“Okay,” he said, and began to back away slowly. “Okay, baby.”
He walked out into the hall and then closed the door softly behind him. He listened as she continued to shriek and he understood that she did hate him. She was fucked up, high as she could be, but that didn’t change the fact that she believed he had taken Jenna and done the baby harm. And to even think he was capable of such a thing told Shelton all he needed to know. Kayla might have loved him, but she hated him too, and more than anything she was afraid of him. He put his hand against the door and knew in his heart that he would never see her again. In many ways, it was a relief.
He turned toward the other room now, toward Bo. He was through with the distractions and the messing around and he did not bother to cover his nose as he approached the corpse. Rather, he welcomed the stench. He breathed in its black truth and justice because it was exactly what he deserved.
He vomited when he reached the doorway, then staggered toward the body by the dim light of the hall. He stood over Bo and coughed up another mouthful of puke. He cried, as much from the vulgarity of the task as the sadness, then dropped down quickly and scooped the dog into his arms.
Old Bo stunk so bad that Shelton could smell it over the vomit that had come up from the back of his throat and burrowed down at the tops of his nostrils. The flesh hung loose and there were a few buzzing flies, though Shelton guessed the cold had helped some with that particular detail. Still, he could feel how bloated Bo had become and there were troubling bulges in his belly and Shelton feared his fingers might push through the spongy skin at any moment and introduce him directly to whatever horrors of decomposition were taking place inside. It was goddamn macabre, is what it was.
Shelton set the body down on his bed and wrapped Old Bo inside the very blanket he used to curl up and sleep on. There were dozens of black hairs in the fabric and the blanket still held the earthy smell of the living Bo. Shelton carried him to the truck and was greatly comforted by Bo’s return to his place of so many peaceful slumbers. It was the first fitting thing that had happened since his passing and Shelton wondered why he hadn’t thought to wrap him in the blanket right off.
He set Bo down in the pickup bed and was glad for his missing windshield in the front. It seemed right he should suffer the cold along with Bo. He took a pallet from the stack he kept out by the pole barn and loaded it with a jug of gasoline beside the dog.
He drank his whiskey and as he walked back inside for the shotgun he wondered why Kayla hadn’t gone for it instead of the knife. It was puzzling because he’d taught her how to load the shotty himself and she knew how to shoot it.
He remembered that gentle afternoon just a few short weeks prior, the way he’d held his hand around hers and eased them up the barrel and taught her to squeeze the trigger and how he was there behind her to cushion the kick. If she were going to threaten him, he would have preferred she pull the shotgun and do it right. He might have felt a touch of pride then, or at least taken some consolation in the fact that she had remembered that time they had shared and put it to some use.
Instead, she panicked and went for the knife. Well, Shelton thought, it is what it is. She was upstairs behind the door now and likely gone to him forever.
Outside, Shelton got in the truck and drove for Bo’s favorite clearing. There was never any doubt about where to put his best friend to rest. Shelton might have squandered every opportunity he’d ever had in this world and been on a run of particularly bad decision making, he might have ruined his life and several others, it was an evolving list, but he was not going to fuck up and put Old Bo to rest anywhere but the wide, brightly lit field where they had so often played together.
A quarter mile from his trailer there was another two-track and it ended in a beautiful little glade where Bo had loved to run wild. On a summer day the sun could sit for hours above that little break in the pines, or so it had seemed, shining on the tall grass and the ironweed while Bo frolicked. While he raced in circles and filled the hills with his buoyant and undimmed barking.
A good game of fetch had always soothed Shelton when he started to drop his high and tweak and it was doubly nice that the field was right there by his favorite cookhouse. Shelton had always considered it serendipity.
He took the two-track to the clearing, put the Silverado in park, and let it idle. He left his brights on, though they were of little use against the torrent, against the spate of snow and the sky the color of cement behind it. Shelton stepped out the driver’s-side door and resolved to complete the work that remained.