A Tree Born Crooked (26 page)

Marlena jumped into the front seat, bracing herself against the dashboard as James made another hard right turn down an overgrown trail he knew connected to another back road, further into the woods.
 

“Where the hell are we going?”

He didn’t answer her. He was too busy trying to drive, watch the mirrors, and stay on the road ahead of them. Marlena tried to get his attention.
 

“James. We can’t just outrun them.”

He jerked the wheel hard to the right.

“We can try.”

Marlena slammed back against the passenger door and hit her head on the window as the Jeep fishtailed again. They were now on a rough dirt road canopied with oak branches and dripping Spanish moss. Under other circumstances, it would have been very beautiful.
 

“No, James, we gotta go somewhere. Someplace where we can hide and figure this out.”

They were on a long straightaway and after checking the mirrors again to make sure the Land Rover wasn’t still behind them, James eased off on the gas. Marlena was right. They had to slow down and think.
 

“We can’t go to your house, or Rabbit and Delmore’s trailer. If they haven’t already done to them what they did the store, they at least know that’s where we would run to.”

Marlena chewed on her bottom lip.

“Okay, someplace else, then. Someplace they don’t know about and can’t follow us to.”

“I’m thinking.”

James wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans as he steered with his knee. Only one place was coming to mind, though it didn’t seem like it could help them. The last time he had been there was so long ago he wouldn’t even know which direction to head in. But Marlena kept staring at him, so he ventured to mention it.
 

“There was this house.”

“What?”

James was quiet for another moment: the only sound was the roar of the engine and the screeching of brush on metal as they swerved too close to the edge of the road.
 

“This old house out near Shearer Pond. But way back in the woods. It was like a hundred years old or something. Me and Rabbit and Delmore and our other cousin, Skinny, spent almost a whole summer out there when we were kids.”

James remembered pieces of that summer, hidden in an empty house away from parents and uncles and teachers and the older kids who liked to stand around and show off their flashy cars in parking lots. It was the summer before Shearer Pond had been drained and they would go swimming there, even though it was full of parasites and plagued them with swimmer’s itch for days afterward. The four boys had discovered the house when they were trying to play a prank on Rabbit by taking his clothes and hiding them in the woods while he was passed out asleep on the bank of the pond.
 

It was an old sharecropper house, vacant since the 1930s, but the roof and floorboards were still in good condition and held up as the boys wrestled through the one main room and climbed onto the blistering, rusted tin shingles to attach a rope swing to an overhanging oak branch. Once they had claimed the house as their own, James and his brother and cousins spent almost every summer afternoon pedaling their bikes down to the pond and then picking their way through the poison oak and Spanish bayonets until they reached the house.
 

Once there, they lived in their own world by their own rules. They brought plastic grocery bags full of Little Debbies and cans of soda, most of which had been shoplifted from Buddy Joe’s bait and tackle store on the way to the pond. They set up the empty soda cans on the one remaining porch rail and took aim with their BB guns. More than once, they took aim at each other and on one occasion, Rabbit and Delmore had to hold Skinny down while James used his pocketknife to pry a shiny black ball out of his right shoulder. They went home every evening with casualties inflicted upon themselves and each other. They crashed down from the rope swing, sliced their bare feet on rusted gardening tools abandoned around the yard of the house and suffered from rashes, ticks, and red bug infestations.
 

It was one of the most perfect summers of James’ young life, and it disappeared when the Pic ‘n Save put out its “Back to School Sale” signs. He then had to clean up, wear a shirt and shoes, and sit for hours listening to teachers drone on about things that held no interest for James and had no relationship to his life. The year progressed, the boys grew older, and by the next summer, things had changed. The pond had been drained during the winter and Skinny had received an Atari for his birthday right before school let out. James had a crush on a girl who liked to hang out with her friends in front of the Dairy Queen. The boys never went back to the house, and it faded away as all singular and remarkable childhood events do. James couldn’t think of anything better.

“I think we should go there.”

Marlena turned around and looked out the shattered back window. The road behind them was still deserted.

“Can we get there from here? Without being followed?”

James swerved the Jeep down another side road.
 

“If I can remember where it is, I can get us there. The problem is remembering.”

Rabbit’s voice, quivering, came from the back seat.
 

“I know where it is.”

James gripped the steering wheel tighter with his sweating palms.

“You sure?”

Rabbit pulled himself up from his crouched position in the backseat floorboard.

“I went there a couple times after you left. Just, you know, to poke ‘round some. Had a lot a good memories from that house. Always felt kinda nice being back there. I think I can tell you how to get there from here.”

James met his brother’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Alright, I’m listening.”

FIFTEEN

They followed Rabbit’s directions and ditched the Jeep at the dead end of a narrow dirt road. James tried to drive it as far as he could into the underbrush to hide it, but at this point they were just hoping that they had enough of a head start on the men in the Land Rover. Even if they managed to find Marlena’s Jeep, James didn’t think the men chasing them would know to follow them through the dense, vacuous woods. He didn’t want to wait around to find out, though, so they immediately plunged into the wilderness of pines, palmettos, oaks, and brittle, brown kudzu that choked its way through the trees and underbrush. He had a vague idea of what direction he was heading in, but didn’t want to take the time to stop and try to orient himself. He kept looking back at Rabbit, but he seemed just as lost as James once they were among the trees.
 

They tried to be as quiet, and move as quickly as possible, but it was difficult once the woods grew deeper and wilder. Dead logs collapsed underneath their boots and creeping, thorny vines reached for their shoulders and clung to their knees as they struggled their way through. Finally, Rabbit recognized a live oak whose long, skinny branches grew out nearly parallel to the ground. They stopped to catch their breath and went slower as James picked out a path in the direction the longest branch pointed. Rabbit followed directly at his shoulder, silently pointing out landmarks, and Marlena kept up the rear with her gun raised, listening for any footsteps apart from their own. After another ten minutes, they broke out of the woods into a small clearing blanketed with pine needles and the dead wood of ancient, fallen trees. In the middle of the clearing was the house of James and Rabbit’s childhood.
 

It was just as James remembered it, only one panel of the tin roof was now hanging awkwardly down the length of the house, and one side of the front porch had finally collapsed in on itself. The air in the clearing was stagnant, and only a dim evening light filtered down through the layer of oak and pine branches. Marlena came up beside James.
 

“I think this is as good a place as any for now.”

“You don’t think anyone followed us?”

“I didn’t see or hear anything. I think we should get inside, though, just to be safe. They could find us eventually and we need to come up with some kinda plan.”

James nodded and they started to make their way across the clearing when a figure appeared in the open doorway. James immediately went for his gun.
 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there, cousin. I don’t think I’m the one you want to be shooting at right now.”

A man stepped out of the shadow of the darkened house and Rabbit heaved a sigh of relief.

“Delmore! You asshole, where you been?”

James lowered his gun, but didn’t run to shake hands with Delmore as Rabbit did. Marlena looked skeptical. She cut her eyes at James and didn’t move her .38 from its aim at Delmore’s head.

Delmore smiled at them.

“Now, come on, don’t be like that. Quit pointing those things at me.”

He clapped Rabbit on the back and braced him by the shoulders.
 

“I been worried like hell ‘bout you guys.”

James put his gun away and stepped up onto the porch.

“What’re you doing here, Delmore?”

“What’d you think? Hiding out from those psychopaths. Come on, get inside. From the looks of it, they must be after you, too.”

James looked back at Marlena, and she slowly let her revolver rest against the side of her thigh. Rabbit had already gone inside the house, but Delmore waited for James and Marlena.

“Really? What’re you doing? You gonna hold a grudge against me now? We ain’t got no time for that.”

Delmore went inside the house, and James could hear him talking to Rabbit, shushing his manic questions. Marlena glanced behind her once more at the woods they had just come from and then slowly walked up onto the porch with James. She bent close to his ear.

“I don’t like it.”

“I know.”

“Delmore shouldn’t be here. Something’s bad wrong.”

James nodded.

“I know. But we don’t got much choice. Let’s at least hear what he has to say. We can’t stand out here waiting for them to find us.”

Marlena exhaled deeply and stepped in front of James to enter the house. He looked out over the woods one last time and then followed her. The interior was saturated with shadows, and he could barely see until his eyes adjusted to the dim light. Like the outside, the inside of the house appeared much as James remembered it. It was one large room, but at some point in time had been two. There was a mark along the length of the ceiling where a wall had been knocked out years ago. Rat and raccoon nests were built up all along the walls, and there were a few more holes in the floorboards opening up to the bare ground than there had been before, but the house was still standing. Rabbit and Delmore were talking at the back of the room, in front of the opening that led out to a small back porch. There were no windows in the house, just the two empty doorframes letting the dusky light in. Rabbit’s voice continued to strain even as Delmore tried to quiet him.

“But we thought you was dead. I saw the blood. And then those men, those alligator nut jobs, they said you wasn’t dead, but that you gave me up.”

“Shit, Rabbit. I didn’t give nobody up. Why would I do something like that? They was lying to you the whole time. It was Waylon, wasn’t it?”

“But then why’d they say you told ‘em it was me? Dammit, Delmore, you don’t know what we been through the past couple days ‘cause of that. They was gonna kill me.”
 

Delmore put his hand on Rabbit’s trembling shoulder. It seemed that once Rabbit had seen Delmore, the fight had gone out of him. James looked across the empty space at Marlena. She crossed her arms in disgust and wouldn’t even look at them. Delmore kept his grip on Rabbit.
 

“Man, you’re ‘bout to hurt my feelings. I think you would know me enough by now to know that I wouldn’t never give nobody up like that to get killed. Especially you. We’re partners, right?”

James stepped in and interrupted them.

“You can come to terms with your feelings later. Right now we need answers, not apologies.”

Delmore glared at James.
 

“What’d you want to know?”

“For starters, how’s that shoulder doing?”

Delmore narrowed his eyes and clamped his jaw tight. The veins in his big, bull neck stood out.
 

“You don’t believe me? You gotta question everything?”

“It’s been a rough couple of days. I’m questioning shit every chance I get.”

“Fine.”

Delmore struggled out of his jacket. James could see the bulky bandage around his shoulder through his T-shirt.
 

“Want me to take my shirt off, too? You want to stick your finger in the bullet hole to make sure it’s real?”

James stood his ground. Rabbit was pacing in circles behind him, twisting his hands and twitching at every little noise. Marlena was leaning up against the back wall with her arms still crossed and a look like she was ready to kill someone, anyone, but James knew he couldn’t afford to lose focus.
 

“Alright, next question. What happened to the money?”

Delmore pulled his jacket back on.