I turned to Fisher, waiting for him to explain—to tell them—that it hadn’t been me, but he just stared back, not moving, not blinking. He didn’t say anything.
“Fisher,” I said, but his face was blank. It already told me everything.
He turned and crossed the lot to them, not saying a word, not looking back.
I stood over the place where the vines had grown. My heart was a hammer under my bones, beating hard enough that I felt it in my back teeth. It had begun to rain a little, the sky spitting fat, chilly drops on the packed dirt.
Fisher’s back was to me, getting farther, farther.
Shiny grabbed the velvet rabbit from me and threw it. “Leave, then!” But her voice was cracked, like something was caught in her throat.
“He isn’t close to good enough,” she said without looking at me. Without really looking anywhere.
The ground around the tarp was empty, like nothing had ever been there.
PART IV
CREEK
THE DOGWOOD BRANCH
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the morning, Shiny lay in bed with her head burrowed into the pillow. Outside, rain still spatted unevenly against the window.
I stood over her in the little room, trying to figure out how she could sleep so soundly. Every time I thought of last night, my throat hurt so much that I had to stop.
During the night, the clouds had broken open and the fitful sprinkling had turned into downpour. I’d woken up in the dark, listening to the storm on the roof and feeling sorry for myself in a muddled way that just got worse each time a clap of thunder rolled across the sky.
Now the rain had mostly stopped, but behind the house, the creek had grown to an ungovernable size. It had overflowed its banks and now it was creeping up toward the yard. I wondered if we were in danger of its flooding the house, but the swell seemed content where it was, leaving muddy puddles under Shiny’s tire swing.
The gray day made the inside of me feel grayer, and it was a feeling I didn’t want. I needed to find something useful to do. I left the house, wearing a battered raincoat and a pair of rubber galoshes that didn’t fit, and headed up the road.
Although the Blackwood place was the closest piece of land to the creek, it was the rest of the Willows that seemed to be underwater. At the Heintzes, the whole yard was knee-deep, and I was mildly comforted that at least it was one piece of destruction I was not responsible for.
Up at the edge of Harlan’s north pasture, I climbed the fence, being careful not to slip on the wet boards, then marched over to where my suitcase still lay, half-buried in the weeds, one plaid sleeve sticking out and looking draggly and wet. I picked it up and hauled it onto the road.
I felt satisfied with myself, virtuous for remembering to come back for it and relieved that it was still where I had left it. After a second, though, the virtuous feeling faded and I was right back to having nothing else to do.
The problem was that without things to keep you busy, your chest could hurt. You could think about what it meant to live somewhere that hated you, or remember that a boy you thought was kind or loyal or brave wasn’t actually any of those things when you got right down to it.
From the pasture, I could see the bluff that led down into the hollow. I was half-tempted to go down and look for the white-haired fiend with the blurry eyes and ask her what to do. The place was full of craft and hell dogs, but that wasn’t the reason I decided not to go. It was that I couldn’t help thinking how Fisher might be down there. The idea made it hard to even think straight. I just couldn’t tell if the fog in my head was because I didn’t want to see him, or if it was because I secretly wanted to see him so bad it made me dizzy.
Instead, I walked along the shoulder of Foxhill Road, wandering back out toward my burned-down house without really knowing why. On the hollow side of the blacktop, the ground was wet and muddy where the flood had come up and then receded, but on the Willows side, the entire birchwood that backed up against the Heintzes’ property was underwater. The trunks of the trees stuck up like fingers, going on for acres.
I was looking out at them when I felt a thin little tug like the niggling whisper of craft. Something was there in the woods. It called with the same insistent hum that I got sometimes when I looked at Fisher, but the tone was different, high and wavering with a whine underneath that made my ears ache.
I set the suitcase down and went straight off the side of the road and into the trees, slopping over the muddy ground and into the floodwater.
I waded along, careful of the roots that bucked up from the ground. I’d gone just a little too far into the trees to see the road when something snagged at my raincoat and I turned.
A fishhook was stuck barb-deep in the yellow rubber at my shoulder, tied to a piece of fishing line so thin and see-through it was almost invisible. I tried to follow it with my eye, but the line disappeared up into the branches. I jerked the hook out of my raincoat and ripped the line down, winding it carefully in my hand.
I turned in a circle, looking up into the trees, but could see nothing around to make the dangling hook seem less bizarre.
By the time I’d gone another hundred feet, though, I’d come across three more, pocketing each one and ripping down the lines as I went, and every time I found I another, it only served to prove they’d been put there on purpose.
I waded on, following the hum that rang in my ears.
I was deep into the woods, up to my knees in water, when I suddenly got a very clear kind of double vision telling me that something was wrong in the ground, something was there that wasn’t supposed to be, buried just under the dirt.
I found a stick and poked it into the water, muddling around until the end hit something hard and slick. Then I got down and scooped away the mud, getting my fingers under the edges and prying it up.
The thing in my hands was made of glass and wires and looked like something from outer space, but when I turned it over, I saw on the back that it was stamped with the word Magnavox. It was a television tube. I’d seen them when I was little down at the dump, and Marvin Coil, who worked there, had shown me and Shiny how if you put a rock through one, it would explode with a terrific pop.
I stood perfectly still, holding the tube in both hands. It seemed to me that if you stepped on one buried in the ground, it might explode then, too. It seemed very clear that I was someplace I wasn’t supposed to be.
I set the television tube carefully on a fallen log and then, with the sleeve of my raincoat pulled over my hand, I put a piece of shale through it. The sound it made was very loud. I tucked the pieces under the log and covered them with mud, then slopped my way deeper into the trees.
I passed a waterlogged duck blind and a little flooded dock with a johnboat tied at one of the posts, which was barely poking out of the creek. And the whole time, I walked like I was being called, following the high, whining hum of craft.
Then I broke through a stand of birches into a little clearing occupied by a tin-roofed shed. It was gray with weather and open on one side, full of shelves, lined with rows and rows of mismatched jars. They all had paper labels, marked with nothing but dates. The glass on some of them was smoky, but something crackled and glowed inside like dark, ugly lanterns. The air around them seemed to buzz.
It reminded me of how the air had buzzed and crackled in the hollow, but now it looked wrong. I had a bad feeling that whatever was sitting in the jars was gone-over. Rotten.
The stuff was aged past all benefit or reason, and I understood with a sinking feeling that I had stumbled upon Greg Heintz’s craftshack. Here was where he kept every bit of dirt and stone that he carted off from the hollow to sell.
I was about to back away when something in the muddy water caught my eye, something small and pale pink.
A broken dogwood branch floated by the shed, and I picked it up. Long strands of hair we
re caught in the bark, white as corn silk, snarled around the places where the blossoms had been knocked loose and a few pink petals still clung, raggedy and broken. There were no dogwood trees anywhere in the birchwood.
The end of the stick was dark with something that looked like blood. The hair was the same color as Davenport’s.
* * *
When I climbed the porch and knocked on Greg Heintz’s door, he yanked it open almost as soon as my hand touched wood. The front door opened straight into the living room, and behind him, I could see a low ceiling looming over a pair of plaid chairs and a blue velvet couch covered in plastic.
Up close, he was even taller than I’d remembered, with eyes that looked too shrewd and too pale in his sunburnt face. I stood in front of him, holding the dogwood branch and trying not to look shaken up inside.
“I’d like to see Davenport, please,” I said, suddenly very aware that I was carrying around a tree branch and a suitcase.
He gave me a long, ugly look, head to toe and back again. “She isn’t here.”
Suddenly, more than ever, I needed to know where she was—to know that she wasn’t somewhere she needed to be saved from. I was gripped by a horrible fear that something had happened out in the birchwood.
In the doorway, Greg Heintz was looking at me in a way I did not like. His eyes were deep-set and silvery, shining out from a sunburned face. “What are you doing out here with a suitcase? Fixing to run away?”
The strange, coppery note in his voice made me hold the dogwood branch tighter. “I want to talk to Davenport right now. Where is she?”
“That is none of your goddamn business. Now, you are kindly welcome to get off my porch.”
“Did you hurt her?”
He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Hurt her? She’s up to Reedy’s selling ice cream in a stupid paper hat. Why would I hurt my own kid?”
I had all kinds of things I wanted to say to him—that every time he so much as looked her way, he hurt her. That being near him was not good for any sort of living thing.
But I just tilted my chin up and said, “Because my cousin says you’ve got a temper, and because I don’t think you treat her right.” I held up the soggy branch. “And because I found this out in the woods, bloody and tangled with her hair.”
Another man might have been worried at that, or started asking a hundred questions, or at least gotten short with me for telling him how to raise his girl, but Greg Heintz did the strangest thing. He laughed. “You’d be hard put to hurt a creature like that. Davenport’s fine.”
I stared up at him, not liking his fixed gaze or his tight-lipped smile. The branch was damp and I held it tighter.
Greg Heintz loomed over me, hands in his pockets. “Now, if that’s all you came for, it’s time for you to be leaving.”
* * *
In town, the excitement of the fair had died down a little. Main Street wasn’t as crowded as the night before, but there were still plenty of people milling around the booths and tents, looking at which pies and which pigs had been special enough to get ribbons.
I wandered through, trying not to think of how good it had been last night before everything went to hell. The smell of the carnival made something ache in my throat, but it was a dumb, pointless ache. I walked right past the arcade games and the giant swings without looking at the place where Fisher and I had pitched at prizes. Where we’d held hands and kissed and where he’d walked away as soon as it got bad. He’d chosen the easy side, just like Shiny’d said he would, and now the truth was out and at least I knew. I didn’t need him.
Inside Reedy’s, the air smelled like fake strawberries and glass cleaner.
Davenport was behind the counter, and as soon as I saw her, something in my chest let go and I felt like I could breathe again. She was scooping pink ice cream into a Styrofoam dish, sprinkling it with rainbow candies and handing it across the glass to one of the sleek, glossy girls Rae had been planning to sell charms to the night before.
Over by the Coke machine, a bunch of other girls in swimsuit tops and denim shorts perched on the edge of one of the tables. They were watching Davenport with bored eyes, licking on their ice cream, and at first I thought they were waiting for her to finish so they all could leave together, but after a second, I knew that wasn’t the case. The way they looked at her was sly and smirking.
She glanced up when I came in, then turned away fast. Her eyes were a pale January-blue, milder and softer than her father’s.
“Hey,” I said, coming up to the counter, careful not to lean on the glass, which was slick and smudgeless, like she might have just Windexed it. “Have you been doing okay?”
At the question, Davenport’s eyes got wider, but she nodded. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
I stood awkwardly with the branch in my hand. “No reason, I just got worried, is all.”
“Well, I’m fine.” Her expression was strange though, flat and far away. She stood limply against the counter with the scoop in her hand. “What are you carrying around that piece of nothing for?” she said finally, studying the stick with slow, watchful eyes.
Her tone was barely even curious, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure about what I’d found out in the woods, or my fear for her, or anything that had happened all morning. “No reason. Just found it and liked the flowers.”
In the corner by the Coke machine, the girls all were laughing, whispering back and forth until it was about to drive me crazy.
Davenport set down her scoop and looked at me like she wanted to be anywhere but here. “You going to buy anything or what?”
“I haven’t got money,” I said. “I just came by to see how you were.”
“Then you can’t stay in here,” Davenport said. “There’s a policy. You have to buy something or leave.”
The tallest, pinkest girl crunched into her cone and said, talking past me to Davenport like I wasn’t even there, “What’s the matter, Davenport? Don’t want people to see you hanging around with your own kind?”
Davenport only mumbled something and hunched her shoulders, but I gave the girl a long, measuring look. “There should really just be a policy where people can’t stay in here if they can’t watch their mouths.”
The girls were looking at me like I had every kind of disease. One by one, they slid down from the table, knocking into me as they passed, my shoulder here, my elbow there.
“Your roots are showing,” one said, eyes roaming over me in a slow crawl.
The way she said it, I could tell she wasn’t just talking about where the cherry-red faded into dark. She meant my everything, my entire past, all right there in the state of my hair. My hand wanted to rake through the tangles, but I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.
“Your bad manners are showing,” I said as they all swished past me. As retorts went, it wasn’t very snappy, but I was well past caring.
Davenport just flicked the rag and looked down through the glass countertop at the half-scooped tubs of ice cream. I wanted to tell her it would all be okay, but as the girls clopped out of the shop in their platform sandals, I knew it wouldn’t be, and it wasn’t.
“You should go,” she said again. Her voice was low and toneless.
“Don’t you get lonely around here? I’ll stay and keep you company awhile if you want.”
“I’m not supposed to go around with any Blackwoods,” she said to the countertop. “My dad thinks it doesn’t set the right tone for the family.”
It seemed like quite a rude thing to say, especially considering that she had been down to see Myloria and get her dogwood tattoo just the other day, which in itself went a long way toward showing that she did not always do what her father said.
“You were just at our place,” I pointed out. “Getting work from Myloria.”
“That was for business,” she said. “It’s d
ifferent if you go to someone crooked for a fortune. I wanted to know mine, and now I do.”
“Myloria doesn’t tell fortunes. She does tattoos.”
Davenport shrugged. “Not every fortune comes from a crystal ball or a deck of cards. Your aunt’s supposed to have a good hand with ink, is all.”
The dogwood branch hung limply in my hand. It was still wet, even though I’d been carrying it around for most of the afternoon. I held it up. “I found this stick, and it’s got blood on it, and I was worried. You really don’t know anything about it, even though it’s like what’s drawn on your back?”
“No. I don’t. Maybe someone bagged a deer.” The way she said it was flat, and her eyes flicked to the door again, making it very clear she was done with me.
I wondered what her father would say—what he’d do—if he knew about the dogwood tattoo, but all I said was, “I’ll go if you want, but if something happens, you know where to find me.”
Davenport looked up, cutting her eyes to the ceiling. “I don’t have a single idea what you’re talking about. Ain’t nothing going to happen around here.”
Her voice was trembly, though, sad and lost, like she was a balloon tied to a railing and waiting for someone to come back for her.
Out on the street, I stood under the striped awning of Reedy’s, feeling stupid and confused, like maybe I’d just invented myself some trouble because Fisher wasn’t around to make the real thing.
I was about to call it a day and start back home when someone said my name, and I knew it was him before I even turned around.
He was standing in front of the Shop Mart, carrying two sacks of groceries and looking unreadable.
“What?” I said. It was strange to say a word and have it fly through the air at someone like a slap. I thought how if I were Shiny, I would be heating up, getting ready to burn down everything. Instead, my throat hurt like I’d been sucking on an ice cube, and all I wanted was to look away.