Break the Skin (27 page)

What Poke didn’t know, when he told his lie to the police, was that people in town would start coming forward to say they’d always thought there was something odd about that boy, maybe even something dangerous.

Ida Henline said she turned off her bedroom light one night, ready for bed, and she glanced toward the window and saw that boy, that grandson of Curtis Hambrick, with his face pressed to the glass.

I heard this and more, heard it on the lips of folks coming through the Walmart, heard it when Mother brought the stories home from work. Even the preacher, Luther Gibson, was telling tales. Claimed he sometimes found letters in his mailbox, the envelopes open. He didn’t mean to accuse, but one day he’d seen Poke out at the curb, raising and lowering the red flag on that mailbox, and, well, if you put two and two together …

It adds up to four, said Jess Raymond, who, of course, knew his wife was in love with the mailman, Bernard Goad, and had finally worked up the nerve to tell her, All right, then, he’s who you want, well, go on, then, and have him, but don’t ever come back to this house.

What a sad lot, said Rayanne Fines when she came to see whether Mother might want to tack on to her life insurance policy. Talking about Poke like he’d done killed someone.

He might have, the police said, and it looked for a while like they might send him away to one of those boot camps for troubled teens, one of those places where drill sergeants stripped them down to nothing and either left them so mean the next thing they did would be even worse, or put them so low they’d barely be able to lift their heads in public.

That’s when I promised myself to go to the police and tell them
Poke was lying about that fire. I’d own up to it. I’d tell them the whole story. But I let Lester talk me out of it.

“We don’t need that trouble,” he said. “Just let it be.”

So I did, and then Mr. Hambrick begged the police not to send Poke away. He’s not a bad boy, he told them. He just has a hard time fitting in. Mercy, what would happen to him in such a place? Mean breeds mean. Wasn’t no call for that.

The police said Poke would have to check in with a probation officer from time to time. He’d have to stop looking in people’s windows, reading people’s mail. He’d have to walk the straight and narrow. One bad move, and he’d be on a bus to the land of “Sir, yes sir,” and there wouldn’t be a thing Mr. Hambrick could do about it except tell the boy to straighten up and fly right.

Oh, he’d straighten up all right, Mr. Hambrick said. And just like that he put Poke in lockdown. Put him to work as soon as he got home from school. Wouldn’t let him slip off at night. Kept the chores coming for him all through the weekend.

I stepped outside one Saturday and saw him running the rototiller in the garden plot. His white T-shirt had ridden up, and I could see his belly shake with the tiller’s vibration. Back and forth he went, and when he hit something that didn’t give, he had to shut down the tiller and pick up a shovel and dig out a tree root or a brickbat or a rock. He tossed it out into the yard, and then he had to pull on the cord that started the tiller. Sometimes it took a number of tries, yank after yank on that cord, and then one time the tiller toppled over, and Poke sank down on his knees and pounded at the dirt with his fists.

The cornfield between Mother’s house and Mr. Hambrick’s had yet to be plowed. I strode across the ground, and without a word, I helped Poke put the tiller upright. Then I took the shovel from him. He started the tiller and I was there to dig out whatever I needed to so he wouldn’t have to stop and do it himself and then start all over.

My hands were healed, but still tender, so gripping the shovel handle
brought me some pain. I wished I’d thought to grab a pair of Mother’s garden gloves, but I hadn’t, and now I didn’t want to go back for them because I wanted to be there whenever Poke needed me.

So we worked that ground, worked it until the plot was turned over and the earthworms were wriggling on top of the dark brown clay. The sun was bearing down, and I wiped the sweat from my face with the sleeve of my shirt. Mother had bedsheets drying on the clothesline, and a wind came up and made them billow and pop. The air smelled of the dirt and the hyacinths in bloom in front of Mr. Hambrick’s house. Poke cut off the tiller, and I was glad to have the quiet that settled around us. I could hear birds singing in the trees, the faint sound of a baseball game on someone’s radio, and then the clarinet music coming from Rose and Tweet’s.

“You didn’t have to help me,” Poke said. “Didn’t that shovel hurt your hands?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t mind.”

I studied my palms where the newly healed skin was pink and sore to the touch. When I’d worn the gauze, those first days after the fire, I’d imagined that everyone was looking at me and that someone would finally figure out the connection between that fire at Rose and Tweet’s and my burned hands, but no one did, no one except Rose, who came through my checkout line one night and said to me, “What’s the matter, Laney? Get too close to the fire?”

“It was Lester’s stove,” I said, telling the same story I’d told Mother. “You know me. Too stupid for my own good sometimes.”

Rose set her hands on the conveyor belt and leaned in close to me. “You tell whatever story you want, and you let that boy do the same.” She reached over the belt and touched me on my gauzed palm. “You don’t know what kind of trouble you’re getting yourself into.” She gouged a nail through the gauze, dug it into my blistered skin. “No idea,” she said, “but keep going, and you’ll find out.”

In the garden, I recalled the feel of that fingernail gouging me, and I said to Poke, “You want to know why we did it? That fire?”

He kicked some dirt from the tiller’s tines. “You can tell me whatever you want. You know that, Laney. You and me, we’re tight.”

I told him about Rose gouging my hand that night at the Walmart, and then I added the story of what she’d said in the waiting room at the clinic. As much as it embarrassed me to say it, I told him that she’d announced as big as you please that—here I had to stop a moment and gather my breath; I had to look away, back toward Mother’s house, so I wouldn’t be looking at Poke when I said it—well, there was only one way to do this and that was to come right out and say the ugly thing, to tell him that the folks in that waiting room heard that the two of us were sleeping together.

For a good while, he didn’t say anything. Then in a shy voice he said, “No one would ever believe that. Honest, Laney, even if I was your age, there’s no way you’d ever want me. I’m nothing like Lester.”

I reached out and took his hand. It was caked with dirt and it was too big a hand for a boy his age. It was hard to hold on to, but I did it, anyway, and I told him he had a good heart, and if he were older, well, then, maybe, and I saw a flicker of smile around his lips, and he looked at me dead-on, and he said, “She shouldn’t have hurt you like that. Shouldn’t have hurt us.”

I smiled. “I guess she still needs to learn her lesson.”

“I can help.”

I wouldn’t for the life of me let him fall deeper into our mess, wouldn’t let him end up with a hard edge to his heart like the one I felt coming on mine. I swore that then. “No,” I told him. “You stay out of this. You’re in enough trouble.”

“But, Laney—”

“I said no.”

A FEW DAYS LATER
, Delilah called to say someone had broken into her trailer and left a mess.

“Rose,” she said.

I saw the inverted pentagram drawn on the bathroom mirror, and then Lester came home and found the same pentagrams spray-painted on his house.

When a car came up behind me on the highway and nearly blinded me with its high beams, I got spooked. Delilah said I could have been killed. That’s when I decided, like I told the police. That’s when I gathered her and Lester one night in her trailer, and I scratched Rose’s name into a black candle and set it to burn. I called the evil spirits forth, and we watched the candle wax drip and dissolve Rose’s name. The fluorescent light above the sink came on, and that spooked us.

Delilah said Rose had put a death hex on all of us, a curse to last until the one who spun it was dead, and I didn’t say a word to dispute what she claimed. I let her believe it. I let Lester believe it, too, a man who already had his demons from the war and didn’t deserve any more heartache in his life. I did all that, and it shames me to own up to it now.

“I want us to be happy,” I told him when we were finally alone that night. “You and me. I want us to be happy a long, long time.”

Did I mean it? I’m not sure. I only know at the time, I needed him by me, so I said what I did, not a thought in my head that this might be the thing that would convince him that it was necessary to take a stand so he and I could be safe to plan a life together.

In time Delilah would show him that .38, and he’d say we needed a silencer. We drove out into the country and tried firing that pistol into a milk jug and a pillow to see if we could kill Rose that way without anyone hearing the shots.

Then we got spooked. We called the whole thing off, said we’d been crazy to even think of such a thing, and we swore ourselves to silence.

“Laney, you’re the angel on my shoulder,” Delilah told me, and I believed her.

The Earth was turning toward May. Soon we’d have the long, sunny days of summer. We’d put our revenge scheme behind us and we’d wait
for the days to pass until it’d seem like it wasn’t us who’d thought it up, but three other people—crazy people we didn’t know at all.

But for a time, I gave Delilah this gift. I let her believe that if we killed Rose MacAdow, then everything in our lives would be good and right and beautiful forever.

MISS BABY

I
meant to make the call. I meant to do the thing that would save my brother, no matter what it cost. Then Lester Stipp looked at me. He called me Baby like we’d been together for years. Said it like a prayer, and I felt everything I knew was right fly out the window.

“Miss Baby,” Emma said. “I’m so sorry everything’s gone wrong.”

“Baby?” Lester said again. He was Lester to me now, not Donnie, but he was still the same man who’d turned my life around, who’d come to me with love.

I put my finger to his lips. “Shh,” I said. Then I took him by the hand and lifted him from the couch. I led him out into the night, and we walked up the street, away from Emma’s house, away from my own house, where the bottles clinked together on the branches of the mimosa tree. We walked deeper into the dark, and I tried not to think about the fact that Pablo was there at Emma’s waiting for me to do the right thing.

Lester and I walked all the way to my shop, neither of us saying a word, and when we were there, inside, I didn’t switch on a light. We were shadows, barely visible at all.

Then I told him. I said, “The police are looking for you. I saw it on the TV.”

I don’t know what look came over his face. Maybe I hadn’t turned on the light because I didn’t want to see, didn’t want any evidence that what the TV said was true.

“What in the world?” he said, and I could hear the confusion in his voice. “Baby?”

“They’ve arrested a girl in Illinois. A skinny little girl with a mess of curly hair.”

I reached out for his hand, but I couldn’t find it in the dark. “Laney,” he said in a whisper, and I felt my heart break.

“You remember her?”

“I remember.”

“What else?”

He wouldn’t answer. I let the seconds tick by. “Lester,” I said. “Lester Stipp. Did you kill someone?”

“No, Baby,” he said, turning on a light. “Not me. Not in a million years.” He took me by my shoulders. He looked me in the eye. “But I’ve got to go back.”

I knew he would because I believed he was a stand-up sort of man, and once he knew that girl was in trouble with the law, he’d do what he could to help her. What’s more, I felt certain he’d never meant to hurt me. He hadn’t played me for a fool. He’d truly forgotten his old life, and he’d let me make this new one for him.

“We could go to the police,” I said. “Right now. We could make things right.”

He took a long breath, and I was afraid of what he’d say. “I’ve got to go back for Laney.”

Lordy Magordy, I could barely get a breath, feeling the life we’d managed to build slipping away. It was so quiet there in my shop. We found each other’s hand, and we held on. “Do you still love her?” I asked.

“I remember her,” he said. “I remember what we lived through.”

“That counts for something, I expect.”

He put his arms around me. He pulled me close. “You took care of me, Baby. You found me when I was lost. That counts for something, too.”

I felt my hope rise. “I’ll go with you. I’ll drive you back to Illinois in my car, and I’ll stand by you no matter what.”

“No, that wouldn’t be right. This is about me and Laney. She’s in trouble, and you’re not a part of that. You’ve got troubles enough of your own. I just don’t know how I’m going to do it. I don’t have a car, Baby, and I don’t have much money.”

A crazy thought came to me. “I’ll give you the keys to my car. I’ll even give you money out of the till. If you’ve got my car—if you owe me money—you’ll have to come back.”

“I can’t promise, Baby. I really can’t.”

“Then you’ve got to do one thing for me.”

“Whatever you say.”

“You’ve got to let me shoot you. Give you a tat. Something to take with you, the rest of your life.”

I gave him money. I gave him my car keys. Then I put him in the chair, and I took my time with that tat. I put it on his wrist, so every time that girl, that Laney, reached for his hand, she’d see it. I put it there in bold letters—Miss Baby—so each time he saw it, he’d have my name to remind him, and if the years went on and I never saw him again, at least I’d know that from time to time he’d think of me. He’d see that command, Miss Baby, and he would—I convinced myself it was true. He’d miss me and maybe, just maybe, he’d come back.

“It really doesn’t hurt,” he said. “Not as much as you’d think.”

I wanted to tell him it was killing me. I said as much with the loving way I bandaged him, with the way I kissed the back of his hand. I told him how long to keep the bandage on. “Don’t peel it back,” I told him. “No matter how bad you want to get a peek.”