Portis, though prone to hyperbole and outright fictions, was telling the straight truth about Mama’s looks. I have a picture of Carletta when she was my age, outside her papa’s house in a summer dress. She is in a field and there are wildflowers scattered in the tall grass—the chicory and primrose blooming while she stands there and looks like she just strolled off some Hollywood set.
Mama’s been up north for years, but she’s from the South and still sounds like it. She used to say I was her rebel daughter because I talk like her, while Starr talks northern. I never considered my speech to sound like anything, but I could hear the difference between Mama and Starr.
Either way, she split her good looks evenly between us. Starr got the breasts and the blond hair, while I got the blue eyes and height. The flip side of that coin is my bird chest and black hair, while Starr is cursed with stubby legs. If Mama was a ten and we both came out sixes then it’s pretty clear our daddy, or daddies, whoever they were, contributed little of value in the looks department. Which was exactly what they contributed in the rest of the departments.
“So why didn’t you ask her?” I said. “To marry you?”
“I told you the truth,” he said. “When I said there wasn’t no reason.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I might have thought there was a reason at the time. But if I can’t remember it now it wasn’t much of a reason, was it?”
Portis had stopped walking.
“Here it is,” he said.
I couldn’t see the shanty in the dark but I could tell we’d come to the edge of Trout Pond. I could feel the open air and the absence of the pines.
“The shanty’s out there?” I asked.
“It’s out there,” he said.
“Is it safe?”
“You’ve fished with me in that shanty before. I don’t recall anybody falling in.”
“I’m talking about Shelton,” I said. “He won’t come back here looking?”
“Shelton’s lazy ass?” Portis said. “No. I don’t think he will hike out to find us on this pond. Of that I’m nearly certain.”
“Certain would be better,” I said.
“Best not to start thinking about what’s better,” he said. “That’s been my finding.”
Chapter Six
Shelton rode his Polaris 500 from the Three Fingers River to the easternmost edge of the north hills and searched every nook-and-cranny trail on the way. He was twenty-five years old and he’d been riding sleds near his entire life, but he still felt that same old boyish excitement with the sled fired up and roaring beneath him.
One thing was for sure: they had needed the snow. Shelton had been disappointed in the snowmobiling so far this season, but then the storm came and winter had been reborn in the deluge. Yes, there was a baby to find, but there was also fresh powder and the hills’ vast tangle of trails to explore. Shelton wasn’t saying it made up for Jenna being gone, just that things weren’t all bad if you knew how to look at them.
His mind was crystalline in the cold air and he could not remember the last time he’d seen such good sledding, certainly before Ionia and the entire winter he missed in the pen. He moved freely through the poplar and paper birch, rode the wide trails with everything electric and purely white in the high beams.
Shelton rode and eventually let his mind slip from Jenna. He forgot about Kayla unconscious at the house and Old Bo being dead and gone. Shelton rode until he forgot even himself.
He shot beautiful white sprays of snow and slalomed through the trees. He stood up on the straightaways to stretch his back and then sat back down and gunned it even harder. He sang bits of the rock-and-roll anthems of his youth, the classics that Uncle Rick had raised him on before all that business with the Talking Heads. Zeppelin. AC/DC. Humble Pie. Shelton did not do this consciously, or even realize it was happening. He would simply hit a little jump or take a tight corner and belt it out: “Thirty days in the hole!”
Shelton rode and rode and rode. He rode until the night drew back above the north hills and bled out slow, until he could see a rise in the distance where the pale stars were like a scatter of river stones and morning dawned above the pines with a bluish tinge.
Shelton believed it was as pretty a thing as he had seen, that edge of cold sun, that strange arc of light, and he hammered the sled and thought he might ride straight to the top of the hills and launch himself. He wanted to see if he could touch the sun, if only for a moment, and he believed he might have if the sled had not seized and then sputtered to a halt in the middle of the trail.
“Shit the bed,” he said.
He started the sled back up and the engine turned, but she never got back to speed and when she petered out the second time it was for good.
“Goddamn,” he said.
He wiped the frost away from the gas gauge and there was the needle, on that bright red, block-letter E. He stepped off the sled and looked around. He’d been on a southeast jaunt, toward the highway, and he was a long way from the farmhouse.