Further South (2 page)

"I don't think I can," she said. "It's hard for me to drink when I'm partying like this."

"Trust me," he said, "it will help."

So she took a drink and lit a cigarette. He watched her, his fingers caressing her arm. Her body had been going so fast for so long that the first swig of vodka did a number on her. If felt good to slow down, even if it was just a little.

"Thanks for listening to me babble," she said. "Sorry I've been so much drama."

"I've had a great time so far," he said. "Take another drink."

She smiled. "Are you trying to get me drunk?" He lifted the glass to her lips and she took another drink. The vodka burned her tongue, but she forced it down. "You're really a sweet guy. I can't help but think that in another life... you and me, we could have had a lot of fun."

"We're having plenty of fun in this life." Now his fingers moved to her neck. Light strokes with the tips of his fingers. Felt so good. "This has been one of the best nights I've had in a long time."

"Really? That's so sweet. Sam used to say sweet things to me, but that was a long time ago."

"Sam's an idiot. He doesn't see what I see. If he doesn't come back, you'd be better off."

She looked to him. She wanted to hug his blue eyes, to live inside his lips. Each time his fingers made a pass across the flesh of her neck, her heart stopped beating until he began another.

"He'll come back. Sam
Tuley will always come back to me."

"I don't blame him."

"I'm an awful person."

"No you're not," said the Boy. He lifted the glass to her lips again. "Take another drink, Melinda."

"If I take this drink, I want you to kiss me again."

"Finish the cocktail, and we'll do whatever you want."

She swallowed it down and melted into him.

Sam Tuley will always come back for me...

She awoke to the doorknob rattling. Not the front door, where visitors and pizza delivery boys came to call, but the back door, through the kitchen, which only she and Sam used.
Oh shit!
Her mind was foggy and she tried to slap the cobwebs free. Bar... Boy... Drugs... Drink... She snapped to and sat up. She panicked. Her world was about to end. She was naked.
She did, didn't she?
She started to scream for the Boy, but he wasn't there.

Had he been a dream? Was he in the bathroom? Where was he? Best case scenario, he left last night, having gotten what he wanted.
On and out of her life. Better case scenario: the whole thing had been some drug-induced hallucination and she was absolutely fucking nuts, seeing things that weren't there and fucking people who didn't exist. That would be great. But she still felt him between her legs, knew it was no dream. She'd have to explain to her paranoid boyfriend why she was sleeping naked on the couch with all JoJo's drugs on the coffee table and--

She froze.
JoJo's drugs were
not
on the coffee table.

And the Boy was nowhere to be found.

Her stomach sank and the kitchen door opened. "Melinda? Melinda, are you home?"

It was Sam. Melinda flew across the room and down the hallway to the bathroom.
You are so stupid, you are so stupid, you are such a stupid--
She slammed shut the bathroom door and locked it.

"Melinda? Baby, we need to talk." She could hear Sam through the door, making his way to the bathroom. She searched the room for answers. Her head was so foggy. Why? They'd each done two rails of meth, how in the hell did she pass out like that? The answer came to her as soon as she'd asked it. Her hand covered her stomach, as if ill.
Oh Melinda, you are such an idiot.

She nearly crumpled to the bathroom floor. The Boy had slipped her a mickey.
Tricked her. How long had he planned on stealing JoJo's shit? When she showed it to him? Before?
Had he planned it way back at the bar? Planned it before they'd even met?
Her world closed in on her. Sam pounded at the bathroom door.

"Melinda, open this door, right now." He pounded some more. "We need to talk. I'm serious. Quit fucking around."

"Just a minute, Sam," she said, barely able to manage her voice above a whisper. What would he do? She knew what he'd do if he found out she'd banged some dude from a bar in their apartment. She had no doubt. She'd pulled all kinds of shit on him, but she'd crossed a line. At some point in the evening, it had made sense. It didn't now. He'd beat the hell out of her for that.

She choked back vomit welling in her throat. She wanted to call her daddy.

He wasn't waiting. "Melinda, I'm serious. We need to talk. Look, I know we've been at it and I don't care right now. I'm sorry for whatever you think I did. Whatever it is, I apologize. I'm really,
really
sorry and I'll never do it again, promise. I love you, buttercup. I always will and you're the best now will you please, pretty please open the motherfucking door?"

She grabbed the bathrobe hanging from the back of the door. It would have to do. If she didn't open the door, he'd kick
it in again and it could be an uphill battle calming him down after that.

"Sammy, I'm going to open the door," she croaked. "Please calm down now."

Her hand rested on the knob until she heard him answer, "I'm calm, honey. Please open up."

She pulled the bathrobe tighter around her and turned the knob. She expected anything. She expected to see him pointing his granddaddy's .22 at her,
then possibly pull the trigger. She even half-expected him to fly into a rage and jump atop her, beating her until she stopped moving. But she did not expect to see what she saw when she opened the door and that was her boyfriend, Sam Tuley, covered in blood and looking all kinds of harried, her realizing then that, despite all the nights he woke her up crying, this was the first time she'd ever seen him scared.

"
JoJo's dead," he told her. "He's dead and I killed him."

He led Melinda out to the living room so he could tell her what happened. She stumbled in a stupor to the couch and sat, then remembered what had happened on that couch and scooted a little further down. Sam rambled on and on, chattering away at the events of the night before, and how JoJo and he had gotten heated and how one called the other motherfucker this and cocksucker that and soon they were slugging each other in the chest and one took it a little too far and they both were cranked out of their minds already. JoJo pulled a knife, Sam wrestled it away from him and stuck him with it and here we are. Melinda wanted to scream, to get sick, to crack up laughing until someone took her away. All around was evidence of what she had done, what she let happen. She hoped nothing gave her away. She hoped Sam was too tweaked to notice.

And all the while, it kept running through her head.
Sam had killed someone
. She slashed his tires once, set his shit on fire, told everyone he couldn't fuck longer than fifteen seconds most the time, thanks to all the drugs. She loved getting him up in a lather, watching him lash out and scream, act like a fool even in public. But hearing that he'd killed someone put them in an all-new ballpark. It put her in a totally different sport.

"But I got good news out of all this." He smiled like a ma
dman. "Are you ready for some good news?"

She could only nod.

"I dragged his body out to the Angelina River and threw it down an embankment," he said. "Wolves'll be real bad out there. Thick with buzzards in no time. There won't be nothing left of him for nobody to find."

She smiled weakly. What was she going to do? She felt time ticking. She probably didn't have a good five minutes before he went looking for the shit. Another thirty seconds or so before he realized it wasn't there. She needed to distract him, keep him focused.

"How come you didn't bury him, honey?" she asked.

"I couldn't bury him." His pupils glazed like donuts. "No time. I didn't have a shovel. I'd be out there all night. You don't think we need to go back and bury him, do you?"

"Maybe," she shrugged. "Just to be on the safe side." Sam scratched his head, but he'd never catch up to his brain. He'd been up all night. She didn't want to lose him, so she added: "Just in case people start looking for him."

"That's the good news!" He snapped his fingers. "That's what I meant to tell you. I'm dragging him down the banks of the Angelina and his cell phone starts up.
Scares the living shit out of me. Then, my phone rings. I don't know what to do, so I answer it and it's Noah. He's looking for JoJo because he wants to score. I tell him JoJo went out of town to sell that ounce, like he was supposed to. He says well, since he's out of town and all, then I must have the shit and I tell him I do and so he wants me to hook him up. Except Noah wants to hook up large because he's got a bunch of people looking so I come up with a plan."

Melinda felt herself getting sick. She spotted her panties next to the magazine rack by the couch, where they'd landed last night.

He continued: "I'll keep selling his stuff like I'm supposed to when he's out of town. When the guys looking for that ounce out in Longview get calling, asking where's JoJo, I won't know, but I'll offer to bring it to them. Pretty soon someone will figure something's up and I'll agree and be the one organizing the biggest search party, trying harder than everyone to find him, only I'll know no one'll ever find him, because the wolves, fish, gators and buzzards and whatever else won't leave nothing. He'll be gone. Disappeared off the face of the earth."

Melinda covered her mouth with her hand. Swallowed what tried to come up. She wanted to go home, to drop out and di
sappear. Sam knew where her parents lived. He'd drive up to Oklahoma and drop them down an embankment to feed wildlife.
Where would he put her
, she wondered.

He went on: "So I got to clean this blood off me and get sel
ling this shit because baby, while we're covering for JoJo and waiting for them to start wondering where he is, we can make a whole lot of money. A
whole
lot."

And she lost him. He spun on his heel and turned to go back to his room. She snapped to and realized what he was doing.
He was looking for the shit!
He'd be under his bed, jimmying loose the floorboard and reaching into the crawl space--

"Sam?"

"Mel, I'm real sorry about the other day. I haven't been myself lately and it's because of this JoJo shit. He doesn't respect me. He never has. He hides his shit here because he's too scared to get caught with it. Or he
was
. He ain't scared of nothing no more. He'd have me do all the driving when we went out to Diboll or Huntington to get shit, or out to Tyler to sell it. You should have seen him mooch when it was time to pay for gas or sodas or whatever. Anyway, my point is that I'm real sorry."

"Sam?"

He was half-under the bed, half-out pulling at the board with his fingernails. "I think that a lot of times I get real angry and I don't know how to direct that anger. So I lash out at you. My dad was a real grumpy person when I was growing up and that's how I saw him act around my mom and me. I think that's where I get it from. But I won't be like that no more, honey." She heard him pull free the board and set it aside.

"Sam, honey--"

"And we're going to make so much money. Believe me, babe. In no time, we'll be running JoJo's business and rolling in it. He made so many stupid mistakes and trust me, those aren't the mistakes I'll be making. Watching him this past couple of months taught me one thing and that's you got to trust people-- Wait a second..."

"Sam, please--"

He scooted out from under the bed and got to his knees, turned to her with a look on his face. She'd never seen that expression in him before and she took a baseball bat to it. One swing and he dropped. Never saw it coming.

The bat fell to the floor. He was still breathing, bleeding freely from a nose split in two. The grip of the .22 peeked from beneath his waistband. She vomited. He would have shot her.
He would have thrown her down an embankment to rot with JoJo.

Time to go
. She grabbed the .22, some clothes, the keys to his Cutlass and was out the door. She wouldn't stop until it ran out of gas. Because she knew it had to be true, the very thing that used to warm her at night, used to keep her sane when she was spiraling... now chilled her to her very bones:
Sam Tuley will always come back for me.

That very same Cutlass sat idle in the weed-choked lot next to the bait and tackle shop clear on the other side of Louisiana, where the two fraternity brothers from Tulane barely considered it as they walked back to their car.

"Looks like she got a ride," said the taller one.

"Lucky for her," said the tubbier of the two. "More than likely, it's lucky for us."

"How do you mean?"

"You have to be careful with these backwater girls," he explained. "The only way a lot of them can get out of their trailers is by using what they got between their legs. Poking holes in rubbers and stuff, just so you get them pregnant and they can have a kid that's only half-white trash."