Break the Skin (15 page)

Then, around two in the morning, when the store had emptied out except for a handful of customers shuffling up and down the aisles—“the Zombies,” we always called them—I noticed that Delilah had Lester cornered by the Vision Center. She had him backed against the security grate that slid down in front of the center when it was closed. She poked him in the chest with her finger. A skinny man with glasses too big for his face came to my register, and as I scanned his items, I kept my ears open for what Delilah was saying.

“Who was she, Lester? That girl you saw Tweet with?”

“What girl?”

“Coming out of the South End. Was it Rose?”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“It was Rose, wasn’t it?”

“Really, Delilah, it was dark. I’m not sure.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

Delilah said, “You know I could make you pay.” She was talking big now, but I couldn’t help but think of that .38 she carried. “I’ve got ways. I swear, Lester, don’t mess with me.”

“I’ve got to get back to work.”

He tried to brush past her, but she grabbed him by his arm and spun him around so violently, his derby hat slipped down over his face, and he had to grab at it to get it straight again.

“You better tell me the truth,” she said.

I could see it was a hard thing for him to say. He must have known it was going to get back to Tweet that he’d tattled, and then there wouldn’t be a chance in the world that he’d ever hang around with the band again. But there was Delilah, mean as she could be. I could tell she was squeezing
his arm so hard it hurt, gouging him with her nails, and finally—maybe just to get her to stop—he said yes. “Yes,” he said. “It was Rose.”

Delilah’s spine stiffened. She held him a moment longer. Then she let him go, and she stomped away. I watched her until she turned down an aisle in Housewares and disappeared from view. My customer was gone, and I was alone.

Lester came over and said, “What’s she talking about, Laney?”

I know I should have told the truth, should have told him Delilah was just blowing hot air to try to get back at him because she didn’t know what else to do in light of the news that he’d given her. I should have put him at ease, told him it wasn’t his fault that he’d seen what he’d seen. The real fault lay with Tweet. It had nothing to do with Lester. I should have made that clear to him, but something held me back. Maybe I liked having this one person in my life who was so taken with me he’d believe anything I said.

So I told him there were as many ways to hurt people as there were to help them. We all had that power and we needed to be careful how we used it.

“Tweet told me to stay away after he took up with Delilah,” Lester said. “You don’t think that hurt?”

“That’s what Delilah was trying to say.” I was thinking about Tweet and Rose and what might happen now that Delilah had the facts. “Keep your eyes open. You never know who might be out to get you.”

AS SOON AS
our shift ended, Delilah said, “C’mon.”

We jumped in the Malibu and drove to New Hope. We drove east on Route 50 and made the turn south on the New Hope Road. Delilah didn’t say a word the whole way. I’d seen her like this once before, the day she bought that .38 and she said let Bobby May try to come after her with a knife again and see what would happen. I knew enough to keep my mouth shut. Once she had her mind set on something, I couldn’t talk
her out of it even if I wanted to. I knew she was on her way to New Hope to ask Tweet what was what, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Certainly a little sad, because I’d seen what that mess with Bobby May did to her, and I was afraid it was going to happen again with Tweet. A little excited, too, because I knew if everything came apart, she’d turn to me for comfort and, at least for a while, we’d be closer. I know I should be ashamed to admit that, but truth be told, I’m not. I still know the girl I was then—a girl starved for love—and when I think back on it, I can’t say I’d have done anything different. I’d have been who I was, having to live through all that I did in order to know the things I do now.

So we drove toward what was waiting. The sun was up, burning off a little ground fog that lingered over the fields. I could make out the dark shapes of crows pecking at the ground. Old trash birds, my mother called them, but to me, there was something about them that was all right. I think it was their calls and the way they were so urgent that plucked something in my heart and made me think of people like Lester and Delilah and Rose and me, people who had things to say if we could just figure out a way to make the world listen.

A murder of crows. That’s what a pack of them are called. A shrewdness of apes, a troop of baboons, a wake of buzzards. I’ve made a little hobby out of knowing such things, now that I’ve got time. A raft of ducks, a convocation of eagles, a seething of eels. Amazing, all the names we have for animals and who they are when they’re together.

The water tower stood tall at the edge of town, black letters painted across the curve of its tank announcing
NEW HOPE
. Mother always said it was an unfair burden on its citizenry, given the fact that so much had dried up in that place—the grain elevator was gone, as was the post office and the school and the general store, where once upon a time folks could buy everything from hardware to groceries. Most of the people in town were just hanging on—212 of them by the government’s last count. A bedroom community to Mt. Gilead, if you wanted to give things a positive spin. A ho-hum, no-chance-in-hell town if you wanted to tell the
truth. A nowhere place in southeastern Illinois, laid out in the middle of farmland, a town of retired folks and too many meth addicts and people just waiting for the next thing.

People like Tweet.

He didn’t know what was coming that morning. Like any of us, he had no way of seeing what was bearing down on him from the future. It was just an early-summer morning, birds singing in the trees as Delilah pulled the Malibu into Tweet’s driveway and shut off the motor.

We sat there awhile. It was a beautiful morning, the air cool the way it is here in early summer before the sun gets full up, and I listened to the birds and watched Tweet’s neighbor, Curtis Hambrick, and his grandson, Poke, out in their garden, picking lettuce and sweet peas. They stooped and bent and moved up and down the rows. I could hear the sweet peas make little clicking noises as they fell into the plastic bucket Poke Hambrick carried. Poke’s real name was Gerald, but no one except his grandfather called him that.

Poke was the curious sort, always sticking his nose into other people’s business. He was living with his grandfather because his mother was a meth addict, and his father—well, it was anyone’s guess what happened to him.

“I guess I got to go in there,” Delilah said.

“You want me to stay in the car?”

She shook her head. “Nah, I want a witness.”

When we got out of the Malibu, Poke straightened up from his picking and gave us a wave. He was at that age, fifteen, where he was eager to grow up, where he thought himself, as his grandfather said from time to time, “too big for his britches.” And he was—big for his age, that is. A big boy with belly fat that hung over the waistband of his cutoff blue jeans.

“Laney.” He waved his arm back and forth over his head like he was drowning and was desperate for someone to save him. “Hey, Laney. Over here.”

Sometimes, when I came to visit my mother, I saw him in the garden grubbing out weeds with a hoe. He’d stop from time to time and lean on the hoe handle and gaze off toward Route 50 where cars sped by, and I knew he was imagining where those cars were going and all the places he himself would go when he got the chance. I knew because I’d done the same thing at that age, still did it from time to time, truth be told.

Now he pushed his glasses up on his nose, those thick-lensed glasses that magnified his eyes so much I sometimes had trouble looking at him, and he waited for me to acknowledge him.

“Hey, Poke,” I finally said, and I gave him a wave.

“Go talk to your boyfriend if you want,” Delilah said.

It was clear that Poke had a schoolboy crush on me, and she always gave me a hard time about that.

“You’re the one with a boyfriend to talk to,” I said.

Mr. Hambrick was on his knees in the lettuce patch. He was hard of hearing, but even he could hear Poke’s shouts to me. Mr. Hambrick took his straw hat off his head and waved it at me. He was wearing bib overalls over a white T-shirt, and one gallus had slipped off his shoulder.

“Laney, you want some lettuce and sweet peas to carry to your mama?”

“Maybe in a little while, Mr. Hambrick.” I had to shout to make myself heard.

He nodded his head, put his straw hat back on, and kept picking.

Then Tweet’s front door flew open, and he came out onto the step, barefoot and wearing nothing but a pair of jeans. His bony chest was white and freckled. His dreadlocks stuck out at odd angles from his head. I saw a shadow step back from the screen door behind him.

“Delilah.” He came down the steps and walked toward us across the yard. “Baby,” he said, and he gave Delilah a hug.

“Who’s in there?” She pushed free from him, and I knew she’d seen the shadow, too. “Don’t lie to me, Tweet.”

He scratched his head. “Baby,” he said again.

“It’s her, isn’t it?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets. He bowed his head.

“There she is,” Delilah said, though I didn’t think she’d seen a thing. I was watching that screen door, alert for the slightest movement behind it, and I’d noticed nothing. “There’s Rose.”

He raised his head then, and just for an instant he looked behind him. That was all it took, that glance, to tell Delilah that what she suspected was true—Rose was in that house and probably had been since the time Lester had seen her and Tweet leaving the South End.

Delilah slapped him across the face, and he didn’t say a word. What could he say? He was caught.

“Let’s go, Laney.” She stomped off toward the Malibu, and that was that.

UNTIL EVENING
when I said, “I’m going to talk to her.”

Delilah was at the bathroom mirror, holding a damp washcloth to her eyes, which were red and puffy from the buckets she’d cried since we’d been back from New Hope. I’d let her. I’d had no choice.

She’d closed the door to her bedroom, and I’d listened to her sobbing. Finally, I couldn’t stand it, so I opened the door and I went to her bed. I tried to hold her to me, but she squirmed away. “Just leave me alone,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do.” I didn’t like the way she barked at me. I’d promised to take care of her and now she wouldn’t let me. I lingered, hoping she’d give in and slip into my arms and let me comfort her. I’d rock her while she cried. I’d tell her everything would be all right. But nothing like that happened. She just stared at me as if somehow she found me to blame for the fact that Rose and Tweet had thrown in together. “I know you’ve always liked Rose,” she said. “I suppose you’re happy about all this. If you ask me, Tweet turned to her because you were always hanging around us. Just like a little sister, always in the way.”

I told her she was being ridiculous, but she rolled away from me,
turning her face to the wall, and I went out into the hallway, closing the door behind me. I left her alone until evening when she came out to get ready for our shift at work, and I told her that tomorrow I was going to have a little chat with Rose.

“Why would you want to talk to that tramp?”

“I want to know what’s what. I want you to know it, too. I want you to understand that I didn’t have anything to do with Tweet having his eye on her.”

Her voice got softer. “I never should have accused you of anything. I was just hurting. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said, even though I was still smarting from the way she’d treated me. “But I’m still going to see what I can find out.”

“Don’t, Laney. Just let it go.”

“I can’t. I have to know why this happened so you can know it, too.”

“Laney …”

I should have let that be the last word. I know that now. I’ll have years and years to know it. But then I only wanted to prove to Delilah that I loved her. “It’s wrong what Rose did. She needs to know that.”

Delilah took my hand. She put her face up close to mine. She let me slip my arms around her and press her to me. She whispered in my ear, “Not just know it. She’s got to pay.”

MOTHER BELIEVED IN
the signs: A shooting star meant someone just died. A toad crossing your path meant your sweetheart was nearby. Dream about the moon, and money was coming your way. I grew up with such talk, my mother’s girl through and through. She taught me what to watch for, the signs and the portents. So when I borrowed Delilah’s Malibu and drove out to New Hope to have a chitty-chat with Miss Rose MacAdow, and I saw a dove settled on the roof of Tweet’s house, cooing its mournful sound, I knew there was nothing but ill fortune behind the front door.

Rose, though, was chipper as could be when she answered my knock. It didn’t faze her a bit that I was there.

“Hey, Laney,” she said. “What’s shakin’? You looking for Tweet?”

“It’s you I’m wanting to talk to.”

She grinned. “Well, it’s a good thing, because I’m the only one here. Tweet’s in town.”

The day had broken clear. It was one of those June mornings with a high blue sky, not even a wisp of a cloud, and dew sparkling on the grass. New Hope was quiet, just the sound of a screen door slapping the frame somewhere up the street. Someone was coming or going, and someone else was getting ready to tar a roof. I could smell the hot sulfur in the air.

I hadn’t been to bed after my shift. I’d waited until Delilah was asleep, and then I’d taken the Malibu.

“It’s about Tweet,” I said to Rose.

“I guess Delilah’s going to try to cause trouble.” She turned and walked into the house, leaving the door open, so I could follow. “Well, let her try. Tweet’s finished with her.”

Rose had been fast about staking a claim to the place. It was clear she’d moved in for the long haul. In a few days’ time, she’d done the sorts of things only a woman can do to a house. She’d draped a crocheted afghan over one arm of the couch. A candle burned on the coffee table and gave the air a scent of cinnamon. A vase of silk tulips, red and yellow, sat in the center of the dining-room table, on top of a white lace runner.