CHAPTER 14
RANSOME
Ransome knew infection when she saw it. When she was a kid living up on the ridge, her dog Beans got in a fight with a coyote and won. He was a scrapper, guarding the chickens like a true working dog, like it was in his blood, and maybe it was—he was five kinds of mutt, maybe more. No doubt that coyote was sorry it bit Beans, if it could be sorry from inside the stew pot, but Ransome was sorrier. The bite was on Beans’s hindquarters, and he couldn’t quite twist his neck enough to lick it. Ransome and her sister cleaned his wound every night before he jumped up on their bed to sleep, but a wet rag lacks the curative properties of dog tongue, and every morning he’d be right back out rolling in filth, as dogs do.
The bite festered and Beans got sick. His nose dried and scabbed. He slept on the stone slab behind the springhouse, where it was cool and shady all day, his flanks shuddering with each shallow breath. Ransome’s mama wasn’t one for pets you didn’t eat; said when Beans died, another mutt would wander in to freeload in his place. But Daddy gave in to Ransome’s begging and got Birdie Snow to come. She was midwifing animals more than people back then, working for a farm vet. She made a poultice for Beans to ease the pain and help draw out the infection, but she thought it might be bad enough that he’d need an antibiotic. Daddy bagged up one of the bantam hens to trade for the medicine. Not likely a fair trade, but Birdie took it and called things even.
Beans got better. Before long, he was back to stealing salt pork off the kitchen counter. But a coyote bite’s not a human bite. You’d think a person would be cleaner than an animal, but a human bite’s got venom to it. Poison. Maybe because a person’s got to think to bite, Ransome guessed, to make a choice. Poison’s in the intent. She knew from the beginning that Lila wouldn’t be okay, though she told herself she would. She put some of Birdie’s salve on the wound, because that would fix most anything.
Ransome walked back up the hill after checking on Lila for the last time. She couldn’t sleep, knowing the girl was right down there in the garage, in the dark, waiting on things to come. She thought about the other girl, the wild one, that Crete had sent away. Such a tiny thing, full of piss and vinegar, as her daddy would say. Never let down her guard, never did a single thing Crete asked, but Ransome could hear her crying at night, hoarse, choking on her own snot. She’d been relieved when that girl was gone, and tried not to think about where she went. She thought Crete had given up on that sort of thing, trading in girls. She figured he’d lost money on the first one, and that was his least favorite thing to do.
Then Lila showed up, and Ransome pretended this one was different. She’d come to the farm of her own free will. It was hard to understand why such a comely girl had need to sell herself anyway; in Henbane, a girl that pretty would be married to the car dealer’s son. Ransome expected her to dress up in slut clothes and sit around filing her nails while Crete drummed up customers, but that wasn’t Lila at all. She took a real interest in the farm, like she really thought that was her job. And heck, maybe she believed it; maybe she was in some kind of denial about the mess she’d gotten herself into.
Ransome wondered what had happened to Lila to make her end up here, in a place like this, but didn’t ask. The girl had some sweetness to her, like she hadn’t given up on things completely. Sometimes, in the field, she’d look up at the sky with a little smile on her face, and it made Ransome think of herself and her sister when they were kids, playing in the sweet corn, and how glad they were to be out in the sun, how other things didn’t much matter, and she wondered if Lila felt that same way. Still, Ransome stood by and let the bad things happen. She showed Lila less care than she’d shown her mutt dog. But she needed the house and the paycheck and didn’t know what Crete would do to her if she crossed him. She told herself Lila would get used to her new job, or she’d get sent away, too, and either way Ransome wouldn’t have to worry about it.
That last night, the night before the first customer was set to come, she found Lila sweating in her bed. The sheets were soaked, and she blazed with fever. She didn’t stir when Ransome pulled up her shirt. Red lines spidered out from the bite, and Ransome couldn’t deny anymore that it was infected, that Lila could die if it went untreated. She couldn’t let that happen. Part of her job was protecting Crete’s assets, and he’d made it clear that Lila was an unmined vein of gold. So she called Crete close to midnight and told him that Lila needed to see the doctor. The phone went mute while he turned things over. It didn’t take long. Some folks thought him cold-blooded, but Ransome knew he wasn’t all bad. He said he’d see to it first thing.
The next morning she was out weeding before the sun got too high. After a while a truck pulled up to the garage, and she squinted across the field to see if it was Crete or the doctor, but it was an old two-tone Dodge that belonged to Joe Bill Sump. She wiped her face off with a handkerchief and hurried through the rows to see what he wanted. If he had an appointment, it would have to wait. She doubted Lila would let Joe Bill touch her unless she was sedated first, and Ransome wasn’t about to drug the girl when she was already so sick.
“Need you to open up early,” Joe Bill said, spitting tobacco juice at her feet. “Crete said the girl needs breaking in. Gotta get this done before work.”
“You’ll have to come back,” Ransome said. “She’s sick.”
“I paid my money,” he said. “Now, lemme in or I’ll make you.”
“I’m gonna call Crete,” she said, turning toward the house. “Just need to make sure that’s all right with him.”
Joe Bill grabbed her shirt and yanked her back, reaching around to feel her pockets for the key.
“Hey!” She heard footsteps quickening on the grit path. Joe Bill shoved her aside, and she nearly lost her balance. “What the hell’s going on here?” It was Carl, who’d come from the direction of the woods. She hadn’t expected him back for another couple weeks. He gripped the front of Joe Bill’s shirt, but he was looking at Ransome. “You okay?”
She didn’t know what to say. Lies spilled out like water from a spring, an effortless gush. “He’s gone crazy,” she said. “He’s trying to get to Lila. He attacked her once already, we had to lock her in to keep her safe. Crete’s getting the doctor.”
“Doctor? She all right?”
“She’s a lyin’ bitch,” Joe Bill spewed, twisting himself out of Carl’s grasp.
Ransome bit down on her lip and shook her head. Carl’s face darkened, and for a moment he looked just like his brother. He spun around and shoved Joe Bill into the wall. “I told you to leave her alone,” he snarled.
“I got every right to be here,” Joe Bill said, shoving him back. “You wanna fuck her, you can wait in line.”
It happened so fast that it all smeared together in Ransome’s brain, leaving only one thing clear: the sharp crack of Joe Bill’s skull against the garage after Carl struck him. They stood there staring at the crumpled body. An accident. Had Joe Bill been a few more inches from the garage, his head wouldn’t have hit the wall with such force, if at all. Had Joe Bill not been such an asshole, he wouldn’t have been punched in the first place. Part of it fell on her, she knew; had she not lied, he wouldn’t be dead. Everything that came after hinged on her lie, a door swinging open on a future that hadn’t existed until that moment. The lie worked out better for everybody involved, everybody but Joe Bill, though she was hard pressed to find that a bad thing.
She had to work quickly to smooth out the edges. She sent Carl home to get his truck—he’d walked through the woods to surprise Lila—and ran up to the house to call Crete. She told him about the scuffle with Joe Bill and Carl showing up, how she panicked and blamed everything on Sump because she didn’t know what to do. Then she explained how Joe Bill needed getting rid of, and Carl was too worked up over Lila to take care of it himself. Crete was quiet for all of one second before he calmly told Ransome her pay would be docked the hundred dollars he wouldn’t be getting from Joe Bill now that he was dead, though she’d done the right thing by trying to see if he’d paid up front. (He hadn’t.) She kept her mouth shut about that not being fair. If that was all she had to pay for what she’d done, she’d call herself lucky. He gave her a message for Carl—that Crete would handle Joe Bill, and Carl could owe him—and told her everything was scrapped now, to let Lila go, to make sure the girl kept her mouth shut or Ransome would be out on her ass, looking over her shoulder every step of the way.
She ran back to the garage, her joints wobbly and threatening to give, and shook Lila awake. The girl was groggy and unfocused, but Ransome gripped both sides of her head and explained that this was her chance to get out and she had to do everything just right or hellfire would rain down on the both of them, that if they didn’t end up dead, they’d be chained in a cellar sucking redneck dick every last miserable minute of their time on earth. She didn’t know if that was true, but she sure didn’t want it to be.
He’s lettin’ you go, but you ain’t free. You can’t tell Carl, can’t tell nobody. He’ll kill you, understand? Do you hear me? Ransome screamed in Lila’s face, begging for some sign that the girl understood, and her eyes flickered and her head moved in Ransome’s hands. She was nodding, yes, yes, and Ransome hugged her, a crazy, panicked hug, grateful that she’d made it through those first ugly minutes when everything could have caved in on her.
After Carl took Lila home for Birdie Snow to fix up, and Crete doubled Joe Bill over into a bag in the back of the Dodge and drove off, Ransome set out for her swimming hole. It was hidden in the cedars, spring-fed and deep, and she stripped to her drawers and untied her hair and dunked herself in the icy water. She stayed under as long as she could. The cold slowed her down, made her work for the surface. Back in the sunlight, nothing had changed. She was the same as she’d always been, no better. She didn’t know why she’d expected any different; she couldn’t step out of her own skin. She dressed soaking wet, wrung out her hair, and headed back to work. Her bones ached as the cold let go, and pretty soon she was right back to sweating.
It wasn’t long before folks started clucking about Joe Bill being gone. Sump’s ex-wife didn’t think it was a coincidence that he’d disappeared two days before his child support payment was due, and that, plus the fact that his truck hadn’t turned up, left little doubt what had happened. But then some of Sump’s pals brought up Lila, said he was planning to pay her a visit the day he went missing. Deputy Swicegood cornered Ransome one Saturday in the cereal aisle at Ralls’ and asked if she’d seen Joe Bill at the farm on the day in question. Angie Petree stopped in front of a display of puffed rice and cocked her head to listen. Junior Ralls watched from the meat counter, never taking his hand off the ham he slid back and forth on the slicer. Ransome told Swicegood she and Lila had worked the fields together like any other day. Didn’t see a thing.
That so? he sneered. Didn’t see one single thing all day? Not one thing caught your eye? Maybe I saw a snake, she said, laying in the dirt. But the next time I looked, it was gone.
Angie Petree nodded knowingly, and Swicegood grudgingly stepped aside.