to find her closet empty and one of the dogs gone with her. She took off in her old rattletrap car he’d just fixed to run smooth.
Is she coming back? I said.
Whitey told me her note said never. He said he slept with the other dog, he was so broke up. She said he’d best clean up his act. Amen to that.
The news made me dizzy and I told Cappy we needed to go somewhere. He said his usual polite and traditional thank-you to Clemence and then we biked away together, slow. Finally we got to the road that led, though it was a long ride off, to the hanging tree where Sonja and I had buried the passbook savings books. We stopped our bikes and I told Cappy the entire story—finding the doll, showing it to Sonja, her helping me stash the money in those bank accounts, and then where we put the passbooks in the tin box. I told him about how Sonja insisted I keep quiet so as to not put him in danger. Then I told him about Sonja’s diamond stud earrings and the lizard-skin boots and about the night Whitey beat on her and how it looked like she was planning to get away from him and I told him how much money I had found.
She could get real far on that, he said. He looked away, offended.
Yeah, I should have told you.
We didn’t talk for a while.
We should go dig up the little box anyway, he said. Just to make sure. Maybe she left you some money, said Cappy. His voice was neutral.
Enough for shoes like yours, I said as we rode along.
I offered to trade, said Cappy.
It’s okay. I like mine now. I bet she left me a goddamned note. That’s what I bet.
We both turned out to be right.
There was two hundred dollars, one passbook, and a piece of paper.
Dear Joe,
Cash is for your shoes. Also I am leaving you saving acct. to spend on an IV education out east.
I looked inside the passbook. It was ten thousand.
Treat your mom good. Some day you might deserve how good you grew up. I can have a new life with the $. No more of what you saw.
Love anyways,
Sonja
What the hell, I said to Cappy.
What’s she mean, what you saw?
I struggled. I wanted to tell the whole dance, every howl, every gliding move, and show him the tassel. But my tongue was stopped by obscure shame.
Nothing, I said.
I split the cash with Cappy and put the passbook and letter in my pocket. At first, he wouldn’t take the money and then I said it was so he could get a bus ticket to visit Zelia in Helena. Travel money, then. He folded the bills in his hand.
We started back home and halfway there we scared up a pair of ducks from a watery ditch.
After a couple miles, Cappy laughed. I got a good one. How come ducks don’t fly upside down? He didn’t wait for me to answer. They’re afraid of quacking up! Still happy with his wit, he left me at the door to have dinner with my mother and father. I went in and although we were quiet and distracted and still in a form of shock, we were together. We had candied yams, which I never liked but I ate them anyway. There was farmer ham and a bowl of fresh peas from the garden. My mother said a little prayer to bless the food and we all talked about Cappy’s run. I even told them Cappy’s joke. We stayed away from the fact of Lark’s existence, or anything to do with our actual thoughts.
Chapter Ten
Skin of Evil
Linda Wishkob rolled out from her car and trudged to our door. I let my dad answer her knock and slipped out the back way. I’d finally worked out my thoughts in regard to Linda and her banana bread; although these thoughts did not make sense, I couldn’t argue myself out of them. Linda was responsible for the existence of Linden. She’d saved her brother, even though she knew by then he was a skin of evil. She now repelled me like she’d repelled him and her birth mother, though my parents didn’t feel the same way. As it turned out, while I was in the backyard running this way and that with Pearl, playing tag, though we never touched but whirled around each other in an unceasing trot, Linda Wishkob was giving my