Velva Jean Learns to Drive (12 page)

“Is Beach asleep?”

“Yeah.”

I leaned forward on my elbows and shook my hair down so that it covered my face. I pulled one of the strands out and tried to straighten the wave so that it lay flat.

Johnny Clay said, “You okay?”

No, I wanted to say. I’m not. I want Mama and I want Daddy, and if I can’t have them, at least I can have you, Johnny Clay. He was too far away on the other side of the wall. I needed to know he was there in the same room, just an arm’s length away.

“I’m okay,” I said.

There was silence. When he didn’t speak, my heart skipped a beat and I sat up. “Johnny Clay?” Had he gone to sleep already?

“I’m here,” he said. “I was just thinking.”

“What about?”

“Going to jail.”

I hunched over again and pulled the blanket up around myself.

“I reckon we’re different now,” said Johnny Clay. A chill crept up my spine all the way from my toes and I pulled the blanket tighter. “I reckon we’re changed forever, Velva Jean. There’s no going back to the way we used to be. The old us is gone.”

The thought of this made me sad because so much was gone now and I had liked the old us. “How so?” I said. I whispered it. “You think we’re mean forever now?”

It took him a minute to answer. “Not mean exactly. But not soft either.”

There was a lump in my throat as big as a bullfrog. We both sat there in silence, on either side of the wall.

“If you want,” Johnny Clay said finally, “I’ll stay awake till I know you’re asleep.”

My eyes teared up at this, and I squeezed them shut so that the water stayed in. “Okay,” I said. I lay back down and rolled on my side so that I faced the wall. I pulled the covers up to my chin and closed my eyes. I thought about the moonshiner’s boy, about the meanness that was in him. “See you soon, Bonnie,” he’d said. I thought about the meanness that was in me. I wondered if I would be able to sleep at all.

One week later, Johnny Clay found me under the porch, playing Daddy’s mandolin, pretending it was a Hawaiian steel guitar and I was Maybelle Carter, the greatest guitar player that ever lived. I sang a song I’d just made up that morning. It was about a girl who had no parents and went to live on the moon with a race of moon-eyed people who could only see at night.

I saw Johnny Clay’s feet before I saw the rest of him. He came up from the direction of the creek, where he’d been panning for gold with Hunter Firth. He squatted down and looked at me and I ignored him, went right on singing.

“I’m afraid the meanness in me has taken over,” he said.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I reckon I’m mean, too.”

“We been sneaking over to a still in Devil’s Kitchen. The one you and me went to last year. Daddy Hoyt was right, Velva Jean. It’s the purest corn liquor you ever tasted, and it don’t leave a hangover. Not even a headache.”

I felt sick and excited all at once. I wasn’t sure I wanted to start drinking regular. But I also wondered if I had a choice now that I was on a wayward path. I said, “You just want to steal from the moonshiner’s boy.”

He ignored this and said, “I’m going back over there now, and you can come with me if you want or you can stay here.”

I sang a little louder to make it clear that I was busy and not to be bothered.

“Velva Jean.”

I stopped playing. I lay there looking up at the sky through the slats in the porch floor. I thought that this particular moment felt a lot like the night before Dr. Keller’s nurse came to give us shots—that same feeling of dread sat like a weight in the bottom of my stomach.

I could hear the pounding of the waterfall long before I saw it. Then suddenly we were there, and the water was pouring down the face of the rock, fifty feet or so, and it all looked so peaceful. You would never have known there was a still hidden back of there. Johnny Clay and I sat down in the laurel bushes at the side of the falls. Behind the water was a narrow ledge that led to the mouth of a cave, which you could barely see.

“What now?” I said, and I tried to whisper it but still be heard.

Johnny Clay said, “You wait here.” He pulled a watch out of his pocket—an old gold watch of Daddy’s. He rubbed his nose. The skin had healed nicely from his late summer sunburn and was now as brown as the rest of him. He checked the watch and said, “The moonshiner just went home for lunch.”

While I played lookout, Johnny Clay slipped across the ledge and into the cave. He was gone for five minutes. I was holding the watch and didn’t take my eyes off it. I jumped at every sound—every bird and creature that rustled by in the underbrush—sure it was the moonshiner come back to catch us.

Finally, Johnny Clay came out of the cave, jar in hand. He grinned, his hair wet from the spray, and edged back to me. He shook his hair like a wet dog, spraying me with water, and unscrewed the lid of the jar. He held the jar out to me. My head swam. It smelled like gasoline. He said, “We’ve got to be men about it, Velva Jean.”

I took the jar from him and raised it to my lips. I took the smallest sip I could. The liquor tasted better than I expected, but it wasn’t good. It was strong and sharp and it hurt my throat. I took a bigger drink, and this one burned going down. I started coughing so hard that my eyes watered.

At that moment, we heard a gunshot. I screamed and dropped the jar.

“Run, Velva Jean!” Johnny Clay hollered, and I did. I ran so hard and so fast that I didn’t pay attention to where I was going. All I knew was that I had to get out of there and get away as fast as possible. The moonshiner was after us. He would kill us if he caught us. He would kill us and then he would take us up to his cave and bury us in there or burn us up in his still and turn our blood into whiskey. I wanted to get home to Daddy Hoyt, who I knew would take care of me and keep me safe and who wasn’t one bit afraid of bootleggers.

I ran so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I ran up and down and this way and that and here and there until I didn’t know where I was anymore. I turned back to look for Johnny Clay, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Johnny Clay!” I began to shout it over and over again. “Johnny Clay!”

The woods were still and silent.

“Johnny Clay!” I knew I should keep my voice down because I didn’t want the moonshiner to hear me. My heart was beating as fast as hummingbird wings and as loud as a drum, so loud I couldn’t hear.

I threw my head back and shaded my eyes from the sun. I was high up Devil’s Courthouse, near where the giant lived, near where the devil held court. I could see the dark, jagged peak of Tsul ’Kalu’s cave, above and to my left. Up here you could see as far away as Georgia and South Carolina and Tennessee. Some people said that on a clear day you could even see the ocean.

The trees around looked dead and black. Their limbs reached up and out like witch hands, skeleton hands. Smoke was rising from the ground. Sixteen years before, a man was murdered on this very same path, higher up Devil’s Courthouse, and some said he still wandered this trail. I prayed that the haint of the trail wouldn’t come out just then, that he was somewhere far away, wherever haints went when they weren’t spooking people or searching for their killers. I prayed that the devil and the cannibal spirits and Spearfinger, the great witch of the woods, and Tsul ’Kalu the giant wouldn’t find me, and that the Nunnehi, or little people, might help protect me and get me home, even though I knew they only came out at night. I prayed that Mama might somehow guide me to safety from heaven.

I turned around and ran forward, and suddenly I hit something. I hit it so hard that I fell down. Then two great hands lifted me and set me on my feet. A man stood in front of me—so tall that he blocked out the sun. His hair was long and black and his beard was wild. He wore a hat that was pulled down over his eyes. My first thought was that it was Tsul ’Kalu himself, but this was a man, not a giant.

“Slow down,” he said. “What are you running from?” I couldn’t make out his face because the sun was behind him. But I knew exactly who he was: the Wood Carver. I had run from one murderer right into the hands of another.

I stared up at him and didn’t say a word. I looked down at his hands, still holding my arms. They were nicked up and scarred and he wore a bright gold wedding ring on his left one.

He dropped his hands and took a step back. I turned around and ran.

After supper Johnny Clay and I stood on the front porch with Hunter Firth. The door to the house was open and there was the sound of Daddy Hoyt starting a tune on the fiddle; of Linc strumming his guitar; of Granny beginning a song in her thin, raspy voice; of Sweet Fern and Ruby Poole washing the supper dishes; of Dan Presley banging on a pot lid; and of Danny laughing and playing with baby Corrina.

“The bootlegger’s probably forgotten all about it by now,” Johnny Clay said. There was a question in his voice. I knew what it was—we might not have gotten away with his moonshine, but that didn’t mean the moonshiner would forget that we tried to steal from him. In his eyes, we would be as bad and as hated as branch walkers now. We would never know where or when the moonshiner might find us.

We could hear the stomp of Granny’s shoes as she danced and Beachard’s shouts as she whirled him around. He was staying away from home more and more lately, no matter what Sweet Fern and Danny told him to do. Beach was fifteen now and said they weren’t his parents and he didn’t need to mind them. He didn’t mean anything unfriendly by it—Beach never did—he said that’s just the way things were.

I wrapped my arms tight around my waist and shivered, even though the evening was warm. I thought about the moonshiner over in Devil’s Kitchen and the bitter taste of his whiskey and about his son who was a bad and dangerous criminal. I thought about the Wood Carver—tall enough to block out the sun—walking the haunted trail. I wondered if he was out there now in the dark.

Johnny Clay caught a lightning bug in his fist and then slowly opened it so we could see the light. “It’s late in the season for him,” he said. “He should be dead by now.” He let it go and we watched it wobble into the air and then light up, go dark, light up, as it headed away from us.

I never wanted to go back to the jail ever again or get chased through the woods or shot at, and I knew Johnny Clay felt the same way. Still, someone had to say it out loud, so I told him I was bored rigid leading a life of crime and, what’s more, that I was swearing off liquor. He said he was too. I think he was glad I said it first.

SEVEN

School started on a cool day in early September. I was in the sixth grade now. I had two more years at the Alluvial School, and then I would be done forever. Johnny Clay was in his last year, but he threatened to quit every day, just like Beachard had when he was almost fourteen.

We went to school according to the planting cycles. We were there through December, then out again until March while we picked peas, dug potatoes, and rounded up the free-roaming cattle from the woods. Then we were back at school again until summer when we waited for the crops to grow.