3

The visitor exhaled on the door’s semicircular window, wiped the melted ice away with his palm, and pressed his face against the glass. It was Cass’s cousin Jesse, George Bloom’s youngest son.

Clasping the rifle, Cass stepped back into the bathroom to hide. While staying out of his line of sight, she could just make out his eyes, which suffered badly from astigmatism. His right scanned side to side while his lazy left merely quivered in place.

“Where’s Jack? Where’s Cassie? Where’s the money?” he hollered. He was clearly drunk. “Who you talking to, Tilly?”

“What do you want, Jesse?!” Tilly shrieked. “Ain’t got nothing for you!”

“Just wanna talk to Jack! But I’d take Cassie in his place!”

“I’ll get the door,” Cass whispered to Tilly, “but you’re going to bed.”

“And leaving you alone out here to deal with them? They won’t bother you none with me sitting here watching.”

The rifle was slick in Cass’s sweaty hands. Tilly grabbed her coffee can as though to throw it at the door. “You bang again like that and I’m calling your folks down here!” she roared.

“My dad won’t arrest me!”

“Your mom might. She knows you’re a little shit, too! By the way, that left eye of yours is so lazy I’m surprised it got outta bed this morning.”

Outside, Jesse’s companions exploded in obnoxious laughter. There was a scuffle on the stoop, from which the quieter and more conciliatory voice of Jesse’s older brother, Danny, emerged. He spoke into the crack between the door and frame. “Cassie, I know you’re in there. I’m sorry. It wasn’t me banging on the door. We’re looking for Jack. We’re worried about him. Open up, would you, it’s cold.”

“Danny, would you shut your mouth?!” Tilly replied. “She ain’t here. Jack, neither. I’m going to bed!”

Tilly shuffled toward Cass, clutched her elbows, and jerked her near with startling strength. Tilly bent to wipe the corners of her mouth on the lapel of her robe, then stared up at Cass. Her words, shuddering whispers, spurted forth in one breath. “Vicky told me Jack ripped somebody off, that’s where the money comes from. There’s a reward out on it. Out on your brother, too. Return the money, you get half. Return Jack, you get the whole thing. It’s bad, Cassandra. I wish you’d helped us.”

“You two couldn’t have just told me that?”

“You didn’t need to know. Suppose you told others, the situation would just get messier. We were hoping you wouldn’t put up such a fight lying and all.”

“Vick probably just wants to turn Jack in.”

“Nonsense, Cassandra,” Tilly said, squeezing Cass’s elbows harder and lowering her voice even more, which forced Cass to lean closer. Mixed with Tilly’s breath was the odor of her unwashed hair. “It’s even worse for Jack, though. It ain’t just the money those boys outside are after. The fellow Jack stole from is a big-time drug dealer named Frost. Those boys shot dead at Wendy’s, it was Frost’s goons who done it. Your cousins are trying to get in with him so they can deal up here, so they told him they’d retrieve his money. Now he’s getting impatient. He told them he’d kill them if they didn’t. Cassandra, let’s call Vicky right now and you tell him where—”

“I don’t know shit about no money. Wish I did so I could hand it over. Now, we’re gonna get your ass to bed. I’ll deal with them on my own.”

“You suppose they’ll think you ain’t hiding nothing when you answer the door with Vicky’s rifle?” Tilly replied. “Call your dad.”

“I lost my phone.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“Use mine, then,” Tilly said, reaching for the cell in the pocket of her robe.

“How do you know Vick didn’t send Danny and Jesse himself?”

“Cassandra, stop with that talk.”

Tilly offered the cell to Cass.

“Put that away,” Cass said. “I’ll hide the gun, then open the door.”

“I ain’t going to bed if you open that door. They ain’t doing nothing to you if I’m here. Too afraid of Vicky, on my soul. But let me tell you something, Cassandra. The instant they’re gone, you’re coming clean. The instant.”

Cass leaned the rifle against the doorframe inside Tilly’s room and escorted her into the living room. Jesse, having scribbled away the rest of the ice on the window with his thumbnail, watched them cross the room. Tilly grabbed ahold of Cass’s neck as she reclined into her rocking chair. She crossed her legs, and Cass draped a blanket over her lap.

She went to the door. “What do you need, Danny?”

“Wanna talk.”

“Who’s with you?”

“Me and Jesse and Boogie. We’ll be quick. It’s cold.”

“Come back in the morning.”

“Your brother don’t got till then. I’m begging you.”

“Sounds like his problem.”

“Cassie!” Jesse cawed. “You’re either letting us in or we’re busting our way in. You choose.”

“Shut up, Jesse,” Danny said.

“Eager to help, huh?” Cass told him. “Did Uncle George send you?”

“Not at all.”

“He might as well have. Can’t even call him to say you’re about to break in.”

Jesse pounded on the woodchute door. Danny hollered at him to quit, but Jesse continued and on the third kick the door splintered.

“Okay!” she yelled.

The kicking stopped. She grumbled to herself before unlocking the front door, then she sat at the kitchen table with her back to the living room. She took the rubber band from the deck of cards and tied her hair back up. Shuffling the cards with her practiced hands, she eyed them as they entered cloaked in snowflakes, first Danny, then Jesse and his girlfriend, Boogie.

Danny took a few steps inside the door and smiled politely at Cass and Tilly. He was stocky, the oldest and shortest of the three intruders. He wore a duck-hunting vest over a bulky hoodie. His undisciplined but spirited boxing career ended three years ago when he drunk-drove his truck off a bridge, tearing his rotator cuff. Now, on account of disregarding his post-surgery instructions, his bum right shoulder slumped. He’d been addicted to pain pills ever since the accident. Though he was high and drunk, his blue eyes were intelligent, placid.

He hid his booze better than the others did. Jesse and Boogie stumbled in, laughing and pushing each other like kid siblings. Too obese to zip up his cheap polyester navy blue jacket, Jesse waddled through the door as if pulled by the momentum of his belly, bulbous as a man’s twice his age. Boogie, a chubby girl with pretty brown eyes and straight brown hair, immediately turned to face him. She tucked her arms into his jacket sleeves, and they began kissing and groping each other, their snowy boots squeaking on the linoleum. The others watched them, appalled. Jesse’s pudgy eyelids and cheeks made his eyes, mouth, and nose look tiny. His ears, cauliflowered from wrestling in high school, were bulging polyps. Mascara ran down Boogie’s cheeks like black tears she’d tried to wipe away.

Though it seemed at first that the couple had forgotten why they’d come, Jesse soon closed the door behind him and began to scan the house for signs of Jack.

Danny sat next to Cass at the table. “Gotta talk to Jack about something,” he said softly.

“He ain’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“You’ll find out before I do, I bet.”

“Smells like popcorn in here. Cassie, make us some, would you?” Jesse demanded.

“This ain’t no goddamn movie theater!” Tilly belched from the living room. “Say, don’t you suppose the kids at the zoo will be upset when they find the walrus tank empty?”

“You shut up, hag!”

“Jesse,” Danny said, drawing his brother’s attention away from the old woman. He glanced at the door to the basement. Jesse nodded. He cursed at Tilly, and he and Boogie disappeared downstairs. Danny scooched his chair close to Cass, put his hand on her shoulder.

“This is all dumb. We’re family. Let’s talk everything over like family would.”

“I ain’t family with you little inbreeds!” Tilly said.

Danny didn’t look at her. He leaned back a bit and folded his hands on his lap.

Cass replied, “I didn’t break into nobody’s house.”

“This town’s too small. There ain’t nowhere to go and hide from people. That goes for you and Jack.”

“People don’t know shit, just think they do.”

“You’re right about that,” he replied. He went to the coffeepot on the counter, poured himself a mug, and looked around the kitchen, into the living room. “I always liked this house. You remember winter vacations from school when we’d come by and play football in the yard, snowsuits and all that? Used to be me and Jesse versus you and Jack, and he’d get so mad when we tackled you too hard.” He drank. “Cassie, Jack needs our help—”

Giggling broke out in the basement and Danny went silent.

Shuffling the cards, Cass glanced over her shoulder at Tilly, who, driving her elbows into the arms of the rocking chair, had propped herself up so she could lean toward the kitchen. Cass returned her attention to the cards and asked, “What’s going on with Jack?”

“Don’t play dumb. Where’s the money?”

“If I knew, I’d take it and leave.”

“Like hell you would. Nothing stopping you from doing what you wanna. Instead, you live here and take care of her.”

“You just think that way because you don’t give a fuck about nobody else. That’s how I know you ain’t helping Jack or me out.”

“But Jack cares about you so much, don’t he? That why he’s got you involved in all this?”

Cass stared at her deft hands for several moments, until it seemed they were no longer her own. Bearing the burden of his glare, she replied, “Everyone knows this is gonna end bad, but nobody thinks it’s gonna end bad for themselves. Why is that?”

He didn’t reply. After a minute, he rose and strolled toward Tilly. Cass watched them out of the corner of her eye.

“How about you?” he asked Tilly. “You wanna help your grandson out?”

Her legs still crossed, she leaned back, squinted at him as though he were off in the distance, and replied, “To hell with you. My baby Cassandra ain’t telling you nothing if she won’t tell me, and she won’t tell me, so why don’t you and those lards in the basement get the fuck outta my house?”

“So, she knows?”

“Might be she don’t,” Tilly croaked, crossing her arms.

“I don’t believe her.”

“I don’t give a damn what you believe!” Tilly shouted. She drew a tin of tobacco from the front pocket of her robe and pinched a dip into her lip. Her voice now slightly muffled, she said, “The thing about you Blooms is that you’re all bitches. You’re a bitch. Your brother’s a bitch. Your dad’s a bitch. Your mom, well, she ain’t half-bad, but she’s working on it.”

“At least we do honest work at the lumberyard, while Jack and Vick run scams together.”

“Working so much you gotta rob my granddaughter, huh?”

“By the way, I heard something funny, Tilly. Rumors are that Uncle Vick was in on the theft.”

Tilly narrowed her eyes at him. “Bullshit,” she replied. “My Vicky wouldn’t do that.”

“Sure, he would. The only strange part is that he didn’t end up with the money. Luckily, as it turns out. Vick always was lucky.”

“He’d have admitted it to me by now.”

“If I were him, I wouldn’t tell you nothing, the way you talk.”

“If you were my son, I’d have smothered you in my titties.”

Danny shook his head at the image, as Jesse and Boogie returned from the basement, blushing. As they passed Cass, Jesse zipped up his pants and Boogie brushed her fingers through her tousled hair.

“Any clues?” Danny asked his brother.

“About what?”

“No, didn’t see him,” Boogie replied for her boyfriend.

“You three better get gone,” Tilly said. “You’re done bothering me and mine. Cassandra, honey, bring me my spitter, would you?”

Danny stared at Cass as she carried the coffee can to Tilly, who took it with her pointer and thumb and drew it to her chin. When she spat, she lowered her head but kept her eyes up, tracking Jesse and Boogie as they approached her. Cass stood next to and slightly behind the rocking chair. Boogie stood between the men, licking her fingers and wiping mascara from her cheeks and eye bags.

Tilly clutched the can to her stomach, as a string of muddied saliva oozed down the side of her askew bottom lip. She cocked her head back and said, “Anyway, you ain’t doing shit to nobody here, or it’ll be my Vicky you gotta face up to.” She pointed at Jesse. “You and your tramp, get!”

Before Jesse could hold Boogie back, she lunged toward Tilly with her arms outstretched. Suddenly spry, Tilly doused the girl’s face with the contents of the can.

For a moment, everyone froze. Boogie staggered backward, her eyes and mouth sealed, clumpy brown residue clinging to her hair and trickling down her cheeks. Then she smeared her eyelids clean with her palms and opened her eyes, two portals brilliantly white against her stained face. Her shriek was long, piercing, guttural.

An instant later Jesse’s hands were constricting Tilly’s slim throat. His weight driving her backward, he lifted her six inches off her seat. The chair rocked back as far as it could without tipping over. Cass pulled on one of Jesse’s arms, Danny on the other, then Danny let go, stepped back, and swung an uppercut into Jesse’s exposed midsection. Air whooshed from Jesse’s mouth and he immediately released his grip and wobbled away from the chair with his hands on his gut. Danny tackled him, pinned him to the carpet.

“Bathroom’s over there,” Danny told Boogie, nodding in the direction of the hallway.

She left for the bathroom and he looked from Tilly, who coughed and grasped her neck, to his brother gasping below him. He shook his head. Jesse, eyes closed, remained motionless on the floor. Danny reached into Tilly’s robe for her cell and tossed it on the couch.

When Jesse finally opened his eyes, Danny said, “Take her downstairs. I’ll deal with Tilly.”

Jesse’s lips were downturned, he was stifling a snivel. It was not the first time he’d been humiliated by his fear of a man so much smaller than he. Gingerly, he rolled onto his side, then onto one knee, before standing. Cass scrunched her shoulders up when he grabbed her by the hair and led her through the kitchen to the landing at the top of the basement stairs. He shoved her into the wall, then pointed to the bottom of the stairs. The look of humiliation on his face had morphed into morbid glee. She went down and he followed, each wooden plank whining beneath his boots.

He pushed the card table toward the woodchute and stood before the woodstove coals that snapped and charmed and hissed like the first gasps of hell incarnate. With one hand he grabbed a two-foot split log from beside the stove and tossed it onto the floor. He told her to sit. She turned the log onto its end and squatted atop it, looking up at his enormous frame, the shadow of which shrouded her in darkness.

Upstairs, Danny struggled to carry Tilly to her bedroom.

“You didn’t gotta do that to Tilly. She don’t know shit. She’s got a mouth but—”

“Shut up,” Jesse said.

“Leave her outta this. Tell Danny to come down here and deal with me if he’s got a problem.”

“He’ll come, too. Don’t worry. Then you’re gonna help us.”

“Just leave her in her chair! She can’t use the stairs, anyway!” Cass shouted at the ceiling.

When Boogie came downstairs with a bath towel wrapped around her head, Jesse opened the stove door. Sucking oxygen, the coals blushed. He instructed Boogie to gather the pelts, and one by one she plucked them off of their hooks and threw them to him. He admired them before flipping them into the stove.

“You don’t gotta do that either,” Cass pleaded. “Just take them and sell them.”

“Ain’t fifty bucks in this whole basement, I bet,” Jesse said. “Anyway, you go ahead and stop me whenever you feel you’ve lost enough of them. We know Jack was here and that you two talked. We know he had a suitcase with him. Tilly told people she saw you. Word gets around, Cassie.”

“Funny. Tilly told me she saw Boogie and Danny in the bathroom at The Spot. Said it looked like Boogie was trying to breastfeed him.”

Jesse shot a glance at Boogie.

“That ain’t true!” Boogie said.

“Didn’t say it was,” Cass replied.

A thump on the living room floor jarred the ceiling, shaking dust loose from the joists above them. They looked up.

“You dropped me, you twit!” Tilly belted.

“Quit squirming, then!”

“Danny!” Cass begged.

Boogie and Jesse stood still, listening as Danny dragged warbling Tilly the rest of the way to her bedroom, then slammed her bedroom door shut and pushed the couch in front of her door.

Cass began to cry. “Don’t do that to her. She’s got no part in this.”

Jesse and Boogie returned to burning the pelts. “Your brother’s using you,” he said.

“Yours ain’t using you?” Cass replied.

“We split everything fifty-fifty.”

“That’s what you think.”

“Don’t listen to her, Jesse,” Boogie said. “She’s just trying to mess with you. And I tell you what, she ain’t doing all this for Jack, neither. She’s doing it for herself.”

Jesse said, “No, that ain’t Cassie. She’s lying for her brother. She don’t know nothing but being walked all over.”

Boogie unwound the towel from her head, bent at the waist to let her hair hang long, and began to rub it dry with the towel. Danny came downstairs with a half-full bottle of Tilly’s whiskey. Sweating, he took a swig on the bottom step and handed the bottle to Jesse. Tilly was kicking her bedroom door with both feet.

“She’s just gonna keep banging like that. Should’ve knocked her out cold,” Jesse told his brother.

“Forget about Tilly. This here’s the one we gotta focus on.”

“Why’d you do that to her?!” Cass hollered. “Christ, have some decency!”

“Decency? Your whole side of the family is criminals. We got the law on ours,” Danny said as he took the fire poker from beside the stove and tucked it beneath the coals.

Cass sat up straight, uncrossed her legs. He knelt before her, Jesse standing at his side. Boogie crouched by the stove, her eyes glinting in the firelight.

Above, Tilly stomped on the door and barked about the vengeance the boys would suffer when Vick and Jack and Beads, the boys’ mom, found out what they’d done.

Danny looked up at Cass. “Let’s see if you can do yourself even a small favor. Can you, Cassie?”

Cass looked from him to Jesse to Boogie and back to him. When she didn’t reply, Boogie went to work collecting the rest of the pelts for the stove. Jesse kicked the log out from underneath Cass, pushed her down, and knelt on her shoulders to pin her to the concrete, his immense butt crushing her chest. Danny scooped up a cluster of coals with the iron shovel and, squatting next to Cass’s head, poured them onto the floor beside her right cheek, close enough for her to feel their heat. Boogie stopped midway between the pelts and the stove, gawking, covering her mouth with both hands.

Cass wept, her lips quavered. But she was silent. She blinked away her tears to look into Danny’s eyes. At first it seemed to her that he wanted to stop himself, but it was soon apparent that he was merely astonished by his own brutality. Then a vacant glaze came over his eyes, that blind, animal hate which only shared blood can incubate. He turned her head right side down, licked his thumb, and quickly pushed a coal beneath her head.

“Speak up any time, Cassie,” he said.

She suspended her head above the concrete, as smoke laved its way up over her face. She smelled her burning hair. The coal began to scald her skin and she gritted her teeth. As Danny pushed her head closer to the concrete, she tried to lurch free and the coal touched her flesh, scorching her. She screamed. Tilly kicked her door, howling. Jesse punched Cass, driving her head into the coal and chipping one of her molars.

He took a swig from the bottle and Danny said, “Don’t make us do all this. We wouldn’t if we didn’t gotta.”

Distressed by the crimes in which she was partaking, Boogie had stepped away from them, her back against the woodchute. “She ain’t worth nothing dead,” she burst out.

Cass bit down on her loose tooth. Through her tears, she scowled at them. Jesse grabbed the coal nestled in her hair and tore it free and threw it toward the stove. He held her shoulders to the concrete as Danny pushed her right sleeve up to her forearm. Then Danny extracted the poker from the stove, lowered its smoking tip over the top of her forearm, and stared into her eyes expectantly. “Well?” he said.

Mouth shut, Cass moaned.

Tilly yelled that she’d fallen from her bed and broken her leg.

Boogie begged, “That’s enough now. Maybe Cassie really don’t know.”

“Boogie!” Jesse castigated her.

“Cassie, just tell them what you know so they’ll stop. Please.”

Cass swallowed her blood to clear her throat. When she turned her head to the side, tears flowed from her closed eyes, down the side of her face, dampening the hair by her temples. Danny leaned back and Jesse loosened his hold on her ankles. She sniffled and opened her eyes and faced Danny.

As Tilly pounded her way through her bedroom door, Cass muttered, “You two are real amateurs, ain’t you?”

Before Danny could respond, she spat her tooth at him, and he immediately dropped the iron onto her arm. Cass and Boogie screamed. He lifted the iron, but it was glued to her flesh. He ripped it free and stood shaking it at her as though he were defending himself.

“I’m gonna check on Tilly,” he said. He dropped the iron near the bottom step and sprinted upstairs.

Boogie rushed across the room and slapped her boyfriend, who cowered. She raised her fist to strike him again, but the thunderous discharge of the rifle above them froze her. Jesse ran upstairs, dropping the whiskey bottle on the way. It shattered on the bottom step, and shards of glass sprinkled across the floor, glinting in the stove’s glow, enchanting Boogie, who’d backed up against the woodchute with her spread fingertips pressed against the wall on either side of her.

Cass looked at her, spat blood into the nearby drain. Boogie stared back but said nothing, and Cass snuck upstairs, glancing at the poker on the way.

The kitchen was empty. The men were in Tilly’s room, arguing about what to do with her. Cass pushed her sleeve down and opened the silverware drawer and slid a steak knife into her pouch. The tarnished metal, mottled ochre, appeared salvaged from shipwreck. She shut the drawer just before Boogie emerged at the top of the stairs. She was on her cell, asking for a ride home, and was in such a hurry to leave that she left the door open behind her. Snow rushed into the house. Wintry gusts cackled.

Cass didn’t bother shutting the door. She walked toward Tilly’s room, and Danny met her in the living room, grabbed her by the back of the neck, and led her to the sound of Jesse and Tilly arguing in Tilly’s bedroom doorway. The men had pushed the couch across the hall into Cass’s room. There was a bullet hole six feet up Tilly’s door. If Jesse had come instead of Danny, the shot might’ve killed him. Tilly sat against the wall just inside the door, her hair disheveled, her neck and wrists already bruising darkly.

Jesse stood over her, pointing the rifle at her chest. “I’ve had enough of you!” he yelled.

“One of your eyes looks ready to kill. The other one ain’t so sure,” Tilly replied.

“Put the gun away!” Cass yelled, her hands in her pouch, clutching the wooden handle of the steak knife.

“He ain’t gonna shoot me,” Tilly said.

“You think I won’t?!”

“Jesse, put it down!” Danny commanded, squeezing Cass’s neck.

“I’m gonna do it. Then me and Danny are tying cinder blocks to your ankles and throwing you in Redding Lake. You too, Cassie.”

“Jesse, quit acting crazy!” Danny bellowed.

Then Cass threw her empty hands up and screamed, “Stop it. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. Just stop.”

The three of them looked at her. Jesse pointed the rifle at the ceiling. Danny loosed his grip of Cass’s neck, and she swayed free, hurtling into the wall beside Tilly, where she froze, still hunched like a cat. She glowered up at the men.

Jesse slipped the bolt back and pocketed the two cartridges. He handed the rifle to Tilly, who took it with both hands and placed it on her gut like a seatbelt, never taking her eyes from Cass.

“Okay, then,” Danny said, panting, “where to?”