by Ed Gorman
“She didn’t come to my bed,” I reminded him.
“I should have told someone.”
“Who could you tell?” I finally said.
“Right. Who could I tell?” He got up and began to pace. “Certainly not Mother.”
“Mr. Tyson?” I guessed. He turned around startled, then nodded. “You always went to him with all your problems, didn’t you?”
He laughed harshly. “Yes, I went to Mr. Tyson. All the kids with problems turned up in his classroom after school.”
I nodded, wondering if every high school had a Mr. Tyson. Certainly the school where I spent forty years did — a Mrs. Philpot — but it was usually a man, and one the other teachers loathed.
“And he came up with the idea of finding men who would pay to sleep with Ronnie,” I said rushing now to get the words out.
I didn’t even realize I had said it aloud until I saw Jim staring at me, his face full of shock. “What men?” So Jim was still going to shade the truth, I thought angrily. There would be certain parts of the story that went unexplained. “I went to Mr. Tyson,” Jim continued, ignoring my interruption, “and he agreed to come home with me to tell Ronnie that her behavior was inappropriate, or whatever the phrase was then. I had no doubt he could make her understand. He seemed omnipotent to me at fifteen.”
“So you brought him home?”
He nodded. “You were in school, and Mother was out on a job. Mr. Tyson asked me to leave them alone, which made sense. I didn’t want to hear what he said to Ronnie anyway, so I went out into the yard and fed the chickens or something. Then, after a bit — maybe fifteen minutes — I went back in.”
“He hadn’t harmed her?” I asked, dreading his reply.
“No,” Jim said hesitantly and I saw from his eyes he was back in that front room. “Ronnie was already gone and Mr. Tyson was sitting on the couch.”
“Probably scared her to death.” I remembered Tyson as an ugly man, nearly trollish with impossibly red hair.
“He assured me he’d made some progress although ‘feebleminded girls’ don’t learn easily. His words. Then he asked about our financial problems.”
“You told him about our debts?”
“I had a strange need to tell him everything, I’m afraid.”
“Then how did it come around him seeing Ronnie alone again?”
Jim frowned. “It didn’t come around to Ronnie, Rose. It was me he wanted.”
“Oh, no.”
He cleared his throat. “Wasn’t a complete surprise. Overtures had been made in the months before. And when I told him about Ronnie, suggesting that he come home and speak to her, it may have looked like … something else.”
“You’re being too easy on him.” I said shuddering. “Children always think they bring these things on. They never do.”
“I was used to his hand on my shoulder, a pat on my head. I had stopped flinching months earlier.” I nodded. “When it was over that day, he placed a five-dollar bill on the table. I let it sit there until he started the car. Then I shoved it in my pocket. He came back again and again. Until I had the money for Mother. I forget how many times.”
“Twelve,” I told him. We were both sobbing quietly. Neither of us was good at it though, and we stopped as quickly as we started, looking at each other with tear-stained faces.
“He left little notes for me in my locker. Saying he’d be free that night. Signing them with his initials — in some ornate script. Like I might mistake them as notes from someone else.” Jim shook his head. “He wasn’t very good at it, the sex, I mean. It was always over quickly, with him looking embarrassed, anxious to get back to talking about a book he wanted me to read. Or a piece of music he’d heard. Sometimes he just wanted to hold me … for as long as I let him.” He paused. “That was even creepier to me, not understanding the need for tenderness at fifteen.”
“So it was you who saved us? All these years, I thought it was Ronnie.”
“I put that in your head, I guess. Couldn’t bear to have you know it was Tyson and me up there.” Our eyes floated up simultaneously. We sat silently for a few minutes, remembering the events of that year. “Jim,” I finally said, “then why did Dr. Large have Ronnie sterilized? Why did you go to him if she wasn’t sleeping with men?”
“She continued coming to my bed,” he admitted. “I could resist her advances, but someone else might not. She was alone in that house too much.”
“So when Dr. Large saw she was no longer a virgin he suggested sterilizing her?”
Jim nodded. “He didn’t once ask me who it was. I’m sure he thought it was some neighborhood boy. Or me. I still think it was the right thing for Ronnie. She could never have raised a child.”
I wasn’t sure about that but let it pass. “Well, you were right not to tell me, I guess. I don’t think I would have understood any of it for years. I wonder what happened to him? Mr. Tyson.”
“I’m sure he’s dead.”
“Then you never had the chance to even things up? To get your revenge?” I looked at him closely. He was examining the clock again. “He just disappeared? And then you took off too.”
“I did even things up,” Jim said, his voice shaky. I nodded hesitantly, afraid he’d say he’d murdered Tyson. “I kept all his — assignation notes, I guess you’d call them that — in that Typhoo tea can where I had stowed the money and when I was ready to leave a few years later, I handed them over to the police. All eleven of them.” He shuddered a bit.
“Did they do anything? The police?” In those days, men were given more leeway than now.
“You know how things like this were dealt with back then. Or maybe you don’t.” He sighed. “They convinced me a trial wasn’t in my best interest, that they would take care of it themselves — quietly. When I put up a bit of a fuss, they reminded that he’d probably done it again. With some other desperate kid.” Jim took a breath. “And then I remembered seeing another younger boy following him to his car several times. I finally agreed to let them handle it. I think they probably did something pretty awful.”
“They wouldn’t just let him go on to another school.”
“No. Anyway, I never saw Tyson again after that. The locker door in his classroom was hanging open the next day, all his things gone. Even the teapot he always kept on his desk, his books, the old blue cardigan he kept on the hook.”
I shook my head. Jim, boy that he was, had driven off both men who threatened our family. We went along to dinner soon after, my brother and me, trying as hard as we could to pretend were like anyone else out to a Sunday dinner. We ordered wine, dessert and an after-dinner brandy. From the smiling and attentive service we received, I’m sure the waitress thought we were an elderly married couple out on an anniversary or a birthday, with children and grandchildren waiting our safe return before dark.
PATRICIA ABBOTT has published more than fifty short stories in various literary and crime fiction publications including Murdaland, Plots with Guns, Pulp Pusher, The Thrilling Detective, Hardluck Stories, Spinetingler, Beat to the Pulp and Thuglit. Her story “My Hero” won a 2008 Derringer Award and her story “A Saving Grace,” (The Thrilling Detective) was included in A Prisoner Of Memory, an anthology of 2007’s best crime fiction. She lives and works in Detroit, Michigan. Visit her at http://pattinase.blogspot.com.
Crossroads
BY BILL CRIDER
They hadn’t killed anybody in three weeks. Roy Barker, for one, was getting bored.
“Let’s go on back to Fort Worth,” he said. He bounced up and down a couple of times in the back seat of the flathead Ford. “I’m tired of hicks and sticks.”
Roy, Dub Dooley, and Jack Scratch had spent a lot of time in west central Texas lately, always on the move, passing through dusty little towns with names like Eden, Rising Star, Mullen, and Zephyr, spending the nights in Brownwood and Ballinger, drifting as far as Abilene and San Angelo, knocking over a hayseed bank now and then but never having any fun, at least not enough for R
oy.
“They don’t like us much in Fort Worth,” Dub said, and he grinned.
Dub was the driver. He was thick-waisted and wide-shouldered, with muscles like steel cables. He had a high voice, almost like a woman’s, not that anybody would ever mention that to him, not if they knew him. Roy had seen him break a man’s back over a saloon chair once, just because he didn’t like the way the man looked at him. It didn’t take a lot to set Dub off.
“The cops in Fort Worth would just as soon kill us as put us in jail,” Dub said. “Sooner.”
A month ago, they’d robbed a bank in Fort Worth and killed a couple of guys, one of them the bank guard. Cops didn’t like that kind of thing, but it didn’t bother Roy any. Didn’t bother Dub, either. Roy didn’t think it bothered Jack, but Jack kept telling them it wasn’t time to go back to Fort Worth, like he had something in mind, but if he did, he never said what it was.
“How about it, Jack,” Roy said. He clasped his pudgy fingers almost as if he were praying. “What say we go back to Fort Worth, have us a little fun?”
Jack Scratch looked as if he needed a shave, but he always looked that way. He sat in the passenger seat, looked out the window at the brown, dry pastures.
“Not yet,” he said without turning around.
Roy sighed.
It didn’t do to get Jack upset. He didn’t have a temper like Dub’s, but if you got him upset, he’d take care of you, all right. Jack was the boss. They’d all agreed to that. There hadn’t been any argument about it. They did what Jack said.
Roy settled back in the seat and shut up. It was hot in the car, and the wind coming in through the open windows didn’t help any. Roy’s shirt was sticking to him under his suit coat. He wished he had a beer, or anything cold to drink, even if it was just water, but he didn’t see any stores around. He didn’t see much of anything but flat brown land and cotton stalks sucked dry and turned brown by the sun.
The Ford wheeled on down the dirt road, dragging a rooster-tail of dust behind.
The old man sat with his chair tipped back against the wall of his little one-pump service station and store that was the only building at the crossroads. He wore a blue cotton work shirt and overalls faded almost white. The boards behind him were weathered gray where the paint had peeled off.
The sun had come up behind the building a couple of hours earlier, but the old man was still in the shade. He looked down the road and saw the kid coming.
This was the third day in a row the kid had showed up at just about the same time of morning. The old man had been more or less expecting him.
An armadillo ran out of a field of dead weeds and dried cornstalks where a scarecrow hung on a cross. Its clothes weren’t much more than rags, and it had a rope for a belt. The old man didn’t think it had scared any crows, but the corn crop had been so bad it didn’t matter.
The armadillo stopped at the edge of the dirt road and sat still, looking like a ridged brown rock. It was almost as if it had been waiting for the kid. The previous day when the kid came along, a hawk had appeared out of nowhwere. It had swooped down from the sky and landed on the fence, and the day before that a jackrabbit had come loping up from somewhere or other. All of them had given the kid a good long look.
The old man didn’t blame them. This was the kind of kid who bore watching. He’d showed up at the store with a pistol sticking in the waistband of his pants, pulling them way down on his hips. The pistol was an old M1911 that someone, maybe the kid’s daddy, maybe not, had brought home from the war twenty years ago. What the old man could see of it was black and shiny, like it had been taken good care of.
“What you doin’ with that gun,” the old man had asked the first day. “You worried about desperay-does?”
The kid didn’t crack a smile. He wasn’t more than thirteen. The freckles across his face and the cowlick in his red hair made him look even younger, but he was big for his age.
“Not worried about a thing,” he said. “Brought it with me in case a bear got after me.”
There hadn’t been a bear in that country in the old man’s lifetime, and he doubted if there had ever been one. But the kid didn’t appear to be funning him.
“I got me a nickel for a co’ cola,” the kid said. “You got one for sale?”
They had gone inside, where the old man’s wife stood behind the counter near the cash register. That was her job, standing there and taking the money for cash purchases. She had a wooden chair that she sat in sometimes, but mostly she stood up so she could watch and make sure the infrequent customers didn’t try to make off with a can of beans. She didn’t say anything as the old man got the kid a coke from the red and white cooler. “Ice Cold” it said on the side, which was right because the bottles were kept on ice, mostly melted since the delivery the day before. The old man popped the cap off the coke in the opener on the side of the cooler and the cap pinged into the catcher.
“You gonna show Ma that nickel, or you gonna stick me up?” he said.
The kid reached in his pocket and brought out the nickel. The old man nodded at his wife, and the kid took her the coin. She looked at it and rang up the sale. The cash register dinged, and the drawer slid open. The old woman dropped the coin into a space in the wooden drawer, then shut it.
The kid walked back to the old man and took the coke. The old man went back outside and sat in his chair.
“He say anything to you?” the old man asked his wife that night. They lived in a couple of small rooms in back of the store.
“Never a word,” she said. “Just drank down the coke and looked around at the stock.”
There wasn’t much stock to speak of. Nobody around those parts had enough money to buy much more than a candy bar every now and then, or a few groceries when they had to have something they couldn’t grow for themselves. Wasn’t much growing, though, what with the dry weather. Some people went hungry. More than a few.
“What you reckon he’s doing here?” the old man said.
His wife shook her head. “I wouldn’t know. I think he’s the Martins’ boy.”
The old man knew about the Martins. So poor, they’d make church mice look richer than Ben Gump. They’d moved onto the old Fallon place a month or two ago. They never came to the store because they didn’t have the money, and they must have known they couldn’t get anything on the credit.
“Long as he’s polite and don’t bother us, I don’t mind him coming by,” the old woman said. “His money’s good as anybody’s, even if he does have a gun stuck down his pants.”
“I guess so,” the old man said, but he worried about it.
That was the way it had gone for two days now. The old man wondered where the kid got the nickels. Surely not from his folks, not if they were the Martins.
And then there was the pistol, but the old man didn’t ask how the kid had come by it, and the kid didn’t say. He just showed up with his pistol and his nickel, hung around like he was waiting for something while he drank his coke, and then left.
He was right on time this morning. He stopped and looked at the armadillo. The ‘dillo looked back at him, then took off at a scoot. People didn’t think ‘dillos could run, but they could. Fast, too, and this one disappeared into the cornstalks as if he hadn’t ever been there. The kid plodded on toward the store.
The old man shook his head and tilted the chair forward until its front legs hit the ground. Then he got up and went inside to get the kid his co’ cola.
Dub swerved the car, trying to hit the armadillo that appeared out of the field and ran in front of the car. Dub didn’t like animals that interfered with his driving. He missed the armadillo, but the swaying of the car tossed Jack and Roy around in their seats.
“Dammit,” Roy said. “Be careful, Dub. You’re liable to throw me out of this thing.”
Dub half-turned his head so he could see Roy. “You trying to tell me how to drive?”
Roy was sorry he’d said anything. Dub was hot and touchy.
“You better not mean to.”
Roy thought about how he’d like to punch Dub, break a few of his teeth or his nose.
“There’s a store at the crossroads up ahead,” Jack Scratch said, breaking up Roy’s train of thought. “You can get yourself a cold drink there, Roy.”
Roy knew the store would be there, just the way Jack said it would. Sometimes Jack knew things that he shouldn’t have any way of knowing. Roy thought it was creepy, but he didn’t say so. It didn’t seem to bother anybody else.
“You want something, Dub?” Jack said.
“Wouldn’t mind a co’ cola.”
“That’d be good,” Roy said. His fingers twitched. “We gonna pay for ‘em?”
“Sure we are,” Jack said.
Roy frowned and started to say something, but Jack didn’t let him. “I mean it. Mind your manners. We’re just three law-abiding gentleman, enjoying a day in the country.”
“Right,” Dub said in his woman’s voice.
Roy figured Dub didn’t like the idea of having to pay for anything any more than Roy did, even if it was just a coke. They had guns, and they liked to use them. Out in this godforsaken country, there wasn’t anybody to stop them. Except for Jack Scratch.
“There it is,” Dub said.
Sure enough the store was just down the road a way. Roy saw it though a shimmering haze of heat. It looked like a half-strong wind would blow it over on its side.
“We’re about out of gas,” Dub said.
Jack told him to pull up by the pump, and Dub did. An old man came out of the store. He started toward the car, then stopped when Jack got out. Roy pushed the seat over and got out of the back, and Dub got out on the driver’s side. They all wore black suits with the coats on so the pistols in their shoulder holsters wouldn’t show.
“Fill ‘er up,” Dub said.
The old man blinked and swallowed a couple of times.