His mother took his plate and washed it in the pot of water warming on the camping stove. Jeff went outside and grabbed a galvanized washtub from where it hung on the wall of the barn. He found a nice spot in the yard that got lots of sun, affording about as much privacy as could be expected when bathing in the yard.
He grabbed two five-gallon buckets used for watering livestock and carried them toward the spring box. It was only about a hundred or more feet from the house, though at forty pounds each when full, the two buckets made it seem like a lot farther. When he reached the spring, Jeff stopped and lit one of his few remaining cigarettes. After this he would be using toilet paper to roll up scraps of tobacco from the barn where his family had cured tobacco for fifty years. If you got a handful of old stuff it tasted like dirt. The thought made him relish the last of his store-bought ones all the more.
Cigarette dangling from his lips, he walked to the overflow pipe that constantly poured numbingly cold water from the spring box. He dropped the bucket and nudged it with his toe until it was centered under the stream of water. He stepped back from the mud and took another draw from his cigarette. He was preparing to exhale when the cold ring of a pistol barrel pressed against his neck.
A lot of thoughts raced through Jeff’s mind at that moment. First, he recalled that he’d placed his pistol high on a cabinet in the living room when the kids mobbed him. He didn’t want to be wearing it while they wrestled around. He’d left it off while he ate, and in fetching water for his mother, he’d gone off without it.
There was no doubt who held the gun on him. While he didn’t know which Cross it was, it was most certainly one of them. He guessed it didn’t much matter. If they’d found his handiwork in the woods, which he assumed they had, it was probable that they all hated him equally at this point. They were going to kill him. There was no doubt about that. If he knew anything about the way their addled brains worked, he suspected that they would lead him off somewhere to kill him slowly and painfully. After they’d accomplished that, they’d return for the rest of his family.
Jeff was not scared to die. He was not scared of pain. He was, however, scared of those things being inflicted on the few people he loved in this world. He did not want this family of mad dogs to kill his parents. He did not want them to kill Sherry’s children.
How could he warn them? He could yell, but would they hear him over the chattering and squealing of the children? He’d only have time for one attempt before the Crosses would try to knock him out and drag him off. He suspected the only thing that would alert his parents and get their attention would be a gunshot. With no gun of his own, it would have to be a shot from one of the Crosses. The only reason they would fire one this close to the house, giving away their presence, would be if they were trying to kill him. He would have to provoke that and make them fire a shot.
Jeff spun to the left, sweeping back with his left arm and pushing the gun off him. He trapped Tim Cross’ gun hand in his armpit and drew the Buck skinning knife from his belt, shoving it up under Tim’s ribs. Jeff pulled the knife out and was going to stab Tim a second time when an explosion rang out.
Jeff flinched as the rifle round caught him below the left shoulder blade. He tried to catch his breath, but he couldn’t. There was another BOOM and he sagged to the ground, landing atop Tim Cross.
The Cross patriarch stared at the bodies, smoke rising from the barrel of his rifle. Behind him, Lisa Cross and her uncle stood soundlessly. The uncle walked forward, nudging each body with his foot.
“They both dead,” the uncle said, spitting into the grass.
“Well shit,” Lisa said.
Chapter 6
Vergie
Vergie was drying dishes when she heard the gunshot. It startled her and she nearly dropped a soup bowl. Jeff would never hunt that close to the house. Something had to be wrong. She set down the plate she was drying and hurried into the living room. The children were all sitting on the floor coloring.
There was a clambering of someone on the basement steps and her husband burst through the door, his eyes wide. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Jeff went to get water. It sounded like it might have come from that direction. I don’t know.” She was breathing hard, her nerves getting the better of her.
“He’s not come back?” he asked.
She shook her head, her lips tight, her eyes wide with fear.
“You kids get up!” Ernie said, rushing to them. “You all got on shoes?”
The youngest one did not and Vergie flew into action, finding a pair of tennis shoes beneath her husband’s recliner. She helped the child put them on.
Ernie ran off to the bedroom and returned with a shotgun.
“What’s going on?” Vergie asked. “What are you doing?”
Ernie shook his head. “I got no idea,” he said. “I want you and the kids to go hide in the coal bin. Just in case.”
“Why?”
“Just go,” he said. “Now. If it ain’t nothing I’ll come get you in a few minutes.” He shoved a worn revolver into her hands.
“You really think I need this?”
Ernie leaned forward and kissed her. “I hope not. I really hope not. Now get out of here. Don’t waste no more time.”
Vergie gathered the children and they ran out the back door, down the steps, and toward the coal bin. Vergie hadn’t run in years but she loped along, apron gathered in her hands. The coal bin was an ancient, sagging shed with tendrils of Virginia creeper working its way up the back and sides. Although they hadn’t used coal in twenty years, occasionally someone would use the shed for storage, despite the filth.
When they reached the shed, Vergie grabbed the old poplar door and pulled. The stiff, rusty strap hinges squealed. She looked around nervously, the pistol in her hand. “Get in kids,” she said. “Don’t make any noise. We have to be very quiet. Do you understand?”
They all nodded seriously, sensing her urgency, slipping into the dark, low-ceilinged structure. Vergie joined them, pulling the door shut tightly behind her. The siding was made of vertical boards and gaps had opened up between them as the boards dried over the years. Sunlight came in through the cracks, creating narrow shafts in the black dust stirred by their movement. Vergie took them to the very back. There was nowhere to sit except in the fine black dust, so that’s what they did. The children huddled around her. She pointed the gun in the direction of the door and waited, her heart racing.
The coal bin was as filthy as filthy got. There were spider webs with wolf spiders as large as biscuits. Her hip ached from sitting on the ground and she could feel it all the way to the top of her head.
“How long we got to stay here?” one of the kids whispered.
Vergie held a finger to her lips and shook her head.
A burst of gunfire startled her and her body lurched. Small hands clutched at her, feeling like pinches all along her arm. The children whimpered. She could tell that it was on the other side of the house. She was sure that at least one of the shots had been from her husband’s shotgun. Not all of them, though. Someone had shot back and there was no more shooting going on now.
Her leg spasmed. A deep cramp gripped her leg and hip. She felt like she needed to get up to move around. She tried to get up and the children clutched her tighter, holding her in place.
“I need to check on your Gramps,” she whispered. “I need to make sure he’s okay.”
“You can’t leave us,” Linda, the oldest whispered. She was six.
“Honey, I can’t stay in here. I’ve got to go check. I want you all to stay put. You do not come out of this coal bin until your mama or grandma comes for you, okay?”
There was no response.
“Okay?” she said more forcefully.
“Okay,” Linda said, her voice cracking from fear.
“That’s a big girl,” Vergie said. She turned awkwardly to her side and pushed herself up with difficulty. There was a sharp twinge in her
back that made her straighten up and hit her head on one of the low rafters.
“Bless it,” she hissed.
“You okay?” Linda asked.
“I’m fine,” Vergie whispered. “Don’t worry about me. You take care of your brother and sister.”
The other two children snuggled tightly against Linda, who wiped tears from her eyes, smudging her face with the greasy coal dust.
Vergie crept toward the door, pushed it open, and struggled out. She straightened her stiff back, the revolver hanging loosely in her hand. When the spasm eased enough that she could walk, she hobbled toward the edge of the house.
The kids all moved to the front of the coal bin, pressing their eyes against the vertical cracks, watching their great grandmother hobble across the yard. When she reached the edge of the house and peered around into the front yard, she emitted a loud groan of pain, her hand flying up across her mouth. She took one step and there was another gunshot. She dropped into the yard, the revolver flying from her grasp. She took a few wet breaths, stiffened, kicked, and died under the dispassionate gaze of the Cross family.
The children sucked in a collective gasp at the death of the woman who’d practically raised them, receding back into the darkness of the coalbin and huddling together, too scared to cry. They tried to shut their ears against the sounds of laughter and breaking glass. Then they smelled smoke and heard the crackling of a rising fire. They could do nothing but stare at one another in sheer terror.
Chapter 7
Randi
It took Randi, her brother, and her daughters nearly three hours to reach her ex-husband’s community. It should have taken two. They kept running into people they knew who either wanted information or wanted to share stories about how inconvenienced they were. Tommy knew everyone and liked to talk. That had cost the group nearly an hour of travel time. Randi and the girls had to drag him along when he got into conversations or he would talk all day.
Eventually, they reached the community of Neon, where Randi’s ex-husband lived. The story went that the daily train that passed through the community would never completely stop because there were so few people living there, but it would slow down enough for anyone wanting to board to get a “knee on.”
Randi had no interest in seeing her ex unless she were blessed enough to find him dead. She made Tommy promise that, if that were the case, he’d come back and get her. She had not been joking in her threat to spit upon his corpse. She still held a few hard feelings about the way their marriage had gone.
Perhaps more than a few.
“I’m going to wait here,” Randi said, gesturing to the railroad tracks.
Tommy cast a wary eye around them. The road was empty and there was no one about anywhere. “I don’t know if I should leave you here,” he said. “You’d be sitting out in the open.”
Randi rolled her eyes. “I’ll be fine. I’m going to sit down on the tracks and rest a while. You stay with the girls. I’ve got a gun and I don’t mind to use it if I need to.”
“Right,” Carla joked, not used to seeing her mother as a woman capable of violence unless it was directed at Carla’s dad.
Randi cut her a sharp look. “You think I got home to you without having to spill a little blood? I still have nightmares about the shit I saw. The shit I did.”
“Geez, Mom, I didn’t know,” Carla said sheepishly. “You never said anything. You don’t have to get all…intense.”
Randi walked toward the tracks. “Let me know what you find.”
Tommy looked at the girls and smiled. “Let’s go find the son-of-a-bitch that knocked my sister up.”
“Please,” Sherry said. “I’d rather you refer to him as my dad.”
“Same damn thing,” Tommy said.
Sherry sighed and walked off. “Let’s just go look for him, okay?”
Tommy took a quick sip of water and stuffed the bottle into the back pocket of his jeans. He winked at Randi, who was sitting on the tracks and wishing for several things she didn’t have at the moment – a cigarette, a cup of coffee, even a beer.
After Tommy and her daughters walked off down the dirt road, Randi looked around her. There were probably a dozen houses in the little community, old company houses. There’d once been a sawmill here that cut support timbers for the coal mines and the mill built these homes for the managers. Now the houses were peeling and the yards were fighting back kudzu. The place didn’t look any different than it had forty years ago. She couldn’t tell if the houses were still occupied or not. Maybe the folks living there had moved on or perhaps they stood in the dark watching her. As long as the residents left her alone, she didn’t care what they were doing. Still, it was creepy to think of them watching her from their dark homes.
She had a hard time believing she’d once lived here in this little cluster of ramshackle dwellings. She’d been seventeen and pregnant when she arrived in a blue 1973 Nova. The car was loud, rusting, and had mismatched tires that made it steer funny. They moved into a tiny trailer in his parents’ backyard. It was unbearably hot in the summer and impossible to heat in the winter. Her ex had ended up being less than she’d expected, and she hadn’t expected much. He had no intention of giving up drinking and chasing women even when they were living under the same roof. He’d also been a hitter.
She hadn’t told many people the story of how their marriage ended, although she had told Gary when they were walking home from Richmond. She probably wouldn’t have told him had she not been so exhausted that her veneer was worn thin and her emotions playing closer to the surface than she usually allowed. Sherry had been around ten when her daddy slapped her because Randi had the audacity to take her girls to church. It had turned uglier, with him hitting the girl again and challenging God to come and stop it.
He did stop it. His fiery sword of justice arrived in the form of Randi, who beat her husband into unconsciousness with a log from the firewood stack. She thought she’d killed him. After the mistake of marrying him in the first place, letting him live was the second biggest mistake of her life. To this day, she did not want to lay eyes on him for the fear that she might be unable to resist the temptation to finish the job she’d started.
She’d called the law and confessed to killing her husband. Two deputies arrived shortly in brown Plymouths. They examined the body carefully before one of the officers approached her. It was not the first time he’d been to their home. He knew the deal. Randi extended her arms toward him, waiting on the handcuffs.
“Ma’am, your husband isn’t dead,” he said. “Would you like us to drive back down the road and come back in a few minutes?”
At first she didn’t believe she’d heard him right. When she looked in his eyes she knew she had. He was making her an offer. They could go down the road, wait a few minutes, and then come back. They were offering to give her time to finish the job.
She didn’t take them up on it. She packed a bag for her and the kids and the deputies drove her to her dad’s house. She’d been there ever since. For their parts, neither Sherry nor Carla seemed to recall that experience at all. While in some ways it was a blessing that they didn’t have a memory of that horrible day, Randi did wish they had more recollection of the horrible husband and father he had been. In the absence of those memories, the girls unfairly laid much of the blame for the failed marriage at Randi’s feet. No doubt at the insistence of her ex-husband.
Wading through the mire of her past agitated her to the point that she rose from her seat on the warm metal train tracks. She began pacing, kicking at rocks, wishing they were his head. Fifteen feet from where she started pacing, she came to the spot where the dirt road crossed the train tracks. There, she found a couple of empty beer cans and a small heap of debris where someone had stopped their vehicle to dump the contents of their ashtray onto the ground.
She stared at the contents of the ashtray. She sank to her knees and dragged a finger through the ashes, the gum wrappers, and the crumpled cigarette butts. She
pulled one of the butts from the ashes and raised it to her nose. It smelled like she expected it to smell but she didn’t care. She slung her pack off and dug in the slash pocket for a lighter. When she found it, she delicately placed the short butt into her mouth, pleasantly surprised to find that it tasted no worse than expected. While it didn’t taste good by any means, it was tolerable.
She struck her lighter and lit up, sucking the stale smoke into the deepest recesses of her lungs. She felt like she was breathing for the first time in days. When she exhaled, her entire body relaxed and she felt at peace with the world.
She tried to avoid thinking about the original owner of that cigarette, the first person to saturate that same filter with saliva, just as she was doing now. In the end, she found that she didn’t care. If the filter had once sat in the toothless gap of an alcoholic’s smile, she didn’t care. If it had dangled from the scabby lip of a herpes-infected meth-head, she didn’t care. If it hung from the painted lip of a pre-teen headed down the wrong path, she still didn’t care.
She was on her fourth butt before she began to feel like she’d almost had a full cigarette’s worth of tobacco. She was still huddled there over the contents of the ashtray when she heard her brother and daughters returning earlier than expected.
“What the hell are you doing, Sissy?” Tommy asked in his booming voice.
“Nothing,” she said, looking up at them.
“Mom, your lips are black,” Carla said.
“And you’ve got black streaks across your forehead,” Sherry added.
Randi remembered wiping a hand across her face several times. She must have smeared ashes there.
“Sissy, are you smoking butts off the road?” Tommy asked.
Randi hesitated, not sure that she could lie her way out of this. Her delayed response answered the question for them.
“God help us,” Carla announced. “Our mom has turned into a hobo.”
No Time For Mourning: Book Four in The Borrowed World Series Page 4
