by Leah Weiss
“He come home with me and stayed.”
“When was that?”
“Like I say. Twenty years now, or near bout.”
I puff on my pipe and wait cause Kate’s got a cloudy look in her eyes.
“That crow came twenty years ago?” she mumbles. “Don’t they all look alike?”
I blow out a stream of pink smoke, and it circles Kate’s muddled head.
“If you don’t know what you looking for.”
We don’t talk for a spell. Just stand side by side in front of the box of Roy’s stuff. The top of my head is level where her titties should be, but that chest is as flat as a man’s.
Kate says, “I’m sorry, Birdie. I’m confused by this story. It’s strange and grounded in folklore I can’t easily accept. Forgive me if I sound rude.”
“You can’t help it. You from the valley.”
“I’m not trying to be difficult, but…” She steps back from me and Roy’s box and slides away from my crow story cause she ain’t ready. That’s okay.
She asks, “Why do you have a box for Roy Tupkin’s things to begin with?”
I wondered when she’d get to that question.
“You hear bout that girl they been looking for?”
“I heard something at the Rusty Nickel, but I wasn’t paying attention.”
“You know who’s tied to that girl gone missing?”
I wait and puff on my pipe, and when Kate’s eyes flash wide, I nod.
“Oh Lord.” She slumps gainst the side of the trailer.
“Uh-huh. Roy and her was tangled.” I cross two fingers as best I can. “Word is he pays for her place. Buys her things.”
“My word… Poor, dear Sadie.”
“Uh-huh.”
I pick up the gold necklace from Roy’s box and dangle it from my finger. “Now if this here necklace went round that missing girl’s neck, it matters something strong.”
“You don’t seriously think it’s connected to the girl, do you?”
When I don’t say, she asks, “When did someone last see her?”
“Seven days back. Tomorrow be eight.”
Kate whispers, “Birdie, do you think the girl’s dead?”
“Yep. A girl don’t up and leave on her own and not tell nobody.”
“Well, there’re a lot of ifs in this discussion: If Roy’s responsible. If she’s dead. If that’s her necklace.”
Kate’s done talking cause she can’t find easy answers. She steps away, waves good-bye, but throws words over her shoulder. “Why don’t you ask Samuel where the crows found the necklace? You might find the girl there, too.”
Her words might sound regular to some ears, but to Samuel and me, they say Kate don’t think much bout crows. Samuel hears it. He flies off that branch over top of Kate, squawks, and poops on her shoulder, then comes back to his branch.
He’s getting old.
Bet he aimed for her head.
• • •
Kate don’t know how close she is to truth. Lots of folks been looking for the girl called Darlene Simms. I hear from Mooney that Petey Pryor called the law when Darlene don’t show at the club. One of em that come to look was Sheriff Loyal Sykes from neighboring Burnsville, and his small posse of men been combing the woods looking for clues or a body, chatting up everybody they can, but they ain’t talked to me.
Petey says business at the Midnight Club is off bad cause who wants to see Sheriff Sykes leaning up against his car looking over dark glasses on his nose, him studying on everybody going in and out of the place?
Sadie says Roy Tupkin’s come back home most days now, restless. He likely thinks he’s safe in his trailer, him with his old routine.
Now Darlene Simms’s name is on everybody’s lips. This thing could blow over if we don’t find the girl or her body.
That don’t sit right with me.
It’s time I do what I do.
I fetch my shallow bowl the color of blood. Put it in the middle of the tree stump. Pour spring water in the bottom, a finger width deep. The surface goes still as a mirror. I pick up and kiss the horn-shaped stone hanging from a leather cord, and hang it round my neck.
With my thumb, I make a X in the middle of my forehead. Over and over I make a X. Skin oil coats my thumb making that X. When my forehead is tender from the thumb mark, I pick up the necklace from Roy’s box. I rub my skin oil all over it and drop the necklace in the middle of the water bowl.
I know what I’ll see. The oil moves like swirling clouds, taking shape round the truth. The smell of rotten eggs rises up and grows strong in the air. I wait and watch and wonder.
Why are young girls dumb and men surprised?
What does evil look like to crows from up in the sky?
They’re brave to play hide-and-seek with the dead.
Billy Barnhill
I always got eyes for Sadie Blue. Long before she up and married my best friend, Roy, I only got eyes for that girl. She sucks the air outta my chest. Makes it hard to breathe. I gotta turn away, sure my eyes are gonna tell on me.
She was but eight years old first time I seen her. So slight a breeze could lift her off her feet and carry her away. Only the paper pokes of supplies in her hands hold her to the ground. She got hair the color of chestnuts and was singing while she walked. Cause I can’t help it, I followed her through the woods, walking soft.
She stopped and turned. “Why you come after me?”
I won’t walking quiet as I thought.
“Name’s Billy. Billy Barnhill,” was my peace offering.
She waited and I waited till she said, “Billy Barnhill, you stay away, you hear?” Her voice was down-in-a-well small.
Looking at her stand there that day, I woulda said she was built flimsy with no mind of her own. That the only things she owned was a angel face and long hair. I was a handful of years older, but she put me in my place standing there waiting.
She backed up, then turned round and walked on. I stayed put till she started singing again, far off. I don’t think to ask her name that first time, but she already burrowed in my heart.
• • •
One day, she walked by the swimming hole me and my buddies was at. I swung out on a vine to drop in the river and make a big splash so she’d look my way. But I forgot to let go and crashed back into a tree and broke my arm. It hurt like hell and made me cry like a sissy.
That girl walked right on without even a glance my way.
Another day she sold apples and jam at a roadside stand. I squatted down in the bushes and watched her sit on a crate, straighten her skirt, collect dollars from fancy people in fancy cars. Sadie said real polite, “Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma’am.”
What I don’t know was I was hunkered down on a nest of nasty chiggers. While I watched Sadie Blue, those little buggers climbed over my bony ankles and up my legs to the top of my jeans. Don’t know till the next day when the chiggers made me claw my skin raw. I dug till blood run. Then scabs come, and I went crazy with a terrible itch. I can’t do nothing but scratch at myself for two weeks.
I don’t mind cause I got to see Sadie be normal by herself.
• • •
Sadie Blue don’t look my way on purpose, but she don’t have to. I settle for crumbs when it come to that girl and don’t have a scrap of pride. She sunk a hook in my heart without paying attention is what she done. Then Roy up and married her nine years later. Me and the boys know he don’t deserve a angel like Sadie. He bet he could marry her, and he did. He knew I wanted that girl for myself but he married her anyway. She carries his baby now.
These days, Sadie still makes my heart swell. If Roy catches me pining, he’ll deliver punishment cause Roy don’t share. I don’t cross him, but I ain’t proud at what I do instead. I chop away at Sadie’s soft side. Snicker when Roy leaves his
mark on her so he don’t think I’m sweet on his wife. We take all her lightness and snuff it out.
At the end of the day, I leave Roy’s place empty. I walk down the worn path through the woods to my trailer and the kudzu what lays heavy on my roof and hangs over the edge and creeps toward my open windows.
• • •
Thursday morning, I sleep in late on my swaybacked mattress and flat pillow that gives me little comfort. The rain peppers the rusty awning and seeps into my dream bout Sadie Blue, naked and willing. In the half-light of that dream, she wears a odd kinda smile I never seen before. Maybe it’s for me. Maybe she’s glad she’s my girl now. Maybe she forgives me for what I done to her. Maybe she knows it was all for show.
“Billy, you in there?” a man’s voice comes from a distance and pulls me back from Sadie’s arms. A flat hand hits the window frame near my head. I open my eyes, and Roy looks in on me through the ripped screen. Wet hair sticks to his head like a black helmet.
“Interrupting somethin?” he asks with a crooked grin.
“Gall dang it, Roy!” I sit up and pull my hand outta my britches. I got a wet spot at my crotch. “Ain’t nobody here.”
Roy’s raspy laugh ends in a hacking cough that doubles him over. He hocks up a wad and spits into the weeds. “Come on. We gotta go.”
I step in my boots. “Where we going?” I grab a stale donut off the counter and my hat. I don’t break my stride walking out the door into the rain. Roy’s halfway cross the clearing.
“Where we going?” I ask again and hustle two steps to Roy’s long one.
He grunts but don’t say.
A loud clap of thunder rattles the trees. Rain comes down hard on the leaves, sounding like buckshot falling outta gunmetal clouds. We trudge single file in quiet through the woods to the truck. He drives and I got thinking time.
I been following Roy Tupkin since we was boys. We was birthed into neighboring hollers with mamas who loved men more than babies. Over the past dozen years, I been Roy’s best friend, likely his only friend. I witnessed stuff that shoulda been punished with the heavy hand of the law. Roy snaps quick. Sows wild seeds and dark fear. There was crazy fun, too, but it all had to do with likker and guns and Roy’s hot temper.
Roy Tupkin was always bigger than me by a head at least. When he was twelve, he already had hair in his pits and fuzz on his chin. I looked up to him cause he stuck up for me when he don’t have to.
It started on a winter night when we was kids and he come up on me bout froze in the front yard, me wearing Mama’s slip and my skivvies. I was on the puny side like now, with doughy skin and washed-out eyes that stay runny. One of Mama’s boyfriends caught me smelling on her silkies, looking for sweetness. That man made me strip in all my paleness and put that slip on. All the time he laughed and his cagey eyes looked at me hard enough to bruise my heart.
Mama said, “Larry, don’t mess with my boy. He don’t mean nothin by it.”
Larry don’t look at Mama. He don’t see the pinch between her faded eyes and the pouty cracks in her painted lips. Still, she let him push me into the frosty yard and lock the door.
Roy come up on me bawling. Saw me leaning up against the side of the trailer, me in a baby-blue slip. He don’t ask questions. He banged on Mama’s door like he had a right to, and when the old man opened it with a huff, Roy beat on him with fists so fast they blurred like a train rushing by inches from your nose. Beat him in the belly. Kicked him in the balls, then broke his nose. Pushed his sorry ass out the door and into the yard where he sprawled facedown in the cold dirt and stayed put.
I run inside and locked the door, bug-eyed and outta breath from the fight, my white skin splotchy red from the cold. Roy laughed easy like it won’t nothing. He don’t even wash his bloody knuckles.
From then on Roy Tupkin was my bodyguard without me asking. His shadow was long. I don’t cast one of my own.
I asked once, “Why you do what you do for me, Roy?”
“Cause we family, you little shit. Besides…now I own your sorry ass.”
Well, we won’t family, but I don’t argue with Roy. I was mostly grateful for Roy. My life’s bigger cause of him but not always better. If I had my rathers, I’d settle down, stop drinking, get a job, and come home to Sadie Blue every night.
I could do that.
If I had a right to.
If things was different.
• • •
Roy parks on a old roadbed, grabs a canvas satchel from in back, and we hike a mile in. Could drive closer, but we don’t want to leave tracks. When we near our still, Roy says, “Somebody’s poking round.”
“Who?”
“Don’t matter who. Only matters we got warned. Nobody messes with what’s mine.”
Roy spits, then spills the contents of the sack. The metal traps clank at his feet. Dried blood and pieces of skin and fur are still in the jagged teeth.
“Roy, traps don’t make sense. You catch somebody, they don’t die right off. They get caught, they get mad. They stay right here where you get the blame.”
The big man chuckles. “The still ain’t staying here. We moving it. Gonna leave behind some presents for the nosy.”
I say, “More than crappy revenuers come this way. What if Pooter or Earl come by? Or the delivery boy? You want their pain on your conscience?” My voice goes higher again.
“Sharpen them stakes, Billy. There’s gonna be more than traps when they come back.”
The rest of the morning, we plant danger for the unsuspecting. After noon, we take apart the still, load carts, and move deeper in the mountains. A camouflage tarp gets tied between trees for overhead protection till we build a proper roof. Pipes get connected. Tracks covered. Bush screens set. A new trail remembered. When we’re done, we walk the woods by moonlight, make it back to the truck, then Roy drops me off. I stumble home bone weary.
I’m too tired to dream of Sadie.
• • •
At fifteen, Roy drove a moonshine getaway car like a pro. It was a 1940 Ford with a Lincoln engine. Black and rusted out along the rocker panel with one hubcap gone. The left rear fender got dented when revenuers got close and almost run Roy off the road. The windshield got cracked when he hit a low-lying limb. The car’s got a double gas tank, and one holds the shine. Roy drove with the headlights off in the dark heart of night.
I’d be the one to get the makings for moonshine. I got the secret recipe from old man Hector Hunt for the best hundred-seventy-proof white lightning in the county. He adds a special honey from a holler way off the beaten path, and I found where he got it. When Roy got tired of handing money to Hector, Roy and me helped the old man retire. Ownership changed hands that night, and no one noticed. Customers just want their shine.
There’s a lotta money to be made in shine if you do it right. And a lotta ways money gets used up. You gotta build the still and fix the still and pay off the law. At times the mash can go bad on you, if you won’t careful. Money flows out as easy as it flows in. Right or wrong, me and Roy never think to save for a rainy day, but we do wanna make the best shine. That takes the best ingredients.
Roy says, “I wanna do something once in my life I’m proud of.”
Me, too.
• • •
Lester Jolly is the king of sweet corn in these parts. The lay of his land makes corn sweeter than most. Other farmers get four dollars a bushel for their corn. Lester gets more. But corn turned into moonshine brings in ten times that. The math’s easy to do; Lester is a bottom-line man, cept he’s got a four-legged problem that keeps him awake at night.
What happened was over a hundred years back, a grandson of Mr. Vanderbilt, that railroad tycoon with all the money in the world and some pretty stupid ideas, brought Russian wild boars with big tusks into these mountains so the wealthy folk could pretend they was big-game hunters. Before he done tha
t, there won’t wild boars in our woods.
If that won’t bad enough, a bigger wild pig was brought in—the Eurasian boar, they called it—and they was kept penned up in a game preserve till they busted out, like anybody smart knowed they would.
Some of them boars still roam these mountains. Just a few years back, somebody kilt a seven-hundred-pounder that come from that bad idea. Hungry hunters keep the numbers down, but Lester’s got his self a special problem.
“A hog can eat up a quarter acre of corn in one night,” Lester complains. “That’s a helluva lotta profit gone that won’t come back. We need to kill us some hogs.”
“We’ll trap em for you.”
“How you do that?”
“Got a plan. You get ready for bacon,” I say and go fetch Roy.
• • •
Me and Roy drive before dark to the cornfield where the hogs been eating Lester’s corn. I set posts, and Roy nails a spiral wire fence in place. In the heart of that spiral we put a pile of sweet corn hooked to a trip wire. When we come back the next morning, two big hogs pace in the pen and the sweet corn is gone.
Lester pulls up in his pickup. “They don’t look happy.”
Roy says, “Ain’t looking for happy hogs, just dead ones.”
He cocks the rifle and puts the barrel through the fence. The first shot kills one hog, but the other gets riled and breaks the fence down. The hog snorts and aims his thick tusks straight for Roy’s privates. The hog musk stinks something terrible. Me and Lester run to the truck and I jump in back, but Roy gets cut off and runs into the cornfield. He has his rifle, but he don’t have time to turn and take a shot.
Lester starts the truck and yells, “Lord! Hang on, Billy!”
Poor Lester Jolly got no choice but to drive straight into his orderly cornfield on the heels of a wild hog and a moonshiner. I hold tight to the roof, and we zigzag the hell all over his cornfield followin the sound of wild grunts and breaking stalks.
“Left… Too far… Back to the right… They on your left—”
“Shut up, Billy. You ain’t helping!” Lester shouts, mowing down green walls of his prize corn.