Hollis stepped forward and told Flannery’s mama, “They clobbered me good.”
Flannery hid her faked surprise behind the lip of the glass, chugging down more water.
Then Hollis looked at her and said what they had planned. “Took a whizz, and they off and split on me. Can barely remember it. Nothing.” He rubbed his head.
Mama said, “Poor dear. Does it hurt?”
“Well, my ma put some Mercurochrome on it. Burned like the devil,” Hollis said, a pity-poor-me dragging his bottom lip.
“I don’t mean to frighten you, Jean.” The sheriff laid a hand on her shoulder. “Most likely those two will come around once they’ve had their fun.”
“Fun,” Mama turned the word over a worried tongue.
Sheriff gently cleared his throat. “When they, um . . . when they see the trouble they’ve caused.”
“What in the world?” Mama said. “Trouble, those two?”
Mama had turned into a mockingbird, lost for words, shocked by the distastefulness of the choices her daughter, her good Patsy, had made that evening. “Inebriated, stealing automobiles, fighting,” Mama said in a high voice, and pulled herself up from the table. “Jack, do you think they are in danger? Some sort of bigger trouble?”
Hollis hung his head, couldn’t look at Flannery’s mama.
“No, no,” the sheriff assured her. “Danny and Patsy are smart kids. Good kids. You know how kids like to goof off at this age. They’ll probably show up here any minute, wearing hang-dog looks and giving heartfelt apologies.”
Mama stared hard at the door like the “minute” might happen any second now. “Whatever has gotten into those two?”
“If they don’t come home shortly, I’ll have my deputy go looking at first light. Don’t you worry, Jean. I’ll let you know.” Sheriff pulled his hat back on and righted the brim, then made his way back to the foyer. “Let’s keep the drinking amongst ourselves, Jean. Hmm? No sense lighting fast tongues.”
All Mama could do was nod and follow the sheriff.
Hollis stayed behind, snatched Flannery close to his side, and whispered, “You’re not telling, right?”
Flannery said, “You done told too much. Thought you were going to say you fell.”
“My ma saw the cut. And it all spilled out before I could help it. You’re gonna keep quiet, right?” Hollis gripped her shoulder, squeezing too tight. “Nobody wants to hear about a baby out of wedlock.”
Flannery bumped him off. “Says only you! Mama’s pretty worried. We should tell them what we know. I think we need to come clean, Hollis—”
“You saw your mama. If you care about her, you’ll keep your trap zipped.” He put his hand back on her shoulder.
“I—I don’t know.” Flannery jerked away and whispered, “I don’t feel a bit right about all this. I think we should tell—”
Hollis caught her wrist. “You don’t side with me, I’ll get Danny to say Patsy’s bastard belongs to a greaser who used to work with me—the punk who got picked up for stealing the distillery’s tools. All on you. Nothing to do with me or Danny boy. My family.”
“Hollis,” Sheriff called from the foyer, “say good night to Flannery. We’ve taken enough of the ladies’ time.”
“Shut up,” Flannery hissed.
“Us big dogs don’t play.” Hollis released her from his vise grip. “And if you know what’s good for you—”
“Let’s get going, son,” Sheriff Henry called out. “Good night, Jean. Try to get some rest. I’m sure they’ll be home shortly. I’ll be in touch.”
Mama slipped into the rocker on the porch, watching and waiting. “Lord, Lord,” Mama said, and prayed. “Please let my baby be okay.”
“Mama, come inside.” Flannery pushed open the screen door and peeked out. “You know a watched pot won’t boil, remember?”
“Yes, but a mother has to keep her baby’s hand from its fire, too,” Mama replied, keeping a sharp eye toward Ebenezer Road.
CHAPTER 18
Patsy
June, 1952
Patsy pulled inside the curve, gripping the wheel so tight she could feel her nails pricking fatty flesh, burning a fire into her sweating palms. The tires slammed into something that made the front end shake and wobble like the fat Roly Poly clown toy Honey Bee’d given her when she was a baby.
Danny stirred and awakened the argument. “You better not have been h-helping Hollis s-s-slap his Sammy,” he spit.
“Stop, Danny, just stop it.” She fought to straighten the Mercury, flexed her hold on the big wheel. “Stop being ornery. Stop with the lies! You promised not to talk about him anymore when I promised not to ask about Violet—”
“You’ve been sick with the s-stomach ailments a lot . . . a whole lot lately,” Danny slurred, coughing.
“My female spells is all. Hollis is a liar. A dirty, rotten, filthy liar. Look what he did to you, Danny. Look—”
“Don’t you be l-lying to me,” Danny said, struggling, pulling himself up to her back. He reached out and gave a slight tug to her hair.
“Danny, don’t.” She threw back her arm, then latched back onto the steering wheel.
“Hey, hand me that whiskey, baby.” He hung heavy over her shoulder, groping for the flask lying on the seat beside her with his good arm. “Busted shoulder hurts like the dickens, Patsy.”
“Be still.” She batted him away. “We’re almost there.”
“Just one pull; it hurts.” Danny couldn’t reach the flask, and weak, he slumped back in pain, knocking Patsy’s shoulder and head.
Patsy flinched and ducked, losing her tight grip. She pounded the brakes, pumping hard. The steering wheel shimmied in her slipping hands.
A startling image of a proud Honey Bee draping his protective arms over her shoulders, helping her sight in the snub nose, flickered before it waned, then Hollis’s gun with the scratched-in initials.
Patsy’s last thoughts rose up from her tightened throat and screaming lungs. Those of her hunger for Danny and a new life, hate of Hollis and his unborn baby . . . of lost pearls, proms, princes, and princesses . . . of the cold loneliness that would come from missing Mama and Flannery, and the coming chill.
She realized how damning her eight-minute-early arrival into the world had actually been—and thought to pray, call out her sins before the river claimed them.
“Dear God,” Patsy urged.
“Oh-o—” Danny breathed.
The automobile skidded, hit rock and skinned trees, somersaulting, tumbling down toward the night-blackened waters of the cold Kentucky.
“Oh, Fatherrr—” Danny hung his sobering prayer into the rot of dying air, the screams of squealing tires and hissing brakes.
“God—” Patsy cried out. Her head batted against the door, off the roof. Hard blows rocked her shoulders, her skull, bruising, crushing bones. Shards of metal and glass flew at her eyes and neck, blinding, burning, stabbing everywhere before God could collect her paralyzed prayer.
CHAPTER 19
For twenty long years that murky river had been the Mercury’s watery grave. Layers of silt mudded the protective coffin. Algae clung to the dented-in roof, draped over its sides and onto all the windows.
Despite being less than twenty feet away, Flannery couldn’t see anything inside the mud-stuffed car.
Hollis had gone off for coffee and brought her back a cup. Grateful and needing a break, she sat down on the grass and drank it.
He cleared his throat as if to speak, and then hesitated like he wanted to chat for the sake of being polite, nothing more, though Flannery knew he wanted to say lots more. “How’s the city?” he finally piped.
“Fine,” Flannery said. “How’s your family? Louise?”
Two weeks after they’d last met on Ebenezer, Hollis graduated high school and moved to Lexington. He started his first year of college (and his last) at the University of Kentucky, and met up with some college girl right from the start. But the girlfriend ditched him three months in,
and talk from Hollis’s roommate was that it happened after Hollis smacked her around.
He was one of those, Flannery knew. Just like her own ex-husband. The type of man who thought he had to display his manliness in order to be one. Always talking with closed hands on a woman to make himself feel bigger. Though, Hollis had most in Glass Ferry fooled.
Flannery had heard the talk, the high points, or rather lower ones, on her yearly trips home. Hollis and his roommate, another Glass Ferry boy, Cook Garner, had been drinking heavily in their dorm when Hollis’s girlfriend, Jane, snuck into the boys’ building. But not to see Hollis; to visit another boy.
Lap-legged drunk, Hollis spied them and took a tire iron to the boy, sending him to the city hospital. Hollis roughed up Jane too. And when Jane’s daddy found out, he whipped Hollis’s butt and demanded the dean kick Hollis out of school.
Soon after, Hollis had slipped into a howling despair and spent the next year freeloading off college pals, boozing it up, and fighting in bars tucked off gravel lanes, gambling in seedy juke joints out on country crossroads until his daddy put his foot down and snapped him back home.
A short time later in another county, Hollis met a girl at the Truth of God’s Point Pentecostal tent revival that an old chum dragged him to. Hollis married her within four months, then had himself three babies before you could sweep the snow off as many springs.
“Louise is a’growing meaner by the minute.” Hollis laughed, answering Flannery. “Ready to drop our fourth any day now. How’s the teaching job?”
One of Mama’s old canasta-playing friends, Alice Locke, interrupted and gave Hollis and Flannery each a plate lunch from her home. Two more townswomen pushed beyond the troopers and offered Hollis freshly baked cookies. “Sheriff Henry,” one said, “you must be exhausted. Here you worked so hard feeding the town yesterday, now having to suffer this.” She flicked an arm to the water. “Poor dear.” She passed him the plate.
Hollis took a cookie, hiding a grateful smile behind a bite. “Mm. Thank you, Mrs. Winter and Mrs. Knightly. It’s delicious, and you do mighty wonders for the sad soul.”
Flannery declined the sweets.
The women disappeared back into the growing crowd.
Flannery’s stomach had been lit from the nerves, her insides so twisted she could barely keep the coffee down. Still she did her best to take a tiny nibble of the meatloaf, gravy-covered potatoes, and butter beans before tossing it all into a bush. She stole away to the onlookers long enough to return the plate and thank Mrs. Locke again for her generosity and the tasty meal.
Gilly’s Tow Truck Service worked hours on the car, trading their squeegees for brooms to clear off the thick coating. A spiderweb of cracks blanketed the windshield.
The state police and the sheriff’s department and the coroner loitered around the old 1950 vehicle, watching it all, sneaking glances Flannery’s way.
From a distance, an official-looking person, maybe a man from the local newspaper, Flannery guessed, took pictures of the Mercury, of Hollis, of her, and a lot of the folks behind them.
Then a lawman stepped forward and tried the partly caved-in door on the driver’s side.
Flannery held her breath. The door wouldn’t budge. The man jerked on the big metal handle again, then circled around to the other side and tried that door’s handle without any luck.
The tow truck worker called out for a crowbar, and someone fetched one. Together those two worked on freeing the door, prying it loose until at last the Mercury creaked open, splashing out more river water and spilling muck and foul-smelling, slurry sediments onto the grass.
Flannery saw it on top of the grass, sticking out of a pile of mud. A scream cartwheeled in her throat, whisked off her tongue into a scratchy cry she didn’t recognize.
Hollis must’ve seen it too. When she took a step toward it, he latched on to her arm and snatched her back.
Flannery slipped free and darted over to the Mercury. A state trooper caught her arm, and she broke his grip and dropped to the muddy ground, screaming wildly.
She plucked up one of her sister’s leather Mary Janes and swiped away the gunk. The pretty organza bow Mama had made and fastened to Patsy’s prom shoe was clumped in dirt, the inside packed full of more mud.
Flannery pulled herself up to her knees, slowly stood, and peered into the opened door.
The Mercury was cramped with mud, stacked thick and almost up past the steering wheel. Two necks of broken whiskey bottles poked up from the muck like headstones. Patsy’s other shoe lay on the dash beside a billfold and a long, human bone.
Slowly Flannery looked to the rear. Someone from behind grabbed her and tried to pull her back. Flannery clung to the door frame, her eyes locked to the backseat.
A man yelled, “Get this woman outta here!”
Someone else hollered, “Secure this vehicle.”
And another screamed, “Don’t touch anything! Dammit, don’t—”
But it was too late. Flannery’s eyes touched everything, burning the memory into her, cutting through the stitches of sanity, branding her with a grief that balled up in her hot-white fists. A scream turned sideways and tightened in her windpipe.
Her wet eyes soaked it all up, every drop of mud, every speck of dirt, every inch of grime and what it tentacled—old bottles, Danny’s leather belt, one of his black dress shoes with the odd penny plastered to its sole, Hollis’s metal flask, and the parcel of two cracked and muddy skulls, resting in the back dash, wedged against the sloping window, locked eternally in a grotesque lover’s kiss.
CHAPTER 20
Flannery clung to Patsy’s mud-filled prom shoe, its heel snapped and missing, as the men surrounded the car and carefully extracted the remains held within. Hollis tried to take it from Flannery, but she held on tight, and growled like a mean dog.
Around her the coroner’s people sealed bone, bottles, and belts. Everything they could find and even things that couldn’t be named were carefully wrapped in plastic and tucked into boxes labeled Evidence.
Flannery knew she looked like a crazy woman standing there gaping. For a short while the men didn’t bother her and left her to soak in that madness, so full of the brokenness, they weren’t sure how to approach. They moved around her, a mixture of fear, curiosity, and pity in their stolen glances.
Flannery thought about the bones scattered in the car. Patsy’s painful death. It’s okay, Patsy. Don’t cry, don’t cry, sister; I’ll do it for both of us now. Flannery did, feeling like someone was tearing at her flesh, plucking the very bones off her body, snapping them in twos and threes.
After a while Flannery had spent her tears. Touching her swollen face, she swiped the mud off. Her clothes were filthy from the grime and the scattered mud around the car.
For years she had thought of, fought against, the nagging possibility that her sister, her one and the same might be dead, each time sweeping away those thoughts with more hopeful ones, imagining a happy family for Patsy somewhere else. Somewhere far away with the man she loved and who loved her back. But always the anger perked. The pent-up fury surfaced for Patsy leaving them like this, leaving Flannery here to fix Mama’s broken heart and her own, leaving them all this time wondering.
Those angry thoughts would come and go over the years, leaving Flannery spent, weighted down for weeks, where she wouldn’t talk to anyone unless she had to, answer her door or phone, or so much as stop to chat with her coworkers at school.
She looked around for Hollis.
A man came over and tried to pry the shoe from her, and she doubled over, clutching it firmly to her chest. “No, you can’t have it. You can’t have this one last piece of her.”
The exasperated young man went off to get Mr. Flagg, the old coroner. Hurrying over to the gentleman wearing a dark suit, he pointed back to Flannery.
Another coroner’s assistant hollered for Mr. Flagg to come quick. The assistant whistled and passed a large bone to the coroner, flicking muck and dirt off his v
inyl gloves. “May have us a murder instead of a drowning, Roy.”
Roy Flagg flexed his gloved hands and took it from the assistant, turning it over carefully and inspecting.
“See the bullet hole and bone shatter? Right there on the upper part of the humerus,” the young assistant eagerly pointed out, announced excitedly.
“We’re going to have to rake inside there, comb this whole area.” The coroner frowned, looking around. “Secure this area. Only my two assistants, no one else.”
“Murder?” Flannery walked up to the men. “Wh . . . what do you mean?” she asked, confused, throwing an arm up to the treetops as if the cliffs would right what she’d just heard. “It was a crash.”
“Ma’am, you shouldn’t be down here, and you should give me that.” The coroner placed a hand on Flannery’s shoulder, and she flinched and hugged the dirty pump closer to her shirt.
“It’s not yours,” she said. “And I’m taking it home. Taking part of Patsy home. Home to Mama.”
“Miss,” the old gentleman said softly and spoke slowly, “I’m Roy Flagg, the county coroner from the coroner’s office. I remember your daddy, Honey Bee. Sure miss him. Now don’t you look just like him, sweetheart.”
Flannery’s shoulders slumped some, and she let down her guard a bit, feeding a tear into his soft words.
“Yessir, just like Honey Bee. What ya got there, sweetheart? A shoe?” Mr. Flagg asked.
“It’s Patsy’s. But, what’s this about murd—”
“May I examine it?”
Flannery shook her head and tucked it behind her back. “Wh-whose limb is that, Mr. Flagg?”
“Right now, all I can tell you is that it looks like a male’s. Now please, miss. I can’t speak about anything else right now. I need to pack everything here and take it to the state medical examiner to be tested. You’ll need to step back, sweetheart, so I can help you here, help put the deceased to rest.”
“So you don’t think it was an accident? Is that what you mean—”
“We’ll know in time. Now I need to do my job and collect everything.” He cocked his head to one of the troopers waiting nearby. “The law says for me to collect everything here.” He talked to her like one would a young child. “Won’t you help me?”
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