For the worst instant of her life, Tammy looks out to the crowd again, for Bo to . . . she doesn’t know. Help her? Not see her? Please?
But, instead of Bo or Seth or Davis or any of them, what she sees instead, staggered in a pew behind an old couple, is Joy. Just sitting there alone, her milksop hair tucked behind each ear.
Slowly then, so Tammy has to see, Joy opens her mouth, her head turned just sideways enough for Tammy to see that she’s lifting her tongue, trying to show Tammy something.
“What?” Tammy says weakly, and is on her knees now, her fingertips to the front of her own lower teeth like Joy’s showing, and then past them, to where the floor of her mouth meets the base of her tongue.
Lined there like pigs at a trough are the engorged bodies of nine ticks. And they’re bigger than the one from Frederick, too, are like grapes, or cherry tomatoes, or plums, or, or—
It doesn’t matter.
All that does is that they have to come out.
Starting at the left, Tammy pulls on the first one until it pops, flooding her mouth with blood, and then the second one’s torso tears away as well, and she’s crying now—two hundred and twelve people!—and by the time the first of the groomsmen’s fathers are able to rise from their pews, offer medical assistance, Tammy has pulled her tongue out by the root, and has started on the large tick hanging by its mouth from the back of her throat.
Standing above her, Brianne is in a kind of shock, she knows. Like this is all happening on the other side of thick, soundproof glass.
For her there’s no stockings or boots or faces in the congregation.
Instead, in her lower stomach, there’s just a—not a kick, but a surge of sorts. Like life, raising its wet head. From the pool boy, she knows. Out in the grass, which had to have been infested.
How could she not have remembered that?
Over the next few months of therapy and sympathy and dieting she’ll try to hide it, of course, her stomach, and then, with the last application, she’ll even try to kill it, but the only thing that finally works is Frederick, lunging for her in the kitchen one afternoon, trying to dig it from her swollen midsection with his teeth and his claws. It’s a suicide mission for him, of course—Brianne’s dad has him put down that afternoon, in a ceremony nobody attends—but it also makes things awkward for a moment in her curtained room at the hospital, when the doctor steps in with the blood results. Behind him on wheels is an ultrasound machine.
Brianne firms her lips and looks away.
When the image resolves on screen, instead of the hazy outline of a giant tick like Brianne expects, it’s a baby girl.
“Just like Joy,” Brianne’s mom whispers, her hands in cute little grandmotherly fists under her chin, her eyes wet.
“Joy?” Brianne hears herself say, all other noise suddenly gone.
“Clarice’s girl . . . ” her mom says, her voice hesitant like how could Brianne not know this? “Fattest little thing you’ve ever seen.”
Brianne breathes in deep once, twice, thinks of Tammy in her padded room, and then the doctor has the ultrasound all over her slick lower stomach, trying every angle.
The noise that was suddenly gone a moment ago was the heartbeat.
Brianne’s mom stands, the stool clattering away behind her.
“What?” Brianne says.
“It’s—it’s . . . I’m sorry,” the doctor stammers, looking at his ultrasound wand like it might really have been a knife. “It wasn’t even in distress. I don’t—”
Brianne smiles a sleepy smile, like she’s more drugged than she is.
“It’s okay,” she says, “just . . . do you get it out now?”
Already she’s thinking of the jeans she wore to the parking lot that last night. Because of Tammy, everybody’s going to crowd around her.
The doctor focuses in on her, then on a spot beside her, Brianne is pretty sure.
“In cases like this,” he says, “your body just reabsorbs the—the . . . ”
Brianne’s mom is already crying, though, her dad pulling her close, hiding her face in his chest.
Brianne swallows, nods, and looks up to the doctor.
“How many—” she starts, unsure how to phrase it even though it’s the most obvious question in the world, “how many calories is that, do you think?”
When nobody answers she decides it must be a lot, a truly unmanageable amount, so, later that week, locked in the basement, hunched over with an art knife, she does the procedure herself, and then decides that she might just want to shorten those intestines too, maybe even loop them together front to back, so they’re a closed system.
It’s makes so much sense that Brianne laughs a little, and then looks up when the light above her lowers to almost nothing.
It means the garage door is grinding up on its long chain. Her parents are home.
But she still has time.
“Just . . . here,” she says to the assistant she can see now, in the dark. The assistant is standing beside her, holding a silver tray, her red and white tights inadvisable against that nurse dress, except—except she’s kind of pulling it off too, no?
Brianne doesn’t let herself think about that, just balances a piece of her lower intestine on the blade of the knife, deposits it on the tray with a plink, and then pushes the sharp point deeper into her stomach, her assistant leaning down over her shoulder to help, saying over and over there, and there too.
There’s more fat than Brianne ever would have guessed.
Things will be better once it’s all out, though.
She’ll be perfect then.
“There,” the nurse says again, pointing to a section Brianne really should have seen, and Brianne smiles—of course—reaches down for it with the knife just as her parents’ footsteps are crossing the ceiling above her, a world away.
Lonegan’s Luck
Like every month, the horse was new. A mare, pushing fifteen years old. Given his druthers, Lonegan would have picked a mule, of course, one that had had its balls cut late so there was still some fight in it, but, when it came down to it, it had either been the mare or yoking himself up to the buckboard, leaning forward until his fingertips touched the ground and pulling, pulling.
Twenty years ago, he would have tried it, just to make a girl laugh.
Now, now he took what was available, made do.
And anyway, from the way the mare kept trying to swing wide, head back into the shade of town, this wasn’t going to be her first trip across the Arizona Territories. Maybe she’d even know where the water was, if it came down to that. Where the Apache weren’t.
Lonegan brushed the traces across her flank and she pulled ahead, the wagon creaking, all his crates shifting around behind him, the jars and bottles inside touching shoulders. The straw they were packed in was going to be the mare’s forage, if all the red baked earth ahead of them was as empty as it looked.
As they picked their way through it, Lonegan explained to the mare that he never meant for it to be this way. That this was the last time. But then he trailed off. Up ahead a black column was coming into view.
Buzzards.
Lonegan nodded, smiled.
What was dead there was pungent enough to be drawing them in for miles.
“What do you think, old girl?” he said to the mare. She didn’t answer. Lonegan nodded to himself again, checked the scattergun under his seat, and pulled the mare’s head towards the swirling buzzards. “Professional curiosity,” he told her, then laughed because it was a joke.
The town he’d left that morning wasn’t going on any map.
The one ahead of him, as far as he knew, probably wasn’t on any map either. But it would be there. They always were.
When the mare tried shying away from the smell of blood, Lonegan got down, talked into her ear, and tied his handkerchief across her eyes. The last little bit, he led her by the bridle, then hobbled her upwind.
The buzzards were a greasy black coat, looked like old
men walking barefoot on the hot ground.
Instead of watching them, Lonegan traced the ridges of rock all around.
“Well,” he finally said, and leaned into the washed-out little hollow.
As he approached, the buzzards lifted their wings in something like menace, but Lonegan knew better. He slung rocks at the few that wouldn’t take to the sky. They still didn’t, just backed off, their dirty mouths open in challenge.
Lonegan held his palm out to them, explained that this wasn’t going to take long.
He was right: the dead guy was the one Lonegan had figured it would be. The thin deputy with the three-pocketed vest. He still had the vest on, had been able to crawl maybe twenty paces from where his horse had died. The horse was a gelding, a long-legged bay with a white diamond on its forehead, three white socks. Lonegan distinctly remembered having appreciated that horse. But now it had been run to death, had died with white foam on its flanks, blood blowing from its nostrils, eyes wheeling around, the deputy spurring him on, deeper into the heat.
Lonegan looked from the horse to the deputy. The buzzards were going after the gelding, of course.
It made Lonegan sick.
He walked up to the deputy, facedown in the dirt, already rotting, and rolled him over.
“Not quite as fast as you thought you were, eh deputy?” he said, then shot him in the mouth. Twice.
It was a courtesy.
Nine days later, all the straw in his crates handfed to the mare, his jars and bottles tied to each other with twine to keep them from shattering, Lonegan looked into the distance and nodded: a town was rising up from the dirt. A perfect little town.
He snubbed the mare to a shuffling stop, turned his head to the side to make sure they weren’t pulling any dust in. That would give them away.
Then he just stared at the town.
Finally, the mare snorted a breath of hot air in, blew it back out.
“I know,” Lonegan said. “I know.”
According to the scrap of paper he’d been marking, though, it was only Friday.
“One more night,” he told the mare, and angled her over to some scrub, a ring of blackened stones in the packed ground.
He had to get there on a Saturday.
It wasn’t like one more night was going to kill him, anyway. Or the mare.
He parked the buckboard on the town side of the ring of stones, so they wouldn’t see his light, find him before he was ready.
Before unhooking the mare, he hobbled her. Four nights ago, she wouldn’t have tried running. But now, for her, there was the smell of other horses in the air. Hay, maybe.
And then there was the missing slice of meat Lonegan had cut from her haunch three nights ago.
It had been shallow, and he’d packed it with a medley of poultices from his crates, folded the skin back over and stitching it down, but still, he was pretty sure she’d been more than slightly offended.
Lonegan smiled at her, shook his head no, that she didn’t need to worry. He could wait one more day for solid food, water that was wasn’t briny, didn’t taste like rust.
Or—no: he was going to get a cake, this time. All for himself. A big white one, slathered in whatever kind of sugar coating they had.
And all the water he could drink.
Lonegan nodded to himself about this, leaned back into his bedroll, and watched the sparks from the fire swirl up past his battered coffee pot.
When it was hot enough, he offered a cup to the mare.
She flared her nostrils, stared at him.
Before turning in, Lonegan emptied the grains from his cup into the edges of her opening wound and patted it down, told her it was an old medicine man trick. That he knew them all.
He fell asleep thinking of the cake.
The mare slept standing up.
By noon the next day, he was set up on the only street in town. Not in front of the saloon but the mercantile. Because the men bellied up to the bar would walk any distance for the show. The people just in town for flour or salt though, you had to step into their path some. Make them aware of you.
Lonegan had polished his boots, shaved his jaw, pulled the hair on his chin down into a waxy point.
He waited until twenty or so people had gathered before reaching up under the side of the buckboard, for the secret handle.
He pulled it, stepped away with a flourish, and the panel on the buckboard opened up like a staircase, all the bottles and jars and felt bags of medicine already tied into place.
One person in the crowd clapped twice.
Lonegan didn’t look around, just started talking about how the blue oil in the clear jar—he’d pilfered it from a barber shop in Missouri—how, if rubbed into the scalp twice daily and let cook in the sun, it would make a head of hair grow back, if you happened to be missing one. Full, black, hair. But you had to be careful not to use too much.
Now somebody in the crowd laughed.
Inside, Lonegan smiled, then went on.
The other stuff, fox urine he called it, though assured them it wasn’t, it was for the women specifically. He couldn’t go into the particulars in mixed company though, of course. This was a Christian settlement, right?
Finally, he looked around.
“Amen,” a man near the front said.
Lonegan nodded.
“Thought so,” he said. “Some towns I come across . . . well. Mining towns, need I say more?”
Five, maybe six people nodded, kept their lips pursed.
The fox urine was going to be sold out by supper, Lonegan knew. Not to any of the women, either.
Facing the crowd now, the buckboard framed by the mercantile, like it was just an extension of the mercantile, Lonegan cycled through his other bottles, the rest of his jars, the creams and powders and rare leaves. Twice a man in the crowd raised his hand to stop the show, make a purchase, but Lonegan held his palm up. Not yet, not yet.
But then, towards mid-afternoon, the white-haired preacher finally showed up, the good book held in both hands before him like a shield.
Lonegan resisted acknowledging him. But just barely.
They were in the same profession, after all.
And the preacher was the key to all this, too.
He went on, hawking, selling, testifying, the sweat running down the back of his neck to wet his shirt. He took his hat off, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and eyed the crowd, shrugged.
“If you’ll excuse me a brief moment,” he said, and stepped halfway behind the ass-end of the buckboard, swigged from a tall, clear bottle of nearly-amber liquid.
He swallowed, lifted the bottle again, and drew deep on it, nodded as he screwed the cap back on.
“What is that?” a woman asked.
Lonegan looked up as if caught, said, “Nothing, ma’am. Something of my own making.”
“We don’t tolerate any—” another man started, stepping forward.
Lonegan shook his head no, cut him off: “It’s not that kind of my own making, sir. Any man drinks whiskey in the heat like this is asking for trouble, am I right?”
The man stepped back without ever breaking eye contact.
“Then what is it?” a boy asked.
Lonegan looked down to him, smiled.
“Just something an old—a man from the Old Country taught this to me on his deathbed. It’s kind of like . . . you know how a strip of dried meat, it’s like the whole steak twisted into a couple of bites?”
The boy nodded.
Lonegan lifted the bottle up, let it catch the sunlight. Said, “This is like that. Except it’s the good part of water. The cold part.”
A man in the crowd muttered a curse. The dismissal cycled through, all around Lonegan. He waited for it to abate, then shrugged, tucked the bottle back into the buckboard. “It’s not for sale anyway,” he said, stepping back around to the bottles and jars.
“Why not?” a man in a thick leather vest asked.
By the man’s bearing, Lonega
n assumed he was law of some kind.
“Personal stock,” Lonegan explained. “And—anyway. There’s not enough. It takes about fourteen months to get even a few bottles distilled the right way.”
“Then I take that to mean you’d be averse to sampling it out?” the man said.
Lonegan nodded, tried to look apologetic.
The man shook his head, scratched deep in his matted beard, and stepped forward, shouldered Lonegan out of the way.
A moment later, he’d grubbed the bottle up from the bedclothes Lonegan had stuffed it in.
With everybody watching, he unscrewed the cap, wiped his lips clean, and took a long pull off the bottle.
What it was was water with a green juniper leaf at the bottom. The inside of the bottle cap dabbed with honey. A couple drops of laudanum, for the soft headrush, and a peppermint candy ground up, to hide the laudanum.
The man lowered the bottle, swallowed what was left in his mouth, and smiled a particularly vacant smile.
Grudgingly, Lonegan agreed to take eight dollars for what was left in the bottle. And then everybody was calling for it.
“I don’t—” he started, stepping up onto the hub of his wheel to try to reach everybody, “I don’t have—” but they were surging forward.
“Okay,” he said, for the benefit of the people up front, and stepped down, hauled a half-case of the water up over the side of the buckboard.
Which was when the preacher spoke up.
The crowd fell silent like church.
“I can’t let you do this to these good people,” the preacher said.
“I think—” Lonegan said, his stutter a practiced thing, “I think you have me confused with the kind of gentlemen who—”
“I’m not confused at all, sir,” the preacher said, both his hands still clasping the Bible.
Lonegan stared at him, stared at him, and finally nodded, stepped forward. “What could convince you then, Brother? Take my mare there. See that wound on her haunch? Would you believe that four days ago that was done by an old blunderbuss, fired on accident?”
“By you?”
“I was cleaning it.”
The preacher nodded, waiting.
The Ones That Got Away Page 7