one big crime and one little lie

I never much considered myself one to give a person the benefit of the doubt. It’s a fact I breathe easier when there’s someone to blame (other than yours truly, of course) and there’s a certain, well, a certain joy in watching a rotten person get their just desserts. Now before you go gettin’ all huffy with me and touting ’bout mercy, just hear me out. We’re not talking guillotines and hangin’ trees here, after all.

Take that morning Aaron McMillan called me Bird Legs in Sunday school. I’ll admit I felt no remorse when he tripped (without any assistance from myself, mind you!) and landed on his face and spent the better part of a week with a big white bandage on his nose. Matter of fact, I can’t rightly make myself sorry that his noggin still crooks a bit to the left and I have been known, on occasion, to make a brief mention of that fact when he gets a look in his eye that says he’s thinking of teasing me again.

But as Aunt Kitty likes to say, that’s neither here nor there. The thing is, a genuine police cruiser came screaming up the road yesterday, peeled around the corner at the mailbox and sped on up the hill to the cross-creek neighbors. Stuff like that just doesn’t happen every day and I’m sure you can understand why Pilot came runnin’ right to me and demanded I take him over the hill to investigate. I could hardly refuse him now, could I? It is after all a dog’s duty to look after his people and who am I to interfere with that duty?

We didn’t spend more than a minute listenin’ to Mr. Curtis and Miss Julia and the policeman; I know eavesdroppin’s a sin and I’d never. Besides, Pilot got restless there in the bushes and I feared we’d be found out.

We’d almost walked right on past that boy before I saw his toes stickin’ out behind a tree. I stalked around to stare him down, hands on hips. “I reckon you’re in some trouble,” I said.

Pilot whimpered a little and crawled into Ezekiel’s lap. Traitor.

“Reckon so,” he said, with a shrug that tried to say he didn’t care. I didn’t much buy it.

I sat beside him, leaves crunching beneath me. “They’re saying you cleared out the liquor supply at the market.”

“Is that what they’re saying.” He didn’t really say it question-like.

“Whatcha gonna do with so much liquor?”

He glanced down at me then, just for a moment, then fixed his eyes somewhere out in the trees. “What would you do with it?”

I had to think on that for a bit. “Well, Aunt Kitty says most of it tastes no better than goat pee. Can’t see how goat pee would be worth goin’ to jail for, so I reckon I’d give it back.”

Zeke just sat there, so still-like I started thinking he’d maybe nodded off. I bumped him with my shoulder. “Why don’tcha give it back?”

He looked me in the eye then, and he said, “I don’t have it.”

“Well, what’d you do with it?”

But he was done talking, that ornery boy, and I was left to wonder if “I don’t have it” meant he already got rid of it, or he up and drank it all, or he never done had it in the first place. I bumped him with my shoulder again, but he just scuffed Pilot’s head and then nudged him away, then shifted ’round enough to take me by the waist and hoist me up.

“Go on, now,” he said, and he gave me a little shove on my backside.

Well I left then, but it was only ’cause I wanted to. Pilot came with me ’cause I grabbed him by the collar and made him.

When that policeman came knocking on our door not five minutes after I walked through it, I hadn’t any idea the words that would be comin’ out of my mouth when he asked the last time any of us had seen Ezekiel, who, in case we didn’t know, had a police record and should be treated with some measure of caution. Here’s what I said, every word of it:

“Well, sure I have, officer. Me and Zeke been camping up the hillside since yesterday afternoon. Reckon you’ll find him at home now seeing as how we just packed up camp a little bit ago. See, I’ve had a burr under my behind since that boy said I was prob’ly afraid of the dark, being a girl and all, so I just had to show him it weren’t true. We spent the whole night up there, we did, without a flashlight between us, and I’ll tell you what, if anyone got scared, it was that lily-livered boy.”

I threw in that last part just so I’d feel better ’bout doing something nice for that rotten boy.