Wire Mesh Mothers (32 page)

She took a step forward, and the girl clutched the child more tightly. The child held the cat’s head to her as if it were the grail of God.

And she was screaming.

“I…,” began Kate.

The girl bared her teeth. The child stroked the head and wailed as if her soul was being raked over hell’s coals. The sound pierced the rafters and echoed along the dark corners of the barn.

“I don’t….”

And then there was a thunderous cracking noise, gunfire, and the voice of a man shouting outside, “Who the hell’s in there? Who’s in my barn?”

The girl leapt up in a single motion, dragging the child up with her. The cat’s head flew away. Kate spun about and stared in the direction of the shout.

“Chuck, go around the side! Watch the windows! Could be that gang of rail riders we heard about!”

“Hope so!” came a second voice. “Got a ‘ward out on them suckers!”

“Shoot first, questions later!”

“Yeah!”

The burning blocks had lit the nearby straw, and a small blaze was starting to spread its fingers across the floor.

“C’mon!” said the girl, hitching her head toward one of the open stalls. Kate grabbed one of Mistie’s arms and the girl took the other, and they carried her off the main floor and into the tiny room where there was a square, latched window. With her free hand Kate knocked the latch open, then shoved the trembling, still crying girl out and into the rainy night. Kate went next, wondering for the briefest moment if the girl might ham-string her as an added bonus, but then she was out, face down in the soaking weeds, and the girl was behind her.

Her breath in her ears, thundering in sync with the hammering of her heart.

Get up get up!

She was up, she had Mistie by the forearm, the girl had the other. They were bolting through the steamy rain, across the black waves of grasses and the confused and snorting cattle, toward a stretch of forest at the far side of the field.

Behind them, two shouts, on the heels of each other.

“Damn barn’s on fire! Get the hose, quick!”

“I see ‘em! Out there, out the window! In my sights!”

A strange moment of silence, stretching oddly out across the field behind them, reaching Kate’s neck, stroking it with cold nails.

Then a blast, an impact in Kate’s left calf, and she went down again into the sharp grasses. No pain for a moment, stretching like the silence, waiting for the precise moment to reveal its full self.

Mistie fell as Kate fell. The girl Tony skidded to a halt and turned about. “Get up, bitch!” she ordered. “Get up and run!”

Then the pain came. It erupted in the whole of Kate’s lower body, blowing apart like a grenade, fierce, powerful, hideously real. She threw back her head in disbelief and agony. Fire raged through her vessels to her brain.

“Get the fuck up!”

Hands grappling for Kate’s hand, tugging her to her feet where she tripped, went down, and was dragged back up again. Another blast from behind and a hoot of joy, “They’re
outa
here, by damn! They’re
faster’n
jackrabbits!”

“I can’t…,” Kate began.

“Hell you can’t, ‘cause I can’t carry you!”

Kate bore down with her teeth and her mind, and made her legs move. Out, forward, out, forward, out, forward. She didn’t have hold of Mistie anymore, but she could see the little girl stumbling along beside Tony. The child was no longer screaming.

It was a life’s time before they found the woods and the sagging wire fence that separated it from the cattle field. Tony pushed the top of the fence down with her foot and threw Mistie across. “Over!” she shouted to Kate. Kate crawled over the fence. Her palms came down in a rain-soaked thistle patch.

Back at the barn, another muffled shot, and distant, incoherent shouts. Kate twisted her head back on her neck to see a faint glowing through the window.
It’s going to be a
Yule fire
, thought Kate.
Poor cows.
All that hay.

Tony caught Kate’s upper arm and dragged out of the thistles, across roots and rocks a short distance. Then Kate was propped against the slimy bark of some lumpy Louisiana scrub tree. Kate closed her eyes against the pain in her lower body. She heard a knife clicked open.

Damn, she’s going to kill me after all. I guess I don’t really blame her, not after the ax.

There was a sound of ripping denim.

The sound of rain water, or was it shower water, in her ear? Thundering, pounding, drilling to her soul.

And then, silence.

“T
ruth or dare?” asked Tony.

The teacher was coming back around, but kept fading in and out, her head thumping against the bark of the tree to which she was tied, her tongue making brief appearances over her teeth. Tony sat beside Baby Doll on top of a flattened nest of some fuzzy-leafed plants, her arms wrapped around her knees. Baby Doll was leaning on her, but she didn’t push her off. Tony thought that
DeeWee
would laugh his retarded ass off seeing Tony in just Ace bandage and pants, sitting in the wet woods with a teacher in just bra and pants, propping up a sick kid in a torn up pink nightgown. He’d talk about it for months. As stupid as he was, certain things stuck in his brain like a thorn.

“You hear me, teacher? I asked you a question.”

The teacher didn’t say anything, but she moaned and it was a wide-awake moan, not a dreaming moan.

Tony had done surgery, sort of. Flopped the teacher over, sliced the jeans leg up the back, and dug out the bullet. Good thing it’d been a rifle and not a shotgun. The wound was raw and bloody but not terribly huge. The teacher had groaned but didn’t wake up, and Tony had easily found the slug in the muscle. A few rounds with the tip of the knife and it had popped out into the humus beneath the trees. Tony had put it in her pocket for a souvenir. Then she ripped the jeans leg apart for a bandage and for bindings.

We look like those beat up guys on the American Colony Insurance ad,
Tony thought.
Only they’re carrying a flag, a drum, and a flute. And they’re standing up.

The teacher’s eyes opened, and this time there seemed to be some focus. “Mistie…?” she began.

“Here, with me. Got my knife so don’t try anything. Shoulda killed your ass when you were out. Truth or dare.”

The teacher sighed, and thumped the back of her head again on the tree trunk. “Not now.”

“You fucking tried to ax me to death,” said Tony.

Eyes closed, opened. The teacher looked up at the sky as if watching for more rain. She shivered, and tried to move her arms. Each hand was outstretched and bound to a low branch with leftover denim strips.

“Look like a fucked-up Jesus there, teacher,” said Tony. “Truth or dare?”

“I don’t…,” said the teacher. “Mistie. Is Mistie all right?”

Tony looked at Baby Doll. She was awake, but silent, curled up into her own knees, leaning on Tony’s shoulder. Her pale hair hung in a sheet around her face in a waterfall of yellow. Her body wasn’t as hot as it had been, but she still looked sick.

“I was shot,” said the teacher, seeming surprised by the sudden realization. She bolted upright against her restraints. “Oh my God, shot.”

“Not anymore,” said Tony. “I got it out. Call me Mark Green. I shoulda left it in, shoulda let you die, shoulda killed you like you tried to kill me.”

Tony and the teacher studied each other for a long minute, and then the teacher broke the stare and looked at the ground. She looked tired, beat.

They’d need some clothes, Tony knew, and soon. Louisiana rain wasn’t as cold as Virginia rain, but they sure as hell wouldn’t pass through to Texas unnoticed in their underwear.

The teacher tried to move her arms again. She said, “Why didn’t you, then?”

“Kill you?”

“Yes.”

“Good question. Because I could, I guess. I could, easily, so wasn’t any point to it.”

“Oh.”

“And dying ain’t
sufferin
’. You gotta pay for what you tried to do to me in that barn!”

Another long moment of silence. And then Baby Doll whispered, “Truth.”

Tony looked at the kid. She brushed the girl’s hair back from her face to find a pair of blue eyes watching her. “What did you say, Baby Doll?”

“Truth.”

“Not you, I meant the teacher. Truth or dare ain’t a game for kids.”

Pale, cracking lips, whispered, “Truth. I wanna go home.”

Tony shifted on the lumpy, fuzzy plants. She liked the kid better before. She didn’t want the kid to be talking. “You be quiet, you ain’t well.”

“Valerie got killed,” said Baby Doll, so softly that the words seemed part of the after-rain breeze. “Valerie didn’t have a bad liver. It was her head that got cut off.”

“You’re sick,” said Tony. “Don’t talk creepy.”

“Who’s Valerie, Mistie?” asked the teacher.

“Baby sister Valerie,” said Baby Doll.

“I don’t want to hear it,” said Tony.

Baby Doll rubbed her mouth, her crotch. She said, “Daddy said Valerie got a bad liver ‘cause if we told what happened the social services would put us in jail. In jail for not watching. I was
s’pose
to watch her. She ran away. Her head got cut off. I think the train did it. It was rolled over in the trash.”

“Fuck,” said Tony. She didn’t want to know this shit.

“Oh, Mistie, dear God,” said the teacher softly.

“I forgot,” said Baby Doll. “But not now. I wanna go home.”

“It’s okay, honey,” said the teacher. “I’m here. You’re safe.”

Tony laughed. “You think you can make her safe? Oh, yeah, you got a hell of a record these past days!”

The teacher said nothing. Tony turned to Baby Doll. “Truth, okay?” she prodded. “Why’d the teacher have you in the back of her car? She like to play with you? She
takin
’ you somewhere to play with you?”

Baby Doll frowned, confused.

“To, you know,” said Tony. She pointed at her own crotch, pretended to rub it. “She do that to you?”

Baby Doll shook her head.

“Her husband do that to you?”

Baby Doll shook her head.

“Somebody do that to you? You want to play truth or dare? You gotta tell the truth ‘bout this.”

“Daddy,” said the kid. “Mama didn’t want no more kids.
 
She wouldn’t let him rub her down there no more. He said I should do what Mama wouldn’t do. So to make him happy.”

Tony’s skin prickled. Her head itched, and she dug at it. “He fuck you, didn’t he?”

Baby Doll didn’t seem to know what that meant, and Tony let it go. She stood up, and walked up to the teacher’s tree, around it, and back again, kicked wet leaves. She wrapped herself in her arms, tightly. “Your Mama didn’t stop him?” she asked.

Baby Doll shook her head. “Daddy said don’t tell Mama.”

“Mistie,” said the teacher faintly. “Oh, honey, I thought so.”

“You thought so?” Tony strode up to the teacher and struck her soundly across the mouth. “You thought so and you didn’t tell anybody?”

The teacher lifted her chin. “You want the truth, here it is. I knew about it. Or I suspected. So did most of the school. But no one had made a move to protect Mistie. I decided it was up to me. I was taking her away, I was driving her to Canada. I had her under the quilt so no one would see her. I was rescuing her.”

Tony slapped her again for the piss poor job she’d done at rescuing Baby Doll. Then she straightened and chewed a loose cuticle from her thumb. It tasted like rust. She spit it out. “Why didn’t you tell me right off? I’d believed that more than the other shit you tried to feed me.”

“I was kidnapping Mistie. You know what that means if I’m caught? Taking a child across state lines in a kidnapping? A teacher doing something like that?”

“I wouldn’t have told.”

“How would I have known that? You cut me up, beat me, you kicked me, you tried to drown us in the car.”

“I wouldn’t have told ‘cause that’s probably the best thing a teacher could do, saving a kid.”

“Teachers do a lot of good things, Tony….”

“Most teachers don’t do shit!” Tony let out three loud breaths. Her fists clenched in and out. “They don’t care about nothing! Truth? Okay, while we’re at it. I didn’t try to drown your ass. I rolled the windows down so I could get you out. That’s the truth. You ain’t dead, are you?”

“I think you just decided we were better to you alive than dead. We made a tolerable-looking family unit, the three of us.”

“I don’t kill people.”

“You killed the gasoline man.”

“I did not! Whitey did.”

The teacher caught her breath. Tony counted seven long heartbeats, and then, “You didn’t shoot him?”

“Whitey did. And he wasn’t suppose to have bullets in his gun, but he did. It was an accident.”

The teacher looked away from Tony, and stared out through the forest in the direction of the cattle field and the barn. Tony had stared out that way for more than an hour after they’d climbed the fence, while Baby Doll was curled up and the teacher was still passed out. Tony had been sure the farmer and his troops would come after them with hounds and county sheriffs. But the fire had obviously been their primary issue. They’d put it out before much damage was done. The building was still standing. Hell, they hadn’t even called the fire department.