He just doesn’t say what happened. He square-dances all around it. The thing is, Odette, I get the sense that’s about to change. He seems ready to bust a gut. We seem to agree on one thing. It’s high time to bury Trumanell.”
I unsnap my seatbelt. “Are you going to help me take down that sign?”
“I’d rather just correct the grammar.”
I shove open the door, bracing my leg and body against the wind. The wind out here on this flat prairie holds me back like a bully, no obstacles in its way. It tried and failed on June 7, 2005, when I tore off in my truck and left Trumanell behind.
I run my flashlight along the sign, hate well-constructed.
Perfectly measured, so it won’t rip when the gate swings open and shut. Vinyl, not paper, so it won’t bleed in the rain. Red, white, and blue duct tape, so God-fearing Americans.
The wind keeps tugging. Why don’t I hate Rusty? Report his behavior, his little “gifts” on my chair, as harassing? After five years of this, why don’t I ask to be moved to another partner?
Instead, it’s him I want at my back, squinting, half-blind, regularly offensive, thinking I lie to him, knowing he lies to me.
I pull the knife out of my boot.
A hand lands on my shoulder. I jerk around.
“Shoot a bullet out here and it could go a mile on its way to hitting something innocent,” Rusty drawls.
“Your point?”
He takes one more deep drag on his cigarette before crushing it with his heel. “Life is vast and unfair. That’s my fucking point. Let’s wait on cutting down the sign. Head up to the house first. Make sure we didn’t come in on the ass end of something. Make sure our sign-makers didn’t do more than make signs.”
29
On all sides, the land is a pressing black tide, ravenous and ready to drown us.
It’s a mysterious and specific sound when corn whispers on a silent night. It’s loud in my ears, even though I know the field at my back is mowed flat, the way Wyatt has kept it for a decade.
Rusty’s head knocks against an old wind chime made of forks and spoons that has hung on Wyatt’s porch since I can remember. It sets off the tuneless melody of a lost flute.
It feels like my father’s heart pounding in my chest, the same as when he stood on this porch terrified that a delicate red handprint on the doorframe was mine. Instead, I was parting ways with my leg a mile away in a bloody Jackson Pollock drive-by.
At least I got to keep you, Daddy had whispered, bent over my hospital bed.
I can’t look at a refrigerator door that holds a kindergartner’s Thanksgiving drawing, a turkey traced around a tiny flat hand, without thinking of Trumanell’s fingers on this door, wide and panicked, her heart banging like a hummingbird.
A hummingbird’s heart beats a thousand times a minute, Wyatt had told me, his ear to my chest after the first time we made love. A whale’s only beats eight.
“Police! Open up!” Rusty hammers on the door with his fist in the same spot where Trumanell’s hand lies under layers of white paint.
I first saw a photograph of her palm print in my father’s study, mixed up in the clutter of his desk. An electric bill, an old Christmas card with a white-glittered church, Trumanell’s bloody stamp on her door.
Rusty twists the knob. He cracks the door a couple of inches. “Unlocked,” he says. “Unusual?”
I shake my head. He knows this without asking. People here still leave their doors unlocked no matter what explodes in the America outside this town’s borders. They tuck their firepower in tampon boxes and Bran Flakes, where their kids won’t look, because by the time they think to, those kids are handy at shooting guns themselves. If there’s terror in their lives, it shares their bed or their DNA. Odds are, they’ll keep it a secret until it’s wrinkled and dead. Even then, they might eulogize it with buttery words.
Rusty nudges the door open farther. “Wyatt Branson! Police! I got Odette with me. We’re doing a welfare check. Just want to make sure you’re OK. Not here to make trouble.”
More words than Rusty usually offers when his gun is drawn.
No shout back. The forks and spoons have changed their tune, grating over my head like rusty fingernails.
“What’s the call, Odette?”
My flashlight strobes across the fire-engine red hood of Wyatt’s rig, parked behind us. “His rig is