SHE WALKED UP BEHIND HIM. He unwrapped the towel from his hand and dropped it on the ground. Blood dripped from his knuckles.
“I like it better without answers,” he said.
He walked over and picked up the crowbar and tossed it onto the back of the flatbed. Then he moved to the truck door.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m loading up everything I can find around this valley and around this town and I’m leaving.”
“I can explain what Dixon said.”
“Then you should have before he said it.”
“Where are you going?”
“It doesn’t really matter.”
“I guess not,” she said. “You’re going to be wherever you go.”
“I’ll be there. All these stories and secrets won’t.”
Myer then turned into the driveway. He drove across the yard and stopped next to the flatbed. He got out and looked around. The screens in the yard. The busted shed. The blood from Colburn’s knuckles dripping from his fingertips.
“What’s going on?”
“It’s okay,” Celia answered.
“Don’t look okay. You do all this?” he asked Colburn.
Colburn opened the truck door.
“I said did you do all this?”
“Yep.”
“It’s fine,” Celia answered.
“How about you? Are you fine? You didn’t sound fine when you ran in the café. At least that’s what they just told me.”
Colburn climbed into the truck and cranked it.
“You need to hold on,” Myer said. He stepped over to the truck and slapped the door.
Colburn revved the engine.
“Kill it and get out.”
He shifted into reverse and the front tires eased back out of the kudzu. Myer slapped the hood and pointed at him as he backed into the yard and then he pulled his pistol. Colburn hung his arm out of the open window. Shook his head at the sheriff.
“I bet that thing don’t even work.”
“You kill it right now,” Myer said. “Don’t move that truck another inch.”
Colburn shifted into drive. Let his foot off the brake. The flatbed crept forward and Myer yelled for him again to stop right there but Colburn pressed the gas, a cough of black smoke from the tailpipe as he turned the corner of the house and headed for the road. Myer holstered his pistol and ran for the cruiser. Grabbing the radio and calling a deputy for help before chasing after the flatbed.
Celia stood there alone for a moment. Then she walked in the back door and into the kitchen. She took a garbage bag from underneath the sink and she went into her mother’s bedroom and began to pick up the broken pieces of the gramophone.
But then she paused. Looked out of the window. A bright afternoon and a powderblue sky. Cherryred wasps tapped against the glass. She stood and walked back outside. Thinking of the spring down below the kudzu. Thinking of her friends riding their bicycles out here. Her mother taking a mason jar from the pantry and giving them a dill pickle. She and her friends going outside and making funny faces from the sour taste and then tossing the halfeaten pickles into the woods before going in. Sometimes walking and sometimes crouched and sometimes crawling as the vine cover rose and fell between trees and brush as they crept down the hillside. Making it to the spring. The faint trickle like some lullaby and cupping their hands and drinking. Taking their shoes off and sticking their feet in the cold and clear water and how it felt so good.
She looked down at her bare feet. Thought about how good it would feel now to sit there with her legs stretched out and her feet in the spring. He told her he had found it. He had cut a path. She went to her closet and grabbed a pair of tennis shoes and she slipped them on. And then she walked outside and across the yard and past the shed, to where the vinedraped woods began. She saw the cuts where he had swung the machete and she followed the path of cut limbs and slashed briars and thorns. The path winding as he searched and she imagined the whacks of the machete. Imagined him curious. Imagined him wanting to give her something and this was it. This path into her childhood so different from his path back to his. She wound between trees and squatted beneath the low drapes, moving deeper down. And then she saw the gathering of rocks, slick and shiny with the water spilling out from the earth. The spring still strong and lapping against the rocks and flowing down into the valley over flatstones and mounds of clay and hard red dirt. The same gentle song.
She knelt at the rocks. Dipped her fingers into the water and then touched them to her face. Then she sat down. She took off her shoes and touched her toes into the water. Cold and giving a chill up her calves and she smiled. Remembering its touch. And then she set her feet down into the spring.