Lucky Strikes (23 page)

“We'd be most grateful, ma'am.”

 

Chapter

TWENTY-THREE

That first afternoon, she stayed but a couple hours. Next morning, though, she was back bright and early with fresh bandages, sponges, compresses, towels, porcelain bowls. She stayed the whole day, spreading calamine lotion over Janey's rash, spooning water and orange sherbet and beef consommé into her mouth. Putting blankets on when she took a chill, taking them off again when she had the sweats. Cleaning her vomit, changing her sheets, plumping and replumping her pillow.

Speaking nary a word the whole time.

Oh, she'd consent to nibble on canned loganberries and Macfarlane Lang's savory crisplets, and for supper, Hiram coaxed her into having some warmed-over Franco-American spaghetti, but she ate all alone on the front porch, with nothing but a glass of lime-juice cordial to wash everything down. She left without even saying good-bye.

She was back the next morning, though, with an armful of books.
Hans Brinker
,
Little Women
,
Black Beauty
. Every so often, I'd pass by the room and hear Mina's flat, thin voice.
“The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end.…”

Now, I figured she was reading to keep up Janey's spirits, but when I peeked in that afternoon, the girl was out like a light, and the words was still pouring out of Mina's mouth.

The third day, she brought a sponge and some Murphy Oil Soap and went to work on the floors. But every time Janey'd so much as move, Mina went running back to her.

We closed early that night 'cause Hiram and Earle wanted to have a couple hours' go at the tar. Me, I stuck around outside as long as I could, cleaning gunk out of the gas nozzles, but after a while, there weren't nothing for it but to go inside. Mina was just where I'd left her, in the husker chair by Janey's bed. In her lap was a pile of red yarn that was slowly getting knitted into … a hat? A glove? The breeze from the north window made her cotton print dress swirl, and at her feet lay Gus the guard dog, tail softly twitching.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

“I was just checking.”

Skin had started peeling off in thin, scabby flakes from Janey's face. In a little while, I knew, the skin would start to come off her hands, her fingers, her toes.…

“Fever must be going down,” said Mina. “She's not hallucinating as much.”

“She hallucinates?”

“Oh, sure. A little while back, she was going on about
dinosaur
juice. Isn't that funny?”

I tipped myself back till my head was resting against the wall. It seemed to me that my heart was cracking, just a little. “There's a history to that,” I said.

“Is that so?”

“When Mama first bought this place, Janey didn't want no part of it. Couldn't stand the smell of gasoline, said it made her sick to her stomach. So Mama said, ‘Well, think of how them poor dinosaurs feel. Turns out oil is just what's left of dinosaurs after they been dead a good long spell. Like, millions of years, right? So every time we pump gas, we're pumping dinosaur juice.' Well, Janey loved that. Next morning she was the first out of bed, jumping up and down on her pillow, shouting, ‘Let's go pump us some dinosaur juice!'”

I half closed my eyes.

“So that's where that comes from,” I said.

Mina said nothing.

“I guess I ought to thank you,” I said.

“No need.”

“I mean, it's right nice of you to do all this. Seeing how we ain't family or nothing.”

“Well…”

I set on the edge of the bed. The sheets was new washed and crisp. Hospital corners.

“Listen, Mrs. Gallagher. Mama ain't round to defend herself so … I think folks might've given you some wrong notions about her.”

“Melia.”

“I swear to you, her and Chester never—”

“Melia, I know.”

A wash of silence. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her take up her knitting needles, then set them down again.

“You may not believe this,” she said, “but I admired your mother. No, truly I did. I remember the first time I met her, I thought,
Well now, here's a woman grabbing life with both arms
.
Squeezing it dry.
It was—it was
warming
to be around her.” She stared into a pocket of space. “I certainly can't blame a man like Chester for wanting to be … warmed.” With her fingers, she brushed the underside of her chin. “Do you know the only person who ever made
me
feel that way?”

“Who?”

“Chester Gallagher. And I had to go and ruin it by marrying him.”

She was silent awhile. Then she took up her knitting once more.

“When I was your age, Melia, I knew this married couple. The Renaults. I'd run into them maybe once or twice a week—they were friends of my parents—but I'd always find myself
staring
at them. Because they didn't make any sense, you see, they—they just seemed like two strangers sharing the same house. You couldn't imagine how they'd ever been thrown together in the first place. It was all just a terrible mistake.

“And then, just the other night, I was lying in bed next to my husband. We'd said scarcely ten words to each other all night, and that's when it struck me. We're that couple! The Renaults! And it doesn't make any more sense when you're in the middle of it. You go—
crawling
back through the years—like you're crawling through shag carpet, looking for an earring—trying to find that
point
where everything started going wrong. But you can't, and then you wonder if maybe it was a
million
points—a million little—pulling aparts—and there's no use even mapping them all because you've become the Renaults, and there's no going back.”

She give herself a little shake.

“Or so it sometimes appears,” she said. “At three twenty-five in the morning.”

The knitting needles fell into her lap just then, and her eyes went wide, like she was gazing through the ceiling and out to the night sky. Next second, she was laughing.

Laughing don't even cover it. Big honking gulps that she tried to stop with her hand and wouldn't be stopped. Who knew she had such a sound in her?

“What?” I said.

“Oh…” She fingered the wet out of her eyes. “I had a passing thought, that's all. I thought,
Mina Gallagher, if you're spilling out your soul to this girl who doesn't even like you, it's pretty obvious you need more friends
.”

She laughed some more then, only it weren't quite so fierce.

“Can't say I got much time for friends myself,” I said.

“No,” she said, softly. “I'd guess you wouldn't. What about that Blevins boy?”

I didn't say nothing.

“Well,” she said. “Never mind. God knows there's no hurry.”

A new breeze come rushing in from the north window, it made the candle flame shrink back. In the corner, by the porcelain bowls, a blue bottle fly was diving and dancing.

“You want a smoke?” I asked.

“No. Thank you.”

We was silent again.

“It ain't that I don't like you,” I said. “It's just—”

“You thought
I
didn't like
you
. And here we are.”

She took up her knitting for real now. Her face, I noticed, had a clean hard line, and I could suddenly picture her in that very same chair ten, twenty years on—her skin looser, her eyes deader. Another lonely married woman to add to the list.

“Chester's devoted to you,” I blurted.

“Oh,” she said.

Another breeze come in, stronger than the last. We both cut our eyes toward the window, though there weren't much to see except a little alley of moonlight.

“I've been meaning to tell you,” she said. “I like your sign.”

 

Chapter

TWENTY-FOUR

I slept deep that night. Dreaming on what, I can't tell you. All I recall is the shock of coming out of shadows and into edges.

It was a sound that did it. A short, sharp crack of thunder.

I jerked my head toward it, and then I heard Gus barking up a fury and Hiram shouting in from the front porch.

“Get down!”

I'm already down
, I thought, but my arms, without my telling them, had gone and wrapped round Earle. We laid there, the two of us, in that pure darkness, not even knowing what was on the other side. Then come another crack of thunder. Even shorter and sharper than the last.

From somewhere far off, I heard an engine gunning into the night. And out of the near darkness, something now was stirring. I could see shapes heaving out of the black—an elbow—a shoulder—vanishing as soon as they showed themselves.

“Sweet Jesus,” whispered Earle.

Then, just like that, come a fall of red hair.

It was Janey. A candle clutched in both hands … her bed-stiff legs tottering toward us and then stopping.

“Glass,” she said.

I had some notion, I guess, of pulling her to safety, but when I lunged for her, something cruel drove itself into the sole of my foot. The word come back to me then.
Glass.

Sure enough, in the candlelight, I found little winking jewels—one of them wedged good and hard in my foot.

Then I swung the candle toward the window. Ain't no brick had done that. No, sir, if you had to go and get your front window busted, you'd have wanted a hole just like this. Clean and small and round, with just a little web of cracks fanning out each way.

“That's just plain rude,” whispered Janey.

The first shell never made it into the house. Passed through the drainpipe and lodged in a hunk of cinder block. The second had one hell of a ride before it was done. Went through the window, passed right over the bed where me and Earle was laying, banged off the coal stove, bounced off Mama's framed rotogravure of President Roosevelt (making another mess of glass), then dived through the braids of our kitchen rug and come to its final resting place about half an inch into our floorboards.

Hiram tweezed it out with a pair of pliers. “By gods,” he said. “This one had
some
body's name on it.”

His voice was dry and low, but when Sheriff Motherwell come creaking up the porch steps, Hiram was waiting at the door.

“These children could've been
killed
. You know that, don't you? You
know
that.”

The sheriff looked a touch queasy. Every three or four words, he'd have to stop talking and put his hand on his belly,
appease
it like it was some jealous wife.

“We'll be glad to look into it,” he said.

“Look
into
it?” said Hiram.

“Not sure what else you want me to do. Did y'all see the shooter?”

“It was pitch-black.…”

“Then how do y'all know it was Harley Blevins?”

There was a rush of quiet.

“I don't believe we said
who
it was,” said Hiram. “I don't believe we once used Harley Blevins's name.”

The sheriff put his hands back on his belly. A tiny belch come fluttering out.

“Melia,” he said. “How 'bout you and me talk outside?”

I closed the door after us.

“Listen up,” he said. “I'm gonna tender this suggestion but the once. Whoever's doing this…”

“Sheriff, you and me both—”

“Whoever's
doing
this, you need to go make your peace with him.” He rested his beefy hands on the porch rail. “You're the only one can.”

 

Chapter

TWENTY-FIVE

Next morning, I did everything like I always did. Ate breakfast. Drunk my two cups of joe. Put on my uniform. Helped Earle pump gas. Joked with Warner and Dutch and Elmer. Then, once I'd waved all the truckers down the road, I went and moseyed over to the truck.

“Where are you headed?” called Hiram.

I could see, just behind him, the slumbering form of Gus, one ear sticking up like a radio tower.

“Gotta go see Chester,” I said. “Some paperwork or other. Be back in an hour.”

Not a flicker on his bony face.

“An hour's about all we can spare you,” he said.

“Oh, what? Like I'm gonna let you and Earle get near one of them engines? I got standards to uphold.”

I shut the door. Put the key into the ignition and tried to turn.

I didn't have to do this.

I could get out of this truck right now. Tell Hiram I got the wrong date. Head back to the garage, forget all about it.

And wait to see what Harley Blevins does next?

As I drove off, Gus's black-rimmed eyes was following me the whole way.

When a feller gets too big for Walnut Ridge, what does he do? He sells his little A-frame on First Street and he heads north for the hills, where he can look down on what he used to be.

It weren't in Harley Blevins's makeup to buy some old plantation house. No, he had to go and build his own. Not so big as the real thing—just a couple stories—but it sure
acted
big with its veranda and its five columns. Marble fountain and pissing Cupids. The whole place as white as angels' wings, except for the shutters, which was ocher and cobalt blue. Standard Oil colors.

It wouldn't have surprised me none if some old darkie servant had answered the big brass knocker, but the woman who drug the door open was fair and freckled, well along in years, with arms that looked even plumper in their leg-of-mutton sleeves and curly bottle-blond hair that the August heat had done evil things to. Even now, she had her hand somewhere in its tangles, trying to sort things out.