Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (27 page)

“I’m glad you landed on at least one of ’em.”

“Me too, Annie. Me too.”

“Mom, what’ll you do with those snakes?”

“Hmm. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll take snake-salad sandwiches on our next fishing trip.”

The girl giggled. She closed her fist around her own prize. She wanted to show it to her mother, but compared to two snakes, well, it just didn’t seem so impressive. “I better go get Gramps’ flashlight.”

“Be careful, Tadpole.” Raven leaned back and closed her eyes. “And hurry up.”

Annie Leigh went back into the house on tiptoe. She picked up the flashlight and switched it on and off a few times. She grasped the edges of the hole and shone the beam into the dark. “Hey! If there’s any snakes in here, I ain’t afraid of you.” She waggled the light to get a better view, then passed it to her other hand. The ring slipped off her finger and landed in the gloom without a sound. “Damn.” She shone the beam around, hunting. The horn honked. She looked one last time into the dark hole and let the ring stay where it was.

THE DRIVE HOME
was a slow one. Annie Leigh lay her head against her mother’s side. “Mom, sing me a story song.”

“Tadpole, my voice closed up tight when I was snake-killing.”

“Then put on a tape.” Raven put in a Steve Earle tape, but Annie couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about how much she wanted to show those snakes to someone, anyone. The beer had gone to Annie’s head. “Gramps never drinks.”

“I know.”

“Quentin Romaine says Gramps is a damn Indian and he can’t hold his damn liquor.”

“And what do you say to that?”

“I say Quentin Romaine is a lying crap-sack, is what I say.”

Raven smiled. “That’s my girl.”

BY EARLY AFTERNOON,
it had become clear that the Reverend’s rings were not the only things missing from the Park. Tender LaCour had come up missing, as well.

Rhondalee paced. She fretted. She fumed. Mostly, she worried. An entire night! All the next morning! She brooded on it. Rhondalee had a rare gift for brooding. I’ll divorce him, she thought. THAT’S what I’ll do. I’ll divorce him, and THAT will teach him to come home at night.

It occurred to her that in her distress, she’d neglected to put on her make up. What if Tender came home and found her in such a state?

She stood in her bathroom applying foundation, crème blush, mascara, broad strokes of liquid eyeliner. She looked at her reflection and smiled. Whatever she saw when she looked in the mirror, it had no relation to the ghastly, painted mask that looked back at her.

Who needs a husband? She asked herself. Who needs some no-good, no-account, silver-eyed, slim-hipped Indian devil to ruin your life?

Her face in place, she felt she could face the rest of the day.

She walked back out to her living room. I’m keeping everything, Rhondalee decided. She addressed the Committee, as if its invisible members were allocating possessions in the event of a divorce. She saw the ceramic imitation Hummel on her end table. If he thinks he’s getting THAT in the divorce, she thought, he’s got another thing COMING!

She settled down, then. He would appear eventually, wouldn’t he? He would beg to come home. She started fantasizing about the lengths and depths to which she would make him go before she would let him.

IT WAS EVENING
at the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park.

Raven and Annie returned to Space 47. Annie ran to her grandmother, babbling about bands of migrants with no underwear and caves full of rattlesnakes and haunted houses that caved in and finding treasure in the truck and rescuing her mother from a deep, deep snake pit.

Rhondalee stomped her slipper. “Stop your lying, Annie Leigh! Stop it right now! Every lie you tell is a chink in your soul that the Devil uses to get in and make you wicked!”

Raven pulled her daughter out of smacking range, and handed the cooler to her mother. “Why don’t you fry these up for dinner, Mother.”

Rhondalee slammed the cooler down on the counter. “Oh, leave it to you to take Annie off and fill her head with nonsense and lies and then you bring me some old nasty river fish full of freshwater stink and expect me to cook it for you, Raven LaCour, that’s just the kind of thing you do, bringing your fish home and…”

She lifted the lid and fell down in one of her fits.

SHERIFF MEMPHIS LACOUR
had a long wait, standing there in the evening shade of the carport in front of the doublewide that Rhondalee and Tender called home. He was there to make a call it pained him to make.

He absently checked the shoe rack. There were those new boots of Raven’s, and Annie’s matching pair. Both pair were black and both dusty. There were perhaps forty pair of shoes belonging to Rhondalee. His brother’s boots were gone.

The door opened. “Hello, Rhondalee. I was calling for Raven. Is she here by any chance?”

“WELL.” Rhondalee got herself positioned to huff. “She took Annie this morning and hot-wired Tender’s truck to go FISHING. In fact, they just got HOME. And they brought home two SNAKES. DEAD ONES. I FAINTED, I’ll have you know, and when I fell down, I knocked my ceramic lemon cookie jar RIGHT TO THE GROUND. It’s broken all to BITS.”

Memphis blinked. “Well. Now you can get a cookie jar with chickens on it.” He gazed at her eyebrows. They had been plucked away and exaggerated over the years. They arched across her forehead in a fantastical shape that reminded him of eyeglass stems.

“Memphis,” she whispered. “I have to talk to you about Tender. Do you know where he is?”

“Mother?” Raven stood at her mother’s shoulder. She had on her yellow hat, and the cooler under one arm. “Mother? I put her in the tub like you said.”

“Did she wash her hair?”

“She’s working on it.”

“I better go supervise. That child always needs to be supervised, or she only gets half-clean. Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

“Right, Mother, and Godliness is next to dead, around here.”

“RAVEN LACOUR! You’re mocking the death of a man of GOD! And you get those evil snakes OUT of here, right now!” Rhondalee slammed into the trailer to avenge herself on the skin of her granddaughter. As she entered the carport door, Annie Leigh popped out of the front door and skipped around in her bare feet to join them in the carport. She had on a ruffled gown that looked like it would make her neck itch, and her hair was wet.

Her mother put a hand on her back. “You get everything clean?”

The girl shrugged. “I got everything wet.” She looked up and flashed her gappy teeth. “Guess what, Uncle Memphis?”

“What?”

“Guess!”

“Well, let’s see. You went fishing with your mom today.”

“I DID! And my mom killed some SNAKES!” She wrestled the cooler out her mother’s hands and lifted the lid. “Aren’t they some beauties?”

Memphis let out a low, admiring whistle, but the thought of his niece in proximity to those snakes made his bowels feel distinctly icy. “These are some of the finest snakes I’ve ever seen, Annie Leigh.”

Unable to hold back, she thrust the cooler at her mother and flung the bundle of bones that comprised her body at her uncle. Annie clambered onto his shoulders, she disarranged his hat and swiped his sunglasses. Memphis submitted to the climbing of his person with equal parts humiliation and delight. “I want you to be careful,” she said softly by his ear.

“Careful of what, Annie Leigh?”

“Somebody’s out here killing skinny old men, Uncle Memphis. They might go after you.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “
Or my grampa
.”

He looked in her grey eyes. “Your grampa’s fine, I promise. If he were gone, I’d feel it in my heart.”

She nodded.

Raven slammed the lid of the cooler and put it on the ground. Her face had taken on a grim and ashy aspect. “It’s bedtime, Tadpole.”

Annie blinked. “Mom, I know you don’t read much but I don’t think you can tell time, either, if you think it’s bedtime already.”

Memphis followed his niece’s eyes. She seemed to be looking at the plywood-cutout silhouette of a man leaning against the Tyson’s satellite dish. Now, Memphis didn’t understand why that romantic smoking-cowpoke-against-the-sundown silhouette would spook his niece like that. Except, he noticed, this one wasn’t smoking. In fact, it wasn’t a silhouette. It was moving. It had disengaged itself from the satellite dish and was headed their way.

He put his hands around his grandniece’s waist and set her firmly on the ground. “If it isn’t bedtime, Annie, then I suppose it’s at least dinnertime.”

“Uncle Memphis. I can’t believe you’re on her side.” Annie Leigh crossed her bony little arms. “Mom, can I sleep in the truck with you?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Can I sleep with the snakes?” Annie Leigh looked from mother to uncle.

“Go in
now
, Tadpole.” When Raven spoke like that, Annie listened. She yanked on the screen door and let it slam shut behind her, leaving Raven and Memphis to stand there, hats on, arms crossed, faces set, spines stiff.

Gator spoke from the end of the drive. “Well, with the two of you standing there so stiff and still, you look like a couple of cigar store wooden Indians.”

Raven spat on the cement, and started to clean her fingernails with that illegal knife.

Gator smiled his flat line smile. “That pretty little girl out here, she belong to anyone I know?”

The Sheriff made himself speak politely. “Gator, might I help you with something?”

“Well, yes you can, Sheriff. I’m getting mighty tired of this shirt, and it smells funny since it got back from the lab.”

“I can tell you the name of a good dry cleaner.”

Gator pretended to laugh. “I have a suitcase over in the Reverend’s trailer.”

“Why don’t you get in the cruiser and we’ll head on over there.”

“I can walk.”

“No, I’ll drive you.” He sealed Gator in his car, wishing those snakes were alive and he could seal them in there with him.