Fourmile (13 page)

Gary knelt behind the truck and petted Kabo, then stood and waited for her. Then I saw them talking and he took the pistol from her and looked at it and gave it back. They talked some more until Mother finally turned and headed for the house.

Gary watched after her until I heard the door shut. Then he started for the barn with Kabo beside him. I left the window and went to my bedroom door and opened it just as Mother was passing. She no longer had the pistol in her hand and she seemed more relaxed.

“What’s he going to do?” I asked.

“He’s going to talk to him if he comes by again.”

“What if he’s not here like tonight?”

“Then I’ll call the police. Everything’s going to be fine. Go on to bed.”

“I want to go see him.”

“It’s two o’clock in the morning. No.”

I frowned and went back to my room. I got my knife and lay in bed, staring at the ceiling fan, squeezing the hilt in my palm, imagining the terror of Dax’s goat face pressed against my window. I heard Mother’s bedroom door close and I squeezed the knife and it didn’t comfort me like I wanted it to. I got out of bed and walked quietly into the living room and opened the top drawer of the sideboard. The pistol was there looking heavy and deadly. I lifted it out and closed the drawer.

33

I woke to the sound of Mother talking in the kitchen. I slowly pulled myself from a groggy sleep and realized that the sunlight was strong through the window. I’d slept later than usual.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes and listened. I heard Gary’s voice.

“Go on to work,” he said. “I’ll handle it.”

“Oh God, Gary. I can’t leave.”

“You’re late already. There’s nothing you can do.”

“Can’t we take him somewhere?”

“No. I’ve seen it before. You’ll spend a lot of money with the same result.”

“It’s going to crush him, Gary.”

He didn’t answer. I still didn’t know what they were talking about.

“Go on, Linda,” he said.

“Oh God,” she said again. “Okay. Oh God.”

I got out of bed and walked to the center of the floor. I heard the front door shut and I wanted to go out and see Gary, but not so fast that they might know I was listening. I heard him get a glass from the kitchen cabinet and then the sink came on. I walked slowly into the hall and down it until I could see into the kitchen. The glass of water was beside him and he was leaning over with his elbows on the counter and his forehead in his hands.

“Hey, Gary,” I said.

He straightened and faced me. His eyes were red like he hadn’t been sleeping. “Hey, Foster.”

“What are you doing?”

He swallowed against something he didn’t want to say. “I need your help in the barn this morning,” he said. “Joe’s sick.”

Everything I’d heard came suddenly rushing over me and all the pieces fell into place. Buzzing rose in my ears and my breathing went shallow.

“He ate something bad last night.”

There was only one question that sat in my head. “Is he going to die?”

Gary studied me for what seemed like forever. “Yes,” he said. “I think so.”

I started for the back door and felt the tears coming. I wiped my face and kept on across the yard toward the barn door, a big, dark, open mouth before me. I couldn’t hear anything, taste anything, smell anything. My senses were numb to the world.

I found Joe lying on Gary’s blanket, his tongue protruding and clamped between his teeth, bared ugly and mean like it wasn’t him inside at all. His stomach rose and fell in quick bursts. Yellow bile was puddled around his face and the blanket was stained with a dark, bloody substance behind his legs. I sat beside him and put my hand on his head. The one eye facing up stared at some place in the beams overhead.

“Joe?” I said.

I leaned over to get into his line of sight and thought I saw the pupil twitch the slightest bit. I fell across him and sobbed into his neck fur. “No,” I cried. “Don’t die, Joe. Please don’t die.”

I felt Gary’s hand on my back.

I squeezed Joe tighter and felt the small convulsions passing through him like electricity. “We have to help him!” I said. “We have to do something!”

“He’s poisoned, Foster. His liver’s shut down.”

I sat up, pried his teeth open, and tried to get his tongue back in. It was cold and thick and limp. It kept falling out until I held it against the base of his mouth and let the jaws snap shut.

“We need to take him to the vet, Gary!”

“He’s going to die, Foster. Probably before we can get there.”

Joe spasmed and gagged and the tongue flopped out again. I started trying to stuff it back into his mouth, but Joe kept gagging and it kept falling out. Gary grabbed my arm. “Stop, Foster.”

“Make his tongue stop doing that, Gary!”

“You’re not helping him!”

I fought against him. “You’re not either!” I yelled.

“If we could make it to a vet, he’d die alone in a back room. I think you’d regret not being with him.”

I stopped struggling and relaxed. Gary let go of my arm and put his hand on my shoulder. I lay across my dog again and squeezed him and cried.

*   *   *

I stayed with him until my cheek no longer felt the twitching in his stomach. Only an hour had passed, but it felt like longer. Gary was still sitting quietly behind me with Kabo. I sat up and my face felt dry and tight. I looked at Joe’s face and the sight of the tongue made me sick and I crawled away and puked onto the ground. Then I lay on my side, facing the house. “He was fine last night,” I mumbled.

“I found him at the back door this morning,” Gary said.

“He was fine last night,” I said again.

“When did you last see him?”

“He barked at Dax. I saw him run around the house after Dax left.”

Gary’s feet passed my face. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said.

I watched him cross the yard and angle out of sight around the house. I lay there, breathing, not ever wanting to move again. After a few minutes Gary returned. I saw him holding his knife at his side with something stabbed onto the end of it. He passed me and then I heard him getting something from the toolroom. After a few seconds he was standing over me. “Come on,” he said. “Take this and I’ll carry Joe.”

I sat up and took the shovel from him. I turned and watched as he wrapped Joe in the blanket and stood with him cradled in his arms. “Where do you think he’d like to be?” he asked me.

I knew where Joe wanted to be. The place where he found me. The place where we built tree forts and paths through the woods. Where we swam in the creek. Where my father was killed. And now, in a numb way, I was no longer scared.

I stood. “In the woods at the back of the pasture,” I said.

“Okay,” Gary said. “We’ll take the truck.”

*   *   *

We drove through the back gate with Joe in the truck bed. We bumped across the pasture and my head swayed and my eyes stayed focused on the tall canopy of trees that held the back sixty acres of creek bottom.

“I want to tell you what happened,” I said.

I saw Gary look over at me.

“About Daddy,” I said.

34

I let the memories come flooding over me, filling my head like a liquid nightmare. Black fluid poison. Flashes, dappled sunlight, barking, running, yelling. Everything that had been pooled inside me for a year.

“There’s a creek back there,” I said. “It’s in a gully. Daddy helped me build a tree fort a long time ago. Last year we were gonna build a bridge over the creek so we could hunt Mr. Hixon’s woods. He has woods that go for almost a mile. And he’s got a pasture with cows and mules. Now our cows are there too. Daddy tried to cut down a tree so that it would fall over and we could walk across it. He cut it with his chain saw and it got stuck in another tree. He told me to stay back, so I was in the fort with Joe because he could climb ladders. Daddy was pushing on the tree, trying to get it loose. I heard something snap and then all these branches and leaves were coming down. When everything stopped I couldn’t see him. I came down and he was under the tree. It fell on him.”

“Jesus,” Gary mumbled.

“He tried to tell me what to do, but I couldn’t understand him. The tree covered him up so all I could see was the side of his head in the leaves. There was blood around his head. I couldn’t move the tree. I couldn’t understand him.”

The forest in front of us was growing closer and taller. “There was nothing you could have done, Foster.”

“I couldn’t understand what he was saying.”

“It was too big.”

Suddenly I knew Gary didn’t know any more than the rest of them. No more than Mother. No more than Granddaddy. None of them knew the answers to anything. I was alone with it all and there was no sense in holding any of it back until the right person came along to take it away. It was just this and it would always be this and it would sit in me and rot my guts.

“There’s an opening in the trees up there,” I said. “You can drive into it a little ways.”

He kept on to the tree line and found the opening and we plunged into the dark shade of the creek bottom. We drove until we came to the end of where Daddy had Bush Hogged the year before.

Gary shut off the truck and we got out and I grabbed the shovel while he lifted the blanket with Joe in it. He looked at me and motioned with his chin for me to lead. I started past him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I think Joe lived in the woods before he found me,” I said.

The gum trees and water oaks towered overhead and the leafy damp of the forest floor was like a smell from another time long ago, instantly familiar but something I’d given up and had no place for. Birds flitted through the forest canopy and a cardinal made its shrill whistle that brought to mind the smell of sawdust and chalky nails and sawn cypress and anticipation.

The pieces of the giant gum tree came into view. It had been cut into several sections by the firemen and pulled about. Part of it had rolled into the gully and the top half stuck up on the opposite slope, brittle and dead. To my left was the tree fort. I stopped and faced it. The roof was littered with Spanish moss and tree limbs. The boards were green with algae. But it was there, hanging in the trees like dried bones. I knew that if I climbed up to it I would know the feel of every board under my palms and my ankles would adjust to every tilt and slant and I would move up the ladder on muscle memory alone and swing into the fort and lie on my back and know every knothole and grain pattern of every board on the underside of the ceiling. But I had no desire to climb the dead thing. I looked at the gully again.

“Right here,” I said.

We buried Joe and left him there. We drove back across the pasture and to the house without speaking. It wasn’t until we were stopped beside the barn that I looked at Gary and realized he was lost in his own thoughts.

“Stay here,” he said.

He got out and took the shovel from the truck bed. He disappeared into the barn and came back and got into the truck with the knife and what I now recognized as a small piece of meat stabbed on the end of it.

“You eat steak last night?” he asked me.

“No.”

He cranked the truck and started around the side of the house.

“You know where he lives?”

“Who?”

“Dax.”

“I’ve been there once.”

His jaw tightened as he shifted into second gear. “Show me the way.”

35

I told Gary to turn left out of the driveway. He swung onto the blacktop and shifted into third gear, staring straight ahead. I looked at the piece of meat lying skewered on the dashboard. It was the size of a card deck and covered with dirt and grass. I saw where half of it had been torn away. It looked harmless.

“You think that was it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You think Dax did it?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do to him?”

He didn’t answer me.

“Did you bring your pistol?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He turned to me. “When we get there I want you to stay in the truck.”

I nodded and he looked at the road again. We didn’t talk until he came to the fourway. “Left,” I said.

We kept on through the farmland and into Robertsdale. We slowed at the one caution light, passed under, and continued a few more miles outside of town. Finally we passed the metal fabrication shop that I remembered as a landmark. I pointed to the red clay road on the right. Gary downshifted and made the turn and we were suddenly walled in by the pine plantation.

“It’s not far now,” I said.

We went around the first bend and I pointed to Dax’s house on the left. Gary came to a stop in the road and studied it.

“Truck’s gone,” he said.

“He’s got a shop in the back where he mounts deer heads and stuff. It might be back there.”

Gary glanced in the rearview mirror then looked at me. “Remember what I told you?”

I nodded.

He put the truck in gear and eased forward. “Good,” he said.

Gary swung around in the front yard and parked with the truck pointed out the driveway. He shut it off, grabbed the piece of poisoned meat, and got out. He stood studying the house. I heard crows calling in the distance and the shadow of a buzzard swiped across the hood. The engine hissed and ticked in the silence.

“I’m going to walk around back,” he finally said. “Stay put.”

I turned sideways in my seat and watched him through the rear glass. He angled across the yard, keeping his eyes on the dark windows of the house. Once he rounded the corner, he straightened his posture and picked up his pace like he’d seen something that put him in a hurry. I slid over to the driver’s side and craned my head out the window, but I lost sight of him.

Minutes passed as the crow calls moved into the distance and the engine cooled and ticked out. I strained my ears, but there was nothing else. Not a dog barking, not a car on the empty road, nothing. Then suddenly I heard what sounded like a hammer hitting a piece of sheet tin. It was quickly followed by the sound of lumber snapping. All of it coming from behind the house. I felt a surge of panic bolt through me and I looked out at the empty road and back again. I started to grab the door handle, then remembered what Gary told me and drew my hand back.