Innocent Foxes: A Novel

‘To hell, more likely,’ she replied when she finally found her voice. ‘And jail most certainly. Oh Billy.’ Dixie covered her face with one hand and turned away. ‘I can’t believe this. Dear Jesus, dear, dear Jesus, please make this just a real bad dream.’

‘Let me explain my plan.’

‘Plan? Billy, do you know what you just done? This isn’t playing. This isn’t some game. Do you understand?’

Irritably, Billy slammed the toolbox lid down. ‘For fuck’s sake, Dixie. There’s no pleasing you, is there? First you’re moaning on and on about me taking the job out at Baker’s ranch. And I heard you. So then I go trying hard as I can to set things right, to get Jamie Lee’s funeral paid for and get us a decent life, and you’re still not happy. Nothing I do is ever good enough for you.’ He hopped over the side of the truck and headed back in the house.

‘No! Billy, no.’ Dixie ran after him into the kitchen. ‘We can’t just leave that kid there, shut up in your toolbox. It’s too hot!’

‘That’s how come I put the truck in the garage, stupid.’

‘Billy, the garage is even worse than outdoors. It’s like ninety degrees in there and it’s all closed up. He’ll die.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’ll go roll the window down, if that’ll make you happier.’

‘He’s not in the cab. He’s in the toolbox and you’ve got tape over his mouth.’

‘Would you stop screaming? You want all the neighbours to hear? If you want to get us in trouble, that’s the way to do it.’ Taking a beer from the fridge, he opened the tab and drained it in loud, thirsty gulps.

‘What if that boy’s thirsty?’ Dixie said in a quieter voice.

Billy crumpled the beer can with one hand and lofted it at her. Dixie didn’t flinch when the can bounced off her shoulder and clattered to the linoleum.

‘If I knew you were going to act this way, I wouldn’t have bothered,’ he said sulkily. ‘I only did this for you.’

‘I certainly didn’t ask you to go do something like this, so don’t blame me.’

‘Well, it’s your fault. You and all your harping about money all the time. You want me to pay for some goddamned funeral for some fucking bastard who isn’t even my kid, and then you think you got the right to tell me how to do it. I’m a cowboy, Dixie. I was a cowboy before you met me; I was a cowboy when you met me, and I’m still a cowboy; so you shouldn’t keep thinking I ought to be something different. You should know I need to be my own man.’

‘Let him go, Billy. Right now.’

‘You had me right up against the wall with all your bellyaching about not having enough for that funeral.’

Lowering her head, Dixie pressed her hands over her ears, then her eyes. ‘Please, Billy. I don’t care about any of that any more. I don’t care if you go cowboying forever. I don’t care if we never get the funeral paid off and that funeral man makes me go bankrupt. Just please let that boy go. Now. Please.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose.

‘Oh Jesus. Now you’re going to cry again. Jesus H. Christ, Dixie. This whole thing is your fault.’

‘I’m not crying! I’m just trying to figure out how the heck to get us out of this. You don’t got the sense God gave a goose, Billy. You don’t even know what you just done. You’ve kidnapped this kid. Oh dear Jesus. You’ve kidnapped Spencer Scott’s son!’

‘It’s not kidnapping. Not really kidnapping,’ Billy said and his tone became more conciliatory. His face brightened with the hint of a smile. ‘I’m protecting him, if you want to know the truth. Because know where I found him? Walking all alone along River Road. That’s dangerous there, because there ain’t nowhere to walk without being on the road itself. And know what he was trying to do? Hitch a ride. No kidding. To California! He’s just a little bugger and there he was with his thumb out. So, see, I’m actually doing Spencer Scott a big favour here, because some pervert could easily have come along and took his kid.’

‘Keeping him safe by putting duct tape around him and throwing him in your toolbox is going to make folks think you’re the pervert, Billy.’

‘I didn’t start out putting duct tape on him. First, I was just picking him up to take him somewhere safe, because he’s too little to be out wandering around and I reckoned his folks would be worried. I didn’t know he was Spencer Scott’s son until he told me. The way it all happened, I reckon God sort of planned this for me.’

‘I can tell you right now it certainly wasn’t God who got into your head in that moment.’

‘No, listen to me. Here’s how I got it figured. You and me can pack up a few things and say we’re going camping. Like we do every summer anyway. No one will think anything of it. We’ll go up on Crowheart for a few days till news gets around that he’s missing. Then we’ll bring him back safe and explain how we found him and were protecting him. We’ll ask for just a little money. For taking care of him.’

‘That makes it kidnapping, Billy.’

‘No, it doesn’t. Because we didn’t set out to do it. Kidnapping means that you planned it all and you meant to do it and you’re holding the kid for ransom. We’re just caring for him and keeping him safe. It’s only fair we get paid for doing that.’

‘And what happens when this kid tells people you tied him up with duct tape and shut him up in your toolbox? Because folks aren’t going to interpret that as “caring for him”.’

‘I’ll say sorry to him once we’re up in the mountains. I’ll explain to him how important it was for me to keep him safe from what could have happened to him. That’s true, Dix. I mean, Jesus, all them perverts you hear about doing horrible, disgusting things with little kids. Even murdering 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?’