Winter's Bone (3 page)

Three dogs that were a mess of hunting breeds lived under the big screened deck. Ree had known them since they were pups and called out as she reached the yard and they came to sniff her nethers and wag welcome. They barked, jumped, and slapped tongues at her until Victoria opened the main door.

She said, “Somebody dead?”

“Not that I heard.”

“You walked over in this nasty crud just for a visit, dear? You must be purty awful lonely.”

“I’m lookin’ for Dad. I got to run him down, and quick.”

That certain women who did not seem desperate or crazy could be so deeply attracted to Uncle Teardrop confused and frightened Ree. He was a nightmare to look at but he’d torn through a fistful of appealing wives. Victoria had once been number three and was now number five. She was a tall blunt-boned woman made lush in her sections with long auburn hair she usually wore rolled up into a heavy wobbly bun. She had a closet that held no jeans or slacks but was stuffed with dresses old and new and most of Ree’s things had first been worn by her. In winter Victoria was given to reading gardening books and seed catalogues and at spring planting she disdained the commonplace Big Boy or Early Girl tomatoes in favor of exotic international strains she got by mail and doted on and always tasted like a mouthful of far pretty lands.

“Well, then, come on in, kiddo. Shake off the chill. Jessup ain’t here, but coffee’s hot.” Victoria held the door for Ree. Victoria smelled wonderful up close, like she always did, some scent she had that when smelled went into the blood like dope and left you near woozy. She looked good and smelled good and Ree favored her over any other Dolly woman but Mom. “Teardrop mightn’t be up yet, so let’s keep it down ’til he is.”

They sat at the eating table. A skylight had been cut into the ceiling and leaked rainwater from the low corners sometimes but helped a lot to brighten the room. Ree could see through the house to the front door and over to the rear door and noted that a long gun stood ready beside both. A silver pistol and clip rested in a nut bowl on the lazy Susan centered upon the table. Beside the pistol there was a big bag of pot and a pretty big bag of crank.

Victoria said, “Ree, I forget—you take it black, or with cream?”

“With cream when there is any.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

They hunched over the table and sipped. A cuckoo clock chirped nine times. Record albums lined along the floor went nearly the complete length of a wall. There was a fancy-looking sound system on a bookshelf, plus a four-foot rack of CDs. The furniture was mostly wooden, country-type stuff. One piece was a big round cushioned chair on a sapling frame that you sat in the exact middle of like you were squatted inside a bloomed flower. Swirly-patterned lavender cloth from Arabia was tacked to a wall as decoration.

“The law came by. That Baskin one. He said if Dad don’t show for his court day next week we got to move out of the house. Dad signed it over to go his bond. They’ll take the place from us. And the timber acres, too. Victoria, I
really, really
got to run Dad to ground and get him to show.”

Uncle Teardrop stood stretching in the bedroom doorway and said, “You ought not do that.” He wore a white T-shirt and plum sweatpants stuffed into untied boots. He was a nudge over six feet tall but had fidgeted his weight way down and become all muscle wires and bone knobs with a sunken belly. “Don’t go runnin’ after Jessup.” Teardrop sat at the table. “Coffee.” He rapped his fingers to the tabletop and made a hoofbeat rhythm. “What’s this shit all about, anyhow?”

“I got to find Dad’n make sure he shows in court.”

“That’s a man’s personal choice, little girl. That’s not somethin’ you oughta be buttin’ your smarty nose into. Show or don’t show, that choice is up to the one that’s goin’ to jail to make. Not you.”

Uncle Teardrop was Jessup’s elder and had been a crank chef longer but he’d had a lab go wrong and it had eaten the left ear off his head and burned a savage melted scar down his neck to the middle of his back. There wasn’t enough ear nub remaining to hang sunglasses on. The hair around the ear was gone, too, and the scar on his neck showed above his collar. Three blue teardrops done in jailhouse ink fell in a row from the corner of the eye on his scarred side. Folks said the teardrops meant he’d three times done grisly prison deeds that needed doing but didn’t need to be gabbed about. They said the teardrops told you everything you had to know about the man and the lost ear just repeated it. He generally tried to sit with his melted side to the wall.

Ree said, “Come on, you know where he’s at, don’t you?”

“And where a man’s at ain’t necessarily for you to know, neither.”

“But, do you—”

“Ain’t seen him.”

Teardrop stared at Ree with a flat expression of finality and Victoria jumped in between them, asking, “How’s your mom?”

Ree tried to hold Teardrop’s gaze but blinked uncontrollably. It was like staring at something fanged and coiled from too close without a stick in hand.

“Not better.”

“And the boys?”

Ree broke and looked down, scared and slumping.

“A little pindlin’ but not pukey sick,” she said. She looked to her lap and her clenched hands and drove her fingernails into her palms, gouging fiercely, raising pink crescents on her milk skin, then turned toward Uncle Teardrop and leaned desperately his way. “Could he be runnin’ with Little Arthur and them again? You think? That bunch from Hawkfall? Should I look for him around there?”

Teardrop raised his hand and drew it back to smack her and let fly but diverted the smacking hand inches from Ree’s face to the nut bowl. His fingers dove rattling into the nuts, beneath the silver pistol, and lifted it from the lazy Susan. He bounced the weapon on his flat palm as though judging the weight with his hand for a scale, sighed, then ran a finger gently along the barrel to brush away grains of salt.

“Don’t you, nor nobody else, neither,
ever
go down around Hawkfall askin’ them people shit about stuff they ain’t
offerin’
to talk about. That’s a real good way to end up et by hogs, or wishin’ you was. You ain’t no silly-assed town girl. You know better’n that foolishness.”

“But we’re all related, ain’t we?”

“Our relations get watered kinda thin between this valley here and Hawkfall. It’s better’n bein’ a foreigner or town people, but it ain’t nowhere near the same as bein’
from
Hawkfall.”

Victoria said, “You know all those people down there, Teardrop. You could ask.”

“Shut up.”

“I just mean, none of them’s goin’ to be in a great big hurry to tangle with you, neither. If Jessup’s over there, Ree needs to see him.
Bad
.”

“I said shut up once already, with my mouth.”

Ree felt bogged and forlorn, doomed to a spreading swamp of hateful obligations. There would be no ready fix or answer or help. She felt like crying but wouldn’t. She could be beat with a garden rake and never cry and had proved that twice before Mamaw saw an unsmiling angel pointing from the treetops at dusk and quit the bottle. She would never cry where her tears might be seen and counted against her. “Jesus-fuckin’-Christ, Dad’s your
only
little brother!”

“You think I forgot that?” He grabbed the clip and slammed it into the pistol, then ejected it and tossed pistol and clip back into the nut bowl. He made a fist with his right hand and rubbed it with his left. “Jessup’n me run together for nigh on forty years—but I
don’t know
where he’s at, and I ain’t goin’ to go around askin’ after him, neither.”

Ree knew better than to say another word, but was going to anyhow, when Victoria grabbed her hand and held it, squeezed, then said, “Now,
when is it
you was tellin’ me you’ll be old enough to join the army?”

“Next birthday.”

“Then you’ll be off from here?”

“I hope.”

“Good for you. Good deal. But, what’ll the boys and —”

Teardrop lurched from his chair and snatched Ree by the hair and pulled her head hard his way and yanked back so her throat was bared and her face pointed up. He ran his eyes into her like a serpent down a hole, made her feel his slither in her heart and guts, made her tremble. He jerked her head one way and another, then pressed a hand around her windpipe and held her still. He leaned his face to hers from above and nuzzled his melt against her cheek, nuzzled up and down, then slid his lips to her forehead, kissed her once and let go. He picked up the crank bag from the lazy Susan. He held it toward the skylight and shook the bag while looking closely at the shifting powder. He carried the bag toward the bedroom and Victoria motioned Ree to sit still, then slowly followed him. She pulled the door shut and whispered something. A talk with two voices started low and calm but soon one voice raised alone and spoke several tart muffled sentences. Ree could not follow any words through the wall. There was a lull of silence more uncomfortable than the tart sentences had been. Victoria came back, head lowered, blowing her nose into a pale blue tissue.

“Teardrop says you best keep your ass real close to the willows, dear.” She dropped fifty dollars in tens on the tabletop and fanned the bills. “He hopes this helps. Want me to roll a doobie for your walk?”

S
HE TOOK
to pausing more often to study on things that weren’t usually of interest. She sniffed the air like it might somehow have changed flavors and looked closely at the stone fencerow, touched the stones and hefted a few, held them to her face, saw a rabbit that didn’t try to run until she laughed at it, smelled Victoria on her sleeves and hunkered atop a stump to think. She spread her skirt taut across her knees and tucked the extra under her legs. Those stones had probably been piled by direct ancestors and for a long while she tried to conjure their pioneer lives and think if she saw parts of their lives showing in her own. With her eyes closed she could call them near, see those olden Dolly kin who had so many bones that broke, broke and mended, broke and mended wrong, so they limped through life on the bad-mend bones for year upon year until falling dead in a single evening from something that sounded wet in the lungs. The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can’t, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup. Yup.

The sky lay dark and low so a hawk circling overhead floated in and out of clouds. The wind heaved and knocked the hood from her head. That hawk was riding the heaving wind looking to kill something. Looking to snatch something, rip it bloody, chew the tasty parts, let the bones drop.

Dad could be anywhere.

Dad might think he had reasons to be most anywhere or do most anything, even if the reasons seemed ridiculous in the morning.

One night when Ree was still a bantling Dad had gotten crossways with Buster Leroy Dolly and been shot in the chest clear out by Twin Forks River. He was electric on crank, thrilled to have been shot, and instead of driving to a doctor he drove thirty miles to West Table and the Tiny Spot Tavern to show his assembled buddies the glamorous bullet hole and the blood bubbling. He collapsed grinning and the drunks carried him to the town hospital and nobody thought he’d live to see noon until he did.

Dad was tough enough but not much on planning. At eighteen he’d left the Ozarks planning to work for big dough on the oil rigs of Louisiana but ended up boxing Mexicans for peanuts in Texas. He slugged them, they slugged him, everybody bled, nobody got rich. Three years later he came back to the valley with nothing to show for his adventure but new scars ragged around both eyes and a few stories men chuckled at for a while.

Dad could be anywhere with anybody.

Mom’s mind didn’t break loose and scatter to the high weeds until Ree was twelve and around then is when she learned about Dad’s girlfriend. Her name was Dunahew and she taught kindergarten down across the Arkansas line at Reid’s Gap. Her front name was April and she wasn’t so hot to look at but she had sweet fat ways and a steady paycheck. Ree had once been taken to Reid’s Gap and left there for most of a week to nurse April through a sickness in her stomach. That was two years ago and she’d not heard Dad say April’s name since or smelled her on his clothes. April owned a pretty yellow house just west of the main road down there, and Dad could be anywhere.

H
ALFWAY BETWEEN
Uncle Teardrop’s and home Ree turned west on the creek road and climbed a snowy ridge, crossed a white meadow. The Langans had a single-wide trailer that was tan and sat on a concrete pad behind their junk barn. The barn was made of wood that had been drenched by generations of weather and rendered gray and rickety. It tilted one way near the front and another near the back. Junk items unlikely to be needed ever again were tossed into the barn and forgotten. The single-wide had a raised deck and men could piss from a corner to the side of the barn and a short frayed shadow of discoloration had been splattered there.

Gail Lockrum, Ree’s best friend, had been required by pregnancy to marry Floyd Langan and now lived in the tan single-wide next to his parents. Gail and Ree had been tight since the second-grade field trip when they’d bumped heads chasing the same frog under a picnic table at Mammoth Spring and stood to rub their ouches, then took a shine to each other and since spent the idle hours of each passing year happily swapping clothes and dreams and their opinions of everybody else. Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she’d overnight become glued to her spot.