Some Kind of Animal

by Maria Romasco-Moore

  “Is this…,” I start, but trail off.

  “Yes,” he says, understanding.

  One of Mama’s hideouts. It seems a miserable place to crouch in the dark, waiting, with a small child. I don’t understand. What was she so afraid of? I ask Brandon, but he just says Everything.

  We stack the mason jars in the hole. Brandon wraps his dishware in the blanket from the couch, shoves the bundle into a heavy-duty trash bag. The beers go into another trash bag. The bags go into the hole.

  We bag up the bedroom. It turns out I was wrong, before. Brandon doesn’t have a gun, but a crossbow. A mean-looking one, with taut black wires and a scope on the barrel. He strips the quilt from the bed, wraps the bow and some bolts in it, shoves it all in a bag.

  We fill the first hole, and a second one behind the camper. Brandon has planned for this. He’s been ready.

  “Where will you go?” I ask.

  “Friend’s place.”

  “What about the cats?” I ask.

  “They can take care of themselves,” he says. “They’re good hunters.”

  We load the meat from the fridge into a large grubby cooler to take with us. He’s got a backpack already loaded with necessities. The last thing he grabs is the tackle box full of pills.

  * * *

  —

  The little black cat follows us through the woods for a while. I try to pick it up, but it wriggles in my arms and jumps free, shoots away through the trees. I could do the same, but I don’t want to be out there alone right now, with half the town looking for me. I don’t want to be found. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The sun breaks out from behind the clouds finally, stabs down like a searchlight.

  We’re almost right on top of the truck before I see it. It’s camouflaged by a brown tarp weighted at the corners with stone, and strewn with leaves and branches.

  “How often do you use this?” I ask. It seems like a lot of work to uncover.

  “Been about a month, I think, since I last went out.”

  I wonder what his life must be like, in that little camper deep in the woods. Lonely, I would think. No phone. No neighbors. He doesn’t even have a television.

  He has Lee, I guess, though she’s not much for conversation.

  I help him uncover the truck, and we push it a few feet through the brush to a little dirt road, not unlike the one I went down with Henry and Savannah and Jack the other night. Friday night. Only three days ago. Might as well be a lifetime.

  The truck smells shut up, damp and earthy. Brandon revs us over a little embankment, and then we rattle down the hill. It’s steep, full of bumps. We don’t go far before Brandon has to stop again to undo a chain stretched across the road and hooked around two posts with a sign that says No Entry.

  The dirt road lets out eventually to a normal ridge road, though even that is rough and pitted with holes, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. The trees lean in toward each other, blocking the sun. We pass a thin gravel drive that I know well—it leads to Grandma Margaret’s house. But her house is far back, hidden by trees, and we don’t see any other cars. I stare out the window, thinking of my sister.

  If she sees any searchers, hears them calling me, she’ll hide. She’ll cower in some dark hole or cling to the top of the tallest tree.

  If there’s one thing she’s good at, it’s hiding. She’s been hiding her whole life.

  Even from me.

  Once, I think I see her out the window, through the trees. I twist in my seat, craning my neck to see as we rattle on. But it’s only a scrap of fabric tied around a tree. Fluttering in the wind.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We emerge from a steep stretch of wooded road into a small valley dotted with houses. We’re in Needle, a town that’s only a ten-minute walk from Lester, maybe three driving. You just go past the high school, down the street a quarter mile, and there it is. The two towns should probably be one. Lester has the middle school and the high school for both of them. Needle has the Kroger. There’s no proper grocery store in Lester. Anyone who doesn’t have a car and can’t walk that far has to do their shopping at the Dollar General.

  I could get home from here easily, if I wanted to, if I thought I could face everyone, face the stares and questions and accusations. Face the pastor, what he must be telling everyone. Can what Savannah said be true? That nobody believes him? I hope so. They didn’t believe me when I told them about my sister, but he’s an adult, a man. If I went back now and said he was lying, that there is no girl in the woods, that they shouldn’t look for her, would they believe me?

  We’re nearing the main drive, the one that leads to Lester, when Brandon pulls into the driveway of a squat one-story house. There’s a porch with a white railing, but someone has nailed sheets of plywood behind the railing, all the way around the porch, closing it off.

  We climb out of the truck, and I shoot nervous glances at the street, gripping the tackle box. I don’t want anyone to spot me. Don’t want the cops coming to rescue me or something, thinking I’m just some poor little girl who got mixed up with the wrong man. Around here that would cling to me forever. I’d never live it down. I’ve got enough to live down as it is. If I go back, I’ll do it on my own terms.

  “You wait here a minute,” Brandon tells me.

  I lean against the far side of the truck, partially obscured. Brandon walks to a door on the side of the house and knocks. A woman answers. For one dreadful moment I think it’s Sheila from Bible study. They’ve got the same bleached hair, the color of buttercream icing, but this woman is a little heavier. She has sharp bangs that hang down over her forehead like the spokes of a rake. A cigarette hanging from her mouth. She’s wearing a man’s undershirt and no bra.

  Savannah once said she thought women should be required by law to wear a bra at all times. I laughed so hard at her she went red in the face. Well, okay, she said, maybe not by law. But still.

  My own breasts are just big enough to be annoying when I run, so I mostly stick to sports bras. Savannah wears neon lacy ones.

  I wish she were here.

  “What you got for me, honey?” the woman asks in a gravelly smoker’s voice. I peer around the side of the truck. The woman puffs on her cigarette, leaning in the doorway. Her breasts are extremely large. I shouldn’t stare.

  “Something different,” Brandon says. He’s got one arm on the doorframe, one leg up on the step.

  The woman laughs, says something I can’t hear as a car rumbles past behind me.

  “I need you to do something for me,” Brandon says.

  “Anything for you, honey.”

  Brandon turns toward the truck. My first instinct is to duck and hide, but he’s waving me over. I trudge toward the doorway. The woman’s eyes snap from him to me and back, her expression hardening.

  “Aw no, honey,” she says as I come up next to Brandon. “You ain’t bringing your little jailbait piece here to fuck on my couch.”

  I feel a flush of shame, even though it isn’t true. I look away, afraid to face the judgment in her eyes, the same kind of judgment I’m trying to avoid by staying away from town.

  “She’s my niece,” Brandon says coldly. I wonder if he knows that for sure. I hadn’t thought to ask. There’d been too much else to take in.

  “Oh,” says the woman, taken aback.

  “She ran away,” says Brandon. He grabs my left arm so quick I don’t even have time to be surprised. He yanks my arm out straight, pushes my sleeve up a little, twists my wrist to show the woman the bite wound, which is starting to scab. His grip is firm. Painful where his fingers dig in.

  “Bad stuff at home,” Brandon says. “I was going to let her hang out with me until she figures out what to do, but the camper’s no good for guests.”

  “Aw shit,” says the woman, squinting at my wrist. “Sorry, honey.”

 
I wonder if she thinks I did it to myself. You can’t tell it’s a bite anymore, the half-moon shape blurred by the scabs. It doesn’t hurt as intensely as it used to, but it still aches. It’s worse if I move it too much. I took another antibiotic pill while we were packing up the camper, so hopefully the worst of the infection is over. Brandon drops my arm and I hug it to my chest, wrist throbbing from the motion. The woman looks me over again. My clothes are probably a mess. My hair almost as snarled as my sister’s.

  “Well, guess you’d better come on in,” says the woman.

  I follow Brandon into the house. It’s dark inside and it smells strange. An unpleasant smell I can’t quite place. The windows are all covered in thick curtains. Something moves in the shadows, and with a start I realize there’s a parrot perched on the back of the couch. A big blue-green one with a yellow belly and a clownish white face.

  It squawks and then launches itself right toward me in a storm of feathers. I drop the tackle box, throw my hands up to cover my face.

  “Shut that door,” snaps the woman. Brandon reaches around me to push the door shut. The parrot adjusts course and swings up, coming close enough that I can feel the wind of its wings on my face. It alights on a tall shelf beside the door and starts preening itself with an air, I think, of embarrassment.

  The woman disappears through a doorway toward the back of the house, and Brandon picks up the fallen tackle box. He follows the woman, closes the door behind him.

  I sit on the couch, which creaks in complaint, and wait. The parrot watches me from its perch on the bookshelf, head tilted. Surveillance camera. It’s as big as a hawk, and the black beak looks wicked sharp. I’m worried if I move too much it will fly at me again. There are faint squawks coming from somewhere else in the house. More birds. I can’t hear anything from the room Brandon and the women are in.

  I check the phone, find another long stream of texts from Dakota’s number.

  jack says he is sry

  i told him i knew it wasnt you

  i told him he was wrong

  he is sry he yelled at u

  hes not a bad guy

  i havent told any1 u texted me

  not even dakota

  not jack

  unless u want me 2 it is secret

  u can trust me

  im sorry okay u can trust

  me

  I want to believe Savannah, want to trust her, but she’s still seeing Jack. She’s still talking to him. She’s defending him, even.

  There’s a flutter of wings again and I look up in time to see the parrot swoop across the room and land on the television. I notice, for the first time, faint streaks of white on the furniture, the floor. Gross. I wrinkle my nose, turn back to the phone.

  lisa says they r sweeping the woods

  I imagine everyone in town armed with a broom, brushing away the leaves, the dirt. Searching the bare stones, the packed earth, the twist of tree roots, looking for clues. Looking for me.

  The door to the other room opens and Brandon comes back in. I quickly shove the phone into my pocket, but he doesn’t look at me, just strides straight to the front door. I jump up from the couch.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “Getting the stuff out of the truck,” he says.

  “Can I help?”

  “Sure.”

  I follow him out. I didn’t want to be left alone in that dark bird-shit house, with that woman who called me jailbait. But now, out in the sunlight, I’m worried again about being seen, caught. I don’t want to be dragged back, a broken-legged lamb. I pull my hood up, stare down at the gravel.

  Brandon hands me the grubby cooler full of meat. I hustle it to the side door and he follows with the backpack.

  Inside, he leads me through the living room into the kitchen. I set the cooler down in front of the fridge. There’s another door off the kitchen, a white metal door with glass panes. The squawks I heard earlier are louder here. I try to peer through the glass, but there’s newsprint on the other side covering the panes.

  “She’s crazy about birds,” Brandon says as he unloads the venison. “You can look if you want.”

  I turn the handle and the door opens with a wheeze. The squawks crescendo as I step through into the boarded-up porch. The smell out here is overwhelming. I breathe through my mouth, try not to gag.

  Cages line the plywood walls. Cages full of birds. There’s a pale-blue one with zebra-striped wings. A pair of small sunset-colored ones with scarlet beaks. A butter-yellow one with a spiky headdress and a pink spot on its cheek like an old woman’s rouge. It snaps at the bars of the cage with its beak, making a rhythmic clacking. The blue one pushes a small bell with its foot. There’s a gray-and-white one off to the side that sits motionless in its cage. It looks like it has plucked half its feathers out. They line the bottom of its cage. One slips out, drifts to the floor.

  The plywood goes all the way around the porch. It reminds me of my room after Aggie nailed the window shut, the sun trying to shimmy through the cracks.

  The sunset-colored birds shriek like shoes skidding on a gymnasium floor. The blue bird rings the bell faster and faster.

  All I can see is my sister. My sister sitting in a dark little room like this with bars on the windows. No trees, no sky.

  The bell rings and rings. The yellow bird bites the bars of its cage. The gray-and-white bird gives a small strange cough that sounds almost human.

  I can see everyone I’ve ever known, hands outstretched, walking slowly through the woods, relentless, calling my name. And the wind carrying just a sliver of the sound, carrying it to my sister, so she is sure that they are calling for her.

  If they find me I’ll be branded, forever, a crazy bitch. A monster. I will be whispered about and looked at sideways in hallways and on the street. I’ll be sentenced to three years of strict parenting, locked windows, and mandatory Bible study.

  I’ll have to face all that eventually. There’s no way around it.

  But if they find Lee, her life is over.

  Everything she’s ever known—endless trees, the night sky, freedom—will be ripped away. She’ll be caught and held and touched and stared at and inspected and checked over by doctors and washed and subdued and fed by a tube and stuck with needles and seen by so many people. Photographed, maybe. Put on the evening news. Feral child found in forest; worst case of neglect seen in years.

  Does she deserve that?

  She lied to me and she tricked me and she attacked Henry and I want very badly to hate her, to leave her to own fate for once. But I’m her sister. I’m all she has.

  Mama would want us to watch out for each other, no matter what. I know she would.

  I pull Savannah’s phone out of my pocket and punch in the only number in this world I know by heart.

  Jessi answers. “Joe’s Bar and Grill.”

  “Is Aggie there?” I ask.

  Jessi doesn’t say a thing, but there’s a faint crackle and then Aggie is on the line.

  “Where are you?” she says, not angry so much as frantic. “Are you okay? Whose phone is this? Where are you? I can come get you.”

  “Don’t scare her off,” I hear from the background. Grandma Margaret’s voice. Aggie must really be desperate if she asked her mother for help. Maybe she had no choice.

  “Jo,” Aggie says, “please, baby, say something.” She never calls me baby.

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  For a moment I think she means Brandon, like I thought with Savannah, but Aggie doesn’t know about him either. She means the pastor.

  I could lie. She would believe me, I think. She would leave him. Worse than leave him. Turn against him. Drive him out of town. Set Grandma Margaret on him, maybe.

  At least I hope she would, hope that she would
choose me.

  “No,” I say. “I’m fine. You don’t need to search the woods.”

  “Where are you? What’s that sound?”

  The bell rings. The birds shriek. The gray one is looking at me sideways with one white-irised eye. “It’s the TV. I’m staying with a friend. You can stop looking for me.”

  “I need to know where you are. You’ve been gone a day and a half, Jo.”

  “I’m in Needle. You can call off the search. I’m fine. You can call it off.”

  “I can’t call off the search,” says Aggie.

  “You can. I’ll come home.”

  “Jo,” she says, “they aren’t just looking for you.”

  “I’ll come home,” I say again, and then her words sink in.

  “There’s another girl,” says Aggie.

  “No.” The shrieking of the birds drops away. No sound but the thrumming of my own blood in my ears. I didn’t hear her right. I can’t have heard her right.

  “You were right,” says Aggie. “The pastor was right. I still didn’t believe it, but some of them saw her. When they were out looking for you. They thought it was you at first. But it wasn’t you.”

  “No.” I squeeze my eyes shut. I’m all she has. I can’t let them catch her. “It was me. They saw me. Running in the woods. I remember.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Aggie, ignoring my lie. “I should have believed you. I just can’t—I don’t understand how—but it’s going to be all right. They’ve got the state troopers in now. Going to get some kind of heat sensor thing.”

  “No,” I croak. My mouth has gone dry.

  I should be happy. Aggie believes me now. Aggie is sorry. It’s exactly what I wanted, what I hoped for. Everyone will be sorry now. Everyone will know it wasn’t me.

  But everyone will know.

  How could I have ever wanted this? How could I have been so selfish?

  There’s a clink behind me, and I turn to see Brandon leaning in the doorway to the kitchen. He’s got a beer in each hand. Green glass bottles. He’s watching me. Wary, waiting.