We’d been driving, on our way back from visiting Mama at one hospital or another. Lobo had kept his promise—but my mama hadn’t. A wild thing, she was drawn to other wildness: drinks that burned, pills that stilled. If it had been just the weed...but it wasn’t just weed.
I had explained to Lisbeth—I couldn’t try anything. I couldn’t take the chance that something might take, something might stick to me, like it did to Mama. She couldn’t shake it off.
The silence of our drive was broken by Lobo swerving off the side of the road. He stopped the truck and drew my attention to the window, to the deer: thin and pale, stumbling in a stripped cornfield. The deer sank onto its skinny knees and just lay there.
We did not accept meat from that neighbor’s woods again.
“It’s wasting disease,” I said to Jamey. “Like mad cow for deer. Or AIDS.”
Jamey took a step back. “Is it catchy?”
“Not from touching. Or breathing. But we shouldn’t eat the meat. We might get sick from it.”
“The meat,” Jamey said.
She turned and ran back to the campfire. She raced into the light and sped around the circle of men, flipping tin plates out of their hands. “You can’t eat the meat!” she said. The glow from the fire made her face look wild. “The meat’s poison!”
Men stood up, shouting, as their plates tipped over, food spilling into the dirt. The woman without her shirt was deposited onto the ground. Grayson and Dance leaped to their feet. Jamey pulled the plate from Jake’s hand and threw it into the fire.
“What the fuck,” Jake said. “Jamey, what the fuck did you do?”
Jamey looked up at me. “Now,” she said.
“Run!” I said to Grayson and Dance. I turned before I knew if they were following, but they were, crashing behind me. I was headed away from the campfire, but beyond that, I didn’t know where to go.
“Where’s the truck, where’s the truck?” Dance was saying.
“We shouldn’t be separated!” Grayson said. “I have the keys!”
But we were already splitting off, Dance straight ahead, Grayson to the right. I panicked and ran on instinct, heading to the first hiding place I could see: a huge garage. There was a slanting tin porch attached to the side, supported by two-by-fours. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if the building was half built or half rotted away.
I heard shouting. Grayson and Dance had disappeared. But from down the hill came the calls of men and the wild, spinning beams of flashlights. They were following.
I ran to the garage. I shoved into the building, and into the dark.