The Ranger - Ace Atkins [40]
“You ain’t hungry?” Gowrie asked.
She didn’t answer. The brown water moved slow and sluggish over rocks and sand, thin slivers of ice collected by the muddy banks.
“We gonna get your boy out,” he said.
“When?”
“I ain’t payin’ no bail. But we got him a lawyer from Memphis. The lawyer says they ain’t got a case. The case on him is on account of me.”
She turned and looked at Gowrie, standing on the banks of the creek, some light snow scattering all about him, him wearing no shirt, only a military jacket open over his big chest, showing the tats and rib bones. His face shrunken and drawn, as if his features had been cut from stone.
“They think he’d turn, but that ain’t how we do things. No, sir.”
“Who are you?”
“I told you. We’re a family.”
She nodded, reaching for a tree branch and standing, feeling cold enough now that she’d go back with him, follow that muddy trail back to the ragged trailers in the gulch. Gowrie reached for her elbow, soft and gentle, and steered her back up the well-worn path, talking and talking, barely able to take a breath between his thoughts, saying that the law in this county was nothing but a dirty joke and that he’d bust old Charley Booth out of jail himself if they even tried to keep him tied in legal knots.
“They just want to fuck me.”
“Where are you from?”
“What’s that matter?”
“Just askin’, is all.”
“Ohio. Near West Virginia.”
“Why are you down here?”
“Come on,” Gowrie said, trudging up through the gulley, all the wash of gravel and trash and beer cans swept down into a fanned-out pattern of mud, steeped in boot prints and hooves, the earth smelling of sulfur. It was getting dark, and most of Gowrie’s people were in their trailers, yellow light coming from crooked windows lined with tinfoil and cardboard beer cases pressed flat against the glass. Somewhere, someone was playing a guitar and beating on some drums.
“I got you a bed,” Gowrie said.
She looked into the open mouth of the old barn, searching for Ditto.
“I got you some candy bars, too. Can you drink beer?”
“I don’t drink.”
“And you don’t fuck, neither.”
He laughed while he led her up some crooked steps and opened the door to his beaten trailer, two women and an old man sitting together on an old sofa watching Family Guy, smoking weed and drinking. The old man stared at Lena, offering her a taste of his Jack Daniel’s bottle, the girls too baked to turn from the cartoon. Gowrie tugged at his Army jacket and tossed it on a pile of dirty clothes, now only wearing a tight pair of blue jeans and combat boots, his back a road map of tattoos of dragons and ancient symbols. He cracked open a beer and pulled the joint from one girl’s fingers.
“Daddy, don’t you got somethin’ to do?”
The old man stood up, stoop-shouldered, and loped out of the room. The girls shifted, one wearing pink sweatpants and a tank top. She was skinny, and her face had small sores across it, as if she suffered some kind of pox.
Gowrie moved back through the kitchen, piled high with dirty paper plates and crushed beer cans, cigarette and roach butts in jelly jars. In the middle of all the junk, Lena spotted dozens of guns, pistols and shotguns and those guns with the big fat clips that could hold a million bullets. Boxes and boxes of shells and bullets.
Gowrie flipped on the lights in a room with a mattress on the floor, filled ankle-deep in clothes. “There’s a blanket in that corner. If you get cold, let me know.”
There didn’t seem to be any heat in the trailer besides a little radiator by the television.
Gowrie smiled at Lena, her noticing the blackening edges of his teeth, the parched lines around his rheumy eyes. He just nodded and walked away, leaving the door wide open, the canned laughter and sound effects from the cartoons filling the trailer.
He was gone for a long while. And Lena was grateful for the food Ditto had found for her earlier, knowing she wouldn’t have to leave the room till morning.
She found a bathroom, no toilet, only a hole cut in the floor, where she squatted and peed, and returned back to the room, trying to lock the