At the End of the Road

by Grant Jerkins

  Kyle did as he was told. And when he pulled his pockets inside out, he was plainly concealing something in his right hand.

  “Open your goddamn hand before I break it open.”

  Kyle opened his hand. One of the boys in back whistled appreciatively. Kyle was holding the silver dollar that Grace had given him in the treasure hunt game. He’d had ample opportunity to spend it, but Kyle had enjoyed just holding it, the comforting heft of it in his pocket. It felt good to him.

  “Fuck,” the biggest boy said. “That’s a standing liberty. Solid silver. We can get ten bucks for that at the pawnshop. No sweat. Give it to me.”

  Kyle shook his head. He wasn’t really thinking about self-preservation anymore; he had simply decided that the dollar was his, and he was not going to give it up without a fight. The biggest boy pulled a knife from his pocket. It was a butterfly knife. The boy’s wrist snapped with three sharp jerks, and the metal parts of the knife made wicked clicking sounds as they unfolded. All five of the boys advanced toward him.

  Kyle looked behind himself into the deep ravine, and there, amidst the warped sheet metal and broken slabs of crumbling concrete, he saw something familiar. Kyle shoved the silver dollar back in his pocket. He jumped into the ravine.

  From the bottom, Kyle saw the boys crest the brink and begin to carefully pick their way down the steep incline. Kyle had run down it. The earth was dry and no weeds grew on the bank and so he knew there were no roots to hold the ground in place. The earth shifted and gave way with each step. Running was the best way to cover such ground. You kept moving before the ground had a chance to shift. But the boys didn’t know that. So they picked their way slowly, lest they take an unforgiving tumble into the cast-off concrete and metal.

  Kyle set to work gathering up the sharp rigid stalks of bloodweed that he had spotted on the marshy bottom amidst the debris. He stacked a small cord of it atop a projecting cement slab with steel rods twisting out of it. Kyle climbed atop. He made quick work to prepare his bloodweed javelins. Each one was about six or seven feet long. He shook the sand and dirt off the bottom to expose the wickedly sharp taproot. He then stripped the stalk—leaving the smallest stems and leaves on the top part to act as fletching. He broke one of the canes in half, and the red milk from which the plant got its name seeped from it. Using three fingers, he then smeared his face with the bloodred war paint.

  Kyle gave no warning. The first boy was approaching fast, his butterfly knife in hand. Kyle reared back and sent the javelin to him. The bloodweed stalk sailed across the bottom of the ravine making a whispering sound. His aim was true. The javelin hit the boy in his soft stomach. The tip sank in a good half inch. The boy looked down, incredulous to see the six-foot projectile sticking straight out from his body. He was even more incredulous when he pulled it out and blood blossomed like an ink spill on his shirt. He looked up at Kyle with full, murderous rage. Kyle threw again. And again, his aim was true. The boy screamed in rage and pain when the vicious point pierced his left eye. He clapped a hand to his wounded eye and ran back up the hill, bloody fluid pouring from beneath his fingers. The boy decided he’d had enough. Fate had dealt him a nasty reversal of fortune. He must tend to his wounds. The other boys scrambled behind him, and Kyle, his eyes wild and his face streaked with bloodweed gore, continued his onslaught, chasing them out of his ravine.

  IT HAD TAKEN DANA A LOT LONGER TO

  track down Louise Edwards than she had first thought. Getting the address had been simple enough; Dana had just contacted Georgia Power. It was in a low-rent apartment complex just outside Atlanta. She followed that up by locating the DFACS worker handling Grace Edwards’s case. The feeling was that Boyd Edwards had beaten his wife and sexually abused his child. In the end, Dana realized, that would explain everything. Living in an abusive household would cause the fear and introversion she had observed in Kyle. Being a witness, a powerless witness, to domestic violence and incestuous abuse, could be emotionally crippling. No wonder Kyle Edwards had looked haunted. He was.

  Dana thought about the day she had followed Grace and Kyle to the little pond surrounded by weeping willow trees. She remembered how the children had held each other and cried. And Dana was angry with herself for not recognizing what she had witnessed. She could have perhaps brought an end to their abuse earlier. When she had talked to Kyle, she should have worked harder to pull it out of him. But Dana had been focused on Melodie Godwin. She had tunnel vision and did not see the true crime in front of her. The boy even had cuts on his face. It had all been right there for her to see.

  None of that explained the shattered auto glass she had found along Eden Road. Or the front seat of Melodie’s car adjusted for a very short person. Or the pair of boys’ sneakers found in the car. The bottom line was that she still needed to talk to Kyle. She needed to be sure that she had misread the situation that, in her own blind quest for justice, she had let the boy down. And if so, she wanted to tell him that she was sorry.

  Late in her shift, she had been called away to a domestic dispute that had turned into a standoff when the woman involved had locked herself into a bathroom and threatened to cut her wrists. Dana had talked the woman down, but it had taken hours. And then she had to sign the woman into the psychiatric ward at Parkway Medical Center. In the end, it had eaten up most of the night.

  MRS. EDWARDS REMEMBERED DANA FROM

  the time she had come to her door on Eden Road. There was some level of surprise in the woman’s puffy eyes, but Dana figured that with the doctors and the social workers who had just become a part of her life, Mrs. Edwards probably didn’t find it too terribly odd that a sheriff’s deputy wanted to check on her youngest son—to make sure the boy was all right in all of this.

  “He’s asleep,” Louise said. “I’ll have to wake him up.”

  “I appreciate that, ma’am. I just need to talk with him for a few minutes. In private. Just to make sure he’s okay. And then I’ll leave you folks in peace.”

  Louise went to wake Kyle, and while Dana waited, she looked around the living room. The furniture clearly came with the place. It was threadbare with little tufts of foam padding peeking out. It smelled musty and faintly of urine. Louise Edwards came back, and Dana read the alarm in her eyes.

  “He’s gone. He’s not in his bed.”

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “Not that I could see. Dear Lord. He’s taking all this to heart. He’s an emotional boy.”

  “I know.”

  “What can I do? Who should I call?”

  Dana wrote a number on her notepad, tore it off, and handed it to Louise.

  “I’ll go look for him. If he comes back home on his own, I want you to call my station. They’ll radio me and let me know. Your job is to stay here. Now I’m going to go look for him.”

  Dana cruised the complex. There were plenty of children and teenagers still up and about. When they saw the patrol car, they ducked into the shadows. She circled the complex twice and came back to the entrance. Ahead of her, across from the highway access ramp, a lighted plaza drew Dana’s attention. The Greyhound station.

  The man behind the ticket counter was a tall, skinny Nigerian with a heavily accented, high-pitched voice. He remembered Kyle quite clearly. This was a diverse area of several minorities, so a young white boy purchasing a bus ticket at night tended to stick in the memory. The man could not remember the boy’s destination, but he did remember that it was within one of the local counties. Dana already knew where Kyle was heading. He was going back to Eden Road.

  SHE COULD NOT SEE THE CHAIN ANY LON-

  ger; her vision was mostly gone. Melodie’s body had begun to shut down.

  Her fingers were raw and blistered from sawing with the slim bit of metal. The hacksaw blade was a foot long, but only about a half-inch wide. The metal was so thin that it bent with the slightest pressure. The teeth would snag on microscopic barbs in the chain link, and her fingers would slide on the blade. She had cut through the first si
de of the link yesterday, so she knew it could be done. But she was weak. In fact, Melodie Godwin was dying.

  She hadn’t eaten in a week—since the boy (Kyle, his name was Kyle) stopped coming. And prior to that, she had only been allowed a single meal each day: a pack of crackers and a can of Coke. And the oven-like heat of the attic sapped any energy she might have gleaned from the food. Each day it rose to at least one hundred and ten degrees. Her body no longer produced sweat. That system had shut down some time ago. Her potty spot on the far side of the chain’s perimeter held only a few rock-like stools that had hurt to pass. She had not passed urine for longer than she could remember.

  The heat exhaustion, dehydration, and malnourishment had cost Melodie her eyesight. Her vision had slowly dimmed over the past few days, so that now she could only make out shadows and light.

  And she had begun to have seizures.

  But she sawed. It could be done. She was close. She could not see it, but by feeling it, Melodie knew that the blade had eaten more than three-quarters of the way through the second half of the chain link. It was like being in the dark again, and the Lee Dorsey song Working in the Coal Mine was running through her mind again. Not in a helpful or hopeful way, but in a feverish, hallucinatory dirge.

  She could sense how deep the blade was set in the chain. Three-quarters through. Maybe more. But that last quarter, that last little sliver of metal was easily three more hours’ worth of sawing. And her fingers were raw and cramped and she just couldn’t hold the blade anymore. Bleeding where she’d snagged the crescent-shaped nail buds that were no longer growing. Her arm muscles ached. Her wrist was numb. And she was sleepy, so terribly sleepy. So very very tired.

  She stopped sawing. She inspected her work, using her sore fingers to feel the groove she had cut in the metal. So close. So damn close. And there was Lee Dorsey, screaming at her about working in that coal mine and being so very, very tired.

  Melodie let her fingers play across the bite in the metal. The steel was eaten almost all the way through. And Lord, she was so tired. She was slipping away. Going down.

  She grasped the chain link with the thumb and forefinger of each hand and applied pressure. She felt it give a little. Then she tried again, this time calling on every little bit of strength her body had left in it.

  The chain snapped.

  She was free.

  BUT WHAT TO DO NOW? SHE HAD GIVEN IT

  no thought. She had not devised an escape plan to implement once she was free of the chain. She looked out the window. Her eyesight had failed to the point that she could tell that it was dark outside, but that was all.

  She had lost track of time and did not know how late it was. The window was nailed shut. Although she could no longer see it, she knew that directly below her was a green tar paper roof, most likely covering the front porch. If she could open the window, it would be an easy thing to drop to the porch roof and then to the ground. But she would have to do it as a blind woman. She would have to break the window, and she had no tools to safely do that, and the noise might draw unwelcome attention. Also, in her current physical state, Melodie realized that her legs would almost certainly give out if she tried to jump. She imagined herself lying in the front drive all night, blind and with a broken leg, naked save for her garbage bag poncho, the paralyzed man finding her there in the morning.

  The paralyzed man. That was how the boy, Kyle, had referred to him, and now that was how Melodie thought of him as well. Not a monster, but a man.

  There were the stairs leading down from the attic. That was her only choice. She carefully felt her way over to where she knew the stairs to be. She took a tentative step on the top riser and the dry wood creaked. Remembering lessons learned from sneaking out of her parents’ house as a teenager, Melodie stepped only on the outside edges of the steps, and the creaking was no longer a problem. Her legs threatened to give out with the wide stance, but there was a handrail, and with that she was able to keep herself upright.

  After fifteen minutes of slow, careful work, she made it to the bottom. She was exhausted, her body wracked with spasms. She forced herself to sit until the spasms stopped. She was scared that she might have another seizure.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs creaked on its hinges. She thought of spitting on the hinges to lubricate them, but saliva was another thing her body wasn’t wasting resources to produce. So she had to open it one agonizing inch at a time.

  The house was quiet. There were lights on, and Melodie could make out dim shapes. Based on the position of the attic window above, she felt her way toward where she thought the front of the house would be. (If she had still had her vision, or had simply been more familiar with the layout of the house, Melodie could have taken a handful of strides to her left—slipped out the kitchen door, and made an escape that would have gone unnoticed for days. But, alas, that was not to be. Melodie went right.)

  She stayed to the wall, not daring to venture out into the open space of the room and risk tripping or overturning something.

  She could hear deep, rhythmic breathing. Snoring. As she worked her way along the wall, the snoring grew louder. She knew it was the paralyzed man, but she did not think that she was in his bedroom. A bedroom would be to the rear of the house.

  She maneuvered past a picture hung on the wall, careful not to disturb it. The snoring was louder now, closer, and it unnerved her. She started to hurry. She just wanted out. She brushed up against a floor lamp, felt it leaning to the side, sensed it tipping over; but she reached out and caught it before it could crash to the floor.

  Her hand touched a cool oval of solid metal. A doorknob. The door! She had found the door. She opened it with care, and was about to step through when the sharp odor of mothballs assaulted her nostrils. A closet. It was just a closet. She closed the door with quiet care and continued along the wall.

  The snoring seemed to be all around her now, boring into her mind. She wanted just to scream, to scream and run. Her hip bumped something solid and immobile. She reached down and prodded it with her fingers. It felt like a wheel. Her fingers played upward and sunk into the flabby flesh of the paralyzed man. Melodie recoiled. The paralyzed man grunted, but the snoring continued. She stepped around him and found her way back to the wall. The hysteria was returning, and she could not stop herself from hurrying. Her hands were almost beating the wall as she rushed along it.

  She jarred another picture, the cheap hook gave way, and the frame came crashing to the floor.

  The wood cracked, the glass shattered.

  The snoring stopped.

  MELODIE STOOD MOTIONLESS IN THE SI-

  lence. She could not even hear breathing now. She stood and listened, not daring to move. Was he awake? If he were awake, he would say something. There would be movement.

  She stood in that spot until she felt her legs giving way again. She had to move or she would fall. The broken glass crackled under her bare feet, cutting them. She came to another door. It had a glass window centered high. It was the front door. She turned the knob and pulled, but the door would not budge. Was it stuck? She let go of the knob and felt along the jamb until she found the turning mechanism for the dead bolt. She retracted the metal bolt and pulled the door open.

  Cool night air baptized her. She was reborn.

  “Poor child.”

  Melodie heard the metallic click when the paralyzed man cocked the hammer of the .22 caliber revolver he kept in the side satchel of his wheelchair. There was a loud pop and the door frame exploded inches from her face, embedding splinters and shards of wood under her skin.

  Melodie ran. She ran across the front porch and caught the handrail directly at hip level. Her body flipped over the railing, and she landed with a thud on her back. She turned over, gasping for breath. She could hear the electric hum of the wheelchair as it emerged onto the porch. By the time she had got back to her feet, she heard the rubber tires squeaking on the sloping zigzags of the wooden ramp.

  Again,
she ran. Her fall had left her disoriented, and it was purely an act of providence that she ran away from the house rather than toward it. When her feet hit the dirt road, she turned to follow its path. She was running blind. The road was her only hope.

  Behind her, she could hear the electric motor whirring, high-pitched and straining now, being pushed to its limits. And over the sound of the motor, the delighted laughter of the paralyzed man. It was as if the sound of that laughter was some kind of voodoo spell, sapping the rest of her strength, her will to live. Whatever last bit of energy reserves Melodie Godwin had called upon to make her escape was depleted now. She slowed. The wheelchair was closing the gap. She stumbled like a wounded gazelle. The wheelchair was at her heels, the laughter trapped in her head.

  The gunshot felt like a jabbing punch to her lower back as the .22 caliber bullet passed through her side, just missing her right kidney. She collapsed, tumbling into the roadside ditch with the last of her momentum. She was deep in weeds and brambles, looking straight up. She imagined that she could see the paralyzed man peering down at her.

  “Looks like the boy will have some work to do.”

  She heard him grunt with exertion while he leaned over his chair to gather leaves, limbs, and trash. She felt the debris raining down on her, covering her a bit at a time. He was hiding her.

  KENNY DIDN’T NEED HIS KEY TO ENTER

  the shed behind his house—the stupid boy never remembered to lock it. He closed the door behind him and pulled at the low hanging ball chain to turn on the light.

  Kenny knew that it was only a matter of time before he was caught. How could he not be caught? The colored policewhore was so far up his ass he needed an enema to get her out. She was closing in on him and he could feel it.