Queen (2 page)

Lucky stopped her sister's frantic flight by grasping her arm. "That was yesterday," she reminded her.

Queen shrugged out of her grasp. "I don't care if it was two weeks ago. I can't lose it. How will we ever find each other again? I lost Johnny. We can't lose each other!"

She raced from the house, her long legs covering the distance from porch to gate in three steps.

Lucky followed behind at a slower pace. She didn't want to be there when Queen discovered the loss, but she couldn't let her face it alone. Until now their whole lives had been intertwined by the fact that they were the gambler's daughters. Living down that stigma would have been impossible alone. Together they'd snubbed their noses at the world that had done a royal job of snubbing them.

Queen disappeared around the corner of the street, a blur of denim jeans and faded brown plaid shirt as she raced the five blocks to the post office. Lucky followed, using the time to take one last look at the rural Tennessee town that had been the only home she could remember.

She tossed her long black hair over her shoulder and squinted against the glare of sunshine, wishing she'd worn something to travel in other than the faded jeans and yellow shirt. She'd always dreamed of arriving in Las Vegas dressed to kill. She thought again of her silent vow to go back to the source of Johnny's misfortune—to Nevada, the place where their father had lost the Houston Luck in a poker game, and reclaim that which was theirs.

It was a childish dream that had taken root years ago. And even maturity had not dimmed the need to find the family heirloom, a gold pocket watch, and bring it back to Johnny. That Johnny Houston now had no use for it didn't seem to matter. What mattered to Lucky was fulfilling his dream.

A child cried beyond the doorway of one of the houses as she walked past. She looked away, trying to ignore the slap she heard and the knowledge that sometimes poverty was more than a lack of money: it was a frustration with life that often turned itself inside out and made nice people do ugly things to the ones they loved.

And the poverty of Cradle Creek was inevitable. The main commerce in town was the small coal mining company that clung to existence as stubbornly as the hill people clung to their privacy. Most of the houses were ramshackle and in sore need of a paint job. Their gray, weathered walls blended perfectly into the monochromatic landscape of a coal mining community. What wasn't coated with coal dust was layered in dirt.

Lucky knew that it was acceptable to be poor in a place where everyone was the same. It was not acceptable to live off the weakness of man by gambling for a living. She also knew that acceptance in Cradle Creek came from scraping out a living in the bowels of the earth, not skinning a miner out of his pay check.

She stopped mere feet away from the post office and watched as Queen stood transfixed on the top step, staring blankly at the landscape as if her answer could be found floating somewhere in the atmosphere.

"It's gone," Queen said. "The only time Mayrene Tate's cleaned the damned post office in a month and it had to be now." Her frustration warred with her fear. She didn't know whether to scream or just sit down and cry. But she was a Houston. She did neither. Instead she walked off the steps and started back toward their house.

"How will we stay in touch?" Lucky asked, unable to look away from the despair on Queen's face.

"It'll be all right," Queen muttered, and slipped her hand in Lucky's. "It has to be. When we get settled, surely we can just call information and contact Diamond through Jesse's record label or something. It can't be all that difficult. Come on," she said. "You've got a bus to catch in less than an hour. And I've got to pack, too. I told Whitelaw we'd be out by tomorrow."

Lucky skipped in step to match her sister's long stride. For the last time, they made the trip home together.

Queen stood in the middle of the street, waving at the back end of the bus long after the dust had settled. The smile she'd fixed on her face slid, turning upside down along with her world. For the first time in her life she was alone. It was terrifying and, at the same time, exhilarating.

It was her time. She patted her pocket to assure herself that her own share of the money from the sale of their home was safe, then headed for the bank. She walked inside and up to the single teller's window, took the cashier's check out of her pocket, and slid it across the counter.

Tilman Harger had gone to school with Queen Houston. By the time they were in high school, she'd become the unreachable goal they'd all strived for. He, like every other boy in their class, had made bets as to who would screw the curvaceous redhead first. He, like every other boy in class, had come up a loser. If Queen Houston had ever dated, she'd done it quietly and chosen someone other than a local. And he, like every other man in town, had hated her for the slight.

"What can I do for you?" he asked, picking up the meek and then smirking as he looked back at her. "Or should say… what did you have to do for this?"

Queen smiled.

Tilman shivered in his shoes. The smile wasn't friendly, and he suspected that his raunchy humor had gone awry.

"I want two hundred dollars in cash, and the rest in Traveler's checks," she said, ignoring the rude innuendo.

Tilman's eyebrows shot upward. "What would you be wanting with traveler's checks?"

"Traveling," she answered. Along with the expression on her face, it was enough to shut him up.

A few minutes later she exited the bank with an envelope in hand and headed for the gas station that doubled as a bus stop to buy a ticket. An hour later she was in her room, shoving the last of her clothes into a hag. By this time tomorrow she should be somewhere in Arkansas, maybe even Oklahoma. She had no notion of how long it took to get to Arizona, and she didn't care. All she knew was, she was going to ride until she found a place where the sun rose on a clear blue sky and the scent of smoky air and coal dust was nothing more than an ugly memory.

There was one thing she'd left unfinished, however. She didn't relish the thought of facing Morton Whitelaw again, but it had to be done. She picked up the document from her bed. This would be her last trip to Whitelaw's Bar.

Morton glanced up when Queen appeared at the doorway. Looking at him always made her think of weasels—his small, dark, close-set eyes; his sharp, beaky nose; his teeth stained from too many years of chewing tobacco.

"What do you want?" he growled, and slung a grimy towel across his shoulder that he'd been using to wipe glasses. He hitched his pants over his sagging belly and ran his fingers through his thin, graying hair.

"I don't want anything," she said. "I came to give you the bill of sale. I'll be gone by six A.M. tomorrow. Until then, leave me the hell alone, Whitelaw. Don't think just because I'm alone in that house tonight that I'm easy game. I'd hate to think I was the cause of my father having to spend eternity with you laid out beside him on the hill behind the gas station."

Morton blanched at mention of the cemetery and then turned red in anger. "Why you think any man in his right mind would want you is beyond me, you bitch. You're mean as a snake and cranky to boot. Men like to bed women, not females with an attitude."

Queen smiled and tossed the bill of sale on the floor between them much in the same manner that Whitelaw had tossed their money in the alley a few nights before.

"Just remember what I said, Morton. Don't set foot on the property until I'm gone or you'll be sorry."

She left as quickly as she'd come. For a few moments Morton stared at the paper on the floor, half expecting it to detonate. The sudden silence of the bar mocked his fears, and in a flurry of curses he grabbed the paper and stuffed it into his pocket. He couldn't wait for tomorrow to get here. The first thing he was going to do was tear that damned house down. He'd been needing more parking space for years.

He'd already forgotten that it was his own greed that had cost him so dearly. The years he'd spent trying to buy Johnny Houston out for ten thousand dollars had come and gone. And when the gambler who'd spent most of his life at the table in the back of his bar had died unexpectedly, he'd planned on the daughters being so devastated that he would get the place for half the price. When they were at their lowest, that's what he'd offered.

Their fury had been shocking. Just as shocking as Diamond Houston's threat to give the entire house and lot to a fanatic bunch of Bible thumpers. He knew as well as she that it would mean the end of his business. They'd preach him out of house and home in months. He'd been forced to pay three times what he'd offered just to get Johnny Houston's daughters out of his life for good.

The sound of a door slamming made him jump and then made him curse. Just to prove that she didn't call all the shots, he walked to the window and stared out at the house across the alley, giving in to the spite he felt obligated to show. But there was nothing to see but shaded windows and the ever-present, gray, weathered walls of Johnny Houston's home.

No one waved good-bye. It was to be expected. Few had cared. Queen stared hard at the back of the seat in front of her and tried not to think of the hillside behind the bus stop. There was no point in dwelling on the fact that Johnny Houston would now be alone in Cradle Creek, because if the God she'd believed in all these years truly existed, then her father was no longer there, but in heaven.

The bus driver emerged from the gas station, readjusting his belt as he walked toward the bus. Queen knew that it was time. In moments she would be gone. She'd never have to wake up and see coal smoke again. She would never again have to suffer the averted stares and hateful whispers of the people who'd judged her and her sisters as unworthy.

The scent of diesel filled the air as the engine kicked to life and the driver shifted into gear and began to pull out onto the highway. In spite of her determination, Queen found herself staring out the small window beside her toward the sloping hillside, searching frantically for the single white cross on the far side of the cemetery.

The bus began moving, faster… faster. In a sudden panic she stood and then crawled onto the seat on her knees, pressing her face against the glass and fixing her gaze on the mound of freshly turned earth that was her father's grave. Her vision blurred, her chin quivered, but tears never came. When the last sight of Cradle Creek had disappeared from view, she sat back on her seat, ignoring the curious stares of the two other passengers in the back of the bus.

She'd said her good-bye. It had not been necessary to say it aloud. It had come from her heart.

Her jacket lay on the empty seat beside her. The map that she'd painstakingly marked with yellow crayon beckoned. Queen unfolded it on her lap and shakily traced the yellow line with her forefinger, suddenly anxious to put as much distance as possible between herself and Cradle Creek, Tennessee.

Today was the first day of the rest of her life.

Outside, the scene became a monotonous blur of roadway and greenery. As night fell, Queen lost interest in the fact that she was heading west. The strain of the past week was beginning to take its toll. She didn't even notice when the bus passed through Arkansas and Oklahoma. But when she woke early the next morning bus driver pulled into another stop, she knew he'd arrived into unfamiliar territory. The Texas Panhandle looked vastly different from the great Smoky Mountains. It seemed to Queen as if sometime during the night a giant rolling pin had flattened the world that she'd known. Gone were the high, covered peaks and the lush growth of evergreen. Gone were the narrow, winding two-lane roads of rural Tennessee, where there was no place to go except straight up the side of a mountain or straight down into a canyon.