The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  He’d finally caught her that day they moved in, stood with his arms around her, feeling her warm, soft cheek against his, watching the sunlight idly probe the soft carpet in the entry. Now everything felt burned-out. I love her! he exclaimed silently, but was bewildered once more. For an instant, he couldn’t put a name to “her.”

  From the traffic light at the top of the square, they could see the police cars, two of them, parked at odd angles in front of the pool room, just down the hill and across the street from the county jail, their drivers’ doors wide open, blue lights flashing. Some of the pool-hall patrons were standing out in front like they were waiting, but there was no law anywhere except at the jail, where Junior Trainor was headed, something like a bandage sticking out from under his hat and across his forehead. Winthrop eased the car to the curb near the cruisers.

  “Do we have to stop here?” Lizzie asked.

  “They asked us to wait,” he replied, suppressing something like contempt now, which only made him feel worse.

  “Yes, but here?” She wasn’t looking at the gathering in front of the pool hall. She was staring straight ahead but also down, like she was ashamed.

  He dropped his forehead into his hand. “Liz …”

  “Not here!” She was in control instantly, right through her tears. “You can park somewhere else if you want to talk!”

  “For Pete’s sake, Lizzie! What is it?”

  THONK! The car shook violently.

  “He’s back!” Lizzie screeched as the man who’d jumped on their hood just a few minutes earlier jumped off their roof. “Winny, he’s got a board!” The man wound up with a two-by-four and swung, and the windshield spider-webbed.

  “Goddamn sonuvabitch!” Winthrop roared, and spilled out the door, promptly losing his footing when his cowboy boots slid in some kind of sticky puddle. Glass tinkled above his head as the man took out one of their headlights.

  Winthrop rolled onto his belly just as J. B. Fisher and Junior Trainor flew over him, then J. B. was behind the man grabbing his arms, the man hurling his body one way and another, trying to kick Junior, Junior yanking a little canister off his belt, swearing, “Damn you, Ned, you should have stayed in that goddamn coalbin where you belong!”

  “Jesus, no! Don’t mace him again!” someone shouted. Winthrop glanced under the car to see the two city police officers pounding down the hill toward them.

  A howl somewhere between a hound’s and a tomcat’s pierced the evening. Winthrop scrambled onto all fours. He heard Lizzie wailing in the car, then saw Junior bent over holding his crotch, emitting a sound like “Hawgh, hawgh,” while the little canister rolled down the street. J. B. Fisher was lying on his back on the hood of the nearest cruiser, his Stetson upside down on the pavement. Meanwhile, the man they’d been trying to subdue writhed across the front seat, yanking the hand mike out of the radio on his way by.

  “We tried to warn you, Junior,” one of the officers said as he ran up. “Perry here already made that mistake. Macing someone when he’s drunk just makes him madder’n hell. Old Ned must’ve got hold of some real panther piss.”

  “Hawgh,” Junior grunted, trying to stand upright.

  “You all right, buddy? We called for some more backup,” the officer said, patting the deputy on the shoulder. “They’ll be along right soon. Just wait here.” He took off again in pursuit of his partner, who was already a block down South Charlotte, running right down the middle of the street after a skinny figure a full two blocks in front, who was swinging the radio mike around his head by its cord like a lariat.

  “Our beautiful car,” Lizzie sobbed, the sound ripping into Winthrop and tearing his heart out, because he thought he knew what she really meant, even if she didn’t.

  “Sonuvabitch!” he roared a second time, then charged down the street after the police officers and Ned, whose only mistake had been not sharing the rotgut he’d acquired—he no longer recollected where—with his coalbin drinking buddies.

  XXXVII

  Winthrop

  It was a sickness, and it was killing him. But he couldn’t help himself, not with will power nor prayer nor any of the loved ones and friends in his life who had always given him strength and comfort, especially not his retired father, who held to that measly thirty-seven-dollar-a-week pension like a badge of honor and righteousness. Oh, he had lots of friends, or always thought he had until now, but as he imagined himself trying to explain this sickness, he could see them all turning away in horror and disbelief and, above all, condemnation: How could he risk so much when he had so much?

  He killed the lights, then turned off the engine of the Ford pickup with “Reedy’s Mobile Home Sales, Damascus, N.C.,” lettered in red on the doors. The windows were down, the drumming of the crickets drowning the random human sounds of Willow Run—the voices, music and televisions. He stared straight ahead at the lighted windows of the mobile home in front of him, so familiar but strange, too, horribly strange, something animate about it in that setting, no longer just an unpeopled commodity, an abstraction. Its momentary hold on him was so palpable he was scarcely aware of the red convertible parked over to the side, its top down, or of the gleaming black Harley-Davidson crouched on its stand nearby.

  Driving down the bypass less than an hour earlier, to their new brick home and all their new things, Lizzie had been silent like a brewing storm. The one working headlight weaving crazily into the sky, he’d struggled to focus through the webbing that was the remains of the windshield, his chest so tight he could barely breathe. At least she’d stopped carrying on about the car. What could they do about it anyhow? Old Ned didn’t own a pot to piss in.

  It was a good thing she’d stopped wailing, too. Winthrop couldn’t stand it anymore. Life had gone elsewhere, and he was going to move with it.

  Elsewhere was standing in front of him, a finger sliding down the middle of his belly, down, down, drawing a line slicing him in two. He couldn’t see her. He could see only a soft darkness like a cloud, but he knew she was there, could feel the hot press of her breasts against his drenched skin, her right big toe playing gently over the top of his left foot, her knee and thigh undulating against the inside of his leg….

  “Winn!”

  Winthrop, sweat pouring off his brow, snapped back to the present just in time to yank the car off the shoulder, back onto the pavement.

  “Not enough fun for one night? May as well finish the car off, and us, too.”

  “Sorry, baby.” Winthrop wiped his forehead. “I guess I’m a little dazed.”

  “Well, I don’t know why we’re keeping this old thing anyhow. It’s ruined.”

  “It’ll be fine, baby. Cub’ll fix it good as new.”

  “No! It’s ruined!”

  Does she know what she’s really talking about? Hell, I’m so fed up with this shit! “Why don’t you leave me off at the office? I’ll catch up on paperwork, maybe calm down some. I’ll be along in the truck.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Who?”

  “That woman at the jail called you Winn like she’s known you all her life.”

  “Lizzie, for pity’s sake, I already told you! That was Helen. I don’t even know her last name! Married to a Grady Snipes fellow I delivered that trailer to up in Sentry a couple months ago. He’s some kind of construction bum, drives a big motor. I told you all that. She just happened to be there when I delivered it, that’s all. Willie and Dooley were both there, too, like always. Good God, Liz, I run across all kinds of women in my job. You never questioned it before.”

  “What was she doing at the jail?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “Well, Junior was writing charges on her. She looks like a sexpot!”

  “Lizzie, why are you going on like this? What on earth are you talking about?”

  When he and the other boys had come back from chasing Ned, all of them blown from running ten or fifteen blocks to catch the drunken sonuvabitch, whom they tossed in the coole
r—the guy might be a wino, but he was sure supercharged with that Mace—and Winthrop had happened to see her sitting there in Charlie Dugan’s office, prim as a saint in church, his heart had sunk right into his pecker. She looked up but didn’t say a word until Lizzie came shoving in, wiping tears from her face like a little girl, snuffling and angry about the car being stomped. Peanut was so composed in contrast, it was embarrassing. Of course, it was then Peanut had to say, “Hey, Winn!”

  Well, Lizzie gave her the look, then wheeled right around and gave it to him. But he recovered, was pretty quick, actually: “Honey, this here is Mrs. Helen … Snipes, is it?” He’d tried to introduce the two of them.

  “No,” Peanut had said, looking right at him like something was real amusing, while totally ignoring Lizzie, like she didn’t exist. Damn.

  Then Junior, bandaged like a war hero, had walked over and said, polite as pie, “We’ve located Grady for you, Miss Peanut. You wish to speak to him?” Junior was kind of strutting a bit, Winthrop had noticed, hiking up his pistol belt and all. Damn!

  “You heard what Junior Trainor said, calling her ‘Miss Peanut.’ Now, what kind of name is that?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Winthrop replied, dropping all pretense of trying to be anything but as exhausted as he felt, though he managed to bite his lip. He swung the car off the highway and hit the brakes in front of the little office. He could see the back end of the pickup sticking out from behind the nearest mobile home. Reedy’s Mobile Home Sales. It all suddenly looked pathetic somehow, but he didn’t know why—he’d always felt such pride here. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said, shoving the door open and swinging his legs out. He looked down briefly at his shirt sleeve, torn at the shoulder when he’d tackled old Ned down at the underpass. It had been a new shirt, on account at Norman’s Department Store. Of course.

  Lizzie had marched around the front of the car and thrown herself in the driver’s seat. “I love you, ho …” The Firebird’s tires caught and threw the rear end around, and Lizzie went sailing out onto the pavement, where the tires squealed again as she brought the car true and tore down the bypass. He had felt his whole life pulled right out of him and down that dark highway after her.

  But that was almost an hour ago, and now he was in Little Zion, sitting in the truck, staring at the outline of the Raconda he knew so well and not at all. His mind drifted between dreams. There was no reality anymore, only one dream more powerful for a moment than the other, and this horrible feeling he might never wake again. Like kneeling before God.

  He pushed the door open, stepped out of the cab, sighed, tucked in his shirt, then, starting up the little gravel walkway neatly bordered by flowers Lizzie had planted, felt his heart fly into his throat. Ahead loomed the familiar double main door and sidelight windows.

  “She’s in the back room, Reedy,” growled Snipes, buried in the round sofa of the Relaxation Nest, his muddy boots up on the glass-topped coffee table. Without looking around, he raised a can of beer over his head in greeting, his attention, like L. D.’s, riveted on the color TV. “She’s expecting you.”

  Turning, Winthrop startled himself in the mirrored wall of the entryway, seeing something confused and furtive. He pushed through the heavy, velvetlike curtains into the kitchen, then down the hall, almost tiptoeing past the powder room with its two heart-shaped chairs, then the portholed bathroom. Whew! There was a smell in the place, like mildew and beer and dirty clothes. And the kitchen floor and sink were filthy.

  At the end of the hall, he slowly, almost fearfully pushed the louvered door open into dark soundlessness. He knew where the little knob on the wall was, and started to turn it. A red glow like dawn filled the room. She was lying on her stomach on the round bed, nothing on but a tight-fitting tank top that scarcely covered half her upper body. Her head was away from him, resting sideways on her arms, her eyes closed, her spread legs and velvet buttocks open to him. He couldn’t breathe.

  “I was hoping you would come in my hour of need, Mr. Reedy.”

  He was mounting her for the second time, his hands splayed on the supple mounds of her hind end, the sweat streaming off his white skin onto the sun-browned softness beneath him, when he heard a pounding at the front door. “Don’t stop,” she whispered. He obeyed.

  The hammering grew furious, and as a part of him tried to listen, he heard the rumble of L. D.’s voice. “Oh, damn, Peanut!” Winthrop groaned.

  “Here, I’ll help you,” she said, rolling under him, then lifting him by his thighs and taking him in her mouth. It was pure magic.

  “Hey, you can’t go down there!” L. D. was saying up front in the trailer—or something like that, his voice muffled, almost incoherent. Then silence. It didn’t matter now. Winthrop closed his eyes.

  The door behind him flew open. “Oh, my God, Winthrop!”

  Though with immeasurable dismay he recognized the voice, it was too late to do anything but moan. Then he was on his back, spent, and Peanut was climbing stealthily over him on all fours. He watched her legs and the feathery shadow between them ease to a stop above his nose. Closing his eyes, he hoped he was dreaming, that she wasn’t really crouching over him like a lioness guarding her kill.

  The wailing started then, the disbelief. “How can you do this to us, Winthrop Reedy? All our plans, our dreams! Ugh!”

  The wailing was above and behind his head somewhere, over near the door. But all he could see was shadowy belly skin, sleek, smooth and tight, the red glow of the room like fire beyond, and all he could do was inhale that glistening, damp pungency inches from his face. “Oh, you get off him, you awful thing!”

  Something like a growl came from the belly over his head.

  Winthrop didn’t linger. He didn’t care anymore—about anything, but especially the wailing. He was fed up. He rolled hard to his right and, flipping Peanut over on her side, found himself standing bare naked, staring into the astonished, outraged, horrified, disbelieving face of his wife. “Whose goddamn dreams? Whose goddamn plans? Yours? Mine? Whose, goddamnit? Your mama’s and papa’s?”

  “Keep them out of this!” Lizzie shrieked.

  “Or my mama’s and papa’s?” He took a little jump at her. “Whose fucking dreams?”

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  “Yes, yes!” he hollered, inches from her face.

  “Whoo, boy!” L. D. shouted. Grady Snipes’s big, grinning face leered around the doorjamb beside him.

  “Get out of here,” Peanut growled from the bed.

  “Shut up, you whore!” Lizzie yelled as she broke into tears.

  “Who are you calling a whore, you sniveling little Southern bitch?”

  Silence thundered down on the room—on Peanut, standing now with her hands on her hips, on L. D. and Grady, shaking their heads in the doorway, unable to wipe the grins off their faces, on Winthrop, naked and truly dazed, like he was just waking into the most awful, awful dream, on Lizzie, bent over slightly, trying to protect herself, arms crossed over her chest, tears rolling down her cheeks, frightened eyes roaming from face to face but finding no one she knew or who cared about her.

  Peanut took a swing and caught Lizzie on her ear, and she cried out.

  Winthrop jumped between them and shoved Peanut back, his heart breaking at the sight of his wife. “Liz—” he began, but Snipes stepped in and with one swing of a huge fist smashed him in the face, hurling him backward over the round bed, blood spurting out of his broken nose.

  Two legs of the bed broke when Winthrop fell, and it lay like a crashed flying saucer. He scrambled to his knees and was wiping blood away with the back of his arm when he heard the roar of a car engine beyond the wall, then the squeal of departing tires. Finally he mustered the courage to look up. Except for Peanut grabbing a miniskirt off a chair, the room was empty. Still wearing nothing but the tank top, she pulled on the skirt, brushed the backside down and pranced out.

  It was maybe thirty minutes later when Winthrop, dressed again, found himself
in the dark kitchen, a cold, wet towel pressed to his nose, gazing into the next room at Snipes, L. D. and Peanut. Her legs curled under her so half her bare ass was showing, Peanut had thrown an arm possessively around Snipes. All three looked real comfortable in the Relaxation Nest, watching TV. He tried speaking to them once or twice, but they didn’t answer. It was as though he didn’t exist and never had.

  It was Winthrop who first heard the squeal of tires again, a car careening off the paved road and sliding onto the gravel drive of Willow Run. He heard it crunch toward them. Instinctively his body stiffened. When he heard the screech of brakes out front, he tried to say something to the others, but no words came out of his wide-open mouth. He heard laughter on the TV, a yuk or two out of L. D., then, out in the darkness where the car had stopped, a loud, precise ka-chink!

  Oh, shit! he thought, and started to fall to the floor.

  The first blast took out the left sidelight of the Raconda’s huge double door and the floor-to-ceiling mirror beyond. The second took out the right sidelight and a good part of the door. Peanut was screaming somewhere. He heard glass break in the living room. “She’s gone fuckin’ nuts!” Grady yelled, his voice up an octave and far less manly than earlier. That’s double-ought! Winthrop realized, flabbergasted. She knew the gun. She knew how to shoot, too. The fourth shot went through the living-room wall and took out the TV. Another shot, a loud pop, and the trailer went dark. She’s got to reload now, he thought.

  Winthrop heard Grady scrambling out a back window, his boots thumping against the metal siding. Then he heard the thud of rapidly receding feet and woke from his shock. To the distant scream of sirens and people yelling all around outside, he scrabbled on all fours down the hall toward the bedroom, an ad he’d run in the paper flashing through his mind: “Willow Run, a nice place to raise a family!” Another shot took out the window above him, glass cascading on his head.

  “Where’s that whore?” Lizzie screamed in a distorted, shrill voice. The remains of the Raconda’s doors crashed open. A shard of glass tinkled at the front of the trailer, and Winthrop, peering back up the hallway into the shadows, saw her dark shape glide into the trailer. Something small and broken-sounding went skittering over the floor in the kitchen.