Midnight Grinding

by Ronald Kelly

  Then there was a pressure on her lips, a soft meshing of warm air against flesh…a spectral kiss from whatever haunted the spiral of dust. Becky Mae, a voice said as if coming from some great distance.

  “Yes,” she gasped. “That’s my name…what’s yours?”

  Silence. Then the voice came again, but different this time. Distinctly familiar and edged in anger. Becky Mae…where the hell are you, girl?

  Startled, she backed out of the center of the little whirlwind, tripping and landing hard on her backside on the barren earth. The dust devil hovered there for a moment longer, then retreated back in the direction from which it came.

  Stan Jessup, dressed in greasy coveralls and toting a lunch box, rounded the corner of the trailer and glared at his stepdaughter hatefully. “What in tarnation are you doing down there?”

  Becky Mae felt panic grip her, but when she looked down, she found her clothing to be intact. “Nothing. Just sitting here.”

  “Well, you ain’t gonna have no butt left to sit on if you don’t get on up right quick,” Stan warned. “Now, get on in the kitchen and put some supper on the table before I give you an instant replay of last night.”

  She did as he said. Before following him up the steps, she cast her eyes back across the broken horizon with its endless miles of buttes and sagebrush. Nothing but an old dust devil, that’s all, she thought in disappointment. Just a daydream. But, somehow, she could not convince herself that what had happened that afternoon had been a trick of the mind, rather than something intimate and true.

  ***

  Becky Mae’s one and only boyfriend had been Todd Lewis, but their relationship had been short-lived, spanning all of thirty seconds. The senior had showed up at the trailer to take her to the double-feature at the Skyline Drive-In, but Stan had chased him off with a shotgun. Her stepfather had blown out the taillights of the boy’s Mustang before he could make the safety of the main highway. Since that incident, no guy in his right mind came near Becky Mae Jessup, no matter how cute she was.

  Now she awaited a boyfriend of a different kind, one that she could only hear in her mind, that she could only feel in the currents of the wind. She awaited him that Friday evening as she had for the past two days, sitting on the hood of an old Plymouth Duster in the backyard. For two days she had watched the dusty desert along the Texas-Mexico border for a fleeting sign of the dust devil. Each evening after school she had stared across the sun-baked wilderness until darkness descended, leaving her depressed and disappointed once again.

  This evening a new emotion joined the others. Fear sat heavy in her heart, not over the absence of the sand spout, but because of her stepfather. Mrs. Ketchum’s cryptic words of four years ago came back to haunt her and she had a dreadful feeling that tonight would be the night that Stan would make his lurid move. Tonight he would finally try to touch her in that wrong way, or perhaps attempt something much worse.

  She knew that it was so, the way he had acted over breakfast that morning, the way he had looked her square in the eyes over french toast and coffee. It was nearly six o’clock now. He had already clocked out from the garage and was on his way home. After supper, he would have a few shots of Wild Turkey to gather his nerve and then force his filthy self upon her. The thought of him close to her made her cringe in revulsion. Stan was a wiry man, but strong, and she was afraid that whatever he had in mind that night would take place, no matter how violently she struggled.

  Tears threatened to come, but she fought them back. She didn’t want her spectral lover to see her bawling like a baby. You really are warped, you know that? she scolded herself. What happened the other day was just make- believe, just a fantasy. But no matter how many times she told herself that, she still could not escape the feeling that the lone dust devil was exactly what she thought it was: a wandering ghost, a kindred spirit as hungry for love and companionship as she was.

  The setting sun hurt Becky Mae’s eyes as she continued to survey the brilliant hues of the darkening horizon. A western breeze blew through her strawberry blond hair, a kiss blown from a thousand miles away. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the sensation of gentle hands upon her body, delivering thrills of delight. Then a harsh voice from behind her dispersed the calm, filling her with a cold dread like a heavy stone in the pit of her gut.

  “Are you out here again, girl?” Stan asked incredulously from the rear door of the trailer. “I swear I’m beginning to think you’re retarded, Becky Mae. Now you get on in here and fix me some supper. You hear me?”

  Becky Mae said nothing. She just sat there and stared across the deepening desert, praying…praying for a miracle and knowing very well that miracles did not happen in Ketchum’s Trailer Park on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.

  “Dammit, girl, don’t make me come out there and get you!”

  Again she ignored him and continued to wish for the impossible. Please! Please come and take me away from this awful place. Come and sweep me away on the wings of the wind, away from El Paso, away from Texas, away from this world if you can. She listened for the familiar whistle of the sand spout’s approach, but heard nothing…nothing but Stan’s angry footsteps crunching across the backyard, straight for her.

  “You little smart-ass bitch!” growled Stan, grabbing her roughly by the arm. “You answer your elders when spoken to, understand? Now get your sassy butt inside that trailer before…”

  She startled him by turning and giving him the dirtiest, most mean-eyed look she could muster. “Let go of me, Stan,” she said, “or so help me I’ll yell ‘rape’ to the high heavens.”

  Her stepfather was a little taken aback by her boldness, but not enough to relinquish his bruising hold. He stared at her for a long moment and a broad grin split his five o’clock shadow. “You know, don’t you? You’ve known of my intentions all along. Well, you oughta know me well enough to know that there’s no way out of it. You know I always get what I want, no two ways about it. And, by God, I’ll have what I’ve set out to get tonight!” He pulled her bodily off the hood of the Plymouth and began to drag her toward the open trailer door.

  Knowing that she had no other choice, Becky Mae began to scream just as loud and with as much force as she possibly could. “Shut up, you hear me?” said Stan. “Shut the hell up!” He loosened his hold long enough to give her a couple of backhand slaps across the face. She continued her screaming as she dropped to the ground and curled up to ward off the raining blows of his work-hardened fists. Her nose bled freely and her eyes began to swell shut as Stan’s calloused knuckles fell time and time again.

  “You can make it hard or you can make it easy,” he warned, pulling a heavy leather belt from the loops of his trousers. “It’s up to you. Shut your trap and crawl into that trailer and maybe I won’t mess you up too bad tonight. But if you keep up that hollering, you might not make it to morning alive.” When she continued her loud rebellion, Stan shook his head and, with a grin, raised the belt for the first downward stroke.

  Then a howling from the west echoed over the desert like the roar of an impending doom.

  “What in Sam Hill?” asked Sam in puzzlement. Becky Mae brought her head from beneath her crossed arms and, with battered, tearful eyes, stared toward the broken horizon. An imposing wall of dust the shade of burnt umber boiled toward them with a violent turbulence that obscured entire buttes and swept through the shallows of drywashes like an earthen tide.

  Stan discarded his belt and, grabbing Becky Mae’s arm and a fistful of her hair, began to back toward the trailer door. “Hell of a duststorm coming up, sweetheart,” he snickered. “We’d better get on inside. Don’t worry, though. We’ll find something to keep ourselves occupied while we weather the storm.”

  Angrily, she batted ineffectively at him with her clenched fists, bringing howls of laughter rather than grunts of pain. They were almost ten feet from the open door, when something totally unexpected happened. Unexpected for Stan perhaps, but not for Becky Mae. She had been hoping f
ervently for something to take place, something that would deliver her from the horrible fate Stan had in store for her.

  The dust at the foot of the back steps began to boil. It rose skyward on spiraling currents of air, until a dust devil seven feet high blocked Stan’s pathway. Its color was not the soft beige that Becky Mae remembered from before, but an angry red. The twister bobbed and weaved like a boxer awaiting its opponent. Stan took a couple of steps to the side to go around it, but it shifted swiftly, stopping his progress. Then a fetid wind like the winds of Hell itself washed over the man and his captive, roaring, demanding in bellowing currents of air…Let her go!

  Stan Jessup stood there and gaped, wondering if he actually heard what he thought he had. Then he knew for certain when the dust devil barreled forward with a vengeance, firing grit with such force that it lodged in the pores of his skin. I said… LET…HER…GO!

  The mechanic’s natural bravado got the best of him. “The hell you say!” he growled, swaggering forward with Becky Mae in tow.

  Before he knew it, it was upon him. A pain lanced through his wrist, as if every bone there had been shattered. Becky Mae escaped his grasp. She tumbled to the side and crouched against the gathering fury of the sandstorm. Stan, like the fool he was, swung blindly at the thing that had hold of him, but his blows flailed through open air, hitting nothing. He moaned in terror as the dust devil lifted him within its swirling cone, the tiny rocks and cactus needles in the currents ripping at his clothing and flesh, drawing blood. He spun end over end, screaming madly as the wraith manhandled him, twisting and battering him until his entire body was racked with agony.

  Then, when he thought he would surely be torn asunder, he was discarded like a rag doll. He was expelled from the cyclone with such force that he sailed through the open door of the trailer, across the cramped kitchenette, and landed headfirst into the cedarwood cabinet. He was out cold the second his skull split the hardened wood and bent the steel piping of the sink beyond.

  Becky Mae lay trembling for a long moment and, when she thought it safe enough to lift her head, discovered that the dust storm had passed. Only the hovering dust devil, now its regular size and color, waited nearby. Her victorious suitor, her knight in shiny armor, so to speak.

  She approached it with a smile on her blood-streaked face, her hands fidgeting nervously. “Thank you,” she sobbed happily. “Oh, thank you so very much.” She giggled as soft currents caressed her face, brushing away her tears. Then Stan came back to mind and she looked toward the open doorway of the trailer. He lay slumped across the peeling linoleum floor, pretty roughed up, but still alive. That meant that she had not yet escaped.

  He would wake up eventually and, madder than before, insist on having his way with her. She would never be able to escape the lustful fury of Stan Jessup.

  That was unless…

  She started forward. In turn, the dust devil approached her in its smooth, shimmying gait. They stood there for a hesitant moment, regarding each other like two, long-lost lovers. Then, closing her eyes, Becky Mae stepped into the heart of the funnel and let herself go.

  ***

  Stan Jessup came to an hour later and found three men standing over him. One was a uniformed police officer, while the other two were plain-clothes detectives.

  “Are you Stanley Jessup?” one asked him.

  “Yeah. Who the hell are you?”

  “El Paso Police Department, Mr. Jessup,” they said, flashing their credentials. “Will you accompany us outside, please?”

  With some effort, Stan picked himself up from the floor. He was a real mess. His clothes were torn and his face and arms were lacerated and scratched. “She sure put up a hell of a fight, even if it didn’t do her any good,” the uniformed cop noted with some satisfaction. Stan couldn’t figure out what he was driving at, until he reached the open door of the battered house trailer.

  Several people stood in the backyard. There was Mrs. Ketchum and her son, two Fire Department paramedics, and, lying sprawled and misshapened on the sandy earth, was Becky Mae. His stepdaughter’s clothes were nearly torn away, her slender limbs cocked at odd angles from her body. Her face was a mask of contradiction, wearing an expression torn between intense agony and blissful rapture. A light powdering of dust coated the orbs of her open eyes.

  “He did it!” Connie Ketchum jagged an accusing finger at the bewildered Stan. “He killed her! Lordy Mercy, I could hear the poor child screaming her head off over here, just before the dust storm blew in.”

  “Do you deny that, Mr. Jessup?” Detective Joe Harding asked, hoping for an easy confession.

  Stan stared in pale-faced shock at the heap of broken bones and damaged flesh that he had intended on sleeping with that night. The flame of desire he had been carrying for so long went cold and, in its place, lingered a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach. “Huh? What are you getting at?”

  “Our abuse center has received a few complaints concerning you, Mr. Jessup,” the other detective, Terry Moore, told him. “Seems that your stepdaughter has been coming to school looking like she’s been in a dogfight. Now, it isn’t our place to go telling a man how to discipline his children, but this has gone beyond discipline, hasn’t it, Mr. Jessup? This is downright cold-blooded murder.”

  A cold fear lanced through Stan Jessup’s lanky frame as he looked from the three policemen to the twisted body of Becky Mae. Why didn’t that thing kill me? he had been wondering since his awakening. Why did it let me live?

  Now he knew.

  “Look, Mom!” piped Tony Ketchum, pointing out across the desert. “Will you look at that!”

  They all looked. Not more than a hundred yards away hovered a lonely dust devil, bouncing back and forth between clumps of mesquite and prickly pear. But, no, as they continued to watch, the twister split and suddenly became two. The twin sand spouts separated, then joined, like two wistful lovers in union.

  I love youuuuu, the wind seemed to whisper and a fleeting, high-pitched whistle, like the voice of a teenage girl, returned the sentiment.

  They stood and watched the two dust devils as they drifted slowly across the border, blending into the dusky horizon, then vanishing. Everyone beside the trailer grew strangely silent, except for Detective Moore, who finished reading Stanley Jessup his rights.

  THE BOXCAR

  I always thought the depiction of most vampires in literature as being wealthy and affluent was a complete fallacy. Most books have them dwelling in crumbling European castles or stately manors. But what about all the bloodsuckers who are just regular folks…the salt of the earth, so to speak? What about the ones who don’t wear tuxedos and expensive silk capes—the ones who don’t have two nickels to rub together?

  That could have very well been the case during the Great Depression, when men rode the rails and wandered aimlessly across the land. But, if so, where would such creatures find refuge when the dark of night gave way to the cleansing rays of dawn?

  Hello, the camp!” I yelled down into that dark, backwoods hollow beside the railroad tracks. We could see the faint glow of a campfire and shadowy structures of a few tin and tarpaper shacks, but no one answered. Only the chirping of crickets and the mournful wail of a southbound train on its way to Memphis echoed through the chill autumn night.

  “Maybe there ain’t nobody down there,” said Mickey. His stomach growled ferociously and mine sang in grumbling harmony. Me and Mickey had been riding the rails together since the beginning of this Great Depression and, although there were a number of years between us—he being a lad of fifteen years and I on into my forties—we had become the best of traveling buddies.

  “Well, I reckon there’s only one way to find out,” I replied. “Let’s go down and have a look-see for ourselves.”

  We slung our bindles over our shoulders and descended the steep grade to the woods below. We were bone-tired and hungry, having made the long haul from Louisville to Nashville without benefit of a free ride. It was about midnight when w
e happened across that hobo camp. We were hoping to sack out beside a warm fire, perhaps trade some items from our few personal possessions for coffee and a plate of beans.

  As we skirted a choking thicket of blackberry bramble and honeysuckle, we found that the camp was indeed occupied. Half a dozen men, most as rail-thin and down on their luck as we were, sat around a crackling fire. A couple were engaged in idle conversation, while others whittled silently, feeding the flames of the campfire with their wood shavings. They all stopped stone-still when we emerged from the briar patch and approached them.

  “Howdy,” I said to them. “We called down for an invite, but maybe ya’ll didn’t hear.”

  A big, bearded fellow in a battered felt fedora eyed us suspiciously. “Yeah, we heard you well enough.”

  I stepped forward and offered a friendly smile. “Well, me and my partner here, we were wondering if we might—”

  My appeal for food and shelter was interrupted when a scrubby fellow who had been whittling stood up, his eyes mean and dangerous. “Now you two just stay right where you are.” I looked down and saw that he held a length of tent stake in his hand. The end had been whittled down to a wickedly sharp point.

  “We’re not aiming to bother nobody, mister,” Mickey spoke up. “We’re just looking for a little nourishment, that’s all.”

  One of the bums at the fire expelled a harsh peal of laughter. “Sure…I bet you are.”

  “Go on and get outta here, the both of you,” growled the fellow with the pointy stick. He made a threatening move toward us, driving us back in the direction of the thicket. “Get on down the tracks to where you belong.”

  “We’re a-going,” I told them, more than a little peeved by their lack of hospitality. “A damned shame, though, folks treating their own kind in such a sorry manner, what with times as hard as they are these days.”