CHAPTER TWELVE

1958

We spun out, turning in circles and circles in front of the truck. Everything went ape from that point on. I saw the rusted-out bumper, and the headlight winking close enough to almost hit. Charlie and me were frozen inside the car as it turned around and around, never stopping until suddenly it did stop, with its nose in a mound of dirt and snow about twenty feet off from the truck. There was an old man behind the wheel I could see, with a plaid hat pulled down, and a mouth that was twisted up on one side like somebody smacked it with a pan. He started up the truck and went by, shaking his head like it was all a nasty trick I had played. I watched the rusted blue disappear into gray. The quiet felt like something shoved down my throat. I gagged because suddenly I was scared things were going to turn out all wrong.

I put my head in Charlie’s jacket and started to cry.

“I’ll kill him,” Charlie said. “Next time I see that truck, I’ll follow it and follow it and run it off the road.”

“I’m sorry.” I sniffled.

“If he ain’t dead then, I’ll hit him on the head with the goddamn jack.”

“I’m sorry I skidded the car.”

“Hey.” Charlie held me away from him and looked in my face. “There’s no sense crying. It ain’t your fault you didn’t know any better. That’s how come you got me.”

“I don’t know anything.” I sniffled. Then he put his lips on mine and kissed like he never had kissed before, like he was trying to dig out a deeper part of me. His whole body went up against my body. My head pushed into the window, and I traced my fingers over the ridge in his pants.

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you so much I can’t love anything else. You’re the only thing I don’t hate.”

“Me too.”

Charlie went to the trunk and got out the chains. It took more than an hour for us to get out of that ditch. A ghost moon hung somewhere in the clouds. The air got colder, and everything snapped.

*   *   *

Roe’s car was pulled in and all the lights were on. It was a good thing there wasn’t any doctor’s car because it would mean something had happened to Betty Sue. There was nothing to do but face it. I thought I could never be in trouble worse than this, and though Roe had never used the belt before he had reason enough to use it now. Nig was back on the chain and barking at the sound of Charlie’s car. “We could turn around,” Charlie said.

“Where would we go?” There was nowhere we could go with no money and Charlie back living with his folks on account of quitting the garbage route.

“We could sleep in the car.”

“It’s cold, Chuck.”

“I’ll go in with you,” Charlie said.

“I can’t decide if that’s worse or better.”

“It can’t get any worse,” said Charlie. He shut off the car. Roe was out on the porch. I could see his body black in the light of the door and how his shoulders were hunkered, mean and hard against it. I could tell he was already ape. I thought I could see he was holding the belt. Charlie and me got out of the car. Charlie put his arm around my shoulder and helped me walk to the porch. Roe met us halfway. He didn’t say a word. He just grabbed Charlie by the back of his leather and drug him toward the car. Charlie dug in his heels, but it wasn’t any good. Roe was bigger than him, and stronger maybe. Roe pushed him down. Charlie slipped his cowboy boots on the ice and went falling in the driveway, hitting his head on the side of the car. My heart jumped. “Don’t push him.”

“Don’t come around here ever, you little piss-ant punk, or I’ll get the police on you,” Roe shouted. “I already told you once you had no warning,”

“I don’t care,” was all Charlie could say. “I don’t care.”

Roe pulled me up the steps and slammed the door behind us, and Charlie disappeared in the cold dark night.

There was bright light all around. Nothing looked as I had ever seen it. I could hear Betty Sue off crying, and how Mother was trying to make her stop with the radio Charlie had got me. It was not Betty Sue’s to listen to. It sounded very far away, like part of a different life.

“You are in a world of trouble,” Roe said. “I tried to do all I could for you, and now I can’t do anymore. I give up! You’re not mine to sweat over, either. Betty might be dead on account of you putting yourself before anything else. Whose blood is it on the floor?”

“You got it wrong,” I said. “I was only gone for a second. She scratched me!”

“Don’t you sass me.” He started shaking me then by my coat collar. I thought this time Roe might really hit me. He was angry enough to. I’d never seen him this angry. His face went so red it was purple. I slipped out of my coat. Roe was left just holding the hood in his hand like he was stupid, standing there in the middle of the floor. I set off into the kitchen. Mother was sitting at the table, with Betty Sue crying on her knee. She looked up when I came in and shaked her head at me like she’d never seen anything so disgusting as her own daughter wanting her help. She reached over and turned off the radio.

“Betty Sue cut me with the scissors,” I said.

“How could you?”

“How could she?”

Mother didn’t believe a word I said. I could see it in her face.

“Noooooo,” Betty Sue cried.

“Wah, wah, wah! Shut up, why don’t you?” I yelled. I had nothing to lose. I could see my dark blood dried up on the light kitchen floor, the color of rust, like the inside of me had just curled up and fell out.

“Caril!” Mother said. “I had to check Betty all over to see she wasn’t hurt!” I stared at the floor.

Roe did not make to touch me anymore. He came into the kitchen and tossed a rag at my head and got to making a sandwich, only he was banging things open and shut and throwing the mustard and ham on the bread like he was throwing pieces of me. I just stood there with the rag in my hand.

“Caril!” Mother said again.

“She can’t see that boy,” Roe said, like this was a new thing. “And she doesn’t mind what I say. I got no idea where she came from.”

“I can’t look at you. Go to your room!” Mother said.

“I didn’t do a thing.”

“Go! And stay there till hell gets icy!”

“It ain’t her fault.” Everyone jumped and we all turned, like we were part of the same thing. There was Charlie taking up the kitchen door.

“Get out!” Roe said.

“Just listen,” Charlie said.

“You don’t got one thing worth hearing. Now go!”

But Charlie wasn’t going anywhere.

Roe picked up the kitchen knife and held it at Charlie, and Charlie lifted the .22 that was hidden behind his leg. “Don’t point that thing at me,” Roe said.

“It ain’t loaded.”

Roe came at him with the knife. Charlie’s whole face squeezed up, and just like that: a bang. Everything is frozen but moving forward even so. The knife clinks to the floor. There is a hole in Roe’s head and his eyes don’t see. He just lays by the table, and I do not know what is my blood and what is his anymore because it has gone and sprayed all over like a bucket of paint. There is a funny smell like somebody has gone to the bathroom right there in the kitchen. I feel my own pants to make sure it isn’t me, and I look at Charlie to make sure it isn’t him. He looks like a deer on a cold wet night, just realizing the road’s a road, and he’s standing in the middle with a tractor trailer bearing down. I watch his eyes blink open and shut. I want to say, I still love you, but just like the deer, the look dies. His chin curls to his chest like he’s trying to swallow. His face goes hard, and it never looks back. Mother is screaming and holding Betty Sue against her.

We can put him in the ground, I want to say. But she won’t stop screaming.

“Listen here,” Charlie says, but nobody’s listening. “Listen.”

She’s making a break for the back door, but her hand can’t catch the screen. There are moths on the other side. Moths in winter. She tries again, but there is another bang, and for a second I do not know if it is the screen or the gun. Mother falls half inside the door with her skirt up on top of Betty Sue. Betty is screaming and howling because Mother fell on her, and I am screaming, “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!” I don’t feel anything. I just want no more screaming. I reach down and pull her out from under Mother. There is blood coming out of Mother’s mouth and nothing on her face to tell where she has gone. She has forgot all about everything. And just like that, I no longer have a mother.

Betty’s diaper is off and pee is running down her leg and she’s crawling for Charlie, still screaming. There is blood in her little blond curls. I reach over and catch her heel. Her head goes forward. She makes a funny sound. Then Charlie sticks the knife in her neck.

“Don’t,” I say.

“It’s too late,” says Charlie.

“Don’t.”

I went in the living room, turned on the television, and laid down on the couch to watch Ed Sullivan and a new singer I never heard of talk about being a star. I didn’t even know it was Sunday. I didn’t even know it was P.M. Everything smelled rotten, like cabbage, and for a while the smell seemed stuck inside of me. Charlie came over, took the tip of my boot in his fingers, and shook it gentle back and forth. “You’re OK. Want anything?”

“No,” I said. “That steak. It wasn’t cooked good. It was all red inside.” Then everything spinned around, and I leaned over. I threw up right there in front of his feet.

*   *   *

When Charlie was done with the cleaning, he laid down on the couch with his eyes wide opened and stared at the ceiling. His eyes were wet in the corners. I could see them shining in the light, and I thought maybe he was crying. I went and put on my coat and got the flashlight from under the bed that used to be Roe and Mother’s. I had Betty’s newspaper hat crammed in my pocket.

“Where are you going?” Charlie said, sitting up with his hair all spiky.

“I’m saying goodbye.”

“There’s no sense doing that. We’re together in this one, Caril Ann. Don’t you see how much I trust you? You have to trust me too.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I’m saying goodbye to Mother.”

“What for? She can’t say anything back.”

I let the back door slam behind me and crunched my feet across the yard. There was no light but my flashlight, not a sketch of moon behind the clouds, or one point of a star anywhere I could see. I opened the door to the chicken coop and scrunched myself inside. It still smelled like chickens even though we had never put any chickens in it. I shone the light around, looking for Mother. My breath plumed out in the cold like a tiny ghost.

Charlie had put her up on one of the shelves wrapped in a rug. I unwrapped a corner. I put my hand on her. The skin was cold. It felt nothing like her anymore, but a rock or a stick or a leaf that could just carry away on the wind like it had never been at all. I found her hair and touched it gentle, and then reached my fist around and pulled out a tuft. I could hear the ripping and the silence on the other end of the rip that was death.

I tucked the hair inside Betty’s newspaper hat and went back into the night. I ran between the husks of corn that were dead and rattly with cold. My boots banged across the snow. It felt like the earth underneath me went on forever. Frosted air ripped my throat like glass that was shattered. I thrust myself between the trunks of the trees. They looked so thin. Nowhere was there a sound. My flashlight bounced from trunk to trunk until I found the one with the ladder that went up to the tree house Charlie made. I found the rotted place where one of the boards had come free and made a hole in the trunk. I hollowed a little more out with the butt of the flashlight.

In science, a teacher told us how every tree in the Nebraska State Forest was planted by men. Before people knew anything about science they explained the world by legends. Back then she said the cottonwoods were called shiver trees on account of their dancing leaves all chattering in a wind. Shhhhiiver treees, the teacher said, like the room was cold. The trees could cure fevers if you knew what to do. It was said that if a woman took a lock of hair or a clipping of nail, put it away inside the bark, let the tree’s skin grow over, and walked back careful, with her head down, not talking, after a short time the sickness would vanish like it had never been.

I found the hollow in the bark with my fingers and shoved in the paper and my mother’s hair. I climbed up the ladder. I put my cold head back on the cold, cold boards and closed my eyes. I was in the car again, turning on a slip of ice with the old man shaking his fist. Everything creaked. A wind shivered the branches and I shivered with it. The sky cracked with the cold.

I could hear Charlie’s feet coming up through the trees. I never was so cold. I turned off the flashlight and laid very still, trying not to make a sound.

“Caril, you up there?” Charlie’s voice drifted up from the ground. I didn’t say anything.

“Caril?” His voice cracked.

I took a breath. “Yes, Chuck,” I said, real soft, so he might barely make it out. “I’m here.”