A Tree Born Crooked Read online

  James took a deep breath.

  “Because if that was the case, I think you’d be dead by now.”

  “What?”

  James turned toward his brother and looked him in the eyes.

  “I think you’d be dead by now. You heard me. Think about it.”

  Rabbit still wasn’t buying it.

  “I don’t know. People don’t just turn on their kin like that.”

  “Yes, they do. Now, I ain’t asking you to trust her. But I’m telling you, you want to make it out of this alive? You gotta start putting two and two together and figuring out people’s motives. That’s about the only way this works. Now, she ain’t got no cause to hurt you. I heard ‘em talking. It sounded like he threw her to the dust with the rest of us.”

  Rabbit considered this for a moment. James could tell that he still didn’t like it, but saw the logic in it.

  “So then, what’s the plan?”

  James squinted up at a hawk circling lazily over them. It was flying low, almost as if it were trying to take part in their conversation. James wished it had some words of advice.

  “I’m still not sure.”

  “Well, I think it’s time you started asking me what I think for a change.”

  “You got some bright idea all of a sudden?”

  Rabbit ignored the sarcasm in James’ voice.

  “Maybe I do. You said them guys ain’t out to kill me, right? They’re following us to get to Waylon, so they can get the money back.”

  “If Waylon even has the money. He wouldn’t tell Marlena one way or the other.”

  Rabbit groaned in frustration.

  “Whatever. We’re still going with the idea that he’s got the money, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Then we just keep going on like we’re still on the way to find Waylon. I mean, as far as we think it necessary for them to know where he is.”

  “And then?”

  Rabbit threw his hands up in the air.

  “Then we hightail it outta there! Go on home! Those gator folks might just leave us alone. They won’t have no more cause to come after us. Shit, they’ll probably think I didn’t have nothing to do with the whole mess in the first place. We just ride on home and don’t look back.”

  Lines appeared on James’ forehead as he tried to think it through.

  “What about Waylon?”

  “What about him? He’s the one took the money after all, ain’t he? He didn’t care if I got killed, right? Well, now he can get himself killed. It won’t be none of our business.”

  “We still don’t know for sure if he’s got the money. If something happens to him, you gonna be able to sleep at night knowing you had a hand in it?”

  “I don’t see no other way, do you?”

  James didn’t. His brother was right; it did seem like the only option to get them home. Rabbit was finally thinking the way he should have been all along. But James wasn’t certain they could really go through with it.

  “What ‘bout Marlena? You think she’s gonna be fine with us leading them to Waylon and then bailing? Knowing what they’re gonna do to him when they find him?”

  Rabbit shrugged.

  “You said we could trust her. I guess this ‘bout figures that one out, huh?”

  James didn’t know what to say. He had spoken for her, but this was asking her to do something that he wasn’t sure he could do himself if the tables had been turned. Yet, what choice did they have? Marlena would either see that or she wouldn’t. Either way, the amount of guilt that it was going to shackle her with would be colossal. James checked the time on his cell phone. They had already been off the road for over twenty minutes and they had to get going. James fixed Rabbit with a hard look.

  “Wait here.”

  James headed down the track to find Marlena and burden her with the choice of her own betrayal.

  ~ ~ ~

  When James came around the copse of skeletal pine trees, sagging with the weight of dead, brittle needles, he didn’t find Marlena, kicking angrily at rocks as he had imagined, but instead, a house. It was an old, two-room dogtrot house of the kind that hadn’t been built in Florida for a century or more. Two rooms formed the base and top of the “I” shaped design, while a narrow, covered porch bridged between them. It was set off from the track about a hundred yards, backing into the trees and surrounded by weeds and knee-high brambles. The place looked like it had been deserted for at least fifty years. The corrugated tin roof and one wall of a room had caved in completely, creating a sharp slant heavy with pine branches, broken bird nests, and rust.

  James approached the house, snagging his jeans on the grasping briars and stumbling over the rough ground. He froze when he saw the long grass rustle beside his boot, but it was only a black snake, looking for a quieter place to sun itself. James watched it slide, slow and easy, and disappear through the middle of a cinderblock in what must have once been a front yard. James made a point to lift his feet higher as he walked.

  “Marlena?”

  He regretted it as soon as he opened his mouth. It somehow seemed wrong to shout in this place. He instinctively knew that she wouldn’t answer him, although he was sure that she was there. She wasn’t hiding from him, but he would have to come to her. He stepped through the covered walkway to the back of the house. The main room boasted a tottering brick chimney, still mostly intact, but two of the back walls had crumbled completely. Pieces of them, a doorframe, a board with a rusted nail still trapping a scrap of calendar, and a splintered windowsill littered the ground. The ceiling to the room was missing altogether, and sunshine rained down onto the weeds and detritus, a homesteader’s dreams of refuge now exposed to the unrelenting elements of nature and loneliness. Marlena, surrounded by the wreckage of forgotten reveries and nightmares, crowned by a halo of late afternoon sunlight, remained still as James approached. There was an ethereal, haunting grace in the way she slowly raised her eyes to his and, suddenly, he remembered the deer.

  Orville had taken James deer hunting only once. Orville was really no good at it; he usually drank too much in the stand and then needed help climbing back down without his rifle plummeting to the forest floor and going off. This had actually happened once, when Orville and Cordie were teenagers, and the bullet had torn a groove in his brother’s calf, which he never forgot. Cordie was forever rolling his pant leg up at family gatherings to show the ropy blue scar that had, according to him, “Near ‘bout killed me.” Orville knew that he wasn’t a hunter. He only went out with the boys when coerced and would sit in his tree stand, armed with a six-pack, waiting until everyone else had their fun and they could all go home and tell tall tales about the twelve-point buck that barely got away. Orville liked the beer and he liked the stories, but left the killing to the braggarts and the fools.

  However, when James turned thirteen Orville had felt that it was his fatherly duty to teach James how to climb a stand, sight a deer, and possibly even pull the trigger. James had no real interest in hunting. He was too busy sneaking onto the high school campus, hot-wiring the older boys’ cars, and taking them for joy rides. But the solemnity with which Orville approached the occasion left James no choice but to go. And though he complained and whined that deer hunting was for old, fat men too lazy to do anything but sit up in a tree all day long, he was secretly thrilled that he would be able to spend an entire afternoon and evening alone with his daddy.

  James and Rabbit had spent plenty of time plinking away with BB guns at rusted beer cans set up on a rail in the tangerine grove, so Orville didn’t spend too much time explaining to James how to load and fire the rifle. They had climbed up the rickety ladder, collecting splinters from the crumbling, near fossilized wooden rungs, and heaved their gear onto the platform. Orville let James practice shooting at a few squirrels, all of which he missed, before laying the gun between them on the smooth planks of the stand and telling James to just be quiet and watch.

  They stayed that way for hours, not moving
and not speaking. Orville drank Schlitz and James drank RC Cola, and they stared out into the fading twilight, watching the shadows creep along the lengths of the trees. It was the longest time James could ever remember being silent, but it didn’t feel like work. When he had to be quiet in school during a test, the minutes were agony, dragging on ever slower until finally the teacher would announce that it was over and they could resume poking the girls in front of them and throwing paper balls at the trashcan and needlessly going to the pencil sharpener and playing pencil break and occasionally doing classwork and maybe even learning something. But this was a quietness that James had never experienced before. He had surrendered and let the stillness envelope him. He watched the thin, November light stretch incrementally across a patch of ground cover that was at once so small and so commanding of his complete attention. James was granted a peace that permeated inside of him and let him rest.

  And then he saw the doe. It was nearly dark, almost past the time when the deer should have been picking their way through the narrow trees, but nevertheless, she was there, alone, with only the forest surrounding her. James had nudged his father with the toe of his sneaker. Orville was glassy-eyed, forgetting the woods for the contemplations of his own mind, and it took him a second to realize that James was trying to get his attention. James was unsure of what to do, so he didn’t raise his arm to point. He only tapped Orville with his shoe and kept his eyes fixated on the deer until his father placed the gun in his hands.

  James had not expected that. He should have. He had known that the purpose of sitting in a stand for hours was to kill a deer, but the weight in his hands was terrible. The butt of the rifle was worn, polished smooth by years of use, but James felt every grain scrape against his neck and cheek as he raised it to his shoulder. He gripped the stock tightly with his left hand and stretched the forefinger of his right alongside, but not touching, the trigger. He closed one eye to sight as his father had shown him.

  When James had first seen the deer, she had been perpendicular to the deer stand, her profile perfectly outlined between the reedy pines and twisting oaks. But as James adjusted the rifle against his body, she turned and walked straight toward them, her head lowered, but her ears alert, the left one flicking back and forth as she moved closer. James was instinctively aware that she knew he was there, above her in a tree, with the barrel of a gun pointed between her liquid amber eyes. But she kept walking. It was her forest. It was her time, and James could see that not only was she not afraid of him, she pitied him. She pitied his wrenching decision of whether or not to pull the trigger. She pitied his existence filled with insecurity and rejection and hope and the many, many fears of failure and of just being alive. The realization was so shocking for James that he almost pulled the trigger out of malice, ashamed that this creature could somehow be privy to his innermost secrets, and out of the terror that she could somehow unveil them. But the doe kept walking, her steps delicate through the underbrush, and she passed beneath the tree stand and moved on. And it was all right, because she would never be able to expose James for what he really was: just a scared kid trying so hard to be a man.

  The deer had continued on through the woods and the light had lowered until it was impossible to see, and Orville had finally taken the rifle from James’ trembling, cramped fingers and laid it back on the boards between them. Then his father had placed his hand on James’ shoulder, where the butt of the gun had just rested, and James realized that his father knew what the deer knew. It was only between the three of them and it would be their secret forever.

  But now James was grown up, and Orville was in a hole in the ground with a grave marker that meant nothing, and Marlena stood in the sunlight with a cloud of tiny insects trying to alight in her hair and her boots poised delicately between two nail-studded boards, and when she turned to him, her eyes were liquid amber and his breath was so tight in his throat that he thought he was choking. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey.”

  She didn’t move. There were years of sorrow, ages of anguish, grief and heartache, echoing behind her eyes, and James wanted to look away, but couldn’t. She reached down and pulled a long, brittle piece of Hawksbeard out of the ground.

  “Did you know that the last time they built houses like this one was back in 1900?”

  James swallowed and glanced around the open space at the weathered, raw boards littering the ground.

  “I didn’t.”

  “There’s part of an old Coca-Cola calendar over in the corner there. December, 1924. This house is probably a lot older, though. I bet this place was built before the turn of the century. Probably a sharecropper’s house. Or maybe somebody owned it outright. Hard to tell just from looking at it now.”

  “Marlena.”

  James took a step forward, but she interrupted him before he could say anything further.

  “You know, my daddy, he had this old mandolin he liked to play. Like a guitar, right? Only smaller. Really meant for a woman to play, but he didn’t care. He won it in a poker game, I don’t know how many years back, before I was born, and he loved that thing. He even named it. Lola or Lily, something like that. The way folks name cars. Before he and Mama split, we used to have picnics in this field behind the house. Sounds strange, huh? Having a picnic in your own backyard really, but sometimes Mama just wanted to do things like that. Go out and sit near the cow patties and eat sandwiches.”

  James didn’t say anything. He watched Marlena’s fingers as she deliberately broke the Hawksbeard into smaller and smaller halves.

  “We’d go out there and Daddy would bring that mandolin and play just for Mama. Sometimes he’d take a song from the radio and put her name into it, in place of the girl’s name. He’d sing too, you know. Not very good, but she seemed to like it anyway. He’d sing and play, and Mama would sit on the old bedsheet we’d put down and I would run around chasing Georgia Thumpers. It was kinda nice.”

  Marlena scattered the broken pieces of the weed and rubbed her palms on the thighs of her jeans. She stood up straighter and pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her cheek.

  “Even when he was dealing guns and pills out of the back of The Diamond, I would look at him and think of that man playing the mandolin. That’s who I’m always gonna think of.”

  She shoved her hands in her pockets and hunched her shoulders up.

  “But I know what he is. And I know what you and Rabbit are thinking.”

  James moved closer to her, until he was standing only a foot away. A breeze rustled the tree branches hanging over the roofless house, and the sunlight filtered through the leaves and danced with the shade across Marlena’s face. James watched her freckles appear and disappear as the light quickly changed against her skin.

  “My daddy’s my kin. And I love him. But I’ve put up with a lot, and it doesn’t matter what I remember from the past anymore. I don’t know what he’s done. I don’t know if he’s got that money or not—”

  James gently cut her off.

  “Then how do you know what to believe?”

  Marlena’s eyes flashed with anger.

  “You know what he said to me on the phone? He told me to go to hell and the devil could have me.”

  “He’s just scared. I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

  But James was lying and Marlena knew it.

  “Yes, he did. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. If I go to hell for this, then at least he’ll know he was the one who sent me there.”

  James put his hands on her shoulders.

  “Marlena. I’m sticking with the plan. To get Rabbit outta this, we gotta lead those men to Waylon. And I’m gonna get Rabbit out of this. I have to.”

  “I know.”

  “If you come with us, if you help us, you’re choosing a side. You’re turning your back on Waylon. They could kill him just as easily as take the money from him.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “You can get out n
ow. I wouldn’t blame you. Take the Jeep and just leave. You could.”

  Marlena looked up at him.

  “No. I couldn’t.”

  There was a finality in her voice that made James understand that she had wrestled with her demons and picked which one to run with. He had no words of comfort. No sage advice. No clichés to utter in an attempt to assuage the situation. He simply stepped forward one more time and encircled her with his arms. At first she remained stiff, her hands still jammed down in her pockets, her chin held high, looking away from him, but he persisted. He held her until he felt her crumble. She bent her head and leaned into him. He felt her exhale and her breathing slow, lapsing into time with his. He felt the bridge of her nose rest against his collarbone and her weight shift against him. He felt her break apart, and he didn’t let go until she began to heal.

  “Thank you.”

  Her voice was hoarse, a rough whisper, and he saw as she pulled away that her lower eyelashes were wet. James raised his forefinger and gently pressed it beneath each one of her eyes. They separated, but walked together out of the house and back to the fate they had chosen.

  ~ ~ ~

  James sensed that something was wrong before he was able to tell what it was. As they walked back down the track toward the Jeep, James couldn’t see Rabbit anywhere. Then he felt Marlena tense beside him and James caught a glimpse of another vehicle parked directly behind the Jeep. They walked faster, but James didn’t have to wait for the silver Tundra to come into view. A skinny man in a flannel shirt with cut-off sleeves stepped out from behind the Jeep. Rabbit was in front of him, and although James couldn’t see it, he could tell by Rabbit’s posture that he had a gun against his back. James tried to stay calm, waiting for Big Ted to step into his view as well.

  “Well, I figured that you two love birdies had to show up sometime. Gotta admit, though, it was funny watching this here Rabbit-boy sweat it out while he was waiting for you. He always so jumpy?”

  Big Ted laughed as he strolled toward them with his 9mm trained dead center on Marlena.