Ink and Bone(40)

Poppa kept driving, silent, his jaw working. He wore a faded blue baseball cap over his tangle of white and gray hair, which he pulled back into a ponytail when he was working. With his free hand, he twisted at the bottom of the full beard that was the shape and color of a gnarled old tree branch. Bobo knew just what he was thinking. Bobo was thinking about her, too. That little doll of a girl, that crooked smile that was pretty anyway. She wasn’t the first little girl Poppa had noticed.

They went back to work after that, worked until the sun started to get low in the sky. Doing what needed doing, then collecting cash at the end of each job.

Poppa liked to think of them as living “off the grid.” We don’t exist, he always said. They lived in a house that Poppa’s poppa had built with “his own two hands” on property that had been in his family since The Hollows was settled. They didn’t have a phone, or a computer, or a television. There was a generator and a fuel tank on the property, so there were no dealings with the electric company. In the winter, when the snows came, the roads became impassable except for Poppa’s snowmobile. He could get into town if he needed to; but mainly they didn’t need to. They worked hard all spring and summer, and in fall stocked the food cellar. And Poppa liked to hunt.

Up way back in the woods, there were other people like them. Folks who lived off the land. They lived in houses that didn’t have a street address; they hunted, fished, and gardened for their food. They schooled their children, not just with books, but by teaching them how to survive like the men and women who first settled The Hollows. They buried their own dead. The townies called them hill people. But Poppa said that the people in the hills, they were “true descendants of our founding fathers.” The Hollows belonged to them.

New Penny cried at first, but not like the others. The others whimpered quietly, went limp with fear, obeyed right away, got used up and discarded. But New Penny, she screamed, she raged and fought. There was a something deep inside her that couldn’t be touched. Even when she had decided to be good, there was a wild sparkle in her eyes. Bobo liked her better than the others, even though she made more trouble. A lot more trouble.

But Momma and Poppa were getting tired of her now. She had been there longer than anyone. There had been another, too. But she was gone.

Poppa was angry about the man with the Bimmer, as Poppa called it. Poppa was skinny, so skinny that you could see the shelf of his collarbone and the dip behind it. His knees were rocks in a sock, elbows hard as hammers. But he was strong. He didn’t need any help lifting the stranger into the trunk of his car. There was a neat black suitcase in there, which Poppa took. He searched the stranger’s body, lifted his wallet from his pocket.

“There’s nearly five hundred dollars in here,” Poppa said, pocketing the cash. Bobo wondered if that would make him less angry at New Penny. But it didn’t seem to. In fact, it just seemed to make him more agitated.

“Real estate man,” he said. Though how Poppa knew that, Bobo couldn’t be sure. Maybe because all the new rich people up here were either buying, selling, or tearing down what was already here and building something new. “Developer.”

Up here that was the dirtiest word. Developers came up all the time, finding their way where locals from town wouldn’t even dare to go. These strangers offered big money for land, never understanding that the folks who lived here were part of the land. They could no more sell it than they could sell the skin off their bodies.

Poppa took the developer’s watch, too, a big glittery thing. And his belt and shoes. Those shoes that city people wore to the country, leather with big treads and fancy laces. Nice looking but not waterproof, not really.

Then they drove out to The Chapel (as the local kids called it) a run-down old barn out in the middle of The Hollows Wood. There were several long, wide trails behind the house on their property (one of several) that led straight to it. And Poppa did a good job of keeping the paths wide and passable for the truck and the snowmobile. So even a fancy car like the Bimmer could make it at least to the clearing. And since the ground was still dry because there hadn’t been as much rain this year, Poppa was able to drive it right inside the old barn.

It didn’t seem like the best hiding spot, because local kids came up here all the time. Bobo snuck out on full-moon nights and watched them smoking and kissing and more inside. Even though the place was so tilted and sagging that it looked like it could come down at any second, they came up here with six-packs of beer and cartons of cigarettes, sleeping bags. They made fires in the field, played music sometimes, and danced. There was a place in the back where Bobo could sit and watch them through a triangle opening in the wood. Whispered words, exposed skin, sometimes laughter, sometimes raised voices and tears. Bobo wanted to be one of them.

But there was no one up there now. Big fingers of sunlight streamed in through the gaping holes in the roof. That’s why Bobo thought of it as The Chapel, because it looked like church somehow. Like God was reaching down to touch it.

Poppa drove the car back as far as they could go into the shadows. Then he got out and started pacing, which he did when he was thinking about what to do. Finally, he started taking things from all around—broken-up crates, pieces of wood that lay around. There was an old tarp by the door, a balled-up blanket in the corner.

They worked for a while to hide the car behind a pile of debris. From the door, where the car was parked toward the back, you couldn’t see it. And the kids didn’t do much exploring. When they came up here, they weren’t interested in the barn or the woods around it. They were mostly just interested in each other’s bodies, seemed like. The car might not be discovered for a good long while. And once the snow started falling, no one would come up here again until spring. It was supposed to be a long, cold winter, according to Poppa. And the way the air felt, it wouldn’t be long before it fell over The Hollows.