You Believers (33 page)

Shelby nodded. The sky was going violet. A pair of egrets flew over the lake. One dipped to the water, came up empty, then soared, gaining on the other. Livy thought of Lawrence. He’d probably called. She’d told him she was meeting with the sheriff, and he’d want to know about that. But if she called him and told him what she’d learned, he’d say,
Now, Livy, you can’t be sure; you can’t be absolutely sure
. His words always when she was worried. But she was sure. She’d seen it on Roy’s face. He knew it was Katy. She stood. “I want to see the girl.” Shelby looked up at her. “The girl who lived. I want to know everything he said about that girl in the blue truck.”

“We’ll see her.” Shelby stood beside her. “Not yet, but we’ll see her when she’s strong enough.”

“What did he do to the girl?”

Shelby stared out at the water, shook her head.

“Where’s Roy?”

“He went back to his office. I’m sure he’s getting more information.”

Livy thought about the missing-person flyer, Katy’s face smiling.
If you have any information, please
. . . “
Information
,” she said. “It’s a stupid word for what it’s really asking. This isn’t just information.”

Shelby nodded and looked out at the water. Livy could see she was biting at the inside of her cheek, not hard, not nervous, just thinking.

“Did Roy tell you what he did to that girl?”

“A little,” Shelby said.

“It was more than rape, wasn’t it?”

Shelby nodded. The land and sky went spinning again. Livy kept seeing that blue truck, that word
POSITIV
on the Tennessee tag. It was Katy. It had to be. She grabbed Shelby’s arm. “Have you ever seen a mother die from crying? I want to die, Shelby. I just want to fall down and die.”

Shelby took her hand. “We all want to die sometimes. But most times we don’t. We go on. You’re gonna go on. And they’ve picked up this guy who did it. And there’ll be some satisfaction in that. This one who lived, she’s got lots of information, the kind of information we need. Want to walk down to the water? Might do us good to get our feet wet. It’s muddy right here at the water line, but you’re a Suck Creek girl. Remember how good it feels to get mud between your toes?”

Livy nodded and stood. She followed Shelby. At the water’s edge, they slipped their shoes off, rolled up their pants, and waded in. Livy could hear the little girl still calling,
Look how far I am, Mom; look how far
. The tears rushed up again. She bent and splashed water on her face. Water ran down her arms and neck. She splashed again and again, knew she was getting drenched, but the water felt good running down her breasts, chilling and soothing. She felt Shelby watching. “See, I am crazy.”

“No, you’re not.” Shelby splashed water on her face. “This is clean water here. It’s good.”

The sun was gone behind the line of trees now. Livy looked back toward the lodge and thought of what was beyond the parking lot, the returning to the truck, and Billy, and Lawrence, and the world. At least there was the girl who had lived. “How old is the girl? The one who lived?”

“Twenty-two,” Shelby said.

“And what did he do to her?”

Shelby bent and swished at the water, touched her face with her wet fingertips. “I don’t know the details yet.” She moved a little deeper into the water, and Livy followed.

Here we are
, she thought,
grown women, our toes in mud while the sky is going dark and my girl is gone, and it all looks normal
. She wondered if Katy had waded in this water, if her toes had pressed the mud where she was standing. She looked at Shelby, who was looking toward the parking lot. She took Shelby’s hand, led the way back to the grass. “Let’s go. There’s a hundred things we need to do. For Katy.”

“For Katy,” Shelby said

Livy felt a wave lap up at her ankles. She looked up, felt the breeze in her face, and saw the dark clouds moving slowly, filling the bright sky. “Like you said, the water’s turning.”

Shelby nodded. “Only about four or five days a summer it doesn’t do that. Hope the fishermen out there have their life jackets.”

Livy looked out. She hadn’t noticed them before, two little fishing boats way out on the water. “They’ll be all right.” She closed her eyes, lowered her head. “‘The Lord didn’t give us a spirit of fear, but one of power and love and soundness of mind.’” She wanted to hang on to this thought, let it hold her.

“That’s good,” Shelby said. “Need to put that on a sign at the office.”

“It’s scripture,” Livy said. “From the second book of Timothy. I have it framed in my house. I had one framed for Katy too. I hope those words were with her when she was scared.” Her eyes stung. She sucked in a breath, kept moving. They picked up their shoes and headed for the truck. “We’ve got a long road ahead, don’t we?”

“Sometimes it’s shorter than you think, but I always like to be ready for the long haul.” Shelby took the lead now, and Livy hurried
with her. There would be time for crying all the rest of her life. For now she had a list. Call Lawrence. Tell Billy. And she’d have to pull Billy up when it was his turn to fall to the ground and want to die. And she’d tell him,
Everybody wants to die sometimes
, and she’d have to try to believe that the world was still worth loving somehow. Somewhere there was something worth going on for. There had to be.

It’s Touch and Go

His granny looked old in the light of the interrogation room. She had sat there glaring at Mike the way she must have glared at his daddy before they’d sent him off to Texas. He couldn’t remember his daddy, a man who showed up sometimes with TVs, stereos, smoked hams, and once a big cooler of shrimp. But the shrimp went bad because his dad went off with his friends without putting the shrimp in the freezer the way Mike’s granny had told him to do. Mike glanced up at her. She’d been the only momma he’d ever known, and now she wouldn’t look him in the face. He couldn’t remember ever seeing his own mom. She left him at his granny’s when he was four, went off to live with a drug dealer, and in a year she was dead. He liked to think his mom had loved him, had kissed the top of his head before she’d walked out the door. He liked to think she’d meant to come back and get him, but that wasn’t easy to believe since she’d left his birth certificate in the diaper bag, along with the bottles and the pacifier and what his granny said was his favorite stuffed bear. He didn’t remember the bear. Only the little blue checked blanket he remembered wanting to hold every night. And his granny, she’d kept it, stitched it into a quilt she’d made. She’d saved
scraps from some of his favorite shirts, a couple of her dresses, and even what she’d told him was his favorite apron that she had worn. It had little red roosters. He could see that quilt folded neatly at the foot of his bed.

It would be a while before he’d see that quilt again. He knew he’d do time, the suspended shit and more. Just like Jesse. But he wanted to think that soon he’d be walking up on her porch, smelling her fried chicken, and sleeping in his own bed. He wanted to think she’d be there waiting with a smile. But in his heart he wondered if she’d ever smile again, and in his gut he knew there was a good chance she’d pass on by the time he was free. He stared at the top of his granny’s lowered head, studied the thin gray hair pulled back tight. He hoped she wasn’t crying. When she raised her head, he knew he’d hurt her once again, but this time he wasn’t seeing sorrow, just fury at the man he had let himself become.

“Michael Ray Carter,” she said, “you could have prevented this. I raised you to be a good boy. That Hollowfield boy says you knew all about his plan to hurt that girl. You knew when he did it, and you sat on that fact, holding out for the money.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. And he was sorry, but no one would believe that. They’d think he was sorry he’d gotten caught, that was all. They just didn’t understand Jesse’s way of making a man do things, making a man think of nothing but himself and the money. He remembered Jesse’s words:
Amazing what some folks will do for a buck
.

“If this girl dies, you’ll be . . .” His granny’s shaking finger pointed at him. She couldn’t remember the word for it. She looked toward the cop at the end of the table.

“Complicit,” the cop said. “He’ll be complicit in the murder of that girl.”

Mike thought about the blue-truck girl. But the cops didn’t
know about that. They just had Jesse on the Land Fall thing. With Jesse’s record, he’d be locked up for years. If the girl lived. The news had said she was conscious, but it was still—how had that newsgirl put it?—“touch and go.” Mike wondered why people said “touch and go” when someone was near dying. Was it like the angel of death came and touched you, then went on without carrying you away? He remembered the blue-truck girl. She’d touched his arm, and he jumped when he felt the weight of her hand.

His granny rocked back in her chair, and he realized she’d been talking, maybe to the cop. But now she was talking to him. “How could you?” she was saying. “How could you run with a boy who could do such things to that girl?”

“I didn’t know what he’d do,” Mike said. He figured Jesse had messed up that rich girl in ways they wouldn’t talk about on TV. The detective had given him a pretty good idea of what Jesse had done. But Mike already knew the kind of things Jesse could do. He could still see the blue truck out in that field. And how Mike had stood behind that clump of trees, afraid to do a damned thing. His granny was swaying back and forth in her chair now. Whenever she got so angry she could hardly stand it, she rocked like that. She was too weak to slam a door or punch a wall and was usually too sweet to raise her hand. But she’d slapped Mike. For the first time he’d felt the pop of her hand on his face when the cop had asked about a truck out of gas. Now she was just rocking, saying, “He will get his punishment.” For a blurred second Mike thought she was talking about him; then he realized she was talking about Jesse. “They have arrested that man for his crimes against God and nature!” She was talking in her preacher tone. “They’ll punish him in this world, but it’s the good Lord in the next world who’ll make that boy truly sorry. Only something evil could do what that boy has done.” Mike was thinking,
You have no idea, Granny
, but the cop was listening, leaning forward as if Mike’s granny were a preacher at some pulpit, speaking the gospel, when Mike was supposed to be the one there with something to say.

Mike figured the detectives had given up on his
I told you all I know
, his
I didn’t think he’d really go in and hurt that girl
talk. When they asked him about a truck running out of gas, he just shrugged. He said he didn’t know anything about that. It was his granny who said something about Jesse being at her house that night, yelling about some truck out of gas. Mike said maybe she’d been dreaming, maybe she’d picked up something about a truck while she was in her room watching TV and falling asleep. But they kept asking,
Do you know anything about a truck out of gas
? They kept asking like they knew the answer, just needed him to say it. He shook his head, said he’d told them all he could about Jesse and the rich girl, but a truck out of gas, he’d swear on his momma’s grave that he didn’t know a thing about that. That was when his granny smacked him so hard it brought tears to his eyes. And the cop didn’t make a move to hold her back. The cop who was sitting there, supposed to be keeping his eye on things, hell, he’d let her beat Mike with a belt if she wanted to.

Mike knew he shouldn’t have said that thing about his momma’s grave. He didn’t know his momma. He just knew she was dead. And the words sounded good; the words sounded true if you followed them with something like
I swear on my momma’s grave
. Jesse had taught him that. Jesse had said swearing on your dead momma was a whole lot more convincing than putting your hand on a Bible in a courtroom. People had seen that so much on TV, putting your hand on a Bible didn’t mean anything anymore. But they kept trying to trick him, sneaking up on that thing about the truck, and he kept saying,
I don’t know nothing about that
. They knew he was lying. He
couldn’t do that thing Jesse could do, but they’d given up on getting anything more out of him. That was why they’d called his granny in.

He realized she had quit talking. He reached for her hand. She sat back, pulled away from him the way his granddaddy used to do, the eyes saying,
I’ve had about enough of you
. She even looked like his granddaddy, her thin hair combed back, her ears grown long and rubbery, and that mole. Why wouldn’t she ever let him clip that whisker growing out of that mole? He said, “Don’t give up on me, Granny.”

She slammed her hand against the table. “You gave up on yourself, Michael Ray Carter, when you gave your trust to that boy you call your friend. I told you long ago, that boy ain’t nobody’s friend.”

He nodded. Jesse would find a way to kill him now. He’d have somebody somewhere somehow make Mike hurt a long time before they killed him, just like that dude and the laundry pins. He wanted to cry, grab his granny’s arm the way he had when he was a little kid, just cry and say he wanted to go home. And he was thinking how he could have collected that thousand dollars of reward money if it hadn’t been for his granny. He’d thought she couldn’t hear a thing back there in her room. But she’d seen and heard more than he’d thought she could, and she was still going on about it. “It’s my own home,” she told the cop. “I’ve been cleaning those floors and walls over fifty years. You think I’m not gonna notice some other boy’s mud prints on my floor, dead leaves in the couch cushions? You think I don’t hear some boy cussing in my house? I heard what that boy said. There was a truck out of gas that day.”

“Granny,” Mike said, “you should stop, please. I—”

She reached, took his hand. “You don’t want no lawyer. You gonna cooperate with the officers here. If you don’t, I will. And the Lord tells me you gonna come out better if you and me are playing on the same team.”