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Bar Circle Z Ranch or handsome tramps in town that hung with her. Those times just hung in the mind swaying, swaying, casting shadows behind her eyes forever. Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they’d get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result. But it just seemed proof that a great foulness was afoot in the world when a no-strings roll in the hay with a stranger led to chipped teeth or cigarette burns on the wrist.

    “I think I’ll root around and find your makeup, too. Get you painted up special today.”

    “Like before was.”

    “A lot of the time.”

    But there’d been hot buttered parts of those nights she’d liked so and missed. The sweet beginnings that held the promise of who knows what, the scent, the music, the shouted names in a loud place, names you might never get straight. The spark of fun when two men quickened at the sight of her, stepped forward on the same snap and tried to woo her, one in this ear, the other in that. Lust slaking to dance tunes, standing hip bone to hip bone, the new hands moving over her rumples and furls and tender knobs, hands good as tongues in the dark corners of those whiskey moments. Words were the hungered-for need, and the necessary words would be spoken low, sometimes sounding so truly true she could believe them with all her heart until the naked gasp happened and the man started looking for his boots on the floor. That moment always drained her of belief in the words and the man, or any words and any man.

    “Don’t fidget—you’re near about dry.”

    While Dad was in prison the rule had been to never see the same stud three nights. One night is forgot like a fart, two like a pang, but after three nights lain together there is a hurt, and to soothe the hurt there will be night four, and five, and nights unnumbered. The heart’s in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.

    Ree went into Mom’s room and flicked on the light. The walls were papered pink from Mamaw’s day. There was a nice curly maple dresser with a mirror that had been Aunt Bernadette’s before the flash flood caught her dawdling strangely on the low bridge and never even gave her body back. Hard not to see glimpses of her face in the creek or the mirror since. Above the bed there was a dusty, cockeyed picture of Uncle Jack, who’d lived through Khe Sanh and four marriages, then died at a roller-skating rink from something he’d snorted. The bed had brass parts, fat brass tubes at the head and the foot, and the bedspread was red and kicked aside. Ree’d been made in that bed, and she’d caught Mom and Blond Milton making Sonny there on a slow sweaty morning. Mom’d already begun to crack in her senses a little and flung an ashtray at Ree, shouting, “You’re lyin’! You’re lyin’! This could never happen!”

    “Can’t find your makeup kit, Mom. I’ll paint your face pretty another time.”

    Mom rocked in warmth beside the potbelly, touching her hands to her hair, and did not seem to have heard. She stared across the kitchen toward the television, squinted past her two sons and cocked her head sideways.

    “Wonder where’d he get that armor from?”

     
10

    C OYOTES HOWLED past dawn, howled from far crags and ridges and down the valley to the end of the rut road where the school bus stopped. Ree, Sonny, and Harold stood next to the county blacktop that led everywhere, beside white levees the plows had built with scraped-aside snow. The morning was clear but bone-cracking cold, and maybe the weather had kept those coyotes from doing what had to be done in the night so they carried on into the day. Wild crooning yips and moans beneath a sun that warmed nothing. Ree kept the boys huddled close together, watched the breath spewing from their mouths like those little clouds that carried words of thought in cartoons. Harold’s cloud