The Scamp (29 page)

You can't, she says. That's kidnapping.

I'm trying to help you, he says.

But she runs. I watch her disappear through the field, into the woods beyond.

I walk down to the entrance of the parking lot, where the trees are cleared around the market and the Laundromat next door, a bare space of road and horizon surrounded by dark pines. I don't see the cops or
an ambulance coming yet. The house across the street, which always looks empty during the afternoon, the siding so dry and warped it looks like it would blow off in a storm, has a light on. An upstairs window with white curtains, the kind with little yarn balls on the edges, is lit up yellow gold against the gray exterior.

It can't be
, I think, and look down to the lower windows, that I could have sworn were broken out with jagged pieces sticking up. The porch, slanted to the lawn, the front door, just a black slab. The curtains upstairs twitch.

I wonder where she came from. Out of the woods. Not from the direction of the campground. We would have seen her. Or if not us, someone else. Early risers. Her hair was matted and tangled in a way that looked like she slept on it wet, like it dried without being combed. Like she came up out of the river, and just kept walking. Up close, she smelled damp and green, like plant growth.

And I think about the hard sound of my voice out here. That there is someone else, dead-looking and crazy, with the same sound.

They send a lady cop, in her thirties, and a young guy, barely out of school. The guy comes to question us, where we saw her, where she appeared to be coming from. We've got almost nothing to tell him. She leapt in front of the car like a deer, Couper says. I almost hit her.

I try to describe her. Tall, thin. Dark hair down her back. She had scrapes and a gash on her thigh.

Did she say her name? the lady cop asks.

Virginia, Couper says.

No one has been reported missing, she tells us. I imagine it was some kind of domestic dispute. It happens, she explains. It's hard to help. Sometimes, by the time we get there, the woman won't say a thing against him.

I don't correct her.

It was a her.

We'll keep an eye out, she says.

They sit in the patrol car a long time, not looking for her. No one runs off into the woods to see where she went, if she's okay, if she's fallen down bleeding to death. She wasn't bleeding out, anyway. She was moving just fine on that leg, but still. You call the cops, you think the cops will go looking for the wild hurt girl you just described to them. The younger cop taps away on a laptop, the windows down, the police radio going. After a while, they pull out, in a cloud of dust, headed toward the campground.

You should probably ice your arm, Couper tells me.

I should probably ice you.

He tilts his head and gives me a stare then. How is that remotely funny? he says. After what we've just seen? After everything? he says.

I hold my arm, and it aches, deep, in the bone. I don't think it's broken, but it already feels hot and swollen under my fingertips.

What did Chuck tell you? I ask.

That he mailed her money, Couper says. In Delta.

He mailed her money, I say.

In Delta, Couper says. He kind of shouts it at me.

So what?

So, we just heard a girl who looked like someone tried to hack her to pieces say she was running from Delta, Couper says.

That was not hacked, I say.

Rayelle.

Why did he send her money? I say.

He rubs the back of his head. Another car pulls into the lot, already eight o'clock now, the regulars coming in for their coffee, their cigarettes.

He said he needed to do what he could to take care of those girls, Couper says.

Those girls, I say. Meaning who? Khaki and . . . ?

You, he says.

All I can do is shake my head at him.

Which one is your dad? Couper asks me.

Ray, I say. I told you that.

Which one is your mother? he says then.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I ask. My mother is my mother.

But I watch his brow come together like he's seen something, something you can't unsee.

Patty brings me a small bag of ice for my arm and tells Couper to take care of me.

I've been taking care of her, he says.

You took care of her all right, she says and laughs like a dirty aunt.

I remember my mother and Teddy sitting at the kitchen table while Khaki and I played on the living room floor. It was summer and I wore a sundress that was too short. Things were always too short for me. I grew fast.

Tuck the skirt in, my mother said. The whole world can see your puss.

I tried, but it didn't work. I went back to playing on the floor the way I was, my knees in the carpet. A pile of Barbies between us.

You can't tell that kid a goddamn thing, Teddy said. They lit their cigarettes. Poured coffee. I felt her watching me. Teddy, with her green eyes and arched eyebrows. This one wouldn't have survived Doe, she added.

Probably not, my mother said.

When Patty kisses my cheek and hugs me goodbye, I get a hard longing for home. It chokes me, her standing there, waving at us. And even though I had a big cup of coffee, when I get in the warm seat of the Gran Torino, I can't wait to close my eyes. I lean my head against the window, the sun hot enough to wilt you.

How far is Delta? I ask Couper with my eyes closed already, already half sleeping.

I think he says sixty miles.

I dream about my mother, that she's in the backyard at her house, on the back step with Summer, that
Summer is walking in the grass, big high baby steps, and laughing, and my mother, too. They both laugh, their mouths open in the same round shape.

Delta is an hour or more up the river, over a bridge that crosses at the widest point, where boats can go underneath, carrying fishermen, tourists. The road is dappled with light between trees that arc over and almost meet in the middle, like driving through a tunnel of elms or poplars. A tunnel with light at the end of it, like dying, or, probably, more like being born. It's maybe the most beautiful thing I've seen, even with my eyes closed.

twenty-four

KHAKI

Bury the hatchet.

They say that to make peace. To take a weapon of war, a sign of aggression, and put it away, to bury it in the ground as a means of stopping the argument, of ending the war.

There's no peace between us.

Virginia is the worst kind of girl. The local who comes snooping around because she thinks she knows something, because she thinks she heard something saucy, something to cure her of her pink-nail-polished girl boredom.

The sheriff's daughter.

With nothing better to do than plan her sister's baby shower, or get her hair done. She might as well play
bridge and eat cucumber sandwiches with the blue-haired ladies at the Eastern Star.

She wore a cropped top and a gold belly chain, glinting on her taut skin. Her face looked airbrushed.

When she ran from me, her face was blotched with terror. The delicate gold chain, cinched around her neck. It left a burn, a permanent necklace.

If I see her again, I will chop her again. Completely. My only regret, not hitting her better before she got away.

I never meant to keep Virginia, to love her, or to take care of her in any way. Once she came, she wouldn't leave. She clung to me like oil. Make me your own, she'd say. Running from her sheriff daddy. Her body, unused, like undisturbed milk. She had no wounds, no damage. I showed her Dakota.

That's who runs to me, I said to her after. Is that you? Were you raped by your own brother? Did he cut your eye out?

She had gasped with a horror I wished Dakota had never heard. Pretty girls frightened of your face is not an alarm you get used to. Dakota, with her sewn-shut eye, her scarred mouth.

In Delta, I went by Parker Dealey. But Dakota knew my real name.

I offered it to Dakota in trust, in another town, another house, coaxing her to come along with me, to let me care for her the way she had never been cared for. My hands open, palms up, on top of hers. I can't tell you anything else about me, I said. But that's my real name.

She looked at me with her one eye, soft and dark brown, her lashes thick and black. Her skin, like copper velvet. I don't need to know anything else, she said.

Virginia, with her perfect manicure and pedicure, wanted to know everything. Eyeing the walls behind me while she stood in my doorway. Not a split end on her head. Not a chipped tooth.

I could be your best girl, she said.

I don't have a best girl, I said.

I made her sleep in the basement, on the velvet couch, where, during the day, I saw clients. At night, it was cool and dark, clean. It was safe, when safety was not what she needed or craved.

I never meant for her to stay.

I took her out after I caught them together. I told her to come with me for a ride. She kept saying, It's not what you think. Her eyes wide and her skin bare in an oversized shirt that hung off her shoulders.

She's pissed, Tennessee clucked at her.

I stared hard at Tennessee's round baby face. You mind your own, I told her, and put Virginia in the truck.

It's not what you think, she said again. I lit a cigarette, let the smoke fill the cab.

A humid summer night, wet with dew. Fog in the low valleys.

Parker, she said. It's not anything. Me and her.

You'll have to show me, I said. I don't know what to think.

I'm not even, she started.

I drove to where the road dipped and rose, past the cemetery, between the canopy of poplars. At the treetops, in the twilight, bats, pinging out blind, circling back.

Not what? I said.

I'm not that way, she said. She squinched her tiny nose, her lip curled. I don't like girls in that way, she said.

Then what were you thinking, coming to my door? I said.

She huffed, her arms crossed over her chest, her delicate wrists tucked into her armpits. It wasn't cold. She was feeling exposed. I didn't think there was sex attached, she said. Not with you, she said. Or with her.

I stopped the car at a T. The bank in front of us, striped with layers of rock. The road curved down to the river one way, out into the flats the other.

With who? I asked.

Clients? she asked.

Who told you that?

Oh please, she said.

I had the hatchet tucked in the side of the driver's seat, its rubber handle where my fingers could reach around. I felt it, and kept driving.

Where are you taking me? she asked.

You know what they do, I said, when they catch pests? Rodents? And relocate them? They take them to
the other side of the river, I said, so they can't smell their way back to town.

She gave a hard little clinking laugh.

Your father ought to be ashamed of you, I said.

He ought to be ashamed of himself, she said.

We pulled off, into an access point for fishermen, where there was a dirt parking circle beside willow trees, and a spot where the river was wide and slow. Kids went swimming there. People took their dogs to fetch sticks and tennis balls in the water. Some fallen trees had made a still spot. A pool you could swim in and not be swept away in the current. Beyond it, the river dipped down over rocks, a loud rushing, under a bridge, out, into thicker trees.

Past ten, it was empty. It was dark, except for the dashboard. You could hear the small waterfall around the bend, the water rushing over rocks and along the shoreline. There were frogs and crickets. An owl, high above.

What happened to you? I asked her. Something I would sometimes ask of the others, who came on their hands and knees, who came running, who still had wounds in their bellies, their backs, had black eyes, or no eye at all.

You happened to me, she said, coy.

It felt like frost moving in, down my limbs, over my face. If she could see it she didn't say. But she did back out of the truck.

I ain't happened to you yet, I said.

After, I buried the hatchet, literally, in my own yard. I washed it in a moving part of the river, wading in barefoot and ankle-deep to the waterfall and submerging the head of the axe in the water. I'd begun to tail her but she ran through the river and up the bank on the other side, scrambling.

I'd said, I'll show you what you're missing. By not being with me. By not being my best girl.

I can be, she said.

You're not that way, I said. Are you. I shimmied her out of her skinny jeans and her silk panties, threw them in the back of the truck. She was down to the shirt only, sloping off her shoulder, and I took a long, slow moment to run my fingertips on her skin, my lips near her ear. I wore a black tank dress, straight and simple, and nothing underneath. When I felt her tremble at my breath on her neck, I lifted the dress off.

I let her see me. Naked, the way I work best. Hard and shining. Strong like an animal. She was unmoved.

There was nothing there to be redeemed. Nothing to fix because nothing had ever been broken. She was a blank slate. I could lay my hands on Tennessee and read the damage on her skin, could hold Dakota's head and stroke her broken mouth, her punctured eye. But Virginia? No text at all. Just a brittle slate I could punch my fist through.

When she detected the cold hatred in my closed hand, moving up her thigh, she ran. She looked at my face, hard, closed, dead inside to whatever plea she
might make to me, and she ran. She didn't scream, she just scrambled on her bare feet, slipping in the dust while she backed away.

I threw the hatchet, overhand, and it hit her in the thigh. I was aiming for her neck.

That's when she screamed, all along the riverbank, up toward nowhere civilized. I picked up the axe, slick with blood and caked with dirt, and stood listening to the sound of her voice getting smaller, farther away. I waded into the river naked under the moon, a small blond woman holding an axe covered in blood. I didn't know where she would end up, or who she might run into.