Karen G. Berry - Mayhem 01 - Love and Mayhem (7 page)

The only reason she drove all night was to get home.

His bare-naked serenade half-registered in her memory on the way south, his big hands on the neck of that guitar, the way his body had filled up her cab. The man had shed tears over her song about a runaway to Mexico. She switched CDs, found Emmylou singing that same song. That was a big part of the problem, these romantic songs about Mexico. Those spoiled college boys always ran to Mexico at the first hint of trouble. They had no idea how many never came back, and the ones who didn’t return weren’t sitting down there drinking margaritas and banging senoritas. They were dead, or worse, locked up in a Mexican prison, where they’d skin a white boy alive for five American dollars and a pair of boots. How many broken boys had she driven back north, shamed and desperate to get back to the land of due process?

She reached up and touched that single hand-rolled smoke, then pulled her hand away. She thought about Isaac in a Mexican prison. He was a strong one, a little narrow through the shoulders, but his arms were massive and hard. Looked like someone had stuffed a few Idaho bakers in each of his biceps. Soft in the belly, but those taut legs went on for miles, and his white ass in the moonlight looked like a perfect curve in Monument Valley. Nope, she thought. He was pretty. Didn’t matter how tall he was, how strong. Those Mexican rump riders would figure out a way to turn him over and hold him down.

If he’d been heading to Canada, she’d have let him go. But Memphis said he had no priors. Maybe six months. Better to do those in an American jail, any day. Yup, she decided, picking some flecks of tobacco from her teeth with her pinkie nail. She’d done right, going through his wallet while he slept, calling her uncle Memphis.

She had absolutely done the right thing when she turned him in.

Night time, halogen lights in the lanes to her left, tired eyes, Lucinda singing, the crackle of the CB, the white on black of highway lines, the white on green of highway signs. Coming home. She used to love to drive at night. Twenty-six and tired. I’ll never last in this line of work, she thought, then remembered that she hadn’t exactly slept the night before. She had a pang of regret. He could have been riding beside her, his thick fingers on the strings of his guitar, singing in that gruff, low voice, sharing her smokes, snooping through her CDs and scoffing at all the country, asking, did she have any Björk?

She looked at his guitar next to her on the seat. It could join that old guitar at home, held in lieu of money a man lost to her in a card game. She’d held on to it for a decade, waiting for that dried-out old poker player to come reclaim it. It’d been the strangest thing. She was sixteen and playing cards in a trailer, waiting to go onstage at a state fair. She’d heard a man with a bleached-out voice say,
I’m looking for a girl with a scar
. One of the guitar players pointed to Raven. He wasn’t really a stranger. He was often in the crowds at Gospel shows, listening, nodding, carrying a guitar case he never opened. It was said by some that he was the Devil, but Raven thought it more likely that he was a washed-up guitar player with a bad liver. The stranger had come her way, smiling, studying her face for the scar under the makeup her mother plastered over it. Once he’d found it, he’d sat down and lost an unheard-of sum of money to Raven as methodically as if he were doing it on purpose.

The guitar was supposed to be a marker.
I’ll be back for it. You can count on that
.

At the time, Raven had owned four guitars. She didn’t need another, even though this old National had a full, strange tone when he took it out and strummed it for her. It also had a massive case as carefully constructed as a coffin, and just about heavy enough to require pallbearers. She’d stuck the instrument in a closet, because she had a feeling that somehow, someway, he’d show up to retrieve it. He wasn’t the Devil, but he looked like he could get mean in a hurry. And besides, she couldn’t get the money if she didn’t keep the marker.

Raven touched her cigarette. All she asked was to get home.

There were curves up ahead. Those curves were banked wrong and more dangerous than they appeared, lying flat like a snake, ready to slither off. She saw the sign.

Free Coffee

It was the last rest stop before home. The last little oasis of light and safety, free coffee and road chat. She never stopped there. Never. She turned off her CB. Like those small movements made by Catholics when they pray, her hands moved automatically to touch the cigarette in her hatband, the handle of the knife that rested on the seat beside her. She rolled past the rest stop. His truck wasn’t there, anyway.

She decided to think about the man she’d had the night before, his sweet voice and clean heart. Like riding an angel. That was a hell of a way to break a dry spell. She spent the last seven years antagonizing men into fights, not into bed. But that sweet hitchhiker was too much to resist. As tempting as her first man, her very first. His name was Floyd, and he was a drummer stupid enough to remind her of those old jokes.
What do you call a guy who likes to hang out with musicians? A drummer
. Or maybe,
How can you tell when the stage is level? The drool runs out both sides of the drummer’s mouth.
Floyd was as dumb as a box of rocks, but his blonde hair had curled around his shoulders, and his arms were as hard as Louisville Sluggers. Drummer guns. He’d looked like Peter Frampton in an FFA jacket. Nineteen years old and divorced, if she remembered right. At the time, she was sixteen pretending to be twelve, chafing in a girlish dress that made her look like she was headed for a square dance, one of her God-awful gospel get-ups, sewn to order by her stage mother, but that was a horrible train of thought, one she’d be confronting in the flesh soon enough, so she took her thoughts back to the drummer. They’d been hiding under the bleachers at a revival show, sharing a furtive smoke. She wasn’t supposed to be polluting her voice. She’d been so damn tired of pretending to be a child. Her heart thudded under her bound breasts. His happy livestock eyes, when she tripped him and beat him to the ground. The first of many men Raven had helped herself to.

She used to take what she wanted. Before.

The rest stop was exactly seven years and eight miles behind her. She was heading west, two lanes then, and she eased the needle a little higher because anyone who patrolled these roads knew her rig and who she was related to. No one would stop her as she drove through the little town of Ochre Water, the whole town asleep under a full moon. Stopping at lights, looking down at the sidewalks around her, the slow speed and narrow confinement of a street after the open road.

She passed the lavender bungalow where Melveena Strange slept. If Raven weren’t so tired, she’d stop, wake Melveena and take her out for a drink, a wild ride. She was too tired, though. She’d stop another time.

Putting it in gear, moving it so carefully, maneuvering onto the highway.

Five miles south, only five miles more, to the south.

NIGHT DEEPENED UNDER
a nearly full moon. Dogs barked. Screen doors slammed. Bud cans rolled, lonely and empty, across the gravel. The lawn whirligigs spun, reversed, and spun again. The wind chime collections jangled and belled and donged and rang. One plastic trellis after another slapped against vinyl siding. A black plywood cutout leaned against the side of a trailer. The wind tried hard to knock it down. It couldn’t.

The cutout was nothing special. In these parts, you could see one every half a mile or so, leaning against billboards, sheds, rusted swing sets. It looked like a Marlboro man leaning back, one booted leg kicked over the other casually, his hat tipped down toward cupped hands as he lit his smoke. The smoking cowboy image was meant to be terribly Old West and romantic. The problem was, at anything but high noon it looked like a full-sized redneck robber waiting for a man to leave the house so he could harm the women and smash the gun rack.

The wind blew. The silhouette shook and rocked. It moved as if it were alive. It moved back and forth, back and forth, as if those feet could pull up and walk silently down Sweetly Dreaming Lane, leaving no footsteps behind. Just an old piece of plywood and a high desert wind that keened like something lost in the night.

Wood and wind, that’s all.

RAVEN PULLED INTO
the park carefully, guiding her rig between the cement lions, maneuvering down Sweetly Dreaming Lane to the extra long parking space in front of Levi Skinner’s singlewide on Going Crazy Drive. Levi never minded her parking there, because, true to his name, he was doing a little illegal game butchering on the side. He’d passed his taxidermy correspondence course. Officially, that was what he was doing in there, but the tractor-trailer made a nice screen for the various animal corpses brought to him in the night that never came out stuffed or mounted.

Raven parked, fell out more than hopped, stretched. The muscles in her neck and shoulders cracked, complained, and snapped into limber. She headed toward the center of the park, her boot heels tapping the blacktop. She tipped her face up to the moon like all that white light would pour down and give her a drink. The moonlight ran down her scar and made it a vein of silver.

She kicked a little gravel. Touched the cigarette and match in her hatband. What she really wanted was a smoke. What she really needed was a bed. She thought of climbing in next to her little scrap of a daughter, waking her up, smelling her hair. Wrapping her arms around her, singing softly, that song about the hank of hair and the piece of bone.

She thought about Annie Leigh’s grey eyes.

Usually this time on a Saturday night, there were dogs barking, couples tripping back and forth to have a beer with each other. There were men going up to the bar for a game of darts or pool, women coming home from Tupperware parties. No kids, of course, this was an adults park, so the only little piece of trouble running around was Annie Leigh, climbing that satellite dish, sneaking through the broken place in the fence, looking in windows. But not this night, no.

Something was wrong.

She stood there on the moonlit gravel that glowed like luminescent toadstools, and she heard it. Minor keys, a variation on a theme, the upper registers played in dissonant chords of sheer desperation. There were a few pianos in the Park, but only one person who played the piano like that. And he did it in the clubhouse. She went to the door and saw the back of a man bent to the task of playing out his unbearable loneliness on a keyboard. She waited for him to finish.

“Well damn, Pop. Did you write that?”

That long back straightened. Her father, Tender LaCour, turned to meet her eyes. “When did you roll in, Raven?”

“About five minutes ago. You didn’t hear?” She sat down beside him. “Where’s your boots? You weren’t named after your feet, were you?”

Tender lifted his long hands. His fingers spread wide and settled into position on the keys. He broke into a joyfully chorded version of “Kumbaya.” It was an old joke between them, referring to the time when Raven’s mother had decided she wanted to learn to play the guitar. Raven refused to have anything to do with the idea, so the task of instruction had fallen to Tender. Three months later, when Rhondalee abandoned her studies, the only song she’d learned was Kumbaya.

But the truth was, Tender loved this song. He played, his bare feet working the pedals, and she sang as he added a soft harmony.

They sat side-by-side in the reverential hush that follows a beautiful song. In that stillness, the sound of the Clubhouse door closing was loud as a gunshot.

“Pa? Who was that?”

“Someone quiet.”

He would break her heart. “I’m going up to the bar. You wanna come? I’ll buy you a seltzer and lime. Might be Bone Pilers playing. It’s early yet. Lots of time before Mother comes and hunts you down.”

“I believe I’ll play a little more.” Tender lay a hand on her shoulder. “Be careful tonight, daughter. The ghosts are howling.”

“You change your mind, I’ll be up there.”