Kitty grabbed Jean by the arm, jerked, and said, “Don’t you get too in the habit of sayin’ that out loud that-a-way, hear me?”
“It needs sayin’ out loud.”
“Be careful where you say it, honey.”
“I’ll say the truth any-damn-where I want.”
“Best say it in whispers about them.”
The women turned from the wind and walked backwards toward the gas station. Ree raised the window, leaned her face to the cold glass, and was quickly gone again. She was tucked into a blackness that was made incomplete by little pale lines of consciousness that buzzed around inside the black. When her eyes rolled open she was part of a cloud of some sort, a thick weary cloud that had settled to ground. Windows frosted and glazed, fog low outside the windows. Through the frost and fog there were red and green lights, and she scraped a peephole with a fingernail and saw a beer sign over the door to a cement-block building, an unpainted tavern with no windows or name but for the beer sign. Ree knew it as Ronnie Vaughn’s place, and it probably had a proper name but she could not bring it to mind. Five or six vehicles were in the lot alongside the truck.
She was shivering, sniffling, and reached for the whiskey bottle. She drank and burped, then pushed the door open and stepped into the murmuring, fluttering weather. She pulled Mamaw’s coat together over her flannel nightie and shuffled in untied boots to the tavern. As she stepped inside eight or ten bleary men looked her way. The kind of clodhopper music she couldn’t stomach brayed from a garish jukebox and two mussed women standing far apart danced in wet boots. Teardrop glanced from the end of the bar, saw Ree, and pointed. He said to the bartender, “There she is now.”
“She don’t look all that terrible bad, man.”
“If you saw the rest of her, she would.”
Ree stood there, stoned sleepy and childlike, with Mamaw’s coat fallen open to reveal her little flannel nightie and bruised shanks.
“That girl oughtn’t be let in here, Teardrop. I mean, it ain’t gonna be three full minutes before one of these drunk peckerwoods takes a shine to her’n…”
The heated room of close withered air made Ree swoon. It was like all the air had been breathed many times before until shriveled and stinky from the mouths of chain-smoking drunks. She started to sit on a plastic chair but felt overcome by the place, the odors, the lights, that music, and she spun about instead and pushed outside again. The wind made her skin smart and she sat in the truck, leaned to the window, closed her eyes.
The truck started soon and Teardrop said, “Shit, girl, even lookin’ beat up I could’ve married you off to three fellers in there. Interested?”
“I think I might puke.”
“That’s how I told ’em you’d be.”
“Man—I’m gonna puke.”
Teardrop drove onto the road invisible beneath stacking snow, goosed the truck to a jaunty pace. He glanced her way, said, “Upchuck out the fuckin’ window, then. As much as you can, anyhow.”
She thrust her head into the cold and broadcast the hot mush of old swallowed food toward the snowbanks. But wind turned the hot mush pouring from her mouth back onto the side of the truck and splats of puke melded to the fender. She hung her head out the window until her cheeks could not be felt and water drawn from her eyes thickened in her lashes. She pulled inside, raised the glass, let her head sag and eyes close. She said, “I ain’t lookin’ to marry.”
Teardrop abruptly skidded the truck to a stop in the middle of the fluffed white road. He stared into the rearview mirror while his thumbs tapped a short flourish of rhythm against the steering wheel. He drummed with his thumbs, looking in the mirror toward the beer sign lights behind him until he said, “I just don’t think I like the way he said somethin’.”
Teardrop clanged the truck into reverse and it whined as he pushed on the gas. He aimed for his own wheel ruts going backwards but twisted all over the road. He was going a bit fast for the turn into the tavern lot, so he just stopped where he was and got out, leaving the door flung open. He grabbed an ax from the truck bed, then walked through a border of drifts to the line of vehicles parked in the lot. They were all obscured by snow, and he walked along the line past two trucks and one car until he came to a certain large sedan. He cleared a hole and looked inside but seemed unsure. He then leaned across the hood and pulled the snow away with big sweeps of his arms, pulled until the front end was swept clear enough. He stood back, studied the grille and hood ornament, then raised the ax and crunched a hole through the front windshield. Snow sagged and sank inside the hole with the ruined glass. He hit the windshield again to speed the sinking, then casually returned to the truck, pitched the ax thudding into the bed. He got behind the wheel and said, “Sassy. Sort of sassy-soundin’.”
Ree saw the tavern door open, and one, two, then three men stepped outside into the snow and watched as Teardrop drove away. She thought they might blast a few deer slugs or something toward Teardrop’s truck, but these men made no gestures, yelled no words they wouldn’t want heard. She faced backwards, watching them until they fell from sight. She turned forward, opened the bottle, had a quick drink.
“Can we go home? It’s fuckin’ cold out here, man.”
“Those pills of mine Victoria gave you was what used to knock me off the mountaintop to sleep whenever I’ve been too far high too long like this.”
“I didn’t bring none.”
“Can’t catch no sleep by myself when I’ve clumb this high. Whiskey works, too, but slower.”
“There’s a few left at home, man.”
The snowfall had nearly tuckered out but the wind remained brisk. They met three moving vehicles in ten minutes, and Ree spotted the yellow lights of a snowplow shoving along the main route distant in the valley. Teardrop left known roads and turned down little woodsy lanes Ree’d never seen before, spun tires up mounds and slid around curves. They made the first tracks everywhere. He finally turned at a flat white space between leaning rock columns, pulled past the columns a few feet and parked. It was an abandoned family cemetery on the back side of somebody’s farm and headstones dressed with snow were lit by the high beams.
Teardrop said, “There’s always been favorite places.”
The headstones were the old sort that turned gray-green with time and often split in cold weather. They split at sharp angles, or fell apart in shards that were scattered by decades. More had fallen than stood. Ree stepped out of the truck to follow Teardrop’s footsteps wending among the graves. Passing years had not rubbed the names to blank space on all the headstones and the name Dolly was in big letters on so many that Ree’s skin spooked.
“Where the hell have we got to?”
Teardrop changed directions rapidly, stomping through the snow, first this way, then that, and she followed him, drunk in flopping boots. He stopped, held a hand to his ear, said, “This is where… I shouldn’t say where this is.”
“What’re we doin’?”
“Lookin’ for humps that ain’t settled.” He scanned the graveyard, his breath puffing hard from his mouth and flying toward the treetops. He crouched beside a headstone, held a flaring match to a cigarette, then blew smoke across the nearest name. He patted the stone, slid his fingers over the remaining letters, said, “It’s a lonely ol’ spot—that’s what makes it a favorite place.”
“You sayin’…”
“It’s been done, girl.”
She stumbled backwards, watching as his fingers tenderly traced the letters above the grave. She turned and felt a powerful need to run, run to the truck or farther, but her loose boots slipped from her feet and flew. She had to calm down in wet knee socks and hunt them in the snow. She carried the boots to the truck, got inside, and laced them tight, fashioned snug bows. She sat straight and stiff, raised the whiskey, poured.