by Frank Bill
What had happened to her started to come in pieces, as if they’d been torn from a magazine, then wadded and tossed into the garbage, and now she was picking them out and unfolding them. Piece by piece. Taking in the distorted puzzle.
She’d left her husband, Moon. Met Clay at some bar to tell him. But Clay left her at that bar feeling used and getting drunk with that oily bartender who came on to her. But she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten here. Wherever here was.
She glanced back at the room, wondering how long she’d been there. Her eyes worked their way up along the ceiling, which was stained with large brown splotches as if someone had slung coffee on it. Then back down onto the wall decorated by torn chunks of wallpaper that led to the thin outline of light framing a door covered in nicks and scratches. She heard men speaking in irritated tones on the other side.
“How damn much you give her, little brother?”
“A teardrop’s all.” The bartender’s voice.
“Teardrops my ass, she’s out like a blown bulb and no replacement.”
“Scout’s honor, Cecil.”
“Lester, you ain’t never been no damn Boy Scout.”
“So?”
“So, your honor ain’t worth a goat’s sack, you got about as much sense as an empty piggy bank.”
“Well, if it’s empty, they ain’t no cents.”
“I rest my case. Now let me see that damn bottle of Georgia Home Boy you give to the ol’ gal.”
“Here.”
“Shit fire, little brother, you might’ve poisoned her ass.”
“Shit, that’s all we need, to have poisoned a conservation officer’s wife.”
“A what? You stupid son of a bitch, you mean to tell me her old man’s a damn squirrel cop and you knew it? Still doped her and let us bring her here anyway?”
“Why, yeah.”
“You are about as dumb as an inbred hound dog. You know I’ve got warrants out on me. Damn, little brother. Damn.”
Ina lay listening in a panic. Her insides felt like an overtrained muscle: stiff, tight, sore. She knew they’d had their way with her but not what they’d used to do it. To make her feel spooned out and weak. They knew her husband was law enforcement. Hearing the conflict in the men’s tones forced Ina to believe the man she’d run out on could become a reason for her demise. She needed to get out of here, but didn’t know where here was.
Ina played possum, keeping her eyes shut as the large outline got up off her. She listened to him breathing as he pulled his pants on, his belt buckle rattling. Then his shirt and his boots. Laces smacking the floor. His stopping to pull a cigarette from his pack. The flick of his lighter. The scent of butane. The smell of smoke as he opened the door, filling the room with light from the kitchen. Cecil’s voice called out, “Melvin, listen to what our little brother got our asses into.” The door closed.
And Cecil said, “Ain’t like we can just put her vehicle on some back road, leave her behind the wheel like all the others, let her wake up confused and violated with no recall to what happened.”
“Why the hell not?”
“’Cause, dumb ass, you done brought home damaged goods, her old man being a squirrel cop and all. Shit, he’ll fingerprint her body, her clothing, and the vehicle. Do all sorts of that DNA shit. Find dirt from our boots or hair from one of our heads. Trace it back to us.”
“That’s right, that’s why we got no other choice, little brother. I ain’t going back to jail for some old bored housewife piece of ass.”
“I guess they could do some of that blood work and find out what we give to her, maybe even who we got it from, and they’d narc us out.”
“That’s right, now you’re thinking, little brother.”
“So what are we gonna do?”
“Real simple. First thing, her car, get Luke and his brothers, who inherited Malone’s Salvage Yard. They can strip down that damn Toyota of hers for scrap. They’ll separate and sell it between here, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.”
“What about her?”
“We’ll dispose of her. Need to make a call to Mr. Masonry, Nelson Dean, down in Tennessee. He can put her ass in with someone’s foundation.”
“That sounds a bit risky, could get caught or something.” She could hear the nervousness in Lester’s voice.
“Ain’t got caught yet. Besides, you might have give her too much Georgia Home Boy. She might be in a coma. Regardless, we gotta get rid of her so her old man don’t get nosy.”
“Shit, Cecil, you’re talking kind of crazy.”
“You backing out on us?”
“If you are, best think long and hard about your words. I done told you I ain’t going back to jail for no dumb-shit little brother who got us into this mess to begin with.”
“No, no, I’m in, I’m in. Just ain’t never took no person’s life is all.”
Lester had only done it for a piece of ass. His brothers were too big for him to handle. If he tried something they might bury his ass out back beneath the outhouse or right along with Ina. He had no other choice.
“Melvin, you go on down to Kenny’s and use his phone, give Nelson Dean a call. If he ain’t home, leave a message, tell him Cecil’s got another squirrel stuck in the transformer. If he’s home, get a price. But if he ain’t, leave Kenny’s number and tell Kenny to come get us as soon as Nelson calls back.”
Ina lay listening, realizing she was right, the mentioning of Moon and who he was had brought on panic that wouldn’t end well for her. Anxiety coursed through her veins. She thought she could feel her legs, then her feet, and she struggled up out of the bed.
The room was off balance. Her body felt brittle. Her heart beat in rapid thuds. She had a shortness of breath, as if the room were without air. Her head reeled as her legs twitched across the cold wood. She knelt down with the room tilting and spinning. Dug through what she believed to be her clothing. Her hands struggled with her panties, skirt, shirt, socks, jacket, and shoes. Her whole body quaked as she got dressed. She felt the warm tears climbing down her face.
She looked for a window, some form of escape, but found nothing. Just the thirteen-inch television that sat on the dresser next to the door. And a flash of memory lit up her mind, the smell of a used diaper in her face and a voice laughing. “She might show you a few things, Lester.”
She closed her eyes, pressed her palms into her face, and wiped the tears. Her arms tensed and shook with the hurt of this memory. She paused, tried to keep herself together, and listened to the words outside the bedroom, speaking about her as if her existence were the lowest link on the chain of life. Why, she asked herself, why had they done this to her?
She’d heard something about Melvin going to Kenny’s to use the phone. She wondered who Kenny was. Then she heard footsteps. A door opening. Closing. Then a slamming screen door. Feet shuffling about in the kitchen. Then silence. The slamming of a car door somewhere. Then a loud engine came to life and slowly became more and more distant.
When the bedroom’s doorknob turned, she panicked, not knowing who it was or what she’d do. Weak and lightheaded, she grabbed the only thing she could, the thirteeninch black-and-white television. She struggled to raise it above her head.
Ina exploded the television over Cecil’s skull. Lester was right behind him, wedged in between not wanting to get caught and unsure about killing Ina. He felt a pinch of relief when Cecil tumbled to the floor. Until Ina came at him like a starved leper in search of food, screaming, “Why’d you do this to me?”
The fingers on both of her hands spread wide. Flashes sparked in her head as she pushed Lester backwards across the kitchen. She remembered him giving her coffee at the bar. Then the blackout. When her eyes opened back up, she stood in the room, everything slanting and twirling as hands tugged at her clothing. Unable to fight, she felt weightless as a palm pushed her backwards and she stumbled onto the mattress.
And now Ina pushed Lester and screamed, “Answer me! Why?” Lester lost h
is footing and his skull met the kitchen countertop’s edge. By the time he hit the mildewed floor, his mind and all his motor skills were heated peanut butter. He was blinking in and out, and Ina began stomping him, remembering the tree-bark hands groping her breasts, wrenching her wrists above her head, followed by the grunts that hammered through her mind as her eyes focused on that thirteen-inch television.
Lester’s frame twitched as if he were getting an electric shock. Ina’s chest burned and throbbed as her air began to disappear, she thought she was having a heart attack. Pictures, tastes, and smells played over and over in her head, and Ina stopped kicking him.
Lester lay on the kitchen floor, a limp pile of blood and pale skin sheathing bone. Ina breathed hard as she struggled out the kitchen door. Anger and revulsion carried her into the yellow-and-orange-leaf-coated yard. The air was cold and Ina’s heart pounded as she crumpled across the leaves and recognized her truck in the drive. The door was unlocked. The keys were in the ignition. She had started the vehicle, not knowing where she was, when Cecil exploded through the screen door, screaming like drunk trailer trash with a severed tongue. Seeing him, Ina slammed the Cruiser into drive, her heart contracting in her temples. She cut the wheel toward him as he stumbled toward the Toyota, his face blotted red like a melting candle, the fragments of the television’s glass separating his features. Ina clipped him with the front fender and dropped him to the ground. She cut the wheel again, driving through the yard, slinging mud and leaves through the air to coat Cecil’s twitching body.
Ina kept the gas pedal floored down the driveway of mud and potholes. The seat thudded beneath her. When she saw blacktop, she twisted the wheel to the right, tires barking onto the back road pavement.
Ina thought about the words spoken by Lester and his brothers as they discussed her like she was just a piece of meat. An animal to be slaughtered and forgotten. She felt the soreness from within, remembering more and more. She’d been raped repeatedly. She thought about the vows she’d broken, causing all of this. And tears saturated her cheeks.
Her chest ached and her vision fogged as she sped down the unknown back road that rushed beneath her truck’s tires. Until all at once she thought to herself, This must be what it’s like to drown.
Her heart pounded less. Her lungs tightened. She began to gasp for air. She clutched the wheel and kept the accelerator to the floor as her head began to blur. Her every breath was pain. Her chest was getting heavier and heavier, like her foot on the gas. Then the cold aching sweat trembled her body all the way down through her arms and legs, meeting her hands and feet. Her front tire hit a ditch. Then the large oak tree she’d not even seen coming head-on at eighty-some miles per hour stopped her Cruiser. She shattered through the windshield and flew out into the woods that enclosed her.
The steam of Moon’s coffee cup fed the air in his kitchen as he asked Detective Mitchell, “No trace of her body?”
“Just her Cruiser smashed into that oak tree. Any reason for her being way down in Orange County?”
“None that I know of.”
“You say you had an argument the night before?”
“Right.”
“And you came home late after the shooting of Rusty Yates and Ina wasn’t home?”
“Right. I figured she was visiting her friend, Myrtle. I started drinking to blow off some steam. Then I found this letter. She quit me.”
Detective Mitchell studied the letter. Looked back at Moon. “Sorry, Moon.”
Moon exhaled. “It don’t make any damn sense why a person would take Ina from where she wrecked.”
“Foul play.”
“You mean she could’ve seen something she wasn’t supposed to.”
“Look, all county and state police know is she flew through the windshield when she hit that tree. Landed out in the woods. They found where she landed and some boot prints.”
“And nothing else?”
“Nothing.”
Cold, Hard Love
Disgust lined the burger grease that coated Carol’s skin and mixed with the pain that arced through her wrists and ankles, pooled into blisters from waiting tables at Jocko’s Diner. She told her husband, “Bellmont, you gotta do it tonight. Between pulling doubles and hearing that old spindle’s words day after day, I cain’t take much more.”
Aft er ten years of employment Bellmont had lost his job at the Brown & Williamson tobacco plant. Drained Carol and his savings, had to sell their home and move to her father’s thousand-acre hog farm. They rested their heads in the old cabin her father had built next to him when his mother was ailing. And now, like his wife’s, every muscle in Bellmont’s body spasmed with ache, from his daily laboring on that farm, working for his father-in-law. Today he’d dug fence-post holes for a new hog pen. And Carol’s disdain made the physical pain that much worse. “Maybe if we sold your car we could take that money, wager on some fights down at the tavern, win enough to stretch things out a few weeks more.”
Pink flushed over Carol’s cheeks and she said, “You want to sell my Iroc? That’s your solution? What’s next, the clothes off our backs, shoes from our feet? You just want to wait for him to die? Hope he just falls over? That ain’t never gonna happen.”
Bellmont ran a hand through his corroded mane, knowing Carol was right, they couldn’t keep going down this road of scratching and scraping to get by. Eating what she brought home from Jocko’s every evening, washing it down with a few paper sacks of his Budweiser or her Pabst. He said, “Carol, we gotta make sure our ducks are lined. We’re talkin’ about takin’ a person’s life.”
Carol’s back rang stiff with hurt as she rolled her blue eyes and said, “What about our life? Don’t we figure into the picture?”
Fault-line cracks seamed Bellmont’s forehead and he said, “Of course we do, baby, I just want us to have one together, not you visitin’ me in the pokey on weekends.”
A bead of moisture driveled from Carol’s sparrow shade of hair, bit her eye with the lunch special from Jocko’s, fried tenderloin, mashed potatoes with white gravy, flaking roll with butter, and the choice of greens or corn. She blinked it away, felt her threadworm lips crook with a caustic taste. “Don’t baby me. You the one come up with this plan from all your daddy’s folklore. And you been puttin’ it off for months.”
Isaiah McGill, Bellmont’s daddy, had sketched words into his son’s mind when he was a boy maturing into a man. Stories of horse dealers, fortune-tellers, bootleggers, gypsies, boxers, and wrestlers of eighteenth-century Ireland congregating once a year, bartering steins of whiskey until the unrest turned unruly and fists were traded and bodies were bruised and the Donnybrook was born.
Bellmont was going to build the Donnybrook in the backwoods of southern Indiana. Use the soil, rock, and trees of his father-in-law’s land. Do it by hand and word of mouth. He’d update his daddy’s stories to the present day. Only it wouldn’t be just one day, it would be a three-day bare-knuckle tournament held once a year. Out among other farmers, fishermen, factory workers, and hunters. Where working-class men still held a grasp on life. The farm had plenty of acreage for expanding, building more than one pit to fight in. Barns to be turned into sleeping quarters and training areas. Best of all, it was secluded. The problem was they needed money and the farm.
“I can’t just run over and wring that fucker’s neck, we have to make it look like he did it to himself.”
The folklore from Bellmont streamed through Carol’s mind as it had every day since he told her the stories. Giving her hope for a life devoid of struggle. And when Bellmont turned his back, stepped into the nicked hallway toward the bathroom to take a piss, steps creaked across the pine floor behind him. Hearing this, he half-turned into the clawing nails of Carol. His rhythm of thought was sheared from his mind. Carol’s hands worked at his thorny cheeks. Scraped flesh like it was plowed soil. His footing slipped and, before he knew it, his head and back slammed onto the hallway floor. Carol straddled Bellmont and he gasped, “The hell
is gone wrong with your brainpan?”
On top of Bellmont, the folklore in Carol’s mind turned to tears, washed down her cheeks and highlighted the corners of her mouth, and she cried, “Tired of this scratchin’ to see another day while that smug son of a bitch judges us like we spend our days takin’ handouts. You promised me you’d do it.”
Bellmont wheezed. He’d lost the wind from his lungs. He pushed one hand beneath Carol’s chin, held her jarring profile and the glare of her desperation, with his other he grabbed and calmed her tilling hands, and said, “It’ll be okay, baby, it’ll be okay.”
Only one thing could coax Carol when she was this worked up. She twisted a hand free, lifted her weight from Bellmont, reached and tugged at the zipper of his jeans.
Bellmont rocked Carol up, trying to get from beneath her, rattled her head into the wall. “Shit!” she screamed and guided herself to standing. Before he could say he was sorry, she was rubbing her head, mascara running like watercolors from her eyes, and she yelled, “Damn you!”
Bellmont sat on the hallway floor, watched Carol stomp into the kitchen, grab her car keys. She turned and stared at him, said, “Can’t keep doing this, you got to do it tonight!”
Bellmont stood up as he watched her walk away, knowing he couldn’t put it off any longer. Listening to the cabin’s front door slam shut, the V8 of Carol’s Iroc-Z rumble to life, tires spinning gravel against the cabin, Bellmont knew she needed time to simmer down, knew where Carol was headed, but he had no road map for the territory he was about to cross.
The past months had created one scar after the next. Bellmont and Carol had planned on having a child before he lost his job. Then, one month after moving to the farm, Carol found her mother, Aggie, laid out in the farmhouse’s bathroom. Her three-pack-a-day habit had brought on a fit of coughing. Aggie lost her balance. She fell backwards. Mainlined the toilet’s porcelain.