Winter's Bone (5 page)

“I think I’ll root around and find your makeup, too. Get you painted up special today.”

“Like before was.”

“A lot of the time.”

But there’d been hot buttered parts of those nights she’d liked so and missed. The sweet beginnings that held the promise of who knows what, the scent, the music, the shouted names in a loud place, names you might never get straight. The spark of fun when two men quickened at the sight of her, stepped forward on the same snap and tried to woo her, one in this ear, the other in that. Lust slaking to dance tunes, standing hip bone to hip bone, the new hands moving over her rumples and furls and tender knobs, hands good as tongues in the dark corners of those whiskey moments. Words were the hungered-for need, and the necessary words would be spoken low, sometimes sounding so truly true she could believe them with all her heart until the naked gasp happened and the man started looking for his boots on the floor. That moment always drained her of belief in the words and the man, or any words and any man.

“Don’t fidget—you’re near about dry.”

While Dad was in prison the rule had been to never see the same stud three nights. One night is forgot like a fart, two like a pang, but after three nights lain together there is a hurt, and to soothe the hurt there will be night four, and five, and nights unnumbered. The heart’s in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

Ree went into Mom’s room and flicked on the light. The walls were papered pink from Mamaw’s day. There was a nice curly maple dresser with a mirror that had been Aunt Bernadette’s before the flash flood caught her dawdling strangely on the low bridge and never even gave her body back. Hard not to see glimpses of her face in the creek or the mirror since. Above the bed there was a dusty, cockeyed picture of Uncle Jack, who’d lived through Khe Sanh and four marriages, then died at a roller-skating rink from something he’d snorted. The bed had brass parts, fat brass tubes at the head and the foot, and the bedspread was red and kicked aside. Ree’d been made in that bed, and she’d caught Mom and Blond Milton making Sonny there on a slow sweaty morning. Mom’d already begun to crack in her senses a little and flung an ashtray at Ree, shouting, “You’re lyin’! You’re lyin’! This could never happen!”

“Can’t find your makeup kit, Mom. I’ll paint your face pretty another time.”

Mom rocked in warmth beside the potbelly, touching her hands to her hair, and did not seem to have heard. She stared across the kitchen toward the television, squinted past her two sons and cocked her head sideways.

“Wonder where’d he get that armor from?”

C
OYOTES HOWLED
past dawn, howled from far crags and ridges and down the valley to the end of the rut road where the school bus stopped. Ree, Sonny, and Harold stood next to the county blacktop that led everywhere, beside white levees the plows had built with scraped-aside snow. The morning was clear but bone-cracking cold, and maybe the weather had kept those coyotes from doing what had to be done in the night so they carried on into the day. Wild crooning yips and moans beneath a sun that warmed nothing. Ree kept the boys huddled close together, watched the breath spewing from their mouths like those little clouds that carried words of thought in cartoons. Harold’s cloud might say, “Hope they don’t eat people much.” And Sonny’s, “Got’ny more of that syrup?”

The Junction School sat six miles distant, next to the main road that led to West Table. The bus was like a big bus but cut short, not half the size. It was yellow with black warnings painted front and back and carried maybe a dozen or a few more kids each day. It stopped at rut roads, skinny rock lanes, certain open spaces between trees. A lot of the kids were cousins to some vague degree, but that didn’t keep them from roughhousing, name-calling, and all the rest. A couple times a week it seemed the bus ride got out of control and Mr. Egan would pull over and swat somebody.

Harold said, “Could be we should set food out, Ree.”

“For them coyotes? Nah. Don’t fret. Not much chance they’ll eat you.”

“Wouldn’t be no chance if we set food out.”

Sonny said, “Just shoot ’em. They come sniffin’ close, just shoot ’em ’tween the eyes.”

“But they look like dogs,” Harold said. “Dogs are okay by me even if they’re hungry.”

Ree said, “Settin’ out food’ll draw ’em close—that’s likely how they’ll come too close and get shot, Harold. Don’t set no goddam food out. It looks like you’re doin’ nice, but you ain’t. You’re just bringin’ ’em into range, is all.”

“But you can hear how hungry they are.”

The bus broke the horizon above the next ridge and rolled downhill toward them faster on the blacktop than looked safe. Mr. Egan stopped beside them, flipped the door open, said, “Quick. Quick.”

The boys stepped up and got on and Ree followed.

“Can I ride today?”

Mr. Egan was about fifty years old, a settling heap of flesh with extra chins loose below heavy gray face stubble and thin pale hair. He had a bad leg, a leg he had to drag, and when asked about it he’d say, “If ol’ Four-Eyes Orrick ever up’n asks you to go jackin’ deer with him,
don’t go.
”He smiled at Ree and pulled the door closed.

“Startin’ back to school?”

“Nope. I could just use a ride.”

“Okey-doke. I miss havin’ you on here.”

“You do?”

“Yup. Damn near quit drivin’ when you quit ridin’.”

“Applesauce.”

“No applesauce, princess. There just about ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone.”

Ree sat behind Mr. Egan. She grinned at the boys across the aisle. She pointed a finger at her head and made circles near her ear. The bus lunged along the blacktop at a good clip. She said, “Are you hopin’ to get in my britches, man?”

“Don’t be disgustin’, Ree.”

“Oh. Kind of sorry to hear you say it all final that way.”

“I’ve hauled you since you were six years old.” The bus rushed past the forest so fast the woods seemed to be streaming. The long morning shadows from the tall trees spoked the light to spin vision from dark to bright, dark to bright, dazzling the eyes on the bus. “I’m a happily divorced man with a shaky pump. Don’t tease me all around tryin’ to mix me up.”

“Okay, but thanks, though.”

“Well, princess, I know damn well how just about everywhere is too far to walk to from out here.”

The school area consisted of two buildings and both resembled automobile-repair garages of a giant sort, prefab metal sheds divided into several classrooms and offices. The larger shed was the Junction School, painted off-white with a black roof, and it held the grades below high school. The Rathlin Valley High School sat across the schoolyard, with its own parking lot, and had russet walls with a white roof. The sports name for all grades was the Fighting Bobcats, and a large picture of several toothy cats with extended claws raking red slashes into a blue sky was painted on a billboard set beside the blacktop. The bus stopped next to the other buses just past the billboard.

Ree said, “Don’t fight if you can help it. But if one of you gets whipped by somebody
both
of you best come home bloody, understand?”

Ree crossed the schoolyard snow toward the scraped hard road that led north. She saw pregnant girls she knew huddled by their special side entrance holding textbooks and bumping bellies. She saw boys she knew sharing smoke, crouched beside their pickup trucks. She saw lovers she knew kissing back and forth with enough wet kisses to hold each sated and faithful until the lunch hour. She saw teachers she knew watching with sad eyes as she left the schoolyard alone to stand beside the north road with her thumb out. She waved once to Mrs. Prothero and Mr. Feltz, but wouldn’t look toward the school again.

The landscape of freeze framed her so pitifully that she had a lift within minutes. A Schwan’s food delivery truck stopped for her, and the driver said several times he wasn’t supposed to give rides but, jeez, that wind, that wind sort of blows the rules away, don’t it? He carried her past the ramshackle wide spots of Bawbee, Heaney Cross and Chaunk, past the turn to Haslam Springs, and on to the y-fork above Hawkfall. His route and hers split there, and Ree climbed down and watched the truck drive away north.

The Hawkfall road had not been plowed below the crest. Ree came down the great steep hill, walking in the lone set of swerving wheel ruts pressed into the snow. The houses of the village sat in the bottomland and perched low or high on surrounding slopes and ridges. The new part of Hawkfall was old to most folks, but the old part of Hawkfall seemed ancient and a creepy sort of sacred. The old and new places had mainly been made of Ozark stone. The walls of the old places had been pulled apart, the stones torn asunder and tossed furiously about the meadow during the bitter reckoning of long ago. The stones had ever since been left lay where they fell and now raised scattered white humps across three acres. The new places had smoke churning from chimneys and footprints in their yards.

Keening blue wind was bringing weather back into the sky, dark clouds gathering at the edge of sight, carrying frosty wet for later. A fat brown dog came waddling through tummy-deep snow to investigate Ree, sniffed and barked his findings until three more dogs came springing across the road to bounce around her. She was escorted by frisky mutts as she walked past the meadow of the old fallen walls and into the village. The low stone houses had short front porches and tall skinny windows. Most places still had two front doors in accordance with certain readings of Scripture, one door for men, the other for women, though nobody much used them strictly that way anymore. At the first house a woman came out the man door onto the porch and said, “Who’re you?”

Ree stood on the road in a drift that touched her knees. “My name’s Dolly. I’m a Dolly. Ree Dolly.”

The woman was young, maybe twenty-five, wearing a tie-dyed bathrobe over a gray fuzzy sweater, black jeans, and boots. Her hair was nearly black, cut short and smart-looking, and she wore sort of burly eyeglasses that made smartness look cute on her. A stereo played behind her, a song with guitars strumming jangly and wild horses running free in the words. She said, “I don’t guess I know you.”

“I’m from Rathlin Valley? Down on Bromont Creek? You know where that is?”

“Might just about as well be Timbuktu to us,” she said. “What’s your business here?”

“My dad, Jessup, he’s pals with Little Arthur, and I got to find him. I been here before. I know which house is where Little Arthur lives.”

The woman lit a crooked yellow cigarette, flicked the match into the snow. She kept her eyes on Ree and her breath and the smoke spun white into the air. The dogs had climbed the steps to sniff her feet and she nudged them back with her boots. She said, “You stand right there ’til I get my hat. Don’t go nosin’ ’round anywhere.”

Houses above looked caught on the scraggly hillsides like crumbs in a beard and apt to fall as suddenly. They’d been there two or three lifetimes, though, and cascades of snow, mushes of rain, and huffing spring wind had tried to knock them loose and send them tumbling but never did. There were narrow footpaths wending all about the slopes between the trees, along the rock ledges, from house to house, and in better weather Ree thought Hawkfall looked sort of enchanted, if a place could be enchanted but not too friendly. Up the road she saw tire tracks that left the hollow in the other direction. It was the long way to get to most useful places but there was no hill of snow to climb before the blacktop in that direction.

The woman came out the door and down from her porch, careful of the crusty steps, wearing a pearl-colored cowboy hat with a blue feather in the band. Her joint had smoked small and she held it to Ree, who took it and inhaled. The woman said, “I do know you, really. I seen you at some of the reunions at Rocky Drop.”

“We don’t always go.”

“You one time smacked fire out the ass of a fat Boshell boy who flicked a booger on your dress, didn’t you?”

“You
saw
that?”

“Knocked his plate of deviled eggs flyin’, then made the boy say uncle with his mouth in the dirt. And you got the momma who went daffy in her head, too, right? Live close by Blond Milton out there?”

“Yup. That’s all me.”

“My name’s Megan. And I knew Jessup when I seen him, too, but never did talk with him none.”

“You
knew
him?”

Ree had smoked the joint down to scrap and held it to Megan. Megan popped it into her mouth and swallowed, then said, “Knew him when I seen him around, I mean. He does stuff I hear about.”

“Oh. Well, he cooks crank.”

“Honey, they all do now. You don’t even need to say it out loud.”

Ree and Megan began to walk toward Little Arthur’s, boots squeaking into snow, and the dogs rallied about them, flicking tails against their shins, then bounding ahead to break the drifts. As they passed other houses folks opened their doors to look. Megan would wave to them and they’d wave back and the doors would close. The stone faces of the houses had caught snow in their burls and creases and looked like small ideal cliffs in the wild.

Little Arthur’s place was up the slope, nearly to the top of the ridge. His house was built more of wood than stone but there was plenty of stone. On the steepest side of the house there had been a porch outside the kitchen door but the stairs and pilings had broken away to leave the floor unsupported above a hellish plummet, a beguiling bad idea lying in wait for somebody high to give it a try. Two bullet-riddled barrels and other metal debris rusted near the house and a battered beige car seat had been set against the wall as a summer bench. A silhouette moved in the front window as the women approached.