Sweetgirl (2 page)

The dog was lying stiff on the carpet in the center of the room and I cried out when I saw its unmoving, marble eyes. I saw the snout receding toward the collapsed jaw, and the fur that lay puddled where the muscles had gone soft. I backed out of the room and had to keep myself from slamming the door in a rage.

You want to bake your own brain with a bunch of damn Drano, then fine, but leave a helpless animal trapped and starving to death while you did it? I was shaking angry and had a thought like I should go downstairs and suffocate that sonofabitch, Shelton, in his sleep. Or shoot him if the shotty was loaded.

It was the kind of thought you have because you know you won't do anything with it, but it makes you feel better for a second to think that you might. I'm not a killer and even if I was, who was going to take care of Carletta while I rotted in prison for doing the world the good turn of putting out Shelton Potter's lights?

I returned to my search and whispered for Mama. I asked if she was there. There was no reply from the hall, and as I eased the other door open I held in my heart a desperate and wordless prayer about what I would find there.

The room was lit with a single, exposed bulb that flickered and cast a dusty light from the ceiling. There was a flood of cold through an open window along the side wall, and there was snow piling on the sill and the carpet. A mattress lay cockeyed on the floor and between the mattress and a radiator I saw a bassinet. Inside the bassinet was a baby.

The man on the stereo was back to the part about fur pajamas. I didn't know if the song was on repeat, or the singer had felt the need to double back and touch on that particular detail again.

Things fall apart,
he went on.
It's scientific.

I could see the baby was shrieking, but its cries were buried by the wind. The snow blew in sideways, edged across the floor, and dusted the baby's cheeks with frost. The baby's eyes darted in a side-to-side panic as it reached up with trembling hands and searched for something to grasp.

I ran toward it.

Crisis is a constant when you're a daughter of Carletta James, which prevented me from outright panic at the sight of an abandoned infant in the farmhouse. This is not to say I was unsurprised by the discovery of the bassinet, or the sight of the baby wailing against the wind. Of course these things surprised me, and filled me with a momentary terror—it's just that I could not allow my shock to extend beyond a clipped breath or two. While the particulars of a given calamity may be impossible to predict, while I could never say I expected to find a baby in the bedroom, chaos itself was always confirmation of the dread I carried blood-deep and certain in my bones.

On the side of the bassinet
BABY JENNA
was written in marker and surrounded by flowers that had been carefully woven between the letters.

“Shh,” I whispered, and lifted her out.

Her pajamas were cold and clung sticky and wet at the back. She reeked of shit and the soured tang of spit-up and I felt her little chest heave as she cried. Her cheeks were icy to the touch and I cleared them of snow as I rocked her in my arms. Her chin was collapsed as she sobbed and her eyes scrambled from me to the room and then back. Her hands were curled and she seemed to be both reaching for me and shielding herself against my presence. I kept hushing her. I didn't know what else to do.

Her eyes were greenish gray, the color of the sky edge before a storm, and her black hair shot off in all directions and curled over her ears. I stood with her in the doorway, keeping an eye on the hall and the stairs, and that was when she wrapped a hand around my finger and squeezed.

You see pictures all the time of little babies' hands, and often they are juxtaposed against the much larger grip of an adult. Often these pictures are used by anti-abortion groups or posted on Facebook by self-righteous rich girls with some moralistic message—but I will tell you that there is true power in that little hand. I will tell you it stopped my heart cold when I felt her clutch. I looked down at her and knew I would not be leaving her in that house. I rocked her and whispered until the crying finally quieted and went even in her lungs.

There was a backpack on the floor beside the bassinet and I held her with one hand and rifled through the bag with the other. There was a change of clothes inside, some diapers, a bottle, a canister of powdered formula, and a rattle.

Jenna started to squirm and I unzipped my hoodie and slipped her inside. She was in desperate need of a change, but it wasn't the
time or place. I covered everything but her mouth, put the backpack on over my shoulder, and eased us down the hall.

I held my breath as we passed the dog and watched as Jenna lay perfectly still inside the hoodie. Her eyes were peeled wide open and she looked at me flatly and with what appeared to be the certainty of her trust. The song on the stereo was on repeat. I was sure of it now.

Speak up,
the man sang.
I can't hear you.

There were wet spots on the stairs from where I'd dropped snow, and I looked carefully at each step as we went down. I noted the worn patches of wood and felt the old house settling in the wind. I put a hand flat against the wall to guide us where the steps turned into the landing and hoped we wouldn't be betrayed by a creak in the floorboards.

I would leave out the back and head straight for Portis's place. My truck was just as far away from the farmhouse as the cabin, and all of it uphill. If Shelton or the girl bothered to notice the baby was gone they'd fire up the sleds and the truck and head right for the road I'd come in on. No, the best thing was to go and get Portis. Have him drive us to the hospital in his Ranger.

Potter and the girl hadn't so much as stirred. They were lying exactly as I had found them as I hurried through the kitchen and out the back door into the wind and snow-swirled dark.

My flashlight wasn't much use outside, not after I'd cleared the rutted trails close to the farmhouse and the dark spiraled out and grew deeper. I walked for some time, worrying when Jenna cried,
and worrying worse when she didn't. I walked until my legs began to wobble and a sweat had broken on the small of my back. I carried Jenna with both arms and carefully cradled her head.

I had on my combat boots, which I'd bought on a discount at the army-navy store. They were made in Bangladesh and were actually for boys at a military academy, rather than being U.S. Army issue, which the crazy militia man had explained to me as he passed them over the counter like a bag of fruit-rotted garbage. I thought he was trying to shame me into a steeper purchase, but he was right to sneer at my sorry boots. I had my gym socks pulled up around my calves but I could still feel the cold leaking through the eyelets and the tongue.

I pushed through the drifts, but of course the snow found a tiny crease of skin beneath the boot lining and decided to pile up there and rub me raw. And that's the problem with the winter in Cutler County—it's not so much the cold, it's the fact that at some point the ass kicking feels personal.

Even worse, I started to wonder if I was wandering circles through the fields. The farmhouse was only a half mile from Portis's and it felt like too much time had passed since I left Shelton's. I couldn't find the cabin and I couldn't tell one drift of pitch-black snow from the next.

Of course, if Carletta hadn't stopped paying Sprint I would have had my phone with me and I could have checked the time while I called for help. I could have called 911 the second I found Jenna, but Carletta quit paying the bill two weeks before she disappeared and my phone was in a desk drawer at home, right beside my prepaid that was all out of minutes.

I squatted low to the ground to rest and watched my breath trail. The cold was inside me now, like a heaviness in my blood, and I started to worry that I was passing it to Jenna the same way bodies share heat. I'd done a paper on hypothermia once and knew the cold was unpredictable. There was a little girl in Iceland who survived a night in the wilderness at 35 below, while another man had died after just a few hours in temperatures above freezing. I couldn't remember what the point of the paper was though, or if there was something the girl had done to protect herself that the man hadn't.

I might have known better what to do if I'd have been a Girl Scout. I'd always envied those little snots in grade school, with their smart uniforms and badges and altruistic fund-raisers for starving African babies. I'd also envied them their mothers, who all looked like Sandra Bullock and wore Pleiades pants when they came to homeroom to recruit new members. I had badly wanted to join, but I knew they didn't mean me when they asked if anybody was interested in becoming a scout.

Yes, there was surely a world of information I would have had at my disposal had my childhood not been spent caring for Carletta and worrying over Cutler Family Services, wondering when they might finally arrive to take me and my sister, Starr, away for good.

I suppose the Girl Scouts would have known exactly what to do in my very situation, though none of them would ever have occasion to be there in the first place—Sandra Bullock moms not being the type to vanish after trading their daughters' cell service for a few rocks of methamphetamine. Ironies abounded out there
in the fields, but I resisted the urge to indulge in their bitterness as I stood up and returned to my march.

What I should have done was walk straight for the river, then turn downstream. That's what the Girl Scouts would have taught me. Go to the river and that will keep you on course. Can't miss a big-ass river. But no, I'd just run out into the dark and hoped I knew where I was going. I'd just taken one step after another and felt vaguely that I was heading in the right direction. I suppose I panicked.

When I saw some light in the far away I worried for a moment that I had simply traced a giant circle back to the farmhouse. I approached with some caution, but then I saw the line of the river behind the cabin. I saw the telltale slant of Portis's roof and heard Wolfdog barking at the wind.

Portis greeted me like he does all his houseguests—with the barrel end of his rifle. He aimed through a slit cut in the cabin door and demanded I identify myself.

“It's Percy!” I said. “Open up!”

I kept Jenna close and stepped away from Wolfdog. She'd turned her bark on me, but I was more hurt than frightened. I'd known Wolfdog since she was a pup and spent whole days fishing the Three Fingers with her and Portis. I loved Wolfdog and I always thought she loved me back, but she was leaned forward on her front paws and flashing her canines like switchblade knives. She was supposed to be part husky, but she looked all wolf at the moment.

“Hurry,” I said. “It's freezing.”

“Step back,” Portis said, and pushed open the door.

He came out in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and boots. He still had his rifle raised.

“Portis,” I said. “It's me.”

“Well, shit the bed,” he said, and lowered the barrel.

Inside, Portis looked me over with his narrow, searching eyes. He set the rifle down and checked the door latch. He looked at Jenna and tugged at his scraggly, gray-streaked beard. Wolfdog was still barking outside and she leapt at the window and dragged her nails across the glass. Portis reached for a bottle of whiskey on the table and had a pull.

“Is that a fucking baby?” he said.

He had the generator humming. There were Christmas lights strung across the ceiling beams and one of his 1970s bands was on the FM radio, singing about lonely nights.

“That's a fucking baby, isn't it?”

Jenna was fairly calm and now I was the one crying. I could feel the tears stinging the cold tops of my cheeks. It was a baby.

“It's a baby girl,” I said, and sniffed.

“Is that your baby girl?”

“What? No!”

“Whose fucking baby is that?”

“I don't know!”

My voice cracked as I raised it in irritation, in outrage at the entire situation. Portis went back to the door and opened the slit. He peered out while Wolfdog barked and batted at the windows.

“What's wrong with Wolfdog?”

“She don't like surprises,” he said.

“She's usually so sweet.”

“She's got a bad omen.”

“What's that mean?”

“She's on edge, goddamnit! She's got a bad feeling in her wolf bones, set her to barking about twenty minutes ago.”

“Maybe it's the storm,” I said.

“It's supposed to storm in the winter,” he said. “I'd probably go with you and that baby as the event of note here. Now, please tell me whose baby that is.”

“I just told you, I don't know. Some girl's.”

“Some girl?”

“I found her.”

“At the farmhouse?”

I shifted Jenna in my arms and stripped off my hoodie. I stood by the woodstove in my T-shirt and blue jeans while Jenna let out a little squawk. I tried to hush her, which seemed preferable to dealing with Portis and his agitations.

“You smoking shit now, Percy?”

“No.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“I swear,” I said.

“So you just wandered up to the farmhouse for no reason? After all the times I've warned you about what goes on up there?”

“Gentry came by,” I said. “He saw Mama when he was up there delivering a keg.”

“And what are you doing cavorting with the likes of Gentry?”

“He's my friend,” I said. “He sells me my cigarettes at the store.”

“You're sixteen years old, last I checked.”

“You gave me Marlboro Reds when I was twelve!”

“That was to keep you from stealing them.”

“What's the difference?”

“It don't even matter,” Portis said, and waved his hand. “Just stay the hell away from that Gentry. He's a thirty-year-old man and I can guarantee he's the type that only does a favor cause he's expecting a payback in return. And you know what kind of payback I mean.”

“He's twenty-three,” I said. “And gay.”

“Gay nothing,” Portis said. “Gay ain't always what it looks like on the surface.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “You really are a lunatic.”

“And just think,” he said. “I'm the one you came to for help.”

In the firelight, even with his beard in full bloom, I could see the white flecks of scar tissue that covered Portis's face like paint splatters. I could see the left eyelid and where it had grown together at the edge of the socket and left him in a forever squint. He had survived his own run on Shelton's dope, but stuck to drinking now. I suppose it was a slower, more reasonably portioned suffering.

He took another gulp of whiskey and I laid out the facts before he could set in on me again. I told him Mama had gone missing and that her Bonneville was parked out front of Shelton's but that she was not inside. I'd come in the back door and found the baby upstairs while Shelton and the mother were passed out in the living room. I described the bassinet by the open window and how the snow was slanting in. I told him Shelton and the woman hadn't moved an inch and that I was absolutely certain nobody had seen me.

“You're sure about that?” he said.

“Positive,” I said. “Nobody saw anything.”

Portis turned to the window and frowned at Wolfdog's barking.

“Just a minute,” he said, and finally set his whiskey down.

He opened the door and I felt the wind thread through the floorboards as he stepped outside to squat beside Wolfdog. He stroked her neck, hugged her close, then whispered something in her ear and she bounded off and was gone.

Portis knew she was too wound up. Wolfdog would lunge on sight if Shelton Potter showed and that man would not hesitate for a second to put her down. I thought of the dead dog in the farmhouse and felt a shiver slide all the way up my spine.

“I'm sorry,” I said, when Portis came back inside. “I saw her there and didn't know what else to do. I just grabbed her.”

“Well,” he said. “You done something, I guess.”

“She seems okay,” I said. “Considering.”

“She's better off than she was,” he said. “Trapped in that farmhouse with Shelton Potter.”

“Will you hold her?” I asked. “Just for a minute?”

“I'm not holding any baby,” Portis said.

“My arms are going to fall off, Portis. I can't just set her down on the floor.”

“I'm not skilled in the area of infant care,” he said. “I lack tenderness.”

“Please.”

“Babies don't like me.”

“Everybody likes you.”

Portis gulped from his bottle, then wiped the corners of his mouth with his shirtsleeve. He glanced at Jenna and then looked away.

“You better take them clothes off and set them by the woodstove,” he said. “I got a blanket you can cover up with. Got some clean woman clothes around here, belonged to a former acquaintance of mine.”

“You think he'll come looking?” I said. “Shelton?”

“He'll come looking,” he said.

I handed Jenna to Portis and she howled on cue.

“Goddamnit,” he said. “I told you.”

“You're doing fine,” I said. “Just hold her.”

“She's small as anything.”

“I think she's about six months,” I said.

“She's wet.”

“We're going to change her and get her fed. I got some formula in the bag if you've got any bottled water. Then we've got to get her someplace safe and warm. I thought you could drive us to the hospital.”

“I got water,” he said. “But no truck.”

“What happened to your truck?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It's up the hill.”

“How far?” I said.

“Far enough.”

“What's it doing up the hill?”

“Sitting, I expect.”

“Why is it that the truck is up there and you're down here?”

“There are reasons,” he said.

By “reasons” Portis meant he'd driven up the hill to check his traps, gotten too drunk, and wandered around the woods until he forgot what he was doing and came back to the cabin.

“Where's your pickup?” he said.

“I left it up there on the ridge, right behind Shelton's. I couldn't drive in any further with the snow.”

I picked a blanket off the rocking chair and told Portis to turn around. I hadn't been to see him in months and took quick stock of the cabin. The sum total of his furnishings remained a cot, card table, and rocking chair, all of which were fanned out to face the woodstove. There were shelves built into the wall behind the stove and they were lined with whiskey fifths, canned food, and jars of jerked meat—which I guess made it the kitchen. Behind the furniture there was nothing but crates of clothes and supplies, then a window looking out on the pines.

“Carletta would call this an open floor plan,” I said.

“There was no plan about it,” Portis said. “Rick Potter built this cabin as a hunting shack. I won its rights in a hand of cards not long after me and your mother quit. But yes, to answer your question, I do like it open. It's better for energy flow.”

I felt the warm air prickle my skin when I took off my T-shirt, then wrapped myself in the blanket and stood by the woodstove. I shivered and told myself to ignore the sour, sweaty funk of the blanket. I reminded myself just how cold I'd been only moments earlier, out there in the night.

Portis bounced Jenna lightly on an arm. He drank from the
whiskey and looked down at the baby from the corner of an eye. He puffed out his cheeks and made a farting sound. Jenna sputtered a bit, then cried a little softer.

“You don't happen to have a phone, do you?” I asked. “Cellular or otherwise?”

“No,” he said. “I don't believe I do.”

“Why does that not surprise me?”

“I don't know,” he said. “But I'd love to sit down and discuss the matter further. I'd like to get to the bottom of your feelings on this issue, which are of great importance to me.”

“She's calmed down,” I said.

“She run out of things to say,” he said.

“She likes you.”

“You don't know nothing about it,” he said.

I took Jenna and the backpack to the card table. Portis had a little stack of pornos there, and of course they were the worst kind of filth. Portis was a miser even when it came to the purchase of his smut. You could tell because the covers had all these tiny pictures of sorry models, like they didn't want you to look too close at any one.

I shoved that nastiness off the table and I could tell Portis was ashamed by how quick he gathered them up and stuck them on the shelf beside the canned food. I unfolded the blanket and set Jenna down on the table while Portis returned to his whiskey and lit a cigarette. He went to the door and peered out.

“I'll go get your fucking rice-burner Tonka truck,” he said.

“It's a Nissan,” I said.

“It is a product of the Orient,” he said. “No matter what you call it.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

I peeled off Jenna's clothes as careful as I could, but there was no stopping her scream. She yelled out and then for a few terrible moments made no sound at all. She just lay there with her mouth wide open, howling silent until her wind caught and she heaved and screamed again.

“My goodness,” said Portis.

There were streaks of urine and shit down her legs and it turned my stomach to look at it. I might not have had it in me to shoot Shelton Potter, or anybody else, but I should have done something with the mother. She smoked herself under, then lay there like a carpet stain while her baby cried out in the cold. What I should have done was grabbed her sorry ass by the hair and dragged her to the police myself.

I took to Jenna with the wipes but she was already covered in rashy burns. Her bottom was blistered terrible and there were bumps at the diaper line that flared red and oozed. There were welts beneath a crust of dried shit on her back and when I looked at it in the light I felt my throat catch. I thought I was going to cry again.

“What is it?” said Portis.

“Will you come here and look?” I said. “Please.”

Portis breathed in sharp when he saw and then I picked up Jenna's legs to show him the backside.

“Jesus God,” he said.

“Do you think it's infected?”

“I don't like that ooze,” he said. “I can tell you that much.”

He had a pot of water warming on the woodstove and he dropped in a washcloth, wrung it out, and brought it back to me at the table. Jenna's cheeks were wet with tears and snot and I put my hand on her stomach to steady her.

She howled and kicked her legs while I wiped. I wanted to drop that cloth and hold her but I grabbed her ankles and kept on. She pounded the table with her fists and when she went purple in the face Portis had to step outside.

I put a fresh diaper on when it was over and then took some blue footie pajamas from the backpack. They were clean and dry and I buttoned her up quick. Portis came back in when the crying was over, read the directions for the formula, and fixed a bottle.

“I expect she's hungry,” he said.

I sat at the table with Jenna in my lap and cooed at her while I shook the bottle. I was worried she wouldn't trust me after that diaper scene, but she snapped the nipple right up and drank.

“There you go,” I whispered.

I watched her throat go up and down with the sucking and worried over how long she'd gone without.

“Go ahead then,” said Portis. “Eat that up, little Jenna.”

“She's hungry,” I said. “That's for sure.”

When she finally paused to breathe I wiped some runoff from her chin and for the first time she made a sound that wasn't crying—gurgling as she reached out to me with her hand and brushed it lightly against my chin.

“Did you say something?” I said. “Are you making conversation, Jenna?”