Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  “What the hell?” The biggest guy swung my way.

  I slipped behind a red mini-van, readjusting my aim over the hood to point at the guy’s left shirt pocket.

  “Bubba, I think we have a little girl with a gun.”

  Bubba? The last time I heard that name I was sixteen, and dating one. Now Bubba walked toward me, unmoved and unarmed, into a slash of light. Brute nose. Evil grin. A black beaver-felt Stetson that cost about five hundred bucks new. Ostrich boots.

  Not a pretender. A professional redneck.

  “This ain’t just any little girl, Rusty,” Bubba said, seemingly unconcerned that I might blast out his heart. “I think this is our girl.” He punched at the screen of his iPhone. “Lookie here, cutie, I’ve got your picture. I’m not going to hurt you.” He strode forward, holding out the phone.

  “I will shoot you,” I yelled. “Stop right there!”

  He grinned and kept on coming. Thirty feet away. Twenty.

  Grip, stance, sight. White noise roared in my head.

  “I’ve already called the police. And you don’t think I can shoot?” I took aim at a Jack in the Box ball grinning from the antenna of a white Volvo station wagon to the right of his head, and it exploded satisfactorily into a puff of plastic. The human Jack had managed to drag himself into a seated position, but his arm hung at a sickening angle. Jack Smith wasn’t going to be any help. I guessed at least three broken ribs.

  I didn’t really believe I would shoot this guy, and by the look in his eye, he knew it. He would be on top of me in seconds. Grandaddy’s combat training raced through my brain while he advanced again, still smiling.

  When he was a yardstick length in front of me, I burst from beside the van and thrust an impressive high kick in the direction of his crotch. The ballet classes I still attended every Wednesday night paid off.

  “You little bitch!” he screeched. He grabbed his crotch with one hand and my hair with the other as I ran past. Yanking me violently to the ground, he pinned me beneath the weight of his boot. I saw long blond wisps in his fist.

  I don’t like to admit it, but I have a thing for my hair. As he leered above me, holding material from my scalp, I forgot to be scared.

  With both hands, I twisted the boot as hard as I could into the most unnatural and painful position possible. The steel toe made a ninety-degree turn, knocking him off balance. His phone clattered to the ground. He let out another howl. I flipped away from him as 250 pounds of hard fat and muscle hit the floor.

  My left cheek was now smack against the cold concrete, inches from the pointy toes of his boots and from his phone. The screen glowed with a picture of me from the staff bio section of the Halo Ranch website. There was no time to think about this. I scrambled up and ran toward Jack and his other attacker, fueled by frustration and anger and hellbent momentum, without a single thought of a plan.

  What was happening to me? I didn’t want to mess with these redneck freaks. I didn’t want the pink letter in my purse. I didn’t want my Daddy to be waiting for a headstone covered with a mound of fresh earth and a blanket of a hundred long-stem roses fried brown by the August heat.

  “GET ON YOUR KNEES,” I screamed at the other goon.

  I hadn’t even heard them coming, not until the two police cars screeched short behind me, and four uniformed officers, a bona fide battalion for a Sunday morning in Fort Worth, exited with guns raised. I braced, my own gun pointed at the head of bad guy No. 2.

  I was only inches from Jack, who peered up at me with a goofy expression.

  “Your hair. It’s so pretty,” he said dreamily. “Like an angel.”

  A cop gently pried the .45 from my hand.

  “Is this registered?” he asked me.

  I nodded, mute.

  “I’ll take your word for it. Let’s put it back where you got it.” Texas cops could be nice that way. His mouth was still moving, telling me how I should look into pepper spray or a more appropriately sized weapon. Texas cops could be sexist like that, too. Grandaddy’s advice was to never argue with them. Eighty percent of Texas law enforcement, he claimed, was the same kind of man, the kind on a lifetime power trip.

  The other cops were busy cuffing the two thugs, who turned as docile as little sheep and no longer had a word to say. The guy in the black hat winked broadly in my direction, though. He held up a few strands of my hair and tucked them in his shirt pocket like a souvenir, before a cop pushed his head down and shoved him into the backseat of a patrol car.

  Smiling at me through the window, he mouthed: You’re welcome, Tommie.

  The cops insisted I take a short ride to the hospital with them so I could get “checked,” although I’m sure they were thinking there is not a pill for a 107-pound woman who tries to take down a 250-pound man with a ballet move.

  They reminded me about Texas’s concealed weapons law when they glimpsed the handle of Daddy’s pistol in my purse, and then proceeded with a barrage of questions about the events of the last twenty minutes. I told them the truth: that Jack Smith had showed up in Daddy’s office last night but that before that, I’d never seen him. I knew nothing about him except that he clearly irritated other people besides me.

  I had no idea why Jack and I ended up in the garage at the same time. It sounded unlikely even to my ears but the McCloud name gave me some clout (“You mean, of the McClouds?” one cop asked). I left out the part about my picture on Bubba’s cell phone. That was too complicated to process.

  At the hospital, while my bloody knee dripped onto a pristine hospital sheet, I punched Jack Smith Texas Monthly into the search function of my phone.

  Nada.

  All manner of Jack Smiths popped up, dead, alive, and Twittering, but none that appeared to be employed by Texas Monthly.

  It took about a half-hour for a resident to cut away the left leg of my jeans at the thigh, cleaning and stitching up the messy gap with the precision of Granny’s old Singer sewing machine. Then, an antibiotics prescription in hand, I tracked down Jack, parked on a stretcher in an emergency room cubicle, tied to a morphine drip. His faded gown bared nicely toned, tan arms with defined biceps, reminding me of a Harvard rower I once knew.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “What do you have to do with me?”

  “Blue popsicle,” he said.

  “What? Is your mouth dry? Do you want me to tell the nurse?” I tried to casually examine the plastic bag that held his personal items, hanging conveniently on one of the bed’s metal rails, courtesy of an efficient nurse.

  “Angel,” he said.

  “I’m not your angel.” My surreptitious attempt to dig out his wallet only succeeded in wedging it deeper into the bag. I didn’t see a gun or an ankle holster. Maybe I’d imagined it. More likely, the cops took it. Where were the cops, anyway?

  “Chicago,” he mumbled.

  I pulled my hand abruptly out of the bag.

  “What did you say? Stop punching the morphine button. Jack!”

  It was too late. Jack was already drifting off into self-induced slumber.

  Chicago.

  A word that wouldn’t go away.

  CHAPTER 6

  I slipped onto the highway about four, curving the wheels in Sadie’s direction, my knee throbbing in annoying rhythm with a persistent headache at the base of my skull. My eyes checked the rearview mirror every few minutes: No one was following me.

  My scalp still tingled. In the hospital’s bathroom mirror, I’d discovered a raw pink space on the left side of my head, an injury to my ego that bothered me a lot more than my knee.

  A fresh-faced rookie cop, Jeffrey something, was nice enough to retrieve Daddy’s pickup from the garage and drive it to the hospital. He’d brought it to the valet at the front entrance, tucked me inside, asked six times whether I was OK to drive, then handed me his card, doing everything but directly asking for my phone number. Any other day, I’d be interested. I could use a little chivalry in my life.

  I usually loved this drive—the
desolate Texas plains dotted with baled hay and cattle, the expansive blue sky that made me feel freer than four shots of tequila, the lazy comfort of going home. Today, all of it flew by in a blur of anxiety.

  I had to tell Sadie about the letter. Why hadn’t I done that already? My mind raced during the forty minutes of familiar highway to Ponder, the small town that abutted our family’s ranch, finally zeroing in on the one thing that bothered me most: Anthony Marchetti, the butcher who sat in a Fort Worth jail cell. I didn’t believe for a second that Marchetti had anything to do with me but I was beginning to think that somebody or several somebodies mistakenly thought so, and that couldn’t be good for my family, not if that scene in the garage was connected to him.

  Maybe Jack Smith was an innocent bystander, just a reporter hanging out by my pickup, and he simply got in the way. Maybe I was their true target. But why? The only weird thing going on in my life was Rosalina’s letter, and she didn’t issue any threats. The note was just a grieving mother’s emotional plea.

  No, Jack had to be involved somehow. What reporter wore a backup gun, for God’s sake? A gun in an ankle holster is always a backup to something else strapped higher up. The ankle holster is too damn hard to reach for a primary weapon.

  Jack had said “Chicago.”

  Rosalina is in Chicago.

  Anthony Marchetti wiped an entire family off the earth.

  In Chicago.

  The whole thing was weird, unbelievable. I turned off I-35, sped by the exit for Dale Earnhardt Way. Minutes later, I entered the Ponder business district, which is, of course, a joke.

  My hometown has been living off two things as long as anybody around here can remember: the Ponder Steakhouse and the ghosts of Bonnie and Clyde. The Ponder Steakhouse had served up bull testicles—more politely referred to as calf fries on the appetizer portion of the menu—and very decent steaks since 1948. Bonnie and Clyde actually had the balls to rob the Ponder Bank.

  Years later, when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway showed up to shoot the movie version, they left it pretty much the same—a dusty spot in the road with twin water towers, three churches, and train tracks right down the middle. I’d like to say the founders named Ponder for its poetic sunsets, highlighted on the city website as some of “the best in the world.” But the town was named way, way back in another century for W. A. Ponder, a big landowner. Land equals power in Texas. I should know. My family owns a lot of it.

  I swerved onto the main drag of Bailey Street, and made a quick U-turn into a parking space in the half-full lot of the steakhouse, my stomach growling for the to-go order I’d called in for three chicken fried steak dinners. An early supper for Sadie, Maddie, and me, as promised.

  The Ponder Steakhouse could be the only place in the world where you’re required to make a reservation by phone for your baked potato. When you sink your teeth into one, fully loaded, cooked to perfection in a giant oven for two hours at exactly 500 degrees, well, you try to remember to call ahead the day before. Today, I’d have to settle for fries.

  The screen door clanged behind me and I could see Betty Lou in the darkened corner taking an order from a couple of old women wearing straw shade hats with jaunty ribbons, in a tiff about the three-dollar charge on the menu for splitting a dinner. Betty Lou was throwing in the senior citizen discount, while righting the tilted frame of a faded autographed picture of Faye Dunaway that hung on the rough-hewn wall.

  “Is your top sirloin tender?” one of the women asked Betty Lou primly, pointing to the least expensive cut of meat on the menu.

  “No one’s ever said they can’t chew it,” Betty Lou drawled. This was the kind of answer you got from Betty Lou.

  “Excuse me for just a moment, ma’am,” she said, waving me over to the register. With a blond dye job from Dot’s Beauty Shop, tomato-red lipstick, and a pair of Wranglers, Betty Lou didn’t look as old as her weathered customers but probably was.

  She glanced at me briefly, taking in the tangled hair, the state of my jeans, and the knee decorated with an Ace bandage. None of it fazed her. She’d seen me in much worse condition in the last twenty years, sometimes with a cast from a bull-riding spill, sometimes smelling like something that came out of the rear end of a horse.

  Betty Lou and I went through our usual routine: She handed me three hot environmentally incorrect Styrofoam containers loaded with thousands of heart-stopping calories and I handed over forty-five dollars, which included a generous tip. “How’s your Ma?” she asked. “Tell her I miss her. I tucked in the last piece of chocolate pie for Maddie, so don’t you put your fork in it.”

  “Thanks, Betty Lou. Mama’s about the same. I’ll tell her you said hi.” Also part of the routine. I loved that it was still not pointless to Betty Lou.

  Five minutes later, I was back on the road through town, driving past January Lane (although there was no December or February), the feed store, and the veterinary, hungrily snatching French fries out of the top container. After a few miles, I turned onto a road that quickly changed from smooth black asphalt to vicious, spitting gravel to clouds of boiling dust. I bumped along until I could see the big family ranch house up on the hill, in a protective clump of live oaks, but before that I turned off on an even more rugged dirt lane, winding through the playing fields of our childhood.

  I pulled up to Sadie’s doublewide trailer, which she’d affectionately decorated with multicolored swirls of spray paint. She’d set her temporary home on a breathtaking spot of land. It faced the sunsets and overlooked a cement pond now shimmering brilliant orange, like someone had filled it with Sunkist soda.

  For the first time, I realized how vulnerable Sadie and Maddie were, alone at night, smack in the middle of open land. Targets.

  I got out of the pickup, then stopped. A new piece of sculpture rose three feet above me, a twisting tower of colorful recycled metal—Coke and beer cans, scraps of rusted tin, bottle caps, all of it attached to an ancient fence post running up the middle. An old doll that I remembered from Sadie’s childhood collection leered down from the top, wired in place. Molly, I think she’d named her. Molly’s blond hair and yellow overalls had seen better days. Her blank blue eyes remained as creepy as ever.

  Apart from the doll, the sculpture was oddly appealing, an idiosyncratic complement to the trailer itself, covered with Sadie’s bold pop art drawings. Window boxes spilled over with marigolds, white petunias, and Mexican heather, thriving despite a spate of hundred-degree days.

  “Do you like it?” Sadie asked, emerging from behind the sculpture with wire cutters in her hands. An impromptu weapon, I thought, if she ever needed one.

  “I’m calling it ‘Last Night,’ inspired by that blind date Irene set me up on. What is she thinking, really? He was at least fifty. He had five threads of hair. He tried to slip his hand down the back of my jeans while we were still in the driveway. Lucky there’s not much between me and my jeans.” She pointed the wire cutters at my legs. “Nice look, by the way. What happened?”

  “Inside,” I evaded.

  While she gathered up her tools from the ground, I took special note of our physical differences. Sadie wasn’t especially tall, but she was all legs like Daddy. We used to lay out in bikinis on rickety lawn chairs, greased up with Crisco or baby oil, eagerly comparing the progress on our arms every half-hour. I always lost. Sadie roasted a beautiful gold; the best I could do was a bubble-gum pink. Her dark hair grew straight like Mama’s and mine but was usually cut ruthlessly short by her own hand. My sister was blessed—or cursed—with sweet, open features that reckless men always took as an invitation.

  Today she wore her favorite summer attire. Paint-spattered cutoffs. A hot pink tank top that showed off two inches of flat stomach. Cheap plastic thongs on her feet that had seen better days. Minimal makeup. Big smile. Sadie made her living firing up tiny blowtorches and bending platinum and gold into breathtakingly delicate jewelry that looked like it was made by the hands of fairies. Her pieces sold for insane prices in ga
lleries in New York and San Francisco. She refused to build a house yet, although she could well afford it with her take from the gas wells. Too permanent, she said, although her muses lived out here in the gum trees and live oaks. Inside, other muses entertained her through her Bose sound system, iPod, satellite dish, and plasma TV.

  “Toooo​ooooo​ooooo​ooomm​ie!”

  My niece, Maddie, jolted out the door behind her, barefoot, brown pigtails flying, wearing a faded Save the Gulf tee that hit her at the knees.

  “What are we going to do tonight?” she wanted to know. “Did you rent something really good?”

  “Yes.” I handed over To Kill a Mockingbird, rented out of a Redbox inside the hospital waiting room, and the chicken fried steak.

  “You’re the best aunt ever,” my nine-year-old niece declared, throwing her arms around my waist, then bouncing away as if her feet had springs, a prime-time commercial for joy. A knot rose in my throat. As soon as Maddie disappeared into the trailer with her loot, Sadie turned from stacking tools under the awning.

  “What’s wrong with your face, Tommie? You look like you’re about to cry.” Her eyes involuntarily fluttered, and I knew what was coming. “Why did you shoot a gun today?”

  This was one of the problems with Sadie. She’d inherited The Gift from Granny. The fluttering eyes, a couple of blinks that most people wouldn’t notice—signals of some kind of premonition or “feeling.”

  She sniffed. “I can smell it.”

  “Really?” I asked, not believing her. Sadie liked to acknowledge other people’s psychic abilities, but not her own, even though hers were, well, real.

  She opened the door of the trailer.

  “Let’s get settled first,” she said.

  It was like stepping into a walk-in refrigerator—a breathtaking blast of cold air. I threw the deadbolt behind us, Sadie looking at me quizzically.

  “It’s still light outside,” she said.

  I only nodded.