Bad Moon On The Rise (8 page)

And where was the boy?

I didn’t touch anything in Tonya’s
room. I backed out carefully and inched my way around a pile of
scattered schoolbooks and papers that led toward the end of the
hallway. I stuck my head out the back door for a few gulps of fresh
air before I continued on past a tiny bathroom that, apparently,
had not seen running water for some time. I found a slightly larger
bedroom beyond it. Unlike the rest of the trailer, the back
bedroom, while disheveled, was fundamentally clean. The floors and
walls looked scrubbed and the bed had been made, even if clothes,
shoes, notebooks, a handheld video game and the other signs of
young life were scattered across the bedspread. I checked under the
bed—this one had a frame, at least—and found nothing, not even dust
motes. I gave up and checked inside a tiny closet. A high school
athletic jacket hung from a hanger beside a single light blue tee
shirt emblazoned with a basketball and the UNC Tarheels logo.
Otherwise, the closet was empty.

This was Trey’s bedroom—and Trey was
not in it.

That meant he might still be
alive.

It also meant he might have seen his
mother die. Or, worse, had something to do with her dying. I didn’t
know the kid, and if this was where he had been living, who knows
what he might have been driven to do. If that was the case, I owed
it to Sally to find him first, before the cops did, so I could
determine what had really happened here in Perry County.

I knew one thing already: whatever had
happened here, someone had been looking hard for something. My bet
was on money or drugs. But all I could find that would lead me
anywhere was a stack of what looked like old mail wrapped with a
rubber band and tucked into the pocket of Trey’s athletic jacket. I
didn’t know what a kid would be doing going around with mail in his
pocket, and it was odd he had left the jacket behind; it had to be
one of his most treasured possessions given how little he had. The
mail was the only sign of the outside world I could find in the
trailer so I took it. Maybe it would help me figure out why Tonya
Blackburn and her son had ended up hiding in this godforsaken
trailer in the middle of nowhere. I grabbed the mail and backed out
of the bedroom. The smell inside the trailer was unbearable. I’d
have to burn my clothes, I suspected, which pissed me off. A good
pair of breathable black stretch pants are hard to find. Maybe I
could boil them? I could use one of those jumbo deep fryers, the
kind that holds gallons of oil and ends up frying more drunks than
turkeys each Thanksgiving.

As I passed Tonya’s bedroom, I glanced
in again at the odd tableau her broken body formed. I saw a glimmer
of brown beneath her right leg and stepped closer for a better
look. It was a pill bottle, with several large pills inside. I took
the bottle, easing it out from beneath the bag of bones and skin
that had once been Tonya Blackburn. There was no label on the
bottle. But then, addicts seldom buy drugs from a pharmacy. I
wondered if what was in the bottle would match the brownish residue
left in the head of the needle. Well, I’d leave the needle for the
cops, but the pills were going with me, along with the
mail. 

I took a moment before I left to say a
quick prayer over Tonya’s body—wishing her an eternity in a place
of peace, even though I wasn’t exactly the praying kind and God had
probably been exasperated with me for a long time now. But I
thought she deserved something and it was all I could do for
her.

I had not known Tonya Blackburn, and
maybe she had not exactly been the best of mothers. But I was still
filled with sadness as I gazed at the sorry end to her life. That
people could be so unhappy, that people could hate themselves so
much they would let life come to this: a body neglected and
poisoned beyond recognition, sprawled on a dirty mattress in a dark
metal box stuck in the middle of nowhere. It was a rejection of all
that was good and clean in the world, a gradual refusal of every
little thing that made life worth living until, at last, all that
mattered was a smudge of brown in a spoon and the empty promise of
a thin, tea-like liquid coursing through your veins.

Unexpectedly, I thought of Tonya
Blackburn’s sister, with her expensive clothes, fine shoes and
straightened hair. Two sisters, a shared childhood and two very
different fates. How close were we all to an end like
this?

It made me wonder. At what point in
life had Tonya Blackburn chosen the path that led her forever away
from any hope of happiness? Had she known that was what she was
choosing at the time? What exactly had brought her life to this? I
decided I would find out.

Not for Tonya, exactly, but maybe for
me.

I drove recklessly away from the
trailer, anxious to get away as fast as I could. I pried the bubble
gum out of my nostrils and tossed it into the weeds. Then I rolled
the windows of my car down all the way, hoping the fresh air would
sweep some of the stench from my clothes.

I was so preoccupied with getting the
hell away from death I almost missed the cloud of dust lingering
above one of the nearly hidden driveways snaking back from the
road. Someone had turned down it recently. I slowed for a quick
look. From the width of the tire tracks, it had been a truck. Well,
that didn’t mean much. Someone lived there or there wouldn’t be a
damn driveway. I peered down the rutted road and saw nothing else.
I let it go and kept driving until I reached the main road and
found a small gas station and grocery store near the Johnston
County line. By then, I felt safe enough to pull over and examine
the stack of mail I had taken from the trailer. 

Why would a kid carry a stack of mail
around?

I soon found out. It was Trey
Blackburn’s version of a scrapbook, a stack of minor achievements
that represented the only pride he could find in his life. I found
certificates of merit for his studies going back to grade school, a
letter proving he had made the honor roll during his first semester
at Perry County High, a few carefully folded letters from his
now-dead grandfather Mac and Trey’s birth certificate. There was no
father’s name listed. This was followed by a postcard of the
mountains in their full autumn glory, with a messily scrawled back
inscription that read, “Back home soon. Study hard and do what
Coach says. I love you so much, always remember that, no matter
what. – Mom.” It was dated last May; I could not quite read the
exact day, but the postcard itself looked to be decades old, the
ink faded and the photo watercolor-like. The identifying caption
was short: The Blue Ridge Mountains boast some of the most
beautiful peaks in the world. No wonder so many people love calling
North Carolina home.

The caption confirmed the age of the
postcard. “I like calling North Carolina home” had not been used as
a slogan by the state tourism board since the 1970’s. That was well
before Trey’s time and my best guess was that Tonya had found it in
some dust-covered rack in a store somewhere and felt the need to
send her son some small token of her role as his mother.

I don’t know why, but the message on
the postcard made me sad. I love you so much, always remember that,
no matter what. It was almost as if she was telling him good-bye,
as if she knew something bad was going to happen.

I stowed it in my back pocket and kept
going through the stack. Next up was a small wallet-sized school
photo of a girl with black hair. I didn’t recognize her, but she
looked to be Trey’s age. I also found several letters addressed to
his mother and examined them closely. One was a letter
congratulating her for completing a drug rehab program. The date on
it was over three years old. The kid was clinging to past glory.
Another was a letter from the North Carolina Parole Commission
confirming that Tonya had completed the terms of her sentence. That
letter was a year old, and evidence of no glory at all. But then
the last letter in the pile stated that Tonya Blackburn had been
accepted for re-admission to Piedmont Technical College, with full
credit given for the six courses she had taken there
previously.

Now that was interesting. She had been
planning to return to college and complete her studies, studies
that had perhaps been interrupted by a stint in jail, if the parole
letter was any indication. I went back over the timeline Corndog
Sally had given me. Trey had been living with Sally during the time
his mother might have been in prison, I figured, then he’d had
about nine months of nearly normal life living with his mother and
attending Perry High before they’d pretty much gone into hiding.
What had happened to cause Tonya to go on the run and take Trey
with her?

I went back through the other
envelopes, searching for a clue. I found one item I had not noticed
before: a color photograph tucked inside a letter to Trey from his
grandfather. The photo made no sense. It showed a beautiful young
black girl dressed in a miniskirt and flowered blouse standing
beside a white man who was sitting on a huge motorcycle, his denim
jacket cut off at the top of the sleeves to reveal a very fine set
of biceps. He was a handsome man, with long legs that stretched out
in worn jeans to keep the motorcycle precisely balanced. He wore
cowboy boots with big heels that dug into the dirt road. He wore no
helmet and his black hair flowed freely to his shoulders. An
equally dark handlebar mustache topped a wide grin. Mirrored
sunglasses covered his eyes. He was smiling at the girl beside him
with an almost joyous confidence in her proximity.

That grin looked familiar.

I peered at the photo closer, trying
to place where I had seen it before. There was something about the
photo, though, that prevented my brain from making the leap to
recognition. Something was out of context—the man was out of
context.

I knew him, but not like that. Not as
a biker.

I tried to imagine what he would look
like without the sunglasses. He’d have dark eyes, I knew, very dark
against that smooth white skin. Sort of like....

I couldn’t breathe.

Just like that, I could not breathe
and my whole life changed. All that I thought I knew suddenly
became as foreign and unfathomable as a country I’d never been in
before.

I knew the man on the motorcycle. I
knew him well. And as soon as I realized who he was, I knew that
the beautiful black girl standing beside him had to be Tonya
Blackburn before the drugs took hold. And the man on the motorcycle
had to be Trey’s father. Trey had inherited his smile and his
eyes. 

All of which explained why Corndog
Sally had come to me.

 “
Whew, girl. You
stink!” With his usual tact and charm, Bobby D. got right down to
it. “I hope the client paid up before he died.”

“
It wasn’t the client. And
she’s paid up,” I said. “Have you seen my emergency overnight bag?
I have got to get out of these clothes.”

“
Women say that to me all
the time.”

“
Bobby.”

“
Under the coffee table.”
He took a noisy slurp from his Pepsi. “But if you don’t mind my
saying so, you need more than a change of clothes.”

“
I need a change of life,”
I said sourly as I rummaged through the bag, retrieving a pair of
jeans and a tee shirt. The tee shirt was left over from my brief
love affair with Bon Jovi in the 80’s, and the art on it was
downright embarrassing. Which meant I could either look like a fool
or stink like a hound that had rolled in the carcass of a dead cow.
I chose to look like a fool. Wouldn’t you?

I peeled the smelly tee shirt off over
my head and tossed it into a trashcan. “Burn that when you get a
chance, would you?”

“
Sorry babe.” He bent over
a legal pad filled with his scrawls. “I don’t do trash. How else
can I help?”

“
You want to help? Tell me
what these are.” I tossed the bottle of pills I’d taken from
Tonya’s trailer onto his desk. For a man with hands the size of
catcher’s mitts, he had a surprisingly delicate touch. It took him
only seconds to have them in his hand and to make the
call.

“
These are Happy Horse
pills,” he announced, staring down at the fat white pills. “Mr.
Ed’s, Jethro Downers, the big H-2-0, scourge of the Appalachians,
your friend and mine: Hillbilly Heroin. Also known as Oxycontin.
They go for over fifty bucks a pill on the street these days.
They’ve been cracking down on this stuff.” He smiled happily at
them. Hopefully, too, I noted.

“
No shit. How did I miss
that?”

“
I suspect you were too
busy stinking.” He stowed the pills away in his drawer. “Best let
me keep these for you,” he said.

“
Best for who?” But I let
it go. I’d flirted enough with drugs in my life. When I got that
little feeling in my stomach, the one that cried, “Let’s experiment
with something new!” I tended to walk away as fast as I could. I’d
learned that walking away meant I could keep walking away. A few
Darvon during that time of the month was all my conscience would
let me justify.  “Be my guest,” I said magnanimously, just to
ensure I did not change my mind. “But you have to take out the
garbage in return. And call the body in for me.”

Bobby raised his eyebrows but said
nothing. I knew what he was thinking: you didn’t even have the
decency to call someone about the body?