by Peter Farris
Lucy knew if it was a boy she’d name him Charles. But she didn’t expect Charlie to live. She had moved in with her aunt. Six months pregnant. Broke. A stiff back. Lousy mood. Her aunt had been the first to say the word “deformed.” Lucy cursed him then. The father. She was sure he was the father. She swore to never say his name again.
Lucy smoked half a cigarette with her aunt while they picked out hand-me-down clothes from the attic.
Asleep in her aunt’s spare room she dreamed about Hicklin. Other men, too. But his memory was strongest. His smell. Muscles in his forearms. The blackheads behind his ears. Lucy loved to squeeze them. When he was in a good mood he’d flip over on his side so she could dig in with her nails. Like a pair of monkeys grooming each other. Memories of him clung to Lucy like pricklers to a pair of socks.
The rest of that afternoon was a blur. A pain like she never felt. Charlie came out headfirst. First thing he felt was the waiting hands of the doctor. At first the doctor studied the newborn as if something was amiss. The baby didn’t make a sound. Lucy felt her throat close up. Felt like an eternity, waiting, hoping, fearing the worst.
But then Charlie cried. Lucy raised her head and stared. She’d never forget the expression on her baby boy’s face, so peculiar. Charlie seemed disappointed in his surroundings. Expecting something different. Like a vacationer disillusioned with his accommodations.
Later Lucy held Charlie for the first time. She took deep breaths. Looked with her one good eye into his healthy two.
And tried real hard not to see the face of Charlie’s father.
* * *
Charlie’s lungs felt pinched in his chest. He fought for air. A pair of meaty hands grabbed him by the ears and dragged him backwards. He watched as another man as big as Hicklin scooped up Hummingbird with one arm. The man wore a ski mask. Charlie noticed his eyes—dull as livestock—peering back at him.
The man curled a thick bicep around Hummingbird’s neck and yanked her to her feet, choking off a scream.
They reached the front door of the cottage.
Charlie was shoved through the threshold. The other man carried Hummingbird inside. She kicked, her legs cycling and scissoring in the air. She spit and cursed at the men, but neither said a word.
Charlie turned around. Raised his hands in submission.
Please, sir. Please …
The polymer stock of a shotgun was the last thing he saw for a while.
* * *
Charlie opened his eyes, although his throbbing head told him not to.
They had tied Hummingbird to the chair. The older man reached back and slapped her. He looked at his hand and, disgusted by what he saw, wiped it on a pant leg. He turned his head and glared at Charlie. The ski mask was rolled up revealing a beefy face, a thick goatee like a skunk tail pointing due south.
“What you looking at, boy?” Lispcomb said.
Charlie craned his neck, averting his gaze to the other man. Nathan Flock returned his look with a pointed, level stare, the shotgun at rest in the crook of an arm.
“What’s a matter? You a goddamned pussy?” Hummingbird said, directing their attention away from Charlie.
Lipscomb slapped her again with an open hand. A gummy tooth flew from her mouth.
“One of you bitches know something!” he said, his face twisting with accusation.
Hummingbird raised her chin defiantly and said, “I’ll go round and round with you all night.”
Her tank top hung off the shoulders in shreds, her rib cage breathing through the skin. Charlie realized his right leg was slick with urine.
Lipscomb ran a hand across her forehead. With the other hand he grabbed her mouth and squeezed it open.
He shook his head, clucking his tongue a few times, said, “Jesus. Look at them teeth.”
“Never seen meth mouth like that,” Flock said.
“You get kissy kissy with this right here?” Lipscomb said to Charlie.
“Look at them sores on her legs,” Flock added.
Hummingbird shrunk into the chair, a wild guess of a woman breathing in teaspoons. She looked over at Charlie and managed a smile. He whimpered an encouragement. Lipscomb and Flock turned at the sound of his voice.
“What did he say?” Lipscomb said.
Flock shrugged, said, “Who is this flabby shit bird anyway?”
“Reckon he might be that bank teller Hicklin took hostage,” Lipscomb hazarded. “Stupid motherfucker shouldn’t a took one to begin with.”
There was a menacing cast in Lipscomb’s eyes. He stood over Charlie. Nudged him with a steel-toe, playfully, as if sizing up his entertainment for the next ten minutes.
“Who are you?” he said.
Charlie scurried to a corner of the cottage. He kept his head down when he spoke.
“Charlie C-Colquitt.”
“No, baby!” Hummingbird said. “Don’t tell them nothing!”
Lipscomb shot her a look that could stop traffic and without raising his voice said, “I’m going to break every bone in your right arm if you don’t shut that fucking mouth of yours.”
The calm delivery was enough to give Hummingbird pause. She scowled at him but remained silent.
“So he that bank teller then?” Flock said.
Lipscomb nodded. He turned and knelt next to Charlie.
“You know where Hicklin is, bank teller? Know what he done with the money?”
Charlie shook his head, turning stoic as sun-bleached wood. He jumped at the sound of Hummingbird’s voice.
“You ain’t never gonna find that money, peckerwood!” she screamed. “He done left us all!”
Lipscomb pursed his lips in disappointment. He hopped up, spun around and charged her. Charlie struggled to his feet, but Flock knocked him to the floor with a swift kick. He watched as Hummingbird seemed to shrink in Lipscomb’s shadow.
Managing to work a hand free, she lunged off the floor—chair and all—and raked her nails down Lipscomb’s cheek. Little rivulets of blood appeared in their wake.
He picked her up, hoisting her into the air like a bale of hay. She was airborne. Thrown with staggering force, and if it hadn’t been for the wall she might have sailed on off into space. She struck the wall of the cottage and slumped to the floor.
The sound of her breathing only enraged Lipscomb more. Charlie cried out, pleading with his captors, but neither listened. Flock popped him with the butt of the shotgun, then pinned his face against the floor with a muddy boot.
An image of Hicklin appeared, a hallucination, merely a figment of Charlie’s traumatized brain. But oddly comforting all the same. Charlie saw Hicklin’s shotgun. An iris-in on smoke from the muzzle. The Technicolor homicide about to play out again.
Charlie opened his mouth but could only muster a hoarse cry, his vocal cords shredded, spent like a motor not turning over. Flock watched Lipscomb and Hummingbird with a manic enthusiasm, laughing like people do on a roller coaster.
Lipscomb had become unhinged.
Charlie closed his eyes before that steel-toe boot came down on Hummingbird’s head.
Wishing there were a way to cover his ears.
* * *
Hicklin spent the afternoon scouting. He stumbled upon a creek surrounded by blackjack oaks and tall spruce, the air along the banks buzzing with wasps and mosquitoes. He gauged where he left the truck, parked just before a covered bridge that didn’t seem fit to accommodate a tricycle. Always had a good sense of direction, just like his own father. There were few good memories of him and all of them involved those woods and a rifle. Hicklin had the cash from the robbery on him, rubber-banded in rolls of two thousand and stuffed into a duffel bag. He needed a place to stash it. A place only he might know.
He knew he could make that money last for a good long goddamn time.
And maybe the boy would come with him.
Hicklin crossed a field of broom sedge rank from rainfall, a low ceiling, clouds floating by as if browsing for the perfect place to drop their car
go. He arrived at an old hunting cabin he remembered from his youth—the place he’d been looking for, popular as a rendezvous for trappers of black bear or fox. Built by a Wright or a Donaldson, he couldn’t be certain. The cabin belonged to everybody, and for local folks like his daddy and his pals from the mill it had served as a refuge from the responsibilities of married life. He never went a day without drinking and had a talent for cruelty. But something about hunting those woods brought him a peace he couldn’t find elsewhere. Brief moments, Hicklin remembered, when his daddy had approached the kindness children expected from their parents yet so randomly received.
Foundation stones were all that remained of the cabin, however. A few rusted traps in the weeds, who knew how many more out in those woods just waiting to be sprung. A chimney had toppled, as if pushed over in some long-forgotten act of desperation.
Must be a hundred years old, he figured, eyeing the crumbled stones and bricks.
There was a box stove on its side, partly concealed by ivy bush. Could work? Hicklin passed a hand between pink flower clusters, right across the edge of the stove, its finely cast iron deluded of its luster from years of exposure. He counted six plates. Looked inside at a large orb of web that stretched the width of the oven’s interior. The work of a barn spider, the web was peppered with the wings and legs of luckless insects who’d stumbled upon it. An egg the size of his big toe trembled at the center of the oven.
Don’t see momma spider anywhere.
Hicklin lit a cigarette, considering the stove. He could smell a big summer rain approaching. Persistent thunder. Flickers of lightning. Without delaying further he stuffed the duffel bag inside the oven. Sorry for your loss, momma spider. He looked intently back to the northeast, the placement of his truck to the clearing, the stream and covered bridge, up the narrow switchbacks to the safe house illuminating itself in his mind, as did a trickle of memories.
Know where you stand in relation to things, Lipscomb once told him as they walked the yard.
Hicklin remembered hunting with his own father, on land to the west of where he stood now. He was instilled with a fine sense of direction (and a propensity to drink) if nothing else from the man. More than a decade of incarceration had sharpened that skill to a point, an intuition, a sense of where you were in relation to the dark corners of a prison yard, to the predators stalking the tiers. The phantom paths of the world.
And the beasts who lurked among them.
When Hicklin made for the pickup, he did so through the wind and rain.
* * *
He drove fast, dragging a tail of dust behind him. The road became paved. Raindrops dotted the windshield. In the rearview he saw storm clouds. Lightning like the prongs of a trident horizontal across the sky.
At the lower altitude his ears popped. The asphalt was smoother now. The road level and straight. Hicklin felt as though he’d arrived back on a map. Entered the land of public record. Territory thoroughly explored and charted. The trees to either side were as thick as prison bars. He made a left at an intersection, then drove for four miles down Highway 9, passing a barn, an old town of tin roofs. Past a feed store, abandoned lots and lonely-looking homes with junk piled up in the front yards. Another left turn brought him to a convenience store.
Where he waited in the truck.
The lone customer walked back to the gas pump and started his car. Drove away.
Hicklin had the place to himself.
* * *
The man behind the counter raised his head and nodded when Hicklin walked in, his attention returning to the book in his hands. It was a worn paperback called A Deadly Shade of Gold. Fluorescent lights illuminated rows of potato chips and energy drinks. Day-old coffee, a microwave next to the warmer, brown stains splattered across the glass. Hicklin already had an idea where the safe was. Lone surveillance camera behind the cashier. Probably for show. One exit between the restrooms and stacked crates of two-liter soda bottles. Probably a couple hundred bucks in the place if he really pushed his luck.
He checked out the snack food. Energy bars, beef jerky, crackers, roasted peanuts. He placed items on the counter. The man didn’t look up but once. Probably about Hicklin’s age. Country and weathered, the cashier’s face had the features of a lapdog that preferred to be left alone. A bookworm still living with Ma. He wore a polo shirt with an oil company logo. Chewed on a toothpick as he read.
Hicklin grabbed two Gatorades and a case of beer. Three calling cards. “I get a carton of Spirit Lights, too?” he said.
“The yellow box?”
“Yeah.”
The cashier surveyed the goods.
“You going on a trip, huh?” he asked nonchalantly.
“Heading down to Florida to visit my brother and his kids,” Hicklin replied.
The cashier turned and looked out the windows. A tractor-trailer loaded with treated wood drove by.
“Looks like we gon’ get some rain here shortly.”
The small talk went unanswered. The cashier keyed in the items on the register, glancing at the lightning bolts tattooed on Hicklin’s neck. He’d worn a sweatshirt to conceal most of the ink, but even with his hair growing out, Hicklin had a face that told people: Yeah, I’ve been there and places far worse.
The register’s display read fifty-four dollars and change. Hicklin thought to break a hundred, but the bill was too crisp and new. He handed the cashier three crinkled twenties instead.
“Have a safe trip, now,” the man said in parting.
Hicklin paused at the door. There was a tape measure tacked up for the clerk’s benefit. When some junky waving a revolver burst in for the fifty bucks in the cash register and a lottery ticket. The tape measure topped out at six-foot-six, the top of Hicklin’s head passing just under that mark. A bell jingled against the door as he exited. He walked silently past the pay phone and trash can, the icebox with a cartoon polar bear painted on the side. The locked-up propane tanks.
As Hicklin was pulling out, a man driving a year-old Nissan Titan turned into the gas station. The driver gave him more than a passing glance.
The convenience store disappeared behind Hicklin. He checked his rearview.
He ascended a winding road that led up into the mountains. A moment later he passed a church that looked abandoned. No lights.
It seemed to Hicklin that night had originated there and was spreading outward.
* * *
Lang parked his Nissan Titan with a notion to fill up the tank. He got out of the pickup, stretched his sore legs against the nagging pains of middle age that followed him like a chaperone. The two days since Kalamity Bibb’s murder had been hard to bear. He’d taken a leave of absence at a time when he couldn’t afford to.
But everyone knew why.
Other investigators and agencies had involved themselves with Kalamity’s case, including the FBI gang infiltration unit. Lang didn’t feel like a member of their fraternity, the investigation now well beyond his expertise. The Jube County Sheriff’s Department had kindly but firmly been handed its hat.
Sallie Crews had been in touch with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and task forces from across the Southeast. Reports of bank robberies from Bakersfield, California, to Danbury, Connecticut. More than a dozen cities. Similar MOs.
Big news from Atlanta P.D. as Mexican gangs from California were chopping each other to pieces with machetes on the city’s Southside. Mexican Mafia franchises—originating from prisons in Atwater and Pelican Bay—had set up shop in nearly every metro county. One house in the city of Smyrna had five hundred pounds of crystal meth stacked like pillows in a back room. Automatic weapons by the crateful.
Having started in South Florida, Nazi Low Riders from Arizona and Texas had traveled farther north into the Tennessee Valley, killing everyone on a twenty-name list. Snitches, rival black and Hispanic gang leaders, even the wife and daughter of a state witness. The hit squad, pure street muscle and following mandates from the top brass of the Aryan Brotherhood, was al
so suspected in a slew of robberies and assaults spanning five states.
Lang could only shake his head after reading the reports. Lawless men roaming the country. Savages without morals or restraint. And a couple of them had shown up in Jubilation County.
Crews had found Lang slightly crazed at Kalamity’s house. He’d been sitting on the back porch, hidden in shadow, smoking his way through a pack of Marlboros. When they carted Kalamity’s body out on a stretcher he got in his truck and left. Kal had been wrapped in a black bag, like raked leaves left out on the curb for collection.
He’d recalled the excitement he’d felt on his way to Kalamity’s house. Lang never slept so good as he did there. With her.
Later that night he’d wrestled with memories of her. He drank a bottle of bourbon to forget.
Lang had ignored phone calls, including one from his daughter. When he heard Diane’s voice on the answering machine he began to cry. Filled with self-loathing, he couldn’t even pick up the phone and talk to the only one of his children who still cared. Beside him, Lady studied her owner as if the hound understood something of the human condition.
And found it exhausting.
* * *
The little bell rang when the door opened. Harvey Ballew looked up from his paperback.
“Harvey.”
“Well, Sheriff Lang. What’s your pleasure?” he said.
Ballew watched Lang make for the red-and-blue cases of beer.
He brought a case of Budweiser to the counter. Harvey offered him a cigarette from a Vantage soft pack.
“I heard about Kalamity,” the cashier said, a streak of sympathy in his eyes.
“Yeah.”
“My sister was over to KB’s place earlier. Lots of people shook up about it. Seems there’s some bad folks floating around up here.”
“Get me a pack of Mediums, would you?” Lang said.
“Sure thing, Sheriff.”
Lang looked outside. Vacant pumps. Orange light under the canopy. The old highway beyond. He caught a glimpse of the Chevy step-side catching a green light before it disappeared from sight.
“Who was that in here just now? Man drivin’ that old step-side,” Lang said.