“Why doesn’t matter.”
“Why is the only thing that matters.”
“You don’t make sense. Just lick the fucking boot.”
Tony loosened the laces and flipped her foot, tossing the boot at the teacher. The teacher picked it up, ran her tongue down the bottom without a single hesitation, and threw the boot back.
“Sick!” said Tony. “God, I’d never do that!” The teacher was becoming as creepy as the old, dark barn itself.
“Really?” the teacher asked. “So I’m braver than you?”
“Brave’s nothing to do with it. Stupid is what it is.”
The teacher shrugged, dipped her sweatshirt and dabbed Baby Doll’s neck.
“Truth or dare?” asked the teacher.
Tony hesitated. “Truth again.”
“What happened to you last night?”
“I meant to say dare.”
“No, you didn’t. You said truth.”
Tony shook her head.
“Okay, dare, then,” said the teacher. “Go to the farmhouse at the edge of this field. Sneak in, get yourself invited in, whatever. I need some Tylenol, some rubbing alcohol. A thermometer if they have one.”
A gray tabby cat appeared near the wheelbarrow, it’s glassy eyes reflecting yellow. It sniffed at the straw on the floor near Tony’s feet. “Get out of here,” Tony said. “You got no idea what I do to cats. Psssh!”
The cat scurried off to where it could not be seen.
“Well? Are you going?” asked the teacher.
“I didn’t hear what you said,” said Tony. “Now just shut up for a while.”
“Mistie is really sick. You said dare.”
“Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. So just shut up.”
She scooted off the straw bale to the floor and leaned against the scratchy surface behind her. Little bits of straw bit into her arms and through the Jesus sweatshirt. Jesus, the great protector, she thought. Oh, yeah.
“If you won’t go for the things I need for Mistie, then let me go,” said the teacher.
Tony leapt up, grabbed the ax and slammed the blade into the floor inches from the teacher’s foot. “Shut up!”
The teacher shut up. Tony bound the woman’s hand behind her back with another length of bale string, but left the kid untied. Tony took off her own sweatshirt — screw the teacher, she could do what the teacher did and not care –and rolled it into a pillow-ball, then eased Baby Doll down so her head rested there.
“You ain’t gonna run off, now are you?” Tony asked the child. Baby Doll didn’t seem to hear or understand. She just sighed heavily and whispered something that sounded like, “Bad liver.” She was dreaming. That was good, Tony thought. If you were really, really sick, you didn’t dream. She knew she’d heard that somewhere. If not, she should have because it made sense.
Back against the straw bale, Tony tossed another few blocks of wood into the wheelbarrow. The fire blazed, crackled, and leveled off. Tony kept her gaze on the woman and the kid. She didn’t want to see what might be in those dark corners. Pussy, she told herself, but it didn’t matter. Dark corners could hold things that weren’t good. And she had enough that wasn’t good without adding to the mix.
She heard a cat’s guttural and distant snarl, then only the secret whispers of the dreaming kid and the casual popping of the straw bits in the fire. She scratched her head slowly, as if one wrong move might bring out the devils in the barn.
50
She dreamed.
She was in a tobacco barn. Leroy and DeeWee were there, hanging like tobacco leaves from the rafters, laughing and swinging and pointing at Tony. Tony lay in the straw, unable to move from the tormenting prickles on her naked body. She tipped her chin up; Mam was holding her arms over her head. She looked down; Burton was holding her legs apart. Something wet and hot was leaking from her privates, trickling along the flesh of her inner thighs like hideous slugs.
“What is happening?” she tried to cry out, but it was a baby’s voice that she heard, a babbling garble issuing from her throat.
Mam said, “We’ll have this done, don’t you worry, Angela.”
Burton, who now had a ten-gallon hat perched jauntily atop his dark hair, said, “Got an elm branch for digging. Knife handle just won’t grab good. Gonna get those bastards out, hold still.”
A searing pain. Tony screamed. Above, in the rafters, Leroy and DeeWee, and now Little Joe and Whitey, flicked dried bird poop at each other and said, “Eat this! Dare, dare!”
Tony tried to sit up, to pull her legs together, but Burton said, “No, don’t be such a cow. Hold still.”
Mam said, “Honey, I need a beer. When we’re done here, would you please get me a beer? My throat’s so dry.”
Burton tugged at Tony’s insides. Tony tried to move with the tug, trying to keep her guts from coming out with the dreadful, powerful suction.
“Hold still!” said Burton. Something in Tony popped and gave way. Burton clucked, and smiled, and held up two wet, writhing earthworms the size of pythons. “Look at this,” he said. “Don’t take after you at all. Must be their daddy.”
She bolted awake.
Fuck!
Breaths. Huh, huh, huh, huh.
Blurry eyes. She wiped them with the heel of her hand. Fucking dream. Who invented fucking dreams?
Who the hell thought us such a damn thing?
And she saw the teacher, standing before her with the ax raised above her head, her teeth barred, her lips peeled back, the eyes of Satan himself staring out from the sockets.
51
Mistie heard something, someone, scream, and she tried to open her eyes but they were glued shut. It sounded a little like Mama screaming.
“Valerie!” Mama had screamed and Daddy had said, “Shut your face, you wanna be thrown in prison?”
“Valerie!” Mama had screamed, and Mistie had cried, a higher sound that blended with Mama’s into something like a song. But the screams and the cries were all Mistie recalled, the wailing voices in the kitchen in the apartment in Kentucky.
Daddy had said, “It was a bad liver. We can’t help she had a bad liver.” And he had buried her somewhere where no one could find out it wasn’t a bad liver.
That was all Mistie knew. It was too far away, Kentucky. It was too long ago, Valerie.
The scream came again. Mistie scratched the glue from one eye and looked out in the fire-lit barn where the teacher was standing over the girl, and it was the girl who was screaming.
52
The teacher arced the ax over and down with a grunt, and as the whistling of the dull blade reached Tony’s ears, Tony threw herself backward in a violent tumble, over the sagging straw bale and to the shadowed floor behind. The ax-head bit into the straw, a solid whack that split the top half in two.
“Shit!” Tony rolled to her side, scrambled to her feet. The teacher shook the ax like a rabid dog with a groundhog, and pulled it out of the straw. She lifted it up again, both her sweating torso and the old blade catching firelight briefly. The eyes again, cold and terrible.
“Back off!” screamed Tony.
The teacher walked around the straw bale, her footsteps rhythmic, robot-like. The ax held position over her head. Tony scrabbled back, slipping in the loose straw, her hands going before her face. “No!”
The teacher’s lips opened and closed, speaking something Tony couldn’t hear, and then the ax came down again. Tony flopped to the right and the ax struck dead center of the straw where she’d been. Tony scooted away on her knees, panting, snatching for the ax handle before the teacher could wrench it free of the floor.