by Ninie Hammon
She can’t cry yet, not now. If she cries now it will wash out her contact lenses so she can’t see and she has to be able to drive. She will hold it in until she gets there, where she can let go of all the pain and hurt, make as much noise as she wants and nobody will hear.
Just a few chance words. “Aw, come on. The party will suck and you know it.”
“Seriously. Who wants to watch Hayley-Whaley blow out sixteen candles? The thought turns my stomach.”
Ginger, Whitney and Sophia were washing their hands and didn’t know Hayley was in the last bathroom stall. She’d pulled her feet up when they came in, didn’t want them to know she was there because she knows she’s going to make a really bad stink. She’ll hold it until they leave. She has always suffered from terrible gas; the doctor says that’s part of her overall “metabolic” problem, why she puts on weight, why she can’t lose, something about the way her body processes food. And when she has a bowel movement — the reek is staggering.
“She’s gross,” Whitney says. “All those rolls of fat. And when she eats—”
Ginger giggles. “Yeah, the pig noises — snort, snort. She’ll probably shove the whole birthday cake in her mouth in one bite.”
“If she weren’t Pastor Norman’s daughter—” Sophia puts in.
“But she is.”
“She makes me nauseous.”
“Don’t eat any solid food before the party.” Ginger giggles again. “Just ‘clear liquids’ — in case you throw up.”
Hayley had held it until they left, then let fly with the most awful stinky, noxious fumes that gagged her … while she sat there trying not to burst into tears. Then she’d gotten in Daddy’s car, didn’t even ask if she could use it, and came roaring out to The Top of the World. That’s what Hayley calls Scott’s Ridge Overlook. It is a spot high on the side of Ironwood Mountain in Dragon Root Hollow. A cliff face that provides a breathtaking view of the hollow and the Rolling Fork River two hundred feet below. Sometimes teenagers parked down the little piece of road where you could park in the trees and nobody could see you, a good place to screw in the car. But it was the middle of the day and there wouldn’t be anybody there.
There is a winding path that leads to the spot where somebody — maybe the state road department years ago — had built a security fence that now dangles down off the cliff, like a raveled string on a sweater. The last post had been sunk in concrete too deep for vandals to destroy it and the rest of the fence hangs down from it. There’s an old concrete picnic table that’s too heavy to move or somebody would have thrown it off the bluff, too.
She comes here often because it is remote, the forest growing out to the edge of the cliff muffles sound so it’s her favorite place to let go, sob loud — like she can’t do at home or Daddy will tell her to pray about it and everything will be fine.
She parks in the pull-off on the shoulder of the nameless gravel road that leads to the overlook from Crocket Pike and walks down the path to the overlook. That’s why she’s so surprised when she sees someone sitting on the picnic table, on the table, feet on the stone seat. He must have parked in the lot … she turns to hurry back to her car but he has seen her.
It’s Mr. Witherspoon, the man who owns the Dollar General Store in the Middle of Nowhere.
“If you came to be by yourself,” he says as he gets down off the table, “I was just leaving.” Then he recognizes her.
“Oh, hello, Hayley.”
“Hi Mr. Witherspoon, and you don’t have to leave because of me, I’ll just—”
“You came here to be by yourself, didn’t you?” He hangs his head. “I get it. That’s why I came here, too.”
The kindness and understanding in his voice are more than she can stand. She bursts into tears, doesn’t mean to but she has been holding onto the emotional outburst for so long she can no longer control it. He rushes to her side and puts his arm around her shoulder and the next thing she knows she’s clinging to him sobbing … and then …
The rest just … happens. Neither of them planned it. He takes her virginity while she lies naked before him on the cold concrete of the picnic table, right out in the open where anybody who comes along can see, but theirs is such passionate, wild abandon they don’t even care.
Afterwards, he’s not awkward with her. Helps her get dressed, touches her tenderly in places no one has ever touched her as he does. She had never known she possessed such passion.
He only becomes awkward when he asks if he can see her again. And she begs, breathlessly, “Yes, please. Again and again and again.”
He laughs, that wonderful, gentle laugh.
That night when she got home, she was so consumed with emotion she had to pour out her feelings in her journal, writing so fast the ink smeared in places, described the whole thing. Well, not the real thing. Just what she wished had happened, what she fantasized. The tall dark stranger who found her there alone and ravished her, ripped her clothes away in a frenzy of uncontrolled desire, took her virginity as she looked up at him through her tears. She described his rugged face, his shock of unruly black hair and piercing blue eyes. She could see him as clearly as she had seen Mr. Witherspoon because she had been dreaming of him her whole life. Well, versions of him. For a while he looked like Brad Pitt, the way he looked as that hitchhiker in Thelma & Louise. Then he became Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. In fact, as Mr. Witherspoon was … doing it … she closed her eyes and pictured him, her dark stranger, the mat of black hair on his chest glistening with sweat as he took her. She always pictured him, every time. Of course, she never told Sugar Bear that.
And she never again journaled about their meetings. In truth, she had never felt the need to journal about anything after Sugar Bear came into her life and shined light into all the dark places. She would journal about today, though, their last time together, because she was sure it would be heartbreaking, lovers torn out of each other’s arms. It would be just like that final scene in Casablanca. Rick made llsa leave him, sacrificed his own happiness, denied himself his only chance at true love. Maybe Sugar Bear would do that — send her away, deny himself. Or maybe she should.
This time, Hayley parked in the secluded lot. Sugar Bear’s car was already there. He had come early because he was so anxious to see her! That butterfly feeling fluttered in her belly just like it always did before she saw him. They would make love today. She’d come prepared, had taken a shower and put on her best perfume, dabbed it between her breasts where he liked to snuggle his nose. They would make love and talk about what the future might bring for both of them. And maybe it wasn’t all bad. Maybe Sugar Bear had their future all planned out.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sam was proud of Liam Montgomery. He had manned up since the day he sat in the bus shelter, moaning softly about the “needle” in his head. Even though he’d been low man on the totem pole in the sheriff’s department before J-Day, he had accepted law enforcement responsibility for the county, and his uniform alone stood for something, gave a sense of assurance that there was somebody here who was in charge and knew what they were doing.
That sense had been waning as the days stacked up one on top of the other, though. It had taken flight alongside the belief that whatever the Jabberwock was, they’d wake up in the morning and it’d be gone just like they’d awakened to find its shimmering presence surrounding the county two weeks ago.
After all, it was only temporary, right? And if you didn’t cross it — literally — it only mattered when it was important to get out of the county or to get something in. Most people believed that the Jabberwock itself was harmless — after all, it was just some bizarre meteorological anomaly that’d blown in and would soon blow back out and they could go on with their lives.
It was, wasn’t it?
“I don’t have to tell anybody in this room that something is happening here to all of us that has changed everything in our lives. We’ve all been dealing with it individually, in our own ways, but I believe it�
�s time for us to figure out how we, all of us, as nowhere people need to respond as a group, doing together what none of us can do individually.”
Sebastian Nower stepped up beside Liam then and literally pushed him away from the microphone. Liam probably wasn’t expecting such rudeness from the old man, and was too polite to confront it; after all, the old man was near eighty and maybe some key synapses weren’t firing anymore.
“Thank you, son,” he said dismissively, and turned back to the crowd. “I know you people are looking for guidance and assistance in this time of our mutual need and the Nower family has for generations taken seriously its responsibility to the people in the county we founded when a contingent of settlers came through the Cumberland Gap to stake their claim in the settlement called Nower’s Trace more than two hundred years ago.”
And he was off to the races.
He was an imposing figure, she’d give him that. He’d been tall and broad-shouldered in his youth — all of which he spent in schools or elsewhere outside the county that was his family’s namesake. But the years had shrunken him, bent his back and taken the meat and muscle off his bones. Standing at the microphone in a business suit so he looked like he had just ducked out of some important board meeting during which important people would discuss important things, but he had deigned to surrender a little of this important time to lead the Great Unwashed out of the desert and into the Promised Land.
The suit hid his slat-thin frame, sharp elbows and shoulders, set below a face with gaunt cheeks and a fleshless chin that resembled the knob of a femur. His was the wind-scoured, sun-weathered skin of a cowboy or a sea captain. He was neither, of course, had merely spent a lifetime ignoring his dermatologist’s warning not to lay out on the beach too long.
But he could not hide the signature attribute of the Nower family, clearly passed on to him by a recessive gene — an Adam’s apple more prominent than his nose. You could amuse yourself while he droned on by watching it bob up and down in his skinny neck like the cork on a fishing line.
Sebastian McFarland Nower III was an eccentric whose every statement was taken with enough salt to crust the rims of a million margarita glasses. To his credit, Liam was in the process of taking back the meeting Nower had hijacked when the chaos broke out — from different parts of the room at the same time, like a spark had lit fuses in several places at once.
“There’s a murderer loose out there roaming around free as the breeze,” called out a woman from the far side of the room whose voice had the distinctive caw of a crow. No, a rooster — Wilma Thacker. “He’s preying on older women all alone in the world ‘thout no man to protect and defend them. I want to know what the deputy sheriff’s doing to catch him.”
Liam tried to respond but he was shouted down by another voice from the other side of the room.
“A man who’d kill his own kin like that, smash her head in so’s you couldn’t even recognize—”
“Martha Whittiker’s head was not—”
“Martha Whittiker! Somebody killed Martha Whittiker?”
“You saying she’s dead?”
“Who’d a’done a thing like that to the poor little—?”
“That worthless grandson of hers, that’s who,” said Ethel Porter, another of Martha’s neighbors. “I keep this here loaded gun right by my bed.” She waved the pistol in the air as casually as a pompom at a football game. It occurred to Sam then that Ethel wasn’t the only person in the crowd with a weapon. Probably half the people in the room were packing. Guns and this kind of tension — a dangerous combination. “I gonna lock my doors, too, ever night now and I ain’t never done that before.”
Voices began to pop off like popcorn heated up in a skillet.
“Need to string him up.”
“Hanging’s too good for him.”
“Beat your own grandma to death with a claw hammer, he’d ought to—”
“It ain’t like he’s got anywhere to run to. Oughta be easy for Liam to find—”
“I’m not looking for Dylan Shaw. I don’t believe he—”
“You ain’t even lookin’ for him?”
“A man who’d club his little old grandmother to death and you ain’t gonna protect us from him?”
“He ain’t the only one’s gonna do murder,” called a male voice from the back and the crowd turned to look. It was George Gribbins. Sam’d heard he’d tried to stand up to Viola the day she took over Foodtown and she’d put him in his place. “Bobby Joe don’t give me back my hay rake, I’m gonna—”
“Yore hay rake?” Bobby Joe Mattingly responded. “A fella don’t get to keep a thing after he done sold it to somebody else.”
“I never sold you a dang thing!”
“You think them chickens I traded was early Christmas presents?”
“You didn’t trade me no chickens! Betty Ann paid you for them chickens.”
“Chickens ain’t the onliest thing George Gribbins and his kin’s took.” That was Buford Haywood, who’d lost an eye and part of his nose in a mining accident and wore a black eyepatch like a pirate. “If another one of my sheep goes missing—”
“You accusing me of stealing a sheep? What would I want—?
“Well, somebody took it. And you’s the last one—”
“Musta been Bobby Joe ‘cause a man who’d steal a hay rake would steal—”
The sound had ratcheted up in no time into a full-bore shouting match. The Gribbins family — maybe a dozen of them had shown up at the meeting — were yelling at the Mattinglys and the Haywoods. And in less time than it took to tell about it, others were choosing sides in the dispute, threatening all manner of violence.
Charlie shot Sam a frightened look, reached down and puled Merrie up into her arms, turned and headed for the door. Sam looked longingly past her to the empty doorway. Where was Malachi? He could get control of this—
Then George lunged at Bobby Joe, throwing a roundhouse punch that if it had connected might have severed B.J.’s head from his shoulder blades. But for all his strength, George was slow, and Bobby Joe dodged the blow and threw himself at George.
“You keep your hands off my brother,” cried Carl Gribbins. “I’m a’snatch the lot of you baldheaded—”
“—come get my hay rake—”
“Musta been who busted that fence line. I knowed it was a Haywood done it.”
The jostling crowd had become a mob in seconds, an angry mob. Maybe it was just-below-the-surface fear of what was happening to them, the pent-up frustration of being locked in.
The bomb had gone off so suddenly, men were fighting everywhere, throwing punches, wrestling on the floor, yelling and cursing and kicking. It was impossible to tell who was on whose side. Those who’d chosen not to take anybody’s side in the brawl had been pushed to the sides and back of the room. From a vantage point against the back wall, Sam saw Liam leap off the stage, and begin shoving his way through the crowd to get to the tangle of men throwing punches.
“… put that gun down!” Liam’s voice rang out above the cacophony of voices. “All of you, put your guns away—”
Bam!
The gunshot was like a howitzer going off in the confined space of the auditorium. The crowd gasped as one, shocked into silence by the sound.
Suddenly, Sam was afraid. The people were backing up away from something. She was tall and strong and she shoved smaller people out of the way, until she came to the spot where the crowd had parted, away from the body of a man lying face-down on the floor. It was Liam Montgomery, his own pistol beside his limp hand, blood spreading out in a puddle around him.
Sam knelt beside him and he looked up at her with wide, beseeching eyes. Blood formed in the bubbles on his lips when he tried to speak and ran in a trickle out the side of his mouth and down his cheek.
Before Sam even had a chance to find where he’d been shot, somebody stumbled into her, knocking her over on top of Liam’s body.
“Who shot Liam?”
“Wasn’t
me!”
“Me neither.”
“You was the one. You and your worthless brothers, a bunch of bottom-feeding—”
The yelling became a single big roar of sound that Sam ignored while she tried to get back onto her hands and knees. But the crowd had closed in around them. She saw someone step on Liam’s hand, someone kicked her in the thigh and—
Bam!
Another shot rang out, followed by two more.
The crowd was shocked into silence.
“Next person touches a weapon, I will put you down soon’s I would a lame horse.”
The voice was stern and vicious. Viola Tackett.
At some point in the riot, and that’s what it had degenerated into, Viola had moved to the front of the room and up onto the stage. She stood there now with a rifle in her hands. A rifle! Where did she get a rifle? She hadn’t been armed with it when Sam saw her and the boys enter the room.
With her cheek on the stock, Viola swept the barrel back and forth over the crowd, ready to pull the trigger.
Every person in the room knew that Viola Tackett would drop them in their tracks with no more concern than swatting a fly. Her oldest son, Neb, was beside her, holding a pistol in a two-hand grip like the cops on television. Obie stood at one corner of the stage, Zach stood at the other — all pointing weapons out into the crowd. They were arranged so perfectly, it looked like they’d rehearsed the drill.
The crowd was totally outgunned and knew it. Nobody would go up against the whole Tackett clan, every one of them as likely to put a hole in you as the next. From their position on the stage, they could have taken out a SWAT team or a squad of Navy SEALs.
“All them weapons, on the floor, now,” Viola demanded, and maybe a dozen people leaned over and placed all manner of firepower on the floor in front of them. “Now get back away so Miss Sheridan can see to Liam.”
Sam felt the crush of the crowd around her pull away as everyone hurried to do exactly what Viola Tackett had directed. Sam sat back up onto her knees, trying to get a look at Liam in the sudden light that now replaced the forest of legs around her.