Shine (24 page)

“But Beef’s daddy fixed it so Tommy wouldn’t get in trouble, even though Tommy’s a douche.”

“
Tommy
? What did Tommy do?”

“When he was out shooting with the others,” he said, like surely I knew this story already. “You know how they get wasted and go and shoot at road signs?”

Boys and their guns. I snorted.

“Well . . . Tommy shot Ridings’s cow.”

I froze mid-scratch.
“What?!”

“The one with a bell around her neck. That one.”

Well, of course,
that one
, ’cause Ridings only has the one. And Tommy
shot
it?

“Did it die?”

“Maybe,” Robert hedged. “But you can’t tell no one. And Tommy did pay to have it butchered. Butchering a cow costs a
lot
of money.”

Ah, crud. Ridings loved that dumb cow like a pet. Not just that, he
needed
her. A man can get by on milk and cheese and a decent vegetable garden, even a dead-broke junkie like Ridings. Why on earth would Tommy shoot Ridings’s cow?

“I mean it, Cat. You can’t tell,” Robert said. He turned his head to look at me. “No one knows ’cept me and you, okay? Well, and Tommy and Beef and Roy, since Roy told Tommy how to fix it.”

“How to fix it?” I said. You couldn’t “fix” a dead cow. How did you fix a dead cow?

“Anyway, it was an accident, and anyway, it
might
have been lightning. So stop looking at me funny!”

If I was looking at him funny, it wasn’t on purpose. I was just trying to figure things out. Could a dead cow have anything to do with Patrick? Was there any possible way the two things were connected?

“Did Patrick know?”

Robert chose not to reply, which I interpreted as a “yes.” In a town like Black Creek, dead cows were hard to bury, even just the bones and scrap meat of them. The fact that I
didn’t
know showed how out of the loop I was.

We were quiet. Robert laid his head back down and straightened his stick-thin legs in his ridiculous shorts, and I resumed the back scratch. On the edge of consciousness, he mumbled, “You’re nice, Cat.”

Then he fell asleep. His eyelashes were dark and long, a detail I noticed only because he was finally still.

I saw Robert safely home, and since I was there anyway, I went inside to see if Bailee-Ann was around. If she was, I planned on questioning her some more about the night Patrick was attacked.

I agreed with Robert that Bailee-Ann wouldn’t have played a role in anything violent, but maybe she saw something when she snuck out with Tommy. Or heard something. She obviously lied to me for some reason.

Bailee-Ann wasn’t there. No one was. Robert’s face fell, and I could see he didn’t want to be left alone. When I was his age, I had Patrick, and Mama Sweetie, too. When I was his age, I didn’t know what loneliness was.

So I stayed for a bit. We played slapjack. I let him win. He talked nonstop—mostly more hero worship regarding Beef—and I listened with half an ear.

After a while, he said, “I’m bored. You’re too easy to beat. I think I’ll go to Huskers and see Beef. Wanna come?”

“No, thanks.” I wasn’t in the mood for Huskers. Who knew who all might be there?

“Will it make you feel bad if I go anyway?”

“No,” I said, smiling ruefully.

He shoved his chair back from the rickety kitchen table, and I did the same.

“Tell Beef hi for me,” I said. “But, Robert . . . be careful what
you say to people about all of this. I don’t want you getting hurt.”

Robert gave me the finger, so what the hell, I gave
him
the finger. For an instant, he was shocked, and then his face lit up and he laughed, the little rat.

I laughed back. I hated to say it, but he was growing on me.

IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK BY THE TIME I GOT HOME. Dinner wouldn’t be for a few hours, so I stopped by our garden and picked the best-looking tomatoes, which I lay gently in the basket I’d rigged to the back of my bike. There were green beans ripe for picking, so I put those in, too. I’d take them to Ridings and see if I could figure out how—or if—he fit into all of this.

As I started down our bumpy driveway, I heard our screen door slam.

“Cat!” Christian called. “You just got here. Where the heck are you going?”

Another voice chimed in. “Is she leaving? Tell her to come back. Tell her we need to talk to her.”

My blood ran cold, and my fool head turned like a puppet’s on a string, even though I knew that voice as well as I knew my own nightmares.

Tommy Lawson, in my house. Tommy Lawson looking for me.
Tell her to come back. Tell her we need to talk to her
.

“Hey, Cat, hold up,” Tommy called, the devil himself standing beside my brother. He was strong and broad-shouldered and handsome as a movie star, most people would say. “I want to talk to you.”

Yeah, only I had no desire to talk to him. I rode hard and fast toward Ridings’s place, and while the burn in my muscles didn’t banish Tommy from my thoughts, it helped. It made it so I could force Tommy back and think about matters closer to the surface.

Once upon a time, Ridings had a house, just like once upon a time he had a pretty wife and an even prettier baby girl. He worked at the paper mill and brought in enough to live on. They were happy. Then a tornado came and sucked the happiness right out of him, and so much for fairy tales really being true.

When I arrived at his ramshackle roadside stand, I saw just how far he’d fallen. There was a basket of rotten peaches on the fold-out counter, and there were fruit flies buzzing everywhere. Also, Ridings himself was a hot mess, as Destiny would say, and he had BO that nearly knocked me over, even from yards away.

“Well, hey!” he called from the metal folding chair he’d set
up alongside the lonely highway. He smiled, showing teeth in desperate need of dental care. “You bring me some veggies? That’s great, that’s great. Bring ’em on over and sit for a spell, why don’cha?”

Normally, I wouldn’t give a second thought to sitting and chatting with Ridings for a bit. But Ridings’s eyes were glassy, and his words were too fast, and there was no one around but the two of us. A car might drive past in the next hour, or it might not.

But I unloaded the beans and tomatoes and leaned tentatively on the wooden stand he’d set up for his vegetables. Remarkably, it didn’t collapse.

“What’s going on, gal?” Ridings said energetically. He scratched his arm, then his other arm, and then the back of his neck. The skin all over his body was raw, with blisters and gashes everywhere. “Durn chiggers. Worst summer I ever seen. Them bugs crawled up under my skin, that’s what I think. Burrowed in and laid their durn eggs.”

“Ridings, can I ask you something?” I said.

“Yeah, ’course. Ask me anything at all.” He scratched his scalp. “You wanna buy some peaches? My little girl, she loved peaches. Juice just dribbled down her chubby cheeks. You ever meet my little girl? You want to see her picture?”

“I’ve seen her picture,” I said. “She’s a cutie, all right.”

He was already digging into the front pocket of his jeans, hiking up one bony hip to get in deep.

“Oh yeah, here we go,” he said. He flipped to the first
battered photo, which showed Ridings and his wife and their little girl, Melody. They were sitting stiffly in front of a blue background, all of them wearing crisp white shirts. Ridings wore jeans, his wife a denim miniskirt, and little Melody a teensy baby miniskirt. She had one of those baby headbands for when babies didn’t have hair yet, the kind that went around the baby’s forehead and had a bow on the front.

“It’s a beautiful picture,” I said. I tried to smile. “So, I wanted to ask—“

“They’re gone now,” he said. “My Danielle, she was at the Piggly Wiggly when the wind started picking up. She shoulda stayed put, but she wanted to get home to me and the baby.”

“She loved you, that’s why,” I said, feeling as if I was being sucked into quicksand. “She wanted to be with you.”

“A tree knocked out the windshield, right in our driveway. They say she didn’t feel no pain. That’s good, don’t you think?”

I sighed. I’d heard all this before. Everyone in town had. The first few times, it was heartbreaking. Then it was just sad. It never stopped being sad, but it was a broken record sad, playing again and again on endless repeat.

I’d hoped to skirt around it today, but watching Ridings rock back and forth in his folding chair, clutching that beat-up picture, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

“I think it’s real good,” I said, referring to his wife’s pain-free death.

“And Melody . . . my baby girl—“He choked up. “I tried my
best. You know? I put her in her car seat. She took naps in it sometimes. I figured it would keep her safe.”

“I know. That was good thinking.” And it was. What else were you supposed to do when a tornado touched down right on top of you? Go to the basement, sure. But what if you didn’t have a basement?

“I strapped her in her car seat, and I put the car seat in the bathtub,” Ridings said. “And then I got in the tub with her. I lay my whole self on top of her.”

He shook his head. His eyes were red, and his sallow skin hugged his skull. The meth Wally had cooked up for him had gotten him bad.

“She died, too,” he whispered.

“I know. I’m so sorry.”

“Just a little baby. A tiny little baby.”

His lips were dry and cracked, with blood showing where some of the cracks had split open. Less than a year ago, he’d been handsome in his red neck, crew cut way. Then that tornado lifted his baby girl right out from under him, tossing her high and dropping her in a field three hundred feet away. She was still in her car seat when Ridings found her. No broken bones, just the life sucked right out of her.

“Why would God take a little baby?” Ridings asked, fixing his meth-addled eyes on mine. He answered his own question. “He needed another angel, I guess. She was too good for this world, her and Danielle both.”

“Um . . . Ridings?” I ventured.

“Yeah?” he said, the entire word a sigh.

If there was a right way to do this, I didn’t know it. So I said, “Didn’t you used to have a cow?”

His gaze drifted. It seemed like he was looking into the forest, but when I angled my head, I saw an open field. At the edge of the field was the shack where Ridings now lived, and also his pickup truck.

“I did,” he murmured. “She died, too.”

“How?”

“Lightning.”

“Lightning?!”

“Don’t that beat all? No insurance for an act of God, not when it comes to cows and lightning.” He thumped his bony chest. “I thought it was foul play, that’s what I thought at first. But nope, it was lightning.”

“Lightning. Wow.”

“I got her cut up into steaks and such, though I hated to do it.” He tugged on his ear, his face as scrunched and bewildered as a baby’s. “Least, I think I did. Man’s gotta eat, right?”

I had no response to that. Tommy killed his cow. Then Tommy had it butchered and got the meat to Ridings, either because Roy told him to or because his sins got to gnawing at him. Was Ridings’s brain so riddled with holes that he no longer remembered anything?

Ridings stood up from his folding chair. He came right up to me, and his confusion dropped away, replaced by a feverish
intensity. I thought fleetingly that a person could do whatever he wanted if he knew he wouldn’t remember afterward.

“You’re a good girl, Cat,” he said. “A real good girl, just like my Melody. Don’t you let the world beat you down, you hear? Don’t you take no peanut butter and mayonnaise sammiches, even if someone gives ’em to you free, ’cause there ain’t no such thing as a free ride. Maybe they’re free at first, but then comes the strings. There’s always strings, and them strings, they tie you up and pull you right down to Satan hisself.”

I tried to step backward, but I couldn’t, because I was up against his produce stand.

“Bad things happen.
Evil
happens,” Ridings said. “Evil’s out there. I seen it riding right by me, like the riders of the apocalypse.”

I inched sideways. My bike was a foot away. I just had to get to it. Once I had the handlebars clenched in my hands, I felt a heck of a lot better.

“I’m real sorry about your cow, Ridings,” I told him.

He went still. Slowly, the feverish light left his eyes, and his body lost its rigidity, so that he was no longer up in my face. He scratched his arm and said, “Damn chiggers.”

“So . . . yeah,” I said. “Guess I’m going now.” I hesitated, thinking about evil. “Hey. You know Patrick, right?”

“Sure I do,” Ridings said. “He used to come talk with me.”

“He did? About what?”

“Just whatever. Tomatoes. The weather. Stuff like that.”

“Oh. Well, he got hurt, like
bad
hurt. Did you know that?”

“I sure did.” His eyes were mournful. “Satan.”

The highway Ridings set up his stand on led to the Come ’n’ Go. It didn’t get much traffic, but it did get some.

“Did you notice anything . . . odd?” I asked. “Not this past Saturday, but a week ago Saturday? The night Patrick got beat up?”

Ridings looked at me like I was speaking gibberish. Maybe I was, or maybe he couldn’t think back that far, what with his brain eaten up from Wally’s home cooking.