But Daddy just shrugged and bit the end off a cigar.
Henry glances over her head to Beatrice. ‘How you feeling?’
‘I’m still bleeding. I feel dizzy. I don’t even know how I cut myself. Did you see, Sarah?’
Maggie shakes her head and looks down at the pool of blood on the floorboard. Then she looks to Beatrice’s pale and sweaty face. She almost escaped. Beatrice collapsed as Maggie’d imagined she would, dropped like a felled tree, screamed and went down, but Maggie forgot her plan to wait for Henry and tried to run by the woman to get upstairs, and Beatrice reached out and grabbed for her. She grabbed her ankle and said, ‘Sarah, what happened?’ and Maggie went sprawling forward and hit her face on the third step and felt a strange bending in her nose, and blood flowing down her face. Everything went gray, a gray fog swept in, and by the time it cleared Henry was downstairs, helping Beatrice up the stairs and locking the door behind them as they left the basement. A moment later he came down for her, picked her up, and brought her outside where her daddy lay bloody in the gravel with a hole in his chest.
‘Look up yonder,’ Henry says.
He points to a small brick house about a quarter mile from the road. A few horses graze on brown grass in the pink evening. The house looks quiet, a single window illuminated. A gray Dodge Ram pickup parked by the side of the house, under a carport made of weather-grayed four-by-fours and plywood. A tire swing dangles still and lonesome from a big oak tree in the front yard.
‘We’ll stop there,’ he says, ‘get you fixed up and get rid of this truck. We ain’t safe driving it.’
‘I still don’t understand what happened, Henry.’
‘I know it.’
‘I don’t know why we had to leave the dishes.’
‘We’re in some trouble with the law, Bee. I explained that already. Hell, you seen-’
‘I didn’t see anything.’
‘You seen the cops in the-’
‘I didn’t see nothing. I was in a lot of pain, Henry.’
He looks at Beatrice for a long time, an unreadable expression on his face. Maggie has no idea what to make of it. Nor of the conversation itself. Beatrice must have seen the blood, she must have seen the policemen lying motionless in the driveway. You can’t not see something like that. Yet she says otherwise.
‘How you feeling, Sarah?’
Maggie turns and looks at Beatrice. ‘Okay,’ she says.
‘You know we’ll get through this, right? You know we love you?’
Maggie does not respond. She looks up ahead to the house they are quickly approaching. She looks at the light in the window and wonders what kind of people live within it. She imagines a cowboy hat with salt-white sweat stains on it hanging from a rack by the door. A man in dirty coveralls sitting on a couch. A woman mending socks. A baby playing in the middle of the floor wearing nothing but a cloth diaper. She wonders if they’ll be able to help her. If Henry stops there maybe she can get help. She can move her mouth silently when Henry’s looking the other direction. Help. Me. If she could just get help she would get away.
‘You better mind your behavior, too, Sarah, you hear?’
Her face goes hot. She feels as if she has been somehow caught. As if he has read her mind. As if he has shuffled through her thoughts like index cards and spied everything that was written there. As Borden so often did.
But Borden wasn’t real and Henry is.
Real enough to shoot her daddy, to leave him bleeding to death in a gravel driveway.
It’s her fault. If she hadn’t called him none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have come and he wouldn’t have gotten shot. None of the policemen she saw would have gotten shot. They’d be eating dinner with their families instead of in the hospital or dead.
‘Sarah?’
She looks up at Henry.
‘You hear me?’
She nods.
‘If we go in there and take care of business and nothing goes wrong, whoever lives in that house will still be alive when we leave. But if you try any funny business, they’re dead, and you’re not any better off than when they was alive. You hear?’
She nods again.
‘Good.’
‘You’re not really gonna kill nobody, are you, Henry?’
‘Quiet, Bee.’
‘But Henry.’
‘I mean it. Hush up.’
Beatrice looks out her window.
Henry reaches into his pocket and comes out with a kerchief. He spits on it and thrusts it toward Maggie. She takes it hesitantly, not knowing what to do with it. She can smell his spit and it makes her stomach turn.
‘Clean your face up,’ he says. ‘We can’t roll in looking like something from a horror movie.’
Henry pulls off Interstate 10 and rolls down a single-lane stretch of gray asphalt. The window is cracked and though evening is coming on quick the air is still unpleasantly hot.
He pulls to a stop in front of the brick house. A gate blocks the driveway. He steps from the truck to swing it open, so he can drive on in, but the gate is padlocked. He walks back to the truck, reaches into the open door, and honks the horn. It sounds very loud in the still evening air. He’s unsure about what he will say to whoever’s on the other side of that door, especially about what happened to Beatrice, but he’ll think of something. He usually does.
He briefly considers tucking the Lupara into the back of his pants, but decides against it. He won’t need it. It can stay on the floor of the truck, beneath his seat, for now.
The front door swings open and a man of about thirty-five, fellow looks like a scarecrow in Levis and a T-shirt, comes out to the front porch in his stocking feet. He squints at the driveway. Henry raises a hand in greeting and smiles. The skinny guy waves back, then grabs his boots from the porch by the door and slips into them, hopping around on one foot then the other as he slides each heel down into place. That done, he walks out to greet his visitors. As he approaches a dart of brown tobacco juice shoots out from between his lips with a sound like a wet fart. The spit hits the dirt in a stream and the dirt absorbs it, forming a hard bead around the liquid.
Henry smiles and holds out his hand above the gate.
‘Howdy,’ he says.
‘Howdy,’ the man says and shakes the proffered hand. ‘You lost?’
‘Not hardly. Just run into a little trouble.’
The skinny guy takes a wary step back and squints at him. ‘What kinda trouble?’
‘Wife got herself hurt.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. We stopped at the side of the road so she could, well, so she could do her business, and she done fell over backwards. I laughed my ass off when I seen it-I know it ain’t nice to laugh at a fallen lady, but I done it-but turns out she cut her ankle pretty awful. Don’t even know on what. Didn’t stay to find out.’
‘Cut bad?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘All right, come on in.’
He unlocks the gate and lets it swing open on its own. It slides into a well-worn groove in the driveway and stops when it hits the edge of the driveway and the grass grown tall there. Then he walks away from them and toward the house, sparing but a single look at the sun sinking behind the horizon.
Henry wants to tell him to enjoy it; it’ll likely be his last.
The skinny man, whose name turns out to be Flint, helps Beatrice inside and kicks a wooden chair out from the dining table and gets her sitting in it. His wife Naomi, a pretty woman in her early- or mid-twenties, paces back and forth wringing her hands and then stops and says, ‘What can I do, Flint?’
‘Call Doc Peterson.’
‘No,’ Henry says, maybe a bit too forcefully.
Flint squints at him. ‘No?’
‘I. . I’d rather we just take care of it ourselves. Ain’t so bad it requires a doctor.’
Flint continues to squint at him for a moment, tongues the wad of tobacco tucked under his lip. He picks up a Coke can from the dining-room table and squirts a stream of brown spit into it. Then wipes at the bit that dribbled onto his chin and sets down the can.