What Comes After (27 page)

I waited for a few minutes, but Beatrice didn’t come back on, so I finally hung up. I still wanted to talk to Beatrice, just not
this
Beatrice.

A week later, the Craven Ravens lost in the play-offs. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving, an away game at Cartaret High. I heard kids talking about it the following Monday: if they hadn’t gotten beat in that one regular-season game, if they’d kept the home-field advantage, if Book Allen had been able to play instead of sitting in jail for some bullshit . . .

I was anxious all day, certain that people were staring at me, whispering things, planning something worse than a black snake in my locker. Nothing happened during school, though — not until that afternoon when I was walking down the sidewalk to my truck in the student parking lot.

Drunk Dennis and his flat-faced friend, Donny, from the field party pulled up alongside me in a black low-rider Chevy.

“You happy now, bitch?” Drunk Dennis yelled out the passenger-side window. Donny was driving.

I kept my head down and kept walking, my cap pulled low, shielding them from my view — and my face from theirs. A few other kids were around, but nobody said anything. Not that I expected them to.

“I asked you a direct question, bitch!” Drunk Dennis yelled. “Are you happy now?”

I still didn’t look up, so he kept shouting at me. He said that everybody knew the true story: That I made all that shit up about Book Allen. That I’d been out to get him and his mom from the start. That I was a Yankee whore.

Some boy I’d never seen before said, “Leave her alone already.
God.
”

I wanted to thank him, but I didn’t want to stop walking to do it.

Drunk Dennis yelled at his friend. “Stop the car, Donny! Stop the car! I will kick this kid’s ass!”

The boy took off running. Drunk Dennis and Donny laughed. They didn’t stop their car, just kept cruising next to me, practically up on the curb.

I heard a high engine sound on the sidewalk behind me, like a lawn mower, and I stepped aside to let it pass, but it stopped. It was Littleberry and his Vespa.

Littleberry looked over at the football players. “Hey, guys.”

“Yo, Dingleberry,” Drunk Dennis said back. “You know her?”

“Yeah, kind of,” he said. “I kind of have to talk to her.”

Drunk Dennis hesitated. Then he shrugged. “Sure. Whatever. We were done with her, anyway.”

Littleberry said, “OK, well, catch you later.”

Drunk Dennis and Donny drove off, tires squealing loudly. I waited until they were out of sight before letting out the breath I’d been holding.

“You OK?” Littleberry asked.

I nodded.

He asked if I wanted a ride, and even though the Tundra was just a hundred yards farther, I threw my leg over the seat behind him and climbed on.

A minute later I slid off the back of the Vespa and leaned against the truck, not really sure I could stand up yet. I realized I’d been shaking and that I was worn out from working so hard not to show it.

“You sure you’re OK?” Littleberry asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “So you know those guys?”

“Unfortunately,” he said. “You sort of know everybody in Craven, I guess. We went to kindergarten together. Dennis’s family goes to our church.”

“You go to church?”

He grinned. “Yeah. I just sort of always went from when I was a little kid.”

“What were they going to do?” I asked.

“I don’t think they were going to hurt you or anything,” Littleberry said. “They’re just mad about their football game. People are pretty football crazy around here. I used to be, too. I was the third-string quarterback on the seventh-grade team.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Impressive.” Littleberry was full of surprises.

We hadn’t made plans for him to go out to the farm that afternoon, but after what had just happened, I was happy to have the company.

We bundled up when we got to Aunt Sue’s so we could take everybody out on a goat walk. None of the other goats would move until Patsy agreed to it, though, and she wasn’t interested. I had to bribe her with a handful of grain. Once she started walking, the others followed, bunching up with us and crowding so close to our legs that we had to keep nudging them back so we could move. Huey and Louie danced along on their own. Gnarly, too.

“Do they always bump you like this on your goat walks?” Littleberry asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “They just like to be close. Once Patsy decides to eat, they’ll all eat, though. She just needs to find something she likes.”

Patsy stopped a few minutes later — almost as if on cue — and pulled a long strip of pine bark off a skinny tree that had fallen onto the trail. It flapped out of her mouth like a giant piece of taffy while she chewed. Loretta, who did everything her mother did, went second, as usual, and the rest had some, too, except Tammy. She nibbled on leaves.

Littleberry and I shivered in our coats, cold once we stopped moving.

“They’re like people,” he said after a while.

“You mean the way people are always eating pine bark?”

Littleberry laughed. “Yeah. There’s that. But you know what I mean. Like Patsy there is the leader and everybody else is the follower, only there’s the one over there, Tammy — she’s like the rebel. She wants to do her own thing and not be like everybody else. The black sheep of the herd.”

“Black
goat,
” I corrected him. “So which one would you be? If you were a goat.”

He grinned. “A Tammy. Definitely a Tammy.”

“And what about me?” I asked.

Littleberry took a step away and crossed his arms. He looked at me, then nodded a serious nod. “You’d be a Patsy. I’m pretty sure.”

I liked hearing that but couldn’t imagine what he’d seen in me to make him say it.

Patsy got tired of the pine bark after a while, and so we went farther down the trail until we came to a giant honeysuckle bush, which everybody attacked, even Tammy.

I looked around to make sure there wasn’t any laurel or rhododendron, which were poisonous to goats, then sat on a log next to Littleberry.

“So this is what you do besides milk them and let them butt you?” he said. “Just hang out with them in the woods?”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked. “They’re a lot better than most of the people I know.”

“You mean like me?”

I smiled. “I’ll let you know. I’m still figuring you out.”

“Nothing much to figure out,” Littleberry said. “I’m a professional goat-cheese merchant.”

“And I’m your boss.”

The goats had practically flattened the honeysuckle in their feeding frenzy. When the girls jerked hard on one side, Huey and Louie pulled back as hard as they could on the other.

I elbowed Littleberry. “So there is one thing I wanted to ask you about.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. That essay you wrote. About the head wounds.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “What about it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just curious about why you wrote it.”

He shook his head, as if he was trying to get something out. “It was just something. Nothing. I had to come up with a topic. That’s all.”

“But wasn’t it about your dad?” I asked. “That’s what your friends told me.”

“It wasn’t exactly about my dad,” he said softly, looking down. “Just his head wound. And anyway, I don’t like talking about it.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you think? Because his brain is messed up from what happened. Because it won’t heal up. Because he thinks my sister is my mom, and my mom is my sister. Because my mom has to tie his shoes to get him dressed. Or sometimes I have to do it. Because he just sits there and watches TV all day. Or else he spends half the time down at the VA hospital watching TV there. But you probably already heard all about that from my so-called friends.”

He spat on the ground, but at least it wasn’t tobacco juice. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him chew tobacco.

“So why
did
you write about it?”

“I don’t know,” Littleberry said. “Why did you write about your dad and the pet crematorium?”

My feet were cold. I stood up and stamped the ground some more and wrapped my arms around myself. “Because I miss him.”

Littleberry stood up next to me and shrugged his backpack over his shoulder. “Well, I guess that’s it,” he said. “We both miss our dads.”

Neither of us knew what to say after that, so we stood there, quiet in the fading afternoon and the deepening cold, waiting for the goats to finish up with the honeysuckle.

We finally had to pull them away from what was left of the bush and coax them down the trail back toward Aunt Sue’s farm.

Halfway to the farm, I felt the back of Littleberry’s hand brush against mine. Then his fingers found my fingers, and the next thing I knew, we were holding hands for the second time.

I almost asked him what he thought he was doing, but since I wasn’t sure what I was doing — letting him, holding his hand, too — I kept quiet. I liked the feel of his hand. I liked his warm touch. I liked walking with him there in the woods.

The goats followed along dutifully, tired from the walk and full of honeysuckle, ready for milking and the warmth of the barn.

Gnarly ran ahead of us, and a minute later I heard him barking wildly. Something wasn’t right.

I saw it as soon as we got close enough to see the farm. There was a black low-rider Chevy parked next to my truck, and familiar voices coming from inside the barn.

It was Drunk Dennis and Donny. They had wooden kitchen matches and were taking turns flicking them off the side of the box, trying to start a fire.

“Well, hello,” Drunk Dennis said when he saw me and Littleberry and the goats, standing together in the barn door. “Check this out.”

He flicked a match and sent it sailing into one of the stalls. I ran past him and stomped out the fire. It was the stall where Jo Dee had delivered her stillborn kid.

“What the hell are you doing?” My heart was racing.

Drunk Dennis turned to Donny. “We must have been aiming at the wrong hay before. That other stuff wouldn’t catch.” Donny took the matches and flicked one right at me. I swatted it down and stomped it out, too.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Just quit it.”

Littleberry stepped toward Drunk Dennis. The goats inched forward with him. “Y’all knock it off,” he said. “This isn’t cool at all.”

Drunk Dennis took the matches back from Donny and flicked one at me, too. “Shut it, Dingleberry,” he said. “We got business with this one, not you.”

Donny grabbed a pitchfork and aimed it at Littleberry, poking lightly at his chest and backing him up against the milking stand. Donny pressed the pitchfork a little harder so the tips cut into Littleberry’s jacket.

Littleberry cursed. “Damn, Donny. Fucking stop it, man.”

I closed the stall door between them and me. “What do you want?”

Drunk Dennis stuck the wooden end of a match in his mouth and chewed on it. He seemed genuinely perplexed by the question. He turned to Donny.

“What
do
we want?” he said. “I forgot.”

Donny shrugged, still pressing the pitchfork into Littleberry’s jacket. “Burn it down, maybe?”

“I don’t know,” Drunk Dennis said. He plucked the match out of his mouth, struck it on the side of the box, and threw it at me. It burned out before it landed. “There’s probably a law against burning down a barn or something. And you know this little bitch would tell on us.”

Littleberry tried to reach for the pitchfork handle, but Donny jabbed him. Littleberry was leaning so far back, I was afraid he would fall over the milking stand.

“Leave him alone!” I yelled. “You’re going to hurt him. Leave him alone.”

They ignored me. “What do we want?” Drunk Dennis said again, rubbing his chin and looking up at the rafters. “What do we want?”

He looked back at me.

“I think we’ll just take a goat,” he said. “Maybe the one that came to school that day. We’ll have a cookout with the little dude. A barbecue. They got barbecues up North?” He tossed another lit match at me. I swatted it away, but it caught dry hay and I had to stomp it out, too.

Drunk Dennis hooked his thumb at Donny. “Me and him, we’re members of PETA. I bet you didn’t know that. You know what it stands for — PETA?”

“Yes.”

“No, you don’t,” Drunk Dennis said. “It stands for People Eating Tasty Animals.” He laughed at his own joke. Donny did, too.

“We’ll even pay you for it. We’re honest gentlemen. How much you want?” he asked me. “How about a dollar? One dollar for a goat. I know you love them goats. God knows what you do with them all the way out here, all by yourself. That’s why I’m offering so much money. One whole entire dollar. Come on out here and get it.”

I didn’t move or speak. I had to think of something, fast.

“What’s it gonna be?” Drunk Dennis said. “You selling us a goat, or are we just
taking
us a goat?”

Littleberry cursed at him and struggled to stand up again, but Donny pressed the pitchfork harder, shoving him farther into the milking stand. I was afraid Littleberry was going to get hurt.

“Fine,” I said finally, opening the stall door and stepping out. “You can have one.”