Ink and Bone(35)

“Where you headed?” asked Poppa. He could be so nice to people, even to Penny. He gave her Baby, the rag doll with the missing button eye that she slept with every night. Sometimes he rested his big hand on top of her head, like her daddy used to. They fed her, gave her clothes. They weren’t always bad.

“I’m looking for a town called The Hollows,” the clean man said.

“Yeah,” said Poppa with a squint and an understanding bob of his head. He stayed rooted on the porch. “You took a wrong turn back at the river. You need to shoot left instead of right, then it’s about twenty miles north.”

“The creek?” said the man squinting. “At the bottom of the hill?”

She moved quickly. There was a door in her room that led to the barn, one that couldn’t be seen from the outside. It was where they hid her when she first came here and the people were searching. She could hear them, but she stayed quiet, Poppa’s threats that he’d kill her, kill them, kill her family keeping her bound and gagged. Now, she pushed out that door. Bobo had showed her how. She walked softly, stood at the tall doors that led outside. Hurry. Now.

“You don’t have one of those computers?” Poppa said. His voice had taken on a darker tone. “With the directions?”

The clean man had a beautiful black car, a BMW, which she knew because her mommy always sighed when she saw one. My dream car, she’d say.

The man laughed a little, held up the device in his hand. “My phone died. We’re lost without technology these days, aren’t we? Literally.”

Poppa didn’t say anything. He didn’t like computers. It was the first thing he did; smash her iPod Touch.

“Well,” said the man, turning back toward the car. “Thanks—and sorry again to trouble you.”

Penny pushed the door and it emitted that long creak, just as she knew it would. She moved into the light even though she didn’t want to. The man saw her, his polite smile fading a little, brow wrinkling.

“Hey there,” he said. “Hey, little one.”

She didn’t say anything, just stared at him. She didn’t have a voice anymore, could hardly get any words out, as if they’d all dried up, blown away like leaves. He took a step toward her, the sun dappling golden through the trees. If only she could say: Help me! Take me home! She took a step closer, the words were right there.

But then a cartoon spray of red blew out of the clean man’s right ear. And his face went from worried to peaceful and blank as if he’d fallen asleep while standing before her. Then he slowly dropped to his knees. He wobbled there a moment, rocking, and fell to his side in a soft heap of himself. Penny’s throat closed up as she turned toward the porch and saw Poppa standing there with his hunting rifle, still aimed. Penny couldn’t breathe, a strange rasping sound in her throat.

“Look what you did,” said Poppa. He lowered the gun and glared at her accusingly, as if she held the gun in her hand. “Look.”

Penny found sound—a deep wail, a thunderous scream from the ground beneath her that traveled up her legs and into her gullet. It exploded from her, scaring the birds from the trees, making the animals in the barn restless and afraid. She screamed and screamed and couldn’t stop, even when Poppa took the belt to her right there on the ground in front of the barn. The lashes were sharp and hot against her back and her thighs, a nasty, searing pain that only made her scream louder until everything went a blessed black.

Later when she came to, in the same place on the ground, Bobo was standing over her. The clean man and the beautiful car were gone, except for a long red stain on the ground where the clean man had fallen that was as big as Penny and still wet. She felt nothing, just an icy numbness.

“Come on,” Bobo said. “Get up.”

He had a chipped tooth and a slow way of talking. She struggled to stand and stumbled after him. Inside, he stripped off her shirt and ran it under the water from the faucet. He used it to dab away at her back, which burned like fire. But she didn’t scream or cry out from the pain. She used up most all the sound she had left. All that remained was a weak whimper.

Then he took off his sweatshirt and put it on her. It was way too big. He helped her into her cot and covered her with the blanket.

“Try to be good now,” he said. “They’re getting tired of you.”

They sky was growing dark outside and the air cool. Then he stood over her, watching; she tried to ignore him. She was always tense around Bobo; she never knew when he was going to be nice or be mean. Sometimes he was both. But tonight he just let her be, stood there a while like he was trying to think of something else to say.

“That’s going to be trouble—what happened today.”

Then he walked off. She didn’t sleep, just lay there thinking, listening as the whispering in the trees grew louder. They were trying to tell her something, but she didn’t know what. Finally, she got up from her bed and walked toward the window. She stood listening, the black space between the trees like a doorway she might walk through.





TEN


Merri and Wolf were not B and B people. Well, Wolf wasn’t. Mr. Adventure. He’d rather sleep in a tent in the woods, go to the bathroom in a chemical toilet, than socialize at breakfast with other travelers over fluffy flapjacks and fresh coffee. Merri always thought there was something nice about the whole enterprise, though. The quaint rooms in beautiful homes, a couple cooking in the kitchen, serving guests, telling stories, giving advice. There was a connectedness, a sincere friendliness to it that Merri found comforting. Kindness, courtesy, true warmth—it was disappearing all around, wasn’t it? Especially in the city. In elevators, on the trains, on the street, people didn’t even lift their eyes from the screens in front of them anymore. The world had become such a crowded, frenetic, and terribly lonely place.