I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure if I should tell him George had shown me the private stash under the bricks in the shed, or if he was talking about a completely different stash of money.
“I didn’t take anything,” I said.
“I’m not saying you did. I mean, I don’t want you thinking I’m accusing you of taking it. I was just wondering if you knew anything about it? I haven’t talked to Rosemary or George yet.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You can check all my stuff if you want. You can check my clothes or my stuff in the bedroom.”
He leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose. He seemed frustrated. I was worried and I hadn’t even done anything.
“I’m sorry, Sequoyah,” he said. “I know you didn’t take anything. Don’t think I think you did. I realize how bad this looks on me as a person. I like to talk to people without accusations. I apologize for asking.”
“No problem,” I said.
He crossed his legs and took another drag from his cigarette. Smoke streamed from his nostrils.
“I know what it’s like to live in a strange place,” he said. “When I was a kid my dad was murdered up north. A man he had planned to meet in the middle of the night pulled up in a car. It was snowing and the man demanded money. Two shots were fired and my father fell face-forward onto the road. They eventually caught the guy, but throughout childhood I kept replaying that murder over and over in my mind.”
He was looking at the cigarette in his hand.
“My dad was a bootlegger,” he said. “I imagined it happened like this: the killer lit a cigarette, then got into his car and drove away while snow fell on Dad’s dead body. That’s how I saw it. Then I moved in with my aunt Alice, who was patient enough to deal with me. It took some time but everything worked out in the end. My dad, he always took me to the horse races. He taught me to look at speed index, weight, class, whether the horse was on Lasix or not, whether the jockey was any good, whether the trainer was any good, and how much money the horse was running for. At some point I got good at handicapping six-furlong thoroughbred races, which was easier than betting on quarter horses.”
“I want to go sometime,” I said.
“Thoroughbreds are more fun to bet on,” he told me. “Long shots are less likely to do anything in quarter horse races. Too many low odds.”
I didn’t know what to say, but it felt like Harold was being honest with me, or at least trying to be. Maybe he felt guilty about his secret life as a bookie, spending all that time setting point spreads to get the edge in a wager. He stared at me in the darkness, cigarette in mouth, smoke hanging around his head like he was burning to death.
George seemed to have calmed down when I went to bed. He was sitting on his bed in the dark, wearing a clip-on tie and slacks. He turned on the lamp and started talking.
“My tie is crooked and at an angle for a reason,” he said. “It means I’m a hard worker. It means I’ve had to loosen my tie due to stress and a strong work ethic. Work ethic is important. Work hard and make money. Save, invest. Buy low and sell high. Work, sir. Work. Do you want to know what I’ve gotten done today? I finished a budget for Harold and Agnes. I’ve written nine pages of my novel. I’ve made a grocery list for Agnes since she always goes to the grocery store and realizes she’s forgotten the list. I wrote a list of long-term goals to achieve before I’m twenty so that I won’t have to be a fry cook or panhandler.”
“Are you scared of me?” I said.
“I was worried you were going to kill me,” he said. “I thought you cut my lip or something to make it bleed.”
He sat slumped like a beaten dog. I was still new in the house. He was still trying to figure me out. My face, the scars. My unwillingness to talk about my past with him. He knew almost nothing about me, and I knew very little about him.
“I won’t kill you,” I said. “Maybe I’ll take a knife and hack up your face like mine. Right?”
He looked at me. “I need a briefcase. I can carry my novel in it now that it’s getting bigger.”
He reached into the drawer beside his bed and retrieved a letter. He unfolded it and held it up for me to take. “This came today,” he said. “You can read it if you want.”
I went over and took it. I read it silently while standing in front of him. The letter was written in cursive, in blue ink, on hotel stationery.
Dear George,
I hope everything’s going well for you. We hope you had a good Christmas. Your Grandpa and I are currently on vacation in Las Vegas. Our food here at the Frontier Hotel is delicious. Last night we ate dinner at a seafood restaurant. We had salmon mousse on cucumber slices. Grandpa tried sushi for the first time. He said his was delicious. Mine wasn’t so good. I drank a Perrier with my meal. Tonight we might try an Italian restaurant that has good minestrone. Or maybe we’ll try a steak house here in the hotel. I’m sure the food will be delicious. We already checked the menu. Grandpa’s sweet tooth may give in for dessert tonight. Chocolate mousse and coffee sounds good. Take care.
Grandpa and Grandma
“Your grandparents?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Do they write you lots of letters?”
“No. They wrote three years ago when they were in Florida. They don’t call. They don’t really write letters much except to talk about food. They wouldn’t let me live with them.”
He scratched at the back of his neck. I waited for him to say something else, but he was silent in the dark.
“I once got a boy to believe I was a werewolf,” I said.
He looked up at me.
“I’m serious,” I said. “It was when I was at the shelter. The kid was a real dumbshit. He was from some stupid shitty little town. He kept putting his shoes on the wrong feet. He had bad eyesight or something and wore thick glasses. Once he asked me about my burn marks and I told him I was attacked by a wolf in the woods in the middle of the night. And I told him sometimes I wake up in the mornings naked with scratches and blood and mud all over my body. I told him other wolves gave me a hard-on. He stayed away from me.”
George seemed to like this story.
“Here’s another,” I said. “I cut his hand with a pair of scissors and told him I didn’t mean to because I sometimes have uncontrollable urges, and he believed me. He was a dumbshit, see? I told him I stole a pickup truck from a rodeo parking lot and drove it all the way down to Galveston, Texas, and that they had to bring me back in the back of a van with adult inmates. I told him they threw me down and handcuffed me just off the freeway. I told him a coyote came out of the brush and started to attack the trooper, ripped into him. Bit his leg so that blood sprayed everywhere. The coyote smelled my blood, knew I was part wolf. The coyote ripped out the trooper’s organs and we started eating it. The kid believed every word.”
“You ever drive a truck, really?” George asked.
“No.”
“Me either,” he said. He told me he was afraid of learning to drive because he would have an involuntary reaction to the stress and swerve into oncoming traffic.
“How do you know?” I asked. “You’ve never driven, so it doesn’t seem likely.”
“It’s a fear I’ve always had,” he said. “I see myself driving on an old highway at night. I mean one of the old highways with only two lanes, like the kind you see around here. I see headlights coming at me. Each passing set of headlights makes it worse.”
“Makes what worse?”
“The involuntary jerk of the steering wheel. Turning directly into oncoming traffic and crashing. Dying instantly in a head-on collision. I don’t know why.”
He took a deep breath and stared at the wall.
All Thursday morning, the day of my mother’s court hearing, I felt disoriented and lost, like the day of a funeral of someone close. Liz told me to dress nicely. Agnes helped me pi
ck out a nice pair of pants and a button-up collared shirt. Rosemary was distant that morning. Downstairs, I told her my mother’s probation hearing had me worried, but she didn’t look concerned. She was sitting at the kitchen table, writing something in a notebook.
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she said.
“I guess I’m worried,” I said.
“Don’t worry, Sequoyah.”
She was concentrated on whatever she was writing, but I didn’t ask her about it. I listened to her breathing and found myself imagining she was in a cage and I was an observer who could free her. The cage I imagined was a glass cage with a glass door, and I had the key to set her free. Somehow the image felt absurd as I stood there watching her write in her notebook, but I couldn’t help feeling I wanted her to look at me and say something. She was too invested in the letter or note or whatever she was writing to look up. I turned and walked away.
Liz showed up just after eight. The hearing was at ten-thirty, and we had to drive to Tulsa. On the drive we talked about school, and she asked me whether I liked living with the Troutts, those sorts of things. She wasn’t bringing up my mother, and neither was I, but the subject hung there between us, silent. Maybe we were both afraid to bring it up. And something about the morning felt off, as I remember it, possibly because of the dreary weather, the gray sky, a freezing winter day.
It was raining when we got to the courthouse in downtown Tulsa. Inside, I was able to meet with my mother before the hearing. They brought her into a room, where I sat with Liz. I was irritated by everything there—all the people in the courthouse, the procedures, the deputy’s mean stare. She had gotten thin since I’d visited her last, and her hair was longer and pulled back. Her eyes were bloodshot. But worse than that, it occurred to me how much she had lost her freedom. She wasn’t able to have a private conversation with her own son, not until a court of law allowed it. The deputy scratched at his crew cut and stood with his arms crossed.
“You won’t come see me when I get out, will you?” she said. “You won’t come see me or miss me. You won’t have anything to do with me.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“You look nice. Is the family you’re staying with treating you good?”
“I like them.”
My mother looked at Liz, as if for confirmation.
“They like Sequoyah,” Liz spoke up. “They’re nice people.”
“It’s important to be with good people,” she said. “If they don’t let me go I want you to keep coming to visit.”
“I will.”
She leaned in. “You won’t come see me,” she said again.
“Stop saying that. I need to tell you about what I’ve been doing.”
She listened, and I knew from then on that she would listen to me the way I’d always listened to her. I told her about Harold and Agnes Troutt and their house in the country. I told her about George and Rosemary and the new school I attended.
“It’s better than anywhere I’ve stayed,” I told her. “The country is like being back in Cherokee County.”
I saw the look of tenderness on her face, and I knew she was happy that I was in a good, safe place. It struck me then how strong grief and hope were. Grief and hope were our anchor, holding us together. I wouldn’t let grief tear us apart, and I knew my mother didn’t want that either. When she leaned forward to hug me I almost cried. I don’t really know why—maybe I realized right then how much I’d missed her, or maybe I clung to some sort of hope that we could be together, just the two of us, the way it was before. Yet somehow I knew that wouldn’t be a possibility.
“Your hair looks nice,” she told me. “Whatever you do, don’t cut it.”
In the courtroom they wouldn’t let me sit at the table with my mom, so I had to sit with Liz in the public seating. There wasn’t anyone else with us. Liz took my hand and held it, something she had never done before. I should’ve known then. I think she already knew what was going to happen. I sat forward when they brought my mother into the room. She was handcuffed and wearing an orange jumpsuit. She stood with her attorney in front of the judge, who was reading something.
Because it was her second conviction, and because her charge was intent to distribute, she was denied probation and ordered to return to the state correctional facility. I watched them lead her out of the courtroom. She turned and looked at me, which destroyed me. I couldn’t handle that look. It was as if all the grievances of my life overwhelmed me right then. After the attorneys and the court reporter left the room, Liz told me she would give me a minute to myself. I sat alone in the courtroom. It was freezing in there. I looked at the judge’s bench and the witness stand and at the chairs where the jury members sat. I looked at the tall ceiling and the woodwork around the room. I wasn’t sure what I felt in the courtroom, but it was no longer sadness, and it wasn’t sympathy for my mother.
“I’m sorry,” Liz said on the drive back.
“I’m fine,” I said.
We passed old buildings through town, empty convenience stores, gutted houses with weeds and tall grass growing. We drove under the overpass with graffiti sprayed in letters I couldn’t make out. There was a woman walking along the side of the road with her three kids. She was carrying sacks of groceries while her kids trailed behind slowly, all of them staring at the ground while they walked. There were parts of town that reminded me of back home in Cherokee County, neighborhoods with cars parked in yards, trailers, pickups with tinted windows. We drove out of town and headed toward the countryside, driving into what felt like another part of the world, a place I was unfamiliar with. The land was low and flat, mostly farms, with barns and silos and fields stretching to the horizon.
“I’m fine,” I said again.
When Liz dropped me off back at the Troutts, I went upstairs to the attic to be by myself. I pulled off my shirt and lay down on the dusty floor. I couldn’t bring myself to feel anything more. The whole day seemed empty. Up there in the attic I kept thinking about my mother standing in front of the judge with her head down. With my shirt off I fell asleep, and when I woke Harold was nudging me on the arm, asking me if I wanted to come down for dinner.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Or if you want to talk or anything,” he said. “Agnes and I are here.”
“I know.”
Harold went back down, and I sat up and turned on the lamp. I heard a door shut downstairs. I heard footsteps on the hardwood floor. I was certain everyone wanted to leave me alone to grieve. The problem, though, was that I couldn’t feel sad about what had happened, couldn’t feel sad about my mother going away for a few more years. I’d grown accustomed to being away from her.
I decided I needed to go out for a walk. That afternoon the wind blew cold and heavy, in circular gusts. I left because I couldn’t bear to sit in the house and feel sorry for myself. I needed to keep moving, to think about other things and walk around in the woods for a little while. With my coat on, I took the trail behind the house. I saw red-winged blackbirds gather at the windowsill as I left. I saw a red-tailed hawk return to its same nesting tree, in the blowing wind. Down the road, an amber pond with moss on the bank was full of catfish and largemouth bass. George told me he had seen bullfrogs and yellow-striped ribbon snakes there, along with muskrats swimming near the bank. As I walked through the woods I saw fog hanging over the trail ahead of me. I saw cedar waxwings with apple blossom petals in their beaks, watching me from their branch.
The air was heavy with the smell of dead things. As I walked I felt an increasing apprehension for my life and everything around me. I thought of my friend Eddie, who was homeless for a while back in Tulsa. He kept running away. I knew little of his home life. He’d joined up with a few others and they lived in and out of shelters, which was where I met him. When they were on the street they prostituted themselves, crept around the city at night, through win
ding tunnels, dark streets, sidling up on drunken old men and then rummaging through their wallets, prying up particle board and removing nails, anything they could find and use as weapons if they needed to. They weren’t afraid of anything. I knew I could never be like that.
I thought I heard running water, but there was no water. I thought of my childhood in Cherokee County, when I was younger and playing in the Illinois River. I would make paper boats and float them down the river. I found strange toys there: pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and a plastic wind-up kangaroo that hopped. I found a broken music box and old tennis balls. I found a small miniature piano that didn’t work regardless of how hard I banged on its keys. I remember wondering why people threw things away like this, or whether they set them free. The people who lived nearby must’ve thought the river would’ve somehow swallowed up all those objects and carried them away.
I walked down a trail, past trees with roots dug deep into the earth. Birds flew out of a scattering of trees, making noises. I gazed into the clouds, hoping for a sign, an answer, a signal, but nothing came.
That night, I woke to what sounded like a gasp or faint cry. I sat up in bed and looked over at George, who was still asleep. I wasn’t sure whether there was really a sound or whether I dreamed it. I lay in bed for a moment with my arm over my eyes, but I felt restless. Thirsty, I got up and went downstairs to the kitchen, turned on the light and filled a glass of tap water. It was after three. The house was dark, dead silent.
From the kitchen window I could see the swing set out back, near the shed. I felt it calling to me in the moonlight. I found myself staring at it as I drank the water, thinking about a park I went to with my mother when I was little, a park far away from here. I thought about swinging high on that swing set, my mother pushing me from behind. When I finished the water I put the glass in the sink and slipped out the back screen door.
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