“Yeah. And?”
“So Tommy was home by one thirty.”
“Oh my God,” Bailee-Ann said, blinking her patchy eyelashes. “Is that what this is about? Seriously?”
Adopting a dumb blond voice, she said, “Tommy was home by one thirty, and I was home by one forty-five. Beef made me feel like a slut when I kissed him, because he pushed me away and said I smelled like a brewery. But he made sure my truck was back in my driveway by the time I woke up the next morning. He even washed it for me. Wasn’t that sweet?”
“If you say so,” I said. I hesitated. “Are you and Beef doing okay?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t we be?”
Well, let’s see. Because he quit school, and because he was possibly selling and/or using meth. Most of all because of the “slut” reference Bailee-Ann threw into her recitation.
“No reason,” I said. Anyway, Bailee-Ann didn’t say Beef actually called her that, just that he made her feel like that.
“Don’t listen to me,” Bailee-Ann said. “I’m just weird. I’m sure Beef didn’t kiss me because Patrick and your brother were waiting in the truck.”
“Uh, okay.”
“He hadn’t dropped them off yet. It would have been gross to make out in front of them. Plus, Beef was mad at them in a big way. That’s why—“
She broke off, zipping her lips together so purposefully that I understood where that expression came from, zip your lips.
“That’s why what?”
She shook her head.
“Bailee-Ann. I know something went on that night, something more than getting high and petting trees. Just tell me.”
“Who said anything about petting trees? I didn’t pet no trees. You think I’m so starved for love I’d pet a dang tree?”
“Why was Beef mad? Was there a fight?”
Seven or eight years ago, some older boys went at one another up into the forest, and things went south fast. One guy had a knife. The other had broken beer bottle, its edges jagged and sharp.
Bailee-Ann stared deliberately past me, but her eyes defied her, sliding to mine for one quick second.
My heart gave a peculiar double beat. Bailee-Ann was scared. That’s why she was keeping mum.
“You can tell me, Bailee-Ann. I swear.”
She leaned forward and got back her piece of yarn, winding it tightly around her index finger. I watched her fingertip go from red to white. “Tommy and Patrick had something they wanted to . . . discuss with Beef. Your brother was in on it, too.”
“In on what?”
“But Beef wouldn’t listen. He felt ganged up on, I guess. He wanted them to lay off, but they wouldn’t, and finally Beef lost it. He told Tommy and Christian to go play with their vaginas, though he didn’t use that word, and he called Patrick a fucking pansy. Nice, huh?”
“Wait. Beef called Patrick . . .” I shook my head. “Wait. In front of everyone, Beef called him that?”
Bailee-Ann cocked her head, and my mouth went dry. Beef was Patrick’s champion. Beef was every underdog’s champion.
Disoriented, I sat back down on the sofa. Different explanations vied for a toehold: Bailee-Ann was lying. It was Tommy who called Patrick that, not Beef. Or maybe Tommy said something worse and Beef lashed out without thinking, his words meant to hurt everyone in the redneck posse, not just Patrick.
There had to be more to the incident than Bailee-Ann was telling me. Everyone knew how stressed Beef was; whatever the guys wanted to discuss with him must have made him even more so.
“It’s probably losing his wrestling scholarship,” I whispered.
“You think?” Bailee-Ann said sarcastically. “Do you know the full story of that, by the way?”
“The full story of Beef losing his wrestling scholarship? I think so. He got a knee injury. I don’t know how, or what kind of knee injury, only that it’s in his . . .”
“. . . knee,” Bailee-Ann filled in, making me feel like a baby. “But it wouldn’t have happened if he’d had his head on straight.”
My own head was muzzy. All I could think was, Beef called Patrick a pansy? Beef did that?
Then, for Patrick to be attacked only hours later . . .
I understood why Christian was being so close-mouthed about it. Means, motive, and opportunity—I knew those terms from various mysteries I’d read over the years, and Beef could be seen as having all three.
I now understood Beef’s hostility at Huskers, too. It wasn’t hostility. It was fear and guilt and self-loathing, all smashed together and coming out as hostility. Because, God, how terrible. It was like a kid lashing out at his daddy for something dumb like not getting to have an ice-cream cone. Like if the kid said, “I wish you were dead,” and then, the very next second, the daddy collapsed from a heart attack.
Bailee-Ann was talking, using wrestling terms and gesturing with her hands. I did my best to tune in.
“. . . could have pinned him right then,” she said. “It was a done deal. But no, he let him back up in order to humiliate him some more.”
I’d missed a big chunk of the story, but I didn’t want to let on if I could help it.
“So Beef took him down again,” Bailee-Ann said, unwrapping the yarn from her index finger and moving on to the next. “He put the legs on him, like maybe he was planning a guillotine. Only he never got the chance to lock it down because the guy from Woodward grabbed hold of Beef’s foot and cranked it.”
Bailee-Ann said “the guy from Woodward,” and Woodward was in Asheville, so now I knew where the other wrestler was from. I didn’t know what “putting the legs on someone” meant, however, and though I knew what a guillotine was, I suspected it was something different in a wrestling match.
“Is that bad?” I asked. “Grabbing someone’s foot?”
“Not if you do it legal. But if you pull back on it until you break the other guy’s ligament, then yeah. That’s bad.”
I went over it in my mind. Beef had his opponent almost pinned. He let him up just to take him down again. To humiliate him. Only it backfired, and Beef ended up with a blown knee.
“Why didn’t the ref step in?” I asked.
“He was on the wrong side of the mat,” Bailee-Ann said. “He couldn’t see what was going on till it was too late.”
“Oh. And why did Beef want to humiliate the Woodward guy again?”
Her expression was incredulous.
“I know, I know,” I apologized. “Just explain it one more time?”
“What’s to explain? He called Beef a crotch-sniffing faggot.”
I winced.
“Then when they were facing off, he wiggled his fingers and said, ‘Come on, sweetheart.’ And he made smoochy noises.”
“That’s so stupid.”
“You think?” she said. She was silent for several seconds.
“There’d been jokes,” she filled in. “Stupid jokes, like you said, about him and Patrick being friends.”
“That’s nothing new. Beef’s never let it get to him before.” She shrugged.
“Did Beef even know the guy from Asheville?”
“Does it matter? He didn’t like being called sweetheart.”
It made me think. As Patrick’s defender, Beef had been on the receiving end of plenty of stupid comments over the years. Patrick got it ten times worse, yet I wondered, for a guy, which was worse: to be called a fag when you were one or when you weren’t.
For the first time, I also wondered if Beef ever got sick of standing up for Patrick, sick of being sprayed by mud just because he was standing in the wrong place. Maybe that was why he lost it at Suicide Rock. Maybe he slipped, like we all did at times, his anger lowering him to the level of guys like that Asheville jerk.
“Anyway, that’s how he hurt his knee, and that’s why he lost his scholarship,” Bailee-Ann said. “It’s sad. It’s extremely sad. But how long is he allowed to punish everyone else because of it?”
“Good point.”
“One day, ever
ything’s great—Whoo-hoo! I love life! Let’s party, girl!—and then there’s one little wrinkle in his universe and, suddenly, everything sucks.”
I started to reply, then stopped. Then did anyway. “Pretty big wrinkle.”
“I know,” she said, like she didn’t need me explaining it to her. “And then he has to go and be all sweet, washing my truck for me or bringing me one of those cookies I like from the sandwich shop. Those butterscotch ones. You ever had one?”
I shook my head.
She leaned back into the sofa, looking bone tired. I knew she’d said all she was going to say about Beef.
We were pretty much done after that. Only later did I realize that she never did tell me exactly what happened at Suicide Rock. She said Tommy and my brother and Patrick wanted to “discuss” something with Beef, but she never told me what that something was.
I STEPPED INTO THE PITCH-BLACK COUNTRY NIGHT. Certain parts of town had streetlights, but not in this neck of the woods. I thought about how Christian would disapprove of my being out here alone, and to tell the truth it was spooky. Then someone said my name, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Robert, what the heck?” I said, peering into the shadows to see his weaselly face. Weaselly wasn’t a nice word to describe him, but it was accurate. Robert was an eleven-year-old trapped in a body that was scrawny by nine-year-old standards, and what he lacked in size, he made up for in hyperness. I felt bad for him, because it wasn’t his fault. His mama drank too much when he was in the womb. These things happened.
But there he was, scrawny and hyper, and just because he wasn’t to blame didn’t mean people forgave him for it.
“Ha-ha, got you good,” Robert said, practically dancing around me. “I saw your bike, and I sat here and waited. Passed the time by throwing pinecones at that there tree”—he jerked his chin at a dark blob among other dark blobs—“and I woulda hit it, too, if I wanted. I just didn’t wanna.”
“Uh-huh, that’s great, Robert,” I said. I took hold of my bike and toed up the kickstand.
“You come here about Patrick?” he said.
I didn’t know what to make of his question.
“I listened in,” he bragged. He laughed and did a sideways nod at the open windows. “I’m good at being sneaky, ain’t I? I hear all sorts of stuff.”
“Like what?” I almost said, but at the last moment, I avoided the trap. Robert would talk my ear off if I let him, boasting about one thing or another, and none of them more interesting than pinecones.
“Yes, Robert, you’re good at being sneaky,” I said, swinging my leg over the frame. “And now, I gotta go.”
“Naw, wait,” he said. Mucus snaked out of his nose. He sucked it back in while at the same time stepping closer, as if along with his snot he wanted to suck every ounce of attention from me that he could. “I like Patrick, even if he is a spoilsport.”
“Huh?”
“He made me go home when it wasn’t even my bedtime. I don’t even have a bedtime. Duh.”
I cocked my head. “Are you talking about the night your sister and everybody went to Suicide Rock?”
“Everyone but me,” Robert complained. “I’ve never gotten to go there at night, not even once. And the others didn’t care if I went. But Patrick was all, ‘Robert’s too little. Robert has to go home.’”
“He was just looking out for you,” I said.
“Only I don’t need him looking out for me,” Robert said. He flipped his wrist. “And ain’t it just like a fairy to get his panties in a wad over something that’s none of his business.”
“Robert, don’t.”
“What?”
“Don’t call him that.”
“A fairy? But he is one.”
I was too tired for this. Most everybody called Patrick names, so it wasn’t as if I was going to change Robert’s way of thinking.
“Ohhhhh,” Robert said. “You think it’s one of those hate words.”
“It is one of those hate words,” I said. “And you just said you like Patrick, so why would you call him something hateful?”
He hawked a loogie and rubbed dirt over it with his bare foot. “I like him well enough. I don’t wanna be kissy-kissy with him, but I didn’t clonk him in the head with a baseball bat, if that’s what you’re asking.”
That wasn’t what I was asking. Robert was a kid, and an undernourished, puny one at that. He didn’t have the strength to clonk someone in the head.
“Well, I like Patrick, too,” I replied. “Your sister says he’s gonna be okay. That’s good news, isn’t it?”
“If you say so,” he said fake-mysteriously. “Only if I were you, I wouldn’t go around believing everything Bailee-Ann says.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “And why’s that?”
“’Cause she lies, that’s why.”
I glanced at the house with its open windows. Then I put down my bike’s kickstand and stepped further into the shadows. He scampered behind me, and I groaned inwardly, knowing I was wasting my time.
Robert was what you’d call an unreliable narrator, that was the book term for it. The kind of kid who was never wrong about anything, who always had a reason for why the pinecone didn’t hit the tree.
“All right, Robert,” I said when we were out of Bailee-Ann’s hearing distance. “What do you want to tell me?”
His face lit up. He liked the low pitch of my voice, the intimacy of sharing secrets. He stepped close, put his lips right up to my ear, and said . . . nothing. Just inhaled deep, like he was breathing me in.
“Robert.” It was a matter of will not to pull away from him. As I said, it wasn’t his fault, but he was a boy who ate his boogers and didn’t bathe often enough. Who without provocation said things like “I gotta go drain my willy” because he was under the mistaken impression that it made him seem manly.
“You smell like raspberries,” he said, his breath warm. He burrowed into my hair, and I drew away.
“Eww, Robert, gross. It’s called shampoo. You buy it at the store. Now, do you have something to tell me or not?”
His face closed over. “You don’t have to be mean about it, bitch.”
“What’d you just call me?”
“I called you a bitch, bitch.”
My mouth fell open. I used to kiss Robert’s boo-boos back in the day. I probably even changed his diapers once or twice, seeing that he wore those pull-ups way longer than a child should.
“Robert Wayne Boxberger, you go inside and wash out your mouth with soap,” I told him.
“Who’s gonna make me? You?”
“Good Lord,” I muttered, heading back toward the house.
“Cat! Wait!”
I climbed on my bike and pushed off. Rocks popped up and dinged my fenders.
Robert ran after me. “Don’t you wanna hear what I got to say?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll tell you, I swear. And you ain’t a bitch, okay?”
“Gee, thanks,” I kept pedaling, and eventually I escaped the pounding of his sneakers. All I heard were the bumps and crunches of my tires on the dirt road, blending with the dark noises of the forest. But it wasn’t the forest that scared me. It was the people who lived and prowled within them.
CHURCH WAS A MISERY.
Something happened last night at the hospital, that’s why. Verleen had the most information, because her sister was married to Deputy Carl Doyle. She told a circle of ladies all about it before the service started, her shellacked hairdo bobbing as she spoke.
“A perpetrator jimmied open the window to Patrick’s room,” she said. “He sliced the screen too. Carl said it hung off the window frame like a flap of skin.”
“Oh my,” a church lady named Dottie said, putting her hand to her heart.
“Uh-huh. Carl don’t know why someone was trying to break in, just that they was. The only reason they didn’t make it was because of the night nurse doing her rounds. She musta scared him off, Carl says.”
?
??Well my goodness, Verleen. That is just terrible,” Dottie said.
“Uh-huh. It is. Now Carl has to do round-the-clock surveillance, sitting outside that boy’s room with his pistol in his holster.” Verleen pursed her lips. “I reckon I’ll bring him a ham sandwich later on.”
I felt ill standing on the fringes of the crowd and listening in, but I couldn’t make myself leave. Verleen said the reporters were back in flocks now, milling around the hospital and hunting for information. Only, there wasn’t much to go on. There was a single set of footprints in the dark soil below Patrick’s window, but no fingerprints, and no hints as to what the perpetrator had in mind to do if he’d gotten in.
The worst part was that all the commotion affected Patrick’s “stability.”
“Carl heard that from Dr. Granville,” Verleen said. “People in comas can be aware of their surroundings, you see.”
Hannah, the young mother from Coonesville, nodded. “That’s why you’re supposed to talk to them. Same with plants.”
“The doctor said he won’t wake up if he don’t feel safe,” Verleen said.
Dottie clucked her dismay.
“That poor boy,” Hannah said. “I wish they’d caught him, that fella at the window. I wish they’d just catch him and put him away.”
“I wish Patrick hadn’t gotten himself into this mess in the first place,” Verleen said. “Can you imagine poor Aurelia having to deal with such a mess?” Aurelia was Mama Sweetie’s given name.
“It woulda killed her if she weren’t dead already,” Dottie said. “Bless her heart.”
The ladies gave a moment of silence to Mama Sweetie’s memory.
A middle-aged woman spoke up. She was in the choir, but I couldn’t recall her name. She had a birthmark the size of a stinkbug under one eye. It pooched out like a mole, only it was the reddish-purple of the grape juice we drank at communion.
“Could have been anyone who attacked him,” she pronounced. She nodded at Verleen. “I know your Carl thinks it’s an out-of-towner, but I wouldn’t stake the farm on it.”
“Carl is doing the best he can,” Verleen said, giving the choir woman a look.
“Well, of course, he is. We all know that.” The choir woman patted Verleen’s arm. “I’m just saying—“She broke off and scanned the room. “Well, you know what I’m saying. You all do. And to think that here we are, talking about it in the house of the Lord.”