Mom rocked in warmth beside the potbelly, touching her hands to her hair, and did not seem to have heard. She stared across the kitchen toward the television, squinted past her two sons and cocked her head sideways.
“Wonder where’d he get that armor from?”
10
COYOTES HOWLED past dawn, howled from far crags and ridges and down the valley to the end of the rut road where the school bus stopped. Ree, Sonny, and Harold stood next to the county blacktop that led everywhere, beside white levees the plows had built with scraped-aside snow. The morning was clear but bone-cracking cold, and maybe the weather had kept those coyotes from doing what had to be done in the night so they carried on into the day. Wild crooning yips and moans beneath a sun that warmed nothing. Ree kept the boys huddled close together, watched the breath spewing from their mouths like those little clouds that carried words of thought in cartoons. Harold’s cloud might say, “Hope they don’t eat people much.” And Sonny’s, “Got’ny more of that syrup?”
The Junction School sat six miles distant, next to the main road that led to West Table. The bus was like a big bus but cut short, not half the size. It was yellow with black warnings painted front and back and carried maybe a dozen or a few more kids each day. It stopped at rut roads, skinny rock lanes, certain open spaces between trees. A lot of the kids were cousins to some vague degree, but that didn’t keep them from roughhousing, name-calling, and all the rest. A couple times a week it seemed the bus ride got out of control and Mr. Egan would pull over and swat somebody.
Harold said, “Could be we should set food out, Ree.”
“For them coyotes? Nah. Don’t fret. Not much chance they’ll eat you.”
“Wouldn’t be no chance if we set food out.”
Sonny said, “Just shoot ’em. They come sniffin’ close, just shoot ’em ’tween the eyes.”
“But they look like dogs,” Harold said. “Dogs are okay by me even if they’re hungry.”
Ree said, “Settin’ out food’ll draw ’em close—that’s likely how they’ll come too close and get shot, Harold. Don’t set no goddam food out. It looks like you’re doin’ nice, but you ain’t. You’re just bringin’ ’em into range, is all.”
“But you can hear how hungry they are.”
The bus broke the horizon above the next ridge and rolled downhill toward them faster on the blacktop than looked safe. Mr. Egan stopped beside them, flipped the door open, said, “Quick. Quick.”
The boys stepped up and got on and Ree followed.
“Can I ride today?”
Mr. Egan was about fifty years old, a settling heap of flesh with extra chins loose below heavy gray face stubble and thin pale hair. He had a bad leg, a leg he had to drag, and when asked about it he’d say, “If ol’ Four-Eyes Orrick ever up’n asks you to go jackin’ deer with him, don’t go.”He smiled at Ree and pulled the door closed.
“Startin’ back to school?”
“Nope. I could just use a ride.”
“Okey-doke. I miss havin’ you on here.”
“You do?”
“Yup. Damn near quit drivin’ when you quit ridin’.”
“Applesauce.”
“No applesauce, princess. There just about ain’t no sunshine when you’re gone.”
Ree sat behind Mr. Egan. She grinned at the boys across the aisle. She pointed a finger at her head and made circles near her ear. The bus lunged along the blacktop at a good clip. She said, “Are you hopin’ to get in my britches, man?”
“Don’t be disgustin’, Ree.”
“Oh. Kind of sorry to hear you say it all final that way.”
“I’ve hauled you since you were six years old.” The bus rushed past the forest so fast the woods seemed to be streaming. The long morning shadows from the tall trees spoked the light to spin vision from dark to bright, dark to bright, dazzling the eyes on the bus. “I’m a happily divorced man with a shaky pump. Don’t tease me all around tryin’ to mix me up.”
“Okay, but thanks, though.”
“Well, princess, I know damn well how just about everywhere is too far to walk to from out here.”
The school area consisted of two buildings and both resembled automobile-repair garages of a giant sort, prefab metal sheds divided into several classrooms and offices. The larger shed was the Junction School, painted off-white with a black roof, and it held the grades below high school. The Rathlin Valley High School sat across the schoolyard, with its own parking lot, and had russet walls with a white roof. The sports name for all grades was the Fighting Bobcats, and a large picture of several toothy cats with extended claws raking red slashes into a blue sky was painted on a billboard set beside the blacktop. The bus stopped next to the other buses just past the billboard.
Ree said, “Don’t fight if you can help it. But if one of you gets whipped by somebody both of you best come home bloody, understand?”
Ree crossed the schoolyard snow toward the scraped hard road that led north. She saw pregnant girls she knew huddled by their special side entrance holding textbooks and bumping bellies. She saw boys she knew sharing smoke, crouched beside their pickup trucks. She saw lovers she knew kissing back and forth with enough wet kisses to hold each sated and faithful until the lunch hour. She saw teachers she knew watching with sad eyes as she left the schoolyard alone to stand beside the north road with her thumb out. She waved once to Mrs. Prothero and Mr. Feltz, but wouldn’t look toward the school again.
The landscape of freeze framed her so pitifully that she had a lift within minutes. A Schwan’s food delivery truck stopped for her, and the driver said several times he wasn’t supposed to give rides but, jeez, that wind, that wind sort of blows the rules away, don’t it? He carried her past the ramshackle wide spots of Bawbee, Heaney Cross and Chaunk, past the turn to Haslam Springs, and on to the y-fork above Hawkfall. His route and hers split there, and Ree climbed down and watched the truck drive away north.
The Hawkfall road had not been plowed below the crest. Ree came down the great steep hill, walking in the lone set of swerving wheel ruts pressed into the snow. The houses of the village sat in the bottomland and perched low or high on surrounding slopes and ridges. The new part of Hawkfall was old to most folks, but the old part of Hawkfall seemed ancient and a creepy sort of sacred. The old and new places had mainly been made of Ozark stone. The walls of the old places had been pulled apart, the stones torn asunder and tossed furiously about the meadow during the bitter reckoning of long ago. The stones had ever since been left lay where they fell and now raised scattered white humps across three acres. The new places had smoke churning from chimneys and footprints in their yards.
Keening blue wind was bringing weather back into the sky, dark clouds gathering at the edge of sight, carrying frosty wet for later. A fat brown dog came waddling through tummy-deep snow to investigate Ree, sniffed and barked his findings until three more dogs came springing across the road to bounce around her. She was escorted by frisky mutts as she walked past the meadow of the old fallen walls and into the village. The low stone houses had short front porches and tall skinny windows. Most places still had two front doors in accordance with certain readings of Scripture, one door for men, the other for women, though nobody much used them strictly that way anymore. At the first house a woman came out the man door onto the porch and said, “Who’re you?”
Ree stood on the road in a drift that touched her knees. “My name’s Dolly. I’m a Dolly. Ree Dolly.”
The woman was young, maybe twenty-five, wearing a tie-dyed bathrobe over a gray fuzzy sweater, black jeans, and boots. Her hair was nearly black, cut short and smart-looking, and she wore sort of burly eyeglasses that made smartness look cute on her. A stereo played behind her, a song with guitars strumming jangly and wild horses running free in the words. She said, “I don’t guess I know you.”