Innocent Foxes: A Novel. Torey Hayden

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СКАЧАТЬ machine for the hospital would have been nicer. This was the whole problem. The canyon folk only seemed interested in Abundance as a dreamy kind of place where they could do storybook stuff. When they got tired of the crappy internet connection or the bad coffee or having only two full-time doctors, they would fly away. For Abundance folk, however, Abundance was all there was.

      On Tuesday evening when Dixie went to the funeral home to dress Jamie Lee, Main Street was alive with high-school kids ‘turning the point’, as they called the ritual of relentlessly driving around the two-block downtown area in their parents’ cars. Entering the mortuary was like stepping into another dimension. The heavy oak doors closed behind Dixie, and there was a sudden vacuum of silence before her ears adjusted enough to hear the softly piped organ music. Her eyes took longer to leave behind the summer evening’s brilliance for the mortuary’s shadowy interior of burgundy carpets and heavy velvet drapes.

      The funeral director came out of his office to lead her down a dimly lit corridor to a small room adjacent to the chapel. Right in the middle of the room was what looked to Dixie like one of those little folding tables you put your dinner on when you eat in front of the TV. On top of it was the tiny blue coffin. Jamie Lee lay inside, swathed in a white baby blanket.

      ‘Is your husband coming?’ the funeral director asked.

      ‘He’s not my husband,’ Dixie replied softly as she bent to take the clothes out of the plastic carrier bag.

      ‘I just wondered if I should leave the door unlocked. It’s the kids, you know. They get up to mischief at this time of night.’

      ‘It’s not his little boy, you see.’

      The funeral director looked at her.

      ‘I mean, he’s been good to Jamie Lee and all. Just like a proper daddy. He didn’t even mind about Jamie Lee being the way he was. But it got kind of hard. ’Specially right here at the end. Know what I mean? But Billy tried to be good to Jamie Lee. Better than Jamie’s real daddy. His real daddy never even seen him …’

      ‘It’s all right. I understand,’ the funeral director said gently.

      ‘I just didn’t want you to be thinking Billy isn’t here because he doesn’t care. It’s that he’s been working all day and he’s real tired. He’s just got a job out at the sawmill, running one of them strippers, and he comes home dog-tired from it.’

      The funeral director nodded.

      ‘He’ll be coming tomorrow though,’ Dixie added. ‘He wouldn’t dream of missing the funeral. He was real attached to Jamie Lee.’

      After the funeral director left, Dixie went over to the coffin. Jamie Lee lay on his back, his head turned slightly to one side, his eyes closed. The way he looked that moment, you really would have thought he was just asleep. He didn’t have that bluish colour of death about him. In fact, he looked better now than he had when he was alive. His poor little heart never could cope, so Jamie Lee had always looked a little blue. Now he was pink and rosy as any baby.

      Dixie felt an almost overpowering urge to lift up his eyelids and see if his eyeballs were still there. She didn’t know why this insistent thought had come to her but she forced it away before it spoiled the moment.

      Very gently she reached into the coffin. When she picked Jamie up he felt … odd, almost slippery; she hadn’t expected this so when his head lolled lifelessly to the side, she nearly lost hold of him. And he was so cold. Not that she hadn’t known in her head that he would be, but there’s a big difference between what your head knows and what your heart expects.

      In the corner of the room was a white rocking chair. When the funeral director had shown her into the room the first time, he’d explained how sometimes mamas and daddies liked to hold their babies one last time and that was what the rocking chair was for. Taking Jamie Lee over, Dixie sat down. ‘I got you some nice new clothes.’ She laid him on her lap and reached into the carrier bag. ‘Look at what I bought you. Lookie here at these little jeans. See? Aren’t they cute? And this little shirt. It’s just like Billy’s rodeo shirt. And see these, Jamie Lee? These sweet little baby cowboy boots Auntie Leola got you? You’re going to look all snazzy when you meet Jesus.’

      Tears came and she let them. It was safe here. No one to tell her not to get upset, to say how Jamie Lee had been going to die anyway, so it was better he didn’t have to suffer any more. No one to tell her she shouldn’t feel so bad, because with the kind of defects he had she should have been expecting it. No one here except the funeral man, and if he did this job every day, he had to be used to crying.

      As she removed the babygrow, faintly stained with the funeral parlour make-up, Dixie thought how she had cried, too, when she’d found out she was pregnant. The last thing she’d wanted was Big Jim’s child. The relationship was already over; in fact, if it hadn’t been for Daddy making such a big deal out of saying ‘I told you so’, and how she only ever attracted trash, Dixie would have finished with Big Jim long before that. Then there she was, carrying his bastard baby. Sitting in the bathroom, with little splashes of pee still gleaming on the plastic pregnancy indicator, Dixie had stared at the thin blue line and cried so hard.

      Mama, of course, had said there was no need to tell Daddy about it to begin with. You could fix things, she said, and men didn’t even have to know. But Dixie couldn’t do it. The baby was alive, and killing was killing. Maybe ordinary men wouldn’t know what she’d done, but Jesus would know and that’s what she told Mama.

      Mama got angry when she’d said that. ‘You been born again or something?’ she said scornfully, ‘because this family’s not so churchified that we can give Jesus as an excuse for our own stupid behaviour. We accept ugly things need doing sometimes. That don’t make them right and that don’t mean we won’t have to pay on Judgment Day, but they still need doing. And it ain’t Jesus who’ll do them. You, of all people, should know that.’

      Dixie cried then because she knew what Mama was referring to, but she still stayed firm. As ashamed as Mama and Daddy said they were of her for having a baby when she had no man, Dixie refused to get an abortion.

      She’d cried again the day Jamie Lee was born, as the doctor stood over her explaining what Down’s syndrome was and how this meant Jamie Lee’s heart wasn’t made quite right and they might not be able to fix it. ‘You just done nothing but make me cry, little man,’ she whispered as she dressed his small, cold body.

      Chapter Three

      Spencer fiddled with the espresso maker, trying to get it to work. As always, it produced enough steam to power a locomotive, followed by a trickle of dark, murky liquid that looked like engine oil. He had been absolutely assured this was the best-quality machine around and yet it routinely turned out sludge that even Starbuck’s wouldn’t call espresso. ‘Sidonie!’ he shouted angrily and bashed the side of the machine in frustration.

      When there was no answer, Spencer turned around. ‘Where the fuck is she?’

      The boy, who was sitting at the kitchen island, shrugged. ‘How should I know?’ Cereal fell out of his mouth when he spoke.

      ‘What are you eating? You sound like a pig at the trough,’ Spencer said and came over to pick up the box of cereal.

      ‘Coco Pops.’

      ‘How the fuck did you get hold of them?’

      ‘The store,’ the boy replied derisively. ‘Sidonie bought them for me.’

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