“Mmmhmm.”
“Even got a name for it,” she said. “Calls it the Silver Bullitt. ’Cause of the way it looks like a Coors Light can.”
“Shelby’s momma is real worried,” Babb said, walking back from the steps. “The little girl sent some pretty awful words to her momma.”
“What did she say?”
“I can’t repeat them.”
“Do I look like I sing in the choir?”
“Harsh words, ma’am.”
“Don’t mix up Hunter in that little girl’s crazy family business,” she said. “He doesn’t have nothing to do with it. Didn’t I tell you he’s got a future?”
“Your boy didn’t have permission.”
“Talk to her mother, then,” she said. “’Cause I can’t raise their daughter while trying to raise my own son.”
Babb was soaked through and through. The trailer door slammed. He walked back to the patrol car. Been easier working with them cows.
“You ever think about killing someone?” Shelby asked.
“Hell no,” I said. “What’s wrong with you?”
Shelby’s shoulder pressed against the passenger window of my truck. She was still in her cheap sunglasses, chewing gum, blowing big loud bubbles.
“You know,” she said, “that your life would be better if someone wasn’t on the planet?”
“You want to kill your momma for being a pain in the ass?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“What are you saying then?”
“I’m just talking, Hunter,” she said. “Can’t we just talk awhile?”
“I’m taking you home.”
“’Cause the law showed up at your mom’s house?”
“She told them I didn’t have a phone,” I said. “She lied for me. She lied for you. And Johnny Law interrupted her afternoon television. That’s all she cares to do until I get home for supper. She said the law said I didn’t have permission to give you a ride.”
“You drove me because I said I’d talk to Lyndsay Redwine.”
“I got you here, didn’t I? Shit.”
“Fine,” she said. “Drop me off then. Right over fuckin’ there.”
“There?” I said. “That’s nowhere. That’s just an old couch on the road.”
“I need to rest.”
“I’m driving you home.”
“Shit,” she said. “I don’t even know where the hell that is.”
Shelby grabbed the door handle and acted like she was about jump out. And I figured she was just about crazy enough to do it. I slowed onto the gravel shoulder.
My truck pipes growled as she opened the door wide. I revved the engine. She didn’t move. She just sat there watching the wipers slap the hell out of the rain. She stared straight ahead, thinking on something.
“What you got in that toolbox?”
“Flowers,” I said. “What do you think?”
“You got a wrench?”
“Yeah, I got a wrench.”
“Give it to me.”
I left the motor running, walked out into the rain, and grabbed a wrench from my Husky toolbox. I looked at her hard as I handed it over in case she had it in her mind to go and hit someone with it.
“What?” she said. “Can’t a girl just go and fix her dang house?” She blew a huge pink bubble and it exploded like a shot.
“I guess.”
“And Hunter?” she said. “Pick me up for school tomorrow. Little earlier than usual. I got somethin’ to do.”
“You want me to get arrested?”
“Will you do it?”
I nodded.
She got out and went over to the wet, ragged sofa as I turned the Chevy around and rolled down my window. Shelby was a trip in her sunglasses, taking a seat on that old sofa in the rain. She acted like she owned all of Paris and that the hamlet was her living room.
“You really introduce me to Lyndsay Redwine?” I said.
Shelby smiled back and crossed her legs. She had a phone in one hand and a big-ass wrench in the other. “Just pick me up,” she said. “Okay?”
Randy had come in late the night before, racing up from Calhoun County where’d he’d been out with his stupid buddies spotlighting deer. He was red-faced and sweating, wearing an old Carhartt jacket over his T-shirt, when he’d asked Shelby to step outside. He had something he wanted to show her.
She knew her damn bitch momma had called him. She’d told him what she’d said.
“Why you want to upset her like that?” Randy said. “Your momma was crying and blubbering so much, I could barely make out her words.”
Shelby just stood there in his headlights, arms crossed over her small chest, in their front yard. Randy opened up the tailgate to his truck and dragged out a dead deer.
“Sometimes a young girl believes things, imagines things that never been there,” he said. “Way it works when you’re a kid. But you spread them things onto your momma, and your momma calls me up, that’s when you need to consider your actions. Brother Davis was sayin’ last Sunday...” Using his winch, Randy hoisted the doe by the back legs over a tree branch.
“Brother Davis is a cross-eyed hypocrite.”
“You need to think on what you’re sayin’ and doin’, Shelby,” Randy replied, shuffling back to his truck and cracking open another Busch from his cooler, Adam’s apple working while he swallowed most of it.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his bloody hand, and set down the beer on the tailgate. His stomach swelled over the top of his pants. The back of his neck was reddish-brown and hadn’t been shaved in a while.
“Are we straight?”
She was quiet. She just stared back at his big, dumb ass, showing she wasn’t scared of jack shit. She knew and her momma now knew too. Whether her momma believed it or not wasn’t Shelby’s damn problem.
Randy pulled a buck knife from a leather sheath and walked to the doe swinging in the wind. There was lightning far off from their neighbors’ and a cold wind bringing in rain from down on the coast. Headlights shone on the dead animal.
Shelby wanted to say more but only got out, “Can I go inside?”
“Hold up,” Randy said. “Hold up. Listen. Haven’t I been good to you?”
“That’s what you call it?” she asked, lifting up the sleeve of her T-shirt, fat finger bruises on her arms. “Goddamn you, you fat bastard. It ain’t right what you did. I didn’t want it.”
Randy froze in the front yard, open-mouthed, doe swinging from the pecan, and slit that deer from anus to throat, the insides of the animal dropping down hard and bloody onto the dead grass.
He studied the entrails that had fallen, picked up a cigarette, closing one eye as if to get better focus, and just nodded at her. “We straight?”
Shelby ran into the house and slammed the door behind her.
“Shelby’s momma ain’t gonna file charges or nothing,” said Johnny Law, a.k.a. Deputy Babb.
We sat in the cruiser together that night as it rained like hell outside us. I didn’t say nothing.
“But she and her stepdaddy wanted me to talk to you,” Babb said. “They wanted you to understand the exact nature of what you done today. That girl is fourteen years old.”
“Yes sir.”
“And she’s real impressionable,” Babb said. “You being a senior with a big, nice truck like that. I ain’t too old that I don’t recall what a young girl would do for an older boy. But your cousin sure as hell understands the consequences of her actions.”
“This don’t have nothing to do with Rebecca.”
“You don’t want to be changing diapers while trying to play ball,” Babb said. “That little girl is messed up in the head. Shelby would do anything for some attention. That’s why I’m talking to you like a man. Let you know all the things that come with spending time with a girl like that.”