Winter Loon(38)

“Mind telling me what that was about?”

“What?” I shook him loose and readied my fists. I wanted to punch him in the nose, the jaw. I wanted to pulverize someone. I wanted blood. “Nothing’s going on. I saw her at the river, is all, and Kathryn’s friends obviously made a big deal out of nothing.”

“Ballot, man. You listen to me. That’s not a girl you can trifle with. That thing with her mom fucked her up. Finally she’s getting right. Last thing she needs is some guy messing with her head. Troy already had a talking-to with that one,” Bull said, pointing his thumb at Lester, who was loping in from the field. “Panting over her like a fucking dog.”

I let what he was saying settle in next to other things I thought I knew about men and girls and how a person gets broken. “I’d never hurt her. I couldn’t.”

“Yeah? Well, she said she took in a bunch of water at the river yesterday. You know something about that?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, remembering her brown legs in the green water, her hair floating against my body, the frightening lifelessness of her in my arms, her rescued mouth on mine. Staying away wasn’t going to work, and I told Bull as much when he and Lester dropped me back in town by the railroad tracks. Lester was still sulking that he’d missed the whole scene.

“You tell her I’ll be by tomorrow. Tell her I asked after her and I hope she’s feeling alright.”

Bull shielded his eyes against the sun and squinted at me. “No way this ends well, Ballot.”

“Tell her, Bull. Tell her I’ll be by tomorrow.”

“I swear. You do anything—”

I slapped the open window as Bull wrestled the stick into gear. The sun warm at my back, I followed my shadow down the tracks, back to the house.





CHAPTER 13

IT WAS WELL and fine, I figured, for Bull to have a white friend, for Lester to hang around with me. It was another thing, me coming over for Jolene. So I was relieved when Mona opened the door to me. She smiled warm enough, though maybe with some curiosity, even distrust. Over her shoulder, I could see Jolene laid out on the long couch in the living room. The smile I got from her was delicate and careful and attached to her eyes and the memory of our bodies behind the old barn. Jolene rolled to the side, letting loose a cough that sounded like the bay of a hound. Mona winced and told me she and Troy worried Jolene might come down with pneumonia. “You can stay,” she said, “but not for long.”

I sat next to her on the ring-stained coffee table.

“Not a word about the river,” she warned, after making sure Mona was out of earshot. “They don’t know it was you.” The story she told was that her foot got caught in a snag underwater and she’d gulped up half the river before jerking it clear, and that I was the one who got her safely to shore. “You’re my hero,” she said, sassing me more than teasing. I wanted to believe that story, how I’d heard her call for help, rescued her from drowning, diving deep down to free her foot, pulling her out with will and brute strength, breathing life back into her lifeless body.

I stayed longer than I should have, moved from the table to the couch when Jolene moved to sitting. Bull and Troy and Mariah got home, and all of them looked at me like I was some orphan dumped on their doorstep. As uncomfortable as I felt, I still didn’t want to be anywhere else. I sat with Jolene and watched the Hightower household operate—shouts from room to room, the chasing and screaming and yelling that comes from having a little kid around, slamming doors, footsteps overhead. Lester walked in without knocking, saw me on the couch next to Jolene. His face twisted, and he rolled his head back. “Oh, you’re kidding me, right? Troy,” he shouted into the dining room. “You cannot be seriously letting this happen.”

“Shut up, Lester,” Troy said, exhaustion in his voice.

“Yeah, shut up, Lester,” I mouthed so he could hear but Troy could not.

Lester glanced once at the dining room, then came at me, pulling me off the couch, taking my spot next to Jolene in one swift move. He put his arm over her shoulder, told her if she was ready for a boyfriend she could do better than me. I tried not to agree, seeing him next to her. Jolene hacked a soupy cough into Lester’s face. He grimaced but pulled her closer still. She wiggled free and held her glass out to me.

“Would you mind getting me water? I need a minute alone with Lester.”

“Yeah, Ballot, Jolene needs some water. You go on and fetch that.”

I feared Lester was slick enough to talk her out of me and into him in the time it would take to fill a glass. “I’ll be right back,” I said, as much to Lester as to Jolene.

Mona batched chicken in a vat of oil while Mariah gnawed on a chicken liver and colored at the little kitchen table. “Fried chicken smells really good,” I said. I made an awkward motion toward the sink, tried to come up with some small talk while I got water from the faucet. “We don’t eat chicken at our house. Ruby doesn’t want anything to do with them. Gets enough at work, I guess.”

“You’re welcome to join us,” she said.

“Oh, that’s alright. Ruby’s probably expecting me for dinner,” I said, though I knew it didn’t matter to my grandparents where I ate. “I better get this to Jolene.”

I passed Lester as he stormed into the dining room, clearly mad. He delivered a knuckled jab to my arm. He did it with a smile, like it was all in fun, but he put as much behind it as he could, message delivered. I dropped the plastic cup and, as water soaked the carpet, I prepared to take one on the jaw next. Troy set his book down on the table and stood next to the two of us. We were both taller than him, but he was somehow bigger than the both of us, maybe combined. Lester smiled and smoothed the spot where he’d hit me. “We’re good, right, Ballot?”