“I’m not a little kid anymore, Kevin.” I handed him a box of tissues, still avoiding eye contact. Through the window, I watched a butterfly land on the outer sill, tilting awkwardly as a small breeze caught its wing and forced the translucent blue extension into a drop of sticky sap. The poor thing got stuck and I realized anew how fragile life was.
“You don’t act young,” Kevin said, “and you don’t think young, but you’re still a kid. With a kid’s brain. Things like this, they leave a powerful scar that you don’t realize ‘til later.”
“I’m already scarred, Kevin. Do you have any idea what it’s like at school? I had to transfer out of my biology class ‘cuz it was mostly Bobby’s friends. My teachers won’t call on me, let alone look at me, and I’ve been sittin’ alone at lunch. People throw things at me.”
“What? Why didn’t you say something?”
“I’m not stupid. I’m not gonna sit there at dinner and tell Mom things that’ll make it even worse for her. Don’t worry, I can handle it. I’m only telling you so you’ll know I can hold it together in court today.”
He sighed. “Let them at least think they’re protecting you.” He reached out and turned my head towards his face, grinning a bit. It made the moisture in his eyes glisten. “You’re stronger than me, Alley Cat. I know that. You know that. But I’m asking you for Mom and Dad’s sake. Please.”
I pushed my face into his pillow and screamed at him to go. He rubbed my back before quietly exiting the room and closing the door as if I were a napping baby. A few minutes later, I heard them pull out of the driveway. The shower in my mother’s bathroom dripped but I was glad for the noise. It gave me something to count, to fill my mind so I didn’t have to think about my father looking out at the world through rusting, vertical slats for the rest of his life. When I reached 982, I got out of bed and felt a roaring surge of energy. It was probably nerves, but I needed to burn it off or die. I returned to my own room where my clothes from the day before lay scattered on the floor. I threw them on, ignoring the mustard stain on the back of my shirt.
I found my red bike against the side of the house and hopped on after wiping the dew from the seat. Defiantly, I rode straight into town to show all the naysayers that I didn’t care what they thought. Besides, I might hear the verdict sooner if I was in town. The trip went fast, my mind racing far ahead of my half-deflated tires. But when I got to the heart of Lavitte, there were no people milling about. None at all. No one to appreciate my defiance. The town stood as empty as a coffin before a duel, so strange for a Saturday. The front window of Westerling General Store displayed a hand-written sign that read Opening late today. Libby’s Salon, usually abuzz with ladies getting their cut-and-blow-dries for a night on the town, was so dark I could see my body and bike reflected in the glass. Was it a holiday I’d forgotten about?
I rode through an alley and into the parking lot behind the grocery store. Plenty of cars there, but no customers loading purchases into their trunks. Maybe it was a holy day and everybody was sweating it out in the old church. I cruised around the lot, weaving in and out of cars, hoping to dent all the ones that belonged to people who thought my father was guilty. That would have been about any car in the lot.
Tiring of that, I steered out to the store fronts again and rode over the sidewalks faster than I ever had before. They were usually packed on weekend mornings with shoppers or churchgoers, but not today. I caught air on a huge bump caused by the roots of a near-dead crape myrtle and landed with a thud that jarred my spine and made my teeth crash down on each other. Then I turned the corner to the courthouse and saw it. The crowd.
It seemed alive, behaving as one massive organism. A snake. That’s what it was. An angry, ravenous snake. The people undulated as if connected, moving like the segments of the hungry serpent, each part vying for the best seat in the house. Every person seemed to be shouting or throwing their arms in the air. Most wore their funeral best and dozens held clunky video cameras. The noise reminded me of the time my parents took me to the circus. Standing in line to get our tickets with my small hand entrenched in my mother’s grip, the din of the crowd had been deafening. From behind a frayed, black tent, an elephant had trumpeted, trying desperately to drown out the clamor of the masses. He’d known he didn’t belong there, his mournful cry long and wretched for the dire circumstances in which he found himself. The sound had stayed with me all these years as one of the saddest I’d ever heard, and this crowd recalled the feeling. For all their racket, I imagined that not one of them had anything as important or woeful to say as that elephant.
There was only one person whose words mattered today and he was tucked safely inside the old building. The judge. A fat, fried, old man who’d come to speak to my fifth grade class years ago. The rocking chair had creaked in pain when he’d squeezed into it. His face had reminded me of a pig who’d been force-fed so he’d be plump and juicy for slaughter. His veiny nose was wider than it was long and looked like a snout, lost in his blubber. And now, that pig got to oink out the fate of my father.
I turned my bike around, not wanting to see my black-clad mother and swollen-eyed brother fighting their way through the crowd. Would people jeer? Would they throw eggs? I hoped my family had already made it inside, unstained and stalwart. But even ensconced behind the thick walls of the historic building, they’d no doubt hear the angry shrillness of the sadistic onlookers. Could my father hear it, too? I was about to turn the corner and leave when a man’s voice blared through a bullhorn. “Attention! May I have your attention please?”
Despite all the ambient noise, the emotional crack in the man’s voice echoed its way to my ears. I rotated myself slowly back around to see the two-story courthouse doors partially open, barely enough room left by the throng to allow breathing room for the man. I rode in closer and braced my feet on the sidewalk.
The man looked familiar. I’d seen him at Artie’s Autos a couple times when Mom and I stopped in. He drove an antique, blue Ford Mustang if I recalled correctly. Always smiled and waved at us. That’s why I remembered him—I had teased Mom that he had a crush on her.
The man repeated his call for attention, then lowered the bullhorn, along with his head, while the crowd steadied itself, coiled and ready. A motionless snake was a dangerous snake, I wanted to tell him. Never shock or surprise it.
When the din settled to a low murmur, he raised the bullhorn again. “There will be no reading of the verdict today.”
The snake hissed and rattled: “What?” “Why not?” “What’s going on?” All the w words blended together into a whirring swoosh that grew louder and more threatening with each passing second. The snake slithered forward, crushing in towards the man with the friendly face. At least two piercing screams formed a harmony with the whirring and I pictured women tripping on their high heels and falling to the ground as the crowd trampled over them.
The man, sensing an impending riot, lifted the bullhorn quickly, in a defensive manner this time, as it offered the only buffer between him and the crowd. “There’s been an accident.”
The snake hissed more loudly: “Accident?” “What kind of accident?” The sibilant syllables sliced into my brain, filleting it into pieces that might never come together again. “What’s this you say about an accident?”
I watched it all. Heard it all. Felt nothing and everything. I already knew. The change affected my heart first. Like cement shooting straight into my veins. Then to my head—my skull and face. Finally, it found the site in the body where personality hides. Where whatever makes a person cry at sad movies and coo over newborns resided. Stoicism, some might call it. Coldness, others. Strange. Distant. Insensitive. Adjectives they could and would use. I’d always thought of it as a Teflon coating. And I cherished it.
My mother took me to visit my dad in the hospital the next day, when he officially died. The unofficial day, in my book, was the morning they found Bobby Kettrick’s stiffening body. The beeps from the cold, white machines, in comb
ination with the chattering walkie-talkies of the guards outside my dad’s intensive care room, reverberated through my brain like the scream of a thousand mourning elephants. I sent the cacophony boomeranging back out into the world, my mind rejecting the intrusion. Let them deal with it. I held it together far better than Kevin as I uttered good-byes to my father, silently forgiving him for his distance and lack of effort. It felt so odd to touch his hand while speaking to him. The length of the kitchen table had exceeded his reach, after all.
My mother sent me to live with my aunt the day after the sparsely attended funeral. Most therapists would have called it a mistake, denying me the chance to grieve properly before being ripped out of the only world I’d ever known. Removing me from my support network. Disallowing closure. They could label it whatever they wanted. My mother did the best she could. There was no precedent for how a mother should react when her husband hangs himself in his cell ten minutes before his verdict is read. Apparently, a sheet shredded and tied by skillful hands into a noose around one’s neck caused brain anoxia, and a brain without oxygen wasn’t much of a brain at all. It didn’t even know how to keep a body alive.
Rumor was, the verdict was Guilty.
Chapter 20
Bobby… sixteen years ago
Shelby pulled the back of her shorts down in a vain attempt to halt the game of peek-a-boo her bottom was playing with Bobby. He made no pretense of looking away. In fact, he’d been enjoying the show and the flash of her rosy pubes since the middle of the first ladder. She hadn’t wanted to climb up ahead of him, and he sure as heck knew why, but he’d insisted it would be safer in case she fell. Besides, he knew that the idea of him catching her as she stumbled would appeal to her fairy tale notions of how a girl should be treated by her prince. Rapunzel and all that shit.
Halfway up the third ladder that led to the highest loft, she glanced down. “We are high!” she said, fear and excitement commingling in that squeaky voice that grated on Bobby’s nerves like sandpaper on an open wound.
“That’s the idea,” Bobby said, reaching up and patting her on the ass. “Come on, get moving.”
“Hey,” she said, swatting at his hand. “You’d better not be looking, Bobby Kettrick.”
Jesus Christ, did girls think guys were really this stupid? Well, she was only fourteen. He could excuse her childish manipulations—as long as she put out.
The final step onto the loft required an awkward lunge. Bobby leaned back from the ladder to get a nice, long look as Shelby’s leg went wide and rotated inward to get her footing. Only a shredded piece of denim between him and ecstasy. He felt himself getting hard and immediately reached down to put things in their proper place.
He joined her a moment later. She sat on the bare wood, panting. Bobby knew her heart wasn’t racing from the exhaustion of climbing a few ladders. Nah, it was from the anticipation of being alone up here with him. This chick probably couldn’t believe her luck. They sat quietly for a moment, adjusting to the dusty atmosphere with its lingering sawdust, before Bobby popped open two beers. He sucked one down fast, seeking the extra high of being buzzed and dizzy up here where the air seemed thinner. The place still smelled like fresh-cut lumber ‘cuz the Hesters had only built the overdosed monument to their drug profits a couple months before their sudden departure. Bobby’s dad had confided that the Hesters had plenty of money but were caught up in a bad scene with some take-no-prisoners meth dealers in the mountains. Local story went that they had foreclosed on the place, but truth was, they’d gotten wind of an ambush so they took off in the middle of the night, leaving behind all their furniture, animals, and even food in the fridge.
Their misfortune had made Bobby’s summer. He and the whole football team had thrown a party in July that made New Year’s Eve look lame and tame, and he’d gotten blown on this very loft just last month. That Mary Jean Putney knew what she was doing and then some. Too bad she was dating Bobby’s tight end at the time; otherwise, he might’ve asked her out. But he couldn’t start thinking about that now or his dick would get stiffer than the plywood under his legs.
He leaned down on his elbow and propped himself next to Shelby. As he reached out to stroke her thigh, she pushed it away. “Please. We ain’t even dating.”
“This ain’t a date?” Bobby said. “That’s funny ‘cuz it sure feels like a date to me.” He put his hand back on her leg, ignoring the tiny bumps of stubble that were even more prevalent than the freckles coating her skin. Girl probably shaved with her dad’s old, chipped blades. She didn’t move his hand this time. The two of them stayed like that for a while, drinking and wondering what the next few moments might hold.
“My father says you’re nothing but trouble, you know,” Shelby said. “He’d kill me if he knew I was up here with you.”
“People think they know me, but they really don’t,” Bobby said, shifting and laying his head back on clasped hands.
Shelby couldn’t help but sneak a side glance at his body as he pulled his shirt up a few inches from his waist, exposing taut, tanned muscles. He saw her noticing. Hell, he didn’t do 125 crunches a day to keep his six-pack a secret.
The beer took its welcome toll on Shelby and she leaned up on her elbow until she was on her side, facing Bobby. When he suddenly rolled towards her and lifted his head to hers, she was too stunned to react. His full lips touched her quivering ones. It didn’t last long, but Bobby knew it would be enough to get her juices flowing. That was all he wanted. For now.
“There’s a couple blankets over there by them rafters,” he said. “Let me get ‘em for us.”
He jumped up and was halfway to the thin, wool blankets when the voices inside Shelby’s head must have gotten too loud to ignore. “I can’t do this, Bobby. I’m sorry.”
“Do what?” Bobby said, trying his best to seem naïve and curious.
“Well, anything, really. I mean, I drink beer and stuff… a bit… but I ain’t real comfortable doing much with… boys. You know, boys I ain’t dated properly.”
“That’s not what I—” Bobby stopped himself. No reason to put her on the defensive. Now that he thought about it, chances were pretty good Kyle Thompson had made up that whole story about feeling Shelby up in the boys’ bathroom. Kyle lied to his teachers and parents every day. Why not his friends? Damn. Now Bobby mighta gone and wasted his whole night on this chick. But, like an unexpected interception in the last quarter, he figured he could still turn things around, maybe even score.
“That’s not what I brought you up here for.” He smiled shyly, as if hurt that she would think anything else of him.
“I didn’t mean to insult you,” she said. “I mean, I really like you.”
No shit. What fourteen-year-old wouldn’t?
“So, you want a ride on my swing?” he said. “It’ll be amazing.”
Shelby lit up, eyes wide. Bobby could see her nipples going hard.
“Sure thing!” she said, gulping some more beer to steady her nerves.
He held out his hand and helped her to her feet, then untied the anchor rope from the pole where he’d secured it earlier. As he pulled the swing in to where they could reach it, it began to arc up.
“You gotta stand on this here crate to get on,” he said. “Might be a little awkward ‘cuz I ain’t had time to work out the kinks yet.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. “Been riding horses most my life and even the small ones are more than twice my size.”
Bobby pulled a steel pocketknife from his back pocket and asked Shelby to hold onto the anchor rope. He walked over to the wall near the dark, acute angle where the ceiling pitched up, grabbed something, and returned with a spare length of rope. “No time to build a harness yet as a back-up in case you slip off the seat or something.”
“I ain’t gonna slip,” Shelby said, batting a hand against his chest. “I ain’t spastic or nothin’.”
“Still,” Bobby said, “let’s secure you to the main rope just in case. That way,
if you slip, you’ll still be attached.”
“All right,” Shelby said. “How should we do it?”
With his knife, he slashed through the spare rope and made two shorter pieces. He lashed the longer one around her waist, making sure his fingers stroked her belly as he did so, then he made a slip-knot out of the other piece and placed it over her tiny wrist. Finally, he kicked the crate to a position directly under the tractor seat and told her to climb up. Even standing atop the crate, she stood a couple inches shorter than Bobby. He tied the tails of both pieces of her makeshift harness to the vertical rope holding the swing, attaching Shelby to it by default.
“All right,” he said. “That oughta do it. If by any chance you fall, you’ll still be attached by your wrist and waist.”
“And I’d just be dangling out there like a spider?”
“Like a sexy spider, yeah. But I’d pull you in real fast.”
Shelby’s nerves started to get the better of her. “Maybe you oughta go first?”
Bobby sighed. “Well, we got you all secured now. You’ll be fine. I promise.” He looped his fingers into her waist rope and pulled her in close, reaping some extra stimulation when he thought about her being tethered to his creation. He kept her in that teasing position until he heard her breathing speed up, then he leaned in and kissed her. More fully than before. He felt her go limp; he went anything but.
“A kiss for good luck,” he said. Then, looking away shyly, he added, “I hope that was okay.”
Shelby found herself mute with delight. With a big grin, she yanked herself up, straddled the tractor seat and clutched the rope. Just before she was ready to launch, Bobby pushed her out over the barn floor forty feet below and shouted, “Bon voyage!”
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