by Alex Bledsoe
Don tossed a twenty on the table and pulled Susie out the door after him. When they were in the car she said, “That little skank called me a gook, did you hear that?”
“I did.”
“And they called you a Tufa. What was that about?”
“Guess that’s what we look like to them.”
“Well, we won’t be coming back here again, that’s for sure.” She glared through the windshield at the restaurant. “And their corporate headquarters will be getting one nasty e-mail.”
Don put the car in gear and backed out of the lot. He turned toward Needsville, then caught himself and headed instead toward home. After a few moments of silence Susie said, “Okay, now that I’m past the whole ‘gook’ thing, I have to ask. If I was seeing things correctly, you sang a song to that boy and he freaked out.”
“Yeah. It just popped into my head. Weird, huh?”
“Weird, huh,” she agreed. She watched him drive for a while and said, “It’s like you’re turning into a different person.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“In a bad way?”
“I don’t know. Not yet. I guess it depends on where it stops.” She reached over and took his hand. “I’m proud of you for standing up to that guy, though. There was a time you wouldn’t have done that.”
“You could still make a case that it wasn’t terribly smart.”
“Oh, it was completely idiotic. He could’ve mopped the floor with you, and dusted the shelves with what was left over. But it was still a brave thing to do.”
He smiled and squeezed her hand back. But inside he felt a little jolt of fear. Who was he turning into? Or what?
* * *
The Pair-A-Dice roadhouse was, and always had been, neutral territory. Tufa from either side could eat, drink, and play with no fear of reprisal or confrontation. It allowed musicians to jam who never played together anywhere else. Those rare outsiders who stumbled onto the place swore it was the best music they’d ever heard, played by beat-up old men who looked like they’d just walked in out of the fields.
Kell Hyatt desperately wanted a drink, a song, and some time away from the drama at home. The tension between Bronwyn and their mother made the air around them crackle, and their father certainly wasn’t going to intercede. Most of the time Kell admired Deacon, but on days like this he really wondered what the old man considered important. He seemed blithely unconcerned with Chloe’s impending death or Bronwyn’s shifting personality, content to attribute both to the will of the night wind.
“Well, if it ain’t the prodigal Hyatt,” the bartender said. “I guess you didn’t get a parade like your sister, did you?”
Kell knew there was no harm intended in the joke, but it annoyed him just the same. “Parades ain’t for the people on the floats, they’re for the ones watching it go by.”
The bartender whistled, mock impressed. He was one of Rockhouse’s people, but at the Pair-A-Dice he usually he didn’t go out of his way to be obnoxious. “I should write that one down.”
“Write it on my ass while you’re kissing it,” Kell said, took his beer, and moved away. The bartender laughed behind him.
He sipped his beer and looked for a place to sit. Benches ran along three of the big room’s four sides, leaving gaps for the bandstand and bar. The walls were lined with wood paneling that should have ruined the acoustics but somehow didn’t. The tables and chairs were an eclectic mismatched lot, as were the glasses and utensils. Torn, stained posters and faded photos lined the walls; they depicted the greats and also-rans of Southern music. Some of the posters went back more than sixty years, to a time when giants like Hank Williams walked the earth in a haze of whiskey-drenched loneliness.
He sat on one of the benches that ran along the bar. He drank half his beer in one swallow, then leaned back and closed his eyes. Not for the first time, he was glad he wasn’t a Tufa woman. Being a full-blooded Tufa male had its own baggage, but it involved contests and hierarchies that were simple, if intense. Tufa women always seemed to be nursing secrets and deciding who was worthy to know them. To Kell, that sounded exhausting.
When he opened eyes, Terry-Joe Gitterman stood before him.
“Hey,” Kell said guardedly. “What’s up?”
Terry-Joe nervously stuck his hands in his pockets, then pulled them back out. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Nope.”
Terry-Joe took a chair from a nearby table and straddled it, his arms across the back. “Can I ask you a question and have it just be between you and me?”
Kell frowned. “I don’t know. Is this about Bronwyn?”
Terry-Joe nodded.
“I reckon, then.”
Terry-Joe paused to muster the words. “Do you think … Is Bronwyn still hung up on my brother?”
“Dwayne?” Kell almost barked out the name. He laughed and shook his head. “Honestly, I don’t think Bronwyn would piss on him if he was on fire. It took her a while, but she finally sees him for what he is. No offense.”
“None taken; I know what he is, too.”
Kell was about to ask why Terry-Joe wanted to know, when suddenly he comprehended. Unrequited love was written in the lines of emotional anguish on the younger man’s face. Kell had seen it before, on nice boys who thought they could win Bronwyn away from her own hell-bent desires. None of them had fared well at all.
He chose his words carefully. “Terry-Joe, I should tell you, her leg may be a lot better, but Bronwyn ain’t exactly all there yet. I don’t know if you read about what happened to her—”
“Sure I did.”
“Well, you don’t come back from that in a hurry, no matter how much the music helps. Sometimes you don’t come all the way back at all.”
“She will,” Terry-Joe said with certainty. “I’ve heard her play.”
“I hope you’re right,” Kell said. “But even if she does—”
They both jumped as the front door slammed against the wall. Dwayne Gitterman strode through with a loud, high shout of arrival. He was flushed red with drink and possibly more, and nearly stumbled over someone who couldn’t step aside fast enough. He yelled, “Goddamn, you old fart, can’t you see me comin’?” and slapped the man with his cowboy hat. He looked around and spotted Terry-Joe and Kell; a slow, mean smile split his face.
“Shit,” Terry-Joe said.
“Pretty much,” Kell agreed.
26
Bronwyn was asleep. There were no nightmares in her head, no dreams of fire, or explosions, or heat. She did not taste sand or the salty tang of her own blood. No one screamed her name, or the first syllable of her name before ending in a wet gurgle.
Instead, she wandered through fields and forests, flew over lakes and mossy rocks, and harmonized with the songs that whispered in the wind. She recognized others doing the same, but kept to herself. She would dance and sing and fly with them later.
I am like them, she realized calmly, but also different. I have tasks no one else can do. She felt the calm certainty of that, even if the tasks themselves were a little vague.
Then something tapped at her window.
She opened her eyes in the darkness, instantly wide awake. The dream dissipated, along with the knowledge it held. She lay with her back to the window, facing the closed door to her room. The tapping came again, rapid and insistent.
Had Sally Olds returned? Every tale, every song said that a haint could be sent away by someone who no longer needed its presence, and Bronwyn certainly didn’t need the poor dead girl hanging around. She would decide what memories she wanted, and if they came back, it would be in their own good time, not at the behest of some supernatural nanny trying to force her into a role she had no intention of assuming.
She took a deep breath, exhaled, and rolled over, intending to confront the haint once and for all. She wished she’d remembered to return the protective blue glass to the windowsill. “Goddammit, Sally, I told you—”
She stopped. It wasn�
��t the haint, or at least not the haint she expected. A slender, definitely masculine shape stood silhouetted beyond the window. She could tell instantly that it wasn’t Dwayne, or either of her brothers. Bronwyn drew the covers up to her chest.
The tapping came again.
“Who is it?” she hissed.
“It’s me, Terry-Joe,” he said in a soft, urgent voice. “I have to tell you something, Bronwyn.”
She sighed. With a chuckle at the absurdity of the situation, she swung her legs off the bed and pulled on a T-shirt. “Terry-Joe, I thought we settled—”
“No, it’s not that. Something bad’s happened.”
She frowned. The intensity in his voice was not lust, she realized. It was fear. She went to the window and opened it. “What’s wrong?”
His hair was mussed, and he was out of breath with panic and anxiety. He looked off to the side, mustering his courage. “Bronwyn … Dwayne stabbed Kell.”
The words took several moments to process. “What?”
The words rushed out. “Kell was at the Pair-A-Dice. Dwayne came in and started talking trash about you. Kell took it as long as he could, then smacked him. He was winning the fight when Dwayne pulled a knife and stabbed him.”
Bronwyn couldn’t breathe. “Is he—?”
“No, he’s at the hospital over in Unicorn, they say he’ll be fine. I drove him there; he wouldn’t let me call an ambulance or the police. Said it was just something between him and my brother that they needed to settle. And he made me promise I wouldn’t call you or let anyone else call. Swore me on my word. So I drove out here as quick as I could. You probably want to get your folks out of bed and head down there, to make sure he doesn’t walk off before they finish stitching him up.”
Bronwyn’s hands tightened on the windowsill. Her nails bent painfully against the wood. Rage like she’d never felt built in her chest, crushing more air from her lungs.
“Bronwyn?” Terry-Joe asked.
She reached for her jeans, then stopped in midmotion. “Terry-Joe, how’d you get here?”
“Kell’s car. I still had the keys from driving him to the emergency room. Figured it might keep him at the hospital a while longer.”
She quickly pulled on her pants, then grabbed her tennis shoes and went to the window. She pushed him back and wriggled out. “What are you doing?” Terry-Joe gasped as she nimbly dropped to the ground. Her leg sent a little warning twinge up her spine, but held firm.
“Take me to the hospital,” she said. “I need to know what happened before my parents find out. He won’t tell them the whole truth, I know him. He’ll make it sound like it was all his fault.” She looked up at the boy, and even in the darkness he could see the rage and certainty boiling in her eyes. “Your brother’s gone too far this time, Terry-Joe. Way too far. Now let’s go.”
Terry-Joe hesitated. Bronwyn grabbed the front of his shirt. “Listen to me,” she said, softly but with earth-shaking fervor. “That’s my brother. I will go to him one way or the other, but if you don’t want to help me, then you’re singing harmony with Dwayne.”
“So ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us,’ is that it?” he snapped back.
She released him. “Tonight, yeah, that’s it exactly.”
He sighed. “Come on, then.”
* * *
The highway was deserted between Needsville and Unicorn, except for Trooper Bob Pafford watching from his usual hiding place. It had been a good night so far: two speeding tickets for well over a hundred dollars, and the chance to slap one smart-ass teenager out of sight of the dashboard video camera. Those monitoring devices had made his job much harder, but they also meant each time he outsmarted them, the rush was that much more intense. At his age, it saved him from complacency.
Some nights he looked at himself in the visor mirror, his skin bluish green in the dashboard light, and wondered if somehow he was off the track. He knew his conduct was considered reprehensible, yet he was secure enough not to care; as long as there were punks and smart-asses, he would continue to treat them the way they deserved. It wasn’t about law or ticket quotas, it was about holding the line against disrespect and chaos. Once a society lost its manners, once it flagrantly disregarded its own most basic rules of conduct, it was doomed. And if he had to sting a few cheeks to accomplish this, he would do it and sleep the sleep of the just afterwards.
He recalled his ex-wife, her own cheek bright red from a blow, as she left him for the final time. “If you come near me again,” she’d said in that cold voice of hers, “I’ll kill you. I mean it. You’ve taught me how to get away with it, too. You’re through intimidating me.”
He shook his head at the memory. A few slaps to keep a wife in line were not “beatings.” Choice words to express his righteous displeasure were not “abuse.” It was that therapist of hers, telling her things that directly contradicted everything Pafford knew to be true. If the man hadn’t moved his practice out of state, Pafford would’ve made sure he couldn’t turn around in his driveway without getting a moving violation.
He got the tingle on the back of his neck before he saw the approaching headlights. He watched them grow larger, and experience told him they were well past the posted speed limit of forty-five miles per hour. He smiled, sat up straight, and watched the radar gun’s readout. As the vehicle passed through the beam, the numbers read 72.
He flipped the switches for lights and siren, and spun gravel as he tore out of the roadside park onto the blacktop.
* * *
“Shit,” Terry-Joe muttered when he saw the lights. He immediately pulled over. The shoulder sloped precariously down toward the ditch, tilting the car sideways.
The state trooper pulled in behind them. Terry-Joe sat still, his heart pounding, hands on the steering wheel. He had no doubt who would soon appear at his window. Only one trooper worked off the interstate in Cloud County.
Pafford heaved himself out of his car and walked slowly toward the other vehicle, one hand on the butt of his pistol. He reached the car and tapped on the glass with his flashlight. Terry-Joe rolled it down and was immediately blinded. “Terry-Joe Gitterman,” he drawled. “I’d have expected your brother.”
“You’d be wrong,” Terry-Joe mumbled.
“In kind of a hurry, wasn’t you, son? Where’s the fire?”
“Her brother got took to the hosp—”
Pafford shoved the flashlight slightly, so that the edge around the lens struck Terry-Joe in the temple. The flashlight’s weight did all the work, and the move was invisible to the dashboard camera.
“You need to learn the meaning of ‘ree-torical,’ son. I don’t give a rat’s ass where you Tufa trash were going.”
Terry-Joe’s eyes watered from the blow, and he felt himself turn red with fury. He gingerly touched the side of his head. “Yes, sir,” he said tightly.
Pafford looked into the backseat. “This your car, boy?”
“No, sir. It belongs to Kell Hyatt.”
“Does he know you have it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Pafford shone the light onto his passenger. “And who’s this little piece of ass you’re toting around? Hope she’s over eighteen, for your sake.”
Bronwyn turned and looked straight and steady into the light, willing her eyes not to blink. She heard Pafford gasp in surprise. “Well, I’ll be a goddamned monkey in the zoo. If it ain’t the Bronwynator. Now, I happen to know you’re over eighteen, but I can’t quite recall Mr. Gitterman’s age here. You wouldn’t be out corruptin’ a minor in your big brother’s car, would you?”
“My brother,” she said quietly, “is in the hospital in Unicorn. He got stabbed tonight.”
He snorted. “I bet he did. Probably some blonde’s boyfriend did it. You Tufa boys love chasing white women, don’t you?” He withdrew the flashlight and slapped the roof of the car. “I smell marijuana,” he said loudly, for the camera’s benefit. “Both of you, step out of the car now. Keep your hands where I can see
them.”
Terry-Joe and Bronwyn did as instructed. They put their hands on the edge of the car’s roof, and Pafford quickly patted Terry-Joe down. Then he turned to Bronwyn.
He took a moment to savor this. Leaned forward, tight jeans hugging her firm ass, she was a sight, and he made sure to take his time. She wore no bra under her T-shirt, and he let his thick fingers caress the sides of her breasts through the cotton. He moved to her waist, then down the sides of her thighs. He grunted as he knelt to continue down.
He stopped suddenly. “How come one of your legs is so much bigger than the other one?”
“I just got one out of a cast,” Bronwyn said through clenched teeth. “The muscle’s all—”
She gasped with agony as he dug one huge iron-fingered hand into the tender skin of her injured calf. Her leg collapsed, and she fell to the ground. Her vision went hazy, and little sparks swirled around the edges.
Terry-Joe jumped back and said, “What the hell, man! You know she was hurt in the war!”
Pafford’s gun was in his hand without a conscious thought. He pointed it at the center of Terry-Joe’s chest and hissed, “You make another sound, and whatever you had for dinner will be splattered all over the pavement.” More loudly he said, “Miss, this behavior won’t help at your trial.”
Bronwyn looked up at him with hatred stronger than anything Pafford had ever encountered. She was breathing hard and quick through her teeth, and spittle collected at the corners of her mouth. “All right,” she whispered, and then more loudly said, “All right! I’ll suck you off, just don’t shoot him!”
Pafford blinked in confusion. Before he could reply, Bronwyn got to her knees and whipped off her T-shirt, exposing her breasts to both the night and the dashboard video camera. “Yes, sir, anything you say,” she cried. “You can come on my tits. Do you want my pants off, too?”
Pafford stared, speechless. Bronwyn Hyatt half-naked was a sight to make any man pause, and the utter incongruity of it froze him in place. It was only belatedly, after she’d said, “Yes, sir, I remember what you told me to do the last time, when I was sixteen,” that he understood what she was doing.