She Walks in Beauty (3 page)

She’d seen the last woman he’d had. Or what was left of her. The little pieces. The broken places.

Now her nose was killing her. The whittled place on her neck burned. She felt weak in the knees. Saliva pooled in her mouth. It tasted bright yellow. She was going to throw up.

“Don’t you dare!” He shook her, and something in her nose crunched. She retched again.

Skeeter screamed, “I said
no!
You bitch! Don’t!” Then he got in close, his breath hot and nasty, and crooned, “I want your kisses
sweet
.”

Then he jerked her up, grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, and slammed her against a tree. A thick rough rope materialized from nowhere. A magician, that Skeeter Bosarge. And he could do rope tricks. Loop-de-loop-de-loop-de-loop. The rope twirled, and she was neatly trussed.

Her mind stepped off. This was
not
looking good. How was she going to manage this thing now? How had she, the control freak, let it get so far away from her?

Then hopelessness and helplessness stepped up and joined hands in her mind, ready to do a little minuet. She was reeling, so sick and dizzy she couldn’t even focus. Skeeter was fading in and out of her private picture show. Or was he just dancing forward and back, back and forward, practicing a little routine?

Nope. He was just trying to find the right distance for his
real
magic act.

You know the one, Sam. The one where the man throws knives at the pretty lady.

“They were having a sale at the store where I stopped in Macon.” Skeeter grinned and held up a whole brace of blades. Two dozen. Three, maybe. Enough to make plenty of holes in her. Blood would flow like booze spilled on a bar by a drunk couldn’t hold her liquor. Remember her?

“They’re gonna think you got drunk, fell down on a porky-pine, there’s enough of you left to ID.” Then he stepped back once more, took aim, and grinned.

God, Skeeter had bad teeth—and a weak chin. Probably the result of years of inbreeding. Here she was, a lifetime member of the Piedmont Driving Club (though she never attended, a point of pride—not to mention reverse snobbism) about to be skewered by South Georgia white trash. My Lord, the ignominy, as the Atlanta ladies would say.

The first knife flew and
ka-chuncked
into the pine a half inch from her waist. She could hear the blade quiver. She could smell the fresh resin filling the tree’s wound.

And then she shut down.

The world, very small and very contained, held only herself, Skeeter, and those knives. One, Sam. Two, Skeeter. Three, knives. Like fog through the Golden Gate, a calm drifted over her. She was soft green hills rolling beneath cool gray clouds.

“Whoops.” Skeeter pursed his mouth. “Damn! Well, practice makes perfect. We’ve got a lot of time for practice, don’t we, sugar? And after while, we’ll take us a little break. See how else you can pleasure old Skeeter.”

Somewhere deep inside the drunken maelstrom that, at present, passed for her brain, she knew she ought to be trembling. But there was a gift she had—which came in very handy if you hung around the likes of Skeeter Bosarge. When the going got very,
very
rough, Sam hung tough and absolutely calm. She was placid and still as a high mountain lake that had a steady date with the bluebird of happiness.

The still place came from years of reciting the Serenity Prayer—a plea for the ability to accept the things she couldn’t change, the courage to change the things she could. And this,
this
right in front of her was one of the former. She wasn’t about to change Skeeter Bosarge. Not now. Not unless she turned into Superwoman, flung off these ropes, and whupped his ass. So she’d just have to turn it over. Put it on the shelf.

Whop!
The second knife didn’t miss. And it hurt like hell, it really did, when a knife pierced her arm just below the elbow.

Somewhere, someone was screaming.

Zingggg!
That one found the fleshy part of her right thigh. The screaming was growing louder, keener.

Ka-whap!
Wailing, that baby was blowing. She sounded like Billie Holiday on speed.

Or Sam Adams on Old Crow and ’ludes, which is who it was.

Sam was screaming her head off. And pleading—or as close to pleading as she ever got. The kind of pleading Margaret Thatcher would do if you got her really pissed.

“Stop it, Skeeter! Stop it this very instant!”

“Who you think you are, my second-grade teacher?” He flung another knife and missed, which
really
burned him.

“Stop it, you bastard!”

He liked that. He grinned, then clucked.
“
Sunday
School teacher talking like that? Oughta be ashamed of yourself.”

Then he grabbed up six knives at once. He drew back, one in his right hand, the other five sinisterly poised. He’d let fly a barrage like the mojo Watusis chucking their spears. He’d show the bitch who’d put him away. She’d snaked two of his most precious years—years he could have been doing good, sending sluts like her to burn in hell.

Suddenly another sound, a roaring of hallelujahs filled the sky. It sounded like glory.

And Skeeter was diving for cover, flying high and wide.

“That’s right!” shouted an old voice, rich and magnificent. It had to be the voice of God. Sam was sure of it. “Get away from her, you bastard!” Now she wasn’t quite so sure, but still, she liked it.

Then from behind a pine tree arose the face of her savior. He was robed in khaki—pants, shirt, a long-billed hat.

Malachy Champion, who was pushing eighty, had been a hunter all his life. Once he’d started collecting Social Security, he figured he could get by with pretending to forget the dates of hunting season—about which he’d always been pretty casual anyway. Malachy was out stalking his supper, mourning dove or bobtail quail, whichever flushed first. He liked little birds. You cooked ’em up, made yourself some pan gravy with the scrapings left in the bottom of the skillet, that and a mess of greens, some leftover corn bread in a glass of buttermilk. Hell, eating like that, a man could live to be a hundred—in the little house his children bought him right over there on the edge of South River.

Except for the bastards. There were all brands and sizes of bastards, and they did various and sundry things to drive men crazy. There were bastards in the government. Bastards on the TV. Bastards throwing garbage in the Chattahoochee. And then there was this kind of bastard crouching over there behind that rusting jalopy.

All the while, his shotgun at the ready, Malachy was steadily sliding forward. Suzie, the redbone hound bitch he’d bought in Louisiana where those old boys knew something about hunting, hung close by his left side.

“Stay, girl,” he commanded. He didn’t want her getting too close to danger, especially since he didn’t need her to flush this varmint.

Suzie whimpered. Whatever it was, she hadn’t come this far to be left out.

“Stay,” he repeated gruffly.

She stayed, and Malachy stepped closer to the old rusted-out Ford the bastard had jumped behind.

Then,
zing,
a knife flew past Malachy’s right ear.

He’s going to die, thought Sam. My hero’s going to die. And then I’m going to die. She kept waiting for the picture show of her life to start flashing, the way people said it did. Well, look on the bright side. She’d never know serious illness. And it would be nice to see her mama and daddy again.

Zing.
A second knife darted and missed, and still the old man kept advancing. Then a third flew.

“Keep back!” Skeeter screamed. You could almost see the panic, electric in his voice.

“Why?” the old man asked evenly, as if that were the most natural question in the world. “I ain’t afraid of dying. I’m old. How ’bout you?”

A fourth knife soared past and thudded among pine needles. The old man stepped closer and closer, now turning his back toward Sam.

Then a fifth knife lifted off, and a sixth, and it was that last one that found a target in Suzie’s leg. She screamed, and Skeeter’s head popped up wearing a grin of triumph, and then flew off, or most of it did.

For a shotgun—which spreads its tiny BB-like shot and will pierce and kill but leave a little bird intact at 30 yards—will turn a man’s face to hamburger when fired at five. It might also tear his head off.

When Malachy fired, he was three yards from his target.

The old man turned to Sam, and said, “Don’t look.” But she already had. Her eyes rolled up, and she sagged against the rope.

Then Malachy Champion laid a so-sweet hand upon her cheek, took out his own knife to cut her bindings. “There now. Now, now.” He gentled her like a frightened filly. “That oughta fix his wagon. Can’t stand a man picks on a woman. ’Specially a pretty woman.”

Sam managed a weak smile before her lights went out. She tried but couldn’t manage the words, trying to say, “Thank you, sir, for the compliment.”

*

The way Malachy told it later, for the 200
th
time it seemed to him—to the police, the GBI, the TV people, then finally to Sam herself when she was sitting up again in bed in the house she shared with her Uncle George. He’d been tracking, see. About to flush some quail when he heard this woman screaming. Got her in his sights, thought, My God, look at that girl, pretty enough to be Miss America. What’s that crazy fool doing to her? It didn’t seem to him you had to think about that more than half a second, the time it took to swing the barrels of his shotgun over toward the perpetrator of the screaming.

“Miss America, huh?” laughed Uncle George, who was sitting right there with old Malachy in her boudoir, the three of them having tea like it was an ordinary occasion, like the man hadn’t saved her life. “Sam was going to cover the pageant for the paper this year. Of course, now—”

Sam pointed to her taped nose. “Guess this got me out of that. Now, listen, Mr. Champion—”

“You don’t say?” said Malachy. “Lord, Lord, I’ve watched that show since they started showing it on TV. 1955. That’s the year Lee Meriwether took it. Pretty girl. Brunette. Looks a lot like you, young’un.”

Your flattery, old man, won’t get
me
to Atlantic City, she thought, and then thanked him.

“You’re a fan of the pageant? I’ve always been, too,” said George.

Since when? Sam wondered. Since when had her elegant uncle been interested in beauty queens?

“Oh, yes,” Malachy continued. “One of my hobbies. Remember ’em all. All the way back to the beginning, 1921. Margaret Gorman. Girl had a thirty-one-inch chest. Pretty as a picture, though. Guess I’m glad times have changed.” He rolled his watery blue eyes down the front of Sam’s pj’s. “Myself, I like girls a little more developed in that category. If you know what I mean.”

Sam, who’d been fairly well developed in that category since she was twelve, did indeed. But what she wanted to know was—

“All-time favorite was Yolande Betbeze, from a good family down in Mobile, Miss Alabama, Miss America 1951. Gorgeous creature, told ’em all to go to hell later, they wanted to mess in her business. Worked with CORE when the integration started.” Malachy nodded. “She picketed, sat in at lunch counters at Woolworth’s. I always liked girls with some backbone, some spunk.”

“Me too,” said Hoke Tolliver. Sam’s editor poked his head around the edge of the door. “Knock, knock.” He was carrying a massive bouquet of calla lilies in one hand.

“I’m not dead,” said Sam, “if those are for me. Looks like you thought you were coming to my funeral.”

“See what I mean about spunk?” Hoke replied. “It’s that kind of attitude that goes right out there and gets the story.”

“Forget it,” said Sam, sliding back down under her white cotton sheets. “I’m disabled. I’m staying here for the duration of my recuperation. Eating gallons of chocolate ice cream.” And getting over her terrible guilt, even though she’d been
forced
to drug and drink.

“Now, that’s a shame, idn’t it,” said Malachy Champion. “To have to pass on an opportunity like that. My heart’s desire has always been to go to Atlantic City to the pageant. To be right there.”

“Hey, Hoke,” said Sam. “You hear that? Mr. Champion here’d
love
to cover the pageant for you.”

“And I’d love to send him.” He smiled. “But it might be a little tough to get him the credentials. You’re not a journalist, are you, Mr. Champion?”

“Don’t insult the man,” said Sam.

“Of course, if you went, you could take him along,” George said to Sam.

“Wait a minute! Whose side are you on anyway?”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of going,” said Malachy. “Old man like me, I don’t much take to traveling anymore. And what with Suzie still recovering.”

The man who saved my life is throwing in his injured dog who was an accessory to the saving, thought Sam. It’s getting pretty deep in here.

“But on the other hand, if you went, you could bring him back an autographed program, the autograph of Miss America, in fact—”