Better That Way

Chapter 4 -Wes

The back of a Bellamy County cruiser smelled like disinfectant and somebody else’s cigarettes. The seat was hard molded plastic, no give in it anywhere. They build them that way so they can be hosed out.

I knew that. I’d never been in one before, but I knew it, the way you know things about a place you’ve spent your whole life being told you’re headed toward.

Deputy Ronnie Machen put us both in the back and left the doors standing open. Then he went around front and filled out the trespass paperwork on the hood by flashlight, one boot up on the bumper.

The cage between us and the front seat was expanded metal, painted, chipped where somebody had worked at it. Every so often the radio up there said something and quit. Out the open door the light bar was still going and the grass kept turning red and back to nothing. No cuffs. That was Machen. He bought a transmission off my uncle two winters back. He is a heavy man going gray at the sides, and he has the specific weariness of somebody who did not want to be doing this at one in the morning any more than we wanted him to. He kept hitching his belt up with the back of his wrist.

Delaney was sitting maybe eight inches off my shoulder with her knees together and her hands in her lap, and she was shaking. Not crying. Shaking, in these small regular pulses, like an engine running rough.

She had a band of freckles across her nose. I knew about the freckles — you can see them from two rows over in American

Government if you’re looking, and I had been looking for two years. What I had never seen was all of them. Whatever she does to cover them, an hour in a wet field had taken it back off.

She smelled like somebody’s clean house. Like laundry that got dried inside.

She’s small. Not delicate; there’s nothing breakable about Delaney Hollis. Just small, and put together quick and neat.

And she takes up about a third of the room she is entitled to.

Twice already she’d put two fingers up to her earring, checked it was still there, and put her hand back down. She had a piece of grass caught in her hair over her ear and didn’t know it, and I wanted to get it out worse than I have ever wanted to do anything about a piece of grass.

None of the rest of it was new either. Four years of school will teach you that a girl’s hair gets cut somewhere outside of the county and her teeth ran somebody about four thousand dollars. What was new was sitting eight inches off all of it in the back of a cruiser and adding it up on purpose, the way you’d read the spec plate on an engine you were never going to own.

That is what I was doing with my head.

The rest of me was somewhere else. She had her mouth open a little, the way she does when she’s scared. Every time the light bar came around I got her face out of the dark for half a second and then lost it again.

There was not one thing about any of it I was handling well.

“Hey,” I said.

I rubbed the back of my neck. My hand came away wet, and I put it on my knee and left it there so I would stop doing things with it.

She didn’t look over. “My father is going to kill me.”

“He’s not.”

“You don’t know my father.”

I moved over on that seat. Not much. There was not one useful thing I could do for her from inside a cop car, but I moved over anyway, until my arm was about an inch off hers, and stopped there.

Everybody knew her father. His name was on a sign at the county line, because he had it put there. His face came to my uncle’s house on a mailer every four years.

My name’s on this county too. There’s a bend in a road out past the reservoir. Cutler Bend. Nobody had that one made. There were Cutlers up on that ridge before there was a county to put a name to. They wore it into the road. Then they ran out.

His name is worth something at the bank and down at the courthouse. Mine is worth a nod at the parts counter and thirty days to pay.

I’d understood since about the ninth grade that men like him and boys like me occupied the same forty-one hundred people the way oil and water occupy the same jar.

She was still going beside me, those same small regular pulses, and not one word of any of that was the least bit of use to her.

So I said, “Machen’s writing it as trespass. That’s a citation. It’s a fine and a court date and you go stand there and say ‘yes sir’ and then it’s over.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he’d have cuffed us if it was anything else.”

She didn’t say anything to that, and the shaking didn’t stop, so I said the other thing.

“I can tell him it was all me. That I brought you out here and you didn’t know about the hole in the fence till I put you through it.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s close enough to it.”

“Wes.”

“It comes off you and it goes on me,” I said. I was looking at the back of Machen’s head through the cage, not at her, because it was easier to offer it that way. “It’s not going to hurt me any worse than it already —”

“No.”

She turned and looked at me. Grass in her hair. Mascara smudged at one corner.

Her eyes are brown. Everybody would tell you brown. Up close there is lighter coming up out of the middle of them, gold or near it.

From two feet back you would never know it was there.

Which means most people in this county have looked at that girl their whole lives and never once seen the color of her eyes.

In the wash off the light bar I kept getting her face in flashes. Red, gone. Red, gone. Never for long enough.

“Okay,” she said.

And then she put her hand down on my knee, palm up, and left it there.

I looked at it for what felt like a long time. At her palm, and the little pale line where a ring had been on that hand at some point and wasn’t now, and at my own hand on my other knee with the black still in the creases of it.

Out front, Machen turned a page on his clipboard.

In eleven weeks she was going to be six hundred miles away, in a dormitory, in a state I had never been to. I was going to be right here. Same field, same four in the morning.

Whatever this was had a hard stop on it, and both of us could see it from where we were sitting.

I put my hand in hers anyway. Mine looked like a shop rag next to hers.

She didn’t seem to notice. Or she did, and it didn’t register as information. I spent years deciding that was the single best thing about her.