Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell Read Free Book Online Page A

flash from wherever he stood. He wore a couple of checked shirts, one tucked, one open, and a black pistol grip showed above his belt buckle. “Come in, ladies—or’re you leavin’, Meg?”

    “Think maybe I’ll stay a bit. Kind of cold.”

    “Suit yourself. Sit anywhere.”

    The house smelled of old beer, old grease, old smoke. No fresh light made it through the windows at this time of day and it was as shadowed as a sinkhole. The main room was long but narrow and a big square table had to be edged past to go from one side to the other. Pie pans had been used as ashtrays and sat full of butts on the table, the floor, both windowsills. A glistening pump shotgun lay broken open across the table.

    Megan sat on an edge of the table and Little Arthur did the same. Ree skinnied past them to stand near a window and said, “This don’t gotta take long, man. I need to find Dad and thought maybe you’d been seein’ him, maybe you two had got up to stuff together again.”

    “Nope. Not since in the spring, babe. At y’all’s place.”

    When he said “spring” Ree turned away, looked out the window onto the gray view. Dad had let Little Arthur, Haslam Tankersly, and two Miltons, Spider and Whoop, lay low at the house for a springtime weekend. Dope of many kinds and an air of excitement came with them. Little Arthur helped Ree make sandwiches for lunch once, and seemed sort of cute going about it, then gave her a handful of mushrooms to eat, saying they’d make fried baloney taste the way gold looks, and she ate them.

    “You ain’t seen him nowhere since then?”

    “Huh-uh.”

    “He kept leavin’ the house goin’ someplace, though—you don’t know where?”

    “Got cat shit in your ears, girl?”

    When the mushrooms took hold she sensed some of the gods calling to her from inside her own chest and followed their urging outside into the yard and up the sunny slope into the trees. She felt all gooey, gooey with the slobbered love of various gods gathered within, and smiling full-time went about the woods looking to collect butterflies and pet them until they gave milk, or maybe roll in dirt until she felt China through her skin.

    “I’ve got to find him—he signed over all we got to go his bond. If he runs, we’ll be livin’ in the fields like fuckin’ dogs, man.”

    “If I see the dude, I’ll tell him that. But I ain’t seen him for quite a spell now.”

    He’d come along behind her on the slope, and they’d bounced smiles off each other in the forest shade for a bit, then he’d hugged her to the ground and she’d felt a tremendous melting of herself, a leaking from one shape into some other form, and she’d been turned about by his hugs to kneel, and her skirt flipped up and Little Arthur knelt to join in her puddling embrace of gods and wonder.

    “I got them two boys and Mom to tend, man. I need that house to help.”

    Little Arthur tapped a cigarette loose from a pack and struck a match.

    Megan said, “Oh, good lord, baby girl—your daddy left
you
to do all that?”

    “He had to, the way things go, you know.”

    “But all by yourself?”

    Little Arthur said, “Maybe he met him a gal and went off to Memphis. He liked Memphis, I remember. That street there, all the ol’-timey boogie music’n shit. Or,
wait,
where else was it he liked? Texas! He had a real hard-on for Texas. Probly went to Texas, that’s all. Or Montana—or someplace else cowboy boots look right in.”

    Ree never mentioned the god goo moment kneeling in the forest and he didn’t, either. If not for her ripped panties she might not have later been sure it happened at all. She likely could’ve buried Little Arthur before the next sunset if she’d merely held those panties out to Dad and let a tear fall.

    She said, “He’s got other shoes, man.”

    “Then maybe he’s wearin’ ’em just about anywhere, babe—wanna snout some crank?”

    “Nope.”

    “Blow some smoke?”

    “Nope.”

    Little