The Girl From Blind River

by Gale Massey

  The sound of a human voice nearly brought him to tears. He stepped closer to the door and read the man’s badge. “Brewster, huh? It’s lonely in here, you know? You’re the first one to talk to me.”

  “Must be the first time you said sir.”

  “What?”

  “You want to address someone in here, you call them sir. Understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, sir,” Brewster said and turned away.

  “Wait!” Toby called. He refused to cry, but that only made his nose run. He swiped at it, hating the pleading tone in his voice and how it made him feel like a girl. “Sir!” Toby yelled. “You got any Red Man?” But the man kept walking.

  Toby took a piece of toilet paper and folded it until it was a small tight square, stuck it between his cheek and teeth like he’d done when he was little and starving. He sucked at it, slumped on the mattress, and tried to think why his uncle hadn’t shown up yet. Or Jamie. She was nineteen now. Didn’t that mean she could bail him out?

  An hour later the man returned.

  “Sir,” Toby said.

  Brewster stopped and faced the boy’s door again. “What?”

  “Why am I here? I threw one punch. What’s the big deal?”

  “You punched the high school coach.”

  “He got a bloody nose is all,” Toby said, moving closer to the door.

  Brewster stepped in front of the opening, his height blocking the light. “You broke his nose.”

  Toby feigned a right hook. “I can’t help he’s a pansy, can’t take a hit.”

  The man’s face was flat, his hands big as paddles, an eagle in military green tattooed on his forearm.

  Toby smelled the stink of a rotten tooth and backed away. “Hey, nice tattoo, man. Army?”

  “Marine Corps. Retired.”

  Despite the bad breath he liked Brewster and wanted to keep him talking. “I’m joining soon as I graduate.”

  “Huh. Don’t know they take punks.”

  “They’ll take me. One of ’em will. Army, Navy. Hey, man, I came in with some Red Man. Can I get it?”

  “Don’t know if you noticed, but this is a jail. Ain’t no room service in here.”

  “I want my stuff!” The cell was too small, the light too low. Someone turned up the volume on the Judge Judy marathon.

  “Your stuff is at the front door. You get it on your way out.”

  Toby gripped the bars and shook them. Nothing moved, nothing even rattled.

  Brewster didn’t flinch. “Settle down. You’re not going anywhere soon.”

  “Where’s my uncle? I’m a juvenile!” He pushed away from the door. “You can’t keep me here! I got rights! Where’s my sister?” He was trembling with rage.

  “See now, that’s where you’re wrong. You got nothing, boy. Assault with intent to harm? At your age, that don’t get you sent to juvie. This here’s downtown jail.”

  Toby picked up the mattress and threw it, kicked it, kicked it again, fell on it and tried to rip it in half.

  “You best calm down, boy,” Brewster said.

  “Don’t tell me to calm down!” Toby screamed. From somewhere deep in his belly a howl made its way through to his lungs and out his mouth. He beat his head with his fists.

  The door clanged on its hinges and three officers rushed in. Brewster caught Toby’s arm and bent it behind his back. Another man guarded the door. The third man picked up the mattress, folded it like a sheet, and walked out the door.

  “You’re going to have to earn that back,” Brewster said.

  Toby jerked to get loose but Brewster pulled his arm tighter. Pain shot through his shoulder, and Toby dropped to the floor. Brewster let go of his arm and pushed him to the far wall.

  “Let me know if you can’t get that back in its joint,” he said, and slammed the steel door shut.

  CHAPTER

  18

  JAMIE PULLED THE truck to the curb outside Jack’s store. He was inside, stooped over a computer, and scratching the scruff on his cheek. When they’d first hooked up she’d expected an older guy to be different from her high school boyfriends. She was wrong about that. Except for the slightly receding hairline and the crinkly lines around his eyes, he was like any other guy. It was almost cute how he was stuck in a time warp when it came to music, playing boxed collections of The Beatles and Pink Floyd. In the beginning, she’d believed his devotion to Bob Dylan meant a thoughtful, reflective mind. He was cool enough, though, the kind of guy who turned off the porn video when she walked into the room. And he always kept it wrapped, not like the jerks in high school that always had money for booze but not for condoms. She was grateful for that because right now a baby would ruin her plans quicker than an STD.

  The store was empty and that was good. She felt the weight of her backpack and thought it through one last time. There was at least fifteen grand in there. She could take off right now, catch a train to Florida. There had to be at least five casinos down there that she was old enough to play in. She might hit it big. Or she could crash and burn like at Mimawa. And then what? She’d never be able to come back to Blind River and she’d always be looking over her shoulder because Loyal would certainly hunt her down.

  And then there was that man’s body. She was already too easy to frame and if she left now it would be easy to pin the whole thing on her. The timing couldn’t be worse. Her cracked fingertips were beginning to throb from the cold. She was hungry and all she really wanted was to curl up under a blanket, but she stood on the sidewalk wondering if she’d ever have another chance like this one.

  Then the door opened and Jack stepped outside. “There you are,” he said. “You okay? You look funny.” He pulled her inside the store and locked the door behind them.

  She started to unload her backpack. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Hang on. Let’s do this in the back.”

  His office was small and cluttered with a metal desk left over from the fifties, four tall filing cabinets from the scratch-and-dent store, a low ceiling, a fluorescent light overhead, and that dumpy futon in the corner.

  He spread the envelopes over the desk. “This it?”

  “Just the eight stops on the west side.”

  “Okay.” He emptied an envelope and started sorting the denominations.

  “I marked where each envelope came from, but I didn’t have time to count it all. That big one’s from Crowley’s Pub,” she said, pointing.

  Jack totaled the money in that envelope, thirty-five hundred and change, and tagged it with a Post-it note and rubber band. Seeing the cash piled up like that, Jamie judged the total to be way more than fifteen thousand. Closer to twenty.

  “I saw my mom.”

  “Huh?” He put a rubber band around a stack of bills. “Why?”

  The impulse to tell him everything was nearly overwhelming, but she couldn’t answer truthfully. “I stopped in for a bite.”

  “Yeah, how was that?” She could tell he wasn’t listening. He got a ledger from the back of a locked drawer and entered the totals.

  “It was fine. That cop, Garcia, was there giving her a hard time about some bullshit at Keating’s the other night.” She didn’t mention the girl she’d seen looking for her father or her suspicions that everything was connected in ways she couldn’t see yet.

  “The game you missed?” He opened another drawer and swore. “Fuck. Where’s my damn calculator?”

  “Yeah. Pissed me off.”

  He stopped for a moment and looked up. “Why would you get pissed about that? You say it all the time, you don’t even know her.”

  “I don’t know. I was supposed to deal that game. Now it sounds like things got a little crazy.”

  “Your mom can take care of herself, Jamie. You know, prison toughens a person.”

  “Or breaks them.”

  She’d been caught off guard by that cop sitting there quizzing them and then hassling her at the truck. And Phoebe had looked awful, the circles under her ey
es dark and puffy, struggling to conceal her nerves. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Well, no. I guess I wouldn’t, would I?”

  She couldn’t tell if it was a put-down.

  “Relax. Talk about something else.” He locked the cash in a safe and walked out from around the desk and stood face-to-face with her. “Why does counting money make me horny?” He kissed her forehead, then her mouth.

  “’Cause you’re cheap like that,” she said.

  It was a line from a porn video she’d caught him watching. The line was funny, the video pathetic, and she’d felt bad for the woman in it. She’d never make a sex tape, even though Jack nagged her about it all the time.

  He wrapped his arms around her waist and she bent backward under his weight, his lips on her neck, the smell of his skin. It was enough to fill her mind with this, with him. They got to the futon in two awkward steps. He pulled her on top of him, yanking at the zipper on her jeans.

  She pulled his shirt over his head. He ripped open a condom. This was the dance they’d perfected over the last month. In a minute they were naked and he was pushing in deep. A few more minutes and he was done.

  Jamie wished it had gone longer but it rarely did. One time he’d stayed with her for nearly ten minutes and she’d seen lights exploding behind her eyes. She wanted that again, but he was catching his breath now and soon he’d get up. She kept him inside her for as long as she could, breathed in his scent, knowing that in a minute he’d be on the phone ordering pizza and the ordinary world would return.

  “That was nice.” His breath was slowing.

  She knew he was thinking about food. “Yummy.” He liked to hear that he was good.

  “Pepperoni?”

  “Sure.” She found her sweater, wondered why she didn’t feel any different than before, wondered if he felt anything at all.

  He grabbed a blanket off the back of the futon, threw it over his body, and texted an order to the pizza joint down the street. “Ten minutes,” he said, and pulled her back on top of him. “Time for another round.”

  “Stop bragging,” she said, but relaxed on top of him and buried her nose under his chin. “I’ve been thinking about stuff.”

  “Not surprising.” He ran his finger along her spine. “Bright girl like you. Probably always thinking and scheming.”

  “Loyal wants me to play in the fund-raiser.”

  “The vets’ game?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s weird. They don’t usually invite the ladies. You know those old guys, they don’t like getting shown up by a babe.”

  “I thought Margaret Freeland played last year.”

  “Yeah, but she’s a vet. Nurse in ’Nam, I think. Loyal still put a bounty on her. Everyone knew it but her. She was out in twenty minutes.”

  “Are you kidding? How do you know that?” Jamie sat up and double knotted her hair in a band.

  “I’m the one who took her out. He gave me two hundred bucks right after she walked out the door.”

  She looked for her boots and found one under the futon.

  “It’s different this year. He wants us to make up for the cash we lost. Wants you to play, too. And that jerk, Tuckahoe. Phoebe’s going to be one of the dealers.”

  “Us?”

  “You know, Mimawa.”

  “You told him about that?”

  “What else could I do? Lucky he didn’t kill me,” she said, remembering the way Loyal had handled that man’s body. For a moment she thought about telling Jack, but she’d taken money from Keating to keep quiet and talking about it now would only make it more complicated.

  “Is he pissed?”

  “Not at you. He’s pissed that I blew Keating’s take. Now I got to work for him till I pay him back.”

  “Huh. So what does he want us to do at the tournament? Basic shit like rat-holing, chip dumping? We take it down and Keating is paid off?”

  “Yep. Exactly.”

  He waved his head back and forth like he was weighing his options. “That’s cool, if it settles the score. And Keating gets to win in front of his constituents, which amounts to free publicity for his reelection. Goddamn. Those two work every angle.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t care,” she said. “I need this to work. And I need to find a way to get ahead.”

  “Ahead? What are you going to do then, pretty girl? Leave Toby, leave Blind River?”

  She noticed he didn’t put himself on that list. “I want to try the circuit, make some serious money. After Toby turns eighteen and joins the Army.”

  Jack smirked. “You still think your little brother is Army material?”

  “Yeah.” She turned her sweater right side out. “I think he could be.”

  “You haven’t heard, have you?”

  “Heard what?” She pulled the sweater over her head.

  “Toby’s been in jail since this morning. He punched out the wrong guy.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  TOBY YANKED HIS boot off and bashed the heel against the window latch. The latch broke off but the window frame was frozen with rust and it wouldn’t budge. His lip throbbed, his head banged, his vision was blurred. Beating the shit out of him and locking him in the back room of the trailer only proved how fucked up his uncle was. No way Toby would stay here and wait for the bastard to come back for round two. He’d take this trailer apart before he’d stay locked up in here one more minute. He broke the window and knocked out the glass fragments until it was wide enough to climb through, then went around the outside of the trailer to the front door which, go figure, Loyal had left unlocked. Inside the bathroom he checked his lip in the mirror, soaked a towel, and wiped the dried blood, which only opened the cut and set it bleeding again. He jumped at the sound of a car’s engine, relaxed when he realized it was just a neighbor passing by.

  At first he’d been relieved when Loyal had shown up at the jail to post bail, couldn’t wait to get away from that guard. But as soon as they got in the truck, he realized he’d been safer in that cell. Bail was a thousand bucks and Loyal had ranted on the ride home about how much money Toby had been costing him lately. Toby had promised to make it up if Loyal would give him a job, but Loyal had shouted no and started in on his flask. As soon as they got inside the trailer Loyal had taken off his belt. He was pretty sure the welt over his eye had come from the buckle, hated how he’d cried out when metal connected with bone. When Loyal got tired he’d stopped, grabbed his coat, and locked him up in the back room.

  No doubt he was at Crowley’s Pub right now getting tanked on whiskey and beer chasers and when he got home there’d be nothing holding him back. Toby splashed water on his face, the lump below his eye still swelling.

  The beating wouldn’t have been so bad if Jamie had been home. Loyal always pulled his punches in front of her. Goddamn her. She was probably with that pervert, Jack. Goddamn all of them. He held a towel to his lip and went to Loyal’s room to rummage through the box under his bed where he kept his stash of nudie postcards from his buddy in Key West. There was almost always money in that box, and today he found a wallet with a few dollars and credit cards belonging to some schmuck named Theodore James Bangor. He stuffed the wallet in his pocket and grabbed his jacket and a box of Pop-Tarts, paused at the door and looked around for something more, but there wasn’t anything more and he walked out the door.

  He took the long walk that wound through the back valley and headed toward town. It had once been a cornfield, but land speculators, predicting a boom, had bought up all this acreage years ago. The boom fizzled the year after the fertilizer plant exploded and left a cloud of toxic smoke hanging over the town for a month. Now it was an empty field of brown weed not even fit for grazing. Standing water sloshed under his boots. He looked at the land his grandfather, Nate Elders, used to own. Twenty acres. Some of it turned into a trailer park, some of it set aside as a dump. If the old man hadn’t sold out they’d still be farmers. Maybe they’d still have cows, maybe a tractor
. Maybe a good life. Toby went up the rise on the other side of the valley and took the road to town.

  He needed to find Jamie. She’d know what to do, maybe help him find somewhere to hide for a few days until Loyal cooled off. Maybe they’d go away together on the bus like they’d always wanted. They were older now and no one would care if they bolted. Kids did that all the time. No one would even look for them.

  When he got to town, he took the alley that ran parallel to Main. He thought about stopping by the diner, but his mother was so weird now. He’d paid a hundred dollars for that stupid necklace and she’d hated it. Fucking waste of time. He saw the Ford sitting in front of Jack’s store and knew Jamie was in there. She’d been different lately because of that guy. Like they were keeping a secret that wasn’t really secret. It was gross. Technically, Jack could have been her father, he was that old.

  The sign said they opened at ten and it was already past noon. He tried the handle but it was locked. Toby peered around the ten thousand stupid posters taped over the windows. The office door in the back was cracked open and he banged on the door.

  Finally Jack stuck his head out of the office and yelled for Toby to knock it off, then called something to the back and came to let him in.

  Jamie came out front, tying her hair up in a ponytail. She stopped short when she saw him. “What the hell happened to your face?”

  “What the hell are you doing here? With him?”

  Jamie made her what-the-fuck face that always pissed him off. “I don’t answer to you, Toby. Why did you hit the coach?”

  He jammed his fists into his pockets, wanted to hit something now, but his knuckles were sore and his lip throbbed. The whole side of his head ached.

  Jack said, “I’ll get some ice,” and went back inside the office.

  When he was gone, Toby said, “Jesus, Jamie, why are you hanging out with a perv?”

  “Take it easy. I like him.”

  “Does Loyal know?”

  “What does it matter what Loyal knows? I don’t need his permission. Did he do this to you?”

  “Yeah, he hit me. Locked me in the back room and left me there. He’s pissed that I got arrested, pissed that bail was a thousand bucks. Says I owe him.” He slammed his back against the wall and crashed to the floor, yanked at his hair. He was so enraged, but there was nothing to do about it. Everything hurt, so he cried.