A Tree Born Crooked (24 page)

She pushed back her disheveled hair and stood up straighter, taking a deep breath.

“But what are you sorry for?”

James stood dumbly in front of her.

“I mean, honestly, who cares if you’re sorry? The only one you’re hurting, every day, is yourself. You’re sticking the knife in your own back, not anyone else’s.”

His voice, very small, was directed at the floor. He couldn’t look at her.

“I know.”

“I said before that we can’t change who we are. If we’ve been struck by lightning, we can’t expect not to bear the scars. But that doesn’t mean that we have to cover them up. We still have to keep on growing, even if we have to twist and contort to be able to adapt to the life we’ve been given.”

James raised his eyes to meet hers, beseeching.

“I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do.”

Marlena walked to the motel room door and opened it.
 

“Everything damnable inside of you, all of the demons, all of the shadows, it’s become what you live for. The pain and the anger remind you that you’re still alive.”

She opened the door wider, framing herself against the rain and the night.
 

“Instead of letting everyone else around you go, why not try letting go of yourself?”

The door closed behind her and James was alone.

THIRTEEN

It was not quite dawn when James opened his eyes. He was disoriented at first, staring at the dented metal side of a window air conditioner unit. He blinked a few times against the weak, gray light filtering in through the grimy motel window, but remained on his side, twisted up in the scratchy sheets. He didn’t want to move. There had been an awful lot of waking up in strange rooms lately, and it took him a moment to recall just where exactly he was on this particular rough morning. Once he remembered, James sat up quickly and rubbed his face hard with the palms of his hands. He felt the blood rush to his head and begin to pound in his temples. Another hangover. At least he was waking up in a real bed, not a deck chair by the side of a pool.
 

He slowly stood up and pulled on his jeans before looking around the room. It was empty aside from himself and the wreckage from the night before. Squashed potato chip bags and beef jerky wrappers littered the floor between the two double beds. There was a pile of crushed soda cans beneath the small table and an empty bottle of vodka underneath the television stand. James noticed that the other double bed had not been slept in. He stumbled to the bathroom and washed his face in the sink, trying to avoid looking in the mirror. He poured handfuls of cold water over his head and forced himself to wake up. As he dried his face and hair with a stiff miniature towel, the tender soreness beneath his eye suddenly brought back the events of the night before. He looked up into the small, grimy mirror. An ugly bruise was forming around the cut on his cheekbone and two long, thin scratches marred the side of his face. Had that really happened last night? As soon as James thought about Marlena, a heavy sickness punched him the stomach. He couldn’t even begin to deal with what had occurred between them. Instead, he tried to remember what had transpired with Rabbit. That was almost as bad, but he could handle his brother. James found the rest of his wrinkled clothes in a pile on the floor and went out to check on him.

When James peered through the Jeep’s smudged windows, he saw Rabbit passed out in the back seat, knees bent awkwardly, one arm slung out toward the floorboards. A line of dried spit was crusted on one cheek. James decided not to wake him yet and instead walked across the parking lot to the Jiffy Mart on the other side of the road.
 

The convenience store had just opened, and the woman pouring water into the coffee maker glared at him. She huffed as she banged the coffee pot down onto the warming plate and then left him to work on her hair and makeup in the bathroom. James snatched a Honey Bun off the wire display rack and split the package open. He leaned against the counter and chewed while he listened to the coffee percolate and slowly drip into the orange-handled pot.
 

He didn’t know what they were supposed to do now. It was yet another thing he didn’t want to think about as the rising sun streamed in through the thick, cloudy store windows. But it was something they were going to have to face. James crumpled up the cellophane wrapper and shoved it through the cut out hole in the countertop above the hidden trashcan. He sucked a smudge of icing off his finger and wiped his hands on his jeans. The coffee was taking forever.
 

Finally, the pot was full enough to get three small cups of coffee out of it. James pulled the glass container out from underneath the thin stream of brown liquid, but the coffee maker didn’t stop dripping as he assumed it would. The coffee popped and sizzled as it hit the hot metal base.
 

“Dammit.”

James shoved the coffee pot back under the stream, causing the liquid on the warmer to hiss and sputter even more as it burned the bottom of the coffee pot. James was snatching paper napkins out of the dispenser next to the empty boiled peanut cauldron when Rabbit came rushing through the front door, letting it swing and bang hard behind him. James turned around with a poof of napkins in one hand and a stack of tiny Styrofoam coffee cups in the other. He decided to get the apology over as quickly as possible.

“Hey, man, sorry ‘bout last night. It was just the liquor talking. I didn’t mean any of what I said.”
 

Rabbit caught his breath.

“It don’t matter. I don’t care.”

“No, seriously, I shouldn’t have—”

Rabbit cut him off.

“Shut up, I don’t care. I just got a voicemail from Mama. Something bad happened at home, James.”

“What?”
 

James set the napkins and cups down on the counter and crossed his arms, waiting for Rabbit to continue.

“It was hard to understand what she saying on the message. Something ‘bout some men, and they trashed the store last night while she was out at the Walmart over in High Springs. She weren’t making much sense. James, you said it was over.”

James turned back to the coffee maker. It had stopped dripping, and James arranged the three small cups in a row before pouring.
 

“James!”

“What?”

James filled the cups and clamped a plastic travel lid onto each one. Rabbit’s voice was trembling.

“You said it was over.”

James handed two of the cups to Rabbit and pulled a crumpled five-dollar bill out his pocket. He set it under the powdered creamer shaker.
 

“I know. And I was wrong.”

~ ~ ~

Rabbit leaned forward from the back seat and hooked his arm around James’ headrest.

“I still don’t understand why they had to go and hit up Mama’s store. I thought they said they was gonna leave us alone.”

James moved his head away from Rabbit’s arm.

“I’m not sure they were men of their word to begin with, Rabbit.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.”

Marlena had been flying down Interstate 75 for the past two hours, passing 18-wheelers and minivans full of children clutching sticky Popsicles and frazzled parents who never wanted to see Mickey Mouse again. James calculated that if they kept up this pace, they would be back in Crystal Springs by mid-afternoon. None of them brought up the night before. James had caught Marlena staring at the cut on his face, but neither one of them had spoken about it. They had spent the time in the Jeep making phone calls and endlessly asking each other the same questions and running through the same scenarios. They were no closer to figuring out what was going on than they had been when they pulled out of The Happy Flamingo parking lot.

No one answered the phone at the Citrus Shop, no matter how long James let it ring. Birdie Mae’s house phone rang five times each time they called and then went to Birdie’s answering machine: “I’m busy, you know what to do.” James had left a message asking his mama to call him back, but so far neither James nor Rabbit had received a phone call since the one Birdie Mae had made in the middle of the night. James had asked Rabbit for Birdie’s cell phone number, but Rabbit had nothing for him. Birdie Mae stuck with landlines.
 

Marlena wasn’t having any luck, either. Waylon’s cell phone had gone straight to voicemail, and Marlena had left yet another message begging him to call her back, knowing full well that she might be leaving a message for a dead man. She had called The Blue Diamond, and the phone rang the same way it did for the Citrus Shop. James suggested she try calling Hollis, but she told him that his phone had been disconnected months ago and he had never bothered to restore service. She had left a message for the neighbor who was watching Roscoe and then flung her phone down into the center console, fed up with listening to automated voices and hollow ring tones.
 

Rabbit had continued to call Birdie Mae’s house, even after James left the message. He directed all of his nervous energy into hitting the redial button on his cell phone, listening until he heard Birdie’s recorded voice, and then hanging up. James had started to tell him to give it up already, but Marlena, eyes still on the road, shook her head slightly. James had sighed, but left his brother alone.

What James didn’t know, though, was that in the midst of Rabbit’s continual calls to Birdie Mae, he had dialed another number. James had already called Delmore’s cell phone and left a message, but Rabbit tried him again. This time, someone picked up. It was a brief sound, a clicking on and off from the other end, but someone had definitely answered before quickly hanging up. Rabbit thought about telling James, but went back to calling Birdie instead. Finally, he had let his cell phone rest and tried to join in on the conversation between James and Marlena.

“But what if they never was going after Waylon in the first place? Supposing that was just a plan to distract us?”

James took another puff on his cigarette and pulled a tiny piece of tobacco off his tongue.

“From what? Look, as far as I know, these guys are after just one thing: the money. Unless they got some kinda problem with our family you’ve neglected to tell me about.”

Rabbit thought about it a second.

“No, none that I can think of. I don’t think Mama knew none of them people that Delmore hung ‘round with.”

Rabbit had pressed himself so far into the space between the front seats that he was practically sitting in-between Marlena and James. Marlena stubbed her cigarette into the foldout ashtray.
 

“Well, why would they go after your mama’s place?”

Rabbit shook his head.

“I don’t know. To get at me and Delmore? Maybe it was some kinda warning?”

James picked up his cell phone and stared again at the blank screen. He finally threw it down onto the floorboard and turned to Rabbit.
 

“No, you’re missing the point. It’s gotta be all about the money. Maybe they got to Waylon and he didn’t have it and now they think that we actually had it all along. We just don’t know. The only thing that really matters is the question that we’ve been trying to answer this whole damn trip: where that bag of cash is.”

Rabbit shrugged his shoulders.
 

“I told you before that I don’t got it and I don’t know where it is. Didn’t we just have this talk, like, yesterday? It don’t change none in the course of twenty-four hours. Anyway, I thought we had all agreed that Waylon took the money. Why are we even still talking ’bout this?”

James turned back around and looked out the windshield.
 

“This changes things.”

“It don’t necessarily got to none. You know, now that I think ‘bout it, we don’t even know that Mama’s place getting hit has anything to do with us. It coulda just been some kids getting their rocks off. Mama didn’t say nothing on the phone ‘bout what happened or who done it. Maybe we’re just jumping to conclusions.”

Marlena rolled her eyes.

“You really believe this was just a coincidence?”

“Well, I just don’t see how it changes things none. Your daddy’s got the money. They told us we was off the hook. We don’t know nothing different.”

James watched Marlena’s grip on the steering wheel tighten, but she didn’t say anything. He cracked his window and flicked his cigarette out.
 

“And we won’t, until we get there.”

They drove to the sound of the wind whistling through James’ window and a woman on the public radio station reminding them repeatedly that the pledge drive had only five thousand more dollars to go. The three were quiet for about fifteen minutes before it started all over again: the same unanswerable questions and circular reasoning that led to empty conclusions and strained emotions. James watched the asphalt rushing toward them and tried to quell the dread building up inside of him. Whatever lay in wait for them in Crystal Springs, James was sure that the outcome was not going to be good.

FOURTEEN

Even the parking lot smelled like sour orange juice, left to bloat inside its cardboard container on the kitchen counter. Patches of thick, orange slime, branded by tire tracks, spilled out from the store’s glass front doors. Marlena carefully parked the Jeep between two wooden fruit displays that had been dragged out from the cover of the store’s overhanging roof and smashed. No matter where they stepped, orange peel and pulpy guts clung to their boots. James paused to glance around the parking lot before they entered. Both he and Marlena were armed, but Rabbit ran heedlessly ahead of them.