Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel

by Wendig, Chuck

  “Poorly,” she says.

  “Poorly.”

  “I think the police might have stronger words than poorly.” She watches the man in the corner and sees a small smile tease the edges of his mouth. It’s then that she recognizes him.

  He’s a cop.

  He was there. That night. The night of gunsmoke.

  Shit.

  Her heart pumps faster: a cold rush of saline through her veins.

  “Not so sure the police need to be involved in this,” Orly says. “Kids being kids and what-not. You started something. They finished it. Nobody’s a winner if the law gets involved.”

  “I see.”

  “You do? Good. Very good. The actions of children shouldn’t be confused with the troubles of adults.”

  “And what troubles do you have, Mister Erickson?” she asks, her gaze floating over the room. A black banner hangs on the caddy-corner wall: on it is a white cross framed by a white circle, and above it the text: PRIDE WORLDWIDE. Next to it is a familiar-looking license plate with the tag, 14WORDS in white lettering on a black plate. Next to that, a t-shirt with a white fist in the center of a horseshoe of laurel.

  (And early though the laurel grows. It withers quicker than the rose…)

  “Every man has troubles his children don’t understand. Not until they’re older.”

  Bite your tongue, she says to herself. And she does. She literally bites it hard enough where she thinks, …just a little more pressure and I can bite clean through. She even tastes that coppery tang of blood.

  But it doesn’t matter.

  She says what she’s going to say anyway.

  “Troubles. Like Jews. Or blacks. Or let me guess—wetbacks, faggots, chinks.”

  He cocks an eyebrow. “Those words don’t sound good coming from a young girl’s mouth. Besides, don’t confuse me with my son’s friends. Like I said, children and adults have different concerns.”

  Orly fidgets with the ring.

  “That’s a big ring,” she says.

  “It was my father’s. It signified membership.” Way he turns it and strokes it she can tell it means a lot to him. He turns it this way and that, letting light play across the ruby facets.

  “All this wall décor signify membership, too?” she asks.

  “Just symbols of one man’s belief.”

  “And that one man’s belief is that the white man is supreme. That about right?”

  He straightens up, massive shoulders tensing, looking like logs rolling just beneath the surface of water. “A man can have pride in who he is. No harm in that.”

  “White power.”

  “White pride. Nobody begrudges black pride. Nobody says ‘boo’ to feminists. And so why balk at pride in being white? One would assume that to delight in one’s heritage is a good thing.”

  “Being proud of being white is like being proud of being not-crippled.”

  “So those who aren’t white are cripples?”

  “What? No, I didn’t—“

  “Your words, not mine.”

  “But that’s not what I meant.” She feels frustrated. Cornered. “You know what? Fuck you.”

  “That how you talk to adults? Guess I don’t blame you. After what happened.” He relaxes again. The tension settles—he takes it off himself and gives it to her. A sharing of energy. Bad energy. He studies her face, must see it in her eyes. “So it’s true, then. What you did. To your stepfather.”

  It’s her turn to tense up. She shouldn’t be surprised that this is where the conversation was headed, but even still, here it is and now she’s having trouble finding the words.

  Again, the man in the corner—the cop—is smiling.

  Finally, she says, “He wasn’t my stepfather.”

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “Just a boyfriend. Of my mother’s.”

  “She have lots of boyfriends?”

  Atlanta says nothing.

  “It’s a shame what he did to you. I don’t blame you. He’s still alive, as I understand it?”

  When the cop chimes in, it startles her. If only because he’d been sitting there quiet as a wart on a frog’s ass. He says, “Alive as any man can be after having his nuts shot off by some teen cooze.”

  “He’s in jail,” Atlanta says through her teeth. “That’s where kid-touchers go. There, and then Hell.” Not that she believes in Hell, but for things like this, she’s willing to hope for an exception.

  Orly holds up his hands. Massive palms, each looking able to crush a coconut with but a clap. Mea culpa. “I don’t blame you. I salute you. You took matters into your own hands. Somebody was giving you trouble and you handled it yourself. I admire that attitude and try to do the same. This man, this boyfriend of your mother’s, was… broken. Deviant. Probably in how he was raised, but maybe even at the genetic level. So many deviants are. It’s why I’m surprised a bit at the company you keep.”

  And there it is.

  “Don’t tie who you are to who I am,” she seethes, lifting herself forward in the chair, hands planted so hard on the chair rails she thinks she might break them off. “Don’t tie my friends to him. I didn’t shoot him because he was gay. Because he was a different color. I shot him because he was a bad person who did bad things, and the only recourse for evil is a firm hand.”

  Orly acts like he’s chewing on that, like it’s a piece of food that he freed from his teeth and now he’s trying to figure out what it is inside the confines of his mouth. Finally he nods and shrugs.

  “Well. All right, then. It was nice to meet you, Miss Burns. By now your mother should be here.”

  “My mother?”

  “Indeed. I called your parents to come collect their wayward children. I handle mine. They handle theirs. It’s the way the world works. Or should, at least.” He stands up. “That will conclude our business, then, young miss.”

  * * *

  When she goes back into the main room of the gun club, sure enough, there stands her mother, fretting over the cuts on Chris’ face. Behind her paces Chris’ father, the flats of his hands shoved under his armpits. When Bill Coyne sees Atlanta come out of that room, ushered by Orly Erickson and his cop crony, he hurries over, scowling.

  “Orly. Pete.” That name, he says to the cop. “What the hell’s going on here? I thought this business was—“ He scowls at Atlanta, and she feels a gentle urge forward by one of Orly’s big hands. Then the words of Chris’ father are lost to her as her own mother steps in and sweeps her up in a big hug. She doesn’t return it.

  “Baby,” her mother says, “c’mon now, let’s just go, let’s just leave this place.”

  The cold glaring eyes of the other three watch from the sidelines. Mitchell. The Skank. John Elvis. All three of them watch this unfold with grim, gravestone faces.

  Atlanta returns the look. She tries burying in there a not-so-secret psychic message: This ain’t over, motherfuckers. Seems like it might’ve worked because the Skank scowls and Mitchell just shakes his head as if to agree. John Elvis just seems lost. Unfocused. Not surprising.

  She pulls away from her mother, turns to Chris—Chris, who watches his father standing off to the side with those other two men, murmuring, arguing in whisper, maybe even conspiring.

  “Chris, c’mon,” Atlanta says. “We’ll take you home.”

  He doesn’t look at her. Instead, he calls to his father. “Dad?”

  The man doesn’t look back.

  “Chris—“

  “Dad.”

  His father turns, mouth a cocked line, and waves him on. “Just go on, get out of here. The girl’s mother can take you home.” Chris pleads with his eyes, but his father isn’t having any of it. Instead he just points to the door. “I said go on, goddamnit!”

  The look on Chris’ face says it all. Like he just got slapped. Like someone reached in and gave his heart a hard squeeze with callused hands. Like this, out of all the day’s indignities, is the part that stings him the most. Tears roll down his eyes over his bru
ised cheek.

  Atlanta’s mother is pulling on her elbow. “Honey. Come on, now. Car’s running.”

  “Chris,” Atlanta says, not budging. “You coming?”

  He does, and the three of them escape the gun club.

  * * *

  The car is a boat. An Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera from 1992. White, but dirty. Has enough miles on it to suggest it’s been to the moon and back.

  Chris sits in the back. Quiet. Up front, Mama grabs the steering wheel, but makes a sound in the back of her throat like a wounded coyote—a low keening whine. Fingers tighten around the wheel.

  Knuckles go bloodless.

  “They hurt you in there,” she says. Her hands are shaking worse than Atlanta’s. “Didn’t they.”

  It’s a statement, not a question.

  “It’s fine, Mama,” Atlanta says. “Let’s just… get the heck outta here.”

  “I said to myself, Arlene, you best never let anything happen to your baby-bird again or she’s gonna hate you forever. Because what kind of mother lets her baby-bird get hurt? Huh?”

  Atlanta doesn’t need this. Not now. “I said, it’s over. It’s fine. Let’s just go.”

  “I can’t abide this no more. Can’t sit idly by while people think they can do what they want. They can’t. World’s not supposed to work like that. I bought something. Something to make sense of everything.” Her mother plops her big fake-leather purse, pink as a baby pig, onto her lap and begins rooting through it frantically. “Something to make up for what happened, something that… that says this ain’t gonna happen again.”

  She pulls out a small revolver. Blued steel. Rosewood handle. Fit for a lady—appropriate enough, given that it’s a Smith & Wesson Ladysmith. Atlanta’s seen them in her gun magazines.

  But right now, that’s not what she’s thinking about.

  Right now she’s thinking, Holy shit, Mama has a gun.

  And Mama gets out of the car and starts marching toward back toward the gun club.

  “Atlanta,” Chris says from the backseat, “did your mother just pull out a—“

  “Yes,” Atlanta says, struggling to undo her lap belt. Damn belts in this car are stickier than a cocklebur. She finally gets it undone and hurries outside and gets in front of her mother.

  “Mama,” she says. “You don’t want to do this. Trust me on this.”

  “You did,” Mama says. Eyes wet. She holds up the gun as if for demonstration. “You protected yourself when I couldn’t. Or didn’t. I made a mistake, baby-bird. I let him hurt you. And you’ll never be the same again.” A look crosses her, a look of a spurned dog ready to bite. “This time I’m not letting anybody get away with hurting you. Now move aside, girl.”

  The gun is trembling.

  Atlanta gently places her hand over the side of the weapon. Eases it down.

  “Please,” her mother says. A sad plea.

  But Atlanta just shakes her head, then takes the gun.

  “Let me handle this,” Atlanta says.

  “No,” Arlene says, but the word has lost conviction. Fresh tears run.

  “Mama, it’s okay.”

  “Please don’t get hurt.”

  Atlanta kisses her mother on the cheek. Smells the cigarettes and perfume. Finds comfort there.

  Then she goes back inside the gun club.

  * * *

  Skank sees her, cackles, says “Oh, the bitch is back,” then starts to march over with her claws out. But that’s before she sees the .38 in Atlanta’s hand, and Atlanta makes sure the Skank sees it by sticking it up and pointing it at that mouth of hers—the one framed by the blackened scabbing split in her lip.

  “Back off, White Power Barbie,” Atlanta says, drawing back the hammer on the gun.

  John Elvis says, “Whoa.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Mitchell says. “Poking a stick into a den of snakes.”

  “Poke-poke, motherfuckers.”

  Atlanta pulls the trigger.

  The Skank falls sideways. Not because she’s shot, but because she’s clutching her ear—after all, the gun went off only inches from her head.

  What is shot is one of the pictures on the wall. Some hunter with a dead bear. Glass drops to the concrete, then the frame and photo follow with a clatter.

  It hung only a foot from Mitchell Erickson’s head.

  He drops to his knees. Fetal position. One hand out as if it could stop a bullet with the flat of his palm.

  John Elvis skulks to the opposite corner and stays there, stiff and still as a broom. An epic task for a tweaker, she figures.

  Atlanta knows what’s coming next and so she levels the gun at the door to Orly Erickson’s office. Orly’s the first out the door, long-barrel revolver in his hand. His position is her advantage. Because when she yells at him to freeze, he does—and his prodigious bulk blocks the door. Behind him, she can see the cop and Chris’ father, but neither of them can make a difference here. Not at long as the big man stands in their way.

  “You’re back,” Orly says. “And you brought a friend.”

  “My Mama’s friend, actually,” she says. “Put the gun down.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  Her arm straightens. As if to ready for recoil. “I said, gun down.”

  Orly bites his lip, then eases the gun to the floor.

  “You going to shoot me?” he asks. “Shoot all of us? Shoot the police officer standing behind me who, even now, has a gun in his hand? This is a gun club, little girl. Give us ten, fifteen seconds and we’ll all have fingers around trigger fingers.”

  Given the number of guns hanging on walls, he’s probably not wrong.

  Not that it matters.

  “You’re the only one I care about,” she says. “And I wager you’re the only one you care about, too. Gun’s pointed at you. I’m not afraid of anybody here. Because you’re not going to let anybody get uppity with their trigger fingers. They do, you’re a dead man. And all this will be exposed.”

  “I don’t care about being exposed. Who I am and what I believe is not a hidden quantity.”

  “Even still, I suspect you don’t want your heart exposed with a ventilating bullet. Am I right?”

  He says nothing. Answer, confirmed.

  “I want the ring,” she says.

  “The ring. My ring?”

  She sneers. “What ring d’you think I’m talking about? The one around Saturn? The one the little hobbit carries? Maybe your tight little butthole? I’m saying I want the one with the ruby. The one what belonged to your Daddy. That ring.”

  “It’ll do you no good.”

  “Help pay for pain and suffering. Help make me feel better. Recompense and all that.”

  Just to make things clear, she cocks the hammer back again.

  “Fine,” he says. He unscrews the ring from his finger with some difficulty—his knucklebones are big enough to be hooves on a kid goat—so he spits on it and that grants it some give.

  He tosses the ring. It bounces across the concrete floor and lands at her feet.

  Atlanta stoops. Scoops it up. Never lets the gun barrel drift from its target.

  “Then that concludes our business,” she says.

  “I don’t think it does,” he says. “I think we’ll see each other again.”

  She nods. “Maybe so. Next time I’ll bring my shotgun. It’s got a taste for the blood of monstrous men.”

  Then she backs out of the gun club and runs for the car.

  * * *

  It takes a while to convince her mother—and Chris, actually—that she didn’t kill anybody in there. Didn’t even shoot anybody, actually. Her mother drives erratically, weeping, babbling about how her daughter’s going to have to go on the lam and that they’ll head home now and pack their things and drive to Mexico because that’s where they can escape the law, but eventually, finally, Atlanta makes it clear that the only casualty of war was a hunting picture of some fat asshole and a dead bear.

  Besides, Atla
nta says, “What did you expect? You gave me a gun. Here! Pull over up here.”

  Her mother eases the car along the side of the road. Atlanta steps out. There, by the road, is a murky pond whose algae is already blooming green like clumps of chopped spinach. Past it is a pasture of cows. And crows dancing on fence posts.