THE YARDS
A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE
A. F. CARTER
CHAPTER ONE
GIT
Even without makeup, I’m not bad looking. True, my face is a little too thin, my nose too short, my chin a bit too firm. But if my likeness won’t be appearing on the cover of a fashion magazine anytime soon, it isn’t a face that men reject. No, attracting men has never been my problem. It’s the choosing part that escapes me.
The way I figure now, the first link was in place long before my outing. Two years and three months before, give or take a few days. That’s when I gave up on having a man in my life. Twenty-five years old, and enough was more than enough. I wasn’t a man-hater. I have girlfriends who married decent men, not perfect, but decent. You could imagine putting your arms around them twenty years down the road. Not me, though. My first love punched me in the face when I wouldn’t go down on him—I was twelve—and my last love, Franky Belleau, emptied my bank account before he headed off to fame and fortune in Las Vegas. Franky’s in prison now, though he did have his moment of fame. A two-inch story on page eighteen of the Las Vegas Review after he shot a grocer.
Maybe choosing badly just comes natural to girls who grow up on the trashy side of the tracks in a broke-down city like Baxter. Between an alcoholic mother who changed lovers monthly and a missing father who showed up occasionally with his hand out, my life illustrated every cliché in the book. There are times when I think that’s all women like me are good for. I think maybe God created us to be living examples of how not to raise children.
But I’m not a whiner, and I don’t have my hand out, either. By waitressing part-time, I managed to finish a year of nursing school after I graduated from Dunning High, and that makes me a licensed practical nurse.
My original goals were much higher. At the least, I wanted another year’s schooling and the title of registered nurse. RNs make a lot more than LPNs. But it wasn’t happening, not even close. The country fell into recession, my Pell Grant went the way of the economy, I couldn’t qualify for another student loan, and Franky ran off with my cash reserves.
If the men in my life were consoling types, I would have cried on somebody’s shoulder.
With little choice, I took a job working three twelve-hour shifts at Resurrection Nursing Home. This was two years before the virus hit. The thirty-six-hour schedule allowed the Baptists who run the dump to classify me as part-time and not entitled to benefits like health insurance or paid vacations. And what they paid me for those thirty-six hours wasn’t enough to cover the bills, not with Charlotte to care for. Which is why I found a second job.
Now I work three nights at Resurrection and three nights as a home care nurse for an old man who claims he was a gangster. Zack’s full of advice but too old to grab my ass, though he checks me out every time I cross the room. Just as well, because I’m not willing to have my ass grabbed, no matter how bad I need the job.
The saddest part is that I’m mostly proud of my achievements. I rent a small house in Dunning, a neighborhood where people turn down their sound systems at ten o’clock. Respectable’s probably the right word—respectable, but still poor. I can see the railroad tracks from the top of the rise behind the house. I can hear the trains go by at night. Should I get sick or hurt, maybe lose a couple of months’ pay, I’ll be recrossing those tracks. Me and Charlie both.
If I hadn’t gotten married, I would have started nursing school two years earlier. I still don’t understand why Sean picked me, because there were plenty of girls in the neighborhood who would’ve jumped at the chance to wear his ring. But pick me he did, always charming, always considerate.
My girlfriends warned me. Sean’s playing you, Git. When you’re not around, he calls you his redneck. It’s supposed to be a joke, but it doesn’t sound like a joke. If you marry him, he’ll own you.
Par for the course, I didn’t listen to a word. I married Sean at age nineteen and had my reception in the back room of a roadside bar.
So, yeah, I was young and soft. A little girl looking for a daddy, any daddy. But give me credit, I hardened in a hurry. Sean used his fists to enforce his ownership rights, fists and threats. That ended on the afternoon I shot him with the Glock he kept in a night-table drawer. The bullet grazed his ribs, but I’d been aiming at his head and Sean knew it. He turned and fled, through the door, up the street, and out of my life. Leaving the Glock and his unborn child behind.
My daughter—Charlotte on her birth certificate, but Charlie everywhere else—was born eight weeks later, a few days after my twentieth birthday. And not in prison. Sean never went to the hospital or the cops. We don’t, people like us.
Charlie became the focus of my life when the delivery nurse laid her in my arms and said, “Say hello to your daughter.” I felt nearly destroyed at the time. I’d been in labor for hours, my head was throbbing, and the stink rising from my armpits was thick enough to light with a match. Charlie cut through all that bullshit. I knew exactly what I had to do, knew that my own life was down the tubes if I fucked this up. My job was to love Charlie, to care for her, to protect her, to raise her until she didn’t need any more raising. My job was to give my daughter more than I ever had, to give her a chance.
I want Charlotte to move up. I want her to live in a neighborhood too far away from the tracks to hear the trains pass, but that takes money.
Sean contributes a few bucks every month, enough to prevent his arrest, not enough to make a difference in Charlie’s life. So it’s on me, my daughter’s fate, and I’m holding my own, now that I’ve sworn off men. These days, I generally make do with a vibrator and my imagination, but there are still times, no lie, when I really need an outing.
The word libido didn’t enter my vocabulary until I was twenty. That’s because the only word used on my end of the food chain is horny. Truth to tell, I’m horny most of the time, and like I said, I usually take care of it by myself. It’s only every couple of months when I reach the point where I have to have a man. That’s where this story begins, the last link in a chain that marks the days since I swore to go it on my own.
CHAPTER TWO
GIT
Mom sits on the edge of the bed, an unlit cigarette propped between her fingers. She’ll have to go outside to smoke it. I’m sitting in an office chair with a wicker seat and back, staring into a mirror propped on my vanity. There’s no reason to hurry. It’s not seven o’clock yet, and prime outing hours don’t begin until after ten on Saturday. I chose Saturday because it’s my only night off.
“I think the green dress,” Mom tells me.
“Not the black?”
“The black makes your ass look flat.”
My rented home is a three-bedroom house on Booth Lane, with a kitchen, a living room, and a too-small bathroom we have to share. There’s me—Bridget O’Rourke—and Charlie, who’s eight, and also my mother, Celia Graham. Charlie’s in her own room now, watching a television I can hear through the drywall. Mom and I are alone.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that my mother put the trash in trailer trash. Cross-addicted to whatever somebody else paid for, she was absent more than she was home when I was a kid. That was a blessing because my mother’s conversation, drunk or sober, tends to include all the rage she’s accumulated over a hard and bitter lifetime. As a kid, I took it. What choice did I have? Still, I was happiest when she was gone, even though I sometimes had to beg my Granny Jo for something to eat.
Mom was as surprised as everyone else in the family when I completed that first year of nursing school and moved out. At the time, I hoped to leave her in that rearview mirror, so long, sayonara, and goodbye. But then I became a single mother, and there was no way I could work and afford day care. Even in depressed, post-Covid Baxter,
professional day care runs a thousand a month. So I cut a deal with my mother: I put a roof over her head and food in her belly, and she became . . . maybe not a real grandmother, but at least a nanny. By then, Mom’s liver had reached the point of no return, and she was in bad shape. The bones of her shoulders and hips were sharp enough to pass for offensive weapons. Her face was a mass of deep creases. Her mouth had caved in so far that it looked as though she was trying to swallow her lips.
Sorry if I’m not mincing words. My relationship with my mother is strictly one of convenience, and my grievances run deep. As far as I’m concerned, I owe her nothing. All debts run in the other direction. But at least she’s sober these days, and for good reason. She knows I’ll kick her out on her ass if she starts drinking again. She also knows that she’s likely to need a piece of my liver somewhere down the road.
“Okay, the green.” I get up, put the black dress in the closet, and lay the green on the bed. The pale fabric is laced with small sequins. They look cheap and brassy under the harsh bedroom light, but I’m seeing the dress in a dim barroom, reflecting whatever light’s available.
I know where I’m going in a few hours, know where I’ll sit, know that a bloodred neon sign announcing the name of the bar, Randy’s, will explode in the sequins on the left side of my dress and the silver bangles on my wrist.
“’Bout time you got out somewheres, Git.” Mom’s on her knees, rummaging through a pile of shoes for the pumps that match my dress. They’re more silver than green, but close enough to work. “Got ’em.” Mom displays the shoes with their six-inch heels. My feet hurt just looking at them, but I do like the dressing-up part one night every couple of months when I can pretend to be what I can never be. Not with a child to raise.
Mom puts down her unlit smoke and takes the small case that holds her cosmetics, brushes, and sponges out of the vanity’s middle drawer. At one time she made a half-assed living as a beautician, but she was always too unreliable to succeed. She has talent, though, along with a small but noticeable tremor that disappears when she’s at work.
“You comin’ home tonight? Tomorrow?” Without looking up, she plucks an eyebrow pencil from the case. “What am I supposed to tell Charlie if you’re not here when she wakes up?”
This from a woman who disappeared for weeks at a time.
“If I’m not home by sunrise, call the cops.”
“And tell ’em what?”
When I don’t answer, Mom goes to work. She sharpens the angle of my eyebrows and extends the outer edges by a quarter of an inch. The lids come next. She applies three coats of base, the color gradually darkening until both eyelids are a pale green that echoes the green of my dress. A spatter of silver glitter on the inner half of both lids and a curving black line that extends about an inch from the corners of each blue eye complete the package.
“Whatta ya think?” she asks.
Mom slips off to one side, leaving me face-to-face with the mirror. I find what I hoped for in my reflection. Party girl, not street whore, the main difference being that while you have to pay a whore, I’ll do it for nothing. That gives me the right to be more selective, but not by all that much.
The mirror holds my attention for another moment. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the too-pale skin and the ruler-straight blond hair that advertise my hillbilly roots. My grandparents—the only ones I knew, my mother’s parents—came out of West Virginia in search of a better life. Which, according to Grandma Jo, they found.
Not long before she died, Granny Jo announced that she was proud of me. I was moving up, just as she’d moved up.
“It don’t matter how hard we lived once we come to Baxter, life was a bunch meaner back in the hollers. You didn’t have a job in the mines, you was likely to find your sorry self eatin’ grass.”
“Did you decide where you’re goin’ tonight, Git?” Mom returns to work, applying concealer to a small scar above my right eye, then foundation to the broad planes of my face and brow.
“I’m thinkin’ Randy’s.”
The name fits the joint. Randy’s Tavern is a bar where randy men and women congregate. You don’t patronize Randy’s unless you’re looking for sex. It might be a couple in search of another couple or a married woman with an out-of-town hubby or me in search of a one-night stand.
The tavern’s located at the edge of Mount Jackson, Baxter’s only affluent neighborhood. The mount part’s a joke to those of us who grew up on the southern end of the city. Mount Jackson could only be called Mount Anything in a city surrounded by hundreds of miles of flatland. The affluent part is just as misleading. True, the Baxter mansion, sixty-five rooms, dominates the top of the hill. But the family hasn’t visited the place in years, and rumor has it they’re preparing to close their plant. There are smaller mansions as well, most of them abandoned, and still smaller homes occupied by professional types—doctors, lawyers, small business owners.
At one time, our city had six major processing plants, each family owned. The Gauss Plant was the first to close, in 1994, and the fifth one, Dunning Pork Products, locked its gates six years ago. There’s only the one left now, the one constructed by George Baxter in the early part of the last century.
And when that plant closes?
They don’t locate tech companies in midwestern states dominated by corn, cattle, and hogs. Barring a miracle, it’ll be run for your life when Baxter Packing shuts its doors.
“You can’t maybe stay with your own kind?” Mom, as usual, drags me back to earth.
“And where would that be?”
Satisfied with my face, she pulls a curling iron from her bag of tricks and begins to curl the slightly thinning hair I intend to cover with a hat. Almost done now, I’m eager to get moving. With any luck, I’ll stagger home tomorrow at sunrise with the itch thoroughly scratched. The earlier I start, the better.
“Lawton’s would do.”
Mom’s probably right, on one level. If I went to Lawton’s, I wouldn’t need to buy a drink. I could stand in the doorway, beckon with a finger, and have a dozen unemployed rednecks named Austin, Clint, or Boyd competing for my favors. Maybe we’d ride to the motel in a pickup truck. Or maybe, if the guy was broke, we could screw in the truck bed.
An hour later, I’m staring into the vanity mirror, fascinated with my appearance. I’m almost beautiful, the effect so exotic I’m not sure what to do with my face. And though I know I’m playing above my weight, that’s the basic idea. My panties and bra cost a hundred dollars. They’re pale blue, trimmed with lavender lace and almost transparent.
Charlie walks into the room as I slide eight silver bangles onto my wrist. They’ll also catch that red light.
“Mommy,” Charlie says, head cocked to one side, “you look beautiful.”
I take my daughter into my arms and give her a quick peck that doesn’t smear my lipstick. Then I go into the vanity’s drawer, take out my wedding ring, and slip it on my finger.
Good to go.
CHAPTER THREE
GIT
People in real cities like New York and Chicago would laugh at Randy’s. I mean the upscale part. But I have to admit that Randy’s owner, Mason Cheat, made a sincere effort. From the stone floor to the metal ceiling, the joint’s sleek. A curved bar is wrapped in quilted leather, the lacquered crimson tables are glass-topped and square, and a white-metal sculpture that reminds me vaguely of a bird in flight dominates the main wall.
It’s all nice, the effort I mean, but to my way of thinking, the bar’s main claim to upscale status lies in what it doesn’t have. A pool table in the back.
The lighting at Randy’s is mostly provided by wall sconces and is very dim, which you’d expect and which I appreciate as I come through the door. We’re far enough west in Baxter for me to get away with a broad-brimmed hat made by a local artisan, which conceals me still further. Hats aren’t really in fashion, even in Baxter, but this close to cattle country, the Stetsons come out at the county fair to celebrate
a time when cattlemen drove their herds through town. And on Wild West nights at the local clubs, where the Texas Two-Step prevails, they’re more or less required.
Satisfied that I’m still anonymous, I cross the room. I can feel the eyes following me. You might call it self-arousal—to be desired, that’s the first step—and I put a little extra into my gait. Not too blatant I’m hoping. Just a bit more bounce to the part of my body currently drawing the most attention.
The bartender approaches. I’ve seen him before, a middle-aged guy with a beard and sad eyes, like he’s been at this way too long. His name is Shiloh and he’s got an easy smile. But if he recognizes me, he’s not giving it away.
“What can I get ya?”
“A martini.”
“Comin’ up.”
The last half of my adolescence was spent downing shooters in one or another of the many bars in the Yards, the low-rent neighborhood surrounding Baxter’s last processing plant. Lesson learned, I don’t plan to get drunk tonight. I don’t need that, and my drink is just part of the show.
My dress stops north of mid-thigh when I’m standing, and its neckline reaches my throat. The armholes are cut deep. They’re open almost to my waist, and only the built-in bra keeps me on the right side of Baxter’s indecent exposure laws. I don’t know about the hem, which naturally moves up when I set one foot on the stool’s polished rung and cross my legs.
Settled in, I take a closer look at the available talent, finding professional types mostly, along with a few overdressed rednecks, the usual stew, with a single exception. I don’t stare at the man sitting at a table within ten feet of the bar. He’s older than I am, though not by much, wearing a black jacket over a silk T-shirt that models his chest without being obviously tight. The T-shirt’s indigo blue, a contrast to the faded blue of his jeans.
Bad boy? Boy toy? Something in a tiny smile that appears as we make eye contact tells me that he’s nobody’s toy.
The Yards Page 1