“That’ll teach you to use your damn seat belt, you bastard,” I yelled as I stood over him like Ali over Liston.
He rolled over slowly and looked up at me, fear smeared across his soft features like a stain, arms raised in defense. “Don’t,” he said softly.”Don’t.”
Don’t what? What was I going to do to him? Hit him, kick him, beat him bloody until he confessed? What the hell had I just done, rushing out at him like that? I’d been pushing him inside the roadhouse, hoping for something to come loose, and instead he had acted perfectly reasonably. But still I had chased after him like a deranged avenger. What had come over me? I had lost my head, absolutely, and not for the first time since I found Hailey Prouix dead. Who was I so damn angry at? Him, for what he might have done to Hailey, or Hailey herself, for dragging me into this whole rotten story? I had lost myself in the anger of the moment and had no idea of what was supposed to come next.
I stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean…I didn’t…All I wanted was to ask some questions.”
He looked so helpless, so pathetic, his arms raised defensively like a battered child’s, that I backed off some more. But this time I backed into a wall where there shouldn’t have been a wall. I twisted my head around to see what I had backed into. It wasn’t a wall, it was Jimmy, the bartender with the boxer’s nose.
He grabbed my arms and pulled them back so that he could hold them both with one of his thick arms, jerking my shoulders until they screamed with pain. The other arm he now wrapped around my neck and squeezed, only lightly, I could tell, but I grew suddenly woozy.
Grady Pritchett was still on the ground, but sitting now, hand to his forehead, legs outstretched like a young boy in a sandbox.
“I didn’t mean to—” was all I could get out in a raspy gasp before Jimmy choked me into silence.
Grady pushed himself to standing and staggered at me, slowly, as if drunk, but he wasn’t drunk, and maybe his stagger was an attempt at a swagger, because the next thing he did was rear back and slam his fist into my stomach.
The air flew out of my lungs so fast I could hear the whoosh. My body tried to bend over from the blow, but the granite grip of the bartender kept me standing straight even as my knees buckled from the shot of pain. Nausea flooded through me as Grady Pritchett gripped my hair with his left hand and cocked his right hand to finish the job he had started on my face.
I closed my eyes and heard the smack of something hard against something not so hard and felt my arms wrench and my body hurtle to the ground. I must have been unconscious already, I figured, because I couldn’t feel the pain I knew had to be writhing through my face, the pain of ripping flesh and tearing muscle and collapsing bone. I thought I was unconscious until I opened my eyes and saw Grady Pritchett flying backward toward his black pickup truck as if propelled by some strange magnetic force.
Seeing him fly like that was right out of a comic book. I looked around dazedly for my comic-book hero. And there he was, brown jacket still buttoned, brown fedora still in place, white teeth glowing in the dim parking lot as if lit by black light, standing insouciantly with a large wooden oar in his hands.
Skink.
“How you doing there, mate?” he said, looking down at me.
I spun my head around to take in the scene. Grady was sitting on the ground, dazed. Jimmy the bartender was out cold on the ground, his arms still loose around me.
I squirmed from his grip and to my feet. “Am I bleeding? Did he hit me?”
“Nah, I nailed the bastard holding you afore our friend Pritchett had himself a chance to improve your face.”
“You took your time.”
“Well, I didn’t know I’d be dealing with two, did I? I needed to find something to even up them odds.” As he spoke, he tossed the oar onto the gravel. “But maybe we ought to make our getaway afore someone else charges out of that front door. Can you drive?”
I pressed my stomach, felt my ribs, my face. My eye was swelling from the first blow, my ribs were tender, my stomach was filled with an unpleasant cocktail of pain and nausea, but I could drive.
“I’ll take Pritchett in his truck,” said Skink. “You follow me.”
“What are we doing?”
Skink walked to Grady Pritchett, on the ground by the black truck with its engine still running, and lifted Grady gently by the arm. Grady gave no fight. Skink helped him onto the bench seat of the truck and scooted him over so that Skink himself could get into the driver’s seat. He leaned over solicitously and hitched up Grady’s seat belt before quietly closing the truck’s door.
“This is kidnapping,” I said.
“Nah, that would be a federal crime,” said Skink through the open window of the truck’s front door. “Do we look like the type to commit a federal crime?”
I scanned his gangster outfit and battered features.
“We’re just taking a ride through the countryside,” he said. “We’re going to find someplace nice and private where you and me and our good friend Grady Pritchett can have ourselves a friendly little talk.”
35
“YOU KNOW that guy at every high school,” said Grady Pritchett, “the guy with the rich father and fast car and best-looking girlfriend, the guy with the pack of followers that hang on his every last word and laugh at his every last joke? The guy that seems to have the whole school beat to hell?” Pritchett took a pull from his can of Coors. “That was me. Leastways, that was me before I got all messed up with Hailey Prouix.”
We were surrounded by trees, not far from a stream whose gurgling we could just hear above the cacophonous calls of the insects all around us searching for love. Skink had stopped at a bar farther down the road and gestured me in to buy a couple six-packs, and now we were in the flatbed of Grady’s truck, drinking. Grady had pulled a small electric lantern from the toolbox and we set that down between us like a campfire. We sprawled around its ghostly light and we talked. Or I should say it was Grady who talked. And the funny thing was, it didn’t take much yanking to get the story out. Any hard feelings about the fight at the Log Cabin took wing as he started talking. It was as if the story had been festering inside him for all those long years, like the rotting core of a rotten tooth, and he was glad now, finally, to let it tumble out.
“I knew her and her sister before anything happened between us,” he said. “Pierce ain’t no New York City—everyone in Pierce knows everybody’s damn business—and everyone knew them Prouix sisters. Their father died when they was just girls and the uncle moved in to take care of them all. It was a touching story, and we all were a little sorry for them. But as they got older, they got cuter, and the sorry turned to something else, if you know what I mean. Now, Roylynn, she wasn’t much interesting, she was like this porcelain thing you were so afraid was gonna break if you as much as breathed on it, but Hailey, well, Hailey grew up nice, with a flash of fire in her eyes. She was a couple years younger than us, but she had something, oh, yes. And when this girl Cheryl I was having some fun with decided she wanted to get all serious, talking about getting married and having kids, well, that was the end of Cheryl. So I was looking around for someone new, because when you’re that guy at the high school you need to always have someone, and something about Hailey lit my fancy.”
“She had that fire,” I said, and the ghostly lit face of Skink stared hard at me as I said it.
“And remember now, she was only fifteen. But still. And so I asked her out, because when you’re that guy, it ain’t no big thing to ask some sophomore out, and damn if she didn’t say no. Surprised the hell out of me, and it wasn’t like a shy no, it was like a get-lost-you-asshole no. The guys, they got a laugh out of that one, but I wasn’t laughing. You know how sometimes you see a girl every day of your life and it’s just like nothing and then, when you decide you might like her, well, then every time you see her after that your heart just goes a little crazy? That’s the way it was with Hailey when she said no to me. And afte
r that, all I wanted in this world was her.”
“She was playing you,” said Skink.
“Maybe, but, you know, it was more like she really just wasn’t interested, like there was nothing I could give her that she had any use for. So then I did like the full-court press, you know, being extra nice and getting her invited to all the parties and looking out for her all the time, like in the cafeteria and such. But none of it seemed to work. Until the reefer. I never expected her for that. Me, I started early, smoking with my mom.”
“Your mum?” said Skink.
“My stepmom. My real mother, she left when I was young and took a chunk of my daddy’s money, and then he got married again to someone not much older than me. And she was the one turned me on when I was just fourteen. My dad was out on business, and she came in wearing one a her outfits, which was not much at all, and looking damn good, and she up and asked me if I wanted to try something. Sure, I said. So we lit up in the backyard just like that, lying side by side in the chaises next to the pool, blowing smoke into the air, and ever since, that was how I had my fun outside of school, blowing reefer. It was why I eventually quit the ball team and started cutting school, because it was all getting in the way of my drugs. I mean, my future was set, I was going to work in my daddy’s car lots and become as rich as him and spend my nights banging models and smoking the best weed money could buy. My future was laid out smooth as ice, and I was all for it. Well, asking Hailey out to the movies or some dance wasn’t working, so one day, out of desperation, I sidled up to her in school and asked if she wanted to blow some dope down at the quarry, and what she did surprised the hell out of me. She looked up, smiled that wicked smile of hers, and said, ‘Now you’re talking.’
“So that’s how we started together, hanging at the quarry with the rest, smoking dope. She pulled it in with this intensity I always remembered. The rest of us was just having some fun, but for her it was serious stuff, like the joint, it was a lifeline she was sucking at, like there was something dark she was trying to forget. I figured it was her father’s death that was bumming her and I brought it up once and she told me to shut up in front of everyone, and that was the last time I did that.
“Now, it was clear that she was my girl, and at the quarry, with the others, she was all full of affection. I’d sit there with my arm around her and we’d act like a couple, and sometimes she would exhale the smoke right into my mouth and that got me harder than anything. But, you know, it never moved beyond that. When we were alone, she was cold, man. I’d sit there and try to kiss her and she wouldn’t kiss back, her lips were like smooth slivers of marble. She’d let me grope her breasts, which was pretty nice, but when I tried to reach lower, she’d slap my hand away. I tried to force it once, and she kicked me so hard in the nuts I couldn’t stand up for a week, and that was the last time I tried that, too.
“But I didn’t sense like she wasn’t that kind of girl. It was more she wasn’t gonna be that kind of girl with me. Now, I’d been going all the way since I was fifteen, and Cheryl like couldn’t get enough of it, but Hailey wouldn’t give me a thing. Just to keep me happy she would jerk me off now and then, but she’d do it only ’cause I was begging and it wasn’t so much better than me doing it myself, worse actually, because she was always acting like she was in a hurry for me to finish, which kind of ruined it. Anyone else, I’d a sent her packing, but her refusals just drove me more crazy. I even once said we could get married, and all she did was laugh at me like I was some zero asshole. It was humiliating enough to be a turn-on. So that’s the way it was when Jesse Sterrett all of a sudden started hanging out at the quarry.
“Jesse and I used to be best friends. We played ball together all the time, basketball, baseball, everything. He was quiet and I wasn’t, he was poor and I wasn’t, he was humble and I wasn’t. We was a perfect pair. But he turned against me when he started hanging with that Leon Dibble. I never liked that kid, thought he was strange in the brain and told Jesse so, and it was like Jesse near took my head off. Next thing you know Jesse’s always off with his new best friend and I’m like nothing to him. It wasn’t no surprise to anyone that Leon was as queer as a three-legged goat, and I figured that made Jesse the same. And he proved it to us all when Leon, he killed himself, it was like Jesse went into mourning. It was no use trying to talk to him after that, he wouldn’t talk back. Got so the only way I could get a reaction from him was to needle, needle, and so I did, and he just took it and glowered, and at least that was something. But then he started hanging out at the quarry.
“I thought maybe it was me he was interested in, like as a friend, like he wanted us to be pals again. He wasn’t there to toke, ’cause he didn’t toke, and he wasn’t there to joke around, because he didn’t joke either. He was just there. And then I got an inkling he wasn’t there for me, he was there for Hailey.
“Why is it that everything we most dread in this life we end up forcing on ourselves? I started making fun of him, needling him like I did, laughing at him for not reefing up with us, for being so quiet, for not liking no girls. Laughing at his back when he stormed off. And then one night, when he stormed off, Hailey, she gave me a look that froze my heart before she went off after him.
“It wasn’t long before I realized something was going on, and it drove me insane. The thought of her doing all the things with him that she wouldn’t do with me. I couldn’t sleep. I started hanging outside her house at night, waiting to catch her with him. I never did but that meant nothing. Sometimes, in desperation, I called out her name and that uncle of hers, a brutal piece of man if ever there was one, would rush outside with his shotgun and tell me to get the hell away or he’d spatter me sure all over the county. I knew he would, too, it was in him, but it didn’t mean a thing to me. I was insane. And then one day I just went after Jesse.
“I always was taller than him, stronger than him, and when as boys we wrestled, I always ended up on top forcing him to yell uncle. But he had kept playing ball and working out and the only thing I was exercising was my lungs, and this time it wasn’t even close to a fair fight. I started it, he finished it, and I ended up in the hospital.
“My cheek was shattered, my jaw broken, my knee was busted up, I had bruises up and down my side. When I came in, the doctors said I looked like I’d been hit by a truck, but that wasn’t the worst. Everyone knew what had happened, I had lost my girl to some closet queer, I went after him and he put me in the hospital. You know how in every high school there’s that guy? Well, I wasn’t him anymore.
“No one came visiting, not even my daddy, who was ashamed both that I had fought and that I had lost. Only my stepmom would keep me some company, staying by my side, wiping my brow when I hurt too much to move. And when I got out, it was like I had turned into something else, some ungainly cripple creature no one wanted to have a thing to do with. You can guess how I felt, like everyone had turned on me, and they had. And then there was my former girl and former best friend off together in their little blissful world, leaving me hobbling in the gutter. I wanted to kill them, I did. I wanted to kill them both, and I said so to anyone who would listen.”
“And so when you knew he was planning to meet Hailey at the quarry,” I said, “you were there waiting for him.”
“No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t, that was it, what no one would believe. I wasn’t there. I swear.”
“Then where were you?”
“Someplace else.”
“Where? With Hailey?”
He stopped talking, just shut down like a radio turned off for a long moment. He stopped talking and sat, and you could see the muscles in his face flinch as he considered which of his answers to tell.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“Hell you was,” said Skink. “Makes no sense that you would be, what with all the stuff happening between you and Jesse and her. You’re just saying it because you think that’s the surest way to keep your arse out of trouble. You’re still worried about it, aren’t you, mate? Even t
hough it happened fifteen years ago and Hailey is dead, you’re still worried they’re going to think you done it.”
“Yes,” he said.
“But you didn’t, did you?”
“No.”
“And I believes you,” said Skink.
He looked up at Skink with a strange hope in his face. “Do you?”
“Yes I do,” said Skink, “but no one else did, did they?”
Grady shook his head.
“Your daddykins wouldn’t believe a word from your face. He was sure you done it, wasn’t he? He thought he had no choice but to bail out your arse. So he paid off his pals, the priest, the police chief, and the doctor, and worked a deal with Hailey. He worked a deal wheres he would pay for her college, pay for her to get the hell out of Pierce, so long as she made sure his boy didn’t rot in jail for the rest of his life.”
Grady Pritchett’s eyes widened. “How do you know?”
“Because you’re still in love with her, mate,” said Skink.
“No I’m not.”
“Don’t even try. I can recognize the signs.” Skink glanced at me. “It’s a frigging epidemic, being still in love with Hailey Prouix. But you wouldn’t still love her if she got you off for something you really done. That’s not the way it works. If she had done that, well, you’d be blaming her now for every wrong thing in your life.”
“She’s the only one I can’t blame.”
“There you go.”
“It was her idea,” said Grady. “She came to me while I was still in jail for questioning. She came to me, and when I told her I didn’t do it, like I told everyone I didn’t do it, she was the sole one who believed me. It was she who came up with the idea of her being my alibi. She said she would work it out, so long as I agreed to parrot her story. And I did. Because I swear to God I thought they were going to fry my ass. I didn’t know yet my dad had the fix in. Both for the charges, and for my life.”
Fatal Flaw Page 27
