Billy Bob Walker Got Married (4 page)

"You never change, do you?" she got out at last, pushing her words past the sudden, unexpected hurt that his had brought.

"I get older. I'm not so crazy about doing stupid things anymore—a few weeks in here are making it real clear that they're never worth what you have to pay. I should already have known that. Guess I was supposed to learn it from you three or four years ago. Me, I'm dumb and slow. I even used to believe in angels with big brown eyes."

A slow, hot flush seeped up Shiloh's cheeks at his pointed words. "You're right. That was dumb. I can't imagine an angel wanting you. You'd have to reform first, and I don't think that's possible."

He leaned into the bars, resting his forehead on them as he looked down at her and retorted, "Oh, I don't know. You're not one—we both know that—but you still look pretty angelic. You're sure preachy enough to make a man reform, and there was a time, Shiloh Pennington, when
you
wanted me."

A flaming red wave of color washed clear to her hairline, and she gasped at his sheer audacity as if she'd been struck. "You—you—oh! I was eighteen and too stupid to know better."

"And now you're all grown up?" He looked her over again, then grinned before answering his own question. "Yes, ma'am, you surely are."

"But at least this time I'm not stupid enough to keep on talking to you," Shiloh snapped back furiously.

"It's not my fault that you quit the first time," he returned.

"It must have been your technique. Like wolf-whistling at every girl that goes by. Aren't you getting too old for that?" she returned, sliding in the open door of the car.

"Maybe I was whistling at the Porsche," Billy Bob answered. "As for you, you looked tired. Too much night life with the judge's little boy?"

"Drop dead," she muttered. It wasn't exactly a scintillating return, but she was too burned up to think of a better one.

As she reached out to pull the door closed, he called, "Hey, Miss Shiloh Pennington. I'm a lot of things, but I ain't no liar. I wasn't whistling at a car. I couldn't see anything but legs. Honey, that dress is too damn short."

She slammed the door furiously, twisted the key in the ignition, and the motor roared into instant, surprised life. Spinning out of
the
bank's parking lot, Shiloh left Billy Bob Walker and his laughter somewhere behind her.

₃

So that was
the big conversation he'd been waiting all these years to have.

Billy Bob laughed under his breath, a touch of wryness in the sound. It hadn't quite lived up to billing, but nevertheless, he'd had his chance to take potshots at the high-and-mighty Shiloh Pennington, and he'd taken them.

She'd given them back, too; somehow he'd known she would. They hadn't parted on the best of terms. She'd proven where her loyalty lay and it hadn't been with him. And if the knowledge had made him furious—at least at the time—it had to make her defensive now when he was around.

He'd worn out his emotions for her; now the only thing that fueled his desire to get back at Shiloh was just the sense of satisfaction that he'd at last forced her to face him and had wrung deep-gut, honest anger from her— that, and the outrage that ran through him every time he remembered that she was about to marry the one man with whom he most hated to see her: his half brother, Michael.

Moving from the window that still held a lingering memory of the girl and the red car. Billy Bob slumped down on the edge of the narrow bunk, where he propped his elbows on his worn jeans and dropped his face into his hands, trying to forget.

Robert Sewell was there, in his head, where he had been ever since Billy Bob was six years old and some kid out at tiny Seven Knobs Elementary had called him "bastard," repeating exactly what an adult had no doubt said. He'd gone home crying, demanding to know what it meant—and he'd made Mama cry, too.

He hadn't understood all of the truth when she told it to him, but between the shame in her face and the anger in Grandpa's, he'd realized enough to at least understand why he didn't have a father at home.

As he grew older, he came to accept and even see what lay behind Sewell's total denial of everything. The man had always completely ignored the illegitimate son growing up on the farm fifteen miles north of Sweetwater, twenty-eight miles from Laurel Hill, the Sewell estate. It was the only way Sewell could cope with the fact that he'd once forgotten himself and his place enough to have seduced a backward, shy little country girl like Ellen Walker and then walked away from her.

It must have been gall to the judge when Billy Bob began to look more and more like him and his legitimate son every passing day; it had been bitter enough for Billy to take when he looked in his own mirror.

And to watch Michael have everything Billy couldn't just made it worse. One son was the canker in his father's life; the other was the apple of his eye.

Now Shiloh was with Michael. It didn't matter, Billy told himself firmly. He didn't love her anymore; in fact, he hated her. But the knowledge didn't help. Seeing her—her, of all people—in the local newspaper's wedding announcement section a few weeks ago with Michael had burned like salt in an open sore.

Maybe Billy's fury had led him to clash headlong at last with Robert in the courtroom.

Which brought him back full-circle to the judge, he thought in frustrated anger, pushing himself restlessly up off the bunk.

"Hey, you got a visitor," Davis McKee, the young, redheaded deputy, called back to him from the open door which led from the dingy cell area out to the offices.

"Yeah? Who?"

"Your grandpa, that's who. Go on in, Mr. Walker."

Billy went slowly to the bars as Willie Walker entered, approaching stiffly with the aid of a dark, heavy cane. The stroke the old man had suffered more than two years ago wouldn't quite turn loose of him no matter how he fought; the doctors had decided he would be crippled for the rest of his life.

But then, they didn't know Willie Walker, Billy thought with an unexpected surge of affection as he watched the white-haired man in the faded overalls and carefully starched high-buttoned white shirt—his "town" shirt—advance slowly toward him. Those same doctors had once said he'd never walk at all.

He halted in front of the bars and looked up at the grandson who stood a full head taller. "Well," he drawled at last, "I see you ain't gone nowhere since the last time I was here."

"Gone stir-crazy, that's about all," Billy Bob retorted unevenly, and he tried to ignore the feelings of guilt the old man's presence stirred inside him. He should be on the farm, helping him.

"It'll do it to you," Willie agreed, looking around at the three cells that stood in a row, each with a hard cot, a chipped, stained urinal and sink, and a little barred window. "It sure ain't home."

"I guess the peach trees have all quit blooming by now," Billy said, wistfully.

"Just about. It looks like it's gonna be a good year. Your mama cleaned the fruit stand and gave it a new paint job. I reckon we'll be ready to open next week just like we always do." Willie braced both hands on the top of the cane, leaning his bulk onto it.

"I was supposed to do the painting. I promised," Billy answered regretfully. "And who'd you get to go pick up the out-of-state produce?"

"Jimmy Mabrey, he's helping, and one of the Allred boys. Maybe you'll think about what it is that's important, and what you need to be doing, the next time you take it in your head to pull a fool stunt like breaking up Bud's honky-tonk. Or tellin' off a judge." Willie's face got a little darker, but it didn't show much emotion where Sewell was concerned. He'd learned to keep it hidden, but it was there, his dislike of the man, tamped down deep inside, just like Billy's.

"Don't you think I've told myself a thousand times I should have stayed home and stayed quiet?" There was a long silence after Billy's desperate words, then he asked awkwardly, "How're you getting along, moneywise?" It might not do any good to ask—Willie didn't believe in telling about money woes. But sometimes, if Billy Bob watched closely enough, Willie's face gave things away.

Not today.

"We're makin' it," the old man said shortly. "When produce starts sellin', things will get a whole lot better. And when I get off this high-priced medicine and away from those so-called therapists that charge an arm and a leg when they're s'posed to be helpin' me get mine back, there won't be any money problems at all."

Billy Bob didn't remind the old man that he'd be on the medicine and probably with the therapists for the rest of his life; keeping his mouth shut was a small price to pay for his grandfather's pride.

"Fact is," Willie continued, "I've come to offer
you
some money.''

Billy Bob stared.

"That's right. I hear you need thirty-five hundred just to get out of this mess."

"What did you do, Grandpa?" Billy asked warily. "You didn't sell something, did you?"

Not me. Don't reckon I got anything worth that much. But you—you got something Harold Bell up at Bell Farm wants."

Billy locked his hands around the bars so tightly his knuckles went white. "He wants Chase. That's what he's always wanted."

Willie nodded, and in an uncharacteristic show of sympathy, he reached out his old, rough hand and wrapped it around his grandson's on the bars. "He knows how it is, that you wouldn't sell that horse come hell or high water. But he figures a few weeks in here will change your mind, and if you do, you won't have to work all summer just to pay Bud Allen. You can put your money toward that other thing you've got goin'. So I told him I'd come and ask, anyway. Not on account of I want you to sell Chase—but because I know you. You're gonna go crazy locked up in this little room, Billy. It ain't right."

"You tell Bell the answer's the same as always. I raised Chase. He's always been mine, and a month or two in jail won't make me decide different."

Willie hesitated. "I already told him that was what you'd say. It's all right with me. But Billy, your mama hates what's happened with you and that judge. She's dyin' 'cause you're in here. It might do her some good if we could find a fast way to—to get you out."

The throat of the younger man worked convulsively, then he turned his back to the bars to lean on them. "Tell her it's my own fault, like always. Not hers. That I'm okay. And . . . and I'll think about Bell's offer, much as I hate it."

Willie nodded wordlessly, then turned away. "Well, I reckon I'll go get a haircut over at Leland's before I head home. Ellen keeps telling me I need it, and I hate to waste a trip to town on just comin' to see you." His words held a joking tone that forced Billy to turn around to look at him as he stood leaning on his cane. In the quiet stillness that lay between them a moment, Willie said at last to his grandson, "You come on home soon as you can. Billy Bob."

Nodding wordlessly, Billy watched the old man maneuver his body and his cane toward the outside, calling as he did, "Davis! I'm through talkin' to your prisoner."

Then Billy Bob looked at the four walls around him, the ones pressing in on him and collapsing down against him. He was in a big mess—and he deserved every bit of it.

♦ ♦ ♦

Weeping cherry trees lined the side of the paved drive that led through the carefully manicured lawn of 618 Dixie Avenue. The sprawling house at that address occupied three acres of land, acres full of fat spreading oaks and tall, reaching-for-the-sky hickory trees so old that they had twisted and gnarled in places. And scattered here and there, where sunlight struck, there were rose beds and carefully pruned dogwoods that bloomed pink even spring.

Now all that was left of the blooms were bits of rosy, lacy froth clinging here and there on stray limbs, and occasionally dusting the dark green of the Bermuda grass as they reluctantly fell.

The house was not a white-columned southern mansion; Sam Pennington touted his mill roots with enough defiance that he refused to look like the established gentry. Or maybe he'd been afraid his neighbors would have laughed at his ambitions if he'd built a modern-day Tara.

So instead, the house was a soft, glowing almond shade, and rather than brick, it was made of a warm, textured stucco. Wide, stretching porches made of flagstone extended from both sides, each under a balconied roof supported by delicate arches. The curved tops of the tall windows echoed the arches and blended the gentle southwestern look with the traditional southern gothic with grace and dignity.

White wicker chairs and heavy rockers sat on the porches, and a handyman was just now putting out a swing on the one porch that was hidden from the road by distance and by big-leafed magnolias and thorny hawthorns, all in preparation for the hot Mississippi summer.

Shiloh could hear Laura instructing the handyman even from the drive, where she left the Porsche.

"I tol' you once, Clarence—that's too close to those windows. The wind blows around this corner so hard sometimes in a storm it sounds like a baby crying, so move that swing over some. No—no—there. Right there."

"Anybody'd think this was a big project," Clarence French, the handyman, muttered. "If you'll just let me hang it where—"

"Shiloh! What are you doin' home?" Laura cut across his complaints in surprise as she caught sight of the girl coming up the two long, shallow steps that climbed to the porch.

"Taking the day off." Shiloh answered the little woman who waited. Laura Kershaw at fifty looked forty from a distance, mostly because she was barely five feet two inches tall, and her shape was trim and youthful. But in her face were lines, and in her eyes was age, the same age that the gray which streaked her dark brown hair proclaimed.

She could be sharp and outspoken, but under it all was a fierce protective instinct that extended to the people she loved. There weren't many of them—her dead husband; her brother, T-Tommy Farley; her cousin and employer for twenty-four years, Sam Pennington; and Shiloh. Laura had been a widow since before Shiloh was born; for as long as Shiloh could remember, the older woman had lived in the little brick house a hundred yards over and behind her own house, separated from them mostly by a lawn and a few pines. Sam had built the house for her.

"Taking the day off!" Laura echoed. "Well, that's a first. All I've heard from you since you got home last fall was how you were gonna work harder than any of 'em.

You were gonna show them that you got your job for more reasons than just being Sam's daughter."

"Maybe I'm tired," Shiloh told her without much emotion as she opened the screened door into the big kitchen, Laura's pride and joy. Across the polished cream tiles of the floor was a big refrigerator with an ice and water dispenser set into its black glass door, and that was where she headed.

Laura followed, her problems with Clarence forgotten.

"Tired of the work?"

"Tired of being Sam's daughter," Shiloh returned. The ice water was cold and soothing, taking away the tears that had burned her throat ever since she left the bank.

"I don't reckon this would have anything to do with Michael Sewell, would it?" Laura asked, her eyes sharp.

"How did you—what are you talking about?" Shiloh hastily substituted.

"Something's going on. He's called every day for nearly two weeks from Memphis, near frantic to talk to you. Best as I can tell, you're not answering. Then I see his car leaving here last night as I'm coming home from the revival—" Laura hesitated, the light skin of her face flushing a little, "and this morning, maybe you don't want me to tell this, but I found your blouse in your wastebasket. Torn to pieces. I been worried sick. A woman wouldn't do that to her own clothes, but a man would. Especially a mad one, like Michael was the last time he called here."

Shiloh didn't move, clutching the empty water glass to her heart as she and Laura looked at each other, but her face went as white as the dough the housekeeper used for her fancy Parkerhouse dinner rolls.

Laura took a step closer. "What'd he do?"

"Sam's determined for me to marry him. I let him— Michael—think I would. I thought I loved him a little. But I can't . . . And last night, he tried to—"