West of the Known Page 2

  I swallowed more whiskey’d laudanum. Hey Rosa, I whispered, holding out my free hand.

  No now, Jackie, Rosa said, taking it.

  If you did a bad thing but you didn’t mean to? Cause he was gonna die anyways either way. I pulled till her head went under my chin. But he was alive and then he wasn’t and I did that, I did.

  Jackson no good.

  No, no good, I said.

  You have money? You take and go. Far.

  But I’m no good, I said.

  Open this damn door! Jackson pounded. Listen Rosa, your pussy ain’t worth so much to me that I won’t beat your face off.

  Hush up! I shouted, Shut your mouth! The shaking door stilled. I don’t want you, I said.

  Lavenia, I heard him slide down the door. Hey, don’t be like that.

  I leaned my forearm and head onto the wood. Why? I asked.

  Baby girl, he said, don’t be sore. Not at me. I cain’t.

  Why did you make me? I asked.

  Darlin, those men seen our faces. What we did we had to do in order to save ourselves. That there was self-defense. Sure, it’s a hard lesson, I ain’t gonna falsify that to you.

  But I’m wicked now, I said, feeling a wave of warm roll me over. I slid.

  Hey, I heard him get to his feet, Hey you lemme in there.

  Rosa put her hand over mine where it rested on the lock. The augury of her eyes was not lost on me. As soon as I opened the door, Jackson fell through, then tore after her.

  Jackson don’t, I yanked him by the elbow as he took her by the neck. You—she didn’t do nothing but what I told her to!

  He shook me off but let her go. Go on, get out, he slammed the door and galloped me onto the bed, tackling me from behind and squeezing until I tear’d. I did not drift up and away but instead stayed there in what felt to be the only room for miles and miles around. He spoke into my hair, saying, We’re in this together.

  Jackson, I sniffed and kicked his shin with the back of my heel, Too tight.

  He exhaled and went loose, The fellas are missing you down there.

  No, they ain’t.

  They’re saying they cain’t celebrate without the belle of the Bell’s.

  I rolled to face him, pushing the stubble of his chin into my forehead, Why do you want to make me you?

  Would you rather be a daughter of sin?

  I am a daughter of sin.

  You know what I mean. A . . . Jackson searched his mind, A frail sister.

  I could not help but laugh. He whooped, ducking my punches till he wrestled me off the bed and I got a bloody nose. You hurt? he asked, leaning over the edge.

  Lord, I don’t know, I shrugged in a heap on the floor, sweet asleep but awake. I cain’t feel a thing. Like it’s afternoon in me, I said.

  Jackson glanced over at the laudanum bottle and back-handed me sharp and distant. Don’t you ever do that again, you hear?

  My nose trickled doubly but I said, It doesn’t hurt. I tried to peel Jackson’s hands off his face, Hey it truly truly doesn’t!

  I laughed and he laughed and we went down to the saloon drinking spirits till we vomited our bellies and heads empty.

  * * *

  The next night two deputies walked into the saloon and shot out the lights. In the exchange of dark and flash, a set of hands yanked me down. I’d been drinking while Jackson was with Rosa upstairs. I got out my six-shooter but did not know how to pick a shadow. A man hissed near my head and I crawled with him to the side door.

  Out of the fog of the saloon, Colt stood, catching his breath, saying, There ain’t nothing we can do for Jackson and Sal. If they take them to the jail, we’ll break them out. C’mon.

  No, I said, getting up.

  A couple bystanders that had been gawking at the saloon were now looking to us.

  Lavenia, Colt took me tight by the shoulder, and swayed us like two drunkards into the opposite direction. In the candlelight of passing houses, Colt’s hand, cut by glass, bled down my arm.

  At the end of the alley, Colt turned us to where three horses were on a hitch-rack. We crouched, untying the reins, and tho my horse gave a snort, it did not object to the thievery, but we were not able to ride out of town unmolested. The sheriff and his deputy were waiting and threw us lead. Buckshot found my shoulder, and found Colt, too, who slid like spit down his horse and onto his back, dead.

  * * *

  Hey there Deputy, said Jackson through the bars, How much for a clean sheet of paper and that pen?

  The men outside the jail began shouting louder. The silver-haired sheriff sat at his desk, writing up a report, ignoring us all.

  This un? the deputy stopped his pacing.

  I’ll give you twenty whole dollars, Jackson said. I’ll be real surprised if I make it to trial, so least you could do is honor my last request.

  There were a few scattered thumps on the door.

  Won’t we make it to trial? I asked.

  Well darlin, there’s a mob out there that’s real upset bout me shooting that bank teller and that marshal and that faro dealer and that one fella—what was he? A professor of the occult sciences!

  I laughed. The men kicked at the door. The sheriff checked his Winchester.

  Jackson chuckled, I’m writing against the clock. The windows smashed as if by a flock of birds. Jackson didn’t look up from writing.

  Now sheriff, you won’t let them hurt my baby girl will ya? You gotta preach to them like you was at Judgment Day. Gotta tell them that this young girl here was jest following me, was under a powerful family sway. Deputy, would you kindly give this to her.

  The deputy took the letter.

  The sheriff said, Son, there are about forty men out there with the name of your gang boiling in their blood. By law the two of us must protect you and that child. I jest hope we don’t die in the attempt.

  Thee Dream—

  Dremp’t I was with you, Lav,

  near yur breth so dear.

  I never new no one lik you

  and I wisht you wer near.

  No Angel on earth or Heven,

  could rival your Hart,

  no Deth or distunce can Us part.

  If any shud tell you

  they love you eternully,

  there is no one you tell em

  who Loves you lik Me.

  Fare well! My sister and frend,

  Allso my Bell of Bells,

  Yors I Hope,

  Jackson Bell

  The forty exited the street and entered our cells.

  They dragged Jackson and I into the dogs the stars the cool and the night. Their hands in what hair I had; my hands underbrush-burned and bound together in bailing wire.

  In an abandoned stable somewhere behind the jail, they made Jackson stand on a crate and put the noose hanging from the rafters round his neck. They were holding down the deputy and the sheriff, who looked eyeless cause of the blood, having been beaten over the head.

  I was brought to Jackson and saw the rope round his neck weren’t even clean.

  Hey gal, my brother said, You’re my final request. Now what do you think? Don’t you think I kept my promise to you? You’ll be all right. If you cain’t find Sal, Rosa will take care a you.

  I nodded and the men pulled me back.

  Hey you ain’t crying, are ya? Jackson called out, swallowing against the rope. C’mon, quick—you got any last thing to say to me?

  The men brought me to a crate and tied a noose around my neck.

  What the hell’s going on? Jackson asked.

  You all cannot murder a woman without a fair trial, the sheriff started up.

  Now fellas, it ain’t s’posed to go like this. Listen to the sheriff here— Jackson said and the men walloped him in the belly.

  Lavenia Bell, the men asked, crowding me, What is your final request?

  Sometimes I wish I were just a regular girl, not a whore or an outlaw or playacting a man. I had a father for two years and a mother for three, but I cannot remember what t
hat was like, if they care for you better or hurt you less or if they keep you no matter what it costs them.

  The girl first, the men said.

  I am not afraid, I said. You kept your promise good. Thank you for you.

  Have you no wives, no sisters or daughters? shouted the sheriff.

  I felt the thick of hands on my waist.

  Wait! Don’t y’all see? She would never done nuthin without me not without me—

  The noose tightened.

  The sheriff was struggling to get to his feet, hollering. Boys this will weigh heavy on your souls!

  Hey I’m begging you to listen—look boys, it weren’t her that killed them tellers it was me—only me!

  Up on the crate, it was that hour before sun, when there was no indication of how close I was to a new morning. I waited for the waiting to break, for the dark of the plain in my face to bring me to dust.

  An Excerpt from The Gone Dead

  Billie

  2003

  It is not exactly as she was picturing. The house where her father once lived. But she remembers it or feels like she does. She puts the car back in gear and turns off the main road, bumping down the gravel drive toward it.

  Billie parks and Rufus pops up in the back, his head veering between the driver and passenger seat, nosing her arm. Her hands stretch across the top of the wheel, palms thick and tingling from the long drive. She gets out and opens the back door. The dog bounds to the front porch, sniffs, and pees on the corner of the battered wooden steps.

  “Thanks,” she says as he gallops across the overgrown yard.

  Her father’s house squats above the ground on concrete blocks, its chipped wooden boards holding on for dear life to flaking white paint. There are two front doors and two front windows, a sloping screenless porch, and a rusting tin roof. She takes out the key her uncle sent and unlocks the door on the right, walking into a living room littered with broken chunks of filthy tile and the corpse of a brown carpet. There’s a fireplace on her left with a broken space heater inside and an old Christmas bow hanging off the mantel. The planks of the ceiling are mismatched and one has even fallen halfway loose in the middle of the room, but the doorframes look new and the air is sweet with the smell of fresh cut wood, her uncle’s doing.

  She walks into her father’s bedroom. Or his thirty years ago. In the dust over the mirror above the mantel, she traces the ghost of her face, then walks the circumference of the room, a hand dragging along the wall. What of him is there in the spattered remains of floral wallpaper? Can she absorb it? Is it drawn to her skin?

  The second door in the bedroom takes her into the back of the house, where the light is weak and the ceiling low. This is where she slept when she visited. Her father put the card table on the front porch and set up her cot with the purple-pink sheets. But she would sneak into his bed when she got scared. Even if Daddy wasn’t there.

  A trail of old newspapers and dead crickets leads her into the kitchen. The back wall of the house is in bad shape, buckling like the sides of a sunken ship. There’s a pair of torn curtains in the sink. Looks like her uncle definitely didn’t get around to cleaning. She unlocks the back door and steps onto a small, raised porch without a railing. Rufus is shopping a collection of perished things for something to chew: old tires, a love seat, a broken fan, bloated bits of cardboard used to cover the windows during winter.

  “Rufus, come.”

  He turns and trots into the woods behind the house. Dammit. It was probably unwise to let him off leash.

  “Stay out of the road!” says the woman who hasn’t owned a living thing since a goldfish called Nameles, which took three days to float to the top of its bowl. She was ten and her mother had been studying medieval hunting guides.

  Billie sits on the porch and stretches her legs across the wood, trying to touch her toes. It’s still freezing back home in Philly. The guy at the local gas station said it would get cold tonight. A cold snap he called it. She closes her eyes, turning her face toward the dogged southern sun, almost melting into sleep.

  She had forgotten about this house, figured it’d been knocked down forever ago. But apparently it had been waiting for her: passing from her father to her mother, then to her mother’s mother, and now that Gran has passed, to her. It’s all she owns until she’s done making payments on the car.

  Inside, she rolls up the old carpet, tossing it into the backyard, then she sweeps and wipes down every surface. It gets holy—the scratch of the broom, the T-shirt stuck to the bottom of her back, the raw corners of her fingers beginning to bleed. The rain wakes her from her trance and she goes onto the front porch, where Rufus is gnashing the vines curling off the side of the house. He looks at her, then bounds up the porch steps.

  She bends to stroke his dark wet head. “Am I going to become one of those people who talks too much to their pet?”

  He used to be Gran’s. Billie has gotten this dog, this shack, and five thousand dollars from her grandmother, a woman she barely knew because even after her mother died, she always spent holidays with her mother’s best friend, Jude.

  The dog follows her into the bedroom, where she dries his paws with the towel from the backseat of the car. She tosses it in the corner and strips off her shirt. Nobody will see—two trucks have driven by here in the last three hours. She drags her suitcase to the bedroom closet, the only one in the house. There’s a calendar on the top shelf, the Kennedy brothers dreamed onto a defiantly serene MLK. JFK looks somber and regal, but Robert Kennedy looks so sad he might cry, his eyes an unreal Caribbean blue. She hangs it up on an old nail left in the middle of the living room wall.

  Hurrying before it gets dark, Billie takes a fading trail to the creek that runs through the woods behind the house. Rufus circles her, diving in and out of the brush. At the bank, the muddy water crashes slowly into itself. Behind her, the sun is scarring the sky pink, turning the tops of the trees black.

  Her cousins tried to teach her to fish in this creek. They teased her when she wouldn’t get in because soft things were always gliding by—that and the feel of mud moving between her toes like it was alive. But they always let her tag along, even though she was the baby and everyone said she was spoiled.

  The dog barks from somewhere. “Rufus?” She pulls a handful of treats from her pocket. “Rufus, come!” She waits but he doesn’t reappear. It is dark when she walks back, keeping an eye out for poison ivy, even though she doesn’t remember what it looks like.

  At the house, all of the lights are out. She stops, then walks around to the front. The driveway is empty except for her car. The flat blue fields along the main road are still. She knows she left at least one light on—the porch, the living room, something—and her uncle said he’d be working. The damn dog is nowhere to be seen. She slips the keys between her fingers for potential gouging. It could be nothing. Maybe the wiring is so old that a fuse blew.

  She kicks the mud off the heels of her combat boots and rushes up the porch, unlocking the door and throwing it open so that it slams the wall behind. She waits. Nothing in the night but frogs and ghosts. Her ghosts. She walks through the house deliberately measured, snapping on every light.

  In the bedroom, her wallet is still on top of the sweatpants she wore to clean the house. So, if someone did come in, they just turned off the lights. Unless she turned off the lights. She must’ve turned off the lights.

  She unzips her suitcase and takes a gun out of a men’s white sock. She checks the safety and tucks it in the back of her pants. All right, cowboy, that’s pretty uncomfortable. She takes it out and stuffs it back in the sock. She’s being silly. It’s just an old house. Except for temporarily losing the dog to the Delta, everything is fine, right? But she takes the sock into the living room, where she pulls off her boots, putting them on the mantel to dry despite there being no source of heat. The guy at the gas station was right, it’s getting chilly. She grabs a sweatshirt and unfolds the plastic deck chair she brought and sits. Rufus strolls t
hrough the open door.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  He flops down at her feet. She brushes the grass off his back and shuts the door. Something falls outside. Rufus barks, and she jumps. “Jesus! We both need to get used to noises, okay?”

  Half an hour later, wrapped in her sleeping bag, cold but feeling brave, Billie drags the plastic chair onto the porch and sets the gun sock underneath. Rufus follows. “You can only come out if you lie down.” He jumps off the porch. “For fuck’s sake.” He jumps back up. “C’mon, dog, give a girl a break.”

  In the field across the road is what’s left of a barn. One night in southern Utah, she went camping with her mom and Jude in a ghost town. It had been a railroad town until the trains stopped coming through. Its roofless buildings and rusting cars seemed to be waiting for someone to tell them that they could stop holding on, that no one was coming back, that they could give in to that sweet final collapse.

  She’s missed traveling. After her father left them to become a bachelor poet, they moved to London for a year, then New Orleans, then to a shared apartment in Boston while her mother got her degrees, and in between they stayed with Jude in Utah, camped, or slept in the back of their blue pickup truck, the one with the white stripe and bad transmission. Sometimes her mother homeschooled her or sometimes she was enrolled in a school where new friends would say: Is that your mom? She’s so young. She’s so pretty. She doesn’t look like you. And new bullies would say: Is your dad black? Like black was a bad dirty thing. And her mother would say: They’re just jealous. You are beautiful. Like moms do.

  Billie never knew that they were struggling because poor meant hungry and she was never hungry; she didn’t know her beloved bike or clothes came from the Salvation Army. She thought her erudite mother just didn’t believe in cable TV, or the Brownies, or the beauty of Leif Garrett, not that they didn’t have the money. Then finally her mother landed a job as a medievalist in Philly and Billie started at Temple University, and one month into her freshman year they found out what the bleeding meant. Her mother was sick. Work, work now, oh dearly beloved, work all that thou canst. For thou knowest not when thou shalt die, nor what shall happen unto thee after death. Her mother taped these words to the wall above her desk.