Ink and Bone(92)

The crying seemed to come from above her, from the right, from the left. Where was she? The ground beneath her was dirt, the air heavy, thick with a scent she couldn’t name. She never thought she’d wish she were in her barn room on the hard cot. But she did wish that now. Even that was better than this.

“Mommamommamomma.”

Bobo. The sound he made, it was horrible. Once she’d heard a dog howling, a mournful, desperate sound. She and her daddy had been walking up Eighty-Sixth Street. He’d taken her for frozen yogurt at the deli, and they were licking big creamy towers and laughing about something when they saw the small, tawny dog shut inside a beat-up yellow hatchback. It was hot, the kind of day in the city where heat rose up off the blacktop and shimmered, and everyone was cranky and flushed. The driver’s side window was open, but just a crack. When they approached the car, the little dog came to the window and tried to push his nose out. She’d felt so bad for him that she gave him some of her frozen yogurt, his pink tongue slurping out the window crack.

“Don’t do that honey,” said her daddy.

Her father had called the police on his cell phone, and they’d waited as the dog continued to bark and howl, then went quiet. A man finally came out of a brownstone and yelled at them to get away from his car.

“You shouldn’t leave your dog in the car like that,” her father said. “I called the police.”

“You should mind your own business,” said the man, who wore a tank top and had so many tattoos on his arms that she couldn’t see any skin. He had an earring in his lip, too. A thin mouth and a long, mean nose. He climbed into his ugly car and drove off, the dog perking up instantly. But that sound, it stayed with her, the sound of something trapped, calling for help.

“Bobo?” she said.

“She’s dead,” he wailed. “Momma’s dead.”

She couldn’t see him, which she didn’t like. She forced herself up from where she was lying and pushed against the wall. Slowly she started to see shapes, light draining from an opening to her right. Was that him? That lumpy object on the ground? She started to move away, toward the light. That must be the way out.

And she had to get back, back the way she came in, back toward the lights and the voices of the men in the clearing. She stood and started edging along the wall. Where was she? In a tunnel? Something in the air tickled her throat. But then the flashlight came on and there was Bobo, face streaked with blood, eyes bloodshot from crying. She shrieked, a loud echoing sound that seemed to go on forever. She backed away from him.

Then she heard another voice, Poppa’s distant growl off in the distance toward the light. And something else, a scraping, dragging sound as if something large were being moved.

“He’s going to put you with the others,” Bobo said.

“No, he isn’t,” she said. She gritted her teeth. “No. He. Isn’t.”

When Bobo moved toward her, she drew her fist back and punched him hard in the face. Her fist landed with a hard crack on something that didn’t feel like a face, sending a blaze of pain up her arm. A warm sluice of blood splashed back at her. She wiped it from her eyes and saw that her own hands were caked with blood. So much of it, dried and caked under her nails. Where had it come from? There was a picture in her mind then, of Momma beneath her, and her own arm coming down again and again, smashing, breaking.

“You killed her,” said Bobo, standing to her right now.

“No,” she said. There was a notch in her throat. “You did.”

“No,” said Bobo sadly. “It was you. You were inside me. I felt you. You made me do it.”

She didn’t know if it was true or not. Once when she’d been very angry, so angry—what had she been angry about? She couldn’t even remember now—but the feeling had been so big, it didn’t fit inside her body.

“Sweetie,” her mother had said calmly. “You need to calm down and then we can talk about this.”

She had wanted something—what had it been? Then, it had seemed like the most important thing in the world. She couldn’t calm down. The feeling grew and grew, tumbled around inside her getting bigger, and she started shaking.

“Sweetie, relax,” said her mother. “You’re turning red. This is ridiculous.”

When the lights flickered, then went dark, then came up again, it had scared the anger right out of her. Startled, she’d looked to her mother, whose eyes were wide, lips parted with surprise.

She knew she had done that; that her rage had leapt from her like an electric current and caused something to happen. Maybe it was like that with Bobo. Maybe she had made him do what he did. She didn’t know and didn’t care. She was glad Momma was dead, and she wished Bobo was dead, too.

Should she move toward the light, or back into the darkness? She opted for the dark, since she suspected that Poppa was up ahead. The light flickered and danced like a flame. She knew now that Bobo wouldn’t stop her, that he couldn’t.

“Momma’s gone now,” she said. “Penny’s gone. You can go, too.”

“I can’t,” he whispered fiercely. “I have to stay until—”

Poppa loped out of the darkness, a ghoul, a breathing skeleton, and knocked her down hard; she fell like a rag doll. No muscle, no bone. The manacle of Poppa’s hand clamped around her ankle. And then Poppa was dragging her, pulling her toward the light.