Dark River Road (38 page)

His shouts brought Dempsey out of the house, and he stood on his front porch watching as they ran past, Shadow way ahead and Chantry trying to keep up on the side of the road where the gravel didn’t reach. Dempsey added his shouts, but it sounded more like he was cheering them on than trying to stop the dog.

Chantry cussed under his breath. He’d stopped expecting anything from Shadow. That was obviously a mistake. Now the dog did what he wanted. Okay, once he got him back, training would resume.

It took nearly an hour. Shadow had treed the big yellow tomcat that Tansy had adopted, and it hunched on a tree branch watching the dog below with an air of bored indifference.

“A cat?” Chantry muttered, grabbing Shadow’s collar. His feet were cut, he was winded, and mud splattered his Levi’s. “I’m not impressed. Maybe it’s time to put you back to work.”

Shadow’s tongue hung out one side of his open jaws and his eyes gleamed. He didn’t seem at all abashed. But the chase had taken all his energy, and he flopped down on the ground and didn’t seem inclined to move at all. Chantry stared down at him. Carrying an eighty pound dog back to the house held no allure. He squatted beside him, stroked a soft floppy ear, and weighed his options.

Finally, because he’d be out there all day if he didn’t, he ended up hefting Shadow up in his arms and trudging back home. Dempsey still sat out on his porch, and when he saw them, he laughed.

“Mornin’ to you, Chantry. Taken up runnin’?”

“Not by choice.”

“Maybe that dog’s tryin’ to tell you somethin’.”

“Yeah, looks like.” Chantry kept going, and when he got to the house he took the water hose first to Shadow, then to his feet. He put Shadow in the pen, where the dog settled quite happily in front of the dog house, and went into the house.

Rainey sat at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in one hand. It was the first time he’d been alone with him since Beau and Rafe were arrested, and Chantry skirted the table and headed for the hallway. If Rainey was up this early, he wouldn’t be in a good mood.

“You gonna leave this damn mess on the floor?” Rainey snarled.

Chantry kept going. “I’ll come back and clean it up in a minute.”

“Hell no, you won’t. Get back here and clean it up now.”

He came to a halt, tension thumping in his belly. Not now. He didn’t want a confrontation now, not when he was still winded from lugging eighty pounds of Catahoula well over a mile. He turned to look at Rainey, mouth tight.

“Fine. But my feet are muddy. I’ll just get the floor dirty again if I try to clean it now.”

Rainey stood up. His shirt was open over his bare chest, his pants unbuttoned, a couple of days beard darkened his jaw. Hell looked out from his eyes.

“Always got a smart mouth, gotta argue with me ev’ry time I tell you to do somethin’. It ain’t changed since the first day I seen you.”

He didn’t remember that, but he didn’t doubt it either. It’d probably been hate at first sight on both their sides. He’d resent anyone who tried to take away his mama, and Rainey resented the constant reminder of Chantry’s father. He must have known he could never measure up, just like he’d said. Remembering that made it a little easier. He sucked in a deep breath and swallowed his pride.

“Yessir. I’ll clean it now.”

He got a bucket and a mop, squirted some cleaning stuff in water, and set to work on the floor. Like he’d told Rainey, he left his own muddy prints on it even when he backed toward the hallway. Finally, he managed to get the mud up without leaving more, and stood in the doorway looking in at Rainey, who’d sat back down and hadn’t moved from his chair at the kitchen table the entire time.

“Is that better?”

Rainey’s eyes narrowed. Then he stuck out his foot and kicked over the bucket so that dirty water ran all over the cleaned floor. “Naw, that ain’t better. Get it clean this time.”

He looked down at the mess. “No. You want it clean, you do it.”

Rainey stood back up. “Oh, you’ll do it, boy. Or I’ll wipe the floor with your ass.”

It was obvious he wanted a fight. With Mama gone, he figured he’d have free rein. And he would if Chantry let him. In the space of a few seconds he thought about how much he hated him, then about how close they were to getting away. Mama intended to leave Rainey, he just knew she did. If he could only keep his temper, it wouldn’t make things worse. He clamped his mouth shut and set to work again with the mop and a clean bucket of water.

He was sweating when he got through despite the cool air coming in through the screened door. Rainey looked smug, watching him while he drank another cup of coffee. Like he’d won at last. Like he’d got Chantry where he wanted him. He told himself that it didn’t matter. It was just Rainey, and what he thought didn’t count anyway.

“Miss that little yellow gal much? Bet you do,” Rainey said softly as Chantry lifted the bucket of dirty water to dump it outside. “Used to meet her all the time over at the Hamburger Shack, didn’t ya? Yeah, it got back. Heard it down at the Tap Room, how she’s meetin’ up with some skinny white boy all the time. Knew it was you. Thought you was so smart goin’ all the way over to the county line to meet your little nigger gal, but you wasn’t so smart after all.”

Chantry looked up at him. “Don’t ever use that word again. Never.”

“What word—oh, you mean
that
word? You don’t like me calling her a nig—”

Chantry hit him with the wet end of the mop, slapping it across his face, too mad to think about anything but how much he hated him and how much he hated that word. It wasn’t just the word but the history of it, what it meant to thousands of people who’d lived and died before he was ever born, and what it meant to those he knew. It was a hateful word meant to hurt, just as powerful as a bullet sometimes. Wars had started with words like that one, and war started with it now.

They fought like two dogs, no holds barred, each set on tearing the other one apart. Rage lent him a reserve of strength, and hatred made Rainey bent on destruction, too. Neither of them would have quit until the other was down or dead or both.

Chantry never knew quite how it happened, but suddenly Mama was there, flinging open the screened door and grabbing for him, her voice raised like he’d never heard it before as she demanded that they stop this instant. He hesitated, let her push him aside, saw her turn to Rainey. It was over so quick, the floor slick, Rainey shouting and giving Mama a hard shove that sent her flying backward, and then she just lay there on the kitchen floor so still, not moving at all, while Mikey watched from the door with eyes wide and mouth hanging open.

Then he looked up at Rainey and Chantry, who stood immobile, frozen in shock, and his voice was clear as doom as he said, “Papa, God’s gonna burn you in hell for that.”

Beside him, Dempsey stirred, made some kind of sound like a moan or a prayer, and he glanced at him before he saw that he was looking down the hallway. Chantry turned as one of the doctors came into the waiting room and shut the door, blood on his white coat, a look on his face that made the world tilt.

“Lord Jesus,” Dempsey whispered even before the doctor shook his head and said he was sorry.

“There was nothing we could do. The injury was too severe. Massive head trauma. She’s gone.”

Somehow Chantry was standing up but he didn’t remember doing it, and he had the doctor by the front of his coat, a fist tangled in the cotton, shoving him backward and up against the ugly green tiles. People were grabbing at him, trying to get him to turn loose but he kept shaking him, telling him so fiercely to take it back that it should have changed it all. It should have but it didn’t. He couldn’t make him take it back, couldn’t make it not be true.

It was Dempsey who finally pried his hands loose from the doctor, half-dragging him away while he said things in his ear, words that made no sense. “Chantry boy, your mama wouldn’t want this, wouldn’t want you to take on so. Please son, listen to me, listen to ole Dempsey. I ain’t never lied to you, have I? Have I? This won’t bring her back. Ain’t nothin’ you can do that will bring her back and you got to let go. I know it don’t make no sense, a terrible accident like this, but sometimes there just ain’t nothin’ we can do when it happens.”

Panting, each breath a harsh sound like a sob even though his eyes were dry, he looked past Dempsey to where Rainey stood as if frozen to the spot, staring at him with white-rimmed eyes like pale glass marbles. Dempsey had caught him around the middle and held him in his arms, keeping him from moving, his flannel shirt rough against Chantry’s bare skin. He could feel the wiry strength in the old man’s arms, hear the rough pain in his voice, the pleas for understanding, but it just couldn’t get past the wildness in him, the pain so strong and fierce and hot he didn’t think he’d survive it.

One thought kept repeating over and over in his head:
It was no accident
.

Maybe he said it out loud. Rainey started toward him, mouth flattening into a straight line like he was mad but it wasn’t anger that made his eyes so wide and those white lines go deep on each side of his mouth.

“Let me talk to him,” Rainey said, and sounded hoarse as if he’d been shouting.

Dempsey’s arms tightened. “This probably ain’t the best time.”

Rainey ignored him. “He’ll talk to me,” he said, eyes boring into Chantry so hard and deep that somehow that got through when so little else had. He was scared shitless, and Chantry knew it. He recognized it. And he knew why.

“Fuck you,” he got out, and heard one of the nurses who’d rushed to the doctor’s side call him a little savage before someone shushed her. He narrowed his eyes at Rainey.

“Chantry—you know we gotta talk.”

Talk, when it hurt to even breathe
 . . .
after a minute, he jerked his head. “Fine.”

Dempsey let go of him. “You sure, son?”

“Yeah. It’s okay.” He looked at Rainey. “I’ll hear him out.”

They went into the chapel just off the waiting room, a carpeted room with an altar at the front, a cross on the wall, and Bibles on the two tables set at each end of a long sofa. Soft lights burned, and a plastic plant gathered dust. Rainey shut the door and looked at him.

“You know I’d never hurt your mama on purpose. It was an accident.”

“You shoved her.” He said it flatly. “You meant to do it.”

Rainey’s face went white. “Shove her, maybe, but never hurt her. I’d never hurt her, not like that.”

“Bullshit.”

Rainey got a cunning look in his eyes. “All right. Go ahead and tell the cops that. See what happens when you do. You ain’t got no mama now, no daddy. Just me.”

“Is that supposed to change my mind?”

“Look at it this way. If I go to jail, you and Mikey go to foster care. That dog? He’ll most like end up at the pound.”

Foster care. Jesus. A fleeting image of Mikey in some stranger’s home flashed in front of him.

“Yeah,” Rainey said, sensing weakness, “they’ll split you two up, send you one way and him another, and then who’s gonna look out for him? How’s he ever gonna get his legs fixed like your mama wanted?”

Fiercely, “Don’t.”

“Keep your mouth shut, and you can stay together. Go makin’ up stories to the law, and you won’t see that kid again until he’s eighteen. A long time.”

Nausea swamped him. Rainey was right. They had no one else to take them in, no one who would want a teenager with a wild reputation, and a six year old with crippled legs. Not here in Cane Creek, and probably not in Quinton County. They’d be sent away to different places.