by BK Loren
Keeping one eye on the window, he sat down, pulled a bag of Drum tobacco from a leather pouch. When he opened it, the smell of fresh tobacco mingled with the scent of the leather. The dogs were off leash now. It thrilled him and humbled him to be hunted by dogs. He took a pinch from the tobacco pouch, placed it in the white paper, then rolled the smoke tightly, licked its seam, and smoothed it over. He heard voices in the kitchen, and the sound startled him. One officer had stayed back, with Brenda. It was something he hadn’t planned on, and it made his neck throb and his throat tighten. He’d wanted to talk to Brenda before he left. He’d wanted to tell her what was on his mind. He listened hard, trying to drown out the pounding of his own heart in his ears.
Brenda was sober, even lucid now. He heard her ask the man if he cared for coffee, and Zeb’s heart thrummed.
“No, Ma’am,” came the voice.
“You saying what you got on him?” Brenda asked.
“What we got on him’s a confession. Written and detailed down to the last iota.”
“What’s he confessing to that’s causing this kind of hullabaloo?”
“He your husband, Ma’am?”
“We never had a ceremony. But we’re pretty damn sick of each other by now and here we are living in this damn house together anyway, so I think that qualifies.”
This was the part of Brenda Zeb had grown to love. She was raw, open, even beautiful in her thick strength and abiding anger.
“No ceremony, no information,” the man said.
“Sonsabitches,” Brenda said.
“He got any real family you know of?” the man asked.
Brenda laughed. “Yeah. He’s got a father. Good luck talking to him because he hasn’t talked to anyone in over ten years. And he’s got a sister who’s a damn good friend of mine who I haven’t seen since the Dead Sea was just sick. She tracks wolves in some remote corner of the planet that even Zeb can’t find, so good luck there, too.”
Zeb half smiled. He could hear Brenda cleaning up the kitchen, something she did on the rare occasions when she could not find words to express the intensity of her emotions. She banged pots and pans loudly, made the silverware sing like out of tune wind chimes. “He means something to me, you know,” she said after a while. Said it calmly and with measure.
“Yes, Ma’am.” There was a silence. No cleaning. No one walking on the creaky wood floor. Then the sudden sound of a chair scraping the wood and the man’s hard-soled heels walking out the door.
Zeb’s breathing slowed now. He knew why he and Brenda had stayed together all these years, in spite of everything. They could read each other like rivers, the fluidity, the steadiness, the soft rage of water shaping something as solid as rock, softening its ragged edges. He didn’t light the smoke he’d rolled. Instead, he tucked it into his front pocket. When the voices in the kitchen went silent and the men in the field were no longer visible, he knew his chance for talking to Brenda had passed. He knew he would put her at risk if he told her anything. He slept that night in his home for the last time, listening to Brenda’s footsteps on the wood floor, her occasional swearing at nothing. In the middle of the night, he heard her slamming doors and swearing louder. Then she left the house, got into her truck, and took off. He knew she would be okay then. He knew she understood his position.
In the morning, he made his way down the mountain, away from the commotion, into town.
Willa, 1980
WE HAVE TO DRAW blood. A finger prick won’t do. We’ve gone more than half the summer and have not renewed our blood-sister pact. Brenda says it’s because she’s too grown up for it now. She has moved on to other things, boys and makeup and stuff like that.
“Besides that, your brother’s bad news,” she says, to me.
“You want to do this or not?”
“He had that gun yesterday, Willa. Not his regular bird gun. He had that little gun, too.”
“You were out there with him before I got there, Brenda. You oughta know.”
“I wasn’t with him.”
“We saw you from the window. Me and Mom watched you and Zeb.”
“Yeah, so.”
“Yeah, so you’re lying and you’d rather be with Zeb than me these days.”
She laughs. “Where’d he get a gun like that anyway?” she says. “That little job is not a hunting gun, you know.”
“A gun’s a gun. You ready to do this or not, Brenda?”
“I’m just saying, he’s bad news.”
“You like him.”
“He scares me.”
“Your dad scares me.”
She laughs. “He’s not such an ass when he’s not drunk.”
“Well, he’s never not drunk. And you think Zeb’s cute, you say it all the time. Can’t say that much for your dad.” I point toward Chet and Dolly Thatcher’s front yard. It’s the only house with a green lawn and a paved sidewalk like the houses across the field. It looks out of place side-by-side with all the other identical houses sitting like Monopoly pieces on our side of the field. I tell Brenda that too. “That damn green lawn makes the Thatchers think they’re better than everyone else in the neighborhood.”
She shrugs. “Least our houses are better than that damned condemned shack like the one in the field,” Brenda tells me.
“It wasn’t condemned. It was eminent domained.”
“Same thing. That’s what my dad says.”
“Screw your dad. You doing this thing with me or not?”
She hems and haws. “That’s the Thatchers’ sidewalk, Willa.”
“I know it’s the Thatchers’. Only sidewalk in our neighborhood, far as I can see.”
“Yeah, and if we get caught—”
“We won’t get caught.”
Brenda studies the white pavement.
I point to the sidewalk.
Brenda flips her long black hair over one shoulder, a habit she has when she’s nervous. “All right. The concrete’s better than gravel, like you said.”
The sidewalk is just on the other side of Chet and Dolly’s cherished rose bushes. Other yards have bicycles, trikes, kites, stacks of tires, sometimes an old stove or fridge in them. We use all those things for hide-and-seek, or for bases in softball. But no one uses the Thatchers’ yard for anything. If you cross it, I mean if your toe touches it when you’re running from third base to home, or weaving your way out of a tackle in football, Chet’ll come outside, shaking his fists, yelling goddamn shit, fuck—words that would make us laugh if it wasn’t Chet Thatcher saying them at us.
Every evening Chet waters his precious lawn and Dolly prunes her rose bushes, and the kids in the neighborhood all stare because we know too much about them. What we hear going on sometimes behind their closed blinds is a story no one will ever tell. We talk about other things that go on, like when Billy’s mom paddles him right out on the front lawn, or when Brenda’s daddy sits in his lawn chair, asleep, liquored-up and drooling. We laugh at shit like that. But when we hear Dolly’s voice crying out, when we hear Chet yelling at her, all of us—Brenda, me, all the kids, even Zeb—we stop playing whatever game we’re playing. “Gotta go now,” we say. “Gotta go home.” In ten minutes, our neighborhood turns completely quiet. No one laughing. No one calling out new rules to a game, no one crying because they didn’t win the last game. There’s probably the sound of Dolly’s voice still, but there’s no one left to hear it. Everyone is home, safe.
Me and Brenda stare at the Thatcher yard. We know what Chet is capable of. All the same, I take a deep breath and call out, “Let’s do it!” and we grip each other’s hands, and Brenda hollers, “Go!”
We run a streak across my yard and enter Thatcher territory, and then things slow down. I see my white tennies churning, see Chet’s green lawn beneath them, see my own legs sprinting right next to Brenda’s, and when we get to the edge of Chet’s concrete strip, I call out, “Now!” We flatten out our bodies in midair and land with our knee bones hard on the pavement. After that, things speed up
again. We stand up fast and sprint to get to the other side of the street, knees throbbing, a held-back laugh pinching our throats.
Bright red blood streams from bright red circles on our knees, flesh torn open good. We run to the field, find a quiet place with no one else around. Already I can feel the blood tightening on my skinned knee. Brenda sits on the ground, her knees pulled into her chest. I sit across from her and we both suck in wind from the corners of our mouths, hissing against the sting. The patches on our knees are a bloody red sheen, and we press the dark circles of our wounds together, my skin so white next to Brenda’s, white as her sisters’ and her father’s skin. We lean in closer, and I feel our blood crossing over.
“Your mama doing all right?” Brenda says.
“Yeah, she’s all right.”
The summer breeze touches our split-open skin, makes the wound feel like a thousand tiny needles.
“She ever go to a doctor about her condition?”
“Can’t afford it much, Brenda.”
“Yeah. It’d be good if you could, though.”
“It’d be real good, yeah. Hey, I saw your daddy sitting outside in his lawn chair the other day.”
“He wave to you?”
“He stood up and hugged me and we had a nice walk around the block.”
“Really?”
“Shit no, Brenda. What do you think?” I press my knee tighter into hers. “Ever wonder what your real daddy’s like, Bren? Your Indian father?”
She shakes her head no.
“If he looks like you, or anything?”
She snorts a little. “My real daddy? I’ll tell you what my real daddy’s doing. He’s drunk and useless and living on the poorest land in the union, Willa. He’s out there on that Indian reservation, and he can’t even buy dinner for his own damn self, let alone for a kid like me.”
“Think so?”
“Yeah.”
“That what your dad tells you?”
She shrugs. “He’s the only one who would know, right?”
I think about it. “I guess so, yeah.”
We sit quiet, pressing our knees together a little longer, till the sting finally fades. “Our blood’s crossed over by now. I can feel it,” I tell her.
Brenda nods. “It’s crossed.”
We separate our knees and strings of blood stretch like sticky red strands of a spider web between us. The pulling apart makes us bleed fresh again.
“Can’t clean it,” I remind her.
“I know. I won’t.”
SOME GIRLS HAVE A kind of chant or contract to seal their pact. Me and Brenda seal it with one pure red rose petal. This means going to Chet and Dolly Thatcher’s yard again. They’re the only ones with flowers, and right close to the flowers is their dog, sitting sad and sorry in a little chain-link pen.
“Don’t get that dog barking,” Brenda says.
“We won’t.”
We walk along the rose hedge with our hands in our pockets, bring them out only to snatch a rose. The dog sits with one shoulder pressed up against the fence, looking at us, wagging its tail in the dirt. Its mouth hangs open, smiling that dog smile.
I cup my hand around a rose bud. It pops like a knuckle when I pluck it from the stem. The dog stands up. “Good pup. Yeah.” I hold the flower in the flat of my palm, sort through petal after petal, looking for one that is solid red.
We go through several rose bushes, thorns shaped like little peaks of stiffened egg whites in the meringue pies Mom makes. If the petals have white on their tips, we let the whole rose drop to the ground. The blooms burst like silent fireworks when they hit.
“Think they’re home?”
I look at Chet and Dolly’s grey-in-summer windows. “Looks to me like they’re never home.” Zeb has a sense about these things, but I don’t. He can tell at a glance when someone is home, sizes any situation up fast. I don’t have those kind of smarts.
Brenda tiptoes alongside the hedge. The dog paws under the chain link fence at our discarded petals. Brenda pulls another flower from the stem, drops it, and the dog noses for it, then starts in barking, butt in the air, wagging his tail like he wants to play.
“Good boy, hush, boy, hush.” Me and Brenda talk to the dog at the same time, but he just keeps barking, and then I hear the Thatchers’ door pull open.
“Holy shit,” I whisper, and together me and Brenda take off running. We huddle behind a corner of my house. I can hear Chet’s hard-soled shoes clicking on the concrete. “Don’t look,” I tell Brenda, “Don’t look!”
Doesn’t matter if we look or not. We can hear the beating going on. The dog yelps and cries, and I hear the sound of Chet’s strap coming down on it, over and over. We sit and listen, eyes straight ahead, and I see the tears coming to Brenda, and I wish to God I could cry, too. It’s something else that starts up in me, though, something sharp and violent, and I can’t help it—I turn and look over my shoulder.
Chet’s back is to me. His arm pumps up and down, belt catching on the fence sometimes, other times hitting with a solid thump. The dog does everything it can to get away. But it ends up quiet in the corner, laying limp.
Chet goes back into the house, wrapping his belt around his fisted knuckles like a boxer’s taped hands, and I’ll be damned if that dog doesn’t get up on all fours and walk toward Chet. It doesn’t growl or bear its teeth like I want it to. It doesn’t take a bite out of Chet’s fat ass. It wags its tail, its whole butt going back and forth, its head down, looking up all sheepish like it’s saying it’s sorry. It wants Chet to pet it.
“Fucking Chet,” I whisper.
“Come on,” Brenda says.
It’s so hard to turn away from that pup, the way he keeps believing and hoping. But Brenda tugs my shoulder, and I turn away and we walk down the street. When we reach her doorstep, she opens her fisted hand, a perfect red rose petal there, no white at the tip. “Blood sisters,” she says.
“Blood sisters. Yeah.” But it’s weakened now. My knee hurts, and I can’t remember why Brenda and I pretended to be blood sisters anyway. That feeling’s gone and I stand there blankly, wondering how someone as worthless as Chet could take something so valuable away.
BEFORE BEDTIME THAT NIGHT, I scour my hands with Lava, the soap Zeb uses after he works on lawn mower engines, cars, guns. It feels like sandpaper on my skin. Brenda has told me about her aunt who died from not washing her hands before supper. Zeb says it’s bullshit, but I scrub my hands till they turn bright pink, anyway.
Mom comes and tucks me in. She used to read to me, but she can’t do that anymore, her own will slipping away from her day by day. “You look all balled up,” she says, and I notice her voice is falling away, too, becoming a soft whisper even when she means to be strong and gentle. I pull the covers up close around my neck. “That can’t be comfortable,” she says, “You’re all tight. Don’t you want to stretch out?”
I shake my head no, and she bends over and kisses each eyelid. “Sleep sweet,” she says, and she tells me she loves me and I want to say the same thing back to her but I feel her fading away. I keep my hands hidden under the sheets. That day, they made a dog get a beating; they stole. I dream of them sometimes, my wrists bloody stumps, my fingers shriveled like burned branches, black with disease. They have done evil things, I know, but I want to wake with them in the morning. I do not want my hands taken from me in the night.
IT’S STILL THE MIDDLE of the night, but before he comes around the corner, I can feel the door opening. Zeb steps close to me, kneels down by my bed. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I was sleeping till you opened that door,” I tell him.
“You can’t hear that door opening.”
“Well, I did.”
“Okay, c’mon,” he says.
“What?”
“Got something I need you for.”
“Johnny’s pharmacy?”
“I told you a million times I’m not good enough for that job yet, Willa.”
I cross my
arms and turn over, facing the wall. “Then I’m not going with you, Zeb. I am not stealing anything.”
“Yeah, you are.”
“No I’m not.”
“Willa. You are. Just quit.”
I keep facing the wall. I tuck my hands into my armpits.
He sighs. “Look, you know the Thatcher dog?”
My stomach tightens soon as he says it. “I know the Thatcher dog, yeah.”
“Gonna save it.”
I turn and look at him.
“You in or out?”
“What’re you going do?”
“Save the dog.”
“How?”
“You in or out?”
Even in the dusky light I can see his smile. He looks like a scruffy young Elvis, kind of pretty, a little bit tough. I search his pockets with my eyes to see if he’s still carrying that gun. There’s nothing. So I release my hands from under the sheets, swing my legs over the side of the bed.
“I’m not swiping anything with you, Zeb.”
“Get your shoes on.”
I grab a jacket and zip it up over my pajamas. Me and Zeb walk out of my room and down the hallway. Half of me wants Mom to wake up and find us and tell us both we’re in big trouble and send us straight back to bed. But I know she can’t hear us, and even if she could, there’s nothing she could do, not in her condition. So we tiptoe through the living room and step out.
There’s a different color to things in the night. Night-green lawns, night-silver cottonwoods by the pond in the field. The dog is almost complete shadow now, shrunk away in his night-sleeping corner.