them. A pervert could easily have been the one to find him walking along all by himself like that, and then where would he be? We’re doing a good thing here. And then just asking a little money for our trouble.’
Dixie shook her head wearily. ‘Billy, if your brain was in a bird’s head, it’d fly backwards.’
Dixie cooked the steaks, because there wasn’t going to be any way of keeping Billy from that steak dinner, but she couldn’t get her mind off the boy. Every ten minutes or so, she went out and lifted the lid of the toolbox and poked him to make sure he was still alive. Because of the tape over his mouth, he couldn’t make much noise, so in the end she decided it was safe to leave the toolbox lid up and the door into the house open in an effort to keep the garage ventilated, but still she worried about him.
Billy demolished his steak with gusto and knocked back a second beer. ‘You’re not going to waste all that, are you?’ he asked, pointing at Dixie’s plate of untouched food.
‘Go ahead.’
Eagerly he pulled the plate over and gobbled down the second steak.
Billy was like a kid let out of school for all his excitement in getting the camping stuff up from the basement. Probably all he was thinking about was what a great excuse to spend time in the mountains this was. They hadn’t been up at all this summer because Jamie Lee had needed so much doctoring at the end, and Billy was really missing the wilderness. Probably he wasn’t thinking about the boy at all.
Dixie, on the other hand, could think of nothing else. Again and again she went out to check on him.
‘Billy?’
He was removing his .22 from the gun cabinet. ‘Hmm?’
‘He’s pooped his pants.’
Using one of Jamie Lee’s old muslin diapers, Billy lovingly wiped the gun down. He didn’t reply.
‘Should I bring him in the house?’ Dixie asked.
‘What for?’
‘Well, to clean him up …’
‘Nah, leave him be. He’ll be all right.’
‘You haven’t been out to smell the garage.’
‘Well, he’s going to crap, isn’t he? We can’t take him out every time he needs to go. Put some newspapers under him and I can just hose the toolbox out when we’re done.’
Crossing over to the gun cabinet where Billy was standing, Dixie snatched the gun cloth out of his hand. ‘Billy, listen to me. He’s a little boy, not some animal. We can’t leave him lying in his own poop.’
‘We’re only talking about till we get into the mountains. It won’t hurt him for that long.’
‘Billy!’
‘Jesus, Dix, would you give me that cloth back so that I can finish?’
She clutched the cloth more tightly.
‘Well, fuck,’ he said in frustration. ‘Do what you want then.’
Dixie raised the lid of the toolbox. The heat and confinement had made the smell so overpowering that she had to step back a moment to keep from retching. When she finally found the courage to touch the boy, he jerked away from her and strained against the duct-tape binding before going still again.
‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ She laid a tentative hand on his head. ‘You’ve done a stinky in your pants, so I’m going to take you inside and clean you up.’
There was no response, no movement, nothing. Scared he might have passed out, Dixie leaned over him. ‘Can you hear me all right?’ she asked.
The boy burst back to life. Startled, she jerked back.
The duct tape and car rag over his face made it hard to tell what age he was, curled up in the toolbox like that. Dixie tried to get her arms under him. He was pudgy. Not obese. More what Mama would call ‘solidly built’, but it was a struggle to lift him. Dixie finally managed to clear the rim of the toolbox.
As soon as she did, the boy began to writhe. Dixie did her best to keep hold of him, but he was too big and, because of the poop, too slippery. He fell with a thud on to the metal flatbed of the truck.
Dixie clamped a hand over her mouth to keep herself from yelping. The boy started to make a snorting-in-and-out noise through the tape.
‘Listen, don’t fight me, OK?’ she said and knelt down beside him. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to take you in and clean you up. OK?’
She’d thought at first that the noise was the boy trying to cry, but Dixie realized then it was a bull snort, full of rage. When she went to pick him up again, he exploded at her touch, kicking out as viciously as his bound legs would let him.
Dixie darted into the house. ‘Billy? Billy, you got to come help me,’ she cried.
Groaning with annoyance, Billy followed her. ‘Fuck, Dixie. Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?’
Dixie climbed into the back of the truck. Billy hopped in with one easy motion. ‘Hey, kid. Stop it,’ he said.
At the sound of Billy’s voice, the boy struggled even more fiercely against the duct-tape bindings. Billy kicked him. Hard. Then again. Then a third time.
‘Don’t. You’re going to kill him!’
Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Billy turned and grabbed the front of Dixie’s blouse. He pulled her right up close to his face. ‘You shut up. It’s all your fault that we’re in this mess to start with, so if you don’t want to feel my boot next, you shut your trap. I mean it, Dixie. I’m pissed off. I won’t take no more fucking around. You understand?’
Dixie nodded meekly.
Billy let go of her. Kneeling, he bent down close to the boy’s head. ‘So, you want to fight me some more, kid?’
The boy whimpered.
‘Good thinking.’ Then he picked the boy up by the waistband of his shorts, carried him inside and dumped him unceremoniously on the bathroom floor. Without saying anything to Dixie, he went back out into the living room.
Dixie softly shut the bathroom door. The boy, lying in an ungainly heap on the floor, made squeaky little noises through the tape, like the mewing of a newborn kitten.
Tentatively Dixie touched his head. His hair was an uninteresting birdy-coloured brown, a bit wavy and flowing down over his shoulders like girls’ hair. Boys around Abundance would have laughed so hard at long hair like that. Dixie felt pity for him. She hated it when parents didn’t notice things that made their kids look weird to other kids, when they just left them to get on with being teased or left out. Gently she tried to smooth his hair back and soothe his crying but it wasn’t really possible because of all the binding.
The boy kept making creepy noises. His nose was congested from the crying and so there were all sorts of gurgles and strangulated sounds that worried Dixie.
‘Listen, I’m going to take that tape off your mouth, because I don’t think that’s good for you at all. But you got to be nice, OK? You got to not yell or anything, because if you do, my man’s going to come back and beat the crap out of you again. You understand?’ She carefully peeled back the tape. In the process the car rag came off his face as well, giving her a first proper look at him, but there was no time to think about that, because the boy was coughing and gagging. Dixie thumped his back to help knock the breath back into him. The second he managed to draw a decent breath, he screamed blue murder.
Billy flung the bathroom door open. ‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ he shouted. The boy stopped screaming immediately, but it was too late. Billy hauled off and kicked him so hard that he slid right across the floor and up against the bathtub. He howled.
Grabbing the car cloth, Billy whipped it around