Sweetgirl (15 page)

Shelton went to the window and watched Percy and the baby run for the truck. He watched them climb in the cab, then saw the headlights hit the clearing and draw back down the trail.

He was glad he'd given Jenna to the girl. It had been the right thing, but Shelton wasn't so foolish as to think it was enough. It wasn't anywhere near enough. What Shelton had done wrong couldn't ever be made right and even the thought of trying exhausted him.

He went for the shotgun in the doorway, then propped the stock in the corner of the room. He leaned over the barrel and wriggled down so that the shot would enter the heart and not leave him as long to suffer.

He reached for the trigger and steadied his stance, balanced the weight on the balls of his feet, and imagined falling into the blast, accepting it without a hesitation or flinch, simply breathing
it into his heart so as not to obstruct its passage with doubt or some spasm of muscle, some instinctual, cellular defense against his release.

He breathed in, then out. He closed his eyes and when he fired the load it was not an instrument of justice or redemption, was not an act of self-hatred or of martyrdom, but was only the truth expelled through a smooth-bore barrel, all buckshot and perspicuity.

Shelton heard his blood splatter the walls like a burst of rain on a tin roof, then dropped off the barrel and fell forward. But he was not dead yet. There were still a few remaining thumps of his heart, a breath or two before his last and summative thought, his bitter and tragic final realization.

And it was only this: that so few had ever glimpsed the deepest and most beautiful intentions of his heart.

I don't know how many days I slept through after everything went down in the north hills. I slept and when I woke I would lay there on the couch, staring out at nothing.

I ate a couple pieces of bread, smoked the few cigarettes I found lying around the house, but mostly kept myself curled up on the couch—clutching Carletta's blanket to my chest as if I were a child.

I had the shades drawn and the days passed in a bit of dim light against the curtains before the night would go black and the cycle reset. And I swear I might have stayed there on the couch until I starved had I not come to and found Deputy Granger sitting in the recliner, hunched over his cell. I sat up startled.

“It's alive,” he said, and smiled.

Granger was a friend of my sister's from high school and he was all right for a cop. Whenever I saw him around town he'd say
hello and start talking about whatever pictures Starr had posted on Facebook. Which didn't mean I liked him barging in the house or sitting in the living room like he was some sort of governor.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“We need to talk,” he said, and cut his phone off.

“Talk about what?”

“For one,” he said. “Your sister thinks you're dead. She's on a plane from Portland with Bobby right now. They left the baby with Bobby's aunt and uncle 'cause he has an ear infection and can't fly. Poor little bugger. For two, what the hell was your pickup doing in the north hills?”

Granger was tall and awkward as ever. He had a beak nose and one of those big Adam's apples, looks like a tree knot. He wore a high and tight haircut, too, which only made everything that bulged stick out worse, and I'd bet dollars to donuts he was still a virgin.

“Well, I'm not dead,” I said.

“Clearly,” he said, and snapped a can of dip in his hand.

Granger is one of those that can't ever sit still. He's all bouncy knees, flinches, and tics, and he worked that tin of Kodiak something serious.
Pop-pop-pop.

“So what are you doing here?” I said.

“What happened was, Bobby's mother called out to Portland when they released Portis Dale's name on the news. On account of how he looked after you and Starr when you were little.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Starr tried to call you, but the phone's cut off and you didn't answer any of the five hundred e-mails she sent. Then they had
Bobby's mother drive over here, must have been a half-dozen times, but she couldn't see in and nobody came to the door and your truck wasn't here. She just stood there knocking. Then they called your work and Jeff Pickering hadn't seen you either. You still work out there at the barn?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, you might want to call Jeff and let him know you're still alive. He sounded a little worried when I called.”

“That's what happens when the police call,” I said. “People get worried.”

“Either way, Bobby called me and told me they were coming on the plane. He asked me to come out in case something had happened.”

Granger finally opened his can of dip. He pinched off a clump between his thumb and finger and when he stuffed it down in his jutted-out bottom lip I could smell it clear across the room. It about singed my nostrils.

“That shit is nasty,” I said.

“Then this morning,” he said. “We fished out a little Nissan pickup from the hills. Just towed it in and the strange thing is, it's registered to you. You want to tell me anything about that?”

And just like that, he'd gone cop on me. His voice was all,
I'm an officer of the law
, and it ground my nerves something serious.

“Where's my truck?” I said.

“Over there at Power's towing.”

“You think you can give me a ride?” I said. “To go and get it?”

“Well, the first thing is how did it get up there? That's the first thing we need to figure out.”

“I would guess somebody drove it.”

“And who would that be?”

“Who do you think?”

“Typically,” he said. “I'm the one that asks the questions in these situations.”

“Carletta took it,” I said. “I haven't seen that truck in days.”

Granger looked at me and massaged the dip with his tongue.

“That's why I haven't been at work,” I said. “Which is why I haven't been checking my e-mail.”

“You don't let your boss know when you can't make work?”

“Jeff doesn't operate like that. You go when you can and he pays by the piece. And anyway, what am I going to do? Send him a smoke signal? I don't have a phone, man. Like you said.”

“So Carletta just drove your truck up to Shelton Potter's and parked it in a snowbank? And you didn't know nothing about it? Not one thing?”

“Man, I haven't seen Carletta in two weeks. You think she leaves little notes around the house when she takes things?”

Granger looked at me for a minute. He made his eyes narrow and hard, like he was in the midst of some serious, detective-type considerations. Finally, he nodded.

“I tried to tell Bobby it was probably nothing,” he said. “But your sister had it in her mind something happened.”

“Well,” I said. “Something did happen. Portis is dead, isn't he?”

And just like that I had reached the limit of Deputy Granger's investigative powers. He spit in his empty Faygo bottle and
transitioned to telling me about the county's indigent burial service. He could try to pretend otherwise, but at the end of the day he was a good guy and he wanted to help me. He said once Starr signed some paperwork—I was a minor and of no help there—we'd be able to get Portis a proper funeral.

“They won't be able to put him in the ground just yet,” he said. “They'll have to wait until spring to bury him, but you can go ahead and have the service now.”

“What do they do with his body?” I said. “In the meantime.”

“They basically put him in a warehouse right there on the grounds. Let Mother Nature keep the body cold.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“It's just what happens,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess that would be good. Thank you.”

He shrugged and spit again.

“I'll call and leave Bobby a voice message then,” he said. “Tell him you're okay. They're due to land in Detroit, but they're canceling flights left and right on account of the storm. I don't think they'll make it up here until tomorrow.”

“What storm?” I said.

“I don't know,” he said. “The one they had on the Weather Channel this morning. They got their map all covered up in them blue snowflakes. They got reporters live at all the airports in the Midwest. Mass chaos. Good for ratings.”

“I'd appreciate it if you would,” I said. “I hate that they've been so worried.”

“You want to use my phone, call them yourself?”

“No,” I said. “Probably better if you do. Make it official.”

“Done and done,” he said. “Now, let's go get that piece of Jap crap you call a truck.”

Granger stood and tucked his hat beneath his arm. He walked across the room all stiff and straight, like cops do, then waited for me at the door.

He hadn't said word one about Mama, which meant her Bonneville hadn't been at Shelton Potter's and that they hadn't seen her when they searched out the north hills. Which meant she was still missing. She was as gone as she was the night I set out for the farmhouse and I had a sick feeling like maybe this time she wasn't coming home at all.

It hit me with Granger right there in the room. A blast of fear that tore a hole straight through my stomach—down in the nervy, low part where sometimes you know things without knowing how.

“Percy,” Granger said. “Are you sure you're okay?”

I stood up off the couch and put my hoodie on.

“Compared to what?” I said.

I was at the airport in Pellston the next morning, watching through the terminal window as Starr's little puddle jumper floated in from Detroit. There were five or six other people inside and we were all standing around the giant brown bear mount—Cutler's airport basically being a hunting lodge with airplanes and landing strips.

Everybody was going on about what they were calling “the shootings” and I pretended to ignore them as the plane landed and then rolled to a stop. Starr was the first on the stairs and when she saw me through the glass she came running.

I promised myself I wouldn't cry, but I was bawling as bad as my sister by the time we hugged. And Starr kept on crying. She about soaked my shoulders with tears before she finally let go and wiped at her eyes with her coat sleeves.

“We got to get you a phone that works,” she said. “Jesus Christ, Percy.”

“I know,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Be sorry while we smoke,” she said. “I'm about to die.”

Bobby was standing behind her and he hugged me and put me in a little headlock before we followed Starr outside.

There were a few cars scattered in the parking lot and the wind blew and tossed around some corn snow while Starr dug the smokes out of her bag. She hunched her shoulders when she stood and Bobby blocked the wind behind her. She lit up and offered me the cigarette and when I took it she tapped out another for herself.

“I'm sorry you had to fly out,” I said. “But I'm glad you're here.”

“It's okay,” she said. “We would have come for the funeral either way. The bad part is not having Tanner.”

“Is he okay?”

“He'll be fine,” Starr said. “He's on antibiotics now. We could have brought him in another day.”

“I want to see him,” I said.

“We'll Skype when we get to Wanda's. She's cooking up a feast for tonight, so you can stay for dinner too.”

Wanda was Bobby's mom and she always put out a good spread.

“I'd say bring Mama,” she went on. “But I don't really want to see her and I got this funny feeling you don't have any clue where she is.”

I looked at my sister but didn't know what to say.

“Shit, Percy,” she said. “I never thought she'd stay sober. I've known she fell off since the fall. Or at least I suspected.”

“I suspected you suspected,” I said.

“I figured as much,” she said.

“I should have told you.”

“I'm glad you didn't,” she said. “I couldn't have done a thing about it anyway, not with a new baby and being all the way out there in Portland. I wanted that time to be with Tanner and not all caught up in Carletta's bullshit. You didn't want to tell me and I didn't want to press you on it. We're even.”

We stood there for a moment in the quiet and I looked up at the cloud-chalky sky and let the silence settle. It was the kind of quiet Carletta put between people, and nobody more than Starr and me—a silence full up with everything that couldn't be fixed and didn't need saying again. It was familiar, though, and in that way of some comfort.

“So,” I finally said. “How long are you in town?”

The next afternoon we were at the Oakdale Cemetery, out on Clowney Road. Mama still hadn't surfaced and I had the same hollowed-out feeling inside, but I did my best to push it away and focus on Portis. After all, it was his goddamn funeral.

The mortician told us all about the “resting facility” where Portis would be until the thaw and then explained what a nice casket they'd secured for him. He went on and on about how they worked him up like they did all their clients—like we were supposed to throw roses at his feet because he'd done the job the county paid him for—because he'd taken the time to extend basic human decency to someone who couldn't afford it.

There was a preacher at the grave when we got outside and I stood huddled between Starr and Bobby while he said some words. It was cold and there was a low, gray sky. Beyond the clouds was a little reef of blue but I didn't try to see it as some hopeful symbol. Portis was dead. There was nothing that could change that fact and I didn't see the point in pretending otherwise. The snow fell in a mist and the preacher read from his Bible.

I didn't bother to listen to the verse. I didn't care what the preacher said, so long as he was willing to stand there and say something. Portis might have detested religion in life but there was going to be something to his death besides sticking him in a warehouse and walking away.

It was bad enough what they'd done to him on the television. I saw the news the night before, at Wanda's. Bobby's mom had the satellite on and she let it run in the living room while we ate. I tried to ignore it, but I was facing the screen and she played the volume too loud. I was grateful for the meal, but she might have realized that our grief was not being aided by the constant, blaring reminder Portis had been killed.

They kept flashing old mug shots of the deceased and made no distinctions between Portis and the others. The hardboiled journalists at 5&2 News—experienced in the reporting of minor grease fires and advancements in bass fishing technology—said the dead were all “drug users and dealers” and listed their criminal histories below their mugs like baseball statistics.

In a strange turn, which I will not pretend saddened me, the coward Krebs had launched his snowmobile into a pine tree and died just hours after he left Portis to bleed out in the snow. He
was probably trying to flee the country, like Portis predicted, or going to ditch the murder weapon he still had in his possession when they found him.

I can't say exactly how I felt when I learned of Shelton Potter's suicide, but I was not surprised. He had looked so far away and alone in that trailer and I think he had already decided how his life would end. I never had to go for the shotgun because Shelton was going to do it himself.

I watched the entirety of that sorry newscast and kept thinking they were going to cut in with a special report on a freshly discovered body. A Jane Doe they'd found slumped over the wheel of a Pontiac Bonneville—but that report never came. The body count remained at four and though anchorman Dick Crutchman never said so out loud, you could tell all along what he was thinking.
There are four dead thugs in the north hills and we are all probably better off for it.

The preacher didn't waste much time on Portis. The charity package got us about five minutes of his holy ramblings before he slammed his Bible shut and stomped off for the warmth of the funeral parlor. I stared at Portis's snowy patch of grass, there was no marking yet to identify it as his own, and Starr finally took me by the elbow and led me away.

We walked among the rows of graves, a bunch of cement headstones with some names etched in. Sorry plots that were not graced with the lamenting angels and Jesus statues that held court across the highway. In the end, you can't even die your way out of being poor.

I knew it was stupid but it irked me to think of some of those
rich bastards, buried in a tomb like King Tut and not half the man Portis Dale turned out to be.

“They got it all wrong in the news,” I said. “About that shootout being over drugs.”

“How's that?”

“Portis was done with that shit,” I said. “He was quit.”

“What were they shooting over then?”

“I don't know. But it wasn't crank.”

“It doesn't even matter,” Starr said. “Either way he's gone.”

I turned around to see Bobby trailing behind us. He was looking off at the highway and had his hands stuffed deep in his coat pockets.

“I think it matters,” I said, “when they put out a pack of lies about somebody that isn't even here to defend himself.”

“It wasn't like Portis was a model citizen.”

“Not being one thing doesn't make you another.”

“To some people it does,” said Starr.

“Exactly,” I said. “That's the problem.”

“You two were always a lot alike, you know. You and Portis.”

“I'm not sure you mean that as a compliment.”

“I'm not either,” said Starr.

Of course, I could have gone to Deputy Granger and put the story straight. I should have gone to Granger, but I didn't know quite what would happen if I did. Plus, it was so much easier not to. I figured Portis wouldn't have cared either way. Cutler had decided about him years ago, and what good did it do to try and change a bunch of narrow minds now that he'd already gone off to the other side? Portis would want me to keep my head down
and go on about my business, at least that's what I told myself once I'd decided it was what I was going to do anyway.

They put out some stories on the news about Jenna, but none of them had to do with how she got to the hospital. None of them mentioned a fever or bothered to touch on her current condition. All they talked about was some emergency hearing and the “safe haven” law. They said Jenna was in temporary foster care, but I'd been there twice myself as a kid and always wound up back with Carletta.

There was nothing on the news about Kayla Hawthorne, about how she was passed out on the floor of that farmhouse while Jenna got snowed on by an open window, and I was starting to worry that everything we went through in the north hills would be for nothing. That Jenna would be delivered right back to where she started.

We dined at the Elias Brothers that night in Portis's honor. I sat beside Starr in the booth and it was good to be beside my sister, to smell her twenty-dollar, cucumber-melon shampoo while Bobby sat across the table with his Detroit Tigers hat pulled low over his eyes.

“He was rough around the edges,” Starr said. “But he was all goo in the middle.”

“I wish I would have known him better,” Bobby said.

“He liked you,” I said. “He liked that you and Starr were together. He said he knew your uncle.”

Bobby nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “Uncle Karl.”

“You remember the aliens?” Starr said, and plunked a handful of fries in some ketchup.

I shook my head and smiled. It was my favorite Portis story of all.

“Of course I remember the aliens,” I said.

“This was back when we were all living together,” Starr said, and turned to Bobby.

“We were in those old apartments over on Petoskey Street,” I said.

“Right,” Starr said. “The rat factory.”

“They were mice,” I said.

“Either way,” Starr said. “The point is that they were really nice apartments and we were living there with Portis when he disappeared for two days, which wasn't really a big deal. The thing was, he'd missed work and they'd already called and told Carletta to let him know he was no longer needed. Mama was pissed.”

“He'd gone to the arcade,” I said.

“That's where he ran into, what was that guy's name?”

“Trout,” I said. “I don't know what his actual name was, but everybody called him Trout.”

“Right,” Starr said. “Fucking Trout. Which is important to the story because he had that misshapen jaw.”

By misshapen, Starr meant long as hell. Or, more to the point, troutlike. Plus he had the generally dazed expression of Cutler's prized river fish.

“In the history of the world,” I said. “No man has ever looked more like a trout, than Trout himself.”

“I think I might have heard of that guy,” Bobby said.

“Yeah,” said Starr. “He won a Nobel Prize. Anyway, Portis and Trout eventually tired of the arcade and wound up at Paradise Junction. A shocking turn of events. So two days disappear and then Portis shows back up.”

“We came in from the grocery store and he was passed out on the couch,” I said. “And Mama got right in his shit. ‘Where have you been? What have you been doing? Are you aware of the fact that you've been fired?'”

“Never mind the fact that Carletta hadn't worked in months,” said Starr.

“Right,” I said. “He probably should have pointed that out. But what Portis did was sit up and launch into this story about how him and Trout had been abducted by aliens.”

“Honest to fucking God,” Starr said. “Aliens!”

“This was when there was a bunch of shows on cable about alien abductions,” I said. “Him and Carletta had been watching them and getting all into it.”

“So his story,” Starr said. “Is all about Trout's jaw, and how the aliens had abducted him to study it. He literally said, ‘Trout's jaw has become a subject of intergalactic interest.'”

“That's a direct quote,” I said.

“The thing about Portis's stories,” Starr said, “is once he got going he started to believe them himself. I mean, he's waving his arms around and giving us all these details about the aliens' eyeballs being oblong and how they could implant thoughts into his head, and how thankfully he had not been anally probed.

“Even in his desperation Portis didn't want anyone to think
he might have been compromised,” Starr went on. “That's how deep his homophobia ran. He said, ‘I cannot speak for Trout, but I know for a fact that there was nothing ever shoved up my ass at any point.'”

“Wow,” said Bobby.

“Classic Portis,” said Starr. “Anyway, by the end we were all laughing so hard we forgot to be mad.”

I cracked up in the booth. It was good, clean laughter from right beneath the ribs. The kind that feels like a valve releasing. My sister looked at me and exhaled.

“Portis Dale,” she said, and shook her head.

“I forgot the part about the probe,” I said.

“Are you kidding? That was the best part.”

“Unreal,” I said.

“I hate these circumstances,” Starr said. “But it is so good to see you.”

“I know,” I said. “It is.”

“I don't laugh like this with anyone else.”