Page 82 - Vol.VI#5

Dark as a Dungeon (continued from preceding page)
lived on in Jeremy, she thought. The incredulous snort. By now, Jeremy knew Bobby Bogue as
well as she ever did, since the two of them went pheasant hunting every fall in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She was sure there had been plenty of campfire stories about the weird directions Margie’s life had taken, the choices she’d made that didn’t include Bobby Bogue. And she got the occasional update via Jeremy, like the thing about the headboard bonfire, the clean cedar smell of it. “If Bobby’d had a little more patience,” she said, “maybe things would be different now.”
“That’s bullshit,” her father said.
And he was right, only because there was no point in thinking about how things could have been dif- ferent. She swigged from the pint bottle and held it out over the passenger seat as if someone there was going to take it from her hand. No one did. Had the grave cured her daddy of the drink? Cer- tainly, nothing else on earth could do it. She had another swig, if only to prove she was still among the living.
“Tell you what,” her father said, “forget about burying me out there in the boonies. I got a better idea: you move back home and settle down there on the land. Share the house with your old moth- er, or build a new place back in the woods. See if your girlfriend likes the idea, with her patience and all.”
Half a smile turned up one corner of her mouth, imagining that. Jazmine, with her office on the thirty-third floor and her rolodex full of senators and CEO’s, transplanted to the dark side of Ken- tucky where the only movers and shakers were crickets and racoons. She’d curl up and die from social withdrawal, a time zone away from anyone else who understood the cartoons in the New Yorker. Thinking of the tirade she’d throw at even the mention of the idea, Margie felt a twinge of loneliness, the need to wrap herself in Jazmine’s arms, the soft smell of her.
She felt her father’s hand on her arm, a warmth. “I only want you to be happy,” he said. She didn’t
know if it was something he meant, or if it was only the words to a song. She swigged another bolt of J.D., hissing her teeth at the empty passenger seat.
Meanwhile, the road rumbled on, and she real- ized that it really was clearing her mind. She watched the gravel road coming at her under the late afternoon sun, recognizing the shape of a gnarled stump that stood like a hunchback at the crest of a hill, amazed that a piece of dead wood could have lasted so many years out in the elements, and equally amazed that some part of her mind had reserved a place for it. Two more miles to Bobby Bogue’s, was what the stump reminded her.
“Had the grave cured her daddy of the drink? Certainly, nothing
else on earth could do it.”
She hooked the last left, wondering what they’d have to talk about now. After a decade of pheas- ant hunting, Bobby might just share Jeremy’s ignorant attitude about her lifestyle. But of course, they had her dad to talk about. The late, great Hankleberry Finn. Speculating, over that bottle of Bushmills, whether Jeremy really had it in him to go grave-robbing behind the Presbyte- rian church. Or whether Margie had it in her to pack up and move back to the hills of Kentucky. Whether she knew any good recipes for wild squirrel. Getting a few laughs in while the night was still fresh and the lightening bugs cruised like shooting stars. She tipped back the pint of Jack, sucked her lips, and slid the bottle back between her blue jean thighs.
The sun had just slipped into the branches of a stand of cottonwoods on the flank of a hill when Margie saw the deer. Three of them, white-tailed does. They stood in the ditch at the edge of the road, their eyes black pools glinting with the last
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