Treeborne Page 6

  Tammy pushed through the marching band, hand still hidden in that purse, till she could of almost touched Lee Malone’s back, then she pulled out the pistol and aimed at his head. There was such wild cheering, such crashing of cymbals and tooting of horns, that nobody heard the first deafening shot. Two more quickly followed. The sheriff wrestled the pistol away from Tammy as the marching band cascaded to a halt. Folks who could do so dropped flat on their faces. Others tried running, but there was nowhere to go in the crowded square. The statue Janie held to tightly rang a long clear note.

  After a brief delay the Hernando de Soto Peach Days Festival parade went on as planned. Accounts of what had happened varied. Somehow nobody made flesh was hit. The next day’s Times-Journal would run a picture of the dimple in De Soto’s bronzed back though, right next to the picture of June Renee Bishop’s crowning. A bullet was found lodged in the wall of Gene’s Pawn & Gun as well. Gene would not fill the hole with putty for weeks so folks could gawk, maybe buy something while they were there. Nothing could be said for sure, everyone there agreed. But not a soul claimed he’d seen Tammy Treeborne Ragsdale pull a pistol out of her purse, and fire it at Lee Malone’s head.

  Not a soul except Janie Treeborne herself.

  * * *

  After the parade Ren sent Janie on to The Peach Pit with her aunt and uncle while he went down at the jail with Lee Malone. The girl got loose from Tammy and Wooten soon as she could though. Wasn’t hard to do among the Peach Days crowd. She toted Crusoe across the road to Lee’s house, hoping to find evidence that proved he had nothing to do with her grandmomma’s death. Janie knew what folks thought. But she didn’t know what she was looking for, which led her to give up and listen to Lee’s recording instead. She mashed a button on the player then set down the needle, just like Lee’d taught her to do.

  I don’t go to church on Sunday if I’m hungover from Saturday night … The needle hit a scratch and jumped ahead in the song. Ain’t no substitute for you, no there ain’t no substitute for you.

  Even his voice would not soothe her. She wanted to scream. Buckshot could sense this too. The dog licked the back of Janie’s hand. First her aunt’d logged The Seven, started building that new house, and now she’d tried to shoot Lee Malone in front of the whole damn town. And nobody’d done a thing about it! Put Lee in jail. For what? The only way to prove what happened in those woods, Janie thought, was by being there.

  She turned to Crusoe. “Were you not?” she said. “Tell me, tell me did you not see!”

  The dirt boy wouldn’t answer.

  None of us were there, she thought. Died alone. Scared and, for some reason, trying to haul a big metal box out of the woods.

  When the recording ended Janie told Buckshot to come on. She could see a fire burning up near the water tower. Voices announcing themselves in the night. She was dying to tell Jon D. what she’d seen during the parade, but he was stocking the fruit stand. Meantime, she’d find somebody else to tell about what her aunt had done.

  Buckshot trotted in front with his tail held confident. Passing clouds played moonlight shadows across the tall grass. Janie recognized some of the voices around the fire. But not in time to stop the dog from wandering right up to Lyle Crews.

  “What you doing out here dog?” Lyle said.

  “Ain’t it that nigger Lee Malone’s?” Pud Ward asked.

  Lyle grabbed a stick out of the fire. He knocked off the ashy end, exposing a glowing tip, then took Buckshot by the tail. “Y’all ever seen a scalded dog before?”

  Pud and some of the other kids laughed. Lyle pulled Buckshot closer and moved in with the hot stick. Janie hollered and stepped into the firelight.

  “Look at baby with her doll,” Goodnight said.

  Janie shot the older girl a bird and told Lyle to let go.

  “Don’t get yourself in a damn tizzy,” he said but let go of the dog’s tail. Buckshot slunk up to Janie then trotted back down to the house. Lyle poked the stick back in the fire. “You want a beer?”

  “Yeah,” Janie said.

  The beer tasted like soap. She plugged the opening with her tongue whenever she sipped. She listened at the older kids talk, watched them get drunk. A few climbed partway up the water tower. Afraid to go all the way to the top. There were several cars parked along the ridge. Every so often a head or two feet appeared in silhouette through fogged rear windows.

  Pud Ward lurched up from the ground. “Who wants to go riding?”

  Most of the kids weren’t interested. But those who were piled into Pud’s red pickup truck, the fat boy hisself behind the wheel. Janie and Crusoe sat up front next to an acne-scarred kid she did not know, Lyle and Goodnight and a few others rode in back and chucked empties at road signs.

  Pud wanted to talk about the Peach Days shooting. He was slurring his words. “Reckon it was somebody after Miss Elberta Peach?”

  “No,” Janie said.

  The other kid in the cab wondered aloud what a kid like Janie would know anyhow.

  “I ain’t a kid,” she said.

  This kid and Pud both laughed.

  Lyle slapped the roof as they approached De Soto Bridge. Pud stopped and everybody jumped out. The county was repainting the guardrails. Lyle picked up an orange safety barrel and chucked it over the side. The barrel sounded like a cannon going off when it hit the Elberta River. Goodnight got Janie to help with the next one. Then she showed the girl how to take a paint can and explode it against the pavement. Truth, it was satisfying. Sky-blue paint splattered up onto Janie’s dress, her legs, her black rubber boots. Another vehicle came over the hill. They all jumped back into the truck and Pud peeled out.

  When Lyle next slapped the roof Pud pulled off into a ditch. They all piled out and headed across a yard toward what was left of Janie’s Uncle Luther’s cabin. A heater for his tropical flowers, the fire department had decided, must of tumped over in the night and caught fire to a rug. An accident. Had Luther not passed out at the veterans’ hall that night he would of burnt up along with everything else he owned.

  “Damn at all them plants,” Pud Ward said, stepping over busted pots that Janie and her daddy had already sifted through to see if any roots survived. Big-old plants with inappropriate blooms Luther’d brought home from the Pacific, or bought from the mail-order catalogs he kept piled on the floor next to the commode.

  Lyle kicked the ashes till he found a melted hunk of the surfboard Luther had brought back from the service—he’d threatened to surf the Elberta River itself. Never did. Lyle whacked a charred wall, and ash sprinkled onto Goodnight’s curly hair. She smeared some onto Lyle’s face. He grabbed her waist and smeared ash onto her throat and her chest. They played around like this for a few minutes then started kissing. Lyle pulled Goodnight into the woods, and most of the other kids started walking back toward town.

  Pud and Janie sat on the rock steps and waited for the couple to return. The fat boy cleared his throat till he’d done so enough times to come up with something to say. “Heard they took Lee Malone to jail over what happened to your grandmomma.”

  Janie didn’t respond.

  “Daddy says she wasn’t in her right mind no more.”

  “Your daddy don’t know shit,” Janie said.

  Lyle and Goodnight eventually emerged from the darkness like wounded soldiers. He sat on the steps and she fell onto his lap.

  “How many days now baby?” she asked.

  “Daddy’ll come after y’all,” Pud said. “I’m telling you.”

  “Fuck your daddy, fat boy,” Lyle said. “We’ll go so far off till he can’t.”

  “You ain’t got the money to,” Pud said.

  “I got some money,” Janie said.

  Lyle made a sound like he didn’t believe her.

  “That right?” Goodnight asked.

  Janie spilled her guts—and an idea with them.

  When she’d finished telling, Lyle still wasn’t sure. Said he had a man in Bankhead who’d buy all the rattlesnakes
he could catch. This was his plan for escaping Elberta. Selling snakes. But Goodnight, it appeared, now possessed other intentions.

  “We’ll do it,” she said.

  They discussed a plan on the way back to The Peach Pit. Time they got there, everybody had left for the Conquistadors practice, except for a lone figure stumbling through the fruit stand. Pud shined headlights on Luther Treeborne, who was feeling all over stacks of gold-and-pink-streaked peaches, despite a handpainted sign that plainly said PLEASE DON’T SQUEEZE US!

  “You want a ride?” Pud asked.

  “I can walk,” Janie told him, stepping out of the truck to take her uncle by the hand.

  Thicker than Blood

  1958

  Janie didn’t know how Lyle, Pud and Goodnight could stand wearing long-sleeved black shirts, camouflage britches and plastic Halloween masks in such heat. She herself wore but a cotton dress and black rubber boots that neared her kneecaps. Playclothes, her grandmomma used to call them. This was the tail end of July, and they were hidden in the woods watching the singlewide trailer where Janie’s aunt and uncle lived. The girl’d stopped by The Peach Pit on her way, but Jon D. wouldn’t speak. He’d already said he’d have no part in this. When Jon D. Crews said something, he meant it.

  “Now what about that money?” Lyle said.

  “I’ll give it to you after,” Janie told him.

  “Maybe they ain’t no money,” Pud Ward said.

  Janie set down Crusoe and pulled a wrinkled paperbag out from her boot. She unrolled the top and held it where Lyle could see. She’d fattened the stack with Times-Journal clippings so it’d look like enough. Lyle eyed the contents through the slits in his mask—a bone man. Pud’s a gorilla. They’d won the masks last week during Peach Days. Goodnight kept off to the side, smoking a cigarette, her mask—a red devil—pulled up on her high forehead. She’d uttered barely a word, which made Janie—a natural-born talker—even more nervous about what they were fixing to do.

  “Alright,” Lyle said. “Ain’t like we don’t know where you sleep at.”

  He told Pud to go on down at the truck and wait for the signal. The fat boy lumbered off a cutbank to an old logging road where one of his daddy’s pickup trucks was hidden. The pickup was a candy-colored red rarely seen in Elberta and had a brand-new radio in the dashboard. Dial never moved from 1570AM-The Peach, which it was told picked up on the Mexican border, though no Elbertan ever went so far to confirm this. Riding over, Pud had tried impressing Janie with the speakers. Like she gave a rip.

  “What’s that?” Lyle said, pointing at the trailer, which was white with green shutters and a matching skirt. A single vehicle was parked out front: old gray pickup belonging to the County of Elberta. They’d watched Janie’s uncle Wooten put plastic gas cans in back of the other truck and drive off maybe twenty minutes ago. That was the moment when what they were doing felt real to the girl—when her aunt was home all by herself.

  “I don’t see nothing,” she said, propping Crusoe between her knees. Dead leaves were stuck to the dirt boy’s caved-in face. She could feel wire poking out from his shoulder. He was in rough rough shape. If I can just be done with all this, she thought, then I’ll spend time working on him. I’ll get him back right.

  “Maybe it wasn’t,” Lyle said.

  He sat down by Goodnight, took the cigarette from her and started humming church music. Lyle Crews wasn’t religious, but he’d latched on to the music after nearly getting killed by a wild hog the year he turned fifteen. Two before this. The hog had been turned out or busted loose from its pen. The Times-Journal wrote up its victims: a prized bird dog, a trio of unsuspecting sows, a riding lawn mower, a volunteer watermelon patch. When some farmers put a reward on the hog’s head, Lyle went after the creature with nothing better than a dull kitchen knife. He was found lying in the paddy fields and holding his guts inside hisself with his fingers. The hog beside him—dead as a doornail. Doc Barfield sewed Lyle shut for no charge. The puckered scar starting just below his waist and running up past his ribs was still oozing when Lyle, drawn by the voices of the choir, first walked into Elberta Second Baptist Church. He joined the choir that day yet did not sing then or ever. Just stood up there rocking on his heels, happy to be awash in glorious sound. Nobody knew what Lyle’s singing voice sounded like—not even his Goodnight.

  There was no denying that Goodnight looked just like Big Connie Ward. Her momma was the youngest of the last family of Elberta Indians in the valley. They’d kept apart from town till time came when they could no longer get by without a vehicle. One day all eight Goodnights walked to Big Connie’s used-car lot and bought a poorly aligned station wagon, leaving the car dealer with their savings and a lovesick heart. He knew something would go wrong with the wagon. When the youngest Goodnight girl walked back to the lot and told him it had, Big Connie explained just how she could get some free transmission work—unaware that a daughter would result from this new deal.

  Janie stomped her feet to get the blood flowing. She watched Martin tote rocks from the driveway and hide them underneath the porch. He was a good dog, if dumb. Nothing like Buckshot, who Janie loved as her own. Martin sniffed a stack of lumber. A foundation had been poured for Wooten and Tammy’s new house. Soon they’d start hauling this lumber and other materials across town to The Seven. Hunkered there in the woods, Janie reminded herself why she was doing this. Somebody had to protect The Seven now that her grandmomma was gone. She’d tried other ways. Maybe this would open their eyes. Still the girl was scared shitless and troubled by doubt.

  “What if I changed my mind?”

  “Too late babygirl,” Lyle said.

  “You can have the money,” she told him. “And I swear not to talk.”

  “Too late.”

  As if to prove this Goodnight stood up and pulled down the red devil mask. She wasn’t much taller than Janie, but she had five years and the full bodyshape of a woman on the girl. Janie had spent enough time around Goodnight that summer to notice certain things. The monumental nose carved out of her face, the way she smelled like corn chips when she sweated, the hickeys like gobs of strawberry jam along her collarbone and up her neck where Lyle Crews placed his lips and sucked and sucked. This, Janie thought, was what being a woman meant. She felt a tinge of jealousy. Goodnight unzipped a bag and pulled out a rust-splotched machete. She brushed her thumb across the blade, checking it was sharp.

  “You said you wasn’t going to hurt her.”

  “We ain’t,” Lyle said. “Scare her’s all it’s for.”

  Goodnight swung the machete back and forth. “Quit being such a pussy.” She headed off, making her way through the woods toward the trailer’s backside.

  Lyle settled on his heels. Janie grabbed Crusoe and squatted beside the older boy. He hummed, drank from a bottle. The stuff inside smelled like kerosene, but Janie took a drink anyway when offered. Her innards caught fire.

  After some time passed Lyle got up and prowled the bag till he found a snack cake. He ripped the plastic then took a bite. “How come you tote that nigger dummy all over?”

  Janie gave him a look and put her arm around Crusoe. Sand spilled out the dirt boy’s side and made a rattling sound in the dry leaves.

  “You gonna have to quit that mess,” Lyle went on. “I tell Jon D. the same damn thing. Always toting that ballbat everywhere with him. Too old for toys and dolls, shit like that. Don’t you want you a boyfriend?”

  “If I did,” Janie said, “it wouldn’t be one lowdown as you.”

  Lyle laughed so hard a fart squeaked out. He finished the snack cake, licking white frosting off the cradle of his palm. “I don’t usually go for kin anyhow,” he said. “But remember babygirl, you’re the one come to me about this.”

  “Me and you’s barely even kin.” Janie’s granddaddy’s uncle Frank was cousin to Lyle and Jon D.’s momma Ouita, who’d died when the boys were young.

  “Don’t go denying blood,” Lyle said. “Might wind up all you got left.
”

  Shadows continued spreading throughout the woods as Janie hunted for Goodnight across the way. Lyle kept glancing over his shoulder till Janie worried he’d set her up. Was Sheriff Guthrie coming? No, surely not. She wondered how long they’d been out there, feared her uncle Wooten would return from wherever he’d gone. This evening had to be it. The Seven depended on them pulling this off tonight.

  Lyle finished what wet the bottle then chucked it into the brush. There came a quiet as dusk lent itself to early dark. In this lull Janie heard somebody walking thataway. She stood up, holding Crusoe on her hip. She figured it to be Pud, hoped it’d be Jon D. after all. It wound up, she saw, being neither of them.

  Ricky Birdsong wore the same long-sleeved black shirt and camouflage britches as Lyle and the rest. He held in his hand a mask made to favor an Egyptian mummy.

  “You’re late,” Lyle said, loud, like Ricky was hard of hearing.

  “I had to—”

  “It don’t matter.”

  “Hey Janie,” Ricky said.

  “Hey Ricky, what you—”

  “You ready?” Lyle said.

  Ricky nodded.

  “Didn’t I tell you there ain’t no need for that?” Lyle snatched the mask from Ricky and threw it on the ground. “And how come you to dress thisaway? Goddamn the ever-loving shit Ricky, I said just come as your own damn self.”

  Ricky Birdsong wiped his face and blinked. He glanced around the woods as if they might speak for him.