Daniel Woodrell - Winter's Bone

THE BLACK parted enough for a hand to reach through and shove her shoulder a few times, stand her up in her flannel nightie and knee socks and wrap Mamaw’s coat around her. The dream did not tie her boots but turned into a truck ride, a truck ride through a white tunnel in the night, with white puffs dribbling across windshield glass and puddling below the wipers. She could smell Uncle Teardrop even through the veil of sleep. His smell and sounds were there, right there, but she was thinking in a gear so low she did not believe she could be awake until he touched her leg and his fingernail scraped a hurt place. She felt the pang through the pills, saw his face, the whiskey bottle held clenched by his thighs, the paratrooper’s rifle and the sawed-off shotgun sliding on the cracked seat between his side and hers.

He said, “Let’s do it then, girl. Fuck this waitin’ shit. Let’s get out’n poke ’em where they live a little bit’n see what happens.”

Might be she said something, or maybe not, she wasn’t sure, but he kept looking at her and his eyes were burnt spots in a flickering face. He nodded, so must be words had come from her mouth, though what she had agreed to eluded her, puzzled her, until a few possibilities came together as thoughts and scared her. She flinched and sat up a bit more. She rolled the window down and put her sluggish head into the cold wind. Places went past in a white hurry and were gone. She raised the window, faced him and asked, “What’d I just say?”

“Huh?”

“Did I just agree to somethin’ or somethin’?”

“Haw-haw-haw, little girl. Don’t try that smarty shit with me. We’ll be there before long.”

She realized with a start that she could again see from both eyes. The one eye afforded only a slitty sort of keyhole view but helped plenty to steady the scenery. There was not much to see except a wilderness of white, white fallen and white thrashing to ground. At road crossings she’d stare for clues as to where he was taking her. House lights and yard lights were vague daubs of glow. When the truck skidded onto a bridge and tires thumped on raised seams in the surface, she saw the water below. The water ate the flakes as they fell and was visible as a black neck between spread shoulders of white, and she knew that neck of water by sight, knew they’d crossed Big Chinkapin Creek.

She said, “Oh, no. Is this really the right idea?”

“Only one I got.”

“You’re goin’ to Buster Leroy’s house, ain’t you?”

“I already told you that.”

“I didn’t hear you when you said it before.”

“You heard me now.” He raised the whiskey bottle and pushed it toward her, into her hands. “Have a snort’n buck up, girl. I been runnin’ on crank’n hardly no food for fuckin’ days now’n I’m tired of waitin’ around for shit to happen.”

She felt the burn in her throat and chest, then screwed the lid on and laid the bottle on the seat. He drove like the road was three lanes wide yet not quite wide enough. He drove the road from edge to edge and fast. The bottle rolled into her hip and she raised it for another swig at the top of a long hill, a long hill she thought they might well fly off of somewhere between here and the bottom. She closed her eyes and felt the swaying, sliding, heard the brakes heave, the gearshift grunt and Uncle Teardrop’s laughter. She closed her eyes and went away on whiskey and pills, sunk into a shallow willed sleep that quickly deepened, and when her eyes opened again there was a farmhouse and a dog leaping at the window glass her face rested against, his teeth bared and his lips frothy inches from her own.

Teardrop stood on the steps of a wide porch to a stone house and the porch lights were bright. Snowflakes churned all around. The dog ran back to the porch snarling and he kicked it tumbling over shrubs into the snow, so it returned to leap at her face and growl. Somebody in a red T-shirt stood at the door, holding a handgun that he did not point at Uncle Teardrop but did gesture with, move up and down. She guessed Buster Leroy. She guessed… she heard the truck’s tires crush fresh snow but wouldn’t open her eyes, wouldn’t when she heard a car horn honk, a mutt barking, gruesome laughter, wouldn’t until motion ceased and voices sounded near and she saw two women and a man standing by the headlights, talking stuff with Teardrop. Snowflakes gushed across the headlight beams, blowing sideways now with smaller flakes that sounded like summer bugs mashing into the windshield.

The man laughed and made big gestures in the light. The two women pulled their jackets over their hairdos and huddled together. This was the parking lot of a gas station, the one at BB Highway and Heaney Cross Road that was also a market and pawnshop. Ree drifted, then knuckles rapped her window and she lowered the glass. The two women had come close for a look at her face, and she knew the closest of them, Kitty Thurtell, born a Langan, light in her bones and a mighty good mountain-style singer. Kitty said, “Oh, you poor whupped little kid, you—them Hawkfall gals sure ’nough beat the pee-waddy-do out your ass, didn’t they?”

“Feels like it.”

“Looks like it, too.”

The other gal crouched to better see into the truck, and Ree recognized her as a Dolly, Jean Dolly from Bawbee. Jean lowered fogging stout eyeglasses and stared at Ree’s marred cheek and fat lip, her head shaking as she crouched, then raised upright and said, “I once had my own ugly-fuckin’ dustup with them lard-assed bitches. They ganged me the same shitty yellow-bellied way as they done her.”

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…”