Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (26 page)

Rhondalee had fallen down in a fit, but even there in a hospital, she couldn’t seem to attract any medical attention. By the time she’d raised herself to her feet, the nurse had washed and wrapped the baby and handed her to her bewildered mother, who stood in a corner, a look of something like glory on her face.
A girl. You don’t say
, she’d whispered, suddenly calmed by that body against her chest.

She’d stood in that corner while they tried to get her to lie down. Delivered that mess that came after right onto the linoleum. Held on to that baby, looking at her face.

Raven lay in the sun, looked down on that face. It hadn’t changed all that much since the first time she’s studied it; the pointed chin, the grey eyes, the black hair. Freckles, now, and those big squared-off teeth, but that face was pretty much the same one she wore as a baby girl.

Annie showed those teeth in a smile. “Mom? Why’d you name me Annie Leigh?”

“Once your uncle Memphis brought me a doll, and I called her Annie. You looked like her. Skinny and floppy and your stuffing was always coming out.” Annie laughed. “Leigh is for your gramma, because she was going to take care of you. But she had this fancier way of spelling it.” Raven wasn’t a creature of memory, but she remembered how she felt, binding up her breasts and handing her baby over to Rhondalee as soon as she could sit on her stitches. “Don’t you like your name?”

“I like yours better.”

“I was named for one of your great-grammas. Grandpa Tender’s mother. She was pure Sioux.”

“That makes Gramps half an Indian. What does that make me?”

“It’s like a pie that keeps getting cut. I’m a fourth.”

Annie Leigh thought deeply. “I’m an eighth of a pie of an Indian.”

“You’re a smart one, you know that?”

But Annie didn’t smile. She looked over at the fishing poles. “Gramma would say, this is a good day for dynamite fishing. Gramps would say, dynamite fishing. What a waste.”

“Hey Tadpole, let’s pack up our tackle and take a wild ride.”

In five minutes flat they were tearing down the highway in Tender’s old truck.

“Mom, where we headed?”

“Wanna steer?”

“Sure!” She sat on her mother’s lap, and while her mother ran the pedals, Annie made a fairly steady track down the center of the road. “They should make roads wider, Mom.”

“Maybe they should. But they don’t. So if anyone comes along, you better get to the right.” Raven cracked a beer and had a sip. She set the can on the dash.

“Can I have a sip?”

“Not while I’m looking.” Raven looked out the side window and hummed. Annie, with one hand on the wheel, took the beer from the dash and had a long pull. Annie had always loved the taste of beer, the feeling it gave her. She felt it first in the base of her spine as a kind of relaxation, then felt it spread along her arms and down to her fingertips. She replaced the can on the dash. “Guess what, Mom?”

“What?”

“I believe,” she said with a smile, “that beer helps me steer better.”

“Is that right? Well, now.”

They passed an abandoned house. It looked like a shipwreck, all weathered boards and rotting eaves. “We should stop and see if there’s anything good in there.”

“If there is, the Bone Pilers have cleaned it out.” The Bone Pilers were gleaners of everything abandoned, cars, homes, gardens. They would take the flowers off graves if they fancied them.

“Well, Mom, we could at least have a look.”

“Gimme the wheel.” Annie hopped off her mother’s lap and Raven turned hard, making a U-turn and throwing up a plume of fine desert dust. The suspension of the truck screamed in complaint. The vehicle shook and bucked like an old bronc in the throes of remembering his glory. The cheap fishing poles clattered around in the truck bed, the cooler opened, spilling ice on Raven’s lap. She hit the brakes and her open beer can slid across the dash and flew out the window, shedding a trail of foam across the highway.

They were near to flipping over before they finally stopped.

Raven sat for a moment without moving. “Damn. Bad brakes.”

Annie’s heart beat like a tub drum. “Mom! Can we do that again?”

“No way. I wasted a beer.” She hit the gas and didn’t let up until they lurched to a stop in front of the old house.

Someone had actually locked the ancient front door. “Stand back, Tadpole,” said her mother. “Watch and learn.” With a loud crack and a well-aimed boot sole, it opened. “If it don’t give in, kick it. Remember that.” She looked in. “Step light, Tadpole. This whole place looks ready to cave.”

Breaking and Entering, thought Annie Leigh. She swelled with a sense of trespass so strong that she shivered.

The dry air shone golden with motes. The living room echoed, not even a sagging sofa or an old newspaper to show that anyone had ever lived there. Raven stepped through to the kitchen. Annie shadowed her. “Look,” whispered Annie. She pointed to a nest of old blankets in one corner, some open cans. Bottles. “Mexicans?”

“Yup. Using this place to hide out.”

“They sure are messy.”

“Well, they always leave their stuff behind because they have to travel light.” Raven looked down at her boot, tangled in something filthy. A pair of panties, torn, blackened with spots. Raven tried to kick them away.

“Mom it’s just some old dirty drawers,” Annie reassured her, but Raven didn’t hear, just continued twisting and kicking, in a dance of panic, finally getting them loose and stomping them into the rotten floor.

“Mom, it’s nothing!”

Her mother hammered her boots into the floor like a demon-possessed flamenco dancer. “Die!” she hissed. “Son-of-a-bitch, die… !”

A tearing, creaking sound, a breaking away of all support. Annie Leigh watched as her mother fell through the floor in an eruption of dust and splinters.

“AFTERNOON, GATOR. SEEMS
like we were just sitting here yesterday.”

“Afternoon, Sheriff. I believe we were.” Air whistled through the place where Gator’s tooth used to be. “I’m getting a little tired of the food here.”

“No one to bail you out again? It’s too bad the Reverend’s dead. He could have bailed you out.”

The composure cracked a little in the form of a frown. “With what? His mighty Sunday take from those Bone Pile idiots?”

“Maybe he could have… pawned a ring?”

“My bail is a bit higher than five dollars, and he’d have been lucky to get that for the whole assortment of Cracker Jack prizes he had on his fingers.” Gator made the closest thing to a smile he could. “What’s happening with the Reverend’s body?”

“We’re shipping it to his sister in Utah.”

“That’s his only family?”

“Yes. She says they’ll have a service this weekend.”

“Well. It’s a sad thing, a man meeting his end so far from the people who love him. I thought maybe if he was buried here, your niece might sing at his service.”

Memphis stared through grey eyes at Gator Rollins. “I wonder when you’re getting out of here, Gator.”

“I suppose as soon as you let me.”

“No, I mean, out of this state.”

“As soon as I get my things out of the Reverend’s trailer, I’m moving on.”

“Back to Arizona? What about the talent show?”

Gator looked at him with something close to fury in his face. “I’m having a little trouble with my back-up band.”

“Bone Pilers pulled out on you?”

“Last night. No good miscreants. Those Bone Pilers are just a bunch of hill snakes when it comes to their word.”

“Well, let me tell you something. I’d leave, if I were you. I’d leave now, and I’d leave fast.”

Gator sat there, stony.

Nothing ever sticks to the man, thought Memphis.

Nothing.

HER FACE HUNG
over the edge of the hole. “Mom? Mom? Are you down there?” She’d heard the landing, a thump and a curse and what sounded like a struggle. There’s Mexicans down there, she thought, they thought we were the Feds when we kicked down the door, and they hid down there and now they got my mom.

Could life be any more exciting?

“Mom? Mom, where are you?”

“Hey Tadpole? You’re not gonna believe this. Would you go out to Tender’s truck and get me a flashlight? I’m sure there’s one rolling around in there somewhere.”

“You break anything?”

“I sure did.”

Annie ran to the truck. The glove compartment had banged open when her mother made the U-turn, and maps, tapes and empty whisky bottles covered the floor. She tried two flashlights. The smaller one worked. She shone it around the floor of the truck a little, and something bright wedged by the seat bracket shot out sparks like a diamond.

It was a diamond. In her Gramps’ truck.

She scooted across the floor of Gramp’s truck and pried it out. Well, she liked this. A gold ring in the shape of a lion’s head, with red rubies for eyes and a big white diamond held in the fangs of the lion’s mouth. She slipped it on one of her bony fingers. Yes, this ring was quite a find.

Mom! Her mom was trapped in a cellar with a mob of horny Mexicans! She ran inside. She shone the beam down into the hole, and it struck her mother’s hat. “Here, Mom!”

Her mother tipped her head back. “I got my hands full. Can you just kinda shine it around the edges, here, so I can see where the hell I can get out?” Annie hung most of her body over the hole. “Be careful, now, don’t you fall in here, too.” Man, did it stink down there. There didn’t appear to be any steps.

“Hey, Annie, go outside and look for some cellar doors.” Annie set the flashlight on the linoleum and ran out the front door and around the back. There they were, just like in the Wizard of Oz, and they weren’t even padlocked. She threw them open. “Hey!” she called into the gloom.

Raven walked up the dirt ramp. Her jeans were muddy, her hair loose, her face smiling. Her hat was clean. She emerged into the flat, dry sunlight of the California desert.

For as long as she lived, Annie Leigh would remember the sight of her mother walking out of that cellar and into the sun, the whip-like body of a rattlesnake dangling from each of her white-knuckled hands.

RAVEN SAT BEHIND
the wheel but couldn’t drive, yet. Too keyed up. Her hand touched the cigarette and match in her hatband.

“Are you going to smoke that cigarette, Mom? I think you should maybe smoke that.”

“Nope. I’ll save it.” She sipped on the beer they were sharing.

“Mom, could you tell it one more time?”

“Well, I landed on one, you see. Killed it right then. But then I heard the rattle of the other.” She imitated that soft shaking,
sshksshksshk
. “I felt it strike my boot three times, but these are good boots, Annie. When it drew back for another strike, I clobbered it with the body of the dead snake. It got all wound up then, and I stepped on ’em both. Stepped hard.”

Annie imagined her mother standing on snakes in the dark of a cellar. She shivered.

“I had them both trapped under my feet. I could feel ’em under there, Annie Leigh, one was dead but one was alive, twisting and trying to get away.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking, God I hope I don’t mash these up too bad.”

“Were you scared?”

“Yup. But I kept standing there, and I listened. Just stood there and listened. I had to hear the rattle to tell when it was dead. That’s why I was so quiet.”