Me & Emma (14 page)

“Whatever it was it isn’t here now, though” is all I say. I go back to letting my cheek rest on the bumpy bark. I wish I had a mirror so I could see the marks it’s making on it.

“I heard it, Carrie,” she says again. “I swear.”

“All right, you heard something. It’s gone now. The coast is clear so let’s get down and get going.”

“Go first,” I say to her branch.

“No, you go first.”

“Jeez, Em. I’m tired of doing everything first. Why can’t for once you just do what I tell you instead of the other way around.” But I’m moving off the branch and down to the next level. I’m so tired right now I think my arms might not be able to hold on if I started falling. We have to get out of this tree quick-like. Otherwise one of us will fall for sure.

“I’m going first, but come on! You can’t wait for me to get to the bottom to start going down—you’ve got to start moving now, Em.”

This is the part I hate the most about getting down from climbing a tree. It’s the part where you have to jump the rest of the way to the ground. It always seems to me I’m going to break my leg or some2

ME &.EMMA

thing. This time I’m so tired, instead of jumping, I just let myself fall to the ground and it’s not as bad as I thought it might be.

“Hey, Em, let yourself fall at the end. It’s so cool. It’s cushioned so

it won’t hurt.”

Thump.

Emma’s down, too, and we’re on our way.

We’re walking along and I start thinking about how neat it would be if you could have a carpet of really soft pine needles inside your house. Wall to wall. For people who don’t live near a forest but wish that they did.

“I knew it was y’all!” A voice cries out from behind us.

Emma and I both scream and whip around. Standing there with a weird smile on his face like he just won a contest is George Godsey, the youngest of the Godsey boys.

Emma seems as relieved as I am to see that it’s only George, since he’s more a pest than a bully.

“Go on home, George,” she says real mean-like, and she shoves him in the chest. I had to keep from laughing since the sap on her hands stuck to his shirt and pulled him back to her like a rubber band.

“You can’t make me,” says George, and I swear he sounds like he’s three. “This is my forest, anyway, so I don’t have to do a thing you tel| me.”

“Grow up, George Godsey,” I say.

Emma and I turn back and start walking again but we both know George won’t be leaving anytime soon. His brothers pick on him for sport, his parents ignore him altogether, and his friends, well, they don’t seem to notice whether he’s around or not, so two girls tramping through “his forest” is too good to be true for George Godsey.

“Whatcha doing, anyway?”

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George has this real annoying habit of using the word anyway in

pretty much every sentence. It all but drives me crazy.

“Nothing!” Emma and I say at the same time.

“Why you all the way out here by our place, anywayP” “None of your business,” Emma says. “Is tOO.” “Is not.”

“Hush up! We got to keep our voices down out here.” I say this

part mostly to Emma but George sure does need to stay quiet, too. “Where you going?” George whispers.

Maybe if we ignore him he’ll get bored and trot offhome. I can see Emma’s thinking this, too.

“Aw, come on,” George whines. “What’s the deal? If you tell me,

I’ll tell you somethin’ I’m not supposed to tell a soul.”

We keep our mouths shut and our feet moving.

“It’s good, too. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Come on. Tell me what’s goin’ on that’s got you all the way out here. Tell me. I’m goin’ to keep buggin’ you till you do so you might as well go on and get it over with. Tellmetellmetellmetellmetellme…”

“Okay!” Emma spins around and slaps her hand across his mouth to shut him up. Before she starts talking, she winks at me but the trouble is she just learned how to wink and she can’t do it real well so George sees her wrinkling one side of her face up and groans under her hand.

“I saw that!” he says through her fingers. She carefully takes her hand away and inches up real close to his face.

“You better hush up, George Godsey,” she says, real low and slow. “Now, if you really want to know what’s going on then you better promise never to breathe a word that you saw us to anyone else in the

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whole entire universe—” George is nodding his head real fast and his eyes are practically popping out of his head like in a cartoon “—not ever. You hear me?”

Now I know Emma well enough to know that she’s not fixing to tell him what’s really happening, but deep down I’m wondering real

hard, like George is, to hear what she’s going to say.

“You swear ?”

“I swear.” George is holding up his right hand, like that makes the swear official or something.

“All right then.” Emma gives me a kindly grown-up look that’s supposed to make George feel like she’s tellinghim something reeeaaally important. “You better sit down.”

George would jump off the highest tree he could find if Emma told him to right about now, that’s how bad he wants to know. He plops to the ground and crosses his milky-white legs Indian style. He hasn’t taken his eyes off Emma.

“We found out our daddy’s killers live in this here forest and we’re on a mission to hunt them down.” She blurts this out without once looking in my direction. How’d she come up with that?

I can tell this is better than anything George ever dreamed of. He looks like he’s forgotten to breathe. After a minute he musters up some words.

“Th-this forest?” he stutters. “Are y-you s-sure?”

He’s struggling to his feet and I can tell that George Godsey won’t be bothering us much longer.

“Yep.” Emma nods her head like she’s in church, real somber-like, as if she’s at a funeral. “They’re here somewhere. We just need to find

ELIZABETH FLOCK

George never even said goodbye. We watched those spindly little

white legs of his run his body all the way out of sight. “That fixed him,” Emma says to me. And we’re back on track.

“How come you said that about Daddy?” I whisper to Emma, even though George is long gone by now but you cain’t be too careful, I always say. We’ve never really talked about how Daddy died—I always figured Emma didn’t think about it, her being so weensy when he was killed and all.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“‘His killers live in this forest and we’re hunting them down’?” “Well…” “Well, what?”

“They might live here, you never know. They never did catch ‘em, did they.” But this is more an answer than a question, so I let it go. She does have a point.

“Still.” That’s all I have to say. Daddy’s my turf and she knows it.

“What was that?” She whips around, looking real scared. This girl

has eagle ears or something. “What was what?” I ask. “Shh.”

“It’s probably George Godsey coming on back,” I say real soft-like. “Shh.” This time she hisses it like she’s mad. So I shush.

And sure enough I hear something, too. And you cain’t mistake it: someone’s feet are breaking branches. And the sound’s getting closer. We both look up and around for a good tree to climb but there isn’t a good one in sight, lust a ton of pines.

“Don’t move or I’ll shoot your head straight off your sorry ass self”

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comes the voice that almost makes me wet my pants. I’m paralyzed from the top of my hair to my toenails. This is worse than we ever dreamed of…worse than anything we were ready for, I can tell you that.

“Well, well, well. What have we here,” he says, and his voice sounds like he’s smiling.

I can’t even look at Emma. I’m too afraid to move my head even a tiny, tiny inch. I almost want him to go ahead and shoot us since I know whatever he does will be ten times worse.

“You can run but you can’t hide.” The voice is right behind us now

and it’s just a matter of seconds before he circles around.

Please, God. Please look out for us.

Number one is seeping down both of my pant legs but there isn’t anything I can do about that now.

And here he is, standing right in front of us like we’re a buck he’s just bagged. He’s in his hunting costume, the paint-by-numbers spots of gray and green and brown just as ugly as his face, with all its craters and moles.

Richard.

“Look at you, you filthy shit, all full of piss in them there denims,” he says, pointing his rifle down at my legs. “Turn.” He motions with the gun for us to turn back around. “Move it!”

I look at Emma for the first time and it makes me want to throw up. It’s like she’s pressed up against a wall, her back is so straight. Her bead’s the same way. She’s like a little soldier marching into war. There’s nothing but a blank look on her face, like it’s made of stone.

Richard’s been talking but I haven’t been listening, I’ve just been studying my sister.

“Ain’t no more of that, now, I tell you whut…” he’s saying.

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“Eatin’ dog food,” he’s muttering now. “You want dog food? You got it. Dog food’s whatchur gonna get. Yessirree…”

He pokes the tip of the gun in my back, shoving me to walk faster. I look over and he’s doing it to Emma, too.

“None a this home-cooked shit for you, you little dog…” Emma’s tuning him out just like a radio and so I’ll try to do it, too. And that’s the way we walk out of the woods, past the Godseys’, past the red barn and up to our dirt-packed front yard. Momma’s standing up on the front porch with her arms crossed like the wood trim on the barn our bag’s hiding in.

“Look what I bagged, Lib!” Richard shouts way too loud, and Emma and I both jump out of our skins all over again at the sound of his raised voice. “Got us some dinner!”

Momma shakes her head at us as we’re marched up the rickety front steps.

Richard’s still poking our backs with the gun so we go inside, even though I don’t want to.

“Momma—” I reach out to her as I pass through the screen door, but she flinches and backs up like I’ve got cooties. I feel the tears boiling across my cheeks.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Richard says in that singsong voice grown-ups use when they wag their finger at you if you’ve done something wrong. “You do not talk!” he shouts. “You hear me? You shut your dirty little mouth I”

Momma floats away and a sick feeling churns in my empty stomach. A feeling I won’t be seeing her ever again.

“Do not stop! Go right on through,” he says, but this time it’s not a shout at least. “I want you to see what you’ve done. You see all these things waitin’ to be packed up? You see this?” Shouting again. “‘Cause

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I had to go looking foryou it ain’t done. Now I’ve got to be up all hours of the night doing shit that would have been done by now if it hadn’t been for you, little Miss Caroline and little Miss Emma or whoever the hell you are. I don’t even know you! You ain’t my blood. Y’all ain’t shit. ‘Sfar I’m concerned you don’t exist. Go on—” he shoves us again

with the gun “—go on out back. I got a surprise for you.”

Where’s Momma?

Out back is our shed that’s been locked since I don’t remember when and our clothesline that’s empty for the first time in ages, probably because the clothes are all packed up and ready to move. And there, right smack in the middle of the clothesline and the shed, sticking up out of the packed dirt like a metal tree that’s trying to grow, is a stake like someone would use to kill Dracula. Snaking out of it is a fat chain.

“Git on over there and sit down.” He shoves us one last time, this time toward the end of the mean-looking chain. “You little shit.” The boot comes fast and hard. This time it takes a little longer for me to get the air back into my lungs. Next thing I know he’s kneeling over us like he’s going to gut us and skin us. Instead the chain clinks and I jump when the cold touches my neck. It circles around just like one of the serpents we saw a preacher hold up at church, but this feels much heavier than that looked. It’s not quite resting on my shoulders. Once the two ends meet I hear a click and I know deep down where you just know things, I know I’m locked to this chain. I look to my right, which is not easy to do with this fat metal necklace Fm wearing, and he’s fitting the same contraption around Emma’s neck. Click. She’s locked in, too. But there’s a big difference I now see between Emma and me. This chain is weighing the top half of my body down, toward my crossed legs, and Emma, even with her being smaller and

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all, is sitting bolt upright and acting like someone’s fastening a diamond crown to her head, like she’s proud to be chained up. With me all hunched over like Igor I can smell the bitterness of the numlzer one in my pants. The dirt from the ground is caked on the inside of my jeans and I shiver, even though it’s hot out here in the blazing sun.

And that’s how we sit for the next I don’t know how long. Me hunched over and Emma straight as an arrow. Every once in a while from inside the house I hear a door open and dose and a thump here or there, like a full box hitting the ground. The sun that’s baking us moves to the side and—finally!—behind the shed so it’s getting ]ate, that much I can figure out. Emma and I stay quiet. What is there to say, anyway ?

“Where’s my girl ?”

“I’m up here, Daddy!”

“Come on down here and give your ole pa a hug—we’re celebrating tonight!”

Daddy could catch me From any stair I jumped From—even the seventh one halfway up. When he did he’d grunt and say, “Whatchoo been feedin’ this child, Lib? You tryin’ to fatten her up for the fair?” But he’d laugh and hug me real tight and I’d sniff the carpet smell right out of his shirt.

“We got ourselves a bloodhound, that’s what we got,” he’d say. “What’d I put down today, sugar?”

I’d breathe him in again to make certain.

“Industrial!” I’d proclaim, and Daddy’d get this surprised look on

his face.

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“I’ll be goddamnedl You’re exactly one hundred percent right! Did you hear that, Lib? Our girl nailed it again!”