Damaged Goods (16 page)

Silvie rolled her tongue across her lower lip, thinking.

He studied her. Was he making any impact? “If you’re afraid now, how will you be any less afraid somewhere else?”

She bit into her lip, her eyes cast downward, masked by soft blond lashes.

“You’ll never be able to stop running.”

Her eyes came up to meet his, and she had tears.

“Don’t,” he said, getting to his feet and pulling her up. She leaned against him, and he hugged her. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things. I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

Her hair gave off the faint scent of apples. The unexpected touch of another person surprised him. Her softness against him made him unquenchably thirsty for more.

“You don’t know,” she said quietly. “You just don’t know.”

Silvie held Hershel’s cellphone away from her ear and listened for signs that she’d roused him, but the house was still. The clock above the kitchen sink snapped out each second, and the moonlight cast an eerie blue sheen over the linoleum. The phone rang several times, and she knew that he wasn’t going to answer. Still, she held on until the call was forwarded to Kyrellis’s voice mail. She hoped she could appeal to his sense of decency. If not, she would persuade him through other avenues.

She heard a floor joist squeak above her and she paused a moment to listen. Then she wiped the phone off and set it on the counter, where she’d found it. She had to talk to Kyrellis. Had to understand him. They could negotiate. It was just a matter of laying out the ground rules. Or so she hoped.

“Everything okay?” Hershel startled her, and she jumped. He came into the kitchen barefoot, wearing a bathrobe. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She caught her breath, fluttering a hand over her heart. “Yeah, everything is fine. I just came down for some water.”

He filled a glass and held it out to her like a gift. He watched her through the darkness as she drank. After a moment, she approached him, taking his hand, and the two slid quietly into each other’s arms. She set the glass clumsily on the counter, and he muffed her ears with his hands, tilting her head back and kissing her. She encouraged him; it was what he expected for letting her stay. But she’d never been with any man but Jacob, and she didn’t really know what to do. Sex in the movies was nothing like what she experienced in Jacob’s bedroom. She often wondered which version was common and which was make-believe. As Hershel sucked her tongue deep into his mouth, she hoped he wouldn’t ask her to strip for him. She hated that more than anything else.

Upstairs, he guided her to his bedroom but left the lights turned
out. She assumed that he didn’t want to see her naked. Was it the pictures? Was he imagining another woman as he stroked her?

He carefully undressed her, and she opened his robe, finding him erect. She knelt and took him in her mouth while he watched through the darkness. His deep-throated groan assured her that she was doing what he liked. But soon he was pulling her up onto her feet again, seeking her mouth. Had she done something wrong?

As his fingers roamed her breasts, she tensed. He noticed and stopped. “Is this okay?” he asked. “We don’t have to.”

“Yes. It’s okay,” she said, admonishing herself for interrupting him. “What do you want me to do?”

He caressed her hair. “Just let me make love to you.” He kissed her again and eased her onto the bed. She couldn’t quite get used to the soft touch. His skin against hers raised gooseflesh, and she mastered every muscle in her body to stop herself from trembling and making him think she didn’t want to do this. When he entered her it was a sharp, painful breach. She sucked her breath in and held it there as he pulled her hips toward him and struck deeper into her core. When he finished, tears had leaked from the corners of her eyes, but she released a sigh in time with his.

Carl stepped out of his cabin before dawn, a dream—or, rather, a familiar nightmare of Vietnam—still gripping his subconscious. He scratched at his arms, pockmarked and now raw. No matter how long he abstained, the urge lay only beneath the surface. A simple dream away.

He wore a wool cap low over his ears, and an extra pair of socks. The landscape lay muted in shades of blue-gray. Rain drizzled out of a dark sky, and he buttoned his coat to the collar. He carried an old metal Tonka truck, dented and hard-used. He’d been saving it for the right kid, and the right kid was just across the muddy yard. Life in this place was too hard for children. There was no room for innocence here. Carl set the truck down on the step, assured that the boy would find it when his father next sent him out. Upon further consideration, he moved it to the ground next to the step, where the boy would see it but the father would not. Carl guessed that its beneficiary would need to hide it in order to keep it.

When he reached the highway, the rain was falling steadily with a west wind, stinging his nose and his fingers. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and leaned into his stride.

“You!
Pendejo!
”

Carl turned to see who had shouted. Three shadowy figures followed
twenty feet or so behind him. He glanced around for help, but the road was quiet at this hour. A tense unease came over him as he listened to their approaching footsteps. His dream of Vietnam, still fresh, reacquainted him with the idea that someone might kill him for reasons that were more ideas and principles than personal.

“What do you want?” he shouted back, pausing to face his pursuers.

“
Usted encuentra a la mujer
attractive.”

Carl turned and trudged ahead, puzzling the words together.

“Hey you, fucker!” another shouted.

“I’ve done nothing to you,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m making my way, the same as anyone.”

“Auséntese del Yolanda!”
Her name was spit at him with venom. The men broke into a run, the soft gravel along the shoulder of the highway spinning beneath their boots.

“She’s a friend,” he said, knowing he couldn’t outrun them; he was twice their age.
“Amiga.”

The short man Carl had seen with the boy lunged forward. Carl stepped back, but the man swung fast, catching him square in the jaw. His head spun, and he heard the bones of his neck pop as he went down. Pain spread across his ribs as one of the men buried a boot in his side. Carl struggled to get up, but he was knocked to the ground again. He took the toe of a boot square in the nose, sending brilliant yellow sparks through his vision. He lay in the gravel, recovering his sight as the three stood over him, staring down, their faces dark and their heads round against the chalky sky. The man who first hit him ran his index finger slowly across his own throat in a warning.

A pickup came around the corner, its headlights casting a yellow beam across the scene, and the men scattered, running into the brush along the river. Carl heard it pull off the road and idle there for a long moment; then a door slammed. He struggled to a sitting position and wiped blood from his nose.

The driver stood his distance and shouted, “You okay?”

Carl worked at getting his feet under him, finally staggering to a stand. “Yeah.”

“You sure?” The man came closer now, but walked with rigid apprehension. “I called the police. I’ll wait with you till they get here.”

“You didn’t need to do that.” Carl felt along his side to assess the injury to his ribs. “I’m just bruised is all.”

“Well, they might come back. I’m not leaving anyone out here to get the shit beat out of them. I don’t care what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything. I was just minding my own business. Walking to work.”

Carl pulled his hat off and used it to stanch the flow of blood from his nose. His jaw was aching powerfully, but his breath was finally coming back to him in slow bursts.

The man leaned against his truck. “Where d’you work?”

“Swift Consignment Auction.”

“Oh, yeah,” the man said with a vague nod. “He’s back now, I hear.”

The sky began whitening in the east, but the rain didn’t let up. Carl wished the man would at least invite him to sit in the truck if he insisted on calling the police and waiting until they arrived. But he simply leaned against the tailgate, his broad cowboy hat shuttling the rain down the back of his waterproof jacket.

“Swift,” the man said, as if remembering Hershel personally. “How long you worked for
that
son of a bitch?”

“A while.”

“He’s crooked.”

Carl had heard it all before and didn’t care to hear it again. “Been all right to me.”

The sheriff’s patrol arrived from the north, casting strobes of blue and red across the gray morning. Traffic was beginning to pick up, and a few drivers slowed and stared as they passed. The sheriff parked in front of the pickup and pulled his hat on before stepping out. He held his hand carefully centered over his gun.
Carl hated law-enforcement men. He believed the profession was a magnet for the worst sort of control freaks and insecure weirdos society had ever produced.

“Hear you two are having a fight,” the sheriff said as he reached them.

The man who had stopped to help was suddenly outraged. “We aren’t fighting. I came around the corner and found three Mexicans kicking the shit outta this guy.” He gestured at Carl.

Carl shook his head, sending pain shuddering through his temples. There was no way the man could know those three were Mexican—not in this light. Today, however, would not be the day to stand on principle.

In Silvie’s dream she was ten years old. A hot Wyoming summer had parched the ground to powdery dust. Sagebrush and prickly pear were all that survived out on the rocky plains, and the family had escaped to the Muddy River for the afternoon. Her father had stopped at the Gas ’n Go and let her pick out a small bag of chips and a soda. Silvie tucked them along the floorboard in the backseat of their Maverick, a treat to be savored, something to look forward to. Her father was an amateur fossil hunter who worked for the school district as a custodian. His hobby, which he preferred to pursue alone, had given him intimate knowledge of the southern Wyoming landscape. In Silvie’s dream he took them to a remote, deserted stretch of river with a wide grassy slope and a deep pool. There she shrieked with delight and plunged into the tepid water, splashing wildly, while her mother situated herself on the bank. Melody carried a box of blush wine, something of a constant prop, and a romance novel. Her father disappeared up the slope to a rock quarry in search of fossils, despite his daughter’s insistent pleas to watch her jumping into the water.

Silvie’s dream was always the same. Her father wanders over
the low-flung bank, a canvas sack draped across his right shoulder. He never looks back. He never
comes
back, though Silvie waits.

Silvie woke in a strange place to the rumble of snoring. She stared up at the ceiling, the familiar dream still casting its gloomy pall—its suffocating sense of abandonment. She could feel his presence next to her. Her life had changed so suddenly. She was now a waitress at the South Store and expected to report to work that morning, and Hershel would be off to find tires and a battery for a car that was not hers but would be hers in the practical sense. As she stirred, thinking of a shower, trying to put this development into perspective, Hershel rolled over and wrapped his arms around her. It felt surprisingly nice there, warm and comforting. He pulled her against him so tight she could hardly breathe, her face buried in his hairy chest.

Jacob had come back to the tavern the week after they’d first met. She heard his voice echoing through the dining room as she bent over her schoolwork in her usual corner of the kitchen. Her skin had prickled with excitement at the sound of that distinct and confident tone.

“Where is she?” he asked. “Where is my little scholar?”

“She’s home, where she belongs.” Melody Thorne’s voice was pleading. Silvie felt her mother’s fear, and it somehow made his request more exhilarating.

Perhaps Jacob had seen Silvie slip in the back door earlier, or maybe he just had a way of knowing. A man like that knew things that weren’t apparent to others, Silvie believed. Her initial disappointment rapidly turned to relief that her mother stood between this man and her.