I whisper, “Shh… Somebody’s behind us.”
We stand still for a full minute, and my ears strain to catch another scattering of shale.
I say, “Be on the lookout. Can’t be too careful,” and we walk on.
I don’t feel right yet. My belly got emptied this morning in Billy’s yard, and sour puke coats my teeth. I smell ripe. Head’s full of slick thoughts all stuck together and feels lopsided. My skin don’t fit right neither. It’s stretched too thin. If I reach too far, it’ll likely split wide open, and my innards will spill out, and them damn crows sitting low through the branches, quiet as revenuers, will peck at my guts and take scraps of me to the tops of them dying trees.
Crows eat anything.
I stop again, and the head in the tarp bumps my legs.
I hiss, “Goddamn it! You don’t hear that?”
“I hear it, Roy, but it’s just a rotten limb come loose, or some kind of animal. Nobody’s fool enough to come after us.”
Billy don’t sound sure this time.
We gotta get the deed done today, but I’m nervous and got reason to be. It’s high stakes and my ass on the line.
We keep climbing.
? ? ?
In my mind, I still see Darlene’s bedroom muddled with hooch and rumpled sheets and plastic beads at the window. Them see-through scarves on lampshades. It always smelled like after-sex, and the perfume of them chunky candles Darlene liked to burn to set the mood, when I don’t need nothing to take me over the top but her tight little body glistening slippery.
She made me howl like a wild coyote in the night is what she done.
At the start a month back, Darlene said, “You a man of few words, Mister Roy Tupkin, my super-stud, sweet-sugar-daddy man,” and nibbled on my ear, breathed heat at my neck, turned me up when I was already on high.
I don’t talk back cause I usually don’t, so in the middle of our time together, she said, “How can I know what you think and what you need if you don’t say?”
Darlene dipped her chin and puckered her pink painted lips, and all I could do was grin and think, I’ve been hungry for special all of my life, and now I got some.
Till yesterday.
When she wore another man’s smell.
? ? ?
“Can you move it along, Roy?”
Billy tries to push me faster but only pisses me off.
“You wanna take all day?” he whines.
I turn round sharp and give him the Don’t cross the line, pissant look, then I go slow for spite cause things in me don’t fire right yet. Just cause he come along don’t mean he runs the show.
I switch hands and flex my fingers cause they’re numb—then hear it again!
Shit! Shit! Shit!
I look back and freeze. Whoever’s trailing is close. Out of sight, round the bend.
I reach for my pistol I always got in the waist of my jeans—but crap! It ain’t there! Is it in the truck? At home? Did it fall out at Darlene’s?
Today won’t a good day.
I put down my end real quiet. Billy puts his down quiet, too. We put our boots on the low side so she don’t slide and get away from us before it’s time. Billy pulls his pistol from his back waistband. I pick up two handfuls of rocks and feel stupid without my gun.
I’m wound as tight as a banjo string waiting to be plucked. I got one arm back, and it quivers, ready to hurl the rocks—when a boar comes round the curve!
A frigging boar!
I never been so happy to see a wild hog in my whole life. I throw the rocks anyway cause my arm wants to, and they hit him on the head. Billy shoots him right between the eyes and kills that old hog with gray in his muzzle, and he drops.
“Why you go and shoot him?” I ask.
“What you mean? It’s just a old hog…”
“Yeah, but we could have scared him off. Now it’s a old hog kilt on the trail we on carrying Darlene’s dead body. You think bout that?”
“No.”
“That’s your problem. You don’t think, Billy. You got shit for brains.”
Billy shocks me when he fires back, “You do, too, Roy—cause why else are we carting this girl’s body this far cept for your lousy temper. Who’s got shit for brains today? Huh? Huh?”
Billy’s got a point.
What’s done is done. When we come back this way, we’ll drag the hog off the trail. At least it’s downhill work.
I say, “Let’s get this over.”
? ? ?
I let my guard down with Darlene is what I done, but I don’t beat up on myself. She walked right into my heart cause I don’t stop her. I played the kind of fool I don’t respect. But truth is, she’s the only woman who ever nailed my loose heart in one place.
It sounds queer to say now after what happened to her and all, but for a while she made lightning bolts shoot outta my feet when I laid down in that red room, up the stairs, at that place I paid for. That kind of feeling happens once in a man’s life—maybe—and it won’t happen again.
One time Billy said Darlene reminded him of my younger mama I hardly remember. I beat the crap outta Billy, and he fessed up to the lie. Said he was just being spiteful. My mama never made lightning bolts shoot outta nobody’s feet. And it’s for damn sure she never nailed a man’s heart in one place. Every week the name changed, but they was pretty much the same, them smelly men with beer guts hanging over dicks, stained teeth, and a dime in their pockets.
They pay me no mind at first when I crawled in the corner outta the way, hungry, sucking on a sugar-water tit. Then, a few years later, they’d mess with me for the fun of it, and call me little man, and rub their hands on my hair buzzed short cause of lice. When I took up too much space and made em call me by name, they beat on me all the way to the back room of that trailer where the door don’t lock.
I was smarter than they figured and more spiteful than they guessed. A dead rat under the car hood. A baby rattler in the glove box. A steel trap on the trail they had to walk. I grew up fast with those men going in and outta my mama at ten dollars a pop.
Then I turned tall and got muscle to match my meanness. I bruised ribs and bashed skulls and broke noses. While I beat up on the men, Mama beat up on me, wailing, “Now how am I gonna buy groceries and pay rent if they don’t come round, Roy! You ruint everything.”
Mamas and mean men shouldn’t mess with growing boys.
? ? ?
Last time I saw Mama was going on two years back. One morning I woke up with a hangover and a itch in the back of my mind that was tied to her. It was strange cause I never think bout Mama cept if Billy be fool enough to say her name out loud and set me in a mood.
No reason for the itch I could think of. No news from that part of the county, but the damn punk itch stayed the next day and turned into a lazy sickness that took the spunk outta me, all in the name of Mama—damn her sorry soul. Maybe it was a warning that the last tie to her might finally be broke. Maybe I needed to drive to that part of the county I stay away from to see nothing got a holt on me no more.