Dark River Road (34 page)

“It’s not his bloodline that makes him worth anything. It was his potential. That’s gone.” Ledbetter shook his head. “Can’t do it, son. I’m sorry. I really am.”

It felt like all the air had left his lungs. He couldn’t breathe for a minute, couldn’t focus on anything but the dog lying on the table.
Shadow
. He’d gotten big. Broad. Muscled. Ruined.

He turned to Ledbetter. “If you don’t want this dog, I do. How much?”

Ledbetter just looked at him.

“How much?” Chantry repeated. “What’s his price?”

“I’m not selling you a three-legged dog, son. Dammit, just let it go.”

“No. I’ll give you whatever you ask. If I don’t have enough, I’ll work it off. Whatever you want me to do. Just don’t
 . . .
God, just don’t put him down. Please.” His voice broke on that last word. Humiliating tears stung the back of his eyes and his throat, and he didn’t even care that he’d been reduced to begging. “Doc, please. Don’t let him do it.”

“Christ,” Ledbetter said, sounding disgusted, but Doc gave him a look and he shook his head. He stared down at his feet a minute, the expensive boots with blood smears on them, and when he looked up, he said, “Fine. You can have the dog. He’s yours.”

“No. I’ll
pay
for him. And I want the papers and a bill of sale. Just name a price.”

“A hundred dollars cash.”

“Done.” He turned to Doc. “I want a draw on this week’s pay. And a receipt for him to sign.”

Doc just nodded, then he eyed Ledbetter. “That suit you?”

“Doesn’t matter if it does or doesn’t, I have a feeling.” He looked back over at Chantry. “I don’t know which of us just got the worst of this bargain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was me.”

Chantry looked back at Doc. “Fix his leg. Don’t take it off unless there’s no other way. If it has to be done later, we’ll do it.”

Doc looked doubtful but game. He nodded.

Chantry had no idea how he was going to pay for everything. He hadn’t saved since the dog had gone. He wasn’t even sure Shadow would remember him. Ledbetter had gotten him right at a year old, and it was nearly seven months later. A long time for a dog. A long time for him.

Maybe too long. Maybe too late.

“I bought a dog,” he said abruptly, and she turned back around from where she’d been wiping down the stove to look at him. “Two days ago.”

“Chantry, why?” She had a look on her face like she intended to lecture him, and he put up a hand.

“It’s Shadow. I bought him back from Dale Ledbetter. You might as well know that I’m not giving him up again. I’ll be bringing him home soon, and either you can tell Rainey or I will.”

Mama pulled out a kitchen chair and plopped down. She didn’t say anything for a minute, just stared at him. “There will be trouble,” she said finally in a faint voice. “I don’t think any of us can go through this again.”

“You once told me that we all make choices and have to suffer the consequences. Pay the price. You just never told me that sometimes others have to pay the same price for someone else’s choices. I’ve paid as much as I’m going to pay for your choices. If Rainey Lassiter even so much as looks at that dog, I’ll make him sorry.”

“Oh, God.” She said it like a prayer, a whisper of sound. Her hand clenched the dishrag she’d been using on the stove, a convulsive movement that betrayed her distress. Minutes passed while he waited for her to absorb what he’d said. He didn’t yield an inch, didn’t offer an apology or an explanation. He just waited.

“Chantry—oh what have I done to you? To all of us?” She looked down at the table for a few more moments, then she nodded. “You won’t have to worry about Rainey. Not this time. I will not let you down again.”

That was that. Whatever Mama said to Rainey, it worked. When he brought Shadow home and put him out in the pen by the garage, Rainey came to the back door to watch but didn’t come out. It was a cold day, and damp, and Chantry saw that Shadow remembered. He sniffed at the fresh bedding, returned to his favorite spot over near the mimosa tree that shaded the pen in the summer heat, dragging his leg behind. He’d lost a lot of weight, and Doc had put a steel rod through the middle of his bone to hold it together until it healed. Muscle and tendons had been repaired as best as possible, but there was still a chance the leg would never properly heal. None of that really mattered to Chantry. Maybe once he had set his sights on something big for the dog, but now he’d settle for just being with him. It meant more than anything else.

Mikey came out despite the cold, cheeks whipped red by the wind, and looked at Shadow with sheer delight. “You got your shark back, Chantry.”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Bring him inside. It’s too cold out here.”

“Mama doesn’t let dogs in the house.”

“You never asked.”

That was pure Mikey. Simple, direct, fact. He looked at him. Mikey looked back. Shadow moved into their bedroom that night, on a bed on the floor by the wall, curled up like he’d always been there. Mama said when his leg healed he’d have to stay outside again, but for now, he could stay in where it was warmer.

By mutual consent, Rainey and Shadow avoided each other. The dog kept away from him, and Rainey stayed away from the dog. It was an armed truce in a way. Because he still didn’t trust Rainey not to be devious despite Mama’s assurances, Chantry left the dog every day at the clinic. It meant he had to get up really early and catch a ride with Dempsey, then walk to school from the vet’s, but it was worth not having to worry what Rainey might do

“Will he ever be able to walk right again?” Mikey asked one cold, wet afternoon when they stood outside while Shadow paid homage to tree trunks and posts. The dog limped, leg held up off the ground at an odd angle.

“I don’t know.” Chantry watched as Shadow moved clumsily over the bare yard that had turned to mud. He wondered sometimes if he’d done the right thing, taking him from what he was used to at Dale Ledbetter’s to bring him back here. No grass, no two thousand acres, just dirt and tension that often settled in like a familiar visitor. But it wouldn’t be forever, he reminded himself. Shadow coming back had sparked determination that this time he’d make it all work out. Mikey said he had his shark back, and maybe he was right.

“I can’t walk right either,” Mikey said after a minute, gazing at the dog. “Me and Shadow are a lot alike. We both had to find a new road to walk.”

Rain fell softly, hissing against the tin roof of the garage. Chantry didn’t say anything, just stood there with his hands stuck in his pockets and thinking about dogs and roads. Then Mikey nudged him and pointed.

“Look, Chantry. A rainbow.”

Off to the west where the sun set over the Mississippi River, gray clouds had thinned and splinters of light shot through to form a rainbow. It hung suspended in the sky, white and blue and rose colored, and he thought of Tansy.

“Yeah, I see it,” he said, and hoped that wherever Tansy was, she saw it too.

It was one of those raw springs
when storms swept through one after the other, tornadoes spinning across flat farmland with ruthless efficiency, tearing up trees and buildings with the same indifference nature had for all human pretensions. Power lines toppled, cars ended up in ditches, house trailers peeled open like tin cans to litter the fields.

Tornadoes made Mama nervous. She hated them. She always paced the floor and stood ready to snatch Mikey up and crawl under the house when the sky got that funny color and the wind blew really hard.

Not Chantry. He found something energizing about a storm. It made him want to go out and stand in the middle of one of the freshly-plowed fields and defy God and nature, dare the elements to do their worst. Used to, he wouldn’t care if he won or lost. Now he thought maybe he did. Sometimes he wasn’t sure that was such a good thing. When he’d had nothing to lose, losing didn’t matter.

It was right after dark one April night when a vicious storm barreled through Cane Creek like one of the county bulldozers, taking down trees and power lines. The lights went out, and one of the windows got busted out by a flying board. Mama and Mikey huddled in the bathroom in the old clawfoot tub, but she couldn’t get Chantry to come in with them. He waited it out in the hallway with Shadow, pillows stacked around the dog like fat marshmallows just in case. When it got quiet again and he could hear something besides Mama’s frightened praying and Mikey’s disgruntled protests at being squeezed into the bathtub, he heard rain coming through what had to be a hole in the roof. Sure enough, there was a big hole in the kitchen ceiling.

Chantry took a candle to Mama, the light wavering over his face. “Took part of the roof. It won’t be hard to fix, but we’ll have to wait until daylight. I’ll put plastic over it for tonight.”

Mama’s hand shook as she took the candle from him. “Go down to the Tap Room for Rainey. Tell him he needs to come home and help you get up there and spread plastic so we don’t have a worse mess in the morning.”

His lip curled. “Rainey’ll be useless by now. He’s been there since lunchtime.”

“Chantry, I won’t have you up on that roof by yourself. Just go get him, please. I’ll put some buckets on the floor in the meantime.”

It wasn’t something he’d want to do at any time, walk into the Tap Room looking for Rainey. While it wasn’t a place like the Hideaway, the men there were mostly like Rainey, drunks or worse, with nothing better to do and no place better to be. The only time the Tap Room closed was Christmas Day. It stayed open the rest of the time, twenty-four hours a day. Liquor and beer might not get served after two in the morning, but a man could buy a Coke for five dollars that came with a free splash of Jack Daniel’s if he wanted. No laws got broken, and men that had run out of something to drink got drunker. It worked out pretty well for the county cops, too, since any man fool enough to drive with a snoot full got pulled over and taken to jail to pay a hefty fine. The cops liked to wait on the main roads to ambush the oblivious. It was like shooting wooden ducks.

The rain had made it cool, so he put a jacket on over his gray Ole Miss sweatshirt and walked down Liberty Road to the blacktop. Lights were on across the railroad tracks a ways, but most of the Sugarditch lights were out. It looked eerie, just blackness stretching, tiny pinpricks of wavery light from candles visible in a few windows.

When he reached the Tap Room, the parking lot out front was crowded with cars and trucks as usual. A little storm wouldn’t faze business. His boots were already wet from trudging across the tracks and through puddles so he went the back way to save time, cutting between cars parked on the muddy lot behind the bar. It was dark back there, only the lights up front keeping it from being pitch black.

He’d gotten almost to the pavement when he was suddenly jerked backward. It caught him by surprise, and before he could react he slammed against the side of a two-ton truck so hard it knocked the wind out of him. A lighter flared briefly. He got a brief glimpse of several men with knotted up fists, then saw one of them stick something hard like a couple of white rocks into a plastic bag before shoving it in his pocket, and knew at once what he’d walked into. A drug deal. Someone had the back of his jacket, and then someone else grabbed his arms. A fist plowed into his belly. He couldn’t move, pinned back against the truck, struggling for breath. Voices, slurred and laughing, the stench of whiskey breath, the smell of mud and rain, the blur of flashing lights from a beer sign out front, all blended into one streak.