Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (36 page)

HER RIG SAT
in the ditch, brakes smoking. Raven walked the shoulder. Whatever remained of her daughter was a hundred feet back. She would have to pass what remained of him on the way to find her. Annie waited somewhere back there by the side of the road. That was nothing new for Annie, was it, Raven thought, being left behind somewhere like she didn’t matter. She would have to go back and find what was left of her, to gather it up, to grieve, to find a way to live on without the only thing that had ever mattered to her in her life. The only goddamned thing.

I love you Annie Leigh. I always have. It didn’t matter where you came from. Even when you were a tadpole inside me, making me road-sick and giving me hemorrhoids, I knew I’d do whatever I had to, to keep you safe. But girls are never safe.

No one understood why she’d left her child behind with her mother who wouldn’t be quiet and her father who hid himself to escape the sound of her mother. Oh, how to explain it. It had seemed so safe. But it didn’t matter, did it? He’d found them anyway.

She could hear the sound of his dying rig, the groans and snaps, a hiss, a dripping. The burnt odor of spilling fuel. She stopped to see the wretched, twisted glory of the rig and stared. He stared back, his eyes as flat as pennies on a railroad track passed over by a train. She stood, a monument of grief by the groaning, leaking wreck, staring at the dead eyes of the father and the killer of her child. He blinked. His hands, locked on the wheel, twitched.

Raven had always had something to lose, before now. Now, there was nothing. Her hand moved to the hatband, where she found them.

One last cigarette. One last match.

MEMPHIS, THE STATE
Patrol, and the paramedics arrived to the sight of a relaxed black silhouette backlit by the lights of a wreck.

“RAVEN! MOVE BACK!”

His words were lost in the hellish roar of combustion. She landed ten feet from him, her eyebrows singed away, unconscious. She was alive, paramedics attending her, but there was no getting near the rig. Memphis charged that inferno as if charging Hell. He tore away his hat, tore at his hair, cursing the very idea of a God. No God could exist, if such a thing as this could happen.

His Annie Leigh.

He fell to his knees. The last prayer of the desperate man who has lost all faith, but rallies enough to ask for the impossible. Lord, let her have died immediately, he prayed. Don’t let my Annie Leigh have burned up in there. Please God, please have spared her that. Amen.

Memphis stood, raised his arms and let out a roar of mourning and anguish. He issued his challenge to the beast of grief. Daring it, begging that beast to eat him alive.

Kill me, he roared. Kill me now.

“SHERIFF?”

He knelt beside the stretcher that held his niece. They had her strapped to a backboard. Memphis set her hat on her chest and looked from her hard face to the burning wreckage in the morning light.

“Sheriff. Sheriff?
Sheriff
.”

Speech was beyond him.

“Sheriff, please. Sheriff,
look
.”

He lifted his head to the sight of an angel. An angel in white coming toward him. It was his sweet little Annie Leigh, come to say good-bye. Her shredded white gown hung around her like feathers. Her chin, elbows, wrists and knees were skinned bloody, but the blood sparkled like mica. She carried an old black guitar that was nearly as large as she was. She was smiling.

“Hey Uncle MEMPHIS!” she called, “guess WHAT!”

Raven’s eyes fluttered at her daughter’s voice. “Get these damn straps OFF me,” she growled. In seconds, he had. She sat up, put on her hat, and turned her head.

In his life, he would never see anything as holy as the light in her silver eyes.

Raven rose from the stretcher and flew to her daughter on wings of her own.

ANNIE LEIGH CONSENTED
to go to the hospital in the ambulance, but only if they let her ride in front and run the siren. Raven, calm as ever, climbed in beside her. Her hands weren’t even shaking.

Memphis’s hands shook as he watched them leave. His knees knocked. His eyes watered. His nose ran. Twitches ran like tiny rodents up and down his spine, and a looseness in his bowels threatened to disgrace him completely. He had changed into something deliquescent that might dissolve completely under the weight of another revelation.

He felt Garth’s hand on his arm. “You all right, Sheriff?”

He was not all right. If I could just hide somewhere, he thought, just crawl off under a porch and hide until I could get myself together. He looked at his deputy with naked appeal. Garth steered him to his cruiser.

Once behind the wheel, Memphis put his head on it and moaned.

The men and women of the State Police and the men of the Ochre Water County Sheriff’s Department were aware of many things, that morning. Hawk-eyed with hunger for a resolution to the mess that was the life and death of Gator Rollins, nothing at the crime scene went unnoticed. They were acutely aware of every detail of the crime scene, the wreckage, the evidence, the time of day, the witness reports. As they swarmed the scene, even the color of the smoke was duly noted.

But not a one of them saw a tall, grey-eyed man sitting in a patrol car, his cheeks flowing over with the limits of his own humanity.

Some things, a person just doesn’t look at.

Thursday

IT WAS THURSDAY
morning, and the most contented man in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park was no longer content. He itched from head to toe. His hands rummaged through his locks as if they were sorting snakes, as if his torment could be shaken free like the louse that fell by the cracked nail of his largest toe.

“Lord, send relief.”

His hands moved to scratch at his bitten, scabby neck. He tore at the skin, tears in his eyes, his teeth grinding with frustration.

“I am bedeviled.”

He stood and reached for his back, his privates, his stomach. It was more than bugs. Years of not bathing had left him with crotch rot, butt rust, and between-the-toe fungus that made his toes appear webbed. His body was nothing more than a collection of maddening itches. He dug and writhed and came dangerously close to taking the name of the Lord in vain.

“Lord! I need vinegar!”

He slammed out of the trailer and slung letters up almost without looking.

“As is my own body, Lord. A plague, a pestilence is upon me. Send relief, and now, Amen,” he prayed.

IT WAS A
Thursday morning in the Francie June Memorial Trailer Park. Unbeknownst to most of the tenants, Gator Rollins had entered a final and permanent sleep. Everyone else slept, as well.

Rhondalee slept carefully to one side of a queen-sized bed under her shiny quilted satin spread, her hair in curlers, her face naked and grey, her mouth nearly lipless without the application of cosmetic enhancement. It had taken her some time to get back to sleep after her daughter had rudely awakened her looking for some old guitar. And then she’d had the bald-faced gall to criticize Rhondalee for the fact that her granddaughter was a wild, roaming, thoughtless little girl who slipped out windows in the middle of the night. Like that was
her
fault.

She twitched and twisted as she dreamed of her husband.

And Tender, wherever he was, was he dreaming of her? Did a thin strand of psychic catgut, a wire woven of disappointment and history, stretch from one to the other, plucking and playing them with tones of possible reconciliation?

Or were their dreams as dissonant as their lives?

ISAAC SLEPT IN
Levi Skinner’s yard, arms and legs flung wide.

He’d spent the previous evening in Ochre Water. After his fight with Raven, he’d hitchhiked to the Shake and Ache and spent thirty dollars on beer. He was propositioned by three barmaids. He wasn’t interested in any of those women of indeterminate age in suntan pantyhose and cutoffs, but he felt heartened by the presence of alternatives.

One got off early and took him to the diner, batted mascara-encrusted eyelashes at him, bought him a plate of eggs. They flirted, talked, laughed. She’d given him a good squeeze under the table. But that was all. He’d hitched a ride back to the Park at dawn, lurched back to the place where he expected to find the tractor-trailer, planning to enter it on a hungry raid like a marauding bear scenting groceries at a campsite. “She left me here!” he roared to the sky, before his big body spread like a fallen star on the small patch of grass that Levi cut with a Kuboda lawn tractor.

He’d have one hell of a hangover when he woke up.