My eyes flew open and I turned my head to stare straight at my father. He was crazy about her! I had picked that up like a radio picking up a strong station for just a second or two before it fades out again. He wasn’t disgusted by her drinking like the rest of us were. He thought she was exciting, she was unpredictable, he thought. She was very dark and scary, like a storm cloud filled with streaks of lightning. He was...he was...I don’t know how to say this except to just say it. She turned him on.
My father wanted her for his lover, drinking or not, deformed mouth or not, criminal or not.
Then information came to me that made my head reel. Heddy wasn’t the first woman he’d liked this way. There had been others, women from the street in our town, even women on the police force, women Mama never knew about. A lot of women.
I wished I’d never found that out. It made me so unhappy that I wanted to cry again.
I moved away from Daddy. I didn’t want to be near my father anymore. I made up my mind never to meddle in his thoughts again. If he wanted Heddy that much, he was lost to us anyway. Mama sure didn’t need him.
He had been cruel to her; I understood that really for the first time that night. How cruel he’d been. He might have been my father, but I stopped loving him like one that night once I knew he was no better than the two people who had kept us prisoner so many days. He was just a criminal of another sort. All his crimes were hidden away under cover. He beat his wife, he went to bed with strange women, and he would break the law and give up his family for the love of money and sex with Heddy.
“...Even Crow doesn’t know about my life, not really,” Heddy was saying. When he tried to protest, she shushed him real loud with a finger to her lips.
“And Crow don’t know me too damn much because if he did, he wouldn’t have tried hiding most of the money from me.”
Before Crow could say anything else, Heddy felt around in her big purse again and produced her gun. She didn’t wait to aim it, but waved it high. She pulled the trigger, shooting above Crow’s head. The shot filled the house, the burst of fire from the cylinder and the noise made us all jump and let out scared noises. The smell from the gunfire caused my nose to wrinkle up and I put my hand over it.
Mama grabbed my hand and pulled me under her arms. “Please don’t,” she said. She was crying and her voice was all wavy and trembly.
“Hell, what’re you doing, Heddy?” Crow got to his feet and moved halfway across the room from her. “Someone will hear that.”
“Someone will hear that,” she mimicked and fired again, this time to her right, at the wall. Plaster splattered onto the floor.
My ears were ringing. I wished we could get out of the house, run for the door and disappear across the field toward the other houses where we could find some help. Crow promised us we could go free in the morning, but here we were in terrible danger just before we could get away from them. Heddy had gone crazy, that’s what had happened. The whiskey made her careless and mean.
“Heddy, put down the gun.” Daddy also came to his feet and took a step toward her.
“This motherfucker tried to screw me out of the money,” she said, waving the gun at Crow.
“I know, I know, but shooting him now won’t solve the problem. You keep shooting and someone might call the cops.”
“I swear to God, Heddy, I was gonna tell you.” Crow looked ready to bolt for the door.
She shot his direction and he danced around the floor like he would be able to dodge the bullet. Heddy laughed and lowered the gun to the floor, her head hanging. “I ought to shoot his guts out.”
“You can have the money!” Crow hurried to his leather bag and pulled out a thick manila envelope that he threw over to Heddy. “Goddamnit, I was just keeping it safe for us.”
Heddy started to laugh louder. “You don’t think I’d get it? You think giving it to me now makes it all right again?” She raised the gun. “I’m going to kill you, Crow. You deserve it, don’t you, you little creep?”
“Shit, Heddy, stop messing around...”
She squeezed off another shot and Crow fell down on the floor. I screamed. I thought he was dead and I was afraid to look, but I couldn’t help myself. He had fallen on his butt and then over to one side. He sat up slowly. He said, “Don’t kill me, Heddy. Please don’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I took the money without telling you.”
The gun in Heddy’s hand wavered. I heard her crying and looked at her. I didn’t think she ever cried. All this time with them and I could never imagine her crying like other people.
She dropped the gun with a clatter on the wood boards of the floor. She brought both hands to her face and wept into them. It was so pitiful. I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, but I couldn’t help it. She was scary, she was crazy, she was drunk, and she was a killer. But now she was crying like a little kid, her shoulders all hunched over and shaking.
At that moment it could have all been over. Daddy was closer to Heddy than Crow and if he’d wanted, he could have stepped closer and taken the gun from the floor. Crow didn’t have a gun out. Daddy could have ended it all right there, by taking control. He could have held them prisoner, turned the tables on them, and turned them into the law.
But he didn’t.
I looked up at him, waiting, mentally urging him to do it, to do the right thing, to end all this. At the same time I understood what opportunity he had let go by, Crow finally realized it too. He scrambled forward on hands and knees and snatched the gun lying in front of Heddy. He rolled onto his back and pointed it at Daddy. “You get back,” he said. “Sit down over there.”
I’ll never know what was going through Daddy’s head right then. It was like he didn’t want to be the boss. He didn’t want to straighten it all out and take Crow and Heddy into custody.
Of course he didn’t. He wanted to go to Mexico with them.
My daddy was truly one of the bad guys. Even my mother knew it now. We all knew the whole truth now.
#
CROW cuddled Heddy in his arms and let her cry against the front of his shirt while he rocked her. He felt a bottomless well of regret brimming up from his chest into his head. In those murky waters floated all the events Heddy had survived to make it to this place along the border of Mexico. Also floating in it, rubbing against his sensitivities like spiny fish, were the things he had done and seen and overcome.
They were so much alike, the two of them. It’s why they clung together, why they needed each other.
Not many times had he recalled feeling so responsible for so many wrongful deeds. In order to kill, it seemed to him, the reality of murder has to slip off and away from a person. Else he will feel answerable and too horrible to keep going without putting a bullet through his own head.
Like Heddy, he had done what he thought he had to do. When you have never been free and the possibility of freedom comes along, there is nothing to do, but take it, he thought, what else could you do? Prentice told him that once while they played checkers in prison. Prentice, the jailhouse philosopher, always reading and saying stuff no one else would say. Others made fun of him for it, but Crow knew there was a kernel of truth in some of the crap Prentice said.
That’s what the six hundred thousand dollars represented. Freedom for the first time in his miserable life. It was dirty money, illegal and tainted. It belonged to anybody who could keep it. Now that he had betrayed Heddy and made her cry, he could see he had done one of the worst things in all his life. He never should have mistrusted her. He shouldn’t have tried to keep secrets from her. He shouldn’t have been so selfish.
He stopped rocking and glanced over in the shadows at Jay Anderson. Heddy wanted the jerk along, but that wasn’t a betrayal. To betray a person you stole his freedom. Who you had sex with had nothing to do with it. Hadn’t he done his thing in prison, hadn’t he even come close to doing it with Carrie? It didn’t mean he wasn’t still attached like a Siamese baby to Heddy’s side.
He didn’t know how it
was going to work out with three of them trying to keep a low profile in Mexico with that kind of money, but Heddy’s wanting Jay along--and he was sure that she did--did not constitute reason to desert her.
Hell, she had every right to shoot out his guts. He didn’t know what he’d been thinking, shipping off most of the money that way.
The first time he met Heddy they’d been at a party. About twenty people were downing drugs like there was to be no tomorrow and the rest of them were getting drunk. It was loud, people spilling throughout the house into all the rooms.
He had found Heddy sitting alone in a broken wicker chair near an open back door. The sky outside was clear, sprinkled with stars. She just sat, staring up at the sky, her hands clasped together between her knees. She wore black jeans and a tight black halter-top. Pale bare skin showed between the bottom of the top and her jean waist. She was thin and ethereal, her hair hanging long around her shoulders. He remembered noticing the little black sword tattooed on her breast, the tip of it hidden by the halter. She was so cool, untouchable, a little beauty queen sitting apart, all on her own.
He had wondered, too, why she was alone, pretty girl like her. Then she raised her face to him as he came around her and to the open door and he saw something wild and unformed in her eyes. When the small smile came, it only raised half her mouth, causing her to look both grotesque and vulnerable at once. He was careful not to let his expression change. He knew instantly that any future relationship they might have hinged on his first reaction.
He said, “Hi there,” and she told him her name. He had thought at first it was a nickname, “Heady,” meaning she could make a man crazy or she gave great head, hell, what did he know, but she spelled it for him right away. “H-e-d-d-y,” she said and smiled crookedly.
He had never been able to explain why this particular woman moved him. Over the next two years, before he’d been busted for nearly killing the guy in the pool hall and going to prison for it, he and Heddy lived together in a small shambles of a house in one of St. Louis’ least desirable neighborhoods. They made out the best they could. When they had to steal to stay alive, Heddy never flinched; she was always right at his side, willing to take the risks.
She had brought him money to Leavenworth, saving him from having to toss the salad of every big goon in the place. She’d stuck by him. And she’d worked out the plan for his escape.
For this he had betrayed her. Hadn’t trusted her. Meant to keep it all for himself.
He rocked her until she slept and then eased her down into his lap where he gently removed the curly wig from her head and brushed back the long tumbling hair from her cool temple.
God, he couldn’t wait until the sun rose. They could get out of here and cross over the border, pretending they were American tourists on a little day jaunt. They’d wait until there was a crowd crossing and tag along with them as if in their party. They’d hurry across the river and on the other side...
On the other side they’d really be free forever. He and Heddy. And Jay too if that’s what she wanted. He owed her the concession. He would never betray her again.
#
THEY had dozed, fatigue taking them one by one. They all lay curled and lying on each other--Emily with her head in her mother’s lap, Carrie lying against her husband, Heddy and Crow wrapped together like snakes tangled together on the hard wood floor.
The first Crow knew there was someone else in the deserted dark house besides them was when he woke with a gun pressed hard against his skull. His eyes opened wide. He blinked and drew in a sharp breath.
A voice said, “You should have gone further south a lot faster. Get up.”
Heddy sat up, startled when Crow moved. She squinted at the two shadowy figures hovering over them and said, “Who the hell...?”
Crow knew now that one of the cars passing them as they walked through town must have been these two men they’d fled from at the hotel. He was suddenly scared for his life. It was not the first time, but on some riotous instinctive level he knew it might really be the last.
“They just want the money, Heddy. Give it to ‘em.”
“What’s going on?” Jay had wakened and so had his family. They all sat up in the near dark, Emily rubbing at her eyes.
“Who are you?” The man with the gun spoke to Jay. He stood between the two groups on the floor. He flicked on a flashlight and shined it directly into Jay’s face, then swept it over Carrie and Emily.
“That must be the hostages,” the second man said, stepping forward. “They took them in Missouri.”
“Oh yeah. You’re famous,” he said to Jay. “You’re all over the news. They’ve even got the FBI out looking for you. Cop, they say. You a cop?”
“Yes.”
“Not a very good one if you got stuck with these two little petty thieves without a struggle.” He turned back to Crow, shining the light into his eyes.
“Hey!” Crow shielded his face with his hands.
“Where’s the money? We want it and we want it now.”
“Heddy’s got it. In her bag.”
Heddy didn’t react. He was hoping she’d know what to do. The envelope he’d thrown at her earlier lay crumpled between them, covered by their legs. In that envelope Crow believed as much as four, even five, hundred thousand dollars were preserved. These guys weren’t getting it unless they stepped over his dead body. He was dead anyway if they took it from him. He and Heddy could not live without it to pay off officials in Mexico. He sure as hell wasn’t going down there to work in a cantina waiting tables or something the rest of his freaking life.
Heddy seemed to come to life slowly, as if waking from a dream. She must have been hung over, but it didn’t show except for her dreamy, slow-moving quality. She said, “I’ve got it. Right here.”
The man with the flashlight did as Crow thought he would. He grabbed out for Heddy’s bag before she could get her hand into it. While preoccupied this way, Crow carefully reached out in the darkness beside him and felt around in his own bag for the gun. He felt one, knew it was Jay’s service revolver, pulled it free as quietly as possible.
Then he fell onto his back suddenly, lifted the gun, not knowing how true his aim, and he was pulling the trigger. Fire bloomed, lighting the room, once, twice, and the sound echoed off the walls like Fourth of July cherry bombs.
The man holding Heddy’s purse dropped where he was standing. Heddy’s bag fell with the man. The flashlight banged onto the floor, rolling wildly as the light from it skittered across the room. Crow couldn’t see the man who had been behind the first he shot.
Heddy was up and moving. The whole room came alive with motion. Crow couldn’t see a thing as he slid around the floor on his back, pointing the gun, afraid to shoot, afraid he’d hit Heddy or one of the Andersons. He couldn’t make out who was who, didn’t know where he should aim. He was breathing fast and hard; his stomach seemed so tight it would fold in on itself.
A bright burst of light blossomed from ten feet away and Crow felt something rip into his thigh. He screamed, dropping his gun. He’d been hit, goddamnit!
Someone had hands on him and he tried to lash out, but stopped in time to keep from knocking Heddy away. She felt along his body and then the floor until she found the gun.
The whole room lit up with sound and smoke. Heddy and the man with the gun spattered the darkness with rapid-fire blinks of harsh white blasts.
Crow ducked, covering his head with his arms, squirming and moaning from the scalding hot pain shooting up from his thigh. He expected to be hit again, to die here on the floor of a filthy house on the night before the door opened to real freedom. He was yelling without knowing it, “Nononononono...!” He was panicked to the point of insanity.
The firing ceased and the clicking of a hammer on an empty cylinder was all that remained. Crow threw off his arms from around his head and tried to see something, anything. Heddy kneeled over him, her legs against his back, and it was she who was holding out the revolve
r before her, clicking and clicking on dead air. She finally slumped back on her heels.
“Is he...?”
Heddy said nothing. She lowered the gun and finally dropped it to the floor. Crow could now hear the little girl crying from somewhere across the room. He saw shadows entering a doorway from the back of the house. Jay said, “Is it over? Heddy? Heddy, are you all right?”
#
DADDY was the one who got the flashlight and found the dead man. The other man was hurt, but not dead. He was shot twice, once in the stomach and once in his arm. Daddy moved the flashlight beam over his body, the blood showing up like black spots against the man’s clothes. He was sprawled on the floor like a baby, holding both hands over his stomach and crying now. He’d been shot in the same place as the boy at the motel days before. In his stomach.
“Help me, I’m dying,” he said to Daddy.
Swinging the light away from him, Daddy rested it on Crow. Heddy was helping him to sit up. There was blood coming from his leg, staining the floor black. “You’re shot,” Daddy said.
“Yeah, he was hit in the leg,” Heddy said. She pulled her bag over to her and drew out a tee shirt. She took it by the neck and ripped it down the center, jerking at the material and cursing when it failed to give the first couple of tries.
“I’m dying!” The man said again.
Daddy kept the light on Crow’s upper leg while Heddy wrapped the shirt around it twice and tied it in a knot.
“How are you going to cross the border like that?” Daddy asked.
“Are you always so goddamn practical?” Heddy yelled.
“I’m a cop.” He shrugged as if to say it was expected of cops to make practical remarks and to think ahead.
BAD TRIP SOUTH Page 18