by the headlights, his gaze coming straight at her through the windshield. He lifted his head, sniffed the air, and blew a moist spray out his nose.
She cut the engine. The animal ignored her and continued across the road.
Jamie turned off the lights to let her eyes adjust to the dark. A half-moon sat over the field, its light shining along the length of the stag’s back as he walked through the grass and disappeared at the edge of the woods.
Farther up was a broken gate, rusted and off its hinges. Old fence posts sagged under ancient wisteria vines. A washed-out path dropped left where a single pine tree stood in the center of the field. She got her backpack and walked.
The sky was black and silky, the ground soft beneath her boots. An owl called out and she froze as though caught in a childhood nightmare. The way she pitched between fear and anger was exhausting. Nothing worse could happen. Nothing more could be lost. She could be afraid for the rest of her life, but now, she knew, fear had never kept her safe. It was time to get some damn courage. Whatever happened tomorrow, this night belonged to her.
The pine glowed silver in the moonlight. Ladder rungs were nailed to its trunk, one slat every few feet. The floor of what looked like a tree house hovered midway up the tree. She recalled her thirteenth birthday, more than five years ago. The contour of the branches extending from the trunk, the low walls surrounding the hidden platform—nothing had changed. This wasn’t a tree house. This was the old hunter’s blind.
She tested her weight on the first rung. It held and she climbed another. There were seven in all. The floor of the blind was a grid of two-by-fours covered by plywood with a hole cut in the bottom for access. She banged the flashlight against the floorboards to flush out any animal that might have nested there. Claws scratched against the floor and she ducked, raising her arm protectively against a rustle of wings. A large bird leapt up and flew from the tree, gliding out over the field.
Holding the flashlight up, she looked into the opening. A short wall surrounded the blind, tall enough that when she climbed through and sat down she could see out over the top. The floor was covered with pine needles and twigs, the remnants of a nest. She shined the flashlight into the overhead branches, checked the floors for bugs and the corners for snakes. She cleared a space and leaned against a wall that was the exact height needed to steady a rifle.
Her phone startled her when it blinged and lit up with a text from Jack demanding to know where she was and that she bring his car back. She turned the phone off. Even if she could tell him where she was, she wouldn’t. Somewhere in a field outside of town where no one would ever find her. The realization calmed her: no one knew where she was.
All around her, the typical graffiti was carved into the walls. Initials scratched with penknives, some set inside the shape of a heart. She imagined lovers coming up here. Jack might have taken her someplace like this if he hadn’t had that futon in his office. If only he hadn’t had that office. When she closed her eyes, the images from the sex tape played in her mind, a torture that would last a lifetime. She opened her eyes and stared at the tree trying not to see what had been burned into her memory.
She searched the walls closely. On the opposite wall she found a T, the one Toby had scratched that cold morning when Loyal had dragged them out of their beds to hunt. In the blind, they’d been bored, cold, but alert. Toby had taken Loyal’s field knife to scratch his name and gotten as far as the T before the stag appeared and all hell broke loose.
As she traced the letter with her fingertip, she felt a grief for the emptiness of Toby’s small life as sharply as the grief she felt for her father. Toby wasn’t even full-grown and he’d already been arrested. Twice. Toby’s initial, a simple mark on a tree, might be all the boy ever left behind.
She dug through her backpack for a Sharpie and used it to ink the T with a vine that curled and blossomed with ivy leaves. Nothing would be the same after tonight. It was clear what her life would be if she stayed in Blind River and let Loyal boss her around. Maybe she’d end up slightly better-off than her mother. Maybe she’d manage to stay out of prison. The future was set unless she found her own way, unless she got out of here. When she was done with his initial, it filled an area as big as a tombstone, and she was calmer.
She wanted to say a prayer for her brother, but all she could think of was “Our Father” and she didn’t know the rest, so she stared at the moon and thought through what she’d do in the morning. She used her backpack as a pillow and lay down for the night, doubting sleep would come, but taking comfort in solitude and the empty field glowing silver under the moon.
CHAPTER
34
JAMIE SHIVERED AWAKE when light began to brighten the eastern sky. She rubbed her hands and cheeks, turned to watch the sun lift beyond the tree line, surprised at how hard she’d slept under nothing but pine canopy and sky. She scanned the area. The car sat on the dirt road where she’d left it, near the broken gate. A ravine dropped off a hundred yards to the east.
Sunlight spread over the field and she shielded her eyes from the reflection off the barn’s tin roof. She climbed down from the blind and walked in the direction of the sun. The slope of t
he ravine was steeper than she remembered, the funeral mound smaller than it had seemed that night. The air smelled sour. She pulled the brush and the tree limbs away until the stones were exposed. They were so purposefully placed it could never have been confused with a rock slide. It was wrong to be here, standing over this man’s body when his family didn’t even know he was dead.
She looked around until she was sure she had her bearings, then headed back to the car to let the engine run and get warm. She turned on her phone. The first of fifteen messages from Jack demanded that she return his car. She wanted to set it on fire. She skipped to the last one offering an apology and deleted the ones in between. In a few minutes the car was warm and her body began to thaw. It had to be eight o’clock. By now, folks would be heading to the veterans’ hall for the tournament. Loyal would be there setting up chairs and tables, putting the coffee on, setting out bags of pretzels.
She backed the car through the weeds to the dirt road and drove to the highway, south toward the 7-Eleven. She resisted the impulse to drive Jack’s car through the glass storefront and instead went inside and bought a cup of coffee and a jug of bleach. Then she parked on the bend around the corner from a stand of pine trees and looked through the pictures she’d taken of Loyal’s ledger one more time, hit the send button, and waited for the bling that told her the message had gone through. Then she drove to the bridge.
Icicles hung off its railings. She pulled to the center and got out, Keating’s cell phone heavy in her hand. Runoff from the fertilizer plant upstream smelled foul but earthy. Debris caught on the frozen ice and swirled in foamed eddies. She threw the phone as far as she could. It splashed and floated downstream for a moment, hit a fallen tree trunk and sank. She drove to the veterans’ hall.
A hundred or more cars were parked on side streets and in the surrounding vacant lots. Men milled around outside the hall, smoking their last cigarettes before the kickoff. She parked the car on the street and poured the gallon of bleach into Jack’s gas tank. When she saw Loyal’s truck, she wished she’d bought two jugs.
A handwritten poster taped to the front door listed the tournament jackpot. She did some quick calculations. There had to be over a hundred entries. She hated that she’d agreed to collude with Phoebe, Jack, and Tuckahoe. The thought of collaborating with any of them on anything put a vile taste in her mouth, but spending the day in her uncle’s presence was her best cover. She swallowed hard and went inside.
A picture of TJ was taped to the wall behind the check-in table along with a note about a reward for information leading to his whereabouts. It made her sick to see that man’s face. Maybe he’d been a kind man, a good father. Her mind went to Toby. He’d never graduate from high school now or join the Army and become a soldier. She’d never have to worry about him getting blown up in a tank or getting shot in combat. Blind River would never forgive him for his part in this thing. They’d already labeled him as one more troubled boy and any argument against that was futile.
Eddie from Crowley’s Pub was collecting tournament entry fees. He closed the lockbox and slid it under his chair. “You’re Loyal’s girl, right?” The smirk on his face told her he knew exactly who she was.
“Niece.”
“Got here in the nick of time,” he said. “He waived your buy-in.”
As a juvenile, Toby’s identity should have been protected, but that smirk said something different. By now the whole town would be talking about the missing-persons investigation and everyone would see her as the sister of the guy who’d been arrested. But that smirk also told her that word of the attempted suicide hadn’t got out.
Eddie gave her a card with her table and seat number on it. “Over there,” he said, pointing.
The hall was dingy and gray, filled with round folding tables and metal chairs. Flags from various armed services were tacked on the walls. There was a coffee station in the back near a small stage with a microphone. Her seat was at a table near the back and she snaked through the room to find it.
Judging by the size of the crowd, she guessed the tournament would run until late afternoon. Most of the players had already found their seats and sat eyeing their opponents, trying to gauge the level of competition. Loyal meandered through the crowd greeting players. One day a year, Loyal Elders was elevated from the redneck country boy they knew him to be to the man who ran the annual veterans’ fund-raiser. Over the years those days had amounted to a bond of sorts, and even though he’d never even considered joining the military, and even though he tore his parking tickets up, and even though the money raised from this tournament never quite made it into anything tangible for the veterans’ hall, the fact that he ran it every year and that the men had a good time earned him their admiration, if only for a day.
The average age, she guessed by the gray hair and beer bellies and the flasks hanging out their back pockets, was sixty-something. These men had been playing cards their whole lives and they’d be tricky. Once they saw her they’d come gunning because no one here wanted to get beat by the only girl in the tournament.
It seemed her eyes had a will of their own because the first person they landed on was Jack, sitting at a table near the front. She swerved toward him. His slumping posture and sunken eyes and scraggly beard suggested he’d had a rough night. She slung the keys at him fast. When he caught them from smacking his face, she was disappointed but kept moving.
Phoebe, dressed in her starched white shirt and black vest, sat in the dealer’s position at a table in the center of the room. When she looked up and smiled, Jamie’s heart felt like a stone wedged between her lungs. Jilkins despised Phoebe and wouldn’t have told her about Toby. Loyal wouldn’t have said anything that might mess up the tournament. There was nothing anyone could do for Toby anyway, and Jamie decided not to tell her until the end of the day.
She passed Tuckahoe and her fists clenched. He rolled a chip in between his fingers like a magician, but when he saw her he touched his nose in a stupid signal of their collaboration. Chip dumping with a pervert, an unfaithful husband, and an ex-con. The fuck you all mantra started looping through her brain again as she found her seat.
Loyal went to the front of the room and tapped the microphone with his finger, sending a screech through the speakers. The crowd quieted. A young guy and a middle-aged woman sat in folding chairs by the stage. They seemed removed, like they didn’t really want to be in this room. Loyal handed the microphone to Keating, who wanted to make an announcement before the game started because he could never pass up cheap publicity for his reelection campaign.
When the girl stepped out from behind Keating, Jamie’s mind iced over. The girl looked exhausted and worn out, even smaller than Jamie remembered from that afternoon in Crowley’s Pub.
Keating said, “You all know that TJ Bangor wanted to play in this tournament. And you probably all know that he, uh, hasn’t been seen for a couple of days.”
A murmur went through the crowd. Phoebe’s face turned as pale as marble.
Keating put his arm around the girl’s shoulders. “But his daughter, Lena, is here in his stead.” He gave Lena a crushing squeeze. She stumbled against his bulk but his hold on her kept her from falling. The crowd made a low, approving noise. He looked at the girl with a tenderness that made Jamie scream inside. She slipped lower into her chair, wanting to disappear.
“We want you to know,” he said, “that we’re praying for your father’s safe return.”
The girl seemed to shrink beneath the weight of his arm.
Keating wiped a nonexistent tear. “And we’re going to play this tournament in his honor.”
The sham was unbearable.
“Now do us a favor, um … honey.” The bastard had already forgotten her name. “Start the tournament for us?”
He lowered the microphone to her and the girl said softly, “Shuffle up and deal.”
There was some scattered applause before the room went quiet and the cards started flying. Keating took his seat at
a table near the front.
Lena stood there alone for a moment—her shoulders narrow, her eyes wide and brown—glancing around the room until the guy and woman came to her side. They had to be her brother, or maybe a cousin, and Mrs. Bangor. They looked so broken. Jamie mucked the first round of cards without even looking at them and watched them walk to the entrance and out the front doors. Jamie gripped the edge of her chair. What was she waiting for? Better timing? For who? Herself? There was only one right thing to do. She stood, about to follow after them, just as Loyal walked up behind Jamie and gripped her shoulder with his hand. She collapsed back into her chair, felt him move in closer, smelled the whiskey on his breath when he leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Don’t even think about it.”
CHAPTER
35
THINKING ABOUT BOMBING out on that first hand at Mimawa still stung enough that Jamie folded every hand for the first thirty minutes, but once she’d settled in enough and got a read on the other players, she decided it was time to play. An hour later, she’d doubled the size of her stack by making a few key bluffs. Now it was time to turn up the heat.
She peeked at her hole cards, saw a suited king/nine, and tossed a couple of chips into the pot. The action went clockwise around the table and everyone folded except the old guy to her right. He played tight, but in the last thirty minutes Jamie had taken a giant pot from him with a bluff too big for any sane person to call. He called her bet now and the dealer spread the first of the community cards on the table. A king, ten, and a nine. The old guy checked, and Jamie bet out hard.
“Why so much?” he asked.
“Guess I’m scared you hit something on the flop,” she said.
Her stomach growled, but all she found in the bottom of her backpack was the remnants of a spilled bag of trail mix and a roll of Tums. It would have to do.