Oh Jesus, she says.
Let me help you, Couper says. Rayelle, he calls to me, call 911.
No! she says. It’s the clearest thing from her throat. She paces up the double yellow line and back, up and back.
I hold the phone in my hand, ready, and stand between the open door and my seat. I notice that it’s the sleeve of her shirt, torn and wrapped around her leg, and that she’s bleeding through the fabric.
No cops, she says. Please don’t call the cops.
You need an ambulance, Couper says. What happened? He speaks soft, higher pitched. Where did you come from?
He looks off into the field, the grass tall, moving in the breeze.
Behind her, the grass rustles open, and she screams, an awful dry, bleeding throat rasp, and ducks her head into Couper’s chest. A deer darts out. A big-bodied doe, leaping onto the pavement, startled by us, by the parked car. It freezes, as deer do when they notice people, and then launches the rest of the way across the road, into the field on the other side, the grass like paper, like pages, closing up behind it.
Couper holds the girl’s shoulders. Is someone chasing you? he says.
I don’t know, she says. Then, No. Not anymore. No, not at all, she says. She looks back in the direction she came from.
The sun comes gold down the center of the road, just above the horizon behind us. It shines in her face, over her cut knees, the dirty white T-shirt, wet and then dry again, stained greenish from river water and algae. She has nothing underneath it. From behind, the rounds of her ass peek out. In the front, you can see her brown nipples.
How far did you run? Couper says.
I don’t know. She shakes her hands, her head. She shivers, and crosses her arms over her chest like she’s holding herself together.
Let me give you a ride, Couper says.
No.
There’s nothing out here, he says, sweeping his arm around, for miles.
She shakes her head again. Looks up and down the road, which is straight and flat to the horizon. There’s nothing. But she seems to weigh which direction is better, as if she’ll just keep running.
I won’t take you anywhere you don’t want to go, Couper says. But there’s a market a little ways up. You can get some water. And bandages, he says. You need both of those things.
I flip through the phone in my hand, to look at his recent calls. Kaplan, twice. Amanda. Most recently, Carleen Reed. Three times.
She grunts, desperate. No cops, she says. It works into a whine that she repeats. I can’t. There can’t be cops.
I’m not a cop, Couper says.
Who is she? the girl asks, pointing.
Her? Couper says, looking back at me. That’s my girlfriend, he says.
It’s not a good time to laugh, but I snort, and toss the phone onto the seat.
He convinces her to let him walk with her. And convinces me to drive the car, five miles an hour, alongside them, with the window down, escorting them down the highway with the blinkers on, the Scamp careening slowly along behind. Less than half a mile in, she leans over, holding her thigh.
How far is it? she says.
It’s still a little ways, Couper says. He stops with her, and is careful not to touch her, but holds his hand open and near her back like he would, if she’d let him. It’s okay to get in the car, he says. I promise you.
I wonder how many times he’s said those exact words, in different scenarios. I reach over into the glove box for my cigarettes, light one and hang it out the window in my hand. This car is old enough to have a push-in lighter, with the bright red coil inside, the kind you can press into the vinyl seat, or your hand, and leave a circular brand. Couper scowls at me. I blow out the window, but the smoke just comes back in.
The girl leans, and presses on her thigh.
It’s okay, Couper says. Just let me get you to the market, he says. I don’t even know where the nearest hospital is.
It’s not till Delta, she says. It’s a shitty hospital.
You need a better bandage, Couper says. Hospital or no.
She stops walking altogether. I’m not getting in with her, she says.
I put it in park in the middle of the road and get out. I walk around the hood of the car and cross over to the right-side shoulder, which there isn’t much of. Not enough to park on. It’s mostly gravel, and then a soft decline to a field. The grass blades, wide and sharp enough to cut you. A ditch that’s dry now, but in the spring probably runs with a small creek, some lilies or cattails springing up from the green water.
Drive her, I say to Couper, walking ahead, my feet hard on the pavement.
Rayelle, Couper says.
I turn and face the sun, blinding me, the car facing west toward the market. He holds her elbow. I don’t know what she has against me, I say, but you go ahead.
He folds her carefully, bare bottomed, onto the seat where I normally sit. And drives off, faster than I was going, leaving me trailing behind, on the side of the road.
I stand on the shoulder smoking and listen to the grass, moving, breathing.
I think about Khaki calling my parents. If I was there when it happened. If my mother answered, or didn’t, or if Khaki waited until the middle of the night and called only Chuck.
I used to worry that something had happened to her. The worst things. A man, a knife. That she was working somewhere against her will. Had to turn tricks. Was in jail. Was homeless. I would lie awake sometimes, looking up at the seamed aluminum ceiling, wondering if she was sheltered, or if she slept outside, hungry, like an animal.
The farther I get from home, or the closer I get to her, I find it harder to imagine that she doesn’t have exactly what she goddamn wants.
Couper could have dropped the girl at the market and circled back around to get me, but he doesn’t. I must be too able-bodied, too protected, too clothed, to warrant picking up on the side of the road. Instead, I walk the last two miles to the market, the sun getting higher and hotter behind me as I go. I finish my cigarette and toss it into the field. I kind of hope the whole thing catches. I could burn the world down right now.
When I get there, she’s still in my seat. Still with her naked twat on the vinyl.
Couper’s inside.
Well, you’re early, Patty says to me when I jingle the copper bells hanging on the door. I see Couper in an aisle with a big bottle of water, rolls of bandage and tape.
Not by choice, I say.
You by yourself? Patty says. She pours me a cup of coffee without asking and hands it over, black.
Nope, I say. I point.
He your fella? she says. She tips her nose toward Couper. He’s not your age.
Nope, he’s not, I say.
Outside, the air has that wet you-shouldn’t-be-awake-yet feel to it. Still burning off the humidity of overnight. The grass and trees wet. The road, steaming in the sun. We come out with the water and bandages and the girl gets out of the car, and then Patty comes out too.
What in the hell is this? Patty says. She yells around the side of the building for Burt, the five-foot-tall wrinkled raisin of an attendant. Burt, she says, call the goddamn cops.
The girl waves her hands. No, she says. No calls. But Patty goes back inside without asking, and without listening to any pleas the girl might offer. Couper has her sit on a bench outside the door, her legs so thin that when she presses her knees together, none of the flesh meets in the middle.
He kneels down and pours the water over her feet.
What’s your name? he says.
She huffs. Depends on who you ask, she says. Then, Virginia. Please don’t call the cops, she adds.
When he pours the water out of the bottle and onto her feet, it makes a bloody puddle in the red mud. One at a time, he holds each foot up by the heel, the way you’d put shoes on a baby, washes it, dabs it with clean gauze, and then wraps it, bundling it thick and dry. He takes a pair of white plastic flip-flops, breaks the tag with his teeth, and slides them on, where her to
es emerge from the gauze. Her toes have a perfect French pedicure.
I’m not a cop, Couper says. Who hurt you?
I won’t tell you that, she says.
Why not?
She looks at me before she’ll answer him. She’ll kill me, she says.
I might, I say. If you don’t back off of him.
Rayelle, Couper says. He looks back over his shoulder at me, standing there, holding my arm where it aches from hitting the dash.
I didn’t even mean you, she says.
Couper opens a new bottle of water and hands it to her to drink.
You need medical attention, he says to her. For your leg, and whatever else happened to you.
There’s no medical attention for that, she says.
Where did you come from? Couper asks. He holds her by the ankles now, his fingers working her Achilles tendon.
This time? she says. Or the time before that?
Either one, Couper says.
Delta, she says. Yellow Springs. Then, over his shoulder, to me, she says, You’re going there.
I don’t know where I’m going, I say.
I know your type, she says.
The hell you do, I say. I know your type, I shoot back.
Girls, Couper says.
You sound just like her, Virginia calls out to me. Except, she says.
Except what?
She’s got a dead look, she says. A crazy dead look. You know who I mean, she says, don’t you. Jesus, she wails. Jesus Christ.
Patty pokes her head out the door. On their way, she says to Couper.
No! Virginia cries. No, no, no. She gets up from the bench.
Couper follows close behind her, but she is running the best she can. She takes the flip-flops and chucks them, and runs on just her bare padded feet.
Virginia, he calls.
I watch her stop, right before the field behind the house, where the propane tanks sit, and a shed with the tools that Burt needs for changing a tire, fixing a belt. She turns and faces him.
You can’t, she says. That’s kidnapping.
I’m trying to help you, he says.
But she runs. I watch her disappear through the field, into the woods beyond.
I walk down to the entrance of the parking lot, where the trees are cleared around the market and the Laundromat next door, a bare space of road and horizon surrounded by dark pines. I don’t see the cops or an ambulance coming yet. The house across the street, which always looks empty during the afternoon, the siding so dry and warped it looks like it would blow off in a storm, has a light on. An upstairs window with white curtains, the kind with little yarn balls on the edges, is lit up yellow gold against the gray exterior.
It can’t be, I think, and look down to the lower windows, that I could have sworn were broken out with jagged pieces sticking up. The porch, slanted to the lawn, the front door, just a black slab. The curtains upstairs twitch.
I wonder where she came from. Out of the woods. Not from the direction of the campground. We would have seen her. Or if not us, someone else. Early risers. Her hair was matted and tangled in a way that looked like she slept on it wet, like it dried without being combed. Like she came up out of the river, and just kept walking. Up close, she smelled damp and green, like plant growth.
And I think about the hard sound of my voice out here. That there is someone else, dead-looking and crazy, with the same sound.
They send a lady cop, in her thirties, and a young guy, barely out of school. The guy comes to question us, where we saw her, where she appeared to be coming from. We’ve got almost nothing to tell him. She leapt in front of the car like a deer, Couper says. I almost hit her.
I try to describe her. Tall, thin. Dark hair down her back. She had scrapes and a gash on her thigh.
Did she say her name? the lady cop asks.
Virginia, Couper says.
No one has been reported missing, she tells us. I imagine it was some kind of domestic dispute. It happens, she explains. It’s hard to help. Sometimes, by the time we get there, the woman won’t say a thing against him.
I don’t correct her.
It was a her.
We’ll keep an eye out, she says.
They sit in the patrol car a long time, not looking for her. No one runs off into the woods to see where she went, if she’s okay, if she’s fallen down bleeding to death. She wasn’t bleeding out, anyway. She was moving just fine on that leg, but still. You call the cops, you think the cops will go looking for the wild hurt girl you just described to them. The younger cop taps away on a laptop, the windows down, the police radio going. After a while, they pull out, in a cloud of dust, headed toward the campground.
You should probably ice your arm, Couper tells me.
I should probably ice you.
He tilts his head and gives me a stare then. How is that remotely funny? he says. After what we’ve just seen? After everything? he says.
I hold my arm, and it aches, deep, in the bone. I don’t think it’s broken, but it already feels hot and swollen under my fingertips.
What did Chuck tell you? I ask.
That he mailed her money, Couper says. In Delta.
He mailed her money, I say.
In Delta, Couper says. He kind of shouts it at me.
So what?
So, we just heard a girl who looked like someone tried to hack her to pieces say she was running from Delta, Couper says.
That was not hacked, I say.
Rayelle.
Why did he send her money? I say.
He rubs the back of his head. Another car pulls into the lot, already eight o’clock now, the regulars coming in for their coffee, their cigarettes.
He said he needed to do what he could to take care of those girls, Couper says.
Those girls, I say. Meaning who? Khaki and . . . ?
You, he says.
All I can do is shake my head at him.
Which one is your dad? Couper asks me.
Ray, I say. I told you that.
Which one is your mother? he says then.
What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I ask. My mother is my mother.
But I watch his brow come together like he’s seen something, something you can’t unsee.
Patty brings me a small bag of ice for my arm and tells Couper to take care of me.
I’ve been taking care of her, he says.
You took care of her all right, she says and laughs like a dirty aunt.
I remember my mother and Teddy sitting at the kitchen table while Khaki and I played on the living room floor. It was summer and I wore a sundress that was too short. Things were always too short for me. I grew fast.
Tuck the skirt in, my mother said. The whole world can see your puss.
I tried, but it didn’t work. I went back to playing on the floor the way I was, my knees in the carpet. A pile of Barbies between us.
You can’t tell that kid a goddamn thing, Teddy said. They lit their cigarettes. Poured coffee. I felt her watching me. Teddy, with her green eyes and arched eyebrows. This one wouldn’t have survived Doe, she added.
Probably not, my mother said.
When Patty kisses my cheek and hugs me goodbye, I get a hard longing for home. It chokes me, her standing there, waving at us. And even though I had a big cup of coffee, when I get in the warm seat of the Gran Torino, I can’t wait to close my eyes. I lean my head against the window, the sun hot enough to wilt you.
How far is Delta? I ask Couper with my eyes closed already, already half sleeping.
I think he says sixty miles.
I dream about my mother, that she’s in the backyard at her house, on the back step with Summer, that Summer is walking in the grass, big high baby steps, and laughing, and my mother, too. They both laugh, their mouths open in the same round shape.
Delta is an hour or more up the river, over a bridge that crosses at the widest point, where boats can go underneath, carrying fishermen, tourists. The road is dappled with light
between trees that arc over and almost meet in the middle, like driving through a tunnel of elms or poplars. A tunnel with light at the end of it, like dying, or, probably, more like being born. It’s maybe the most beautiful thing I’ve seen, even with my eyes closed.
twenty-four
KHAKI
Bury the hatchet.
They say that to make peace. To take a weapon of war, a sign of aggression, and put it away, to bury it in the ground as a means of stopping the argument, of ending the war.
There’s no peace between us.
Virginia is the worst kind of girl. The local who comes snooping around because she thinks she knows something, because she thinks she heard something saucy, something to cure her of her pink-nail-polished girl boredom.
The sheriff’s daughter.
With nothing better to do than plan her sister’s baby shower, or get her hair done. She might as well play bridge and eat cucumber sandwiches with the blue-haired ladies at the Eastern Star.
She wore a cropped top and a gold belly chain, glinting on her taut skin. Her face looked airbrushed.
When she ran from me, her face was blotched with terror. The delicate gold chain, cinched around her neck. It left a burn, a permanent necklace.
If I see her again, I will chop her again. Completely. My only regret, not hitting her better before she got away.
I never meant to keep Virginia, to love her, or to take care of her in any way. Once she came, she wouldn’t leave. She clung to me like oil. Make me your own, she’d say. Running from her sheriff daddy. Her body, unused, like undisturbed milk. She had no wounds, no damage. I showed her Dakota.
That’s who runs to me, I said to her after. Is that you? Were you raped by your own brother? Did he cut your eye out?
She had gasped with a horror I wished Dakota had never heard. Pretty girls frightened of your face is not an alarm you get used to. Dakota, with her sewn-shut eye, her scarred mouth.
In Delta, I went by Parker Dealey. But Dakota knew my real name.
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