by Jake Hinkson
“I didn’t murder anyone.”
“I found the log.”
I opened my eyes. “What?”
“That you threw down the crevice. I found it. That’s what I did with the day before we left. I went back out to the scene and looked around. Found it down there in the crevice caught between a couple of rocks, shielded from the elements. Still had a fragment of his scalp and hair on it.”
“I …”
She held up a hand to stop me. “You have plenty of time to try and come up with a defense. You have the entire trip back to Arkansas to come up with something.”
I sat up. She leaned forward. It was as if we had locked eyes over a chess board. I said, “What’s to keep me from screaming for help right now?”
“Two things. One, if you try, Eustace is going to thump your head. He won’t like doing it. He never likes hitting a lady. But he’ll do it just the same. And that’s going to give you an even worse headache than the one you clearly already have. And number two, it wouldn’t do you any good. Might slow things down for a couple of days. Might. Might not. We have a warrant for your arrest. Sure, we don’t have jurisdiction, but these Los Angeles police officers have their own crimes to solve. Unless you’re wanted for something here, I doubt they would kick up much of a fuss about extraditing you back to Arkansas.”
That took the wind out of me. I sat back, and my body seemed to deflate. Lucy watched me. She glanced up at her brother and nodded. He walked over and sat down next to her on the divan.
I tried to think of something to say, but my mind was blank. I could barely hold myself up, and I couldn’t think very well. I don’t know if it was fear, depression, or just plain exhaustion, but I could barely keep myself upright anymore. I said, “I’m tired…”
Lucy nodded. “Get some sleep.” She turned to her brother. “We’ll leave in the morning.”
~ ~ ~
With the sun breaking through my blinds, I woke up in my bed the next morning. The room was cool and quiet, with the light slowly starting to fill the room. I sat up in bed and found that Eustace was sitting in a chair across the room.
As I blinked at him, he just stared at me. Eustace had a way of going blank. He was like a sheet of paper with nothing written on it. I would have been more alarmed to find him in my room if he’d had any expression at all – one of menace, annoyance, or even happiness. All of that would have given me the creeps. But Eustace never seemed to be doing anything except waiting to be told what to do.
“Good morning,” I said.
He smiled and nodded.
“Where’s your sister?”
Blank stare.
“Where’s Lucy?”
Nothing.
“Can I get up and use the powder room?”
Smile. Nod.
I slid out of bed. I was wearing my pajamas. I vaguely remembered putting them on the night before, but I’d fallen asleep almost immediately.
I walked across the room to my bath and closed the door. In the mirror over my sink, my face seemed strange, like the face of an unknown actor on a movie screen. It’s an odd thing to watch yourself as you watch yourself – it was like two images staring at each other. All that seeing, but who was really doing the looking? I looked down at my hands, the nicked knuckles and nubby fingernails. They seemed like foreign objects. Had these hands really buried Amberly?
I used the toilet and brushed my teeth and splashed my face with water. When I walked back out into the bedroom, Eustace was gone and the door was open. I walked over to the door and peaked through.
Across the den, from the kitchen Lucy looked up and saw me and said, “Good morning.”
I walked out into the den. The place smelled of bacon and eggs.
“Did you go shopping this morning?”
“I did. I also made breakfast. Get dressed. We’ll eat and get on the road.”
I scratched my head. “Okay.”
~ ~ ~
They were driving a Coupe that was a few years old.
“It’s the doctor’s car,” Lucy explained. “He felt bad about botching the inquest. Loaned it to the city. City’s paying the expenses. I have to keep our travel accounts in good order.”
Eustace had taken a shower in my bathroom. When he came out, he was fully dressed, but his face was pink and his hair still dripping. As he loaded my suitcase into the Ford, Lucy smiled and joshed him, “You smell like a girl.”
He grinned and held up his hand and she smelled his tanned skin. They smiled at each other.
It was such a sweet moment between them that I decided to make a run for it. I slipped away while they were still smiling at each other.
I was wearing slacks and a man’s checked shirt and some good shoes. Without looking behind me, I ran down the street, passing parked cars and people waiting for the bus. The sidewalks seemed too open, so I ducked down a long sunny alley with a fence at the end. I hopped on top a garbage bin and pulled myself over the fence. Then I ducked into a restaurant on the corner that was still serving breakfast. The place was bustling and no one noticed me as I headed for the ladies’ room.
Inside, I sat down in a stall and waited. A woman came in, used the other stall, and washed up. A woman came in with two little boys and washed syrup off their hands and butter off their mouths. A girl came in and blew her nose and left without washing her hands.
Eventually, I eased out. The bathroom was empty. I eased further out into the restaurant. It had switched to lunch.
I made my way to the door.
“Hey.”
I turned around.
The lady behind the counter said, “You going to get something to eat or what?”
I shook my head and left. Outside, the day was clear and bright. I took two steps and ran into Eustace. He took my arm and led me to the side of the building where Lucy was waiting in the Ford.
He put me in the backseat. Lucy turned around. She didn’t seem mad or upset with me. It was as if we’d eaten at the restaurant and she’d had been waiting for me to finish paying the check.
“Hands,” she said.
I held up my hands. She put cuffs on me.
Eustace slid into the back with me.
“Now that we got that out of the way,” Lucy said, turning around and settling into the seat. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Twenty
Our first day on the road, Eustace sat beside me in the backseat. That day I realized I had been wrong when I assumed he never knew what was going on. He never spoke and rarely made any sound, but he was always paying attention. Near the end of the day, I was staring at the road running by when he leaned over and tapped my shoulder. He gestured at the sky, crystal blue and fractured by streaks of red from the sinking sun.
Together we just stared at the warm glow spreading out across the horizon. After the sun dipped below the earth, Eustace turned to me and smiled in the dying light.
Lucy held her own surprises. The next day she let me sit up front, and as we rolled through the southwest we talked. At first, it was small talk about birds we saw, or cars we passed, or people walking on the side of the road.
But soon enough I learned that Lucy wasn’t much for small talk. That’s not to say that she wasn’t a talker. Quite the opposite was true. She just had very little patience for talk that was essentially meaningless. She was a talker who was interested in meaningful things.
“I’ve never been too sure about the existence of God,” she told me. We were driving through the desert, Eustace sleeping in the back while we talked about one thing or another, and the subject had come up, naturally, in the easy way that serious subjects surface when you’re talking to a serious person. “I grew up in Stock’s Settlement, so of course I was taught to believe. I don’t think my mother ever questioned God. She loved the King James Bible, though, and it’s fair to say that she raised us on it. But she was never a dogmatic person. None of our people were ever fire-and-brimstoners as far as I can recall. They were believers, to every last man
and woman, but I don’t know that any of them ever believed it past the point of public decency.”
“What do you mean by public decency?”
“No one in our family ever felt that religion was much more than a polite social obligation. Mother respected preachers, but she never seemed to lose sight of their humanity. She’d read the same book they had, and I don’t think she ever believed that she’d met a man who had read it deeper or better or truer than she had. At the end of the day, a preacher is a man interpreting a text for you. Mother just went straight to the source.”
“Quite a woman, your mother.”
“She was,” Lucy said with a smile. “But I hate to hog all the talk here. What about your people?”
I stared out at the passing desert, the cacti spearing up between hard rock and yellow-white dirt. “Not much to say. Daddy was a roughneck and a cowboy. He rode horses in the rodeo and drank tequila and chased women. He was with my mother just long enough to make me.”
“Did she raise you?”
“No, she dropped me off at his mother’s house on her way out of town. The way she saw it, it was the old lady’s fault for raising such a worthless son. She certainly had no intention of sticking around being an unwed mother. She moved east to the Carolinas. Eventually, she got married and had a couple of children. And that was it for her. She’s probably got a couple of grandkids of her own by now.”
“You see much of your father?”
“He came back to town occasionally to see me and grandma. He was all talk. Every time he came through, there was some new story. He’d stop by on his way to Colorado to work for a logging company. He’d kiss me on the forehead and tell me he was going to send for me. Then a couple of years would pass, and when he finally did show back up, he would have been in Utah working for Mormons or something. Always some new story. He was going to move to Hollywood to be a stuntman. Or he was going to be a crewman on a rich man’s yacht. Always a new story, always about how the promised land was just over the horizon. For all I know, he actually believed it.”
We rode in silence as Lucy pondered all I had told her. Finally she said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Billie.”
I shrugged. I’d told that story before. Girls liked tragic tales of ne’er-do-well fathers. It didn’t hurt that the tale was true – the old man hadn’t been worth a damn – but I knew that the point of the story was that I’d had it rough.
Still, after she told me she was sorry for me, Lucy didn’t say any more about it. I could tell that she wasn’t someone who was going to be swayed by my tale of woe.
“I imagine you’ve heard some sad stories in your time,” I said.
She grinned and nodded. “In my line work...that is to say, in Eustace’s line of work, you hear all manner of sad stories. This world has never wanted for sadness.”
“So,” I said, “I’m not going to get anywhere with you by crying.”
She smiled at that. “If I’ve learned one thing, Billie,” she said, “it’s that tears should never convince anyone of anything.”
~ ~ ~
She drove all day. As the sun started to darken the west, she began looking for a place to stop for the night. I felt my heart sink when we topped a hill and plunged into a desert valley and I could see, in the distance, the gleaming blue and yellow lights of the Days And Nights Motor Lodge.
“I’d rather not stop there,” I said.
Lucy said, “We’re not going to stop there. There’s a cheaper place in town.”
We crossed the valley, the neon sign growing ever larger, and she turned off the road by the motor lodge and started toward Brittle Rock. I realized then that we were driving by Amberly’s grave.
Is she doing this on purpose? I wondered. She wants to see how I’ll respond?
The desert at night was as cool and dark and blue as it had been just a few days before. We passed cactuses and mounds of rocks, but I didn’t remember where Amberly was buried out there.
We came to Brittle Rock. The city’s streets were lined with one-story buildings on either side. A gas station at the corner. A leather shop. A knife shop. A diner. A surprising number of people milled about, and most of them seemed to be headed to the edge of town.
We pulled up to a small two-story hotel, and as we got out of the car and stretched our legs, I saw tents set up beside a small city park just down the street.
Lucy leaned forward and said, “What on earth?”
At first glance, I thought it was just a circus, but a large tasseled banner over the entrance to the circle of tents announced:
W.J. Wallace’s Festival of Unusual Attractions
From where we were, we couldn’t see into any of the tents but we could see a large open-air elephant pen. A man with a long iron-gray beard and red velvet pants was giving rides on a haggard looking beast with sad eyes and dry, cracking skin. A line of families stood around the elephant pen waiting their turns.
A father paid the bearded man, and the man walked the elephant over to a rickety little ladder. The elephant took a knee, its massive, hairy trunk lying in the dirt like a depleted water hose, and three boys climbed up on its back.
I shook my head. The father laughed. The mother of the boys, watching her children slide around on top of the tired old beast, stood with one fist pressed to her chest and the other pressed to her mouth.
Lucy watched her brother. Eustace stood with his hands down and his mouth slung open.
A hot breeze flung some dirt against us, but we all just watched the man leading the elephant around the pen by a long leash.
The more I watched the hulking animal clomping around the pen, though, the odder I felt about it. Something about seeing that giant creature led around in circles as an attraction angered me.
I felt my face flush.
“Can we go inside already?” I asked.
Lucy turned to me. I don’t know what she read on my face, but she nodded and said, “Eustace, let’s go.”
The big man stared at the elephant until his sister pulled at his sleeve.
We walked up the steps of the hotel.
“Have you ever seen an elephant before?” Lucy asked me.
“Sure. In Hollywood.”
“We haven’t. Not in the flesh, anyway. Seen them in photographs or jungle movies. Never up close like that.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it must be a big day for you.”
She glanced at me, but she didn’t respond.
Inside, a bucktoothed man with thick spectacles checked us in. “All we got left is a two room suite,” he told us.
“That will be fine,” Lucy said.
“Last thing available in the hotel, what with the geek show in town,” he said. He stopped when he saw that I was wearing handcuffs.
I waved at him. “You got your own little geek show right here.”
Lucy handed the man a piece of paper and explained that she and Eustace were extraditing me back to Arkansas to stand trial for a felony offense. The hotel clerk thought that was wonderful, and his bulging, magnified eyes looked me up and down like I was an escaped oddity from W.J. Wallace’s Festival.
He led us down the hall to a suite. It was a spacious two bed set up. He said, “The washroom is back down the hall.” Then his big weird eyes gave me one more hungry gawking, and he left.
Lucy told Eustace, “I need to visit the washroom.”
He nodded.
She left without saying anything to me. I hadn’t meant to insult her outside, but I knew it had been taken that way. I thought about apologizing, but as soon as I had the thought I rejected it. This woman was taking me to jail. Why the hell should I care about her feelings or her pride? What she was doing was illegal, transporting me this way, across state lines. It was kidnapping. And for what? She couldn’t prove that I had murdered the preacher. She didn’t even know that Amberly was dead.
The more I sat and thought about it, the madder I got. My life had been one long unbroken string of misfortunes. Bad luck and betray
al had snapped at my feet my whole life. I cursed the day I ever entered the state of Arkansas. I cursed the day I ever took a job at PRC. I would have been better off getting another waitressing job.
I told the big man, “Eustace, I need to change for bed.”
He just stared at me as I lifted my suitcase and took it into the other room. I put the suitcase on the bed and closed the door behind me. Then I walked over to the window and opened it and climbed out into the night.
Chapter Twenty-One
I ran behind the hotel toward the geek show. I had no plan. I had no thought except to get away. Sweat covered my face and my heart kicked against my chest.
Hide in the tents. Hide until you can find a way to cut the handcuffs.
Maybe Lucy would think that I had run toward the desert. Hide in the tents.
The place got louder as I got closer. Kids yelling about that sad elephant. Teenagers yelling about the geeks in the back tents. Barkers trying to sell trinkets and popcorn. I passed by a trash bin. Inside was half-eaten food and used napkins and balled up paper sacks. Nothing I could use to obscure the handcuffs.
I got to the entrance of W.J. Wallace’s Festival of Unusual Attractions and walked past the people in line to the fat old man taking tickets at the gate. I held up my handcuffs. “I’m the new escape artist,” I said.
He had a round red face and dumb brown eyes. “Pardon?”
“I’m the new escape artist,” I said, bouncing on my feet and waving my handcuffs at him. “I got to get in there. I stepped out to use the shithouse, and now I need to get back in.”
He said, “Well, go on in.”
I went in, looking over my shoulder back at the hotel up the street. So far, nothing.
Lanterns hung on wires between the tents, and people lined up under the swaying lights, waiting to get into the attractions marked Restricted To Adults. The largest tent promised All Manner Of Body Oddities. Another advertised Catherine The Uncanny Contortionist. The smallest tent, which had the longest line, simply said The Rat Eater.
I hurried past the tents to the caravan of large trucks sitting in the darkness. I crawled under one and sat there in the cold dirt, waiting in the shadows for the freak show to end. Once they packed up, I would crawl inside one of the trucks and hide.