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On a huff, I reach into my pocket and hand him the bag of pills.
His groan sounds like the raspy chug of a dying engine. “You have any idea how many times you should’ve been locked up by now?”
“You don’t actually want me to answer, right? It’s rhetorical?”
He tucks the pills into his coat and fires up the truck, revving the engine that sounds like the noise he made in his throat just seconds ago. “You’re nineteen years old. How the hell d’you expect me to get on with my life if I gotta keep bailing you out of trouble?”
“I didn’t ask you to--”
“Don’t even say it. This shitshow was a sequence of events that woulda ended with you in jail for the night. And drugs? Are you fucking kidding me?”
Hypocrite. I was fourteen when I had my first sip of alcohol, while sitting out in the shack waiting for his monster buck to come in. Whiskey, of all things. Of course, I hated it, as I’m sure he hoped I would. “But if it was a six pack of beers, you’d be cool with it, right?”
“Beer is different.” The cans he’s accumulated in the back rattle in mocking, as the truck bumbles over the curb where he pulls out of the lot.
“How? Is it addicting? Yes. Could I die consuming it in large quantities? Yes. Is it illegal for my age? Yes.”
“Don’t be a smartass, Cely. It’s different. I don’t worry about you drinking on occasion. But those pills … you don’t know where they’re coming from. What’s in ‘em.”
“Are you kidding me? Travis probably scams them from his mom’s medicine cabinet. That’s top of the line shit. No generics. No additives, or preservatives.”
“You always gotta have an argument, don’t ya?”
Shrugging, I cross my arms and watch the dusky stretch of Lake Superior slip past the window in streaks of pink and yellow. “Just defending my case, is all. No different than you defending yours.” The beer cans rattle a second time, drawing a smile to my face. “However many you have back there.”
“That’s over the course of months.”
“And that’s only a fraction of what you have back at the house.” If I were to check right now, the guy would probably fail a breathalyzer. It’s a joke between us, that if someone hooked a tap to his vein, they’d probably get a mild buzz off drinking his blood. Thing is, he’s so big and drinks so frequently, I can’t say I’ve ever really seen the guy shit-faced. He’s passed out on occasion, but that takes the hard stuff to accomplish. “I’m not abusing them, okay? They help me sleep, is all.”
“There are more legal ways of falling asleep at night, Cely.”
“What? Counting sheep? Chamomile tea? Who, aside from cat ladies and yoga fanatics, drinks chamomile tea?”
“It so happens, I do. And it works. Soothes my stomach after dinner.”
“Well, it won’t work on me. The things that keep me awake are …” The window beside me blurs into a dark silhouette of passing houses, and the undefined features of a horned skull pops into my head. Doesn’t matter that I close my eyes to it. Shutting them doesn’t make it disappear. It’s always there. Always will be. In my head, I’ve always called him TonTon Macoute, a Haitian boogeyman, as I learned from childhood stories growing up. I don’t remember hearing the story, or why it stuck with me, but I convinced myself he was after me for years. Even now, I have to remind myself that boogeymen aren’t real. “Look, no cup of tea at night is gonna make them drift away. Besides, do you have any idea what I had to do to earn those pills?”
“Tell me you weren’t skinny dipping again. ‘Fucks sake, it’s winter! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“It’s actually therapeutic. Way better than chamomile tea. You should try it sometime. Just … not where anyone’s around. Nobody wants to see that. No offense.”
“None taken.” Lips tight, he huffs an exhale through his nose. “On a different note, I came out lookin’ for you for a reason. Been trying to get a hold of you for an hour.”
A bleak grimness clings to his tone that turns my stomach a little. That’s when it occurs to me how strange it was that he came out looking for me. The guy hasn’t chased off teenage boys with a groping problem since I was fifteen, when he nearly ran Cash Iverson over with his truck because the jerk coaxed me into going with him to a place the locals call Bareback Bluff. A decision I instantly regretted when I learned what the name actually meant.
“Everything okay?”
The flinch of his eye tells me something is very wrong. Staring out through the window, he hands me back the pills without so much as a glance. “Just a couple, okay? Store ‘em in the medicine cabinet so I know you ain’t downing all of them at once.”
Heart thumping against my ribs, I stare down at the pills. The last ones he confiscated, he flushed down the toilet. Something is wrong. Very wrong. “What’s going on?”
The tightening of his lips only stirs my fears, and he lets out a huff through his nose. “Found Noya about an hour ago, in the backyard. Wolf got to her.”
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Thierry
Chevalier Isle, Louisiana
