Now she let out a real peal and Huck cracked a grin back, felt webs of pain jolt out of his cheekbone. He didn’t even care. “You’re funny,” she told him.
“Ow,” he winced. He still didn’t care.
“It’s a doozy,” she said. “Your eye, I mean. Can you see out of it?”
He tilted his head toward the bulb on the elevator and covered his good eye. “Not really. That light up there’s like looking at the crack under a door.”
They sat in silence, listening to the other kids laugh and drink fifty feet away. Now that he’d made her laugh, he had no idea what to do next. Under ordinary circumstances this might be his moment to steal a kiss, but his face was no doubt a sight and his mouth tasted like a slop bucket. His effort to make a bold statement with a whiskey bottle had turned out to be his downfall.
She reached into her little purse. “Do you want some gum?”
Maybe her mysterious eyes could look right into the corners of his mind. “Gosh, yes.”
She passed a piece over and he folded it into his mouth. “Sorta hurts to chew.”
She laughed again and this time he hadn’t even meant to be funny. “So,” she said. “Glider Number One.”
“It was kind of a prototype. That’s why I called it that.”
“Do you still have it?”
“Nope. Burned it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I burned it. It didn’t work.”
“But you flew it, right?”
“Yeah. Long enough to know it wasn’t right. And no way it ever would be. Plus I was in hot water with Cy Gleason, not to mention my ma. So I gave it a proper send-off.”
“But surely that’s not the end of it. Surely there’s Glider Number Two?”
“Glider Number Two would probably be even crappier.” He gave her a little sidewise look. “Get it?”
“Yes, I get it,” she said, though this time she didn’t laugh. “You boys really are all the same.”
He had a sudden flash of panic, and following that, an impulse to get her back where he thought he’d just had her. It occurred to him to lead her over to the shop. He didn’t have a motorcycle, but something that would really separate him from the boys—an honest-to-God airplane, which would rock-paper-scissors the bejesus out of anything Bobby Duane Boyd might come up with.
He’d have to swear her to secrecy of course, but not for long. Once they had a motor in hand, the whole town would know. He imagined taking Katie up in the passenger seat, flying out over the sage steppes and along the sandstone rims, across the patchwork hayground in the bottoms and the golden grain higher up on the tables, climbing the updrafts along the slopes and finally banking right over the spine of the Bull Mountains, showing her the world as neither of them had ever seen it—
Another voice, a girl’s, snapped him back. “Who all’s the same?”
Sharon White. Huck hadn’t noticed her before. Surely she must have been at the revival, too. She walked up to them.
“Boys in general,” Katie told her.
“Houston’s a little different from the average,” said Sharon. “In a good way.”
“You’re right. On the other hand, we’ve been sitting here alone for an hour and the fool hasn’t kissed me. I even gave him chewing gum.”
Huck felt a hot glow travel through him like lava. One part embarrassment, one part incredulousness. One part thrill. “Must be that hit I took to the noggin,” he offered.
Katie started to say something else just as the throng of kids in the lot broke into a scatter like billiard balls. Headlights came at a fast approach, then two red flashers and the growl of a siren. Sharon bolted, and he and Katie were up and flying too.
She kissed McKee and let herself out, made her way down the back staircase in the dark. She’d checked her watch again in the light of the little kitchen. Nearly three hours since she’d left Houston down by the grain elevator.
She debated simply walking on her woozy legs back to the cottage and actually went a few steps in that direction, before thinking better of it and turning on her heel. Maybe he’d gone home already himself, in which case he was no doubt sleeping off the prelude to his first official hangover. But if he happened to linger at the carnival, he was no doubt lingering for her.
The rush of motion behind her at first made her think of McKee and his endless pranks, her beer bottle tipped and held in place and fed by relentless gravity, faster than she could swallow.
She realized the folly of this the instant she lost her chance either to flee or to scream. A hot hand clapped to her mouth, and her right arm was wrenched in a blast of pain behind her back, and something hit her in the backs of the knees. She went down as though dropped through a trap in a floor. Her head bounced on the walk.
Freeze or fight. She feared them both but she feared the first more, and her legs started kicking and striking like they had their own reactive brain. The hem of her dress was back up around her hips but not at all like earlier. She connected hard with something not attached to whoever pushed her down from the back and heard a rough grunt, and she knew there was more than one.
The hand pushed hard at her mouth, pushed her head into the ground. She felt screaming tracers in her wrenched right arm, and the second her mind went to that, some weighted black bulk pinned her kicking legs down. She swung her left fist as the last untrapped thing, and a grip like a vise seized that, too.
This was a crazy place to rape a girl, with houses all around, and almost simultaneously she considered the sheer oddness that her mind could even go to such an objective place in such a moment. Then her left thumb bent back sharply in the wrong direction, bent like it might snap off at the base. She froze like a plank.
Something worried at her wrist. Undoing the band of her watch. I couldn’t help but notice. It’s one big watch . . .
An hour ago she bit McKee to keep from crying out and now she sunk her teeth into this other evil hand for exactly the opposite reason, pincered what meat she could and clamped like a terrified dog. She heard a gargled reaction, half gibberish and half curse, and the instant the hand ripped away, she went to shrieking with a pitch to smash glass.
Her arm was still pinned behind her, but her legs had come free again and she started kicking and lashing and kept on screaming and now flinging her head from side to side like a madwoman, screaming and screaming and flinging and flinging, until she flung it right into some wallop that seemed to detonate like dynamite, way down deep in her ears . . .
She swam back from some deep black suspension. Fleeing footsteps and a pan of headlights. Car doors slamming, tires angrily squealing. She heard the rising sputter and diminishing fade of a departing vehicle.
New footfalls pounded and she rose up swinging. She landed a blow on a bare chest and another alongside a head with her opposite hand, and he flinched but took the hits and said over and over, “You’re okay, you’re okay,” and she recognized him then and clutched him and put her face into him, and panted and sobbed at the same time. Her heart wanted to drum right out of her chest.
McKee had a club or a bat or something in one hand, but he managed to get an arm under her knees and the other beneath her shoulder blades. He carried her to the steps behind the house.
“I knew the old boy was hard of hearing but I had no idea he was that deaf.” He eased her down. “You have to walk, honey. I can’t carry you uphill.”
“We need to go to the shop and call the police. There’s no phone here.” He was looking at the side of her face in the light of the kitchen. “Bastards smacked you good. You’re gonna have a black eye, miss.”
He’d given her another beer, but she was unsettled to the edge of nausea and couldn’t drink it. She placed the cold glass against her blazing cheek. McKee was barefoot and shirtless, trousers buttoned but not zipped. It wasn’t a club he’d held but a short-barreled shotgun, lyi
ng now atop the counter.
She looked at him. “Oh my God.”
“I know . . .”
I couldn’t help but notice. It’s one big—
Her wrist shot into the light. “Oh my God. They took my watch.”
Huck skirted the fairgrounds and got over to Second and walked in the shadows, heading home.
The carnival was winding down for the night, the dance band gone and the calliope quiet, although he could still hear laughter and the occasional bark of a huckster. He could see the top of the Ferris wheel with its bulb-described spokes and rim, still turning away. Up ahead, the headlamps of cars departing down Main.
His right eye had fused totally closed and either that or the shock of the originating blow gave him the distinct sensation of balancing on a catwalk, even on level ground. Somehow despite this he’d run like an ace sprinter with Katie around the other side of the elevator, then down the tracks to the darkened platform in front of the depot.
She’d cut right and gone up under the veranda and stopped in the dark. He nearly ran right over her. “What now?” she’d hissed.
He looked back and saw the bob and pan of a flashlight. “This way,” he said, and hustled down the length of the platform and just around the corner of the building. They flattened against the wall in the dark.
She leaned in close. “What if somebody’s coming around this side?”
Huck peeped back around the corner. The flashlight traveled in the other direction, down toward a line of dormant rail cars. “Pretty sure it’s just Junior and he’s gone the other direction. We ought to scoot,” and the words were no sooner out than his mouth went straight to hers as though it had a mind all its own.
Or maybe she really could read right into his thoughts, and liked what she saw. Her mouth opened and his did too. For months he had dreaded looking like an amateur in the moment of truth, but now their tongues practically collided with this identical urgency, and all his concern went straight out the window.
She tasted like wet electric peppermint. That’s all he could think about for the longest time. Her tongue was a hot inquisitive mystery, exclamation point and question mark and magic charm all in one. A teasing pink miracle. A temptation he’d never dream to resist.
When they came up for air, he was actually light-headed. He peeped around the corner again. The flashlight was coming up the tracks, nearly level to the platform. He took her wrist, pulled her through the wedge of shadow along the building and peeped around the front corner toward the elevator. He couldn’t see the county cruiser from here.
He pulled her around to the front and looked back the way they’d come. The flashlight beam waved around.
“Stay in the shadow,” he said, and they held hands and went at a fast walk up the street to the newspaper office and into the alley out back.
“Are we safe?” she said, and they were kissing each other again.
“Can I give you advice?”
“Sure.”
“You won’t be offended?”
“No.”
“Don’t be offended.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
He had one working eye and the alley was dark but he could see her, even the glint in her own mysterious eyes. He said, “I hope I don’t taste like puke . . .”
She laughed and shook her head. “You taste like gum.”
“Am I doing it wrong?”
“No, no, not wrong, just . . . go slow. Trust me. Slow down.”
He didn’t know how long they had been here, because he couldn’t keep track of seconds or minutes at all. Maybe the knock to the head had something to do with it, but mostly the delicate maze of her mouth seemed to have some time-dilation effect, some catalytic ability to make him feel on the one hand permanently frozen between the jump and stall of a ticking watch and on the other hand, soaring through particles and waves like a gravity-defying ray of light. He didn’t know how to slow down, because he had no idea whether they’d been kissing each other for thirty seconds or two hours.
Finally the dots connected. “You mean my tongue?”
She kissed his cheek. “Yes, Houston. Just a little slower . . .”
They parted a couple of streets over, half a block from Katie’s house. She had a one o’clock curfew and would barely make it, which Huck found stupefying. For all he could tell it was five in the morning, the hours passing in a flash.
He came up on Main Street and looked down toward the shopfronts. The two taverns were still lit up, with a handful of vehicles clustered in front of each, but most of the street had cleared. He passed under the streetlamp and walked for the shop.
He hoped that Mother was asleep, although he doubted she would be. She slept poorly to begin with, and otherwise would surely not appreciate the unauthorized departure from the revival. Maybe the black eye would prove a blessing in disguise—he could tell her he’d been elbowed by a guy shouting in tongues. How on earth had she missed it, she’d been right there when it happened . . .
It was a good idea actually and brought him back to Annelise. Hopefully he’d cross paths with her before he encountered Mother, so they could get on the same page. More to the point, he was dying to tell her about Katie. He knew she’d say something clever, something teasing but still a seal of approval.
Things began to look up as he approached the shop. McKee’s panel truck was parked out front and the office light was on, but the REO was nowhere to be seen. Surely the tent meeting couldn’t still be going on. He peered through the pane in the office door. McKee and Annelise sat next to each other on the front edge of the desk, Annelise shaking her head dramatically and yammering away.
He’d been so heady to tell her but he hesitated now because she wasn’t alone, felt a self-conscious flicker when his eye caught McKee’s through the glass and that was enough to derail him altogether. He shifted to his cousin and saw he wasn’t the only one to have taken a shot to the face. He flung the door open.
“What happened to you?” he blurted.
“What happened to you?” McKee and Annelise in unison, syllable for syllable.
Then his cousin only, rising to her feet and coming toward him, putting her hands on his shoulders but looking to McKee. “Good night—they got him, too. Okay, you’re right. We need to call the police.”
“Cripes, don’t do that already, I just spent an hour running from the dern police.” He frowned, took in her swelling eye. “Who attacked who?”
“Some passel of thugs jumped her on First,” said McKee. “We are . . . what is it we’re doing again?”
She winced, and not because of her eye. “We’re trying to come up with a story.”
This was beginning to sound familiar. “For what?”
She let out a breath. “For why I just happened to be leaving this jack Mormon Romeo’s apartment alone at midnight.” She gave him another wince, a truly exaggerated one. “Get it?”
“Oh.” He was starting to get it. “Who attacked you?”
“I don’t know. More than one man, though, and I think one of them had already approached me at the carnival earlier, right after I left you and Raleigh. He . . . wait. That eye looks terrible. Why were you running from the police?”
“Junior Joe showed up down at the depot and we all had to bolt. That was way after the fight, though.”
“What fight?” Annelise and McKee, again one voice.
“I took a swing at Royce. Busted his lip actually.” He put his hand to his hot balloon of a cheek. “He did me one better, though.”
“Royce is an ass,” said Annelise. “I’ve wanted to hit him myself, more than once.” She glanced at McKee. “Back to square one, I guess.”
McKee took a pull off the usual Highlander. “I think we need to make the call. At least get it on record, in case these bozos wind up jumping some other p
oor girl. Plus it’s the only chance of getting your watch back.”
Huck saw his life flash before his one good eye.
McKee went on. “Here’s what you tell them. You lost track of Huck and figured he either went to my place or back here. So you decided to head home, but check in with me first.”
“Not bad,” Annelise said.
The swollen eye of course had a throbbing burn, but now Huck’s entire face flushed hot as a skillet. “They took your watch?”
She held up her bare wrist. “Fucking bastards. The guy at the carnival earlier? That’s what he was badgering me about.”
Huck stalled. “You think he was in on it?”
McKee’s bark of a laugh said it all.
Annelise was shaking her head, and to Huck’s own grief she started to cry. “Fucking bastards,” she said again. Her voice wobbled like a sparrow’s.
Huck wanted to cry himself. He reached into his pocket. “They weren’t after your watch. They were after this one.” He let it dangle by the strap from his fingers.
“Oh my God,” she said. “How did you—”
“We took this . . . I took this. Off the dead man. The guy we found in the river.”
McKee groaned. Annelise was still perplexed.
“They saw your watch, I guess. Thought it was this one.”
“Wait,” she said. She shut her eyes tight and scraped at her face with her hands and looked in the moment stunningly like Mother with a headache mounting. “You’ve had that same watch all this time?”
The words spilled out like a dam had broken. “I should’ve told you, I know, but then they started calling Raleigh, and they started calling me, fishing around for the dern watch, and I just got more and more scared, and Raleigh called down to Billings and found out—”
“Wait,” she barked, a contrast indeed to the swiped shine on her cheeks. “Wait. You mean the police were calling around looking for that?”
He couldn’t stop shaking his head. “That’s what we thought, but it wasn’t the police. Raleigh figured it out. It was the rest of the gang. Or one of them, anyway.”
McKee groaned again.
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