I can’t give Tress anything. She won’t accept my clothes, my texts, or my friendship. But I can give her money, folded into a tight square, our skin barely touching as we hand off. The one time I slipped an extra bill in my payment I found it the next morning under my windshield wiper. I know she didn’t drive over, because that truck of Cecil’s doesn’t have a muffler and the whole neighborhood would’ve called the cops on her in the middle of the night for breaking the noise ordinance. She probably walked down out of the hills in the black of night to return twenty dollars, rejecting my charity and keeping her conscience clean.
Twenty bucks for a clean conscience. Sounds nice.
I’ve handed a lot more than that to Tress over the past couple of years. It doesn’t help. But I keep trying. I slip past Brynn into my bathroom, my sexy clown reflection staring me down as I dial. She picks up, blunt and monosyllabic.
“Yeah?”
“You coming to the Allan house?” I ask, realizing my mistake when there’s no immediate response. A friend would ask her that, someone who was going to meet up with her at the party. I’m not a friend; I’m a customer.
“I need a couple forties,” I say quickly. “Maybe some weed?”
Tress’s weed is shit, but I’ll pass it off to Hugh.
There’s a rustling on the other end, like Tress is checking her supply. Then a short answer, quick and concise. “’Kay.”
“See you there,” I say.
But there’s just a click as she hangs up.
Chapter 6
Tress
I need manacles.
Everything else came together pretty quickly and is already tucked into the back of Cecil’s truck. The drill and bit, some masonry tools and Quikrete from back when Cecil tried to make a little patio to put the grill on. We found that grill in the ditch, and the concrete he poured has the imprint of the alligator’s tail in it, because she got out before it dried. She ate a few of our chickens, and we might have never known the electric on her fence had gone out if not for the racket and the flying feathers. I had to lure her back to her little swamp with a side of beef, then spray her off with the garden hose so the concrete didn’t dry in her tail.
And now I’m searching through the lean-to, looking for manacles.
“What a fucking life,” I say, then bite my tongue. For all I know my mom and dad don’t even have that. I’ve asked the questions and done the searching, didn’t get answers or make any discoveries. Hitting brick walls doesn’t feel good physically or metaphorically; I’ve got scars on my knuckles to prove the first, and memories of being sent on my way by well-meaning adults when I asked hard questions about my parents’ disappearance to back up the second. Tonight, I’m going to ask the one person who knows something, the one person that pure human decency has kept me from talking to. I’m done with that. What I’ve got in mind isn’t decent, not by a long shot.
And I need those manacles.
“Cecil!” I call, hoping my voice carries over our acreage. He always says his land is rocky, good-for-nothing shit . . . but there’s a lot of it. And it’s the truth. Usually we just yell if we need something, hollering until the other answers because if we walked around trying to find each other, we’d spend half the day wandering. Cecil’s drinking problem combined with being hard of hearing means that there’s an unfair amount of yelling on my end. Once or twice I’ve found him passed out in the weeds, and sometimes I think he pretends his hearing is worse than it is, especially when what needs to be done is anything resembling work.
“Cecil!” I yell again, in the direction of the back twenty acres. It rolls down to where our summer crop is growing, but there’s also a stream, and he could be fishing. It’s not Cecil that answers me but the low whine of a Weedwacker. I follow the sound past the enclosures, keeping an eye on the cat while I do—he flicks his tail at me, cool and calm—as I make my way toward the front of the trailer. Cecil is out by the road, whacking weeds down around the mailbox.
Figures. That’s the one thing he’ll do with consistency—get the mail.
I gesture for him to turn off the Weedwacker, but he finishes what he started first and I’ve got to duck around the pieces of shredded poison ivy flying through the air. He finally sets the Weedwacker down, and I see that he didn’t load it with a string; Cecil put a circular saw blade on the end. It spins as it slows, individual teeth finally showing themselves as it comes to rest.
“Jesus, Cecil,” I say. “You’ll take your leg off with that.”
He nods, agreeing. “Or the cat’s, she gets it in her head to come after me again.”
“He,” I correct. “The panther is a male.”
“Acts like a woman,” he says, looking over his shoulder at the cages as he spits. “Holds little things against you. Doesn’t forget. Bides her time.”
I’ve been hearing this shit long enough that I figure Grandma might’ve been smiling when she signed her will, despite the cancer eating her alive. I’m willing to bet the little things she held against him were probably larger and more general, like him being a dick and the occasional insufferable—yet mercifully concise—diatribes. I will give him that. Cecil doesn’t have a lot to say, it’s just that all of it is spiteful.
“I need the manacles,” I tell him.
“What’d Rue do?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say quickly, jumping to the orangutan’s defense. “I just need the manacles.”
Cecil’s eyes tighten. The network of lines around the blue eye deepen; the muscles around the ruined one remain slack from where the cat’s claws went in deep, slashing everything to tatters. “You being weird?”
I’ve been living with Cecil since the fifth grade, and the closest we ever get to the talk is when he asks me if I’m “being weird.”
“No, I just need them.” I give him a hard stare then, one that I remember Mom using on Dad when she was done with words and had moved on to something more powerful. They didn’t fight a lot, but when they did and Mom pulled out that look, I knew it was over. So I studied her, mimicked the set jaw, narrowed eyes, cock of the hips, slightly raised eyebrows. The whole posture says, Come at me. But it also says whatever I want it to say, or whatever the person I’m arguing with is scared of.
I imagine when I give this look to Cecil right now it says, There are at least fifteen animal rights violations in our backyard and I can make that very clear, very quickly to very many people, if you don’t tell me where the manacles are. You don’t need to know why I want them.
He grunts and picks up the Weedwacker, the circular blade spinning lazily. “West shed,” is all he says, before jerking it back to life, a cloud of smoke erupting between us, followed by the high whine of the blade slicing through live vines. Poison ivy sprays across my back as I walk away, and I know he did it on purpose.
It’s a pansy-ass, passive-aggressive, cheap move. One that he would deny if I turned around and called him out on it. But I don’t. Instead, I clench my fists and head toward the shed, passing Rue’s cage as I do. She follows along beside me for a second, grabbing the bars and showing me her teeth.