A Tree Born Crooked Read online

  Rabbit shifted his weight rapidly from one foot to the other. James thought he looked like he was doing the pee-pee dance. It was almost enough to make him laugh. Almost.

  “Well, that’s good, ain’t it? I mean, that they’re not wanting to kill me. That’s something on the bright side.”

  Marlena sat back down in the driver’s seat and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.

  “When you pulled that bag out of the safe at Lucky’s, how hard did you look in it?”

  Rabbit paused for a moment, thinking.

  “Not very hard. I mean, I just took a peek. Delmore said it was missing all the money we thought it was gonna be.”

  James groaned.

  “Delmore, who sold you out to these nut jobs? You didn’t think to look for yourself?”

  Rabbit’s face went pale. He slowly closed his mouth and stared at James, a pathetic look of defeat creeping across his face. He was quiet, as if all the wind had been blown from his sails. He dropped his gaze and finally just looked down at James’ boots.

  “I’m sorry, James. I trusted him.”

  James turned around and raised his eyebrows at Marlena. She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. He couldn’t tell what she wanted to do. Her expression told him nothing. He couldn’t tell if she was angry, if she wanted to drive off and leave them both there, or if she was really in it with them. She hadn’t slammed the door and stepped on the gas though, so he thought maybe there was a chance she was going to see this through with him. All he knew was that he wanted her to stay. He turned back to Rabbit and scratched the stubbly side of his face, trying to decide what to do. Finally, he did the only thing he thought they could do.

  “Get in the car, Rabbit. Let’s find Waylon, get the money, get out of this mess, and go home.”

  ~ ~ ~

  James pulled down the square, metal door of a free newspaper box and let it snap shut. He pulled it down again and let it snap shut again. He did it one more time, then jammed his fists into his pockets and turned his attention out to the 7-Eleven parking lot. Aside from Marlena’s Jeep, a Volvo station wagon with a “Trust in Jesus” sticker on the back bumper was the only other vehicle at the pump. The gas station was deserted, even though it was the only one for at least twenty miles in either direction down the road. In spite of the fact that they had all agreed they were being followed, Marlena still insisted on sticking to county and state roads and staying off the main highway.

  The brass bell tied to the double glass doors tinkled as Marlena pushed her way out, the edge of a bag of salt and vinegar chips held in her clenched teeth as she juggled her cell phone, change, and receipt. James took the bag from her, smiling slightly, and she managed to get everything back into the right pocket.

  “Where’s Rabbit?”

  James pointed to the green metal door of the bathroom on the side of the building.

  “He still feeling rough?”

  “Rough enough to brave that bathroom. I’m pretty sure I saw at least three palmetto bugs run for their lives when he opened the door.”

  Marlena shook her head and grimaced. A long strand of loose hair floated across her face and she blew it away in annoyance.

  “You know this is gonna turn ugly.”

  “Yep.”

  Marlena traced a crack in the sidewalk with the toe of her boot. James noticed that the ashy darkness beneath her eyes had not disappeared.

  “You think he’s telling the truth?”

  “Who?”

  Marlena nodded her head toward the bathroom door. James sighed.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t spent this much time with my brother since I left home almost fifteen years ago.”

  Marlena crossed her arms in front of her chest.

  “I’m not sure I buy this innocent act of his. If he was smart enough to set up, or at least help set up, this stupid heist in the first place, you’re telling me that he doesn’t know anything else? He just got caught up in all of this, like we did? I know he’s your brother; he’s your kin. But you’re seeing him from way back, when you two were kids. I’m seeing him from being in my bar every day with that skunk Delmore leading him around.”

  James snapped the door to the newspaper box one last time.

  “If he knows something, and he’s keeping it from us, then he’s just as likely screwing us over.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  James walked away from her to the edge of the sidewalk. He knew that what she was saying made perfect sense, but he didn’t want to believe it. However, Marlena was also right about how James saw Rabbit. In James’ eyes, Rabbit was still sixteen-years old, standing in the doorway of the bedroom they shared, watching James pack and begging him not to leave. He didn’t see Rabbit as over thirty, a petty criminal with a warped sense of what it meant to be somebody. James rubbed his face, trying to clear his mind of speculations and focus on the task at hand: where exactly they were driving to and what they were going to find when they got there.

  “Hello?”

  James whipped around. Marlena had answered her cell phone on the first ring and from the look on her face, he knew who it was. She waved him over and he stood close beside her, able to hear most every word from both sides of the conversation. James was glad that Rabbit was holed up with the roaches. With a pang of sheepish guilt, he realized that he didn’t want his brother to be a part of this.

  “Daddy, where are you?”

  Waylon’s voice came through the phone, nervous and raspy.

  “Well, I can’t really say.”

  “What? You can’t say because you don’t want me to know, or can’t say because someone is there with you?”

  “I just can’t say.”

  “Then why are you calling me?”

  James put his hand on Marlena’s arm and tried to get her to meet his eyes. The last thing he needed was for her to get into a fight with Waylon. Marlena pulled her arm away and turned her back to him.

  “Do you have any idea what’s going on? Do you have any idea of the shit storm you’ve created?”

  James tried to lean in closer to the phone, but Marlena stepped off the sidewalk and into the parking lot. Now James could only hear her side of the conversation.

  “Are you kidding me? Yes, you got me involved. Because I care, that’s why.”

  From the tone of her voice, it sounded like they were arguing. James wished she would calm down. They needed to know where Waylon was and if he had the money. If it was possible, they needed to all be on one side.

  “Wait, what?”

  Marlena turned around and James saw the look on her face shift from anger to concern.

  “Daddy, what’re you talking about? Did you know something was going to go down with Rabbit?”

  James couldn’t hear anything as Marlena attempted to interrupt Waylon several times. When she was finally able to overtake him, she was near screaming.

  “Are you out of your mind? This is bigger than all that bullshit.”

  Marlena’s voice started to crack.

  “No, I won’t shut up! No, you listen. I’m not gonna play stupid ass-backwards games with you. Just tell me, do you have the money?”

  James winced. He hadn’t wanted her to just come out and ask him like that. She was definitely going to scare him away and then they would never get to him. He tried to make eye contact with her and motion for her to stop, but she wouldn’t look at him.

  “Jesus, Daddy. I don’t care. I don’t care, okay? You have to stop acting like this. These men want that money back, and they are coming for it. They’re coming for it, do you understand that? You’re not safe and we’re not safe. Nobody is. If you have that money, you have to tell me.”

  Marlena’s voice had grown desperate. James was beginning to understand now; she was genuinely worried about Waylon. Up until this point, James had only been focused on trying to help Rabbit. He had forgotten how much Marlena had at stake as well.

  “Please? We’ll help you. I’m o
n your side, too. We can make it out of this. But you gotta let me help you. I need to know if you have that money. No, wait, no, don’t hang up!”

  James started toward her. He could see the tears glassing over her eyes and the frustration carving out her voice.

  “Just tell me, Daddy. Just, no, wait, don’t do this. Don’t—”

  Her face collapsed and her voice came out in a whisper.

  “Please?”

  James knew that the line was dead. He got to her just in time to grab the cell phone out of her hand, and so it was only her rage and anguish that she hurled across the empty parking lot. He tried to touch her shoulder, to pull her to him, but she wrenched free and stormed off toward the Jeep. James let her go.

  ELEVEN

  The sky reminded James of the one and only time he and Rabbit had ever dyed Easter eggs as children. Birdie Mae preferred to just pick up a netted bag of neon plastic eggs from the dollar store, but James had seen an Easter egg kit at Winn-Dixie and begged to be allowed to try it. Birdie had finally given in, as long as the boys didn’t stain her countertops and understood that there would be no plastic eggs filled with jellybeans that year. James and Rabbit had promised and agreed, enticed by the dancing PAAS bunny on the skinny cardboard box, to give up their candy for the fun of dipping boiled eggs into plastic cups of water, vinegar, and pastel-colored tablets. Rabbit, only six at the time, had whined until James whispered to him that they could still get candy at church. Once that was settled, Rabbit became James’ shadow, standing on three old phone books to balance the smooth eggs on the tiny wire dipper and lower them carefully into the pools of color.

  When they were done, the eggs drying back in their Styrofoam carton, their bottoms becoming slightly darker as the liquid pigment slid from the surface of the egg to nest in the shallow hollows, Birdie Mae had sniffed that they were not as pretty as the ninety-nine cent bag she would have bought for them. James, becoming more and more comfortable with doing so, ignored his mother. Sure, the green was really more of a brown, and one of the pink eggs had been dropped too hard into the cup, creating a spiderweb of deeper colored veins across the shell, but James had been enthralled all the same. It wasn’t that he had created the Easter eggs, James was certainly no budding artist or even interested in such things, but it was something about the authenticity of the colors. They just seemed so alive to him. The yellow was fainter than the picture on the box showed, but it was also the exact color Lawtey Lake’s surface assumed during the late afternoon hours of summer. The pink was the pink of the Azaleas flowering in the neighbor’s front yard, and the blue was a cloudless winter sky, a blue so deep James felt he could fall into it if he didn’t hold on to himself, a blue that could swallow him whole and carry him far, far away.

  James looked up into the sky and, for a moment, let himself be taken.

  “I’m alright now, James. I think I’m good. No, wait.”

  Behind him, James could hear Rabbit retching onto the dust and dried grass next to the Jeep. James kept his head tilted upwards, but the moment had passed; he no longer saw the sky.

  They had been about an hour outside of Mobile when Rabbit said he was going to be sick. James hadn’t hesitated to pull over onto the first side road they came to. It was actually more of a four-wheeler track cutting across the fallow land. It had once probably been a timber farm, but was now an abandoned waste of sandy dirt and scattered, broken pine trees left behind to rot.

  It had been a miserable drive. Marlena hadn’t said a word since the gas station. She had sat in the back seat, pressed up against one door, her arms crossed, and her gaze never wavering from the window. James could feel the fury radiating from her. It was almost as if she were afraid that if she moved, she wouldn’t be able to contain her emotions any longer. She sat rigid, immobile, her mind racing, but her body controlled and stiff. Meanwhile, Rabbit sweated and griped from the front seat next to James. He would be silent for ten miles, then start complaining about the lack of radio stations, the suspension of the Jeep or the temperature inside it. One minute it was too hot, and he was twisting the air conditioner dial to full blast, and the next he was freezing, cursing at the vents and pointing them in different directions. James suggested rolling down the windows, but as soon as Rabbit did, the wind was in his face or he could smell a distant paper factory, or road kill, and the window had to go back up. Then it was back to punching the air conditioner button on and off again. James tried to remind himself that Rabbit was coping with toxic chemicals draining out of his system, but it was hard to have sympathy for him. James kept glancing back in the rearview mirror, but Marlena appeared oblivious to Rabbit’s antics.

  Eventually, Rabbit had settled down, but grew paler by the mile. His skin had a waxy sheen to it, and James was ready for it when Rabbit told him to pull over. As soon as they were off the highway, Rabbit had tumbled out of the Jeep and begun ten minutes of dry heaving and spitting up stomach bile. James had left him alone, staying clear on the other side of the vehicle. Marlena had gone for a walk, or at least that’s what James assumed. She had quietly left the Jeep, kicking her way down the sandy track with her arms still crossed tightly in front of her.

  James didn’t know what to do. He kept trying to put the pieces together in his head, but he didn’t know these people. He was unsure of what anyone was capable of and what they really wanted in the first place. What did Waylon want? Was he really taking the money and running? What about Rabbit? What had he been planning to do with all that money in the first place? And Marlena? For that matter, what did he want himself? There were so many unanswered questions spinning around inside his head. James closed his eyes. In truth, what he really wanted at that moment was a cold beer with the condensation running down the side of the bottle, and to sit in a dusky bar with the blinds blocking the sunlight out and a baseball game on a television he could hear, but not see, his only concern being to mark the time with each drink. That was what he wanted.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t foresee that happening anytime in the near future. Rabbit came up next to him, wiping a string of spit from the side of his face.

  “I think I’m good now.”

  “How you feeling?”

  “Like I got run over by a semi. But I’ll spare you the details.”

  “You really into that stuff this bad?”

  Rabbit ducked inside the front of his T-shirt and dried the sweat from his face.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why I even started in the first place. It was just there, so I, you know. Didn’t think not having it would ever be a problem with Delmore ‘round. He was always able to scrounge up something. He had all these secret hiding places in the trailer. Like in the hole behind the light switch cover in the bathroom or stuffed into one of the coils behind the fridge. I always told him that one was a bad idea. Like to catch on fire, I always reckoned.”

  Rabbit’s brow furrowed.

  “He probably don’t want me telling you none of that. He’s kinda paranoid, you know. I wouldn’t say nothing ‘bout it.”

  James turned and looked down the track. It curved away around a stand of pine trees about a quarter of a mile down. He didn’t see Marlena anywhere.

  “Rabbit? I need to tell you something.”

  Rabbit bent over and spit into the dirt at his feet.

  “Now what?”

  “I just thought you should know there’s a possibility that Waylon set you up. And Delmore might have had a hand in it, too.”

  Rabbit’s head jerked up.

  “You mean that?”

  “Marlena got a call at the gas station a ways back. I could only hear part of it, but it sounded like Waylon definitely don’t want us to find him. I don’t think he just took that money from you and Delmore, like maybe you thought. I think he took it and set you up to take the fall for it. Maybe Delmore helped him and they were gonna split it or something. You gotta admit, Delmore pointed you out awful fast.”

  James watched Rabbit’s face. It fell by deg
rees as what James was telling him began to sink in.

  “But, why? I mean, what I ever done to him? I didn’t never do nothing to him.”

  “I know. But it’s the way this game is played by some people. You wanted to be part of it. That’s how it goes. Selfishness and greed win out over people most of the time.”

  Rabbit stared back at the ground, his face slick again with sweat.

  “I thought he was my friend.”

  “Maybe he was. That don’t mean you could trust him when money got into the picture.”

  Rabbit kept his eyes on the ground.

  “Can I trust you?”

  “I’m not looking to get rich, if that’s what you’re asking. That cash ain’t worth what it’s worth.”

  “No, I mean really trust you? You gonna help me outta this?”

  “I am. And you’re gonna get outta this. I wouldn’t be wasting my damn time otherwise.”

  James tried to grin, but Rabbit didn’t seem to notice. He nodded toward the curve in the track.

  “What ‘bout her?”

  James raised his eyebrows.

  “What’d you mean?”

  “Well, whose side you think she’s really on?”

  James felt the spark flare up inside him, but he tried to put it out. He couldn’t blame Rabbit for asking.

  “She’s on our side.”

  “Why? ‘Cause you bang her and now all of a sudden she’ll follow you anywhere?”

  James clenched his fists, but kept them firmly at his sides, reminding himself of where Rabbit was coming from.

  “It ain’t like that.”

  “Bullshit. Don’t tell me there’s not nothing going on between you two. I think maybe you ain’t seeing things straight ‘cause you got some kinda feeling for her.”

  James sighed.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Well, there you go! Don’t you go telling me that she’s just gonna up and turn on her daddy. How’d you know she’s not part a his whole plan? How’d you know she’s not just going along with us, messing with your head, or whatever you want to call it, so as to go and get me killed, huh? Answer that for me.”