by Larson standards, she asked the question I’d been dreading.
‘Why did you go back to the body?’
I stared at her, stunned, and then my eyes darted to Rudy. His were lowered. He knew I’d think he told her and he hadn’t. Unless he had and they didn’t believe me.
Jenny, limping from a deep gash in her knee, answered.
‘Because it was a hundred times better than being in that house.’
The harshness in her tone shocked me and our friends. I don’t think either Rudy or Gloria knew how bad it was for Jenny until then. In truth, neither did I. Sharp, drunken words were one thing but since when was a cold dead body better than a warm bed? Better company than a real live mother? I swallowed down grit and tried to understand it but I couldn’t.
Gloria put her arm around Jenny, Rudy didn’t say anything, he didn’t have to. He’d spent nights in the Fort on his own when his dad got heated. Better a dirt floor than Bung-Eye’s backhand or belt.
Rudy put his arm around my neck, a friendly headlock. Gloria and Jenny walked in front, entwined, their heads resting together.
They never asked about that night again. Plenty of people did, over and over, rumours sprouted like weeds after the first rain, but between us four, there was nothing more to be said.
We waited in Gloria’s kitchen. One single room bigger than my whole house. Gleaming white and red tiles, like a picnic blanket draped on the walls. Mandy tutted and shook her head at our injuries. Rudy leant against the cabinet holding but not drinking his glass of lemonade. Ice clinked. Condensation beaded and ran. Gloria fretted in the corner, pacing, talking about mess, impatient to tell us her big idea, only to be hushed over and over by Mandy. Jenny sat with Mandy at the table, getting cleaned up while the woman muttered about who did it and why and if Jenny were her daughter, oh you wouldn’t be sniffling over nicks like this if you were my girl, she said. I waited my turn, standing awkwardly in the middle of the tiled floor, like a statue put in the wrong place.
Mandy had all but raised Gloria and the pair had a tense, parent–child relationship the like Gloria never had with her real mother. Mandy was the one telling her to pick up her shoes, clean her teeth, eat her cabbage. Real Mother dressed Gloria in bows and made her twirl. I doubt Gloria’s mother knew a thing about her daughter other than what colour dress best matched her eyes. Mandy didn’t care about any of that. She was ruddy-faced, skin scorched and bloomed from years over a steamer iron, her thin blonde curls made lank from the heat. Her body was a pillow lined with steel. Tree-limb arms, stump legs and hips spread wide from six babies of her own.
Jenny hissed, cried out.
Mandy dropped a chunk of stone onto the table. Red, ferrous streak in the granite. My sister’s blood. My blood.
‘Hush your whining, whey girl, just a scratch,’ Mandy said. Thick, Ozark accent. Straight down from the mountains Mandy came, like an avalanche.
Jenny sat at the kitchen table, leg on the big woman’s lap, while Mandy dabbed and cleaned the cut on Jenny’s knee. Deep. About an inch long. Every time Mandy took a cotton wad to it, took off all that red so the edges of the cut were clear, Jenny’s blood would well up again, spill down her leg, drip onto the floor.
‘You ain’t got no sticky in you,’ Mandy said, talking more to the blood than my sister. ‘Idiot body of yours, needs the sticky to gum all this up and stop the running. Here,’ she handed Jenny a folded-up kitchen towel, ‘hold this against that hole long as you can while I tend your shoulder.’
The mound of cotton wool, clean and white on one side of the table, shrank and transformed into gore. Wool stained red and wet, slapped every time Mandy threw a used piece on the wood. Despite her grumblings, she was gentle. Carefully sluicing away the grit, responding to Jenny’s wincing and yelps. Every time I heard Jenny’s pain it was an electric shock through me, a tiny charge that made me want to leap forward.
‘Lemme see that hole,’ Mandy said, placed her hand over Jenny’s and pried the ruined cloth away from her knee. The old woman smiled. ‘Ah, there it is, the sticky done gummed it up. No more running away with you.’
Jenny smiled along with Mandy’s words, the music in them, so quick and up and down and lulling. Gloria said she’d sung her lullabies as a baby and my insides turned green. I didn’t know any lullabies. Momma wasn’t the singing type, unless it was on a table in Gum’s or humming Patsy Cline in the bath.
Bandaged up, limping but mostly undamaged, Jenny was on her feet. She took the untouched lemonade from Rudy and drew down half the glass.
Then it was my turn with Mandy and her thick, hard hands.
‘You telling who did all this to you chickies?’ she said as I pulled my ripped-up shirt off over my head and sat down.
Gloria stopped pacing and locked eyes with Rudy and Jenny. Then me. A minuscule shake of her head. Mandy was a talker, we all knew, and no one liked a snitch.
‘We were up at Barks,’ Rudy said before I could think of a lie. ‘The cliff side, you know Fisher’s Point? The Evel Knievel twins here got too close to the edge. Scared the shit out of us.’
‘Hush your nasty tongue,’ Mandy snapped, ‘don’t be cussin’ in my ears.’
Rudy met my eyes, winked. If there was anything Mandy hated more than a torn sock she had to darn, it was foul language. Piss, shit, fuck, all would shut her up quicker than a drunk can pop a bottle cap.
Dozens of small cuts and bruises covered my back and shoulders, but none as bad as Jenny’s knee. It took Mandy most of an hour to clean me up. Wet wool, dab dab, then the sting of Bactine. It pulled tears from my eyes and I couldn’t stop it, I tried, but it was tiny spikes all over my body, stabbing, piercing, deep down into my muscles. Be a man, John Royal, I heard Momma’s voice in my head, but it hurt, all kinds of hurt. Each spike was a reminder of the stone that made it, the hand that held the stone, the kid that threw it. Classmates. Friends.
‘You all done, mister man.’ Mandy gathered the soiled wool in one arm and the bowl of red water in the other.
‘Shoo shoo shoo,’ she said until Gloria moved away from the sink. ‘Go on now, go play outside.’
Gloria wasn’t allowed boys in her room. The only place me and Rudy could be with her was outside.
The house was a great whiteboard castle with red shutters and columns at the front pulled straight out of a Roman history book. Gloria said her father had the shutters repainted every year. Nothing like a fresh coat of paint to make you forget the troubles of the past year, he said. Sand them down, paint them over, good as new, it’s like those rain storms never happened.
The house sat in private gardens, surrounded on three sides by thick trees. Rose bushes ringed the front grass. A gazebo in the back. The back lawn was pristine, as if nobody had ever stood on it. Table and chairs on the patio. Pots of plants that had no business growing in this part of the world dotted all over. Going to Gloria’s house was like going on vacation. We’d be brought lemonade. We’d be cooked dinner. Me and Jenny never wanted to leave but Rudy never wanted to stay. He shuffled and fidgeted until we were outside. A bad kid in a good house never quite felt comfortable, he’d say. He always said he was bad. Bad stock, bad blood, bad name. A Buchanan through and through. A name isn’t anything, I told him once at the edge of Big Lake, you can change it like you change your shoes. You can be
