You Only Get Letters from Jail (9 page)

“It's not true,” Ruby said. “Boone won't ever come back. Casper says that Boone is weak and that's why my mom always favored him. Casper says that maybe Boone is queer, you know, and that's why he ran off.” I could hear the sound of metal rubbing metal outside in the wind. “Boone put a lock on the inside of my bedroom door before he left. I don't use it, but Boone told me maybe sometime I should.”

I took three deep breaths of fumes and closed my eyes. All I could see was a dark blank wall and changing shadows and my broken car outside. “If Boone really isn't coming, I guess we'll have to figure something else out tomorrow,” I said. “We can get a tow into town.”

Ruby's hand moved higher on my thigh. “It's been kind of nice to have you and your mom here, though. It's been really good.” Her small bony fingers squeezed at my jeans.

I wanted to tell her that when I was eleven, I heard my parents having sex in the middle of the night, and it was a terrible sound that I will never forget—worse than crying, and empty, and sad. I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard and started throwing our dinner plates against the floor, as hard as I could.

“Maybe we should go check on Thumper,” I said. I stood up and her hand slid from my leg. “It's getting late.”

I waited near the entrance to the garage while Ruby took the flashlight and went to check the rabbits. I stood against the door to block the wind, half of me in the darkness and half of me in the yellow light from above. There were bugs swarming the bulb, and every now and then I could hear one hit the glass with a solid-sounding ping.

When she came back, she was swinging the light and smiling. “There's four,” she said. “Maybe more will come, but right now there's four. Thumper's got them all lined up against her.”

We went back to the house, where everything was dark and quiet, but after being outside our eyes were adjusted and we didn't bother turning on the lights. I thought that I could hear voices somewhere in the back, but Ruby said it was probably Casper's television, which he liked to run late into the night. They had made a bed for my mother in one of the extra rooms, but I didn't try to find her. Ruby brought me blankets for the couch, crocheted afghans and a quilt
that someone had sewn together from pieces of the clothes she had worn as a baby. She took my finger and ran it over the corduroy from her first pair of overalls. She covered the couch with a sheet and spread the blankets out while I sat and watched her and undid the laces on my shoes. When she was finished, I thought she might sit down and keep talking, or maybe I was afraid that she might, and I realized that we were alone and out of the wind with blankets and a place to lie down. Instead she fluffed up a pillow and put it on the makeshift bed, and then she touched my arm gently, almost like my mother would, and told me that she hoped I would sleep well. When she was gone, I slipped off my socks and pulled the covers around me, suddenly conscious that I hadn't brushed my teeth, but too tired to do anything about it.

It was the screaming that woke me up before the sunshine did. At first I was unsure about where I was, the strange smell of the pillow under my head and the heavy bulk of blankets did not belong to me. I sat up and everything clicked back into place, except for the screaming outside, which was high-pitched and very loud.

I walked out the front door and held my arm across my face to block out the too-bright light. My mother was leaning against my car with a mug in her hand. She turned around when the door slammed behind me. “It's about time you decided to get up,” she said. “I thought you were going for one of your noon wake-up calls.”

I stepped off the porch and walked across the driveway. The gravel was sharp and I tried not to put all of my weight on my bare feet. “What's going on?” I said.

When I got closer to my mother, I could see that the mug was chipped and had the name
Susan
written in flowered script across the front. She was wearing a button-down men's shirt that did not belong to her. “Casper says that sometimes this happens.” She pointed the mug in the direction of the garage and I saw that the door was pulled open. Inside, Ruby was crying hard, her face red and smeared, and Casper had a beer in one hand, and with the other hand he was pulling on an end of rope and yelling something about a hammer. Ruby stepped back and I could see a rabbit noosed by its hind legs to the end of a rope that went up toward the dark ceiling of the garage. I could tell it was Thumper. She was trying to kick her back legs free, and every time she did, her body would spin and make the rope jump like a pit bull was giving it a good shake. And when the kicking slowed down, she would open her mouth and scream like nothing I had ever heard before, like a girl, or maybe ten girls, something human and too afraid to feel pain.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “What in the hell is going on?”

My mother sipped at the coffee and shifted her weight back against the car. “I guess she ate her babies, mostly all of them, anyway. Ruby has one of them wrapped in a towel over there, but it won't live past tonight without a mother. Casper says that once a rabbit gets a taste for something like that, it's no good anymore. It'll never be right again.”

“So he's hanging her for it?” I asked. I couldn't take my eyes off the body spinning at the end of the rope, all of her stretched out long while her ears hung down toward the
floor, and her front legs pawed at the air around her head while she screamed.

Suddenly Casper swung something and there was a soft sound that I could not describe, but would probably remember for the rest of my life, and then there was quiet in the yard. Even Ruby's crying had scaled down to something like a whimper between breaths.

“I can't stay here,” I said. “We need to get the car towed and go.”

My mother turned on me then, and she was smiling but there was nothing light in her eyes. “We can't judge what they do here, Sonny. This is farm life, something we know nothing about.”

I looked around at the garage with the tires and car parts and dented sheet-metal sides, and beyond that a wire fence with leaning posts, and then grass and more grass and empty sky that was too blue to consider. “This is not a farm,” I said. “
He
isn't even a mechanic. Do you know that? He can't even fix the car, and no one is coming to help him. Ruby told me.” I turned to walk back to the house but my mother caught my arm and her fingers sank into the place between the muscle and the bone.

“Ruby told you that? I wouldn't believe anything she says if I were you. Casper told me that ever since his wife left him, she's gotten into trouble at school, started telling lies and running around with boys that are almost twice her age. He says it started even before his wife left, all this troublemaking, but now she's out of control and it's all he can do to keep her in line anymore.”

I could see Ruby crying in the garage. She looked as though she was miles away from the age of thirteen. “I don't believe him,” I said. “And I can't believe that you do.”

Her hand tightened on my arm and I knew that when she let go there would be marks. “I like it here, Sonny. I like Casper. I haven't met a man in a long time who makes me laugh and feel good inside. And I'm not in any hurry to lose that feeling. We're gonna stay here awhile and see what happens. So get used to it.” She loosened her grip on my arm and I pulled away from her. She let me go, but when I looked back at her, she was staring at me, trying to swallow me with her eyes.

Casper set a bucket under the swinging rabbit and I saw him take a knife from his back pocket and open it to the longest blade. I turned away from the garage and scanned down the drive toward the road. My mother once had a boyfriend who could play the drums and when he was drinking he'd hit them hard. He used to call it “Jake Brake”—the sound of a semi on a steep grade, and if I closed my eyes I could hear the sound again coming up from my chest in a solid beat. For a minute I lost my sense of direction, but I knew which way I had to turn. The grass was high, but I thought that I could see the black strip of asphalt rising up through the green.

At first I thought maybe it was me, some dark cloud of dying that was hanging over my head, but when Shirley and I sat there on the embankment and I tried to convince her of things before the sun went down, she told me that there was never any rhyme or reason for death coming, and she didn't believe in any god or fate or destiny or bigger plan. Shit happens, she said, and as it was we both figured we'd probably freeze to death once night came, and we were in about the deepest shit there could be.

My father went out for cigarettes and orange juice one Tuesday morning when I was five years old and never came back, and it had been my mother and me together since as long as I could almost remember, except for a hazy image of him tying my shoes, explaining to me again how the rabbit ears go in and out of the hole. My mother burned all the pictures and remnants of him in
the weeks after he left, and there was nothing to anchor me to him.

When I was eight my babysitter was a ten-foot piece of rope knotted around my wrist and the other end tied tight to a leg of the couch. I could watch TV, sleep, get in the refrigerator, have access to two cupboards, and pee in a bucket—the bathroom was twenty-two feet away and we had only one length of rope. By the time I was thirteen my mother had four DUIs and a way of walking slumped over like she was carrying something heavy on her back. She had a boyfriend named Tyler and he had been in and out of “the program” for years—AA, NA, AA again—he went back and forth every time he failed, so she quit vodka and announced that she was off the drink, for me, for Tyler, for the sake of a normal life, but then the plastic bottles of Listerine started showing up around the house in places where they didn't belong—under the couch, behind the TV. It was the original kind, which burns so bad you can't swish it around in your mouth for a full thirty seconds, but she could do more than swish it; she could drain half a liter bottle in a day, empty three in a week, and smelled like medicine but not bad breath. She and Tyler pulled the blinds, drew the curtains, and decided to see whose liver would kick out first. My mother won.

She spent most of a Friday on the bathroom floor, and I called 9-1-1, but by then it was Sunday, and then Tyler said he had a warrant and went out the back door as soon as the flashing lights and sirens came down the gravel road. Uncle Nick was the one who picked me up from the
hospital, my mother's older brother and only next of kin, and he took me back to the trailer to pack a bag and then he drove me four hours north to what he kept calling my
new home
as we went up the interstate, as in
I think you're gonna like your new home
and
We've got a new bed set up for you in your new home
. His was a deep voice of reassurance, but I was whipped and dog-tired and I stared out the passenger window without talking so I could watch the mile markers tick by without counting them.

For the next three weeks I went limp. Uncle Nick drove me places, bought me things, signed me up here and here and here, and I just went with him, stood quietly, filled out forms to the best of my ability:
father's name, date of your last tetanus shot
. I spent two Saturdays sitting on a folding chair in a portable building behind the VFW hall, taking a hunter's safety course—trigger, safety, barrel, butt—and then the test, and then I had a junior hunting license and my Uncle Nick was more proud of me than if I had won an award at school, which I was not attending yet because my mother was not big on organizing or saving things or filing papers, and I didn't have a birth certificate or any proof that I was fifteen and a California resident and really who I said I was. Uncle Nick could smooth that over with Bob, the hunter's safety teacher and Uncle Nick's trout-fishing buddy, but the school couldn't be smoothed over and they put me in a holding pattern until proof could be shown. I couldn't say that I was sorry for the delay, but then I found myself wandering around the house with Uncle Nick's wife, Shirley, home during the day, telling me not to put my feet
on the coffee table, put my cereal bowl in the dishwasher, take a shower, don't watch so much TV—
don't you read?
—and after three weeks of avoiding her and her bird hands that liked to snatch at me and my things, I was in the backseat of the truck, climbing in elevation, facing five days with them in the mountains—or until Uncle Nick and Shirley took their deer—whichever came first.
Bucks
, Uncle Nick reminded me.
Buck hunting—there's a big difference
.

Uncle Nick was a big man, not particularly tall, but with a stomach that hid his belt buckle and rubbed the steering wheel as he drove. He used to smoke, but was determined to quit, so he would put a cigarette in his mouth without lighting it. He would just suck on it, hold it between his fingers, put it back between his lips again. He was a talker—didn't take a break, could hold a conversation about anything, jumped from subject to subject, and covered everything once a subject stuck. Shirley was a clock-watcher and a speed monitor, a passenger-seat driver who told Uncle Nick we weren't making good time, it was taking forever, slow down, you're following too close, you're back too far, you're swerving.

Just past noon we pulled off the freeway and stopped at a chipped and faded burger stand near the two-lane junction between highways and ordered lunch. Shirley was disgusted with the picnic tables because they were splintered and carved up with names and dates and misspelled bad words that told Joey B. to
fuk off
, but we took a seat anyway because Shirley didn't want spills in the truck, so we sat outside in the sunshine eating.