Jimbo wobbled up, his yellow Coors Light T-shirt rising like a drunken sun. And I saw it was his size 14 feet attached to those lifting legs. Which meant they weren’t mine.
By then my head was a timpani, the pain drumming in time with each pump of panic and blood. And it occurred to me this was good news: that I still had a head to hurt.
Em lept out of the cab, Big Dog right behind him. Her wet nose sniffed us for signs of life. I could hear L. J. moaning beside me.
The skewed beams of the truck headlights illuminating our tangle of limbs, Em knelt by my head, and the hand he lay on my shoulder was trembling. His other hand reached for Sanna. “I thought,” he said, “that we were all dead.”
“You and me both, cowboy.” Jimbo stepped gingerly on each of his feet, like they were clown’s shoes he was just trying on. Sanna had leveraged herself up and stood, unsteadily, between Em and Bo. Bo knelt over me then. “You crack your shell, Turtle?”
“Only my head.” I felt in the dark for L. J. “Laban Jehu, you okay?”
“Address me in that fashion once more, Turtle, and I’ll have you stewed.”
“He’s all right,” I said up to the others. “Mean as ever, and knows his own name, Laban Jehu does.”
“I thought I directed you, Shelby Lenoir—”
“Just had to be sure.”
“Welp?” Jimbo asked, helping Bobby to stand. “You survive?”
Welp grunted back.
“Good. Because we’ll be waiting for you to tell us all about how you knew something was up.”
“I swear,” Welp whined, “all I knew was to steer clear of Steinberger’s. And …”
He didn’t add the “her” that meant Sanna, but we all heard what he didn’t say.
Jimbo helped me up and Em helped up L. J. and the five of us, Welp lagging yards behind, linked shoulders to limp to the truck.
Em glanced back repeatedly over his shoulder, toward Welp in one direction and the roadblock on the other. “You do realize they’ll come after us.”
L. J. nodded. “Although maybe not right away.”
“And maybe not us—exactly,” I added.
The boys looked at me.
“I mean not us only. Not only us.” This only made matters worse.
My brother popped me on the back of my head. “So, Turtle, now do you think maybe Sanna’s and your little incident on the Pike, getting blown off the road, might’ve been on the intentional side?”
“Okay, so maybe I’m a little slow to add up the numbers. At least I don’t get all hysterical and jump to conclusions.”
“You’re slow,” my brother came back, “to admit there are numbers.”
“I reckon,” Jimbo began, “one thing’s got itself clear.”
We stopped. My back hurt. My head hurt. My tailbone for sure was broken to bits. Nothing was clear. I waited for Bo to go on, and he did.
“Reckon old Welp was trying to hook us on up out of trouble.”
I rubbed my head, then my tailbone, and wondered which was in the worst shape. “If you ask me, he didn’t try very hard to tell us.”
“Maybe he did all right for Welp,” said Jimbo.
I dusted off my legs and backside—gingerly. Every square inch of my midsection hurt, wrenched and bruised and battered. “I say next time we listen to Old Man Steinberger, even if we don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“Well?” L. J. asked, wiping blood from his knee. “How to proceed? Emerson, any more speedways on which you’d like to deposit us next? It’s a veritable miracle we weren’t dismembered entirely.”
“Look, I was just trying to save all our necks from the bedsheets back there. Y’all could’ve held on a little tighter, you know.”
“To what?” I demanded. “The exhaust?”
Jimbo put a hand across all our shoulders. “Now, men,” he nodded my way and Sanna’s to include us, “we got to lean in together—else we fly all apart.”
Our little regiment stumbled to the truck, with Welp stumping a few feet behind us.
Bo paused before crawling in. “We got to check Sanna’s folks.”
Em already had the truck rolling. “Way ahead of you, man. Get your butt in the truck.”
We scrambled, including me. It was the last place I wanted to go just then. Which was, I suppose, precisely why we were going.
When Emerson’s pickup eased to the head of the Moulavis’ driveway, three more trucks were already there—just leaving, in fact, their wheels spewing gravel and dust and, like cornstarch dropped into gravy, they turned the hot, humid night air into paste.
We sat in the back of Em’s truck without making a sound, without moving even.
I choked on the paste that was passing for air and watched, like the others, in silence as their taillights disappeared up the road. One of them set off his horn, which hooted the first line of “Dixie.”
Plenty of truck horns in our town played “Dixie,” but I recall that night hearing those first notes, Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton, like a spray of grapeshot through the pines as the trucks disappeared down the road. It seemed to me not at all unlikely just then that boys in gray, Confederate gray, would appear next, armed but shoeless, crouched and ready to fire out from the line of loblollies behind the Moulavis’ house.
We all recognized one of the trucks, Mort’s gun rack empty. Farsanna seemed not to notice the trucks—she was staring out to the woods behind her house.
Like a prison camp searchlight, Em swung his headlights in a swift arc to the side of the Moulavi house, over the parched, treeless lawn, and then back to the right in another sweep of the woods. The light swept so fast, but I thought I’d spotted something other than trees in those woods. Then I saw through the cab’s back window my brother’s profile, his jaw set tight. He must have seen what I thought I saw: In the scrub pine to the right of the Moulavis’ house, something—or someone—hung from a rope.
25 What Hung from the Rope
Sanna was standing up straight in the truck bed before Em had shifted to park. He slid from the cab and joined us at the side of the truck.
“What’s happening?” Sanna demanded to know.
“That,” L. J. said softly, “was the end of your rainbow.”
Em aimed a glower at L. J. “Visitors …” he said, and he nodded, all earnest, like he was needing to show he agreed with himself.
“… who left,” I piled on the lie. “And likely had the wrong street address.”
Farsanna looked directly at Welp, who looked away, then at me, like it’d be me to give her the truth ungussied up.
Em had aimed his headlights away from the woods, from whatever it was at the end of the rope. Maybe he thought no one else saw. And maybe he thought that if only for a few minutes, he might save Sanna that small piece of horror.
But seeing us all sneak glances at the woods, she’d vaulted over the side and was sprinting before I’d untangled my legs to jump out of the truck and follow her.
Jimbo leaped out, right behind her.
L. J. reached the ground next, suggesting to nobody listening, “The headlights require realigning if they’re to shed light on the matter at hand.” Hands on his hips, L. J. stood there as the rest of us raced toward the woods. All except Welp, who crouched alone, with his knife, in the bed of the truck.
Muttering, “One’s judgment is generally impeded by one’s inability to see,” L. J. climbed into the cab and aimed the headlights back toward the line of loblollies.
In the flood of white from the headlights, we semicircled several yards from the scrub pine whose branch held the rope, and what dangled from it.
Farsanna reached for my hand, my standing closest to her. In the wash of white light from the truck, I saw fear flicker there on her face. Even then,
she kept her face set. But her eyes locked on mine, and her eyes asked a question, something ancient and horrific and terrified there.
Her gaze swung toward the house, which sat just as we’d left it, bare and dull, almost violently ugly, but dark now. No commotion. No suggestion of disrupted peace. But also no light. No sign of life.
Pulling me with her, Farsanna stepped toward the rope and what hung there. Behind us, and then beside us, came Emerson and Jimbo and L. J., all of us finding each other’s hands and arms in the dark, all of us grasping for something to hold, some way to keep walking forward.
We’d not gotten closer than fifteen feet of the tree when the new girl doubled over and lost all her supper there at the strip of woods by the side of the rectangle house. Even with only a shiny white shard of light, there was no mistaking the long, silky ears that flopped down over the noose.
Emerson knelt by Sanna and lay a hand on her back while she retched. My brother’s tears dropped onto the back of Farsanna’s bare neck, her thick hair falling forward into her face. I’d never seen my brother cry, or reach as he did now to hold someone’s hair back as her whole body heaved.
Me, I collapsed on the ground. I lay back and wished I could throw up too. L. J. sat down beside me and for once didn’t try to say something smart. Didn’t try to say much at all, and that was as much as I wanted to hear.
Reaching up for the rope and for the soft, still-warm body that hung there, Jimbo dropped his arms back to his sides and I watched his shoulders curl forward and shake. In a moment, he called softly over his shoulder, “Hey, Bobby, we’re needing you. And your knife.”
“Where is Welp?” L. J. demanded.
I answered, not because I could see much, staring into the headlights like we were doing, but because I knew Welp. “He’s whittling.”
“In the dark? Correct me if I’m mistaken,” L. J. growled, “but nobody’s got to whittle.”
“Maybe,” Jimbo said, “you do if you’re Welp.” Bo called again toward the truck, “Bobby! Bobby, we’re needing you. And your knife.”
Sure enough, still in the truck bed, Bobby Welpler had pulled the pocketknife from his jeans and busied himself with a stick of cedar. Lumbering sullenly from the truck and along the white beam of headlights, he joined us.
L. J. took the knife from Welp then, maybe because Welp stood too long staring at the cadaver. For all his faults, impatience was one of my cousin’s best virtues.
Mostly by feel, L. J. cut down the hanged dog.
Welp was the only one who tried speaking, and then only this: “I tell you what, didn’t I say that pup didn’t know where it’d shacked up?”
None of us bothered to answer.
Bo found his towel in the truck bed and wrapped the limp little body in it. “I reckon we got to bury the poor soul right around here. But maybe back in the woods some.”
Bo stood with the bundle inside his towel while Emerson and I fetched the shovels that only a few hours ago had done nothing more morbid than mix peat moss and manure. We moved through the dark, navigating by clutching the T-shirt beside us. And somewhere back well out of range of what we imagined might be the sight lines of the Moulavi windows, we took turns digging a hole into soil that we couldn’t even see in the dark.
When it seemed deep enough, Bo knelt with Stray and lowered him into the grave. And even as he bent over the body, I suddenly was fighting the urge to sob—and I couldn’t have said why. Like I was seeing another grave and another body, and not knowing who.
I put both arms around Sanna, whose whole body convulsed.
I nudged my brother. “Somebody should say something—if this is the poor creature’s funeral.” I suppose I meant Jimbo, since Em and I couldn’t have come up with a sermon, or even a verse, to save our pitiful souls.
But it was Emerson who launched in instead, whispering into the nothing around us:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me….
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
I was standing beside Jimbo and could feel as much as see him cross himself then. It’s what Jimbo did on solemn occasions, and when none of the rest of us knew what to do, there’d be Jimbo, crossing himself. Seeing how there were only two Catholics on the Ridge at the time, and they at least had the good manners never to go genuflecting or crossing in public, we never figured out where Bo picked up the habit. But he carried it with him like some kind of a sword.
Stepping to where his voice had come from, I touched Emerson on the arm. “That was nice, Em. Very grand.”
He pulled on my ponytail and let his arm hang there, limp, down my back.
“That Sports Illustrated,” I tried, “is good stuff.”
Maybe he heard that and smiled; maybe not—it was too dark to tell. But I knew neither of us felt any better.
L. J. cleared his throat. “We, um, we should sing.” L. J. had the singing voice of a strangling bullfrog—and I mean that in the nicest possible way—so for him to suggest a song meant it was imperative.
We all looked to Jimbo, who closed his eyes and began in his mellow bass a tune I recognized but not the verse:
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
we have already come;
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
L. J. joined in as best he could; the rest of us put our arms around each other’s shoulders and just held on and let Bo be our voice. Even Welp let himself be drawn in the circle when Bo tugged his T-shirt toward us.
Sanna leaned hard against me. I tried to stand straighter to hold her up good.
Not a one of us questioned the use of a hymn for the funeral of a stray dog—not even L. J., who could be a stickler for the rightness of things. Because it wasn’t just the death of a sweet little beast we were marking; it was the death of what we thought we’d been doing, where we’d thought we were living, the death of being able to believe anymore in our innocence and the existence of goodness around us.
From the final verse of the hymn, without missing a beat, Bo shifted key and song:
When the night has come
And the land is dark …
His whole lanky self swaying, he nudged our bodies to keeping beat with his.
No, I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand,
Stand by me …
Em, who’d hauled mulch for good portions of his life to the song, provided backup harmony. We held to each others’ shoulders and threw our heads back and sang how we wouldn’t be afraid, no, not shed a tear, not even if things crumbled and tumbled and fell, and our cheeks were wet as we sang.
We finished the song to its end, all of us keeping our heads down to hide our eyes from each other.
Jimbo stood still then. “God,” he began, before any of us realized he was praying and maybe could stop him. “Well, here we are. I don’t reckon we got to tell you things have been ugly lately, and especially tonight. I don’t reckon we got to tell you things don’t look too good from where we’d be standing here in the dark. But I’ll just say it outright anyhow: Things may be even worse than we know. We may be even worse than we know, each one of us here. So all’s I know to do tonight is ask, just simple: Stand by us. Help us stand by each other. Amen.”
“Amen,” said L. J.—which I could’ve maybe predicted, since his daddy had gotten religion.
“Amen,” said my own brother, which I couldn’t have seen coming, since our daddy had always held out.
We walked Sanna to her door, Welp lagging again a few yards behind, and stayed by her side
for a time, promised to meet her first thing in the morning. Then we hugged her good-bye, even L. J., who never hugged anyone. Sanna was inside the door when she turned, and I realized she’d focused on Welp, back in the shadows of the porch light’s bare bulb.
Bobby Welpler lifted one hand, only waist high but a definite wave goodnight. Then he hung his head.
Exhausted, we stumbled down Sanna’s broken concrete walk toward the drive. Emerson stopped under the plate-glass window and pointed to the one growing thing there in the red clay soil.
“A pink rosebush,” he said. “How long has that been there?”
I looked at Bo, who shrugged. “Some time now.”
Em turned to face Jimbo. “If I weren’t so dog tired and worried about Sanna, I swear I’d punch you again. I reckon you told her the rosebush was from you.”
Bo shook his head. “Told her it was compliments of Big Dog Lawn and Garden. Planted it late one night so she’d never so much as know which of us stuck it in the ground. Honest.”
Em looked from Bo to the bush, and we followed his gaze, all of us staring at the rose like it might speak.
“It’s flourishing there,” I finally said.
We waited until Sanna’s house lights shut off.
Then Jimbo charged, not back toward the truck, but towards the woods.
26 Found Hidden in the Back Woods
Jimbo called over his shoulder, “If she finds anything strange inside, I reckon she’ll let us know here soon enough. Meanwhile, we best go searching for whatever else they almost done but didn’t. Or done already did, and left clues.”
L. J. followed Bo, and I joined Emerson and Big Dog just behind.
“What? Why?” It came out of me like a whine, and too much like a girl—what Emerson thought of as girls. But my knees had already gone spongy on me.
Reshouldering shovels, we clung to each other as we tromped through the woods. “What exactly,” I whispered into what I couldn’t see, “are we looking for now?”
No one answered. I don’t reckon anyone knew.
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