Between, Georgia Read online

  The Bitch shook her head back and forth, jerking at Genny.

  The pain was immediate and awful but very welcome, because it was stronger than the fear. Once the pain started, she could think; she could clinically feel her flesh tearing away and the smoky heat of the dog’s body bracing into hers. Genny thrust her forearm in the dog’s throat and began beating at the Bitch’s back with her other hand, shoving herself along the sidewalk with her feet. She could feel the concrete tearing her dress and the skin of her back as she wormed away. She didn’t care. She had to get out from under, because she knew when the two big males came, she would be dead in a matter of seconds, and she absolutely could not be dead. She heard Mama screaming, and in her very center, in some calm place that was watching with mild interest as the dog killed her, a voice said, “Oh, that’s probably a good idea,” so she started screaming, too.

  Henry Crabtree was trying to sell a Dennis Lehane on tape to a trucker who had stopped in to see if the bookstore carried any decent porn. Henry made a lot of sales this way; the truckers who paused in Between to gas up generally took to him. There was something a bit dirty about Henry that belied his crisp white shirts and fine-boned face. It lived in the hollows of his severely cut cheekbones or maybe in the permanent dark circles that made his eyes look deep-set and older than the rest of him. It was hard to pin down, but Henry seemed like he might have an opium pipe or an ivory-handled knife in the back pocket of his tailored khaki pants.

  He had the trucker all but sold when he heard my mama start screaming. At first he couldn’t identify the source of the wail; it didn’t sound human. He looked quizzically at the trucker, who shrugged.

  “Steam whistle?” the trucker said.

  Then Genny started screaming, too, and Henry said, “No,”

  and vaulted the counter, knocking the big trucker aside and sprinting out the door. Bernese had come out of her store already and was puffing past, her stocky legs pumping as she ran toward her sisters. Henry passed Bernese easily, and as he went by the diner, he yelled, “Call 911” to Trude, who was standing openmouthed in the doorway. She disappeared back inside.

  The Bitch already had Genny by the time Henry could see them. The male dogs were practically scraping the skin off their heads trying to get through the gap in the gate. Stacia was crawl-ing down the center of the road, keening. Henry didn’t stop; he was afraid that at any moment the Bitch would burrow down deep enough into Genny’s neck to tear open an artery.

  Henry threw himself onto the dog, trying to lever her mouth open with his hands. His long black hair escaped its leather tie and got into his eyes, blinding him, and in that moment the dog released Genny and clamped down hard on his forearm.

  Ona Crabtree came loping around the corner from the front of the gas station with her graying red hair slopping out of its bun.

  She was calling, “Here, dog, got-dammit, here, dog, here, got-dammit, here.” The Bitch ignored her, but the males froze immediately and slunk away from the fence. Lobe was at Ona’s heels, red-faced and sweating in his coveralls. He came bearing down on the scene with a choke chain and a grim expression, his bushy orange beard bristling fiercely.

  Bernese huffed up and peeled Stacia up out of the street, then led her to the side of the road. Stacia was signing in frenzied bursts, and Bernese, who had never learned ASL, was trying to capture her hands and manually spell out “OK” into them. She was so flustered that she was actually signing “BK, BK, BK” over and over again, and Mama was slapping at her and trying to sign at the same time.

  Together with Henry, Lobe managed to wrestle the choke chain over the Bitch’s head. He jerked back on the chain, putting his weight into it so that the choke cinched and the dog was pulled off of Genny, who immediately rolled over and began worming her way up the sidewalk, weeping.

  Ona Crabtree arrived and went at the Bitch with her bony bare feet, kicking so violently that her housedress flipped up, showing her varicose veins. “Piece of shit! Piece of shit!” she cawed, and the dog dropped to her belly and cringed like a meek puppy, her mouth still foamy with Genny’s blood.

  Without a word, Lobe turned and started dragging the Bitch back toward the gas station. Ona opened the combination lock and began rewrapping the chain that held the gate. She got it shut properly and then marched off after Lobe. The sidewalk was freckled with small puddles and spatters of blood, both Genny’s and Henry’s. It was a fake bright Hollywood red but was already drying to brown at the edges. Ona had walked through the worst of it, and her right foot left four red prints, one after another, growing sketchier as she stomped back around the corner to the gas station.

  Henry pulled off his shredded shirt, crouched down beside Genny, and pressed the shirt hard into her shoulder to stanch her bleeding, ignoring his own wounded arm. Genny was only semiconscious; she’d crept off the sidewalk into the strip of grass beside the fence. Henry pulled her up into his lap to try to elevate her wounded shoulder, still applying pressure.

  Isaac Davids had come out of his law office and was making his way down Grace Street as quickly as he could with his cane.

  Trude from the diner followed with her arms full of paper towels, as if she planned to clean up the street. Behind them, Mr. and Mrs. Marchant were toddling as fast as they could from their bed-and-breakfast, their daughter, Ivy, and Amy Bend from the Sweete Shoppe urging them on. The doors of the antique marts were opening, and worried faces were peering out.

  Bernese had given up trying to communicate with Stacia, and Stacia was breathing like a steam engine, red-faced and trembling, silently demanding Genny in their shared language.

  Henry could hear the sirens of the ambulance coming to Between from Loganville, and just as it seemed things would calm down, that moron Lobe kicked the cringing Bitch out the back door of the station, back into the parts yard. The minute the back door shut, the Bitch untucked the stump of her tail and charged at the fence, growling, hackles rising. Genny heard her and struggled with Henry, trying to sit up, screaming as the dog’s leering face came up against the fence not two feet from her own. Trude went into gratuitous hysterics, but at least she gave Bernese someone to slap.

  When the ambulance arrived, it was all chaos with Lobe and Ona Crabtree taking turns screaming profanities out the back door, trying to quell the dogs by sheer volume. Genny was wailing, Henry was bleeding and dizzy, and Trude was hollering at Bernese, who was clearly itching to slap her again. Everyone else was milling around wringing their hands and tracking through the blood and generally getting in the way. Mama’s back was bleeding from where she’d scraped it in the street, and she was reaching out with both arms, trying to touch something, the fence or the side of a car or a person, anything that would help her orient.

  The EMTs took one look at the scene and started waving needles and threatening to sedate everyone who wouldn’t shut up.

  The warning worked as well as any medicine could have, and the crowd’s hysteria dropped by a dozen decibels. The medical per-sonnel then methodically made the rounds to see who was bleeding and who had only rolled in the blood. The sheriff arrived, and more ambulances, and cool, efficient people who were accustomed to carnage got everyone sorted out and the injured were carted off to Loganville General. It was nominally over.

  I pieced it all together later, questioning everyone who had been there, getting the details separately like puzzle pieces I had to put together in both time and space to get a clear understanding of what had happened and when. It was strange, the odd bits that stuck with different people. No one but Bernese had any idea what the male dogs had been up to. Isaac Davids was the only one who noticed Ona’s trail of bloody bare footprints. And Henry told me that while he was fighting with the dog, that trucker walked out of his bookstore with about five Dennis Lehanes on tape.

  “It’s terrible to be robbed, of course,” Henry said to me later.

  “But looking at the bigger picture, perhaps I’ve created a reader.”

  I added the trucker to
the scene. I saw him, a big man, thick through the chest with long, meaty arms, looking across the square. He squinted to see down Grace Street where the dog was tearing up Genny. I watched him choose not to help, instead grabbing whatever he could reach and then dashing for his truck in the lot behind the church. I could not forgive him.

  I couldn’t forgive myself, either. Mama had needed me to help her choose a head, Genny had needed me to soothe her nerves, and Fisher had simply needed me, like always. But I had been un-willing to lose one of the last days left that I could rightfully call Jonno mine. I’d been simultaneously afraid that if I so much as looked away, Jonno would find a way to gum up the works and stop the divorce himself. Maybe I’d wanted to prove to them all that I wasn’t such an easy dog to call. Whatever my motive, the result was that I found myself in Athens, staring into the vapid honey-brown eyes of Amber DeClue with a cell phone clamped to my ear, listening as Bernese told me everything I’d failed to avert.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE BITCH GOT Genny?” I said into the phone, and for a dizzying moment, I thought Bernese was telling me Genny was dead. Amber was still looming over me, blocking me into the booth, or I might have thrown the phone and gone running pell-mell crazy for home.

  “She’s in the hospital,” said Bernese. “Serious but stable. She lost a lot of blood. The Bitch tore her up and down.”

  “The hospital?” I was suddenly so afraid that I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I helplessly said, “Bernese, Bernese,” while Amber’s eyes got bigger and bigger in her pointed kitten face.

  Bernese chose that moment to be intuitive for the first and last time in her life. She said, “No, no, she’ll be able to sign just fine.

  It didn’t get her hands at all,” and I could breathe again. Bernese continued, “It went for her throat, but you know podgy Genny doesn’t hardly have a throat you can get to.”

  I heard the low tones of a male voice in the background, and then Bernese apparently covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

  I couldn’t make out anything my uncle Lou was saying, but I could have heard Bernese braying through a brick wall. “Yes, it’s long-distance—it’s Nonny. Nonny is long-distance.”

  I heard the rumbling male voice again. Bernese overrode it and snapped, “You act like I’m sticking a monkey up your nose. I’m just making a phone call.”

  “Aunt Bernese, where’s Mama?”

  “She’s in the hospital over to Loganville. I couldn’t make her understand what was going on, and she was flushed and flapping around, ill as hornets. Then she went paper-color. The EMT took her pulse, and no one could talk to her. He was worried she’d stroke out, so he pumped her full of Ativan. They admitted her right alongside Genny. Stacia won’t wake up for at least another four, five hours, not with the dose that EMT put in her. Hell, she’s likely to sleep through the night. But I can’t be for sure.”

  “I’ll be there before she wakes up,” I said. “I’m on the way now.” Already my brain was ticking back and forth like a metronome, flipping between horrified listening and a to-do list to get myself on the road to Between as quickly as possible.

  “Don’t go leaping in the car all harum-scarum and blast over here and have to go back tomorrow because you didn’t get your work squared away. Genny’s not going to be able to do for herself, and when that dog knocked your mama in the road, she scraped half the skin clean off her back. She needs you, Nonny. I have to go.”

  “Wait a sec. What aren’t you telling me, Bernese?” I said.

  “Just do what you need to do to be able to stay over here with us. If you can’t get here by eight or so, tell me now. I can hire that mealy-faced worm-boy to drive over from Atlanta and interpret.

  Someone has to tell Stacia what happened when she wakes up.”

  For the ninety-seven millionth time, I silently cursed Bernese for not learning to sign, but the Fretts’ system of communication had been in place for decades and was ingrained and habitual.

  Genny and Mama were twins after all, and as toddlers they had made up their own sign language. When Mama started school, Genny picked up ASL almost by osmosis, and to the rest of the family, there was no recognizable transition. Mama had always spoken by gesture, and Genny had always interpreted. The pattern was set.

  “I’ll be there before Mama wakes up,” I said.

  Amber was bobbing in my peripheral vision, trying to get my attention. When I looked up at her, she mouthed, “Is everything okay?”

  I waved her off, but instead of leaving, she slid back into the booth across from me, sinking into the leatherette upholstery.

  She folded her legs up into the seat after her, crumpling up into a wad with her knees poking up over the table. She looked about twelve.

  I heard Uncle Lou talking in the background again, and Bernese barked, “She needs to know what all is happening. Can you clamber on down out of my butt, please?”

  “Good grief,” I said. “Don’t take it out on Uncle Lou.”

  There was a slight pause, then Bernese said, “That’s not Lou.

  He’s in Loganville.”

  “Wait a minute, then. Who are you yelling at?” She didn’t answer me, and I remembered the number on my cell phone had been a Between number, not Loganville. “Where are you, exactly?

  Why aren’t you at the hospital?”

  “I’m going over there soon as I can,” said Bernese, then didn’t say anything else.

  “Bernese,” I said. “You better get straight with me right now.

  Where are you, and where is Fisher? Is she okay?”

  “Oh, take a pill, Nonny. Your uncle Lou is picking Fisher up at her little friend’s house. She had a playdate set for today after kindergarten, praise Jesus in heaven, or she’d have been there with me and seen the Bitch eating up Genny.”

  “Then who is that man I heard talking?” I said.

  I could hear Bernese drumming her fingers, impatient and annoyed. Finally, she said, “That’s just Thig.”

  “Thig Newell? Sheriff Newell? Are you pressing charges against the Crabtrees?” She didn’t answer me, and my spine began to straighten, elongating involuntarily, until I was sitting up as stiff and taut as if I were being inflated. “Bernese, quit dancing with me and tell me what the fuck is going on.” Amber’s eyes were as round as quarters, and I got dirty looks from a young couple spooning ice cream into a baby at the next table.

  “I’m a little bit arrested,” said Bernese primly. “And I wish you wouldn’t use the F-word.”

  I sank back down in the booth and covered my eyes with my free hand. “Arrested! What did you do?”

  “I did the only thing I could and still look at myself in the mirror, Nonny. What do you think I did?”

  I took a deep, cleansing breath that didn’t leave me feeling any cleaner. I lowered my voice and said, “I think you stood there until everyone left for the hospital or went back to the square, and then I think you pulled your illegally concealed pistol out of your purse, and I think you shot the Bitch dead.” Amber gave a little gasp, her shoulders jerking up. I turned sideways in the booth, away from her. “Please, please, tell me I am wrong.”

  “Two to the head,” said Bernese, and her voice was creamy with satisfaction. “I would have got those boy dogs next, but they took off running and got under the junk cars when I started shooting.”

  “Oh, shit, Bernese. Shit! Are you crazy?”

  “Watch your mouth,” Bernese snapped. “I know what I’m doing.”

  But she didn’t. She didn’t have a clue. She’d gone up against Ona before, but she’d used lawyers and paperwork and police, all parts of the civilized world that the Fretts inhabited, a world that cowed the Crabtrees. Now she had opened with violence, and that was a language the Crabtrees spoke fluently. I suddenly felt so scared I couldn’t get a breath in. I wished I could simply fold myself up and slide down under the table and hide. “It’s a war, Bernese. It’s going to be an all-out war.”

  Bernese snorted rudely in
to the phone. “Well, I didn’t start it.

  My devil dog didn’t eat a Crabtree.”

  I had to get home. Not only to see Mama but to intercept Ona before she retaliated. My brain ticked back over to my to-do list and paused. I had several jobs scheduled that my agency would need to get someone to cover. I should probably give up the anthro classes altogether, since the semester was ending in a few weeks and I had no idea when I’d be back. Friday afternoon I was supposed to be at the courthouse, getting my divorce, but I couldn’t leave Genny and little Fisher and my injured mother to the nonexistent mercies of angry Crabtrees. I’d have to gauge Ona’s emotional state before I’d know if I could come back for the hearing.

  Maybe I could call Jonno and ask him to go on Friday and get us a new court date. I’d have to beg. As it was, I’d needed to take his hand and lead him through our breakup, showing him where to sign and ferrying him to and from our lawyer’s office. Honestly, he was so disconnected from the process that had he owned anything but a 1987 Chevy Impala, I could have robbed him blind. Even more honestly, there were moments when I had been so angry I probably would have.

  I was tired of patting him along through the jocular dissolution of our marriage. Jonno had treated our initial visit to the lawyer’s office like a field trip, a mildly interesting peek at how divorce worked, like going behind the blue door at the donut fac-tory. I was willing to admit that he might take it more seriously if I stopped sleeping with him, but when I was around him, my desire to murder him usually got sublimated. My hands were magnetically drawn toward him; they longed to wrap themselves inexorably around his lovely throat. They would cramp and twitch as I fought to hold them into flat, unthreatening pancakes at my sides, and then in the next breath, they’d be climbing him, never quite making it up to strangle him before I found myself on my back.