Hard Twisted (6 page)

What makes you think we can't? He kept his word once, didn't he?

You mean about the wood?

I mean about him takin you to Texas and bringin you back all safe and sound.

She did not answer. She watched the truck as it swung wide on the blacktop, backing toward them in a churning dust cloud.

And besides, her father added, hefting his bedroll. I done prayed on it, and there ain't no more to be said.

They pitched their army surplus tents upwind of the coop. They unloaded the truck and gathered rocks for a firepit and strung a new clothesline. They dug a latrine. They folded their clothes and stowed their tools and sorted their kitchen, and then they
rolled their pantlegs to fill earthenware jugs from the lake's grassy shallows, the men from the camp standing and smoking and watching, and none of them offering to help.

After a familiar order was at last imposed on their new surroundings, Lottie sat on the stoop and blew the hair from her face. At the neighboring cabin, a droop-eyed hag in a flour-sack dress labored at her laundry, the clothespins moving rapidly from apron to mouth to sagging line. She paused long enough to scowl in Lottie's direction, her face gaunt and brown against her washing, and she mouthed a silent word.

Whore.

They ate their supper in the cabin, the men taking whiskey with their coffee and talking all the night of roosters.

At bedtime Lottie took her father's arm and helped him down the stoop to his tent, where she untied his shoes and stripped his dirty socks and set them all outside to air. Then she gathered up her bedroll and kicked pebbles in the darkness to make her pallet outside by the firepit.

She lay in her boots and studied the stars, blanketed by the murmur of distant voices and the rustling sounds of the birds in their cages and the courtship song of the crickets. The moon when it rose was cold and white and its reflection on the lake was as a crescent chalked on blackboard. One by one she watched as the houselamps darkened and the cookfires faded, until at last the only lights in camp were the aureate glow of the cabin's window and its trapezoid effigy cocked beyond the dark andirons of her boots.

Merciful Jesus, she whispered to the moon. What have I got us into now?

Then a shape appeared in the window, its dark form lifting her to an elbow. The featureless shadow centered in the lamplight, patient and watching, like something trapped in amber.

A minute passed, or an hour.

And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the shadow moved off, and the windscreen brightened.

And then all was darkness.

Toward evening of the day following, Lottie prowled the lake-front sedges, running and skipping and tossing feed to the ducks while the ragged camp dog yapped and coiled, charging at her heels. Some hundred yards distant, broom in hand like a lunatic charwoman, her father worked the day's final rooster in the run he'd built behind the Palmer cabin using scrap boards and wood stakes and rusted chicken wire.

Blackbirds rose at the sound of Palmer's horn. There were shouts, and a whoop, and when she looked to the run where her father had been, the cock alone stood beside the abandoned broom.

She found them in the cabin, both men grinning, each holding a glass of amber liquid. On the table between them a pile of greasy bills lay paperweighted by the open whiskey bottle. Palmer was sunburned and sweaty, his jeans filthy and blood-spattered, and he thumbed his hat and leered drunkenly toward the doorway in which girl and dog had appeared.

There she is. Fetch her a glass, Dil.

Now hold on.

Oh, Jesus, don't be such a old lady. Palmer reached to the sideboard and clapped a beveled tumbler beside the bottle, pouring out a thin finger of whiskey.

Here's to grabbin what's yours. Palmer grinned, raising his glass. And the devil take the hindmost.

They clicked glasses and drank, Lottie bracing to stifle the choke and burn. Her father's eyes watching, his look both reproving and surprised.

Run and fetch that bird back to his cage, he snapped. Then go clean out the back of the truck.

There'd been wild talk of driving to town, and of pink champagne and fish eggs, but the inertia of the whiskey had soon taken hold and reduced their ambitions to naught. And so the men sat in the cabin, drinking themselves torpid, while Lottie counted and recounted the day's winnings.

A windstorm arrived with the night. It swept off the lake, flattening the grasses and flagging the trees and sending camp trash cartwheeling through the clearing. It grounded the birds and silenced the crickets, and it buckshot the grill of Palmer's truck. Inside the cabin it whistled in the chinking and moaned in the stovepipe, and when Lottie ventured outside for the coffeepot, she heard the mad flapping of their tents beyond the guttered firelight.

The men had been drinking for several hours by the time Palmer rose from the table and bent to the curtained space below the sideboard. Where the hell is it? he muttered, striking his head as he straightened. Shit!

What's all the commotion? her father demanded, rousing from his stupor.

I been waylaid by my own larder. Palmer rubbed his head as he set a tin on the table. Here you go, Bonnie. I been savin these for just such a occasion.

Bonnie? Who's Bonnie?

Palmer grinned recklessly. Why, Dil, she's a first-class, natural-born cock handler is all she is.

Who is?

Look, Daddy, shortbreads! They're your favorites!

She opened the lid and spread the crinkling paper for her father's inspection.

I'll be damned.

Have one, Daddy.

Tell you what, her father said. These here would go right nice with just a whisker more of that store-bought.

By midnight he was unconscious, and man and girl shared a glance across the table.

You'd best give me a hand with him, Palmer said as he stood.

They scraped back his chair, and as Lottie held her father upright, Palmer squatted and barred his arms across the sleeping man's chest.

Grab his feet, honey.

They carried him, shuffling, to the doorway, then down the stoop and into the maelstrom, the stars at distant anchor their only witness. They sat him down and loosened his tentfly, and they eased him like some prostrate catechumen into a canvas baptismal.

Outside her own tent, with its grommets whistling and its canvas snapping, Palmer lifted Lottie like a new bride.

You can't sleep out here in this! he shouted as he turned her crossways to the wind and, staggering, bore her back to the cabin, and onto the stoop, and thence over the threshold.

BY MR. PHARR
: When you said there'd been a patch of trouble, what did you mean exactly?

A
: Daddy and Clint had a fight. Not a fight, really. They had words, I guess you could say.

Q
: What about?

A
: I reckon Daddy thought Clint had got fresh with me.

Q
: Had he?

A
: No, sir.

Q
: And as a result of this misunderstanding, did your father threaten the accused?

A
: Probably.

BY MR. HARTWELL
: Speculation.

BY MR. PHARR
: I'll rephrase. Did you hear any threats made by either man as a result of this misunderstanding between your father and the accused?

A
: No, sir. I wasn't there when it happened.

Q
: When what happened?

BY MR. HARTWELL
: If she wasn't there when it happened, then whatever it was that allegedly happened, counsel knows full well he's eliciting hearsay or speculation from the witness.

THE COURT
: Henry?

BY MR. PHARR
: Not necessarily, Your Honor. For example, the accused might have told her that he'd had words with her father.

THE COURT
: Ask her that.

BY MR. PHARR
: Did Mr. Palmer ever tell you that he'd had words with your father, or that either man had threatened the other?

A
: Yes, sir. Clint said that Daddy had gone to the sheriff, and that he'd had to trace Daddy down and get him drunk so's to calm him down a little.

She woke with a start.

She lay in her clothes on the hard wooden floor with Palmer in the bed above her, his breathing slow and measured. The cabin was dim as yet, a gray light from the windscreen shining through the empty bottle whose shadow fell like an accusing finger across their jumbled boots.

Floorplanks creaked as she rose and tiptoed barefoot to the window. There she pressed one cheek to the cold glass and then the other, a hoarfrost butterfly clouding her vision of the outside world in waiting.

Hinges squealed as she stepped onto the stoop and thence to the corner, from where she saw her father's brogans as they had left them, paired and empty before his still-fastened tent-flap.

Water splashed behind her, and she wheeled to the sound. From the porch of the next cabin, the hag-woman shook her pail, her droop eye glowing dull and malignant in the low light
of sunrise. She leaned and spat, and wiped her mouth, and turned back to her doorway.

Lottie returned from the lake with her old clothes in a bundle. By now four men were at the rusted Overland, arranged like surgeons on tiptoes, leaning over the patient and reaching with blackened arms to point and poke and stanch some oily hemorrhage. Her father drew a clean rag from his pocket.

She set the clothes with the others to be washed and with her fingers ran the wet knots from her hair. Of all the cabins, Palmer's alone remained dark and still despite the hour. She gathered her hair and tied it back, then she set the soap and the scrub brush in her pail.

I'm doin the washin! she called to her father's back, and he raised his rag in reply as, from the fender opposite, a face lifted into sunlight and grinned, and she saw in the grinning a fleeting flash of gold.

The day was bright and still, and the only sounds where she stood on the bank were the echoing calls of the ducks and the plash and splatter of her own enterprise. She dunked and scrubbed and dunked again each of the garments, wringing them out to hang on the sagging lakeside branches until she herself was tented and moved within them like a bedouin.

Her jeans lay neatly folded with her boots nearby and her legs were bare and blotched by the serial ablutions of warming sun and frigid water. The hymn she hummed was the only tune she really knew, the fragmented score to a fading memory of a whitewashed church and hard oak pews and the talcum hand of
a mother whose golden cross hung now slapping lightly at the hollow of her own throat.
When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of glory died, my richest gain I count but loss, and pour contempt on all my pride.

And so she never heard the footsteps.

The hand that grabbed her was calloused and hard, and it yanked her backward and spun her roughly to the ground.

Daddy, don't! Daddy!

But the eyes she saw through the pulsing of her blood were not her father's eyes, or the voice her father's voice.

You dirty little mink, the man breathed softly, his face streaked and flushed. He fumbled at the knot that was his belt buckle, and as his pants fell away, his long, pink cock bobbed free.

I'll scream, she whispered, backing in the dirt. I swear I will.

The gold tooth glinted. Go ahead. I'll bet your daddy'd like to hear all about you and that half-pint convict ruttin like spring goats behind his back. You go ahead and call him over here so's I can tell him all about it.

He dropped to his knees grabbing at her ankles. She kicked and tried to rise, but he bulldogged her and dragged her twisting onto her stomach, tearing the thin, white panties loose from her clawing fingers.

Don't. Please.

Don't, please, he sneered, spreading her legs.

She tried to scream but gagged instead on a bitter loam of earth and snot as he gripped her neck and pressed her face into the dirt.

The report of the pistol cracked like a whip, echoing across the lake. The rough hands fell away, and Lottie scrambled and
twisted, and only then saw Palmer holding a level bead on the man's back.

You want a new asshole, or you want I should plug the one you already got?

The man lifted both hands slowly. Hold on, neighbor. I didn't mean no harm. We was just havin a little fun is all. Ain't that right, miss?

The crash of footfalls in the woods halted the arc of the pistol Palmer had raised over the kneeling man's head. He glanced over his shoulder, then to Lottie, where she lay wet and dirty and cowering.

You'd best put them drawers back on, he said calmly.

The men, when they arrived, were three in number, her father at the lead. They drew up short in comic unison. Then her father made a wounded sound that was part shout and part whimper, and he threw himself flailing onto the kneeling man's back, his fists windmilling into flesh and bone and earth.

Oww! Shit! Help! The man curled himself tightly, warding off blows with his arms.

The other men watched as her father pounded the man head and ribs and head again until both his fists were bloody and both his arms were too tired to lift. When he slumped to all fours, spent by his efforts, the groaning man rose to a like position, and any discernible difference between victor and vanquished was lost in the shared gasping of breath and the pooling of blood and tears.

Fucking. Bastard.

I didn't. It was him. The man gestured with his bloodied face. Ask the wife. She saw them. Ask her.

When Garrett stood again, Palmer backed a step, reaiming his pistol. I ain't the one with my pants round my ankles.

Garrett, still heaving, looked first to the gun and then to the other men. He unbuckled his belt and drew it from its loops and doubled it in his bloody fist. He brushed past the others and raised the belt high and brought it down with a crack across the cowering girl's legs.