Cry Baby Hollow

by Love, Aimee

  “Can I help you find something?” The boy asked solicitously.

  She shook her head and went to work. They didn’t have carts, which meant she had to make a pile on the counter and drop things off there whenever her arms got full. It would have been irksome if she hadn’t been the only customer. As it was, the boy could give her his undivided attention and whenever she picked up something that weighed more than three pounds, he appeared instantly at her side and wordlessly took it from her. Perhaps, she decided, not wearing a bra wasn’t the worst thing she could have done.

  It took her almost an hour to assemble the supplies she needed, and as the pile grew, the boy looked less and less besotted and more and more intrigued. She knew if she had accepted Joe’s offer of a ride, he would right now be subjecting her to an endless series of questions and digressions, but the boy remained politely uninquisitive in spite of his obvious interest in her varied purchases.

  After she’d paid, he picked up a bag of Quick Crete in each arm and followed her out to her car. She expected him to totter over. He was tall, but painfully thin, and the bags were heavy. But taking them both at once was apparently more than sheer bravado on his part, because he strode along beside her with ease. She popped the hatch and he smiled, a huge, beaming grin that transformed his face.

  “You know you’re engine is made by BMW?” He asked her with a touch of envy in his voice, enunciating each of the car makers initials as if it were a separate word.

  She smiled and nodded.

  “They used these in that Marky Mark movie,” he went on, waiting patiently while she folded down the rear seats to make room for all her new cargo. “But I never saw one up close until I spied yours coming out across from Broad’s a few weeks ago. I was just driving by,” he explained quickly. “I live on down that way.”

  Broad’s was a notorious den of sin and no self-respecting boy would admit to frequenting it in front of a lady.

  “I guess you’re the girl who took the old Guinn place,” he raised his voice at the end, making it a question.

  “Aubrey Guinn,” she told him with a smile. Normally, she chafed when people called her “girl”. In the military it was always used as a term of condescension. But here, coming from a smitten teenager, she decided to take it as a compliment.

  “I’m Noah,” he told her with a nod. “Why don’t you hop in and get the AC running, Miss Guinn,” he suggested. “I can run the rest of the stuff out for you while it cools off.”

  He set off at an ungainly trot before she could protest and she decided to let chivalry win the day. She started the car and pressed the sunroof button to vent out some of the scalding hot air. When he returned with the pipe, she had to slide the passenger seat forward and recline it all the way back before they could fit it in at an angle, but they managed well enough. After he brought out the final load, she slid down the window and stuck her head out.

  “Thanks so much for your help,” she told him. His face once again split into the magical smile.

  “Just doin’ my job, ma’am,” he beamed.

  She thought about letting him take the car for a spin, but she needed to run a few more errands and then get home and start work on her project. Offering to let him stop by her place sometime for a drive was equally problematic. He might get the wrong idea and the last thing she needed right now was a kid with a crush puppy-dogging after her.

  “Is there a gun shop in town?” She asked.

  “No ma’am, ’fraid not,” he said dejectedly, obviously hurt that he couldn’t shape the town to accommodate her needs, but then he brightened again. “Fat Daddy’s Pawn usually has a good stock though, and they got ammo and stuff too.” He pointed down Main Street past the Food Lion. “It’s behind the Sonic,” he told her helpfully.

  ““Whatcha workin’ on?” He called as she started to pull away with a wave, unable to restrain his curiosity any longer.

  “Revenge,” she told him with a twinkle in her eye and pulled out of the parking lot, turning toward the Sonic.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Apparently, in East Tennessee, “a good stock” translated into enough armaments to wage a small coup. Fat Daddy’s leaned heavily tow

  ard hunting rifles and shotguns, but had a healthy assortment of handguns on display as well. A wooden plaque on the wall over the cash register had a stuffed duck on one side and an Uzi on the other. Underneath, the words “So many ducks - So little time,” were crookedly burned into the wood.

  A heavy set man in his early twenties, three days of stubble on his flabby jowls and a half smoked Marlboro Red dangling from his lips, sat on a stool behind the counter reading a copy of Guns and Ammo.

  “What you lookin’ for, honey?” He asked around the cigarette when the bell taped to the door handle announced Aubrey’s arrival.

  Aubrey couldn’t very well avoid his help, since everything in the store was in locked cases.

  “Do you have anything non-lethal?” She asked.

  He set down his magazine and lumbered over to a case. He pulled a massive ring of keys off a hook on the wall and slid the glass panel open. Reaching in, he pulled out a small pistol and set it on the counter in front of her.

  “That’s a .22,” she observed.

  “You’d have to have real good aim to kill anybody with it,” he assured her.

  Aubrey pursed her lips and tried not to laugh.

  “I was thinking of something more along the lines of pepper spray,” she told him.

  “Those things’ll just piss a man off, honey.”

  “That’s the idea,” she told him.

  He shrugged elaborately and replaced the small pistol in the case.

  “I guess we might have something in back,” he told her.

  “Could you see?” She asked when he made no sign of moving.

  He sighed resignedly and disappeared through a door that had been papered with posters of bikinied women holding assault rifles. He returned a few moments later carrying a large, partially mangled cardboard box. He hauled it out from behind the counter and dropped in with a loud clatter on the floor at her feet.

  “This here’s where we put the stuff they send us on accident,” he told her.

  Inside was an assortment of handcuffs, pepper spray key chains, personal alarms, and self defense tapes on VHS, still in their little plastic bags with the manufacturer’s coded labels on the outside.

  Aubrey knelt down and rummaged for a few minutes, then stood up with her selections in hand. She noted with a trace of disgust the predatory leer plastered to the man’s face and realized that standing over her while she looked, he’d probably gotten a pretty all-encompassing view down her tank top.

  “I’ll need some shot gun shells, too,” she told him curtly. “Slugs.”

  “Somebody botherin’ you?” He asked, ringing up her purchases.

  “Only you at the moment,” she told him, crossing her arms in front of her.

  “You got a mouth on you, honey,” he sneered. “That’ll get you in trouble every time. No wonder your man beat you. If you held your tongue you might not need all this stuff.”

  She motioned to the bag of goodies.

  “All this stuff,” she told him, “means someone else is in trouble, not me.”

  She slapped enough cash on the counter to cover her total, grabbed her bag, and stalked out without waiting for her change. A hoot of amusement as the door swung shut behind her made her cringe inwardly, but she held her head high and strode to her car without a backward glance. Today, she had bigger fish to fry.

  When she arrived back at the cabin after a few more stops, Joe was sitting in the shade on the front deck, a longneck sweating profusely in one hand, gazing out into the woods at nothing. His white, ribbed undershirt clung to him damply and his muddy work boots had been removed and were
sitting on the railing with his balled up socks sticking out the top.

  The slamming of her car door alerted him to her presence and he strolled down to meet her, walking with exaggerated care once he hit the gravel drive with his bare feet.

  “What are you still doing here?” She asked.

  He shrugged.

  “I haven’t been here the whole time,” he assured her. “I had to go and fetch some supplies too,” he saluted her with the beer and took a long pull, tipping it up so high that she could see his Adam’s apple bobbing as he gulped it down. She looked down at his bare feet, hoping for warts, fungus, or perhaps something more exotically repulsive like webbed toes. But they were clean and as sun-bronzed as the rest of him, with evenly-spaced, well-proportioned toes and neatly-trimmed nails. They were, in fact, the nicest looking feet she’d ever seen on a man. She sighed.

  “You want one?” Joe asked her, mistaking her frustration for thirst. “I think I’ve got one left in my cooler.”

  “I don’t drink beer,” she reminded him.

  “Only at football games and pool halls,” he remembered with a grin. “Maybe we should go shoot a few games sometime.”

  “I’m not very good,” she lied.

  “Hell, that don’t matter,” he told her good-naturedly. “It’s just an excuse to drink beer, right?”

  “What are you doing here Joe?” she asked again, giving up.

  “I thought you might need help,” he told her, taking another long drink, “and I wanted to give you this.”

  He handed her a small slip of paper that had been ripped from a spiral notebook. On it, in a prim, cramped hand was written: “Your current mailbox is not in keeping with U.S. postal regulations. Your mail will be held at the post office until you can erect a suitable receptacle.”

  “Great,” she muttered, balling up the paper and sticking it in her pocket. “Couldn’t she just leave the mail with you or Vina?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “I offered, but like I said, Tina is real fussy. She said you’d have to sign a form authorizin’ me or forwardin’ your mail to another address.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Aubrey told him. “I’ll have another one up by tonight.”

  “Want help?” Joe offered again.

  She weighed the pro’s and con’s of letting him stick around and decided that if she kept him busy enough, he wouldn’t be too distracting.

  “You can help me unload for starters,” she told him.

  He looked taken aback, clearly he had expected to be sent packing.

  “No problem,” he smiled. “You couldn’t have much in that little thing.”

  She walked around to the back of the car and popped the hatch.

  “Don’t worry,” she told him. “They were sold out of clowns.”

  He came up beside her and peered into the thoroughly stuffed car, letting out a long, low whistle of amazement.

  “When you don’t have a lot to work with, you learn to get the most out of it,” she told him, admiring her own packing job.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Joe told her with a wink, lifting a bag of groceries. As he passed behind her to bring it into the house he bent and whispered in her ear, “I’ve always had plenty.”

  “Men with big trucks always think they can throw things in any which way,” she shot back, “and they’re always wrong.”

  “I’ll be sure to call you next time I got a load,” he told her innocently when he returned for another trip. “So you can show me how it’s done.”

  After that comment she let him unload the rest of the car alone and went to inspect the workshop. The little carriage house was all that was left of the original Guinn place. She had measured it when she first arrived, to see if it could be made to accommodate the Mini, and noticed that it had been set up as a potting shed and tool room by some one long ago. Now she set about getting it ready for a full day’s work. She was pleased to note that it had power outlets against one wall, so she wouldn’t need to string electrical cords from the cabin, and that someone had abandoned a large oscillating fan on a stand. She had it set up in the door and blowing hard, had organized all her tools on the long table against the back wall, and had killed eighteen spiders by the time Joe began delivering her purchases. She stacked them in neat piles and deflected his questions by telling him that she had picked up more beer at the store and he could help himself as soon as the car was empty.

  He returned thirty minutes later, sad eyed and empty handed.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” he observed.

  She looked up, feigning surprise.

  “What?”

  “There wasn’t any beer in those bags,” he told her.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, all innocence and shock.

  “I unloaded them all.”

  “Did you put the cold goods in the fridge?” She asked.

  He nodded.

  “I guess the beer never made it into the bags,” she told him apologetically. “I know I paid for it though, because they carded me.”

  “What’s next?” Joe asked, resigned to a beer free afternoon.

  “Can you dig out the old post and make the hole a little bigger?” She asked sweetly, as if it weren’t over ninety degrees outside and Joe wasn’t already parched.

  Joe didn’t complain, but his near constant smile drooped and the twinkle went out of his eyes.

  “Sure boss,” he told her, trying to keep a stiff upper lip.

  She waited until he had gotten the shovel out of the back of his truck and pulled on a pair of work gloves before granting him a reprieve.

  “Joe?” She called.

  He looked up.

  “You know it just occurred to me that they probably put the beer in a separate bag. Did you check the floor of the passenger seat?”

  Joe abandoned his shovel immediately and looked into her car. His face lit up like a child on Christmas morning.

  “Bingo!” He called, letting out a little whoop of glee. He reached in, grabbed the beer, and emptied it into the cooler in the passenger seat of his truck. She watched as he pulled one out, opened it and went back to work, this time whistling a little tune. She knew he wouldn’t bother her again for a good long time.

  Her own work was considerably more delicate or she might have broken down and joined him in a drink. First she had to build a makeshift hazmat chamber. She draped a clear plastic drop cloth over and around an old sawhorse and sealed all the joints with an entire roll of duct tape. She made a few cuts and pushed a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves half way in, then sealed those with duct tape as well. When she was done she had a relatively airtight chamber. With her hands in the gloves she could work inside the area without risk and did so for over an hour. The result was several empty aerosol cans and a pool of multicolored liquid that was rapidly forming on the bottom of the drop cloth. She left it to finish settling and turned her attention to her next project.

  She lined up a dozen old mason jars on the workbench and placed a quart sized Ziploc bag in each, being careful to fold the top over the lip of the jar so that liquid wouldn’t drip down between the bag and the glass.

  She poked her head outside and saw Joe hard at work on a beer, staring intently at the un-dug hole. Plenty of time left, she decided.

  She sat down and went to work with the soldering gun and the shotgun shells. It was mid-afternoon before she stood up again, hot and tired, but smiling brightly. Aubrey loved shotgun shells. If you knew what you were doing, you could take out the slugs and replace them with almost anything. In this case, she had chosen thumbtacks.

  She carefully transferred the slurry from the hazmat chamber into the Ziplocs, wearing a painter’s dust mask that covered her eyes, nose, and mouth. She sealed the bags and placed them gently into an old dish tub
.

  When she emerged from the workshop, Joe’s truck was gone but the hole was finished and her old mailbox, with her name careful stenciled on the side, was sitting on the drive beside her car, the dents more or less banged out.

  Aubrey mixed a batch of Quick Crete and filled in the hole with it. When it was semi-solid, she placed a rod of rebar in the middle and then lowered a perforated black drainage pipe made of corrugated plastic over that and stuck it into the rapidly hardening base. The result was a solid center, a donut of empty space, and a somewhat wobbly and fragile exterior covering.

  Aubrey scooped up handfuls of loose gravel from her driveway, filled the first two feet of the tube’s hollow center, and then went and collected her gear from the workshop. She was excruciatingly careful with the liquid filled Ziplocs, taking them one at a time and lowering them gently down into the tube with both hands, easing them along beside the rough rebar so they wouldn’t be punctured. In careful layers, she alternated the Ziplocs filled with liquid and the little shotgun shell contraptions she had devised. When she reached the top, she drilled a hole in the bottom of her mailbox, stuck it onto the rebar so that two inches protruded into the interior of the box, and wired it all together with practiced ease. When the mailbox was removed, either by hand or with a baseball bat, the circuit would break and the result would be a thing of beauty.

  She stepped back to admire her handy work. It looked a little odd in the bright afternoon light, but she decided that at midnight it would appear solid and tempting. It wouldn’t hold up for more than a few days. All she could do was hope that cats and raccoons would give it a wide berth until then. She went off for a shower and a drink wearing a smile of pure, sweet satisfaction.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That evening, after a few hours getting caught up with work on her computer and eating a salad, Aubrey found she was too antsy to sit down with a book or watch TV. She called Vina but was told by her ever-informative answering machine that it was Karaoke night at The Home and she wouldn’t be in until late.