She kicked over the coffee table and toppled a floor lamp. She grabbed a water glass and threw it against the wall.
“Freak, freak, freak...”
Marvin hurt her deeper than his postage-stamp imagination could conceive. It wasn’t what he’d done. Hell, there wasn’t a woman in town he hadn’t peeped on. Nobody particularly cared to give him the credit of making a complaint. What stung most was that fart of a man was the only one who’d looked in the last six years.
Damn it.
She was a freak.
She’d weighed over six hundred pounds. She looked like a walking tent and saw visions like some folks watched soap operas.
But freak or not, she was still a woman.
And she was pissed.
She rolled through the trailer like a juggernaut, tossing whatever came to hand. Her rampage led her to the bathroom and the mirrors screwed tightly to the walls. She stared at the image imprisoned within the glass.
She wanted to whisper a name.
Raoul.
She wanted to feel his name pull from her lips like pink cotton candy.
Like fried chicken.
If she could say it, she would weep, and let all this poison out of her system.
But she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t unswallow the razor that cut her in the heart. She sighed out an empty attic of a sigh. Then she cocked her fist back and banged it into the glass of the mirror.
Again.
Again.
Again, all three mirrors sharded into pieces.
She stared at the pieces, scattered across the peeling tile floor.
Seven years bad luck, times three.
And there she was, little shatters of her own reflection peering up from the floor. There was blood spattering some of the shards. Her hand had come open. She looked at the pink meat. She sucked at it, eating herself.
Could she eat herself completely?
Could she chew herself down to nothing?
Why not?
She’d done that to Raoul.
She opened the medicine cabinet and bandaged her hand.
Then she walked back to the living room and picked up the phone.
She dialed the grocery store.
When she was done talking, she righted the coffee table and sat down to wait.
* 3 *
Wendy Joe sat by the window of the cafeteria, through a cup and a half of the worst coffee brewed on this Earth. Actually, the coffee wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t exactly rat piss. It was more a combination of the two. Good coffee and bad piss, which wasn’t surprising.
Crossfall was one of those compromise towns – large enough to support a police force of one Chief and one deputy, but not large enough to pay a clerk to mind the desk. Large enough for an elementary school, but the older children were bused to a high school in Wolfville.
The town was lucky enough to have a two-doctor health clinic; but one of the doctors had effectively retired. He only came to work alternate Wednesdays, except in the summer when he lived in his cottage and never came to town.
Nobody missed him.
Crossfall had a six-man volunteer fire department. Two of these six consisted of the Chief and deputy. They had a brand new fire truck, but no firehouse. The pumper truck was parked in the lot behind the police station. Even the parking lot was a compromise. It stood double duty as an impound yard for any seized cars, and parking space for the town’s single squad car. There was a padlock on the fence gate, but in a pinch you could climb the dumpster and vault the fence.
That was it.
Most times Wilfred or Earl prowled up and down the streets enough to let folks know they weren’t asleep on the job. They made sure nobody stroked or tickered out in the middle of the night. There were a couple of summer homes to be watched, a couple of drunks to be supervised. A couple of tickets a month for illegal parking, and if they were lucky, a little speeding and a half dozen DWI’s every New Year.
They didn’t even have a lock-up, just an empty storage room with a reinforced door. A Boy Scout with a compass and jackknife could mastermind an escape.
Still, it wasn’t bad.
Wendy Joe made enough from her salon to allow her to work alternate nights as a volunteer clerk.
Ha.
She’d taken the job to get close to Wilfred.
A fat lot of good it did her.
She sipped her coffee. She pretended she was on stakeout, surveilling a drug dealer.
That got old real fast.
She wondered how come the guys on NYPD Blue never seemed to get bored. Twenty minutes of sitting and staring was all she could handle. She stared at the stains on the bottom of her coffee cup. She watched a housefly beating against the window glass. As far as she could see, the housefly was the only thing moving.
Maybe I ought to read the fly its rights, she thought.
“You have the right to buzz and flap and beat your soggy fly skull against the window pane,” she said aloud.
Do flies get headaches?
“You have the right to make more sense than me.”
She tried reading the stains on her coffee mug.
Her future looked dark as a dug grave. A raven perched near the rim of the mug, a sign of dark things coming. The shape of a hound whispered from the far side of the mug. That meant betrayal, distant, from a real close friend. The bottom of the mug looked a little like a broom.
That usually meant marriage.
Was Wilfred going to break down and propose?
He’d have to get a divorce first.
To hell with it. The coffee was probably instant. Nothing lied worse than freeze-dried Maxwell House. She ought to give it up. She ought to just quit the clerking and forgot about Wilfred.
There were plenty of fellows out there.
Yeah, right.
She motioned for another refill from the waitress.
“What’s the pie today?”
“Apple.”
She stared at the station house.
Nothing.
“Bring me a slice, would you?”
* 4 *
Earl stared at the telephone.
Lily Milton had called him useless.
Maybe he was, but he hadn’t started out that way.
He had wanted to be a police officer since he was twelve years old and had watched his first lynching.
He wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.
“Stay out of the hills tonight,” his father had warned him and his brother Jude. “There are dark things moving out there.”
Dark things was right.
Earl remembered the wide-eyed look of the man as the lynch mob had snugged the rope about his neck. He’d hidden in the darkness while the men finished their work. Earl had watched one of the men catch hold of the dangling man’s feet, giving them a good yank to make sure the job was properly done.
Earl wanted to do something about it, but even at twelve he knew there was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do.
He spent the night beneath the shadow of the hung man.
By morning the man was buried beneath a shroud of blue and green buzzing pallbearers.
It didn’t seem right to leave him like that.
Earl had clambered up and cut the man down, using his jackknife on the rope. He didn’t have a shovel, so he buried the man beneath a heap of rocks and dead branches. A bear or coyote would unearth the man soon enough, but that wasn’t the point.
Everybody deserved some sort of goodbye.
His father wouldn’t have found out about Earl’s meddling if he hadn’t been naïve enough to ask why the man was hung.
His father beat him first.
He used his belt, something he’d never done before.
“That’s for disobeying.”
Earl stared as his father replaced his belt, sliding the leather through the belt loops like a deadly leather snake.
“That fellow was a bad man. He hurt a girl from up North Mountain way. I
knew her family. I knew her too. She didn’t deserve to go the way she did.”
“What’d he do to her, Daddy?”
His father wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“He hurt her bad.”
Earl wouldn’t let up.
“Maybe it was an accident,” he suggested. “Maybe he didn’t mean to. Maybe he was sorry.”
“It wasn’t no accident,” Earl’s Daddy said. “I found what was left of her. Found her lying in her family’s slaughter house. She was lying next to the chopping block and meat axe.”
“He cut her up?”
His father looked dark, like the light was draining from his body.
“Like a hog, only worse.”
His father stared a thousand miles away, looking at something he never wanted to see again – something that he’d see until the undertaker glued pennies over his eyes.
“How many pieces do you think you could be cut into, Earl?” Daddy asked, his voice soft and thoughtful, like he was asking a math problem. “How many pieces, if someone was really trying?”
Earl thought about ham hocks and stewing chunks and the wormy ribbons of pork his mother cranked from the meat grinder clamped to her kitchen work table; his grandfather mincing venison for a pie and all those tiny painstaking cuts. All of a sudden he didn’t want to know any more. He tried to look away, but his father held him with a grip so strong he couldn’t turn an inch.
“I work for a living. Death never bothered me too much. I seen men looking like half-made hamburger dolls after a skidder truck rolled over them.”
Now he was looking right through Earl.
“But when that hamburger doll has a little girl’s voice, when that voice from the hamburger calls you by name...”
Earl stared at his father, who stared back with a gaze harder than the beating.
It was about then it dawned on Earl that his father had been out there that night out amongst the crowd of lynching men. His father was one of the killers.
One of the bad guys.
“I seen hell once, down at the bottom of a coal mine collapse. I seen grown men scream like little kids. I seen the Devil come out to dance among the dead and dying, but when I saw that girl all I thought was what if it was my son, lying there and dying so certain I could no more halt the flow of his life than I could dam up a river with nothing but my own two hands. What would I do then? What could I do?”
He paused.
“There are some things in life that are just plain evil. Some things you got to stomp out. So that’s what we did when we caught and hung him. We stomped him out the same way you’d stomp on a snake that bit your horse.”
It was in his teens that Earl found out exactly why the man had been lynched.
He’d done everything Earl’s Daddy had said, and maybe even worse things.
The reason they’d lynched him, why they hadn’t taken him to the law, was because of the man’s family. The family had been rich. Old money and untouchable in any court. So Daddy, being a practical man, found a way to touch him.
Earl stared at the telephone receiver, still dangling in his hand.
“Fuck you, Lily Milton.”
He hung up the dead phone, and headed for the door.
Nothing ever happened in this goddamn town.
* 5 *
The kid in the Mercury took off in a cloud of dust, leaving Wilfred sitting there like he was made of clay.
“You ain’t getting away that easy.”
Wilfred stood on the gas pedal. He leaned his weight sideways as he hooked around a corner and coaxed the accelerator a little closer to the floorboard. The tires shrieked. Another layer of rubber and steel shed against the pavement.
Clavis bounced in the back like he was made of Goodyear rubber.
“God damn it, Wilfred.”
At least he’d stopped singing.
Wilfred hung onto the wheel like it was growing from his hands. He didn’t dare speak. He kept his teeth clenched, so he wouldn’t bite his tongue off in mid-bounce. The kid kept on moving; motoring that big Mercury just as slick as snot on brass. He headed straight, and then fish-hooked a U-turn.
As the kid pulled past, he laid into the Thunderbird with a pistol that thought it was some kind of cannon. He planted three good holes in Helliard’s front hood.
Fuck.
The Thunderbird was as good as dead.
“Damn it,” Wilfred swore. “I’m getting too old to be playing Wile E. Coyote.”
He kept his gas foot flattened. The car kept on moving, shot to death and still running, like it was possessed by the ghost of Mario Andretti.
“Shoot the bastard,” Clavis hollered in very ungodly enthusiasm.
Wilfred wanted to, but he was busy holding the car on the road. It wasn’t as easy as John Wayne made it look in the movies. Driving and shooting was tricky business.
He stomped the gas harder.
The Thunderbird labored into another gear.
Wilfred hit the horn to let folks know to get out of the way, in case the hurtling bat-out-of-hell blue Thunderbird wasn’t enough of a clue. Even so, he damn near bounced a skateboarder off his front bumper. The little shit should have stayed in the playground where he belonged.
Wilfred kept motoring.
He didn’t even look back to see if the skateboarder was okay.
He wasn’t feeling like much of a sheriff, right now. He was way too pissed.
He caught up with the Mercury by the next block.
Clavis kept bouncing and cursing.
“You fucking better strap your ass in,” Wilfred swore.
The kid leaned the big pistol out the window. How in the hell could he drive that way and shoot straight?
He must have had three hands.
BOOM.
Wilfred’s windshield sprouted a large hole.
“Damn!”
That was close enough to make a fish sweat.
Wilfred jinked the Thunderbird to the left, hoping to throw the kid’s aim.
“Are you all right, Clavis?”
No answer. Wilfred chanced a look in the rear-view mirror. Clavis was lying flat in the back seat.
Wilfred couldn’t see any blood.
Damn.
“Are you okay, Clavis?”
“Goddamn you, Wilfred Potter,” Clavis swore. “If we get out of this, I’m suing your ass harder than a pop star’s titties.”
Wilfred grinned in relief.
“Pull over before you get us killed,” Clavis ordered.
Clavis was right. Wilfred ought to pull over, phone up county and tell them what happened.
To hell with that.
Wilfred kept on rolling.
He leaned his head towards the door window.
“Bang!” he yelled. “Bang, bang.”
It wasn’t much, but it made him feel better.
CHAPTER 10
A Bad Memory
* 1 *
The barn door was alive with flies.
One fly socked into Maddy’s mouth as she grabbed a quick breath. It vibrated like a buzzing raisin against her tongue.
Phit!
She spat the little bastard up. The horses thumped their hooves nervously against the barn walls.
“I’m coming,” she called through carefully tightened lips.
She hoisted three bags of garbage from the house, most of Vic’s clothing and belongings. She’d burn it when she got the chance.
One of the horses whinnied.
It sounded like King.
He was the biggest and pushiest.
There were two horses – the big black stud, King, and the straw-colored palomino, Deanie. Vic had bought the horses in Maine, for breeding, thinking the palomino to be a mare.
What had fooled Vic was the fact that the palomino was gelded.
Without balls, Vic figured it had to be a mare.
Maddy laughed at the memory.
What the hell did he think that pizzler was?
A garden hose?
<
br /> King whinnied louder.
“I’m coming,” Maddy repeated, risking the invasion of another fly. “Hell, it’s not my fault Vic went and got himself killed.”
She shoveled the fragrant souvenirs they’d left for her.
“How come the less you eat the more you shit?”
The palomino looked a little embarrassed.
“I’m just kidding, big fella.”
She forked a couple extra handfuls of hay to apologize for overlooking their meal.
“I’ll brew you some good warm mash come tomorrow.”
She went deeper into the barn. This felt good. It felt the guilty kind of good, like sneaking a chocolate bar. The barn and workshop were Vic’s private domain. His man-cave, he called it.
Like Batman.
Or Dracula.
Vic hid out here when he didn’t want to see her.
She didn’t mind. She’d never cared for the barn. There were way too many memories. The shadows of her Daddy still lingered in the corners. It reeked of his liquor and hot pepper breath.
She reached the door of the workshop.
As workshops went, it wasn’t much to look at. Just a few sheets of plywood hung from the rafters to give the illusion of a separate room. Zigger growled from the corner, reminding her she wasn’t supposed to be here. He’d low-bellied in through the crawl-hole that Vic had cut for him.
At least he’d stopped his baying.
“Shut the fuck up, dog, before I feed you to the horses.”
Zigger thumped his tail to show he recognized her voice, but he continued to growl.
“You psychopathic stumpdiddler. I ought to sell you to a hush puppy factory.”
Maddy checked the workbench.
The tools were a mess. Wrenches, hammers and screwdrivers strewn like bones in a coyote lair. She saw a couple of barrels of diesel gas for the backhoe. Leaned against the bench was the welding torch he had used to mend the backhoe. Added to the hay in the barn, the whole place was a bomb waiting to go off.
She’d warned Vic a few times.
He’d told her to shut up.
“Not no more, Vic.”
She’d clear this up, and soon. She’d have herself one hell of a yard sale, maybe.
There it was.
Three tins of red paint stolen last year from a construction site. Vic had promised that he’d use it on the yard furniture that he’d promised to make a year ago.
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