“I wasn’t always this crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been on the mean side, but this place. The solitude of it. Well, it changes you.”
“You killed your wife. That indicates long-term crazy to me.”
“Fair enough, but I do prefer to think of it as putting her out of her misery. I’ll do you the same favor if you’d like.”
“I’m good.”
“Hey. New subject. Wanna know how I hurt my arm?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say, and turn toward the ladder. If the truck has keys, maybe, just maybe we can get it started, bust through the wooden door, and run right over George on our way out.
“There’s a man out here in these woods. Says he knows you. He got me in the biceps a few times with a switchblade before I could get the cellar door to shut on him.”
I stop in my tracks and turn back toward George’s voice.
“Lowell Smith is his name. Says people call him Smitty.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say.
I’ve come to the edge of the loft again. I can see George down below. His body big and filthy even from this height.
“Here’s proof if you need it,” George says, and throws a shiny object up into the loft. It plops down between my boots. I lean over to pick it up, feel the weight of it in my hand before I am ready to admit that it is Lowell’s switchblade. The one I left him so his chances of survival might not be a total joke.
“That’s not possible.”
“Because you tried to kill him? Well, he wasn’t as hurt as he looked, and these woods aren’t as mysterious as they seem if you know the right paths. I’ve helped him along a bit. And don’t worry, he won’t get you unless I say so. Got him locked up safe and sound with all our monsters.” He grins up at me widely.
“He’s nothing to me,” I say, and slip the switchblade into my jacket pocket.
“Maybe. Or maybe you care a little. Maybe you don’t want to be a murderer after all. You shot him. Left him to die. Sweetheart, if you think about it, I actually saved him. Even after he stabbed me I still had his best interests at heart. He’s pretty pathetic really. He keeps telling me he has a kid. Over and over like I give a fuck,” he says. “My God, think about this! If he dies out here, it’s not my fault. I haven’t hurt him. You did and you could still save him. Right your wrong and all that shit. I’ll tell you what. Give me my kid and I’ll give you your dumb-fuck boyfriend.”
“You gave up your right to Earl the first time you hurt him.”
George is momentarily enraged. A new look on his horrible face. Flashing across with such force that I know he is still too strong for me. Adrenaline, testosterone, hate, whatever it is that makes him run will overcome frostbite and stab wounds in order to get through me to Earl. Then he tilts his face to the ground, raises it to me again, and the rage is gone. Fully replaced with a smile.
“You know the thing you should be most afraid of out here?” he asks.
“You?” I ask.
“Mother Nature. She’s the real bitch, and the snow is coming.” He raises his palms to the sky and snow, as if on command, lands there. “It’s gonna blizzard again.”
“We’re getting outta here.”
“Hmm,” he says, surveying the land around him. “Maybe, but not right now. Hey, you planning to drive out of that barn?” He pulls a set of keys out of his pocket and rattles them up at me. “That should be a neat trick.”
George winces. Some part of him is hurting, shooting pain through him enough to make him stagger backward. He pulls himself together, but I see that it is still there in his stance, in his face, in the way he reaches out to the tree to prop himself up. He’s weak.
The snow is coming down faster.
“I’ll fucking kill you before you hurt anyone else.”
“Good girl, stepping up like a real prince,” he says. “Since you won’t let me in, I’m going to go weather the storm elsewhere, but don’t you fret. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I stand in the loft until George reaches the tree line. He doesn’t try to hide his pain anymore, and as the wind picks up and pushes at him, he stumbles, falls into the snow, and then stands to give me a thumbs-up. Just before he disappears into the dark of the woods he turns and grins. It sends a chill through me.
“Emma,” Earl says from below. “What are we gonna do?”
“Come here, Little Wing.”
He climbs up to me. It is a long while before I can move my eyes off the space where George stood. The snow has begun to blow again, whipping white and thick and coming into the barn to beat at our faces. There is no walking out of this. Not now. Not yet.
When the tree line that enveloped George is no longer visible, Earl and I move down to the dim light of the first floor.
I drop to a seat on the ground in front of the woodstove and Earl climbs into my lap, wrapping his skinny body in mine. I hold him, his mask catching on the collar of my jacket.
“You’ve got to stop wearing this,” I say.
I slowly remove the mask and for a moment he hugs me, presses his cheek to mine so I feel the bumps of what’s been done to him. The skin is hard in a resilient way. He pulls away and offers me a smile that is so totally open and charming that I begin to cry.
“I’ll put it back on.” Earl reaches for his mask.
I swipe at my eyes, breathe.
“No,” I say, and throw it into one of the barn’s dark corners. “I’m sorry I started crying. I don’t cry. Not much anyway.” I hiccup. One hiccup. Two. The third one is loud, and I clamp my hand over my mouth. Earl laughs. That giggle. His face crinkles in a way far more genuine than the permanent wrinkles of his scars, and it makes me smile and hiccup again. We both laugh.
“I can’t stop,” I say.
“You have to hold your breath and roll your eyes,” Earl says. “That’s what my mom tells me.”
“That’s silly.”
“Swallow the hiccup while it comes and keep rolling your eyes.”
I try to do all these things, but Earl is laughing and then I’m laughing and then, at some point, the hiccups are gone.
“What are we gonna do?” he asks again.
“We’re gonna wait until the snow eases up a bit and then we are going to drive right on out of here. Did you uncover the truck?”
“I did,” he says, and points into the far dark corner of the barn.
Even in the dim light, I can tell that the vehicle with its nose nestled to the barn wall is something far better than the promised truck. I run to it.
“Earl! This is a 1986 Jeep Laredo. A CJ7.”
“So?”
“The CJ2 was made in the forties. This is the same basic model, but the wheelbase on this sucker is, like, ten inches longer than that of the CJ2 or maybe the CJ5. They call them Willys.”
“Okay … we can call him Willy if you want,” Earl says. He’s caught up with me to stand by my side.
The Jeep’s door glides open. George has been lovingly caring for it. The interior is gorgeous. High-back leather bucket seats and a tilting steering wheel. It’s a manual, five speed. I have to climb up into it; it’s wonderfully tall. The tread on the tires is deep and thick and new.
Earl sidles up to the open door of the Jeep and is watching me admire the leather steering wheel.
“George loves this thing.”
“Earl! This is amazing!” Earl just smiles at me like I’m crazy. “You don’t get it at all, do you? This thing will bust through the barn door out into the snow. I bet it even has a winch on it that will help me pull Veronica out of here. Go look at the front. Is there a winch?”
“What’s a winch?”
“Just see if there’s a cable and a hook in the front.”
Earl hustles around front, ducks down, and then rises back up with his thumb in the air.
“Go around,” I yell. “Get in.”
He climbs into the passenger side.
“See this?” I ask, pointing to a plaque on the dashboa
rd.
He reads it slowly, stumbling a bit: “‘Last of a Great Breed. This Collector’s Edition CJ ends an era that began with the legendary Jeep of World War II.’”
“This is the real deal, Earl. This baby was probably made in my home state of Ohio. Unless that was just the diesel version made in Toledo … can’t remember, but we couldn’t have hoped for a better vehicle.”
“A helicopter would be better,” Earl says.
“Well, I guess! If you want to be all glass-half-empty. You did good, Earl. Bringing me here was supergood.”
Earl giggles, pleased with himself. The feeling of a plan that might really work is intoxicating.
The Emma and Earl team might be the winning team after all.
“One problem,” he says.
“No keys,” I say, finishing the worry for him. “I’ve been known to jump-start a car or two. I’m sure I can do it.”
“Really?”
“Really. We are going to bust old Willy the Jeep right through the damn barn wall.”
“Fun!” he says, and claps his hands together in a way that reminds me he is just a little kid. “The storm will work through the night. We’re safe in the barn.”
“‘Safe’ is not a word I feel comfortable using in this place, but it would be good if you could rest a little. I can stay up and sit watch. If the snow stops, we’ll have to get out of here. Daylight or no daylight. Let’s go sit by the fire,” I say, and we do.
I let my fears of George fade into the snowstorm and pull Earl onto my lap. We stare at the fire for a bit and then Earl twists to look up into my face.
“I love you, Emma.”
He stares at me. His little sculptures, his forest mobiles, and marionettes. Hours of focus hiding in this barn, dodging around corners and staying in the dark. Days alone. Nights alone.
“What will I do with you?”
I rub at my face with both hands, and I wonder for the first time in days what I look like. It can’t be good. Matted hair. Unwashed face. Evidence of sweat and vomit and blood. My scar throbs under my shirt. I haven’t thought about Vicodin in a while, but it would be nice now. I took my own stitches out just before I met Lowell. Did it in a gas station bathroom with a pair of toenail clippers fresh out of the package. It hurt. Each loosening. Even with the meds. Each tug.
“I saw my mama go.” He sits up and opens his palm. A small tinfoil object hangs from his finger in the breeze. It’s the bird. My bird. It dances in the wind, his hand moving so gently that it’s easy to ignore that it is Earl controlling the bird at all. It floats easily on the breeze, and with one sudden motion, the bird drops to the floor, loosed from his finger without warning. It sits in the dirt, lifeless. “She was all there. His hands were around her throat and her body was full and then nothing. Gone. George held on to her for days, crying and crying, but I knew it was okay. I saw her fly up and out before he took her down into the cellar. She got away from him no matter where he keeps her now.” He pauses and takes a deep breath before sharing: “She’s one of the crows now. The biggest of them.”
I study his tiny, serious, scarred-up face. It gives away nothing. No sense of humor or awareness or irony.
“I can call her if you want. I’ll show you.”
“No, no. That’s okay.”
He shrugs and curls back up in front of the fire. I sit down behind him. Rub my hand over his back.
I take a deep breath and let the smoky warmth of the fire into my body. There was a winter with my father when we lived out of an old car someone never picked up from the garage. It was a 1980 B210 Datsun coupe. Navy. Almost brand-new but they’d wrecked it. My father put hours into making it right, only they never came back to pay their bill. It was around the same time that we lost the house. The first house. The one I was born in. There was a string of homes and apartments after that, but this was the first big loss, and from the way my mother tells it, my father decided on his own that losing our home was better than losing the garage.
Our furniture on the front lawn looked so meager and weak that we left most of it there. A sagging sofa. A tilted lamp. My mother screaming at my father as I held on to his hand. Then there was just Daddy and me at the garage. He pulled that Datsun into the shop and turned it into a bed for me. Lifted the hatch and filled the back with blankets. He slept up front in one of the bucket seats and told me stories until I fell asleep. All that shit happening around me and I was happy. He made me happy and he knew it. And yet it didn’t stop him from leaving me.
For the first time, I wonder where my mother went during that time. I mean, I’ve thought about the fact that she didn’t come with us before but more from the abandoned-child point of view. The why-is-she-so-mean-to-Daddy perspective. But what was it like for her? I remember, suddenly, going into the empty house to use the potty, but stopping because the bathroom door was cracked open and she was in there crying. Sobbing, really. She looked up at me as if I’d made a noise, although I swear I hadn’t. Her eyes were red and swollen and there was snot on her upper lip and she said, “It’ll be fine. Just give me a minute.”
I said, “But I have to pee.” She stared at me like I was an alien. Looked at me with what I thought was hatred, and maybe it was. She left then. The bathroom. The house. Disappeared for days and I only remember thinking her selfish. Weak. A good mom would have stayed.
“You know, Earl, parents disappoint.” For a second, maybe two, I feel the relief of having said it, but then the relief is gone. So gone that the void fills with such a hot self-hatred that my hiccups start again, as if my body can somehow evacuate what I’ve just said. I was a cruel kid, a cruel teenager. And here I am … still selfish and still cruel.
“These hills are always shifting. Swallowing things up and then growing them anew. Life is cyclical. That’s what my mom says. We all come back,” he says, and then adds, “I’m sleepy.”
“Don’t fall asleep yet, Little Wing. Let’s pack what we can into the Jeep, all that stuff at the base of the ladder needs to go in, then we’ll check the weather again, and if it’s still bad out there, you can rest while I jump-start the Jeep.”
The snow is falling fat and fast when we are done loading up the Jeep. It is a white wall, a moat around our barn of a castle that allows us to relax a little, knowing George cannot get to us.
I walk over to the stove and lay down a blanket. “I’ll sit watch.”
He cuddles in beside me, flips and adjusts, flips and adjusts, rests his head on my leg.
“What would we do? I mean, if I decided to really leave here with you?” he asks.
“That’s a good question.”
“Could we get candy?”
I laugh.
“I like that one candy that comes in boxes.”
“That describes a lot of candy, Earl.”
“Ice cream! I want ice cream.”
“Funny thing to want in the middle of a snowstorm.”
“I can’t sleep. I’m too waked up.” He throws his arms over his face and then flops them at his sides. His scar doesn’t look so bad in the firelight, the dramatic edges of it softened by the flickering shadows.
“Shut your eyes.” I put my palm over his eyes. I move my hand up to his hairline and rub his temple. I smooth his scarred forehead and feel his body relax. “If you rest, we can head out of here whenever the snow lets up. It might even be safer to head out when it’s still dark.”
“Lemonheads,” he mumbles.
“Good night, Earl,” I answer.
“Night.” He whispers the word back like it’s an agreement between us.
I mean to stay awake. To keep watch over it all, and more responsibly, to listen for George to return, but the fire is warm and Earl’s body trusts my body. We are two peas in a pod, and I am slipping, staying on the edge between sleep and wake. Pea Baby.
My mother stands over me with long brown hair stretching down to touch my face. She is all giggles and fairy dust. No, not fairy dust, she’s crying. I shake myself awake, but
I can see Earl’s mother. She is naked. Her skin pale, her face flushed. She is beautiful until I get closer and see that her belly is cut open, marked with an X. Each flap of skin peeled back and inside there is a crow. A big black crow picking at her spine.
Wake up, Emma. Just wake up, but it is not Earl’s mother at all. It’s me. I’m the dead girl. The bird shifts, turns pink, rolls fetal. My never-baby gasping for air.
“He can’t breathe,” I say, but baby and body disappear.
I jerk awake.
The wind outside the barn is loud and whirring. The storm is still on and my eyes shut again. I think I should work on starting the Jeep but my body feels too heavy.
* * *
Time passes. The fire lights the darkness, throwing shadows that make me weary. “Help!” I shout from the deep black of a still dream. I sit up, hair stuck to my cheeks.
“Earl?” I fumble for him, but before my fingers find his leg, Earl shrieks. It’s a shrill sound. With my hand on his calf, I feel the convulsions before I see his body thwap against the floor. Drool connects his mouth to barn dirt. His eyes are half open. His pupils have gone somewhere deep in his skull.
I saw a kid have a seizure in class once. Back in elementary school. He raised his hand, stood up from his desk, and then dropped to the floor and flopped around like a fish spilled out of its tank. No one did anything. Even the teacher, who was in his first year of teaching, did nothing. The kid, Nicholas, bit almost all the way through his tongue.
“Any idiot knows you put something in their mouth and keep their head from banging the floor,” my father summed up for me after the incident.
I scan the room for something to fit in Earl’s mouth before I realize the end of my leather belt will do. I whip it off. Earl is shaking, his arms curled up like a baby bird, his legs kicking violently, jostling me.
“You’re okay.” I keep my voice low and steady and put my hand between the top of his head and the floor to stop the thumping. I try to work the belt into his mouth but his jaw is locked. Teeth held tight to teeth. There is no blood so I wait what seems like forever for the shaking to slow. And it does. It slows, his jaw loosens, and there is no need for the belt.
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