“Tom? Honey?” It was his wife, Dolores.
“It’s me. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I was just calling to remind you to pick up those steaks on your way home tonight,” she said. Her voice had a lovely lilt to it, and not for the first time he was thankful all over again he’d married such a good woman.
“God. I forgot all about it,” he said. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“No problem. Don’t work too hard, honey, and get home as soon as you can. I’ve got the house clean and I’m putting on the potatoes and greens soon.”
“I’m starving already,” he said. They were having some friends over tonight to have a little cook out. They were celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary. The actual anniversary was really next Saturday, but they were going to be long gone by then, off on a cruise down around Florida, along the gulf coast, stopping for three days and nights in Mexico. So they were going to celebrate with their friends tonight, pack Saturday and Sunday, and leave Monday morning, bright and early. He could hardly wait.
“Love you,” Dolores said.
“Love you, too,” he said. He hung up and looked around but Hattie was long gone, having apparently lost interest in him already. He smiled. Things were looking up. He thought maybe he’d grab some more hamburger meat when he stopped at the store, just in case. He figured he had enough at home, but you never knew. Plus, they could eat leftovers all weekend and freeze what they didn’t use.
And then, come Monday, it was vacation time.
Tom rubbed his hands together, eager to get on with the day. He had a few more hours and then it was closing time. He smiled, thinking about the night before him and then the weekend and then…Mexico.
“Excuse me,” Hattie said. She’d come from nowhere to wipe the smile from his face. A frown creased his chin. “How come this medicine is so expensive?”
VII
Jenny
Jenny Dobson sat on the park swing and rocked back and forth gently. She looked up into the pretty blue sky, dotted with fluffy clouds drifting by, lazy as a hound dog on a hot summer’s day. Speaking of hot, it was scorching outside, but Jenny didn’t mind. She liked it hot. When it was so warm, she could wear her favorite summer clothes, like the tight white shorts that rode her ass and the soft, thin blue halter top that barely kept her boobs from springing out.
Brad liked the way she dressed, too. That was who she was waiting for; her secret boyfriend. They were supposed to take a little walk into the woods. Those little walks were their code-words for fooling around. And she could hardly wait for that, her toes curling in her flip flops like they had a mind of their own.
Jenny was just out of high school and spending her last summer at home before heading out to college this fall over in Bowling Green. She was the daughter of Ted, owner of Dobson’s Grocery, and was a very pretty young lady. She had blonde hair like her mother, Carla, and it ran straight down to the middle of her back, dividing her classic hourglass body. Top that off with a thousand-watt smile, and her breasts, so big and full and lusted-after by just about any red-blooded all-American male within fifty miles of Constance, and you had Jenny Dobson.
Brad was almost her exact opposite. As summery and sunshiney as she was, he was more winter; pale, skinny, with unkempt black hair that lay greasy across his forehead and dark eyes that glittered with mischief. He reminded her of one of those Goth rockers she saw on the internet sometimes. Her Daddy didn’t like him and that only served to make Brad even hotter in her eyes. But he was a summer romance, a final fling before heading out to school in August, and the time was drawing nearer to when she was going to have to break up with him.
It wasn’t like she was toying with him; she’d made it clear when they started dating just after her prom she was going away, that this was nothing serious between them, and that they should just relax and have fun. He seemed pretty eager to agree with her on all the important points, and things had been going along fine until he’d shown up the other day, toting a nice necklace with a small diamond as a gift for her. She though it was pretty and all, but the look in his eye said he was getting serious, and that worried her.
A branch snapped to her left and she whipped her head, eyes falling on Brad as he crept from the woods wearing his usual black jeans, black tee-shirt, and denim jacket. She smiled when she saw him; he wasn’t the typical jock or hunk she’d dated before and that was another thing she really liked about him. He’d also turned her on to some cool music she never would have heard before. He really dug psychobilly and his love for it bled over onto her.
“Hey, baby,” Brad said. He eased across the grass and slipped an arm around her waist when she stood to greet him with that thousand-watt smile.
“Hey there yourself,” she said. He was twenty, two years older than Jenny. He’d gone to college for a year before dropping out, saying it wasn’t his thing, and moving back home to Constance to work in the Feed and Grain store over in Elkton that his father owned. He said the pay was good and the work was steady and that’s all he really cared about, in the end. He had no real ambitions, which was fine for a summer fling, but she could never be serious about him, even though she feared he was getting serious about her.
She pushed those thoughts away. There was no need to get so concerned. They were having a good time and in a month she’d be gone to school and that would be the end of it. Maybe she’d visit him when she came home on breaks or the random weekend, but probably not. By then, she imagined she’d be dating somebody else from school.
He leaned down and pecked her cheek. She blushed and looked around.
“Not here,” she said. “Let’s go out into the woods.”
“You’re so dirty,” he said. He grinned, his crooked teeth gleaming in the sunlight.
“You don’t know,” she said. She laughed and pulled free from him, grabbing his left hand and guiding him away from the park swing and towards the woods. He hesitated and she tugged a little harder. Laughing, Brad followed.
They walked down a path for about thirty yards before taking a left at an oak tree with a big heart carved into its side. Dozens of initials were engraved into the tree from boyfriends and girlfriends past. DB and TA, Bobby and Sarah, Booger and Trish, and on and on it went. She pulled Brad along with her through a pair of bushes and a long stretch of woods until they spilled out into a small clearing. A yellow blanket sat in the middle on a tuft of soft grass. He looked down at it and grinned.
“You came out here already?”
“I set it up a little while ago,” she said. She leaned into him and kissed his cheek again. His skin tasted like the clove cigarettes he sometimes smoked. “I thought it might be nice.”
He giggled and slid his jacket and tee-shirt off. She laughed.
“Slow down, Romeo!”
“Hey, I know what I want,” he said. He rubbed his naked, skinny chest against her arm and she ran away, laughing, before throwing herself down on the blanket. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the sky, her eyes dreamy, reflecting the floating clouds gliding by overhead. He lay down next to her and kissed her shoulder.
“It’s so pretty out here, isn’t it?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, eyes solely on her.
“Brad…”
“What?”
Jenny turned to face him. This was the wrong time to bring it up, she knew it, but there was something in the googly-eyes he was giving her that was too much for her to ignore anymore. She really wanted to fool around, maybe even go all the way, but she was feeling guilty, like she was leading him on. She had to make things clear to him.
“You know I’m going away in August,” she said.
He sighed and fell onto his back. His dark eyes looked up at the passing clouds that she’d been watching.
“Do we have to go through this again?” he said.
She rolled onto her side and put her chin on his naked shoulder.
“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” she said
.
“And what would that be? I get it, you know. We’re just out here, having some fun. Why do you want to spoil it?”
“It’s just, you gave me that necklace, and I got to thinking…”
“That I was in love?” Brad said. A disgusted bark that was supposed to be a laugh sprang from his chest. “Don’t be stupid. I know how things are. You’re the daughter of a rich guy. You’re having a little rebellious fling with the town weirdo. I get it.”
“It’s not like that,” she said. Her eyes studied his face, searching. She was hurting him, she could tell. She didn’t want to be this person. Why couldn’t she just have fun and not have things get so serious?
“Sure it is,” he said. He turned and met her eyes. “Listen, I got you that necklace because I thought you might like it. I thought that maybe when you wore it, you’d think about me. That when you were old and had kids and was married, that you’d put on the necklace and remember the good times we had. I wanted it to be like one of those songs, where they think about their high school romance, all wistful and shit. I thought it might be cool.”
She stared at him. It was cool. It was one of the coolest things she’d ever heard of. A grin cracked her solemn face.
“I like it,” she said.
“I figured you would,” he said. “Now, can we drop all this bull and get to fucking?”
Jenny laughed and threw her body on top of his. They kissed long and hard. As the afternoon passed into dusk, they made love in the small clearing, their bodies twining together in pleasure.
VIII
Sheriff Monroe
Sheriff Edgar Monroe shut the cell door and smiled at the woman on the other side. Mandy glared back, defiant, a nice shiner growing under her left eye.
“You know she assaulted me, Sheriff,” Mandy said. “You should’ve arrested her.”
He sucked back a big slobber of tobacco juice. Where was his damn spitting cup? He grinned and spat on the floor at her feet. A big, wet wad of juice splattered across her shoes.
“I don’t reckon you got much more to say now, do you?” he said.
He twisted with disgust when she dry-heaved. He stuck a finger out and jabbed it at her.
“You throw up you’re gonna have to clean it,” he said. He turned and walked back to his desk. He wished Maude, his secretary, was in today, but she had every Friday off and, since this was Friday, she was at home watching her programs and probably eating a big tub of ice cream. Maude loved her ice cream.
“How long am I going to be here?” Mandy asked.
“Until I say so. When you cool off, I’m gonna take you to your car and follow you to the city line. You cross that and keep driving and that’s the last you’ll see of me.”
“But, Sheriff, you must listen to me,” she said. She stepped around the wad of tobacco at her feet and leaned against the cell bars. “There is evil coming to your town.”
He held up his right hand, made a duck’s bill out of it, and clapped his fingers and thumb together like he was working a sock puppet, mocking her every word.
She shut up, folded her arms across her chest, sighed heavily, and sat back on the bunk in the cell, sullen.
“That’s better,” he said. “The more peace and quiet I get, the quicker you get out of jail.”
He sat down, carefully, at the front desk. His hemorrhoids were flaring up again, and God help him but it hurt like a bastard. Every time he thought he got them knocked, they’d come back, worse than before. Doc said it was from straining too much when he shit, but hell, you got to get the crap out somehow when it ain’t responding. Doc also told him to eat more vegetables, that they’d help him pass his stool easier. He didn’t have the heart to tell Doc that eating vegetables was for rabbits and faggots, and he was neither one. Still, if this kept up, he might just start having a salad every day, much as he hated the taste. At this point, anything that could help was a Godsend.
He looked up at the picture of his nephew, Ken, his sister Sally’s son, and bit his lower lip. Hemorrhoids sucked, that was for sure, but at least he was still alive, unlike his nephew. Mauled by a bear, they said. He and his best friend Martin went camping up in Red River Gorge and only Martin had survived. The whole ordeal tore Sally apart, and he took a few days off to follow up on things.
He’d taken the trip up to Lexington to visit Martin in the hospital to get his side of things but he was still unconscious when Sheriff Monroe got there. That poor boy, God only knew how he’d turn out. When he finally woke up, word got back to the sheriff that Martin was out of his mind, claiming it was a monster that attacked them.
‘Course, when Sheriff Monroe saw the photos taken at the campsite of the scene, he could see how the kid could think such a thing. He had lived all of forty-eight years and spent most of them on a police force somewhere, and he’d never seen the like as he had in those pictures. How the law sorted through all those body parts and figured out what belong to who, he’d never know.
One of them bodies was his nephew.
It was crazy to think about, but he used to take Ken and Martin out hunting and camping when they were kids. They used to have a grand old time. But then puberty hit and Ken started chasing girls and that was about all Sheriff Monroe saw of him, except at the brief family reunions.
Now Ken was dead.
He’d gotten a call from Martin yesterday, saying he’d been cleared to leave the hospital, and that the police were through with him. He told Sheriff Monroe that he’d be passing by tomorrow on his way home to see his own family down south, near Maysville, where Ken and Martin had grown up, and wondered if he could stop by for a minute and visit, maybe get some lunch. Sheriff Monroe had agreed, happy to finally have the chance to talk to Martin face to face and get a first hand account of what really happened. And besides that, he could use the company.
His wife Delia had been gone for close to two years now and they’d been two of the most miserable years he’d ever had in his life. She ran off with a truck driver she met one day when he was tooling through and she was waitressing down at Drake’s Diner, a job she used to hold afternoons that kept her busy and out of trouble. So Sheriff Monroe thought. Instead, it led to a whole ‘nother kind of trouble, the kind that involved one man sticking something in another man’s wife that didn’t belong. When he got wind of the affair, he cooked up a couple of different scenarios on how he was going to kill this fellow and get away with it.
A random traffic stop, the smell of drugs, and then when Sheriff Monroe asked to look through the truck, the guy had ‘resisted’ and been shot. It was too bad, really, but criminals are criminals. After he killed the turd, he’d plant some drugs in the cab of the truck and that would be all she wrote. This one was Sheriff Monroe’s favorite scenario on how he’d kill his now ex-wife Delia’s lover, the truck driver named Race Connors.
Race Connors. What kind of goddamned name was that? He sounded like he was straight from a comic book. Sheriff Monroe had gotten a look at him one day, when he was meeting up with Delia and the piece of shit actually looked like a comic book character. He was tall, handsome, had a thick black beard, and looked like he’d been in that movie Convoy, with Kristofferson.
Race Connors. Shit the bed but that name got on his nerves.
He shook his head. His damn wife had taken off before he could put one of his two murder plans in motion (the second involved knocking Race out, driving his truck out to one of the overlooks nearby, and then steering it over the edge and boom, Race the comic book guy would die in a fiery accident). By the time he realized Delia was even gone, she was living high on the hog over someplace in Alabama. Two weeks after that, the divorce papers arrived. He signed them and spit a wad of ‘backy juice right square in the middle of the papers to seal them. He was better off without the tramp, anyway.
He missed her sometimes, though. And in those weak moments, he wished she’d come back. He’d forgive her of everything, he reckoned, if she did.
Mandy’s screams shock
ed him out of his walk down memory lane and nearly made him swallow his wad of tobacco. He wheeled in his chair and glared at her as she ran in small circles, like a dog that got hold of a batch of crystal meth.
“Cut that out!” Sheriff Monroe bellowed. He got to his feet and a pain shot like lightning from the crack of his ass up his spine. Goddamned hemorrhoids.
But Mandy wouldn’t stop. She ran, spun, and ran again, her eyes rolled back inside her head and her body shaking all over. Her teeth chattered together so hard he thought they might shatter. He was measuring her up, trying to decide what to do when Mandy’s foot caught the wad of ‘backy juice he’d spat on the floor and she slid and then, like something out of a Three Stooges show, she flew up in the air and landed square on her back. He hustled over to the cell.
If she wasn’t hurt, he was ready to laugh his ass off at what he’d just seen, hemorrhoids be damned.
He reached the cell and was met with the most murderous eyes he’d ever seen. If Mandy was in her head, she wasn’t using it; something else was there, something that kept her body shaking like it was hooked up to a car battery. He didn’t know what to do. Should he call Doc? This woman was having some kind of seizure, that was for sure, and she needed medical help.
As soon as he turned to get the phone and call, everything went silent in her cell.
Sheriff Monroe turned around slowly. Mandy sat up, back stiff and shoulders tense. Her eyes were wild and her face was slack as her head turned and she stared at him.
“They arrive tonight,” she said.
Mandy fainted dead away as Sheriff Monroe scrambled for the phone to call Doc.
VIIII
Men of Perdition Page 9
