“You introduce her to it?”
April shook her head. “That one, that wasn’t me. I figured out she was using ’cause that kind of shit runs through my family. I asked her, and she denied it at first, but she broke down and told me. She was holding it together and scared all at once, and she wanted someone she could talk to. One thing after another and we were shooting up together.”
“How did the whoring start?”
“Not long after summer break, right before our senior year. Me and Meadow, we’d already got kicked off the cheerleading squad. We weren’t doing much more than shooting up and wasting time. She came by one day freaked out, crying, saying she needed to get the fuck out of town.”
“She tell you why?”
“Nope. I asked and she’d never tell me. Just sobbing and saying she needed to get out of Parker County. So we did.”
“You left?”
“We left, motherfucker. She had a nice pickup truck. She emptied out her bank account from an ATM and left this place in the rearview mirror.”
“What about your parents? Her parents?”
“I don’t know what she told her people. I told mine we were going to hang out with her family. That’s all they wanted to hear. So we went to Charleston.”
“Why Charleston?”
“Why not Charleston? Biggest city in the state and it’d be the easiest place to score.”
“Heroin.”
“Fuck yeah, heroin. We were cute and strung out, and that makes shit easy. We hooked up with a dealer on the west side of town, and he connected us with a guy named Tommy, was looking for girls. He ran chicks out of a little motel called the Washington Inn. He put us up in a room. We did our thing and used the money to buy heroin.”
“From Tommy?”
“Yeah.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
I swallowed the anger brewing in the pit of my gut. The news called this “human trafficking” now, which sounds better than “pimping and whoring,” I suppose. Less judgmental. What it was at its core, though, never changed. Selling off pieces of a youth you would not get back, a few bucks at a time.
I lit a cigarette.
“How long did all of this go on?” I said.
“Until Meadow OD’d and the hospital called her old man. He came down and got her that night. We were there about two months.”
“You come back with to Parker County with her?”
“Fuck no. My family didn’t give a shit I was whoring. They all got their own crosses to bear. Meadow’s people came and got her, left all of her shit with me at the motel. Clothes, makeup, even her blinged-up cell phone. Damn thing was all shiny and sparkly, like a Kardashian threw up on it.” She took another hard draw on the cigarette. “They never even looked at me when I sat there in the waiting room. They came and got her, wheeled her out into a chair. Put a blanket around her head so no one saw her, like she was a fucking celebrity. Rolled her right past me. Last time I ever saw her. By the time I got back here, she was already dead.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“I got knocked up. Let some fucker drop a load in me, and I thought he had a rubber on. I thought there seemed like an awful lot of freaks in the world, and a few had to be into pregnant chicks. Tommy told me to pack my shit and roll. Said no one wanted to chew someone else’s gum.” She blew smoke. “Fucking asshole.”
“The cops ever talk to you about Meadow? After she was killed?”
“Not a one. They got hold of Eddie so fast, no reason to I guess. Guess they never cared about that shit.”
In the yard, Tre stirred slightly.
“Shouldn’t he be awake by now?” April said.
“Should. You worried he’s gonna have brain damage?”
“He puts food on the table. No one else offering to do it. I just don’t want to deal with his ass when he wakes up, or him being retarded from being passed out so long. He’s angry already; I can’t cope with angry and stupid, too.”
“You can do better than this.”
“Sure I can. Lots of guys in these parts want to hook up with a girl got herself a half-black baby. The line for that stretches back for miles.” She smiled bitterly. “I’m someone else’s already-chewed gum. I’m lucky someone else got interested.”
“That what Tre down there tells you?”
“He ain’t wrong.”
“I wouldn’t bet the rent on the things he’s right about. Always other options, April.”
April stood and stretched and spit into the yard. She missed if she was aiming for Tre. “I didn’t finish high school, I keep a needle hanging out of my arm, I got me a little bastard, and I live with my parents and this asshole who drinks and calls my kid a nigger, and I’m not even twenty-four. You think if I had other options, I wouldn’t be using ’em right now?” She stood up and headed for the door. “Just be sure to step over Tre on your way out.”
“His name ‘Tre’ on account he’s the third one?”
“Yeah. William Ray Stickler III.”
“The first two versions assholes, too?”
“Fruit don’t fall far from no tree.”
17
I was quiet during the meeting at St. Anthony’s later that night. I kept the conversation with April Bevins rolling through my head, and all it did was make me angry and leave a sour taste hanging in the back of my mouth.
Woody saw it on my face as we walked out of the church, my hands shoved deep into my pockets and my mouth surprisingly shut. We went over to the Riverside to get food.
The waitress poured our coffee, and I ordered a chicken salad sandwich and fries, and Woody got an open-faced roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes. He drank his coffee and watched while I stirred my spoon around a few hundred times.
“Bad day at the office?” he said.
I told him about April. He listened as the waitress came by and refilled our coffee cups.
“Why do you think no one told you that Meadow was whoring?” he said.
“Because no one likes the idea their daughter or their stepsister is a whore. The family lied about Meadow being in rehab. Hell, Dagny lied about it the other day.”
“Any reason this girl would lie to you? She the type, wants to make a dead girl look bad?”
“She didn’t make herself look that great in the story either. You spin a story like that, you don’t paint yourself worse than the other person. You’re defeating the whole reason for the lie.”
The waitress brought our food. Woody went to work on his, and I gave mine an off-handed glance and drank more coffee. Woody dipped a slab of his sandwich into his mashed potatoes and ate it.
“You want to drive down tomorrow to Charleston, find this motel?” he said.
I ate a french fry. “Don’t know what I’ll find there.”
“Don’t know what you’ll not find, either. Can’t hurt. If nothing else, could be fun to find the guy in charge and tune him up like a piano.”
Woody’s tone—as casual as if he were remarking about the weather—caught me the right way and I laughed. “You want an excuse to beat someone up.”
“I’m out of practice. Besides, be nice to watch you lay a hurting on someone for a change. I hate I missed out on it today.”
“Tre wasn’t much of a challenge.”
“Challenges, like Kubrick films, are overrated. Sometimes it’s nice to have it be easy. When it’s too hard too often, you lose the joy in it.”
“I feel like I should say ‘That’s what she said.’”
“Don’t.”
Woody had decimated most of his meal while mine sat untouched. The waitress came by again to check on us, and I asked for a box to go.
When the waitress came with the check, Woody said he had it. “You can get a meal when we go to Charleston tomorrow.”
“You don’t mind coming with?”
“Not at all. I’m not sure you can be trusted alone anyway.”
18
By the
time I got home from the Riverside, it was too late to call Dagny and ask about Meadow. I debated calling before we left the next morning and decided against it. The Charles family worked hard to maintain the Saint Meadow story, and all I did was chip away at the lie.
We took the Aztek. The drive’s a little less than two hours, a straight shot down I-79, winding through roads carved through mountains, staying at a relatively high elevation most of the ride and offering you a scenic view for your efforts. Sometimes, along the way, you could just appreciate the beauty of the state—the green of the trees, the roll of the mountains, the lushness of everything that surrounds you. You could ignore—at least for a moment—the view of third-generation trailers resting in valleys that would have remained hidden if not for road construction, and try not to think about how, if the government hadn’t come along and carved through the mountains, those trailers and the people inside them would have been forgotten; they would never have been known. As it was already, they were barely blips on the radar, a fleeting image in your peripheral vision on your way to wherever it was you were going.
That was the great dichotomy of highways and freeways in West Virginia; they connected everyone, made it easier to get from one place to another, but they also made it easier for people to drive through and never need to stop. The state became just another dot people plotted on their GPS on their way to the beach, where you got gas and took a piss and kept on driving because you had somewhere better to be, and you needed to leave before the taint of poverty and rednecks got to you.
“Hurry, honey, I hear banjos.” Ha ha. Funny. Fucking Deliverance jokes. They filmed Deliverance in Georgia, assholes.
Charleston pops up on you as you coast down and around the last few curves, and after a hundred miles of nothing but trees and valleys, it looks like something. The gold leaf dome on the capitol building lends a sense of grandeur that’s more promise than it can deliver.
We didn’t get to appreciate that, though. We kept on driving and took the exit for Washington, which was, truth be told, nothing but a goddamn pit of sadness.
Once upon a time, Washington had been an incorporated community—before there had been five murders in twenty-four hours, and they converted a strip club into the town hall, and a series of political scandals shameful even by West Virginia standards—swept over the town. They shut down the government and left Washington as a strip of road littered with titty bars, sex toy shops, and dollar stores. What the area lacked in amenities, it made up in opportunities to see women taking off their clothes to reveal caesarean scars and cigarette burns.
I work hard to not judge, but let’s face it: I was judging. One club had been turned into a church next to another strip club that was, well, still a strip club. I wanted to imagine an awkwardness—averted eyes and scornful looks and such—but church hours and stripper hours don’t overlap much, and I have to admit I was a little disappointed when the realization struck me.
The Washington Inn was built not long after the interstate explosion, designed to cash in on the influx of parents shuffling children across the country to see historical landmarks the kids didn’t give two shits about. The motel was too far from the nearest exit, however, and planted between two separate operations with neon signs that advertised “Live Nude Girls!” as opposed to ones not live, and dressed. I bet the clientele paid with cash and by the hour.
The only way the motel could have looked more down on its luck would have been if it had been signed by Berry Gordy to Motown. There was a car in the parking lot at the check-in area, and another farther down in front of one of the rooms. We pulled in next to the check-in area and walked in.
Inside smelled like cigarette smoke and desperation. The orange shag carpeting was worn down to a crew cut throughout. The only furniture was a set of folding chairs with “Property of Washington Baptist Church” spray-painted on the seats. I felt like I needed a shower once I walked through the door.
The kid behind the desk had a porno mag in one hand and a cheeseburger in the other and probably thought he was living the best life ever. He was a heavy slab of humanity, with shaggy, thinning hair, and a complexion that resembled the surface of the moon. He would end up with an overt familiarity with porn when it was all said and done.
When Woody and I walked in, the kid dropped the magazine on the counter and the cheeseburger on top of it, a drop of mayo splattering across three women doing something that wasn’t legal in Alabama. He looked at us with bored eyes.
“Help you?” he said.
“Looking for a room for the night,” I said. I kept a distance from the counter. I worked with the assumption that every surface in the place had something that penicillin wasn’t strong enough to handle.
The kid’s eyes bounced between Woody and me. He picked up his burger and his porn and went back to both. “Yeah, we’re all full up,” he said.
“The sign says you’ve got vacancies.”
“Sign’s broke.”
I glanced out the nicotine-stained windows toward the parking lot. “There’s one car out there. There’s twelve rooms. That math doesn’t work no matter how you try.”
He shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you, Sky King. Twelve rooms, no vacancies. Try the Holiday Inn Express down the street.”
“But you came so highly recommended on Yelp.”
The kid took a bite of his burger and flipped a page in the magazine. “You guys have a good rest of the night now, you hear?”
A king-cab Dodge was at the far end of the parking lot, sitting on tires the size of a third-grader. There were Yosemite Sam mud flaps and a set of fake bull testicles hanging off the bumper.
Woody and I walked nonchalantly toward the truck—at least as much as we could. I wasn’t sure how you walked chalantly, either, or if that was even a thing.
Traffic whizzed by us, and I felt the judgmental eyes of passing drivers. Harsh moral assessments were made of us at forty-five miles an hour.
We found the room with the Dodge in front. Woody leaned an ear against the door and made a face that denoted serious concentration. He listened longer than he needed to listen.
“Well?” I said.
Woody pulled back. “Sorry. Got distracted by the mating ritual.”
“Might just be a couple feeling amorous.”
“Might be, but doubtful.” He gave the knob a gentle jiggle. Much looser, and it would have fallen off with a breeze.
I pulled the .38 I had clipped in a holster. “Busting in on people mid-coitus is a good way to get ourselves shot.”
Woody had a 9 mm in his hand. “Never has stopped us before.”
“Fair point. You got the Doc Martens on; I’ll let you have the honors.”
Woody knocked the door open with one kick. It was that rarest of times where it was as easy as they show it to be on TV shows. No one since Dan Tanna had thrown a door open that easily.
You wanted to scrub yourself with steel wool from the moment you stepped into the room. Flecks of dust the size of ants danced in what little light came through the slats of the nicotine-stained blinds. A lamp buzzed in the corner of the room.
The guy on the bed was trying to hump-crush whoever was underneath him. A wide expanse of pale, hairy ass was high in the air. Spindly legs stuck out from underneath him, four limbs waving wildly like a mutilated spider. The guy froze and glared back at us with a red face filled with blood and no small amount of anger at the interruption.
I leveled my pistol on him. “Evening.”
The face went from the color of tomatoes to a shade of moonlight in two heartbeats. He rolled over onto his side, hands in the air, and his nubby stub of manhood wilted like an over-watered flower, his condom dropping off.
“The fuck, the fuck, the fuck!” He sat upright on the bed. “Fuck. Did my wife send you?”
The girl who had been underneath him pushed herself off the bed, setting bare feet on the stained green carpet and standing upright. She was naked except for a bra that covered up
a chest she didn’t have, with her sharp hip bones jutted out and blonde hair knotted in the back. She lit a cigarette from the pack on the nightstand next. She glanced at her hands, chewed on a hangnail, and spit something out before taking another drag on her cigarette. Bored disinterest—as though guys with guns were a common occurrence for her—never left her face. She was maybe nineteen, but I doubted it.
“You guys know Tommy?” she said, sucking in another pull from the cigarette.
“Should we?” I said.
“You should. He ain’t gonna be happy. Shit like this pisses him off all sorts of ways.”
“Tommy your pimp?” Woody said.
“He’s who I work for.” She lowered herself onto the bed. The fat guy had shoved himself against the headboard. She glanced over at him. “Jerry, put your pants on.”
He kept his hands up, but his eyes flashed at her. “But I ain’t done yet.”
The girl rearranged pillows next to Jerry and propped herself up against them and crossed her legs at the ankle. There wasn’t anything modest in her movements. She didn’t seem bothered to be naked in front of strangers. She continued smoking.
“I think we’re done regardless,” she said.
“I want my money back then.”
“People in hell want ice water, too, Jerry, but they’re not getting it.”
He came off the bed and dropped his arms and glared at the girl. I took a step forward and gestured at him with the gun.
“Jerry,” I said, “go somewhere and jerk off and call it a night.”
Jerry came around the bed and picked up a pooled expanse of denim that happened to be his blue jeans. He put them on and then the pair of flip flops next to them and shuffled toward the door.
“Did Marcie send you guys?” he said.
“She did not,” I said. “Though stopping on your way home and buying her flowers might not be the worst idea ever.”
“Bitch hates me.”
“Probably because you never buy her flowers. Get her chocolate, too.”
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